Devotional and Bible

Jesus isn’t preaching some kind of easy religion here – like tell everyone to ask me into their heart and have a vague feeling of love for me.  No, we are to make disciples – of all nations – and these disciples make a public stand for Jesus (baptism) – and they are taught to obey Jesus.

Jesus is building His Church.  We are not to only preach the word and then move on.  Of course there are times when we do that individually, but it’s not our goal.  Our goal is … well, everything Jesus has said in these three verses.  We’ll looking toward the end goal – disciples in every nation – baptised believers following the commands of Christ (Revelation 5:9-10).

These are not easy verses.  Not because they’re not clear – but because Jesus takes His position of authority and He issues commands.  And they’re radical – both for the disciples who were listening, and those who are believers today – and for those who are being asked to follow Him in the future.

However, the commands of Christ are sandwiched between two very comforting statements.  First, Jesus has authority.  We are going under the command of Someone who knows all things and has all power.

Now He affirms that He will be with us.

Us, I say – because He uses the words to the end of the age.  Jesus is clearly not just commanding the disciples who are there watching Him physically.  He’s commanding also those who will believe in Him through the disciples’ word (see John 17:20).  Every disciple – to the end of the age – has this promise of the presence of Christ.  And we know that the glory will be God’s – in the Church and in Christ – forever (Ephesians 3:14-21).

A lot has been made of the word "Go" in this passage.  Some people have argued that it doesn’t actually mean go (which kind of begs the question – why do Greek scholars keep translating it that way?!).  No, it means as you are going (they say).

In other words, don’t worry about going anywhere – that’s not the point.  Just share the Gospel wherever you happen to be.

However, this simply isn’t the case.  Now I’m no Greek scholar, but if you want an easy example, look at another place where this form is used – Matthew 2:13-14.  The angel tells Joseph to get up, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt.  No, the angel was not suggesting that, if Joseph happens to be getting up, or sometime someday when Joseph gets up – no, it’s a command!  Get up Joe!  Move it!  Get the Child and GET OUT OF HERE!

I wrote a little about this before here: Great Commission: What does GO mean?

No, this is a command – go, make disciples, and baptize.

Jesus of course reinforces this idea when He says all nations.  No, this was not just if you happened to bump into someone from Samaria (ouch!).

The Jewish disciples really needed extra encouragement that they needed to go – and in fact needed to go to all nations.  As we read about the early days of the Church, we can see God reinforcing this point again and again.  He commands them to go, He tells them how the Word would spread (Acts 1:8), He first sends the Gospel in many languages at a time when people from many nations came to Jerusalem (Acts 2:4-11), and He allowed persecution to move them on (Acts 8:1).

Going to all nations was (is?) not easy.  But again, the authority of Jesus was with them.

And Jesus is not being overly arrogant here to include Himself with the Spirit and the Father – here we have Jesus very clearly equating Himself with the other two.  This job of reaching the world comes from the Triune God – Father, Son and Spirit.

Today we start a three-verse run.  Like the last set of verses, they include some of the last words that Jesus said to His disciples before His ascension.

Of course, no self-respecting missionary should forget to memorize these!

I had never really thought about the first part of this verse.  Jesus came to them.  If you look at the passage, you can see that He was already there – at least in the order of the verses.  The disciples had come to the mountain and they saw Jesus, and worshipped Him.

Maybe He just came closer to them – the way you might do if you wanted to tell everyone something very important.

All authority had been given to Jesus.  This is the authority that the disciples could be confident of as they went out into the world.  It also gave authority to their message – with confidence they could tell people to obey the Gospel (ie 2Thessalonians 1:5-10).

This authority came from the Father (1Corinthians 15:27; John 5:26-27).  Of course, this doesn’t take away from the equality of the persons in the Trinity – it just shows that they each have different roles, perfectly coordinated, as one God.

Our confidence – as those in Christ – is that He has all authority, anywhere we go.  Anywhere.