The Church of Christ: Yesterday and Today. . .

IS THE CHURCH UNDER THE GREAT COMMISSION?

There are at present about 42,000 Protestant missionaries scattered around the world, several hundreds of these coming from our own Church of Christ-Christian Church ranks. Most all of these, we presume, would say they are helping to execute the Great Commission as given by our Lord: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” Missionary societies, both large and small, number into the hundreds, and most of them write it into their constitutions that carrying out the Great Commission is their foremost aim. And it is a frequent experience of any church-goer to hear the Great Commission elegantly quoted and vigorously applied to the church’s task of taking the gospel to all the world.

It will no doubt appear presumptuous on my part, therefore, to question this interpretation of the Great Commission. In doing so I am by no means questioning the missionary spirit, which any disciple of Jesus must surely cherish in his heart. It is not a question as to whether a believer is to share his faith with others or as to whether the gospel is to be preached to every soul on earth. Jesus was God’s great missionary to this earth, and that spirit must be in us all. A silent Christian is an anomaly. Someway and somehow, however stumbling and awkward he may be, he will share faith that is precious to him. That great preacher who made famous the phrase “the impulsive power of a new affection” touched upon an important truth. Man talks about what is in his heart, and he cannot help but share a new affection, whether it be his first sweetheart or a new golf swing. How much more will he talk about Jesus, the new affection that has changed his life, when the impulsive power of his love is at work in his heart.

So this is not a question as to whether the church is to bear witness to its faith. The question is whether we are under the obligation imposed by the Great Commission. The question is not trivial. Not only does it involve a proper understanding of the church’s mission in our time. The conclusions we shall reach in this study will not only spare us some glaring inconsistencies in reference to what we say and do (or not do) about the Great Commission, but may also help to correct some woeful misapplication of scripture.

Let’s start with the new brother in Christ who is diligently studying the Bible in an effort to determine God’s will for his life. Since he has recently responded to the gospel his eyes fall upon Mk. 16:15-1 6 with deeper appreciation: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; he that believes and is baptized shall be saved.” It is clear enough to him that the sinner is to believe and be baptized. He has done this and praises God that he can now claim Jesus as the Lord of his life. How about the rest of the passage? Is this brother to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature? That is what it says do, and if it applies to him, then he had better get going. This may mean quitting his job and leaving his family, but if that is God’s commission to him, then he needs to “get a gait” on him, as they say up in Tennessee. It says Go! and he needs to get with it. And I’ve heard scores of preachers quote the passage with lots of vim in the Go!, fully accepting the order as applying to themselves and their congregations, and with no one making a move to leave town, then or later. They’ve conditioned themselves to suppose that they are carrying out the Great Commission when they send $5.00 a month to Bangkok.

I would say that our new brother is obligated to share his faith with others. He may be telling his parents about Jesus, and he will find chances to say a word to the fellows at work. But this is not what the Great Commission says. It says to go and make disciples of all the nations. It is a commission that embraces the entire human race. It is ridiculous to suppose that brother, or a whole congregation like him, is under any such obligation. “Oh, but is he doing his part in carrying out the Great Commission by preaching to those where he is,” some-one insists, contending that other believers will take care of other parts of the world.” But that is not what our Lord was talking about in the Great Commission. He told somebody to go into all the world and preach, and one does not do this by staying at home and preaching to his neighbors and kin. I believe that our new brother could stay at home the rest of his life and serve the Lord faithfully without going anywhere, but I couldn’t believe that if I believed him to be under the Great Commission. Just as I believe that those to whom the commission was given had to go, and they could not have pleased God by staying home, however much they preached.

But we are told that while none of us may be personally obligated to the Great Commission, the church as a whole is, and we are to see to it that all nations are evangelized by sending missionaries. While I appreciate any church for its missionary zeal, and no excuse ever needs to be made for a passion for souls, I hardly see how the Commission can be given any such application. In giving the commission Jesus was talking to individuals, a group of select men that he called apostles, and he tells them what they were to do. It was not something they were to assign to others while they stayed at home.

Is it not a bit ridiculous for a congregation to assume itself to be executing the Great Commission simply by sending money somewhere? They may well be a people who do little or no personal witnessing for Jesus, looking to their hired minister to do that for them. But they have a “missions committee” and a missions budget,” and they (or the preacher) glibly quote the Great Commission as the basis for their concern. They sing “Fling out the banner’ let it float skyward and seaward, high and wide; the sun that lights its shining folds, the cross on which the Savior died,” and suppose themselves to be really with it by way of “our man in Tokyo.” Anything that any congregation does for a missionary I say, thank God, and surely they will be blessed but it is amiss for them to associate that with the Great Commission. It is simply a matter of helping a preacher who wants to evangelize abroad. It has nothing to do with their personal obligation to share their faith and it has nothing to do with the Great Commission.

The Great Commission was an apostolic commission, and it was given only to the apostles, not to the church. Just as Mt. 16:19 was only to the apostles (and perhaps Peter in particular): “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.” The apostles, and only the apostles, could loose and bind on earth as if heaven itself were doing it. The church has never had such authority. The apostles were chosen envoys, diplomats of heaven with full authority, and they received commissions that no other mortals have ever received. We have cited two of them. To impose the Great Commission upon the church would be no different from imposing the authority to bind and loose sins.

The scriptures make it clear that when God gives a commission to a man He always equips him with the power to execute it. Jesus is the noblest example of that: his commission was unique and so his powers of execution were unique. Moses was given a mission that would stagger the best of men, and even he was but a child in the face of it. God equipped him for his mission to Egypt. And so with all the prophets. Each had his unique commission, and God gave each only the power that was needed. So with the apostles and the Great Commission. How staggering it was in its embrace! There they were, twelve ignorant, frightened men who had never been anywhere, being told to visit the capitals of the world and stand before peasant and monarch alike and tell the good news of the gospel. Paul must have spoken for them all when he later wrote in 2 Cor. 4:7: “We are only the earthenware jars that hold this treasure, to make it clear that such an overwhelming power comes from God and not from us.” And he also said to that church what could be said of no one but an apostle: “You have seen done among you, all the things that mark the true apostle unfailingly produced: the signs, the marvels, the miracles” (2 Cor. 12:12).

As ambassadors of heaven (2 Cor. 5:20) the apostles were endowed with plenipotentiary authority. They could seal their mission with signs from heaven, with miracles and marvels. And they had the gift of speaking the languages of earth. Thus equipped they set out upon the grandest mission ever given to man. And anyone so charged would have to be so equipped.

That commission was executed by the apostles and their duly appointed assistants, evangelists. The gospel circled the then-known world like a golden belt of glory. In Col. 1:23 Paul could speak of the Good News as that “Which has been preached to the whole human race.” If that is made to refer only to the Mediterranean world, subsequent history indicates that the apostles and their assistants finally reached distant kingdoms. And 1 Tim. 3:16 exalts the Christ as being “preached among the nations.” Rom. 16:26 refers to the gospel as being made known among all the nations.

The apostles have done their work, once for all. The Great Commission has been fulfilled, not only in the apostolic mission of the first century, but in the story that they left the world in their writings. The gospel is now a matter of record. It is there, in a book and in all the languages of the world, for anyone to read. Bless them, they did what heaven commissioned them to do, and it is a work that need not and cannot be repeated. Talk about “fulfilling the Great Commission in our time” only betrays an ignorance of the apostolicity of the church. For the church today to want everyone to know about Christ is one thing, but for it to assume the Great Commission is folly.

Actually, no missionary effort today can be in the same class with the apostolic mission, for the situation is so different. No one today can preach the gospel in the same sense the apostles did, for in their time it was unknown and unwritten. They were evangels bringing the Good News before unheralded. In my hometown of Denton, in my state of Texas, in my county, and in my country, and in most all of the world I would have difficulty finding a person that has not heard of Jesus the Christ, and they all have knowledge of the basic facts of the gospel, whether they believe or not. I cannot therefore proclaim the gospel as the apostles did. It is already proclaimed and known the world over—and what better tribute is there to the success of the apostolic mission? The greatest testimonial of all are the Bible societies that issue the, gospel story in thousands of languages. Those who may not yet know of the Christ can be handed a copy of the proclaimed gospel, as recorded by the apostles.

The scholars who have written about the word gospel are agreed that the original words in Greek, and there are three of them in particular, indicate two important things about the nature of the gospel: it is good and it is news. Good News! A message already known may still be good, but it cannot be news. So one can really preach the gospel as the apostles did only when he is bringing news, good news, about what God has done for us through Jesus. That is a rare experience in our time.

This means that our task in reference to the gospel is different from that of the apostles. We are to impress the claims of the gospel upon those who are but vaguely conscious of it. We are to remind people of it, including the church itself, as did Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:1), though it would be absurd to speak of preaching the Good News to the church, for it is already evangelized. We are to persuade people to obey the gospel, which includes instruction on how this is to be done. We are to defend the gospel from those who would pervert it. But, strictly speaking, we do not preach the gospel, for it has already been preached and recorded. If anyone may not have heard, we would only need to hand him a copy of the New Covenant scriptures.

It would follow, I presume, that if a person knows nothing about the gospel and has never heard of Jesus the Messiah, then one would be making known the Good News on a basis similar to the apostles, and this may be the case in some dark corners of the earth. But it still isn’t quite the same so long as we have the written gospel to hand them, even if they are illiterate. We would teach them to read so that they could know the gospel! But until the apostles executed the Great Commission the most literate of the world could not and did not know, for it had not yet been proclaimed and recorded.

We live in a world that has some knowledge of the gospel, but it is a world that does not realize the gospel. Many do not really understand what it is all about, and so they need to be taught further about the Good News that they have absorbed as if by osmosis from their culture. “Christ died for your sins” is not going to be news to people that we contact, but the implications of it, the responsibilities of it, the blessings of it, and the claims of it are vitally relevant, and this is our task. But, if you are prepared for it, this is not preaching the gospel. It is teaching, admonition, and exhortation in reference to the facts that are already known.

We all understand, of course, that there is an important difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing him as a person and as the Lord of our life. And this is true of those in the church as well as others, and so we need to impress upon the church itself what the gospel really means to our lives. Even those who have obeyed the gospel can have a legalistic view of religion, and so they need to come to see the Jesus who is our sin-bearer. This is why Elton Trueblood can say that the church itself is the greatest mission field in the world.

Those of our own people who still labor under the impression that all of the New Covenant scriptures constitute the gospel, and thus equate the apostolic proclamation with apostolic doctrine, will see only nonsense in what I am saying. That would also make nonsense of the Great Commission, for if Good News that was to be proclaimed embraced all of what is now in the New Covenant scriptures, then the apostles went forth with an educational program rather than “the thing preached,” as Paul describes it in 1 Cor. 1:21, or “the message preached” as another version gives it. The gospel is clearly outlined in 1 Cor.15:1-5, and if this is not properly distinguished from “the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42), then there is much more fouled up than the thesis presented here.

If then the Great Commission is only an apostolic charge, is there a commission to the church or individual believers in reference to preaching? Strangely enough, the scriptures say but little in reference to this. One cannot turn to passages where the saints are instructed to proclaim the Word. The emphasis is upon the church edifying itself. In really being the Body of Christ it seems to be taken for granted that the church will grow. It is assumed that the believers will share their faith. Believers are to be the light of the world, and in being light those who want freedom from darkness will find their way to them.

By implication we can say that the commission that each of us has is to tell others what God has done for us. This is what Jesus said to one of his disciples who would have gladly gone on a worldwide mission. The Gadarene demoniac was ready to follow Jesus anywhere once he was freed from his prison among the tombs. Jesus said to him: “Go back home, and report all that God has done for you” (Lk. 8:39). Here is a commission that fits us all. The demoniac was all gung-ho for something like the Great Commission, but the Lord was better pleased for him to share his faith in his own neighborhood.

There is, of course, the commission to evangelists to “Preach the word” and “Do the work of an evangelist,” but this could hardly be applied to all believers. That there is a special work for the evangelist is evident enough, and it is unfortunate that this is so often confused with what the located minister does, which is not a recognized function in the scriptures, and, for the most part, supplants what the shepherds (elders) of the flock should be doing.

At the very close of the scriptures there is what might be called the great commission to the church: “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come. Let every one who listens answer, Come. Then let all who are thirsty come: all who want it may have the water of life, and have it free: (Rev. 22:17). That simplifies it for us all. No big deal. We don’t have to take the next jet to Russia. We can all say Come to any and all we know who are thirsty. We can invite them to Jesus, which is the most glorious invitation ever extended. And once we look at it that way, that our mission is to invite people to us, we will see that the invitation can just as well be extended to many of those who are in the church as well as out. Come! is a plea based as much or more upon what we are as what we say. And Come! is an unending invitation, for however near or far one may be from his likeness, he can always come nearer. Come I will invite some to repentance and baptism, while to others, even those who have long professed him, it will be an invitation to accept him as sin-bearer and to cast all their anxieties upon him.

How’s that for a great commission for us all? Once accepted, we can give the Great Commission back to its rightful owners.—the Editor

 

The commission ends with a promise of the unceasing invisible presence of the authoritative Lord with his disciples to the close of the age. Then, as Matthew has already informed his readers elsewhere in his gospel, the Son of man will be visibly present to his people in the kingdom of God. Meanwhile, both their responsibilities and their resources have been made available by the risen Lord for the fulfillment of their appointed task.—Howard Clark Kee