The Long Commission
The Great Commission of Matthew 28 has long been a cornerstone of American Evangelicalism. It has formed and fashioned the American church’s missional impulse. Yet when viewed from the wide lens of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the Great Commission is revealed as one of the pillars of postmillennialism.
Consider the context of the book of Matthew, which, from its very first chapter and verse, places the story of Jesus in specific Biblical, historical and theological frameworks. This means that detailed exegesis of the Great Commission must take into account more than verb tenses, distinct vocabulary, syntax and similar constructions in other parts of the Bible. All of these things are important in their own way, but the Great Commission belongs to a larger picture which detailed exegesis must not ignore — which is a fact of Biblical interpretation that applies comprehensively.
Call to mind the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew: “The Book of the genealogy [lit. genesis] of Jesus Messiah, Son of David, Son of Abraham.” Matthew says more here and in the verses that follow than I can address, but in terms of his book and the Biblical story, Matthew is saying that Jesus is the Messiah who fulfilled the covenants God gave to David and Abraham, which actually places the story of Jesus into the framework of all Scripture that had been written before Matthew. For, though the story of Abraham begins in Genesis 12, Abram is introduced in Genesis 11:26-32, linking his story with the story of the Tower of Babel and the nations descended from Noah. The covenant that God granted Abram was specifically the “cure” for the curse on the Tower of Babel. Thus, the whole of Genesis 1-11 lurks in the background of the story of Abraham, showing that Yahweh chose him to bring blessing by undoing the curse of Eden and the curse of Babel. Jesus, of course, is the Seed of Abraham through whom this is accomplished.
But is not the first verse of Matthew’s Gospel strange? It says that Jesus was the son of David — who lived about 1000 years before Jesus — and the son of Abraham — who lived about 1000 years before David. Why these 1000-year gaps? That is not the way genealogies are usually written. True, in the verses that follow Matthew fills in the gaps that he left out in verse 1. But we need to understand the reason for the gaps to begin with. Why the gaps? The answer is the covenantal significance of Abraham and David. In the flow of Biblical history Yahweh called Abraham and gave him a covenant that aimed to undo the curses of Eden and Babel and bring in a new world. About 1000 years later Yahweh gave a covenant to David that specifically aimed to fulfill the Abrahamic promise through a Messiah who would reign the world as a King of Peace — though it would be peace won through conflict (Psalm 2, etc.).
The Authoritative Commission
What does this have to do with the Great Commission? We can begin by noting a word repeated four times in the commission: the Great Commission is an “all” commission! Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. He commands for all the nations to be discipled. That includes teaching disciples all He has commanded. Finally, Jesus promised to continue with His disciples “all the days” until the end of the age.
Let’s begin at the end, “all the days.” Jesus’ commission covers the whole age from His resurrection until His return. Fulfillment of this commission is the work of Jesus’ disciples — the church — for this entire era. The Resurrection-to-Second-Coming is a singular era encompassed by the Great Commission.
What about the original covenant that God gave to Adam and Eve in the Garden? Jesus clearly means for us to understand that the Great Commission takes up and brings to fulfillment the mandate God gave to Adam and Eve in the Garden.
Look closely at the beginning of the commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been granted to Me.” Matthew quotes Jesus’ words to show that Jesus is the new and Last Adam. Jesus is alluding to something beyond himself. Remember, the first Adam was given all authority on earth: “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” The command to “subdue” and to have “dominion” gives Adam and Eve authority, but it does not stop with them alone, for it includes their descendants. Adam and Eve were to multiply into a whole race of mankind who would rule over all of creation in order to bring out and develop the potential God had planted within His world.
The Great Commission shows that after the resurrection, Jesus not only has all authority on earth, like Adam. Jesus also has all authority in heaven. This marks the beginning of a whole new era. A sinless son of Adam is enthroned at the right hand of God ruling heaven and earth. Therefore, Jesus’ Great Commission takes up and aims to complete the original commission given to the original pair.
The fact that the announcement of Jesus’ absolute authority comes in a commission Jesus gives to the church is significant, for Jesus is not doing the work alone. He is not coming in power to force submission. Rather, He will work throughout this new age as He worked in His life — in and through the paradoxical way of humility and suffering, winning the victory through His Word. Of course, since this is a commission, it means that this great work will be done by Jesus with His bride, the church. Jesus’ bride, the church — working with Him by the power of the Holy Spirit — is to follow His ways and work as He did.
The Gospel of Matthew’s first words indicate that Jesus is the Messiah in whom the covenants with David and Abraham will be fulfilled. Call to mind that the covenant with Abraham promised that kings would be born to him (Genesis 17:6). The covenant given to David brought that promise into narrower focus — David’s son would be king. The world needed a new king, one better than Adam. Thus, in the context of the larger story, the Messiah Jesus is the promised Seed of the Woman, who will defeat the serpent and bring salvation to the world — which desperately needed a new Adam.
It should be clear, therefore, that Jesus’ statement that “all authority in heaven and earth” had been given to Him points to the fact that He is the One who will lead the human race to fulfill the meaning that defined man as God’s image from the beginning. Given the covenantal background for Jesus’ command — alluded to from the first words of Matthew’s Gospel — the scope of the Great Commission can be nothing less than universal. The whole race of Adam’s sons fell in Adam. Jesus as the Last Adam must save and build a new race of man. All authority in heaven and earth has been granted to Him for that end.
The National Commission
We turn now to the next “all.” Jesus’ command is to “disciple” — a verb here in Greek — “all the nations” — the direct object of the verb. The imperative verb is not the first word in the commission, but it is the main verb, so we consider it and its direct object first. The command “disciple” means in normal English to “make disciples of,” but that can sound like “make disciples from all the nations” or something similar rather than the nations themselves being the direct object of the verb. Before we consider what might be involved in the command “disciple,” consider the object, “the nations.”
Why must the Commission reach to “all the nations?” Because Abraham was chosen to reunite the world that had been divided by the Tower of Babel.
Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:1-3)
The promise Genesis 12:1-3 was ratified in Genesis 15: “On the same day Yahweh made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land . . .” (15:18). And then when Abram was 99 years old and should have given up hope, Yahweh renewed the promise.
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless. And I will make My covenant between Me and you, and will multiply you exceedingly. Then Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying: “As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, and you shall be a father of many nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you (Genesis 17:1-7).
But the climax was not yet, for after the miracle-son, Isaac, grows up. Yahweh commanded Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham believed in Yahweh and His promises, so he offered up his only son. Yahweh responded by reiterating the promise — this time with an oath.
By Myself I have sworn, says Yahweh, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son— blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice. (Genesis 22:16-18).
Through Abraham all the families and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. The curse of the Garden and the curse of Babel had been universal. With the Great Commission, the Messiah, the Son of David and Abraham, commands His disciples to work with Him to bring all the nations and families of the earth into submission to His rule so that they can all be blessed.
The Great Commission concerns nations — “all the nations” — because it is as universal in scope as the promises to Abraham — not to mention David: “Ask of Me, and I will give You, the nations for Your inheritance, And the ends of the earth for Your possession” (Psalm 2:8).
All the ends of the world
Shall remember and turn to Yahweh,
And all the families of the nations
Shall worship before You.
For the kingdom is Yahweh’s,
And He rules over the nations. (Psalm 22:27-28)
But how does Jesus envision all the nations being discipled?
The commission actually begins with a participle “going,” which we usually translate as an imperative verb, “Go,” which is followed by “therefore” (though the inclusion of this word in the text seems to be disputable) and then the imperative verb: “Go, therefore, disciple the nations.” Our grammar books say that when a participle immediately precedes an imperative verb, it takes on the force of an imperative, so we translate it as such: “Go!”
Jesus’ disciples, unlike Jesus, are to reach the nations of the world. Jesus’ own ministry was confined to the people of Israel, but the disciples are to have a ministry to all the nations of the world in order that the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants may be fulfilled. Therefore, they must go. As Mark has it: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (16:15). Luke, has different words, but the same implication “repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations” (Luke 24:47). To preach to all the nations, one must go to them.
The Sacramental Commission
The Great Commission is a global missionary imperative requiring aggressive outreach of the sort that we see in the travels of the apostle Paul. That is the first part of the answer to how Jesus sees this being fulfilled: the disciples must go to all the nations.
Then, the command to “disciple all the nations” is followed by two participial phrases: “baptizing . . .” and “teaching . . . .”
Assuming baptism and teaching are part of the answer to the question above, leads to other questions: How can “all the nations be baptized and taught?” It is interesting that Matthew does not specifically mention “preaching the Gospel,” though it is obviously presupposed, since he speaks of baptism.
In the commission given in Mark, Jesus says, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned” (16:15-16). And what we see in the book of Acts is individuals and families believing and being baptized, as well as larger groups like on the day of Pentecost and also a larger group at the house of Cornelius. But, still, baptism is individual. There is no doubt about that.
Thus, in Matthew 28:19, the change from the neuter “nations” to the masculine “them,” no doubt reflects the fact that the subjects of baptism are individuals, but it does not erase the fact that it is “all the nations” who are to be discipled. Putting the “nations” together with “them,” implies that the baptism of individuals aims ultimately at the baptism of all the individuals in all the nations. It implies that the kingdom of heaven grows and increases by a gradual process, like the leaven which the woman hid in three measures of meal until all was leavened (Matthew 13:33).
Luke offers a similar vision. After Jesus took 40 days to show how all things written in the Law of Moses, the Psalms, and the prophets had to be fulfilled in Him, He spoke to the disciples: “Then He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things’” (Luke 24:46-48). Luke brings back the emphasis to “all nations,” but the book in which he shows this being fulfilled never talks about a whole nation hearing the Gospel at one sitting or about a whole nation being baptized in a day. The fulfillment of the work of discipling the nations is gradual, though the preaching of the Gospel — which is why Jesus must be with His church to the end of the age for the commission to be fulfilled.
Next, it is important to note exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, though English translations seldom reflect it. Jesus said: “baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Jesus said that baptism is to be “into the name,” not merely “in the name” of the Triune God. In other words, baptism brings the recipient into a new relationship with the Triune God. It is the new covenant ceremony of initiation that replaces the old covenant ceremony of circumcision. Unless one is baptized into the name of the Trinity, he is not a covenant member. Since Jesus is establishing a baptism that is different from that of John the Baptizer, He makes it clear that it is not merely a baptism of repentance. Christian baptism established in the Great Commission is “into” the singular “name” of — there is one name because there is only one God — “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
The other aspect of the work of the Great Commission is “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” What is the “all” that Jesus is referring to here? Though Matthew and Mark do not refer to it in their Gospels, we know from the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts that after He rose from the dead, Jesus spent 40 days teaching His disciples how to understand all that was written about Him in what we call the Old Testament (Luke 24:25-27, 44-49; Acts 1:1-3). It should be clear, then, that the “all” that Jesus commanded must comprehend the totality of Scripture, which implies how very great and demanding the command to teach is. But we must note that the emphasis is not on “information” about the Bible or Jesus. Jesus commanded His disciples to teach others to “do,” “keep,” or “observe” what He had commanded. The aim of discipleship is a transformed life.
Thus, all authority that backs the commission, all the nations who must be discipled, and teaching all that Jesus had commanded, requires the aid of Jesus Himself: “Lo, I am with you all the days even to the end of the age.” This promise has deep roots. Jesus’ promise to be “with” the disciples alludes to the covenant promise of God’s special blessing on His servants, repeated frequently in the Old Testament. Perhaps the emphatic words to Joshua record the most well-known form of this promise. “ No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you. . . . Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Yahweh your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:5, 9). In all, the promise to be “with” as a promise of covenant blessing and success appears about 100 times in the Bible.1 Jesus has commanded and He will be with His church to be sure the commission is fulfilled.
Afterward: Discipling the Nations
This is a simple and I hope clear exegesis of the Great Commission from a postmillennial perspective. I have not included footnotes or references to keep this short as possible. But I should add a word about what seems to be a stumbling block for some, the idea that we are to disciple nations. Perhaps that is because we are Americans living in a pluralistic society and we have come to think that pluralism is normal. But historically, pluralism has not been normal. What is more, the Christian church in the past did actually disciple nations, which is what Christendom was — nations (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, etc., etc.) that had been discipled — baptized and taught, though, alas, not so well taught most of the time.
One of the greatest examples of a nation being baptized and taught is the England of Shakespeare’s day. It is not the only example, but it is the one I know best through my study of Shakespeare. I begin with a simple fact that might seem odd to us. We do not really know Shakespeare’s birthday. (I think that means he never had a birthday party!) We estimate when his birthday might have been from the day of his baptism, which was recorded, and in that day the records were kept in the churches. Everyone was baptized and everyone’s baptism was recorded. The nation was baptized. In Shakespeare’s England due to the work of Thomas Cranmer and others, including Martin Bucer who aided the work of Reformation in England from 1549 till his death in 1551, the English church had a good liturgy and good teaching. For pastors who were not competent, homilies were put out that they could read to their congregations. The utterly profound impact of all this in practical everyday life is well expressed by Hannibal Hamlin in the introduction to his book on the Bible in Shakespeare.
This book is about allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare’s plays. It argues that such allusions are frequent, deliberate, and significant, and that the study of these allusions is repaid by a deeper understanding of the plays. A supplementary argument, or perhaps a presupposition, is that Shakespeare’s culture as a whole was profoundly and thoroughly biblical, a culture in which one could assume a degree of biblical knowledge that is difficult to imagine in today’s mass-media global culture. One gropes for a modern analogy, but there is none. Imagine a television program that everyone in the country has been watching every week, sometimes more than once, for their entire lives, having seen some episodes dozens of times. Suppose your parents and grandparents had watched all the same episodes, and suppose further that millions of people in other neighboring countries had watched these episodes too, dubbed into their own languages. Suppose people had actually been watching this show, in still other languages, for over a thousand years, and that vast libraries had accumulated over the centuries full of books about how best to interpret the show. Suppose that it was illegal not to watch this show and, moreover, that your eternal salvation was understood to depend on it. Suppose that this TV show was the basis for your country’s literature and art, its political theory, its history, its philosophy, its understanding of the natural world as well as human nature, and essential to most other fields of knowledge as well. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the Bible was that show; it was always in reruns, and it never went off the air.2
Finally, remember that when John Calvin and other reformers addressed letters to princes and kings or dedicated books to them, they were not betraying an exaggerated sense of self importance. They were working to fulfill the Great Commission to bring the nations of the world into submission to Christ, the true Lord and King. And they were successful to a degree that we, with our secular education and Enlightenment-influenced presuppositions might forget. Indeed, I think that in many respects, the church has regressed with the result that many pastors and teachers have given up on the possibility of the Great Commission, forgetting, it seems, that Jesus is with the church to the end, to work in, through, and with her for its fulfillment.
Though our work may be more like that of the first century church — a small group of believers surrounded by a hostile society — Jesus promised to be with us to enable us to accomplish what He commanded. All authority in heaven and earth is His and He will bring the commission to success through the work of the Holy Spirit in His church. Jesus’ own victory was the victory of the cross and if we are going to be faithful to Him and His Word, we will also have to carry our own crosses. Many Christians today suffer persecution, sometimes severe. What is their comfort? What is their encouragement? — the fact that the cross is the way to victory, that the cross will inevitably bear fruit and lead to the building up of Christ’s church. How can that be? Because Christ is with His church all the days to the end of the age.
Ralph Smith is a pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
- Gn. 26:3, 24, 28; 28:15, 20; 31:3; 39:2, 3, 21, 23; 48:21; Ex. 3:12; 10:10; 18:19; 20:20; Nm. 14:9; 16:3; 23:21; Dt. 32:12; Josh. 1:5, 9, 17; 3:7; 6:27; 22:31; Jdg. 1:19, 22; 6:12, 13, 16; Rth. 2:4; 1 Sm. 3:19; 10:7; 14:7; 16:18; 17:37; 18:12, 14, 28; 20:13; 2 Sm. 7:3; 14:17; 1 Kg. 1:37; 8:57; 11:38; 2 Kg. 3:12; 10:15; 18:7; 1 Chr. 9:20; 17:2; 22:11; 16; 28:20; 2 Chr. 1:1; 13:12; 15:2, 9; 17:3; 19:11; 20:17; 36:23; Ezr. 1:3; Ps. 118:6, 7; Is. 8:10; 41:10; 43:2, 5; 45:14; Jer. 1:8, 19; 15:20; 20:11; 30:11; 42:11; 46:28; Zph. 3:17; Hag. 1:13; 2:4; Zch. 8:23; 10:5. Mt. 1:23; Lk. 1:28; Acts 7:9; 10:38; 18:10; 2 Thes. 3:16; 2 Tim. 4:22; Rev. 21:3. ↩︎
- Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 1. This is the most profound study of Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in print. ↩︎