From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a missions book. And God is a missionary God.
Some people will find that unpalatable. They will say, “No, this is a book about Jesus and salvation, about finding eternal security through Christ.” And it is exactly that. But look deeper. There is a layer of understanding and appreciating the heart of God that you cannot afford to miss, and it is missions.
Father Abraham had many sons
Here is one way to know you are getting a little long in the tooth: you remember going to Vacation Bible School in the summertime and making ashtrays for your parents at craft time. Nobody makes ashtrays at VBS anymore. It has been a long time since that happened.
I was about six years old at Carmel Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. I can still picture the two beautifully sweet older ladies who so faithfully taught us, both at Vacation Bible School and in our weekly Sunday school classes. They were devoted to the children, and they taught us the stalwart songs of the faith, the kind that make a difference in the heart.
One of them went like this: “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you.” Then came the motions: right arm, left arm, right foot, nod your head, turn around. I loved it. We taught that song to our own children when they were young.
I don’t know how many churches still sing “Father Abraham.” But it is full of theological significance. The reason I love it, and the reason I taught it to my children, is that I am a missionary.
Why missions is in our DNA
PassionLife is a missionary organization. I have devoted my entire adult life to missions, and it is what I bring to this ministry.
John started PassionLife as a pillar of the pro-life movement. He had written pro-life books. He had been arrested multiple times during Operation Rescue in the 1980s and ’90s. He gave his life to rescuing the unborn.
I have always been pro-life, but growing up my pro-life theology was thin. I understood that God was probably not in favor of killing babies, and that was about as far as it went. So John came to me and said, “I have started a missions organization. I am going as a missionary to the places in the world with the highest abortion rates, to help them understand the abortion issue. I need your help to take this into other countries. You have lived on the mission field. You are a missionary.”
John brought me on because of my missions experience and my missions passion. As he put it, “I can teach you the theology and the ethics, but I can’t put a love for missions in your heart.” That love grew in me as a child, by the grace of God. If you cut me, I will bleed missions all over the floor. It is in my veins. It is who I am, because I believe God is a missionary God, and I believe with all my heart that the Bible is a missionary book.
The Bible begins in Genesis 12
J. Vernon McGee, the old Thru the Bible pastor, used to say, somewhat inflammatorily (and I think intentionally so), that the Bible begins in Genesis chapter 12, and the first eleven chapters are simply the introduction.
He was not minimizing those chapters. Look at what they cover. Genesis 1 and 2 give us creation. Chapters 3 and 4 give us the fall. Chapters 5 through 9 give us the flood. Chapters 10 and 11 give us the table of nations and the birth of languages at the Tower of Babel.
Then, in Genesis 12, the narrative changes completely. Abram enters the story, later to be known as Abraham, Father Abraham. The rest of the Bible unfolds from God’s relationship with Abraham and his descendants.
It is an amazing scene. God comes to Abram, a pagan man living in a pagan place, Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram has no idea who is speaking to him. It is many generations after Noah and the flood, and the knowledge of the true God has all but disappeared from the earth. Yet God speaks, and He essentially says: pack up, leave everything you know, head out into the wilderness, and I will tell you where you are going when you get there. And Abram packed up and left, on the word of a God he did not yet know.
Blessed to be a blessing
Here is what God said to Abram:
The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Genesis 12:1–3
I count the word bless or blessing five times in that passage. God’s promise to Abram was twofold. First: I will bless you. Second: you will be a blessing.
God did not bless Abram so that he could feel privileged. He blessed him for the responsibility that came with the second half of the promise. I will bless you so that you will be a blessing to the peoples of the earth. Abram was blessed for the responsibility of blessing.
A multitude no one could count
In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abram. He takes him outside and says:
“Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
Genesis 15:5–6
God promised an old, childless man that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abram never saw that promise fulfilled. His descendants were the ones who fulfilled it.
Even his name tells the story. Abram means “exalted father” in Hebrew. Later, God changed it to Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.” Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac had a son named Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons, who became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel: the Hebrew nation, the Jewish people of today. That is a multitude, and Abraham is their father.
But not only that. The New Testament explains that the followers of Christ are grafted in as the spiritual descendants of Abraham. Father Abraham gave birth to the Israelite nation and to all who are grafted in through the blood of Christ, through salvation in Jesus. Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you.
This promise of being blessed and being a blessing, and this covenant of a multitude of descendants, are foundational to a missionary understanding of the heart of God. God always wanted all the peoples of the earth to be blessed, every tribe and tongue and language and nation, so that they would know Him and His blessing of salvation.
His chosen instrument for getting this done was the Hebrews, and eventually the Christians. God would bless His people in this world. The world would see the blessing of God in their lives and want to know the God who was powerful enough to act on their behalf. That excites me. If you cut me, I am going to bleed missions.
Write an M in the margin
God gave birth to the Hebrew nation through Father Abraham, and He blessed them so that they would become a blessing to the non-Israelites around them. The nations would see the glory of God at work among His people and want to know the God who was powerful enough, and loving enough, to treat His people that way. It was a beautiful thing.
Years ago, I began to read my Bible looking specifically for the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant: God making Abraham’s descendants numerous and blessing them, so that they would become a blessing to all the people around them who did not know Him.
Every time I read a passage that showed God blessing His people so that those who did not know Him would want to know Him, I wrote an M in the margin of my Bible and circled it. M for missions. This is the missionary heart of God: I am going to bless you so that people will want to know who I am.
I have never recovered from those years of going through my Bible and writing an M in the corner. I invite you to do the same. Once you start looking, you will find the missionary heart of God everywhere.
Missions all through the Old Testament
Have you ever noticed that David’s slaying of Goliath was a missionary event? Listen to what David says to the Philistine:
“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will hand you over to me, and I will strike you down and cut off your head. Today I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel.”
1 Samuel 17:45–46
Write an M in the margin and circle it. That is a missionary statement. God is going to bless what happens here today, so that the whole world will know there is a powerful God who works on behalf of His people.
Have you ever noticed that in the plagues on Egypt, God was showing Himself to be a missionary God?
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me, or this time I will send the full force of my plagues against you and against your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’”
Exodus 9:13–16
Have you ever noticed that the dedication of Solomon’s temple was a missionary event? Here is what Solomon prayed on that day:
“As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name—for men will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name.”
1 Kings 8:41–43
Have you ever noticed how often the prayers of the Psalms are missionary prayers? Take Psalm 67:
May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God, our God, will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him.
Psalm 67
Bless us, so that your ways may be known among all nations. There is the Abrahamic promise again. The rest of the Old Testament is God preparing the Hebrew nation to receive the Jewish Messiah.
Heirs according to the promise
The New Testament opens with the Gospel of Matthew, and Matthew opens with a genealogy. Oh joy, genealogies are so exciting. Maybe you skip over the genealogies in Matthew and Luke when you read. Don’t. God never wastes a word.
Matthew traces the genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham. Could he have gone all the way back to Adam? Yes. But Matthew was a Jew, and his point was to prove that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. The gospel of Jesus started with a promise and a covenant made with Abraham, the father of nations. Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise made to the father of the Jews.
Notice, by the way, that Matthew includes four women with Gentile ties in that lineage: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. In any ordinary royal genealogy, that would have been a scandal. Three of them stand in King David’s line, and all four stand in Solomon’s.
Luke also gives us a genealogy, but he goes past Abraham, all the way back to Adam. Why? Luke was a Gentile. He was saying that Jesus is the Messiah for all people, for all the offspring of Adam.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day did not understand this. The Pharisees thought the blessing of God was only for the physical offspring of Abraham. But Jesus extended the Abrahamic promise beyond the physical descendants of Abraham to all of his spiritual descendants. Paul makes the other side plain in Romans 9:6–7: not all of Abraham’s physical descendants are true Israel and heirs to the promise. And Galatians 3 makes it crystal clear:
If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:29
Those who place their faith in Christ become the spiritual descendants of Abraham. We are heirs to the promise of blessing, to the covenant of a multitude, and to the calling to become a blessing to all the peoples of the earth.
That is why Jesus gave the Great Commission. There are five Great Commission passages, one in each of the Gospels and one in Acts 1, where Jesus says, “You will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). We are to be missionaries until the ends of the earth worship Jesus.
Acts is a missionary book. You have Pentecost and all the languages. You have the message going out to the Gentiles. One of my favorite chapters in the entire Bible is Acts 10, where Peter’s encounter with Cornelius makes him understand that the gospel was always intended not just for the Jews but for the Gentiles. And remember, Acts begins in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish world, and ends in Rome, the capital of the entire world at that time. That is intentional. God loves all people, and He wants all people to worship Him.
Every nation before the throne
Revelation shows us the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise:
After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
Revelation 7:9–10
A multitude no one could count. That is the promise God made to Abram under the stars, fulfilled. Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you.
Matthew 24:14 gives us insight into the end times: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” I believe that is why 2 Peter 3:12 speaks of looking forward to the day of God and speeding its coming.
Why God has left you here
So what is the primary purpose of your being here on earth? Why has God left you here past your salvation?
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
1 Peter 2:9
Write an M in the margin of your Bible. You have been blessed so that you can tell people how excellent He is. Live your transformed life before your neighbors. Serve them. Reach out to them. Minister to them in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in your school, on your softball team, in your grocery store.
That is why PassionLife exists. We are a missions organization, and we take the gospel of life to the world. God is a missionary God, and the Bible is a missionary book.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.