Missions and the Covenanting Nation

The Role of the Church in Bringing Every Country On Earth Under Christ's Lordship

Good Morning,

This coming Wednesday I’m fixing to go to Rwanda to serve as an assistant professor in the training ministry of the ARP called SEED, which stands for Serve by Educating, Equipping, and Discipling. The SEED ministry of the ARP is engaged in teaching pastors in the Global South the basics of reformed, biblical, confessional, theology in order that we all might grow in grace and love towards our common savior Jesus Christ. The better informed the leaders of the church are towards the good news and the Christian faith the more ready they will be to serve their own local churches in raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Part of the goal of SEED is to work itself out of a job. In other words, as men are discipled in the truth of the Scriptures the less there will be a need for teachers from the United States to come to them. I write all this today primarily to ask for your prayers for safe travel, for my family as I’ll be gone about ten days, and for the work on the ground, that the Holy Spirit would give me a mind towards recall and bless the teaching.

For our prayer and worship help today we are going kind of segway from this personal opening to think some more about how God has provided the church of Christ to build us up together in the hope of the gospel. In the Great Commission of Matthew 28 it is understood that the work of baptizing and discipling the nations is the work of the Church. Sometimes you will hear words like “parachurch” or “inter-denominational” or even “inter-faith” to describe missions’ activities where individual Christians will get together and do some type of activity that is Christian focused, whether it be gospel-work or medical outreach or even construction-oriented labor, but is outside the direct oversight of a denomination. All of these things are good, and I do not want what I am getting ready to say to downplay how vital a willingness to leave home and its comforts to go out and serve is to the witness of our faith. It is however, not in keeping with a scriptural witness, to think it is okay for us to do this outside the authority of the wider body of Christ. I’ve said before that there are no individuals in the Church. We are all one in Jesus, and His ideal in John 17 is that we would work together in the institutional, organized faith, to see the world turned upside down and under the visible reign of our Redeemer.

To defend this from church history sometimes you will hear the word “Magisterial Reformation”. What that means is the state churches which were organized and sometimes founded by the majesties or the civil magistrates of European nations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I.e. – the Lutherans are German, the Anglicans are English, the Presbyterians are Scottish, the Dutch Reformed are well, Dutch. You even have Huguenots who are descended from the French reformation. To that end John Calvin when he wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion penned a letter to then French King, Francis I. In that letter he encourages the sovereign of France as to his reasons for the book:

That, Those who feel some interest in religion might be trained to true godliness. And I toiled at the task chiefly for the sake of my countrymen the French, multitudes of whom I perceived to be hungering and thirsting after Christ, while very few seemed to have been duly imbued with even a slender knowledge of him.

His goal was that the French people would be built up in the true faith and his interest in letting Francis I know that, is because the chief French man was their king. If he could win the heart and mind of Francis then the whole of the nation was possibly near the victory. The same was seen of course in the preaching of Jonah. When the leader of Assyria is convicted of his sin the whole of the city repents with him. The goal then is to see not just that individuals would come to the knowledge of the truth. It is that as people who are brought to truth can then join existent bodies for local discipleship and local support. In Presbyterian theology this is why not just infant baptism is an important component, but how we understand that local churches are part of an organism bigger than themselves. It’s part of the reason why we used to name churches after locations and not after emotions or adjectives or attributes. They were located to support a local community in bringing all people under the Lordship of Christ for all eternity.

There is a focus in the Old and New Testaments towards the conversion of whole corporate peoples to the good news of not just the salvation of sinners at the moment of redemption, but of their salvation for all of life. Discipleship is about a lot more than just reading the Bible well or praying better. Those things are important to be sure, but we in the Christian life have a higher goal in mind. If we are to be sanctified and are to put to death the worldliness of the flesh when we place that same standard on the whole of a people there are a lot of institutions, including things like the military and public education which will be affected, for the good and the betterment of all members of a community, whether they believe or not. If the old saying about a rising tide lifting all boats is true of water how much more so when God is the chief end of national life? It is not a confusion of kingdoms to desire such, but rather simply recognizing what the Bible itself does in its support of calling even Caesar himself to bow the knee in Romans 13.

Consider for a moment the glory which Revelation 11:15 witnesses, “Then the seventh angel sounded: And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!”.

In closing, the theme of the last several Tuesday devotions has been joy and a positive presentation of the Christian life. As part of that we were encouraged to think forward of the future mercies and love that is promised by God for His covenant people. The goal of the Christian church should be to see every nation under heaven to explicitly recognize that Jesus alone is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That is part of what Jesus calls for in the Great Commission. It has been said by others that you can baptize someone into nothing. Our forefathers in the faith in the Seceder tradition which became the ARP desired this by way of covenant, a public oath testifying the goodness of God for all. The church exist for this purpose.

Here's the Last Word:

https://www.broomallrpc.org/articles/christ-s-kingship-over-the-nations

Blessings in Christ,

Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Pastor, Bethany ARP Church