When Jesus approached his followers in Matthew 28, what exactly did he have in mind when he said to “make disciples of every nation?”
Every nation? Every single one of them? Yep! Okay … um … so what (in the world) is a nation? And what were the disciples thinking when they heard the word nation?
The answer to these questions is critical in understanding the scope of “the mission” of the Church - The Great Commission.
Our everyday English doesn’t help us because we use the words nation and country interchangeably. For example, in the Pledge of Allegiance we say, “One nation under God.”
It’s Luke’s account of The Great Commission that begins to bring clarity to this issue. In Luke 24 Jesus took his followers to the Old Testament to launch The Great Commission. Now, that makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, there was no New Testament, right? Have you ever pondered the fact that Jesus was restricted to the Old Testament while launching the Church into a new endeavor popularly referred to as the Great Commission?
Jesus said, “(Everything) must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses (Gen.-Deut), the Prophets and the Psalms” (v. 44). “Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (v. 45).
Wow! That must have been some kind of “Bible study.” I wonder what passages Jesus used?
No doubt he took them to the first place the word nation is used in the Bible: Genesis 10. That’s where Moses laid out the family tree of Mr. & Mrs. Noah through their three sons. The seventy names listed under the three boys are identified by languages and are called nations (vss. 5, 20, 31).
God, through Moses, identified a central element of nation being language - the highest expression of culture.
Let me combine these two elements into a definition of a nation:
A nation is a group of people
who have their own language and culture
According to www.joshuaproject.net there are 16,000 nations in the world and 7,000 are still unreached
Who are they and where do they live? Many of them are living in our communities!
“Oh, Lord, open our eyes to see the nations in our communities: in our grocery stores, in our schools, across the counter at the donut shop, at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Lowe’s. Places where we shop, places where we play. In Jesus name, Amen.”
