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Lesslie Newbigin says that scripture is missional. Among other things, that means Scripture has a movement to it. It begins with two people, Adam and Eve, who initially walk with God in the garden created for them, but they are naive. They are duped into not trusting God. They are exiled from the garden and are instructed to multiply and populate the earth.

Scripture tracks the story of God’s plan to redeem Adam and Eve. It progresses through God’s interaction with their children, their children’s children, and their descendants along a missional path.

God works through Noah, Abraham, and Moses to move his plans along. All the milestones along the path are missional in the direction of God’s established before the foundations of the earth.

They coalesce in the incarnation, where Jesus picks up all the missional threads, fulfilling them in himself and carrying them forward in his life. He proclaims the presence and the future coming of the kingdom of God. He gives himself up to death, and he rises again to defeat sin and death. Jesus takes his seat at the right hand of the Father after commissioning his followers to carry his message and to the ends of the earth as his ambassadors.

From the promise to Eve that her seed will crush the serpent, to the rainbow covenant to Noah, to promise to Abraham to bless all the nations of the earth through his descendants, the missional progression of God’s plan in Revelation: in the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven and in God establishing His habitation among His people in a new heavens and new earth.

In that final chapter in which God’s plans come to fruition, all God’s people are gathered in one great assembly of people. They are from every nation, tribe, and tongue. (Rev. 7:9)

In this progression, God doesn’t move; people do. God doesn’t change; people do. The mission doesn’t change from beginning to end, but people change in relation to their understanding and involvement as the mission unfolds.

Another way of characterizing the missional character of Scripture from beginning to end is with the word, migration. Scripture is about the migration of people from the garden to the New Jerusalem.

The theme of migration runs throughout Scripture, and that migratory theme is itself missional. Migration is another way of looking at the journey, at the outworking of God’s plans in mankind throughout history, ending (beginning again) with the establishment of the City of God in the Kingdom of God where Jesus has made room for all of us who have heard his voice and responded to Him in spirit and in truth.

The idea of migration is rooted in the concept of place and displacement. The first displacement took place at the very beginning – in the Garden of Eden – when Adam and Eve were cast out into the world God made.

They were displaced from the idyllic garden where God walked with them in the cool of the morning to wander in a fallen world full of heat and cold, pain and toil, seeking and longing. The banishment of people from that garden began the great migration: the exodus from the garden into the world that God created – separated from God.

Even in that great displacement, God’s plan was always to redeem them – not to bring them back to garden, but to bring them forward through the trials and tribulations wrought by their distrust of God into a place of trust, rest, and right relationship to God. This time their naivete will be replaced with full understanding and full alignment with God because they choose to trust Him.

The displacement, itself, is part of the plan – the beginning of the progression through which God would redeem mankind and the creation to the destination God planned at the beginning. From then until now, mankind has been migrating to the ultimate destination.

That theme of displacement, of migration, of longing for a home—which is simply a longing for the eternity that God put into our hearts—is a story of migration or immigration, if you will. Adam and Eve were exiles entering into a strange world. They did their best to make a home there, but the eternity that God placed into the hearts of Adam and Eve and of each person is a longing, the fulfillment of which we are ever seeking – and never finding. Not in the life.

Archaeologists and anthropologists tell us of the strong current of religious ideation that is rooted in humanity going back to our most primitive ancestors. Even now, in all of our sophistication, we have not lost that longing for the eternity God has placed in our hearts. It drives us forward. It drives us to search for meaning. It drives us to search for God himself. It drives us to search even for our own selves that somehow are not complete because we await the fulfillment of our very selves that will occur when we find out ultimate rest in God.

God sent Adam and Eve out into the world to multiply and fill it. God gave Noah the same command after the flood. Those commands are echoed in God’s promise to Abraham – that from his seed, his descendants would become like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore.

Go and multiply! Through Abraham’s descendants, God would bless all the nations of the earth, but his descendants had to travel a long and winding road along the way. They migrated to Egypt, where they lived hundreds of years ending in slavery. They wandered 40 years in the wilderness.

Before God sees them into the Promised land, God reminds the Israelites that they were strangers in a strange land in Egypt. As a way to embed that identity into them, God tells them to love the stranger – love the foreigner – as themselves because they were foreigners and strangers in Egypt. God reminds His people of this over and over again of their identity – people who lived as foreigners in a foreign land

God tells His people before they enter the land that they will live in His land only as guests, as temporary dwellers – as foreigners. After living many generations in the land God promised them – devolving in a long, downward spiral of sin, idolatry, and injustice – they were exiled again. Again and again, God’s people are made to feel their migratory existence as their very identity as God orchestrates their journey/migration.

God’s people are temporary dwellers just passing through, living as foreigners in a foreign world.

These things are missional. They have a direction. People in this great redemption story that God is working out, migrate into and through physical and spiritual spaces, as they seek that destination identified in Hebrews 11 – the city, the architect and maker of which is God.

All people of faith see this destination, but only from afar. The identity of God’s people as aliens and strangers, identifying with the aliens and strangers in this world, is embedded in them because that is who they are. Thus, the Psalmist says, “I am a stranger on earth, do not hide your plans from me….” (Psalm 119:19)

God’s people were considered strangers temporarily dwelling in the promised land (Leviticus 25:23) because that land was never meant to be the final destination. When God became incarnate and walked among us, he pointed us beyond – to God’s kingdom that is not of this world. Thus, we are aliens and strangers still in this world. (1 Peter 2:9-12)

Just as people of faith who came before us saw the ultimate destination only from afar (Hebrews 11:13), we also only see our destination from afar. We will not arrive at our destination until that new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven. Until then, we are all just migrants on a journey to that great Great City – the New Jerusalem – that awaits us, as promised by God.