From “Come and See” to “Go and Tell”: Old Testament Foundations for the Great Commission (Part 3)
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.
A Biblical Theology of Ethnicity
Chris: Now, Scott, your piece does deal with a lot of these issues, even if you’re not using “centripetal,” “centrifugal” language. You do have a significant portion of your work on the centrality of Israel in God’s kingdom plan. The movement toward the blessing of the nations has to come through Israel, and you’ve traced through the Abrahamic covenant and given a lot of detail to make that really map on well to what Kyle has been discussing. Your chapter, your thesis is to invite a return to God-centered thinking about ethnicity and the people of God. We know a little bit of your motivation for all of that and some of the issues that need to be addressed. Why don’t you address the role of Israel and of God’s work through the covenants to get us the proper view of ethnicity?
Scott: Sure. The need for this has a lot to do with the fact that we Gentiles tend to deprioritize Israel because we think we’re the big deal. So I used three big theological categories to help organize a brief biblical theology of ethnicity. These happen to come from my own missions book which I co-edited and the Old Testament theology chapter.[1]
The first category is creation. I’m trying to show that in creation, there’s no ethnicity there. Human beings did not have ethnicity categories from the very beginning. We did have male and female categories, but not ethnicity. That de-centers it from the beginning from being this all-inclusive, so-important element of our thinking about identity. It’s just not there.
Then there’s the election theme. You see election happening, for instance, in God electing Noah and his family, but not anybody else, in a big restart [Gen 6:6–10, 18]. Yet even then, out of Noah’s family come these nations [Gen 10]. You have an emergence of ethnic consciousness or nation consciousness there, with this people over here and that people over there [10:5, 10, 20, 31, 32]. And in a big Bible way of looking at this placement of peoples in different locales, well, in the New Testament we find out that this was somehow God working out His plans to bring Himself glory—through all peoples simultaneously groping around to find Him wherever they are [cf. Acts 17:26–27].
Then, there’s also an election of a covenant people from among them all, and that’s Israel. With that I am trying to show readers the covenant centrality, as opposed to the ethnic centrality, of election with Israel. From the beginning, the things that people think normally attach to an ethnic group for its specialness or uniqueness were absent; Abraham was no different from anybody else. But in God’s choosing him, you have the beginnings of a new people, still not ethnically defined even with him, the first Hebrew so called [Gen 14:13].[2]
We see not only this covenant centrality instead of ethnic centrality in his family, but also the fact that you can join the covenant people. We have Rahab and Ruth, for instance, as examples in the Old Testament. I use Ruth to then transition to the issue of marriage in Ezra and Nehemiah, where historically scholarship has taken a dim view of Ezra and Nehemiah’s responses toward the Jews’ intermarriage with the local peoples. They think, “What’s wrong? Ezra and Nehemiah, why are you so upset?”
Yet even in these books, we see there is supposed to be covenant-centric thinking. The biblical concern was: If you marry people from those groups, let’s say it’s a wife from Moab, then the wife is going to have you go worship Chemosh, or if from Egypt, she’ll have you worship Ra. It’s going to happen. It is exactly what happened with Solomon, Nehemiah says [Neh 13:26]. These wives from all over—well, Solomon even set up places of worship for them to rival the temple [1 Kings 11:1–8]. Solomon, what are you doing?
Okay, but even in Ezra-Nehemiah,[3] before these dramatic parts that draw our attention to the problem of these marriages (which, actually, seems not to have been happening in a big slice of the population, but mainly leaders), earlier in the book, it distinguishes between this kind of marriage and the marrying foreigners who had rejected their old ways of thinking [Ezra 6:21]. It seems like it was okay to marry those people. It’s okay to marry Ruth; it’s not okay to marry Orpah because she’s going back to Chemosh.
Yes, by that time, there is an ethnicity called the Hebrews. Sure, generations down the line, God has kept them separate to a great degree from other peoples because of His different way of life for them. It is a definable ethnicity. But still, the covenant is the important thing, so people like Ruth can become Hebrews even as the book is focusing on her differences. That’s the election of the covenant people.
Then, third, there’s judgment. Yes, there’s plenty of pronouncements of judgment against other ethnicities in the Old Testament. You’re accustomed to them being filled with curses. But some of them are kind of equivocal about the curses, expressing sadness over the cursing, even to the degree that Assyria and Egypt are considered in a group of three with Israel in what God’s going to do in days ahead [Isa 19:24–25]. So, again, ethnicity is not determinative of one’s redeemability or value to God.
Israel’s Enemies Their Equals
Scott: And, you know, what an insulting thing for anyone who would be ethnocentric: These are the baddest of the bad guys, Assyria and Egypt. How can they be considered alongside them?
Josh: Why is that? Why are they the baddest of the bad guys?
Scott: Well, the evils that they had inflicted upon the people, for one [see Exod 1:8–22; 2:23; 2 Kings 15:29; 17:5–6; 18:13; Isa 10:5–11; Nah 3:1]. But also, from an Old Testament theology standpoint, the displays of God’s deliverance of His people from Egypt does serve the function of showing Egypt who God is, in whom they do not believe; “I am Yahweh,” He says [Exod 7:5; 12:12; 14:4, 18]. So that adds to the insult: “These people who rejected You, how can You include them alongside us?”
It’s interesting to me that you can see in the Septuagint and the Targum versions of the text [Isa 19:24–25], they make clear that, “No, no, no. It’s actually the Hebrews who live in Egypt and in Assyria who are considered the trio with those in Israel.”[4]
Josh: Oh, wow, so it’s a reinterpretation of the text?
Scott: It is a reinterpretation. That was uncomfortable for the Septuagint translator and the Targum translator to see that Egyptians and Assyrians have this prominent place in God’s plan. And Isaiah 19:24–25 isn’t the only place in the Old Testament about the blessing being spread beyond Israel.
Kyle: Zechariah 9:6–7 talks about the Philistines also being brought in and that they’ll experience blessings too.
Josh: Okay, if I can synthesize, these are archetypal enemies. Egypt is where Israel was brought out of in the exodus, Assyria is where they were cast into in the exile, and Philistia is the sort of perennial thorn in their side in the land. Yet God intends to save them. And that’s amazing.
Scott: Yes. God did these works to bring “the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir” (Amos 9:7). I mean, the Hebrews are in the spotlight in the Old Testament, obviously. But these little glimpses of His sovereignty over other peoples—that He’s done things for other peoples—even while not being acknowledged, are significant.
Do you know the oracles against the nations, pronouncing judgment on Moab and Ammon, Assyria and Babylon, Egypt and Philistia, and so on [Isa 13–23; Jer 46–51; Ezek 24–32; Amos 1:3–2:8]? Well, it seems like these other nations didn’t hear the oracles. It was for the instruction of Israel that these oracles were given. This judgment theme is really big. Nevertheless, God desires to save them. It would be easy to forget that—and we are not even Hebrews, most of us. So we need an Old Testament theology of ethnicity to understand these things and how it would apply to the church today.
Judaizers and Gentilizers in the Church
Scott: On that note, something I think is ironic is that Paul deals with folks that we call the Judaizers, those who are trying to impose a sort of conversion to Judaism and being Jewish upon Gentile believers in Christ [cf. Gal 2:11–14]. Well, Paul doesn’t give a moment’s concession to this way of thinking. He’s saying, “If you start down that road, you’re totally missing the point of what Jesus is doing. Therefore, you’re missing the gospel. Therefore, you are not a Christian if you embrace this way of thinking that someone must become Jewish to be saved.”
In Paul’s letters he’s trying to show that we’re children of Abraham by faith, not by circumcision [Rom 4:9–12; Gal 3:6–9]. Furthermore, the bodily circumcision sign was particularly sensitive for the Greeks who wouldn’t want to take it on. Yet actually, in the New Testament, Paul tries to get this point across: “Look, circumcision is important. Circumcision of the heart is where we are now in the new covenant. So yes, you must be circumcised—in the heart, as the Old Testament always said” [Lev 26:41; Deut 10:16; Jer 4:4; 9:25–26; Ezek 44:7, 9]. It even indicates that God is going to do it one day for you [Deut 30:6; cf. Jer 31:33; Ezek 11:19; 36:26]. Paul is not inventing something new. Rather, he announces God has done that through the Holy Spirit [Rom 2:28–29; cf. Col 2:11]. When the Holy Spirit regenerates, He is circumcising the heart.
When talking about the church, we don’t so much face the problem of explicitly the Judaizers today, being a majority Gentile church. But unfortunately, we do in our modern era face the same problem from the opposite perspective. It’s this Gentile idea of the nations, where you focus on being part of some nation as central to your identity as a follower of Jesus. Oh no!
Here we have the Judaizer problem again, but for fun I call it the Gentilizer problem. It’s the same manner of thinking, of denying explicit gospel truths about all peoples in the new covenant and giving your membership in an ethnic group a higher or a lower status in God’s plans.
Kyle: So you’re still using identity markers. You’re just using different ones. It’s no longer circumcision; it’s my ethnic identity.
Scott: Sadly, it’s skin color. Whereas circumcision, you could argue, is a private sign, skin color is public. You’re not showing circumcision anywhere you go, but you’re showing skin color everywhere you go. Then you’re judging people based on their outward appearance instead of the heart [cf. 1 Sam 16:7].
It’s an egregious problem that has to be pointed out for what it is. If these are truly parallel ideas, and I think they are, Gentilizers are attacking the gospel. They are to be anathematized for doing so. Help them to see, “This is anti-gospel behavior. If you persist in this, you are actually fighting against God. You are not a Christian. You’re outside of the covenant.”
Kyle: I was just thinking as Scott was talking that ironically, the first text that some go to in order to say that Israel did have a missionary mandate is Jonah. And in the case of Jonah, there’s a sense in which he’s elevating ethnic standards to a primary position because he doesn’t want to go to the Assyrians because they’re Assyrians. Now tied into that, of course, is what the Assyrians were like and all the terrible things we know they did. But at the same time, it was a sort of reverse ethnocentrism that he elevated and aggravated his animus toward this people group as his way of resisting God’s intent to bless them. Jonah wasn’t so much Jewish-centric as he was perhaps Assyrian-centric, only it wasn’t a favorable centricity but a hateful one.
So, yeah, I think to your point, we’ve exchanged one set of identity markers for another set of identity markers, whether positive or negative, and it diminishes God’s actual intent to bring blessing to all peoples.
Scott: It’s big business in scholarship, too. We are at professional meetings right now, at ETS [the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting], and the theme this year is Global Evangelicalism. Well, some of the publishers downstairs are totally taken over by these ideological criticisms.
Kyle: Yeah, I could see it walking through the bookstore this morning.
Scott: Ethnocentrism is big in scholarship; it’ll be even bigger at SBL [the Society for Biblical Literature’s annual meeting]. I call it making much of the creature at the expense of the Creator [cf. Rom 1:25]. Your membership in a certain ethnic group or being female, or I guess in theory, being male, gives you access to a positional relationship with God or knowledge that others can’t have. This then creates somebody’s value system for deciding which category is better than another, and which can exert power or privilege over the other. If you don’t all have access to the same truths or relationship with God, then it’s going to end up in a stacked value system.
But at some point, we have to say, we’re not on the same team. This is Gentilization—like Judaization, only by a different ethnic name. God has specifically said that ethnicity is not to be an issue. Christians are not to be exercising power over others in any way.
Josh: Was Paul being ethnocentric when he said, “The gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” [Rom 1:16]?
Scott: Well, surely Paul is thinking biblically as he’s saying this. And the work of God did not begin with the first Gentile coming to faith; the gospel came historically to the Jew first. God’s working came through the Hebrews since the time of Abraham, and the blessing extended out to all nations from there. But that isn’t any license for elevating them or any people group above another.
Beyond that, from a Christian standpoint, we understand that the Jewish person’s privilege is that they have the prophets—the Scriptures, the covenants, and the expectation of the Messiah [Rom 3:1–2; 9:3–5; cf. Acts 15:21]. They have all these advantages, so Paul goes to the synagogue first, wherever he travels [e.g., Acts 17:1–2; cf. Rom 11:1–5]. But what we all need is relation to God through Christ. So Paul’s insistence is on not dividing people up, not building the dividing wall of hostility that Christ tore down [Eph 2:11–22; cf. Rom 10:12; 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:28; Col 3:11].
Chris: Yeah, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Ethnocentrism is anti-gospel.
Messianic Judaism
Josh: I lived in Israel for a couple of years, and I belonged to an evangelical congregation there in Jerusalem, where we went every Shabbat (because that’s when most churches, like the synagogues, meet). And a difficulty in Israel is the Jew–Gentile distinction that is especially poignant between Jews and Arabs today.
Now, most Jewish Christians in Israel are familiar with the Old Testament and are very committed to, very hopeful of God’s future plans for them as a nation. How that relates to the land and the modern state of Israel are, of course, sensitive issues to be handled with care. And there are immense cultural and ethnic tensions outside the church because of war. So this is not a criticism of anyone. My pastor was a gracious man, and there were people in the congregation evangelizing their Arab neighbors, some even going out to the Bedouin.
But perhaps we should also ask, Does a congregation set up barriers by calling itself a messianic congregation? Evangelical churches use the label more or less, here and there, though not the mainline Protestant denominations. And there are often reasons behind these decisions that are unique to Israel or other predominantly Jewish environments, which we should appreciate. Maybe they observe the Passover or Hannukah or read the weekly Torah portion—traditions that are not prohibited nor prescribed in Scripture for the church but which might be a helpful witness. But on the other hand, does the label “messianic” communicate an assumption of being Jewish that creates barriers, at least for some Gentiles?
Kyle: I had a student write his ThM thesis a couple of years ago on the Hebrew Roots Movement. I don’t, on the face of it, have any problem with a church calling itself a Messianic Jewish congregation, but the Hebrew Roots movement I would see as a distortion of that. In that movement, identifying as messianic becomes a new barrier to the gospel. In other words, it’s saying, “If you’re not being authentically Jewish in your worship patterns and that sort of thing, you don’t understand the faith.”
So as the student was working through his thesis, he made this comment to me at one point: “Is there a definitive book that would really crystallize why we should be concerned about this particular movement?” And I said, “Well, probably Galatians. Galatians is a good place to start, because, yeah, it’s a pretty authoritative book.” That was my cheeky way of saying that this isn’t a new problem.
To circle back to your question, I would say I think Christians can be helped by being better informed of the Jewish roots of their faith, and there have been some helpful resources that have come out of that. But you have to be aware of that tendency in any sense that becomes a prioritizing of something subsidiary to the gospel. How far do you elevate that Jewish root or tradition before you inadvertently begin to be exclusive or exclusionary? How that plays out in the culture is an issue for pastors there to discern.
[1] Scott N. Callaham, “Old Testament Theology and World Mission,” in World Mission: Theology, Strategy, and Current Issues, ed. Scott N. Callaham and Will Brooks (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 3–32.
[2] For evidence that Abraham’s entourage was ethnically mixed, see Gen 12:15–16; 15:2–3; 20:1, 13. The same was true of Israel at the time of the Exodus; Exod 12:37–38; cf. 2:15–3:1; 46:20; Lev 24:10; Num 12:1.
[3] Scott’s referring to the two books of Ezra and Nehemiah as one is common parlance in Old Testament scholarship since it follows the Jewish tradition in the Masoretic Text, Septuagint, rabbinic sources, and even early church. It is not, however, an argument for a theory of their composition. See the insightful discussion by Israel Loken, “Introduction,” in Ezra & Nehemiah, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2011).
[4] The LSB translation of the Hebrew (the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls are identical here) is: “In that day Israel will be the third party with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom Yahweh of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed is Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance.’ ”
The NETS translation of the Septuagint reads: “On that day Israel will be third among the Assyrians and among the Egyptians, blessed in the land that the Lord Sabaoth has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be my people that are in Egypt and among the Assyrians, even Israel my heritage.’ ”
The London “Chaldee Paraphrase” (1871) translation of Targum Jonathan on Isaiah reads: “And at that time Israel shall be a third party to the Egyptians and to the Assyrians, a blessing in the midst of the land. Whom the Lord of hosts hath blessed, saying, Blessed be my people, whom I have brought out of Egypt; and because they sinned before me, I carried them captive into Assyria, but when they repent, they are called my people, and Israel mine inheritance.”