One of the courses I am taking as part of my PhD work is a History and Theology of Missions. It has been edifying thus far. Part of the course work is to post comments about our reading from an amazing two volume book on missions by Dr. Schnabel from Trinity. He defines “mission” and “missions” as necessarily including the notion of a community of faith that “actively works to win other people” to its views. We post in the forum for dialogue with other colleagues. The discussion centered on the “mission” activity of Israel in the Old Testament. Do we find Israel being proactive in the cause of missions in the same vein that we see in the New Testament? Here was my brief response based upon the book we were reading at the time:
“While there are some incidences in which Jews were proactive in advancing the kingdom of God to others, there were limitations in this mission (see Matthew 10:5-15). It appears that in Old Testament Judaism we have more of a “come and see” mission rather than a “go and tell” mission. It is clear that many of God’s people understood the unique blessing God had given Israel as His covenant people, and that they used that blessing to attract and stand out from other nations (see Exodus 19:4-6; 1 Kings 11:23-25; Psalm 67:2; Isaiah 49:6 among others).
Interestingly, Schnabel’s definition could apply to a proactive engagement within Israel when they became like pagan nations. When Israel rebelled against God’s desires for them, God sent messengers to proclaim a message of repentance in the hope of winning His people back to them. So from Moses to the prophets to Jesus there is a concentrated effort of mission to “win” Israel while they remained hostile toward God (1 Kings 19:10; 2 Chronicles 24:20-22; Nehemiah 9:26; Jeremiah 2:30; Matthew 5:12; 11:21-24; 21:35ff; 22:6ff; 23:29-36: Acts 7:51-52; 1 Thessalonians 2:15; Hebrews 11:37-38). This of course was one of the central themes of Peter’s gospel message at Pentecost (Acts 2-3), and is certainly a part of Jesus preaching (Matthew 23:37-24:2).”
Any takers bloggers and lurkers?
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