Today was the first day of classes at UGA, and it was awesome! Before you start calling me crazy, let me explain why. It actually has very little to do with my classes. Just one. Perspectives.
The full title of the class is Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. It's not a class through the university; at least, not this one, although it does count for course credit. Perspectives is a class that helps prepare people for the global mission that is the expansion of God's kingdom. What's so unique about this class is that it doesn't just teach future full-time missionaries. It teaches regular workingmen how to be missionaries within their own fields. It gives people an idea of what it's like to be a missionary, and what it really means to be serving God to glorify His name.
Tonight was the first night. Because they have a "first night free" policy, I decided to check it out. And it was great! When I got there, the first people I saw were the outdoor greeters (one of whom goes to Watkinsville First Baptist); then, I walked inside, and I saw a good friend (also from Watkinsville) and Stephen, the leader of Freshley. So being signed in by two people I see so often was really cool to me. Then I met Bryan, who is in charge of grading papers for the class.
Now, Perspectives isn't cheap. The class is $275. So when Bryan told me that I could earn money for volunteering to grade papers, my chances of being able to participate in the class went way up. With a salary of $30 per student assigned to me, I could be well on my way toward paying off the class. And this is great news, because I loved the class tonight!
Tonight's topic was "The Missionary Heart of God," which is just what it sounds like: God's heart for missions, the spread of the gospel to the nations. So for this post, I'm going to try to summarize my notes.
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"We must develop a God-centered, rather than a man-centered theology of missions." The gospel is not simply about saving people from condemnation; this type of approach to missions is referred to as a focus on "the lost-ness of man." Instead, we need to focus on "the worthiness of God": He is so worthy of worship that we simply
must tell the world about Him so that everyone has a chance to praise Him. This brings us into a "glory fix," which is when our worship reminds us of God's worthiness of praise, which leads us to worship Him more. It's a circular process that never ends.
But Satan always tries to ruin things. Popular belief is that Satan's ultimate goal is to keep us from getting to heaven. But he has ulterior motives bigger than you and me: he wants to rob God of His praise. He tries to distract us from worshiping God, and in so doing, he claims the glory for himself.
To guard against this, we need to make sure that we have the right perspective on God, because our perspective on Him will shape the rest of our spiritual lives. Often we let our peers influence our views of our professors: they tell us all the negative things about them, and we go into class expecting to face the devil himself. But as the year goes by, some of us come to realize that we actually like some of our professors and enjoy our classes. When it comes to God, a lot of us do this exact same thing. We need to come to God without all the "invisible baggage" weighing us down, and let Him speak for Himself to show us what He's really like.
The nature of God can be found in Exodus 34:6-7: He is compassionate, gracious, patient (slow to anger), abounding in unconditional love, faithful, forgiving, and just. All of this leads God to offer salvation to all people, which demonstrates His heart for missions.
That brings us to Genesis 3:8-9, where we find the first Missionary pursuing the first sinners. God asked Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" But this did not mean that He couldn't find them. Sin puts distance in our relationship with God, putting in reverse Jesus' cry in Matthew 27:46: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Basically, God is calling out to Adam and Eve, "Why have you left Me? Why have you hidden yourselves?" And because they have hidden themselves from God, God chases after them, as the shepherd looking for his lost sheep (Matthew 18:12-14). This is the first "mission trip."
As we go on, we find that God is always adding onto the mission, always putting everything together for the good of His people (Romans 8:28). In the story of the Tower of Babel, the author of Genesis (probably Moses) writes that God confused the language of the people who were building the tower, and they were scattered. Today's speaker compared this to his mother separating him and his mischievous brothers in order to calm the chaos. God observed that "nothing... will be impossible for them" if they continue to work together uninhibited by language barriers (Genesis 11:6). That does not mean that God was worried that the evil they would be capable of could harm Him. He separated them and confused them to protect themselves: He kept them from hardening their hearts against Him so much that another flood would be required to wipe them out. Instead, by separating them, He let their evil desires cool down so that they would be willing, in time, to accept His salvation through Jesus Christ.
Since it's getting late, I'm going to speed this up a little. One thing that I found really interesting was God's covenant with Abram in Genesis 15. This type of covenant was called a "covenant of blood." In Jewish culture, a covenant of blood was one of the most binding promises anyone could make. A set of animal carcasses would be cut in half and laid to make a path, and the two people involved in the covenant would join hands and pass through, as a way of saying, "If I fail to keep my side of the covenant, let it be done to me as we have done to these animals." What is so awesome to me is what happens next: Abram falls into a deep sleep, and God gives Him a vision of a torch from heaven passing between the halves of the animals. But what's missing from the covenant? That's right: Abram. In an awesome example of foreshadowing, God declared to Abram: If either one of us fails to keep this covenant, the covenant that I will give you descendants as numerous as the stars through your own flesh and blood, and that you will obey my commands, then I will be held responsible, and I will accept the punishment. Wow... If that doesn't point to the cross, then I don't know what does.
In Exodus 2:24, God keeps His promise to Abram/Abraham. Moses writes that "He remembered" the covenant. But this does not mean that He ever forgot. This particular point in time was always a part of His plan; it had been determined from the beginning that this would be the time when God would fulfill the covenant. So the time came, He remembered His plan, and He acted.
Moving on, Ruth 4:16-22 and Matthew 1:1-16 both give genealogies of David's family. But what's different about Matthew's account is that he gives the names of women, very unlikely non-Jewish women. Clearly, this is to show the "expansiveness of God's grace," that it reaches to all peoples of all generations. And Isaiah 49:6 essentially says, "Saving the Jews is too easy. It's not enough, so I'll save everyone to prove My greatness."
God has been working since the beginning to bring us back to Him. When the Israelites went into exile, they came into close contact with non-Jews. By introducing non-Jews to the Jews and their beliefs, God was preparing them to receive the gospel when He sent His Son. As the years turned into decades, and then centuries and millennia, synagogues began to be built. And where were they built? Right under the noses of the curious Gentiles. And one of the biggest signs of God's missionary heart rose out of the Jews' co-existence with the Gentiles. As the Jews began to learn the Gentile language of Greek, the common language of the time (like English is today), it became necessary for the Scriptures to be translated so that Greek-speaking Jews could understand it. The inadvertent result was that Gentiles had access to the Scriptures in their own language.
God's heart has always been for missions. So ours should be too.
