From “Come and See” to “Go and Tell”: Old Testament Foundations for the Great Commission (Part 1)
By Chris Burnett, Scott Callaham, Kyle Dunham & Josh Sherrill
Chris is the director of the Center for Biblical Missions at TMAI, adjunct professor at The Master’s Seminary, and co-editor of Biblical Missions (Thomas Nelson, 2025).
Scott is host of the Daily Dose of Aramaic podcast, composer of Chinese worship music, and former missionary to Singapore.
Kyle is Professor and Chair of Old Testament at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, a former local church minister in New York, and a former missionary to Ecuador.
Josh was Lead Copy Editor for Biblical Missions and Biblical Missions Workbook. He is a PhD candidate in Old Testament at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven.
*This article is based on a live conversation between the authors. It has been edited for clarity.
God’s Heart to Bless the Nations from the Beginning
Chris: Kyle and Scott, you both deal in our textbook with the importance of seeing the nations as crucial to God’s overall kingdom plans. But you’ve come at it from different starting places. Kyle, you’ve answered the question of whether or not the Old Testament has a Great Commission in the way we see it in the New Testament. Scott, you present an Old Testament walk-through of the biblical theme of ethnicity. So why don’t you share a high-level big picture of your pieces and how it gives us the big idea of God’s heart for all the peoples of all the world. Kyle, do you want to start?
Kyle: Sure. As we walk through Scripture, we first encounter in Genesis 1 where God intends to bless humanity and bless the created order [1:22, 28, 31; 2:3]. However, the introduction of sin, the fall, and the curse means that the creation that was good at the end of Genesis 1 is now corrupted by the end of Genesis 3. It‘s been twisted and warped, so there‘s a threat to God‘s intention to bless humanity.
What then happens after Genesis 3 is this back-and-forth in God‘s intention to accomplish His redemptive purposes through a single individual, on the one hand, and humanity at large, on the other. That begins with the promised “seed” of the woman, where all of humanity is included in her seed and the seed of the serpent, but there’s also a singular “he” that will come to crush the serpent [3:15]. There was a violent humanity before the flood versus Noah, and a rebellious humanity at Babel, which becomes the table of nations, versus Abraham.
With Abraham, there comes a specificity for this blessing underscored in Genesis 1. The agency of Abraham is God‘s intended means of still bringing that blessing to the nations, even though they’ve been scattered. So I would call the Abrahamic covenant the foundation of missions. Even though blessing is mentioned in Genesis 1, the Abrahamic covenant is where that blessing is specified to be through an agent, through a mediator, to the nations as nations. The mediator specifically is Israel, a nation which God forges from Abraham‘s descendants—Isaac, Jacob, and the Patriarchs—who go down to Egypt, multiply, are put into slavery, are redeemed from slavery as a nation, and are brought to Sinai where their nationhood is inaugurated.
What succeeds from that is the Mosaic covenant where God covenants with the people of Israel, making them a mediator nation, a kingdom of priests in Exodus 19. Following that, the nation is set apart to invite all the surrounding nations to come and experience God‘s blessing through His presence, which is localized in the tabernacle and, later, the temple [Exod 19:5–6; 34:10; Deut 4:5–8; 28:8–10; 1 Kings 8:41–43].
We can see strains of this in the Psalter, too. It begins with David lamenting the nations’ rebellion against the Lord’s anointed [Ps 2; cf. Pss 3–7], and it ends with all creation, including the nations, glorifying God and praising Him by the end of the Psalter [Pss 145–150].[1] So there‘s this strain that runs through many biblical books where blessing is going to come to the nations through the agency of Israel, as the nations acknowledge God’s chosen agents of His blessing. Specifically, that gets concretized through David and His covenant with David [Pss 2; 89; 132; cf. 2 Sam 7].
Then, when we get to the Latter Prophets, this ”come and see“ invitation to the nations starts hinting at a future ”go and tell“ mission, because the Messiah Himself is going to be a light to the nations [Isa 9:1–7; 42:1–9; 49:1–7]. He‘s going to bring blessing to the far reaches of the earth, and the nations will have His law [Isa 2:2–4; 45:20–25; 51:4–8; Jer 31:31–34]. They‘ll experience the justice that He brings [Isa 19:19–25; Mic 4:1–5; Zech 14:8–9, 16–17]. So we see these glimmers that God is going to transform this come-and-see strategy into a go-and-tell strategy, as His light extends to all peoples.
By the time we end Isaiah, we don‘t exactly know how that transformation is going to work out, but the Gospels pick up on it. Jesus very clearly shows how. He offers the kingdom to Israel [Matt 4:17; 9:35–38; 10:5–7; Luke 4:16–21, 43; 9:1–6; 10:1–12]. There‘s a rejection of Him and His righteous demands [Matt 21:33–46; Luke 13:31–35; 19:11–27, 41–44], and He then commissions His disciples to go and make disciples of all nations [Matt 24:14; 28:18–20; Luke 24:46–47].
By the time we reach the Great Commission, I think we see how Isaiah‘s prophecies are going to work out: through the worldwide dissemination of the gospel. Our task in this age is to take the message of the good news of the Messiah to the nations, by which God prepares for His future kingdom and brings blessing to every people group, every nation, every place in the world where the gospel is spread. That‘s the task I would see the church do today:Go out and make disciples, who are citizens of Christ’s kingdom, as we‘ve been commissioned by Jesus himself to do.
The Danger of Ethnocentricity in Missions
Chris: Now, you both obviously have strong opinions about where we need to land on faith versus ethnicity. Maybe you can talk us through your chapter, Scott, to help us understand what motivated you to write such a strong piece from the Old Testament against the common racial identity politics that are infusing seminaries and the missionary field today.
Scott: Yes, well, what motivated me was having the opportunity to look, in a book such as ours, at an incredibly hot-button issue in the West today. There is an idolatry all around us—like an alternative religion—that‘s very ethnicity-oriented in our contemporary way of thinking. There needs to be clarity brought to it from Scripture. But some major evangelical leaders have kind of embarrassed themselves by giving in, giving ground, not thinking biblically about ethnicity because of social pressure. So I thought to myself, whatever good we can do in this book, we definitely need to go hard on a biblical view of ethnicity to clear the air.
But also, while I think that the critical race theory way of thinking (that‘s what we‘re talking about here)has so infected the American church, it‘s not going to stay in the American church. It‘s going to fester and, as all bad ideas from the West will do, go to the mission field and mess things up overseas as well. We certainly don’t want that.
In my view, another reason why discussing ethnicity biblically is so important is that from a Great Commission standpoint, it doesn‘t make any sense at all to be ethnocentric in one‘s faith, either in the ways that society condemns or in the reactive ways that it favors. Come on! There‘s a much more robust way of viewing both ethnicity and the Great Commission than the contemporary kind of thinking can offer.
To give you an example, my background is Southern Baptist. Here’s a denomination that exists because of a controversy in the 1840s. Baptists in the North said you can’t have a slaveowner be appointed as a missionary, so Baptists in the South decided to start a whole new denomination that allowed it. Yet at their very first meetings, they organized international missions to send people to China and Africa, including some black Americans![2] Now, there’s no defending anybody’s stance about slavery in the past, but these Baptists clearly cared about reaching all ethnicities with the gospel. It’s a good example of how a Great Commission mindset is just not compatible with being ethnocentric.
That’s why I wanted to trace ethnicity through the Bible. Of course, the Abrahamic covenant is really important for that because we see right in front of us that the next generation after Abraham had a splitting of children: a child of the promise, of the covenant, and a child who wasn’t part of that covenant. If genes and ethnicity were the point, then Ishmael would have been of the covenant too. So the initial motivating thing for me was all of these factors together. It’s a very anti–Great Commission way of thinking to be ethnocentric.
On Targeting Ethnicities and “People Groups”
Kyle: Can I ask a question, just as an aside, Scott? Are you cautious, then, about McGavran‘s approach that we ought to target ethnicities in the spread of the gospel?[3]
Scott: Why, yes. That‘s a charitable way to put it.
Chris: Tell us the position.
Kyle: Essentially, McGavran was a very influential professor at Fuller Seminary in the twentieth century, and he argued that the way we‘ve been thinking about missions is entirely wrong. He said if you look at Revelation 5 and other places, it‘s every people group that will be worshiping around the throne of the Lamb. So what we need to do, if we are going to complete the task of missions—which is understood to mean that once the gospel has been preached to every nation, then Christ will return—we need to focus on people groups rather than just planting churches in every neighborhood. We need to identify a given subgroup that‘s never been reached, which is what gave rise to the “reached” versus “unreached people group” dichotomy.[4] So that’s been, as far as I can tell, hugely influential in missiology and how you approach the task.
Scott: Right. Well, in his delineation of these groups, he didn‘t have the intention, for example, that you would get a church started among the high caste people in India (he worked in India) and it be inclusive or interact really at all with people in a different caste.[5] So he was perpetuating the evils of Hinduism in separating people instead of letting biblical faith shatter those evils.
Sadly, this is a very ethnocentric way of thinking that is pragmatism-oriented. Well, yes, from a pragmatic standpoint, it would be easier to get people to form a church together who have lots of things in common, with the only people they see all the time, from within their system, and who don‘t have any uncomfortable interactions with lower-caste people. Yes, you could see how this church could grow faster numerically—by this homogeneous unit principle. You could see that, but where did it come from? That was anthropology, sociology, but not the Bible. And that‘s not what the church is supposed to be.
From the beginning—from the time when almost every Christian was Jewish—to the transformation into a worldwide church with a large Gentile majority, there was never any indication that such a transformation—that the Gentiles should come in—was wrong. Now, people needed to be encouraged to think biblically about the Gentiles believing, to see what God was doing. As you’ve shown, Kyle, it was in concert with what the plan had been all along, but it had to be demonstrated so that Jewish believers could see. "Wait a minute. Peter, why did you go to these Gentiles?" "Well, the Holy Spirit came upon them. They are our brothers now." "Okay, well, I guess if they have the Spirit, they‘re Christians" [Acts 10:34–11:18; cf. 15:13–35]. There’s full fellowship, no separate church by people group.
That‘s why I was saying it was charitable to frame the question as you did. I‘ve seen the effects of encouraging people to think in terms of there being a “Chinese church.” Now, I’m not advocating for making the phrase taboo. Chinese missions is my background, but by that we both know what I mean; the people in such-and-such a church speak Chinese. Okay, but this “Chinese church” should not consider itself to be something separate that couldn‘t be involved in God‘s worldwide plans for all peoples but only focused on people of Chinese descent. I‘m part of the church, period. Does that answer your question?
Kyle: Yes. It’s an attractive thesis, to “reach every people group,” right? There’s a level at which I’ve been attracted to the idea, but based on what I think you’re saying, there are implications that are actually deleterious to that intent, which came in along with it as baggage. That is, now, rather than focusing on every ethnic group, we’re actually being exclusive about ethnic groups.
Scott: In my work doing Chinese theological education, Chinese missions, I would tell the students, “The way things are going in the world, it could very well be that your descendants come to my homeland, my countrymen and evangelize them.” So we should not be thinking paternalistically. We should be thinking as if we’re always dealing with a worldwide church of all peoples, because we are.
There’s the practicality that you only have Chinese people in a certain place. Great. But this is part of the worldwide church. And when we think ethnocentrically in our missions, we imprint that on the thinking of the people who come to faith in the churches we plant. Sadly, the contemporary Chinese church is not good at reaching out to other ethnicities—and they have a ton of them in China! Westerners are the ones going to the various minority groups in China, not the Chinese who are right there. So I think we’ve just imparted bad ideas from McGavran’s way of thinking.
Josh: Okay, so let me ask a clarifying question. There’s the “people group” categorization. But then there’s an alternative that a lot of our friends in ministry and conservative evangelicals use, which is “ethno-linguistic people groups.” Besides the linguistic division, which is obviously a barrier—not to Christ building His church but to those who would take the gospel to foreign places—there is also a cultural element where we have to be effective, right? Which involves learning the culture, translating Scriptures, what we call linguistic accommodation without the so-called contextualization that is in vogue. So can you talk about that and make that more explicit? Where is the line between the helpful and unhelpful categories?
Scott: Yeah, in other words, is the ethno-linguistic category appropriate? Well, there is something helpful from the perspective of, "How are we going to carry out the Great Commission most effectively with the limited resources we have?" Take your school in in Belgium. There are probably going to need to be people who serve the Flemish and then there are probably going to need to be people who serve the French, because learning both languages for one person, or one missionary team, is going to take a lot more time than if you just focus on the one.
There are practical reasons why identifying a group of people who speak the same language and have similar cultural customs helps us have some sort of strategy to reach those folks. There are reasons why that makes sense. They don‘t speak the same language as the people next door, so if we only speak the national language that they don‘t, that‘s not good enough. We need to reach that particular people.
That‘s okay. But when you start tallying—"Okay, we‘ve reached this people group, this people group, this people group"—you‘re doing something that‘s artificial now. You‘re using the best we can come up with—our research ability and our categorization ability—but that‘s not necessarily how God sees everybody. So this is more of a tool of the trade that‘s helpful for just knowing how to figure out where, from our standpoint, priority areas are.
But what do we know? Adoniram Judson serves the Burmese, and hardly any Burmese convert. It was the minorities that ended up where Christianity took root. Many of them are using the Burmese Bible, admittedly, because the Burmese made them learn their language. But if Adoniram Judson had his way, probably many more of the Burmese ethnic group would have responded. But he was fine with also reaching those other ethnic groups, and that was God‘s sovereign plan.
Kyle: In other words, we shouldn‘t put a sociological straitjacket on the gospel.
Scott: Right! The fact that I have this heart for Chinese people, a supernatural thing, shouldn‘t mean that I shouldn‘t be interested in the evangelization of the Japanese or incorporating them into my church if they’re believers. However, those who have that similar grip upon their hearts for the Japanese are probably the better choice to evangelize them than me. I can‘t speak Japanese.
[1] Cf. Jason S. DeRouchie, How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament: Twelve Steps from Exegesis to Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2017), 120–21, 126–27.
[2] See the history page of the Southern Baptist Convention’s and its Foreign Mission Board, founded in 1845, now called the International Mission Board, accessed June 10, 2025, https://www.imb.org/175/decades/1840s/.
[3] E.g., Donald A. McGavran, “A Church in Every People: Plain Talk about a Difficult Subject,” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, ed. Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, 4th ed. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2009), 627–32.
[4] See Donald A. McGavran, The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions (New York: Friendship, 1955) and its key excerpt in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, ed. Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, 4th ed. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2009), 335–46.
[5] Ibid. McGavran critiqued what he called the “station mission” approach, which aims at evangelizing individuals from every caste of society and forming them into one local church, because he saw clans, castes, and tribes as being the most effective means to “Christianize a people” by a rapid chain reaction, which he called “people movements.”