Triumph of the Warrior-King: A Theology of the Great Commission, Part 3
— Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 —
God’s purpose is not just the rescue of some human beings, but also the restoration of human rule by conforming believers “to the image of his Son so that he would be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom 8:29 NASB). Jesus’ death, resurrection, and his subsequent calling of sinners to repentance is presented in strikingly cosmic terms, with human redemption seen as within “a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens, and things on the earth” (Eph 1:10 NASB).
Nowhere is the Christ-centered nature of redemption seen more clearly than in the content of Great Commission proclamation itself, the message of the crucified and resurrected Messiah (1 Cor 15:3-4), who bears the wrath of God in the place of sinners.[1]
The centrality of Christ in the accomplishment of redemption establishes both the universal scope of the mission of Christ and the freeness of the gospel offer, seen in the way Jesus is called the Savior of “the world,” literally the entire cosmos (John 3:16-17). The universal scope of the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world further grounds the global and cosmic nature of the Great Commission.
Some Christian theologians have tended to abstract the atonement from Christ himself, as though the atonement were simply a strictly commercial transaction of so-much wrath for so-much sin.[2] And yet, the New Testament presents propitiation more specifically in terms of the sinner’s union with Christ as his substitute and representative.[3]
Thus, the apostle John writes: “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2 NKJV, emphasis added). This does not result in universalism precisely because the benefits of the atonement come only through union with Christ the covenant king. Believers, before they came to faith, were not justified before God, and their sins were not seen as propitiated, even though no one disputes that Jesus objectively died for them.
Instead, Scripture writes, we too were “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph 2:2 ESV). Jesus propitiates the wrath of God in his sacrifice, but the benefits of this propitiation become the believer’s when he comes into union with Christ through belief in the gospel. This faith union is the transition from condemnation to righteousness, from wrath to grace, from the dominion of Satan to the kingdom of Christ (Col 1:13-14).[4] Theologian Bruce Demarest correctly concludes that “by divine intention Christ’s suffering and death are universal in its provision and particular in its application.”[5]
The cosmic scope of the atonement is a double-edged sword. Jesus grounds the free offer of the gospel in the fact that “all is ready” (Luke 14:16-17). The apostles do not simply instruct unbelievers that if they believe in something that may or may not be true (that Jesus died for their sins), then they will find it to be true after all. Instead, the apostles plead with all unbelievers to come to Christ (that is, to abandon all other hope of salvation except in the substitutionary death and resurrection of Jesus) on the basis of the provision of the atonement (Acts 2:40; 2 Cor 5:20). Indeed, the apostles do not just invite all people to come to Christ, with no conditions except repentance and faith; they command all people to do so (Acts 17:30-31).[6]
Those who refuse to come to Christ insist on standing before God without a Mediator. Thus, they bear their own sins (Num 18:22; John 3:18), and receive a heightened condemnation as those who have “trampled” the blood of Christ (Heb 10:26-31). The freeness of the gospel offer means that Great Commission Christians must crucify any hesitation to proclaim the gospel to any sinner in any place at any time. The gospel of the apostles is not offered only to the elect, but to all sinners without distinction.[7] Thus, Jesus and the apostle Paul calls on Christians to plead with persuasion and urgency for all sinners, on behalf of Christ himself, to be reconciled to God through the atoning mission of Jesus (2 Cor 5:17-20).
The resurrection establishes the authority and the power Jesus delegates to the church in the Great Commission task. The resurrection of Jesus means that he is the righteous One (Dan 12:2-3). He is the true Israel, who has been raised from the dead (Ezek 37:13-14). He is the propitiation of Yahweh’s wrath against rebellious humanity. He has been vindicated as the anointed human king of the cosmos (Rom 1:2-4).
This is why the resurrection is so pivotal in the apostolic preaching of the Great Commission, so much so that Paul is said to be preaching “Jesus and the resurrection” when he stirred the crowds in Athens (Acts 17:18). The apostle Peter sounds less like a television evangelist and more like a military strategist at Pentecost and beyond. The resurrection of Jesus is good news for Israel (Acts 13:30-32) but very bad news for the cosmic powers and their allies (Acts 2:22-36; 1 Pet 3:21-22). ”The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the ’son of god’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation,” notes biblical scholar N.T. Wright. “He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.”[8]
The apostolic preaching of the cross is indeed necessary for the Great Commission mandate. But the preaching of a penal substitutionary atonement without the bodily resurrection of Jesus is to no avail (1 Cor 15:15-19). Those who come to Jesus for salvation, the Scriptures testify, must “believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead” in order to be saved (Rom 10:9 ESV). This is not simply some sort of test of faith, as though one must believe a seemingly unbelievable miracle in order to “prove” that one is really trusting in Christ. Instead, believing in the resurrection is part of what it means to trust Christ.
The believer counts the crucifixion of Messiah as the penalty for his sin, and he counts the resurrection of Messiah as his acceptance before the Father. The resurrection is for Jesus the transition from sin-bearing substitute, under the wrath of God, to the vindicated substitute inheriting the blessing of God.[9] When the believer is united with Jesus in his resurrection, his life is now “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3).
This resurrection focus of faith is seen perhaps most clearly in the interchange between Jesus and Martha after the death of Lazarus. When Jesus mentions the resurrection, Martha turns her attention to the eschaton, when the graves of the righteous are opened. Jesus proclaims: “I am the resurrection” (John 11:25), before asking Martha the most soul-penetrating question she had ever heard: “Do you believe this (John 11:26)?” Through his Body the church, Jesus now asks the same question of every sinner on the planet.
Union with Jesus in crucifixion and resurrection is seen also in the baptism mandate of Jesus in the Great Commission. The church is to make disciples of all nations, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19b ESV). Baptism is not a bare Bar Mitzvah of initiation into Christianity. It is not accidental that baptism is done with water, the element of the wrath of God in the flood judgment of the world (1 Pet 3:20-21) and the element of the seas, which in the Old Testament represent chaos and hostility to the Creator.[10]
Jesus speaks of his death under the curse of God as a “baptism” he must undergo (Mark 10:38-39; Luke 12:50). The apostle Paul speaks of the Old Testament Israelites as “baptized” when they passed safely through the waters of judgment (1 Cor 10:1-2). In the new covenant, baptism signifies the burial of the believer with Jesus in the chaotic waters of death and the resurrection of the believer with Jesus from grips of the grave (Rom 6:3-9). As such, baptism is itself a call to battle. When believers from every nation go down into the waters, they appeal to God for rescue from the condemnation of the “angels, authorities, and powers” which have been swept away by the resurrection triumph of the warrior Messiah (1 Pet 3:21-22).
1. For a defense of the atonement as penal and substitutionary, see Paige Patterson, “Reflections on the Atonement,” Criswell Theological Review 3 (1989): 307-20.
2. See, for instance, the treatment of the extent of the atonement presented by the first writing Southern Baptist theologian, John L. Dagg. See Dagg, Manual of Theology (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857), 324-31.
3. For an excellent analysis of this emphasis in the thought of John Calvin, see Kevin Dixon Kennedy, Union with Christ and the Extent of the Atonement in Calvin (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
4. This is contra the “double payment” objection offered by Puritan John Owen in his classic defense of limited atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1984). Owen does not take into sufficient account the issue of union with Christ in the application of the benefits of the atonement.
5. Bruce Demarest, The Cross and Salvation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997), 193. For a similar treatment of the extent of the atonement issue, see Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 841-58.
6. For an analysis of the relationship between the design of the atonement and the free offer of the gospel, see John Thornbury, “God’s Universal Call to Men,” Reformation and Revival Journal 2 (1993): 99-113. While this author might emphasize more than Thornbury the universal aspects of the design of the atonement, the article masterfully defends a free offer based on the infinite value of the atonement of Christ. Thornbury writes of his personal transition from the atonement theology of John Gill to his current view: “When I was entrenched in the system I had great difficulty preaching to sinners, particularly with any fervor or pathos. But in the providence of God I came upon a treatise of Andrew Fuller titled The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. In this Fuller shows that the gospel does not address people as elect and non-elect but simply as sinners. The gospel is therefore a mandate to all indiscriminately to leave the paths of sin and lay hold of Christ. Hence it is the duty of all to seek forgiveness through the shed blood of Jesus which is sufficient for the whole world.” The reference to Fuller is important, since Fuller’s recovery of the free offer of the gospel and the duty for all to believe is what sparked the Great Commission vision of William Carey, and thus launched the modern mission movement.
7. The New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith (1833) contains a succinct and powerful expression of this biblical truth in its article “On the Freeness of Salvation.” The confession states: “That the blessings of salvation are made free to all by the gospel; that it is the immediate duty of all to accept them by a cordial, and obedient faith; and that nothing prevents the salvation of the greatest sinner on earth except his own voluntary refusal to submit to the Lord Jesus Christ, which refusal will subject him to an aggravated condemnation.”
8. N.T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 576.
9. For an analysis of the resurrection as the “justification” of Jesus as the righteous new humanity, see Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., The Centrality of the Resurrection: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 116.
10. This is true from the opening words of Scripture when the Creator Spirit hovers over “the waters” of “the deep” in the formless and void earth. The Old Testament prophets speak of the cosmic warfare as a struggle between God and “the sea” or “the sea dragon” (see, for instance, Isaiah 27:1). And in the final New Jerusalem in the new earth, the apostle John reveals that “the sea was no more” (Rev 21:1 ESV).
