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.
Continue reading “The Missional, “Migrational” Nature of Faith”
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