The Supernatural Missionary Community.
God created and it was Good!
God spoke His Word and by His power everything came into being and it was very good
God’s Word, His Son became flesh and was empowered by the Holy Spirit to announce the Kingdom. When Jesus ascended on high he sent that same Holy Spirit to continue the work of the Kingdom.
In between these two events of God creating and re-creating in Jesus, was of course, the History of the people of God and all their ups and downs and after is the History of the church with all of her ups and downs!
But in it all is the incredible story of the ‘Mission of God’. He is a Missionary God. That word literally means Sent one. It has a Latin origin. We as God’s Supernatural Community serve a Missionary God. We are therefore God’s Supernatural Missionary Community. We saw last week that we are a Biblical Community, so let’s take a quick journey through the bible to understand our calling to be Missionary.
God set Adam and Eve in the Garden. The Garden is a picture of God present with His creation as He determined it to be. Adam and Eve carry the image of God. They are commanded to multiply and fill the earth with His Image and rule as God’s Ambassadors. And God Blesses them and sends them, they are to multiply throughout the earth.
All this is for God’s Glory and for His creation to know His Glory. It was indeed all very glorious, very good. God was delighted and took his contented rest. After God’s rest came Humankind’s test. And Humankind failed the test big time. The result was a separation from God.
Humankind from this point on became a mixture of Dignity and Depravity: Dignity as those created in God’s image and Depravity because of rebellion and sin.
God has not rested since. Rather He has passionately been at work in seeking to restore Humankind and all of creation back to its Garden status.
But by Genesis 6:5 things had got so bad that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only on evil all the time! It was so bad that God grieved that he had made Humankind and His heart was filled with pain.
There was just one man and his family through which God could do something. Noah and then the covenant of the rainbow that God would not destroy the earth again.
Humankind has the chance to begin again but rather than multiplying through the earth as commanded, they stay in one place. And rather than honouring the name of God they seek to make a name for themselves by defiantly building a tower to the sky. Instead of a Garden they preferred concrete!!! And they cover it with Tar – waterproofing – the weren’t buying the rainbow thing! God forces the initial command to scatter by confusing their language. God knew that if they continued in their rebellion it would be impossible to reach them.
You might think that surely now it would be impossible for God to restore the Garden with the world now divided with each national group standing as racists and thinking that their own cultural standards were at the centre of god’s world. But God had a plan.
God you see was on a Mission. That Mission was for Humankind and indeed the whole of creation to experience His loving grace in Garden Presence. He didn’t destroy Adam and Eve, He didn’t totally destroy human kind. He had a plan to reveal himself in His relationship with a particular People in order that the whole world would know of His loving grace.
And so God blesses one Human to be a blessing. He is going to make one Human into a nation and He is going to Bless that nation so that they could be a Blessing to all the nations of the earth. And so from Abraham there is Issac, then Jacob and the many sons that become the tribes.
He loves them and protects them, guides them and disciplines them. There are moments when this Supernatural Community of God look like they will see the Garden restored but for far too much of their history they prefer the concrete. They prefer what they can build for themselves, they prefer to make a name for themselves and even if they do acknowledge that they are chosen, they frame this in elitism rather than seeing the blessing of being chosen was to Bless and point towards the Father in Heaven who desired for all nations to come to the knowledge of His glory.
He protects them from being wiped out by famine through Joseph. Though they find themselves banned from gardening and enslaved in the concrete business of a self appointed god Pharoah. God delivers them from slavery and gives them their basic training through Moses. He begins to establish them as a people in their own land, their own garden through Joshua.
Still this people seem to choose concrete rebellion and choose not to follow the God that want’s the best for them. God continues his missionary zeal in sending them judges and prophets but for the most part the people refuse to listen. Instead of revealing God to the people around them they want to be like them. They want a king. Still God reaches out to them and after the failure of Saul, God gives them a King who is ‘after God’s own heart’ David. David had his faults but he was prepared to acknowledge them and repent. This is what God continues to want for us. Solomon his son began well but was easily sidetracked by his 700 wives and 300 concubines. You can’t get into this situation by simply making mistakes and saying sorry and trying again, this too was rebellion but even his failings were nothing compared to the vast majority of 40 kings that came after him reigning in the now divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Our Missionary God has to resort to other peoples, other empires to get his peoples attention, Assyria and Persia. In all this time he still calls and sends Prophets. People who hear his voice, people who capture something of the Garden, people who see the times but also see what can be, who capture a vision of God’s purposes and declare them to the people.
Then everything seems to go quiet in our protestant bibles but history and the apocryphal books fill in some gaps. Greece became the super power for a while and as a result most of the world spoke Greek. Even the OT scriptures had been translated into Greek. The chosen people of God had become very religious! So surely they were getting back to Garden times. Well, not quite, the world was very concrete, a new super power – Rome – and I can’t resist the ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’ line – Roads – the concrete world did have some advantages!!!
The ‘Religious’ people of God were a pain in the neck to Rome and tragically and astoundingly a pain in the neck to the missionary God. Racism and Elitism seems to be the religious trademark. The concrete of the bricks and mortar of the temple were more important than the garden presence and the groups of the religious such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes fought over the minutiae of what God hadn’t said and ignored most of what he had clearly said. In all of these groups there was huge expectation that God would act but they were so very far from a true knowledge of God that the expectation was a long way from the way He would act.
You would think that the missionary God would have given up at this point. He had sent so many prophet who had been ignored or killed. He had exhaustively revealed himself in so many ways in the garden nature of his creation, in the wisdom of those who knew Him and understood His ways. But concrete is hard to break up.
In Galatians 4:4 Paul writes ‘In the fullness of time God sent His Son’
Where did that come from? It is a mind boggling thing that God should do this. So desperate is He that His creation should know Him that He reveals Himself and His purposes in His Son. The Messiah. But not as it turned out the Messiah that the religious were expecting. The Missionary God had incredibly promised His coming time and time again to those who understood but so few really understood.
The word that Paul uses for time, here in Gal 4:4, is not the greek word chronos – chronological time, it is the greek word kairos – a particular moment in time. It was at this particular moment in time that our Missionary God, rather than giving up on His creation, sends His Son, The Word whose voice resounded at creation ‘let there be’ (John 1:1) This same word becomes flesh (John 1:14). There are many kairos moments to come but this is THE kairos moment!
By this time God’s chosen people had a manual for life — the OT scriptures, in a language that the world understood. This people had been scattered throughout the world, not in obedience as they had been commanded to fill the earth but by being carried off by the superpowers that conquered them. And what’s more the Romans had made roads – we’ll come back to that!
It’s amazing enough that God sent His son to us, never mind the manner in which he is sent. Not in a concrete like palace but a garden like back-yard stable! A surprise? No, planned since the beginning of time and prophesied so many times it is almost unreal.
As He begins the ministry for which He is sent, another prophet is sent who also was prophesied about. He comes with the appearance of emerging from the back end of the garden, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Sort out your concrete living, make your path straight! Here is the lamb of God who will … who will … is this right? take away the sin of the world!!!!
Adam had been blessed to be a blessing. Now this second Adam is blessed at his baptism to be a blessing. This is my beloved Son, with Him I am well pleased. That which was ruptured in the garden has been repaired. Jesus has his sights on the glory of God and sets out in obedience to fulfil the intentions of a Missionary Father and makes himself and His Father’s purposes known to just a few disciples who bore the image of the seed of Abraham and He blesses them in order that they would be a blessing to their nation and beyond. The Garden project is back on!!!
Clearly the crowds marvelled at Him and the power of God displayed in Him but His focus again was on the few. God could reveal His glory in such a way as to force all to bow the knee. The day will come when every knee will bow but that day is held back by the loving grace of God. In Jesus God pushes the reset button. Adam failed in the garden and humankind bears too much of that character of failure. Just as Jesus passed the test against temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of His ministry so he does so again at the end. Jesus goes to another Garden (Gethsemane) and passes the test. He faces death so that we might live. Again Humankind is blessed in order to Bless. Not just a nation now but all peoples. He commissions those few disciples. Just as He had been sent by His Missionary Father so He sends His Disciples to be His witnesses in Jerusalem yes, but not just Jerusalem, to the whole of Judea, even the Samaritans and on to the ends of the earth. And being the Missionary that Jesus was, just like His Father, He sends the Holy Spirit to empower these disciples to do just that. Now they are referred to as Apostles, the greek word for sent ones.
It was a kairos time, the time was right – those Roman roads! They could travel more easily than ever before. As they went they could make Jesus known. And if you were Roman you could travel with guaranteed safety (Pax Romana). If only those first Apostles had a Roman with them who also was steeped in understanding the way God worked. A Pharisaical Roman who knew Jesus! Wouldn’t that be great? I sense another kairos moment! The road to Damascus. If ever there was a sign of the garden grace it is when roads are becoming a blessing.
And so Paul is the blessed, called and anointed to travel throughout the Roman world and through him and those who traveled with him the nations are being blessed.
A way has been made possible for all nations to be blessed, the point has to be driven home to Peter though a vision that leads to the Spirit being poured out, even on gentiles, right before his eyes but then he is able to convince his compatriots to the extent that blessing is given for the gentiles to be blessed, note the irony.
One of these guys was Luke. He wrote two of the books in the NT. One was a Gospel that bears his name. In his introduction he says that having carefully investigated what God was up too in Jesus, he wrote an account of it. He actually concludes it in his second book’s introduction, he writes that he had attempted in his first book to write about all that Jesus began to do and teach. The inference is that Acts and all of church history, for that matter, is going to be about what Jesus will continue to do and teach through the lives of His disciples.
And that’s where we come in. If we respond to God’s Son Jesus, whom God sent to us, we will know what it is to have a garden relationship with the living God, ‘to walk with him in the coolness of the day’! We can know blessing in order to bless we can be, indeed we are sent people. We are God’s Missionary people.
Oh I know I have left out 2000 years of church history but this message is already a bit too long. And church history on times has shown that people who claim to know God can do worse not only than the chosen people of God that had failed but worse than any that have been put on this planet.
Nonetheless, there have been amazing things too, and amazing people. You too can be an amazing person. Turn to Jesus, be filled with His Holy Spirit, be part of God’s Supernatural Community, know that you are blessed in order to bless and know that you carry that blessing as you are sent. Be part of God’s Supernatural Missionary Community!