From “Come and See” to “Go and Tell”: Old Testament Foundations for the Great Commission (Part 2)
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.
The Abrahamic Covenant and Israel’s Mission
Chris: Okay, so we’ve seen there’s this overly parsed strategy that is really common in missions, especially today. The last forty years has seen these rapid growth plans, now exporting everything that’s kind of the American, sociologically infused missiology onto the peoples of the world. Now, what is the Old Testament’s corrective? How is a modern reader of Scripture—if they can understand the biblical paradigm—going to help us undo the overly parsed strategy?
Kyle: I think the Abrahamic covenant, to me, grounds a lot of it because God’s blessing intends to go to the nations, and it’s not specifying the nations as these ethnic groups or those ethnic groups. It’s essentially the world—all people in every place. That gets clarified as the trajectory of Scripture goes along until we get the consummation in Revelation, where all tribes and peoples and tongues and nations are worshiping.
But specifically, I would say the blessing that God intends through Abraham to give to the nations is going to come in stages. God first invites them to experience the blessing through their approach to His presence—through assimilation to Israel, through observing how the Torah works itself out in the life of the nation. Israel is a mediator who is covenanted with God.
The Sinai event sets them apart as a “treasured possession”—a special representative [Exod 19:5]. It’s a word that means usually a choice servant who relates to a master and is a representative of that master [cf. Mal 3:17].[1] I think Israel is commissioned not necessarily to be an evangelist nation but to live a holy existence as the kingdom of God so that the nations can see how great God is and experience life and fullness in His presence.
But as the trajectory of Scripture goes along, that understanding gets transformed once the Messiah comes into focus in the latter prophets, principally Isaiah. When the Servant of the Lord is given more detail in the Servant Songs in particular [Isa 42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12], He’s now going to be a light to the nations. He’s going to spread His law to the coastlands, the law of the Messiah. I think this goes hand-in-hand with Jeremiah’s new covenant [Jer 30–33]—that there’s going to be blessing that comes to the nations through the agency of Messiah.[2]
I see that prophetic theme as the first glimmers that something will change with the coming of the Messiah. What was a “come and see” will transform into a “go and make.” We’re to go to the ends of the earth and make disciples of all the nations because as we go, we are bringing God’s presence in a more mobilized fashion through the local church.
So to summarize, at a high level, I don’t know if Scott would agree with this too, but I argue in my insert that God’s blessing in the Old Testament is mediated principally through presence. The nations are exhorted to come and see what a wise God has done through the Torah [Deut 4:5–8], to experience His presence through the temple/tabernacle complex.
What transforms into New Testament missions begins to happen with the Servant Songs of Isaiah. The Servant of the Lord is now not necessarily calling the nations to come; He’s going to the nations as a light. So our New Testament mission has been transformed by Christ Himself, who turns the attractional centripetal model into a centrifugal, outward-to-the-nations model. God’s presence is now mediated not through the tabernacle but through the church as it spreads the gospel everywhere it goes.
It’s centrifugal versus centripetal. Centripetal “pulls it all” into the center [from Latin petere “to go to, to seek”]. Centrifugal is like “fugitive” [from Latin fugere “to flee”], so it’s outward from the center.
Chris: Scott, where is this paradigm connecting with you and your piece?
Scott: Well, it certainly connects with my ethnicity chapter and beyond because it’s so good. The motivation for my chapter was to address the idolatry around ethnicity that we’ve seen in the last few years in the church. We’ve seen the elevating of the circumstances of one’s birth to be such a core part of our identity that it exceeds, in practical terms, what we’re supposed to have in brotherhood with other Christians.
There’s definitely a need to talk about such things because of the panta ta ethnē, “all of the nations,” in the Matthew 28 Great Commission. That comes back to the centripetal versus centrifugal distinction.
That distinction is good to keep in mind because human beings have a natural inertia to not want to go anywhere. If the attractional model is given some ground in the New Testament times, people are not going to go anywhere. They’re not going to obey the Great Commission of going to these nations. They’re just going to celebrate the fact that the nations have decided to come to the United States, for example.
There needs to be engagement with people from other nations who come to us, but that doesn’t change the “go” nature of the Great Commission. So, these things you’re saying, these are thoughts that I’m cheering.
Just anecdotally, Christopher Wright’s works, representing the missio Dei [“mission of God”] approach, have been translated into Chinese. I’ve been told, when I’ve gone and taught overseas in Chinese, that, well, obviously what gets translated starts to have an influence, because not everything is translated. The fact that his material has been translated, in the words of one of the training centers there, has “snuffed out the flame of missions.” We need a more biblical approach to these questions, and it doesn’t do any good to say simply, “I’m for the whole Bible in missions,” and flatten out what we’re responsible to do as Christians today. That way of thinking basically says anything, anything blessing-wise, is part of the mission of the church.
Kyle: Right. It eviscerates the particularity of the Abrahamic covenant, where God particularizes His blessing through a mediator. The Abrahamic covenant becomes more about how the nation of Israel is blessed than about how God blesses through Israel as a mediator to the nations, ultimately through Abraham’s descendent, the Messiah. So that approach inadvertently inverts the relationship.
Scott: There’s also some fantastic wording there in the Hebrew [Gen 12:1–3] about the Abrahamic covenant with the form of the verb bless. Are the nations going to “bless themselves in you” or “be blessed in you?” Well, both of them are there!
Josh: I remember sitting in class in Jerusalem, and my Jewish professor in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East program told me that nivrekhu [Nifal third masculine plural, from ברך, bless”] does not mean that Abraham will be a blessing to the world as evangelicals take it [i.e., that the nations will “be blessed”]. He said all critical scholars acknowledge that this means the nations will bless themselves, so as to say, “I want to be like Abraham. May I be like Abraham.”
But that is to completely override the context. Even if the argument from that verb form is true, the whole context is still conveying the point that the nations will be blessed through Abraham.[3]
Scott: You need to account for the preposition in there too—“in you, Abraham, they will find their blessing.”
Gentiles in Israel’s Covenant
Scott: These are good thoughts because with the Abrahamic covenant, you start to have what seems to be a particularity of God’s dealings with humanity in an ethnic group. That’s what it may look like superficially, and that’s how people normally talk about it. But as we see in the ethnicity chapter, the point is not actually ethnicity. The point is a covenant relationship with God.
If it were ethnicity, well, what about Ishmael? What about Esau? Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob—why is one not included while the other is? It’s the “not all who are Israel are Israel” idea [cf. Rom 9:6]. It’s the covenant relationship with God. Within that context, you receive forgiveness for your sins, and therefore you are in right relationship with God. But if you’re outside the covenant, then you can’t be in right relationship with God.
Even in Old Testament times, where it looks like the boundaries of the covenant are ethnically defined, it’s actually not. Ethnicity happens to be a big part of who these people are, but there is hope for Gentiles even then. That’s significant for continuing past Old Testament times into New Testament times. For our appropriation today, we must remember that ethnicity is not the defining element of one’s humanity in the Bible. Therefore, it’s not the defining element today either.
Kyle: Yeah, well there’s only one human race. I would agree. I think of Ruth as a good case in point for me.
Scott: Yes, see, I always bring her up.
Kyle: Some of my students say that technically, if you’re strictly following the law, David would not be allowed to come into the sanctuary because he has a Moabite ancestress [Deut 23:3]. Yes, exactly. So then, how do we account for the fact that David is the one who plans the temple complex and is constantly in the Lord’s presence? My answer is because Ruth was no longer considered a Moabitess by the end of the book. She’s been grafted into the nation [cf. Rom 11:17].
Scott: It’s even in this cool way, where this word is constantly hammered, Moabite, Moabite, Moabite [Ruth 1:4, 22; 2:2, 6, 21; 4:5, 10]. But now she’s in the covenant, and that counts more.
Kyle: Right. It’s transformative; she’s grafted into the nation. She’s no longer a sojourner; she’s now an Israelite.
Then I contrast that with this: Why is this a problem in Ezra and Nehemiah [Neh 13:1–3]? It’s because those wives never abandoned their gods [Ezra 9:1–2; Neh 13:23–27]. That was an illegitimate marriage because they were still pagan, whereas Ruth had embraced Yahweh—“your God will be my God” [Ruth 1:16–17].
Scott: I got Joshua’s assistance in bringing that up in my chapter about Ezra-Nehemiah because that’s the thing that people want to slam down on the table, saying, “Look at this xenophobia here,” that obviously ethnicity is a significant part of the Jewish thinking. Well, whether it was or it wasn’t, we want biblical thinking. The historical question of what they were thinking is not the main thing. What does God want us to think about the relationship between Him and His people? The issue of the marriages is only there, in that context.
I also find a little bit of God’s sense of humor in the narrative—though, of course, it wasn’t humorous at the time it happened. But the narrative records that Nehemiah made them promise not to intermarry with the local peoples [Neh 10:28–30; 13:1–3]. Then it says he goes to Persia and comes back to Judah again [13:6–7], and what have they done? Exactly that! The thing they promised not to do [13:23–31].
Josh: As a footnote to that, it’s really interesting that Nehemiah pulls out their hair in response. It’s not because Nehemiah is a bully. He’s actually imposing on those individuals a covenant violation penalty—in his words, the curse they had earlier taken upon themselves [cf. 10:28–30; 13:25]. If they had made any kind of loyalty oath to any suzerain other than Yahweh, they would have suffered that kind of thing and much worse—penalties that are explicitly stated, for example, in Neo-Assyrian covenants and loyalty oaths. The hair-pulling kind of thing was among many other gruesome threats that the Assyrians loved to detail in their treaties, but that was a commonly used genre of the Persian period too. It underscores that it was the kingship of God that had been violated with this disobedience of the covenant the Jews had made.
Scott: You can tell how serious Nehemiah is about covenant faithfulness too, because he’s also saying, “You will not enter that gate on the Sabbath” [cf. Neh 13:15–22]. He’s a Sabbath enforcer because he was a covenant enforcer [cf. 9:13–14].
These questions of ethnicity are important because we need to disentangle our modern wrong thinking and go back to a biblical, covenant-based, relationship-with-God kind of thinking.
Understanding Israel’s Failure and Exile
Josh: One of the things I think we often assume about Israel and its centripetal mission is failure. If you’re expositing the Bible, you have a lot of negative things to encounter as far as Israel and its witness are concerned. How do you think God used either the failure or the bright spots in Israel’s history to demonstrate that He still has a heart for those billions of Gentiles between Abraham and Jesus in Old Testament history?
Kyle: Well, we see glimmers of it throughout the storyline of Scripture. We can look at occasions when Gentiles like Rahab and Ruth are grafted into the nation because they acknowledge that Yahweh is the one true God. So there’s always a spiritual dimension that has priority over the physical dimension, seen in that these Gentiles were acknowledging the supremacy of Yahweh.
To your point, yes, Israel ultimately fails. She succumbs to the temptations around her. Rather than having the nations come and assimilate into Israel, for the most part, she assimilates into the nations because Israel adopts their idolatry. Hence, one of the themes of Judges is the Canaanization of Israel. By the end of Judges, the episode of the Levite and his concubine in Benjamin [Judg 19–21] shows that Israel has become worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, that they’ve been Canaanized. Now, there are ups and downs for several more centuries, but Israel’s eventual exile again shows that what was intended to be “come and see and experience God’s blessing,” becomes Israel looking more and more like the Canaanites who are in rebellion against God by the end of her story.
But there’s always that glimmer of hope, and part of this I see even in the contrast between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles. They overlap in content, but in Samuel-Kings the narrative is tracing how this downward trajectory of idolatry leads to the exile. You have this extended explanatory comment in 2 Kings 17, following Jerusalem’s fall and deportation in 586 BC, where the narrator says this was because Israel didn’t listen to the prophets—they disobeyed the covenant. It is a predominantly negative picture, but one which validates God’s Word.
But after the exile, the Chronicler is reflecting on what’s happened. Rather than showing this downward trajectory leading to exile, the Chronicler’s burden and interest is to show that there was always a glimmer of hope in how God preserved the Davidic line and, through those kings, gave blessing, although partial and incomplete, to the nations. I’m thinking particularly of Hezekiah, when many are coming to experience the blessing of the Passover [2 Chr 30]. We know archaeologically that during Hezekiah’s reign, Jerusalem expanded quite a bit, and I think it was partly because Israelites were coming after the Neo-Assyrian incursions to Jerusalem to experience the blessing of being near the temple, being with a faithful, God-fearing king.
Scripture doesn’t give us a lot of information, but if we mix what we see in Scripture with what we know was going on archaeologically, then we know many were coming into the nation to experience God’s blessing. So essentially, I would say there were always glimmers of hope, however imperfect, that God wasn’t abandoning His program, even when His people were being unfaithful.
Even to the end of the exile, the authors of Scripture were recognizing that God had been faithful to His promises. For those living in exile—Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and others—Jeremiah became the key text, which we know because his prophecy about 70 years shows up in each of their books [Jer 25:11–12; 29:10; cf. 2 Chr 36:21; Ezra 1:1; Dan 9:2; Zech 7:5]. The reason is that they were recognizing that God was faithful. “If we can get back into the land and be faithful to the covenant, we can restart His intention to bless the nations. We failed to do that, but that doesn’t mean hope is lost. God is still redemptively working, but we need to get back to the place where we’re acknowledging His supremacy and living out faithfully the Torah.” I think that motivates even the exiles to get back to the land.
Josh: I don’t know if someone else has suggested this, but was the exile, then, a centrifugal working out of God’s mission?
Kyle: I think it was a reorientation, but I would have to think about that more. God was displacing them from the land. If you remember Ezekiel, he has this vision of God leaving the temple, and God sort of comes up to the top of the hill east of Jerusalem and looks back [Ezek 9–11]. I say it’s like a homeowner who’s had to sell; he’s been evicted and now he’s having one last look at his house before he goes off. There’s a sense in which this dramatic departure of God’s presence exists as a cloud that hangs over Israel in exile.
They’ve been sent east into exile, which has a lot of biblical symbolism attached to it [cf. Gen 3:24; 4:16; Ezek 10:19; 11:23; 43:1–5; Zech 14:4; Matt 24:27]. But even there, Jeremiah says, “Build houses, have families, and as God blesses you, God will bless the city where you live” [Jer 29:4–7]. So, they’re still bringing blessing to the nation by faithfully living as Yahweh worshipers, but it’s a temporary thing. There’s a time limit on this. And it’s for specific theological reasons that God has sent them there.
Josh: That’s interesting. It sounds like it’s still a centripetal mission. It’s just in a different place than it was before.
Kyle: Right. It’s been re-localized
Josh: All this because there’s an attraction that is supposed to be there in how they live before Yahweh even under His judgment.
There seems to be traces of faithful Jewish presence in exile. You’ve got the magi, for example, who come from the East, knowing something about Messiah, maybe as a result of Daniel and his ministry over the magicians in Babylon. But this was centuries later; obviously, a remnant had stayed. Actually, I would even say that a remnant returns; most of the exiles stayed in Babylon. But it makes perfect sense that their presence there was still centripetal. There’s no tension or critique here for seeing Jesus’ Great Commission as the turning point moving from centripetal to centrifugal.
Kyle: Yeah, I think even in the book of Esther, to a degree, it’s a similar thing. As a result of how God strategically places Esther and Mordecai, it says later in the book that many pretended to be Jewish—it’s an interesting phrase to say that they adopted Jewish lifestyle or customs [Esth 8:27; 9:27].[4] And so again, I think it’s that centripetal idea. When we see God’s presence and blessing through these people, it attracts us to want to be like them. Yes, I think that was happening even in the exile.
[1] See Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, Mervyn E. J. Richardson, and Johan Jakob Stamm, “סְגֻלָּה,” The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 1:742; Eugene Carpenter, “סְגֻלָּה,” New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Willem A. VanGemeren, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 3:224.
[2] For a summation of Jeremiah’s teaching in the “book of comfort” (Jer 30–33) and a canonical synthesis with the other latter prophets, see Paul R. House, Old Testament Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 317–21.
[3] The voice of this Hebrew root (ברך) in the Niphal stem is debated as to whether it conveys the passive (be blessed), middle (find blessing), or reflexive sense (bless themselves). Critical scholars often take it as a reciprocal reflexive (bless one another) and so undermine the divine agency implied, in turn, undermining its corresponding literary theme that is borne out in the Old Testament, as shown in this essay. But helpful discussions such as Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 206 and Gordon J. Wenham Genesis 1–14, Word Biblical Commentary, 1 (Dallas: Word, 1987), 277–78 show that the meaning of the verb in this immediate context, whatever the voice’s usual nuance, would necessarily “carry the implications of the passive,” as Wenham wrote.
[4] “יהד,” HALOT, 1:393. “To pose as a Jew.”