From “Come and See” to “Go and Tell”:Old Testament Foundations for the Great Commission (Part 4)
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.
Prioritizing Some Voices, Deprioritizing Others
Chris: What are some other trends that you’re seeing in Old Testament scholarship that you believe either are or could affect missions for the average believer wanting to go out and affect change among the nations?
Kyle: I think what I’m seeing is some of what Scott’s been saying. It’s a desire—and I think with positive motives in some cases—but a desire to elevate voices that have been minorities in the past, so that they’re given a say and have more influence. We all might agree that that would be a good thing in some cases, given that we haven’t heard from our brothers and sisters around the world from a Western perspective. But in doing so, it’s often swinging the pendulum to the other side so as to say, “Because of these ethnic identity markers, what they’re saying has more power, more importance than anyone who comes to Scripture and interprets it correctly.” In other words, it has elevated the identity markers of the voice above the authority of Scripture. I see that happening quite a bit.
Scott: Transplant that to the mission field. I’m the only non-Chinese person in the room. Does that mean what I have to say is somehow better because I’m a minority? No, its significance doesn’t have anything to do with that. Fidelity to the Bible is the significance of what I would hope to bring in that kind of situation.
Chris: Nor would it be of lesser significance because you’re the outsider, right?
Scott: Right, as though I should be thinking of myself as the guest unallowed to impose anything rather than the ambassador Christ says I am [2 Cor 5:18–21].
Chris: Which is actually a big issue happening even in this particular conference—Global Evangelicalism. That is to say, “Which is the global voice in the room that you ought to be listening to first? And what must you do to support their voice? And how much lip service of your own must that involve?”
There was a session where the presenter decried the fact that in India every bookstore has more John MacArthur publications in it than anything natively Indian. The concern there is with where the Indian voice is and, “Why are we just importing our North American counterparts? They’re going to take over the church.” Now, for many, there’s an attitude of hostility, though the brother giving the speech wasn’t hostile. He said, “No matter what you think of MacArthur’s theology, it’s not right to do that.” The issue is, he probably thinks it’s good theology, but that it’s coming from the wrong person to make the point.
Scott: Well, I would hope that we would encourage people to step back and say, first, “Wait, what’s so-and-so doing with his ministry?” If he’s trying to raise up these very natives, whom we think should be speaking about the Bible, then there’s no reason to criticize his influence. At this point in history, MacArthur is the voice that’s published. But we’re working towards a day when there are going to be a lot more on the shelf than just him.
Kyle: All of us who accept the gospel have the gospel presented to us by an outsider in some degree. The gospel has always come to us, somehow, from the outside. So rather than decrying the source because it’s hetero-ethnic, we ought to acknowledge that the gospel always comes initially from an outsider before it breaks through to our group.
Chris: That is the Great Commission, isn’t it?
The Missio Dei Approach
Chris: What else are you seeing in terms of what we discuss elsewhere in the book, missio Dei [Latin for “mission of God”]? I’m specifically thinking of Christopher Wright—a very important Old Testament scholar for the cause of missions today. But while there might be many things that we can agree on, there are some sticking points. We would say there are issues, perhaps—if it’s not the centripetal–centrifugal model, because he might even get that right—but where does he go wrong? And how far back in the Old Testament is he going to make what we see as errors? And where does it lead us?
Kyle: Well, as I’ve delved into this quite a bit, I’ve increasingly become alarmed at what I see as the locus or impetus of missions being grounded in creation itself. What this tends to lead to is the task of mission being about giving access to creation resources—it’s about economic activity, it’s about stewardship of financial resources, improving health and safety and the quality of life. Yet what I see this essentially doing is undermining the primacy of the gospel by elevating ancillary social concerns to a place of primacy, but inadvertently in doing so, undermining the primacy of preaching, the primacy of the gospel message itself. In the case of Christopher Wright, for example, our primary task is to bring the blessing of creation to all people so that they have access to resources that they might not have had access to otherwise. But in doing that, we’re no longer as concerned with telling people that they’re sinners in need of a savior who’s provided atonement for them so much as we’re trying to elevate their financial position or improve their lives, materially speaking, in some sense. None of those things, of course, are evil or off-limits, but I think unwittingly, by making that the “mission of God,” you’re actually devaluing the gospel.
Again, I don’t always or exactly know the rationale behind some of these conclusions in the missio Dei, but what I do find interesting about it is itmaps easily onto what I would consider worldly concerns that are currently very popular. In other words, it’s mapping the gospel onto what Western culture is already telling us we ought to be thinking, rather than remembering that the gospel is inherently offensive and, in that sense, anti-cultural. It goes cross-culturally against the grain because it brings good news, yes, but news that humanity and culture are broken and in need of a Savior. That’s not going to be a popular message that everyone will just latch onto.
Josh: Is it convenient not just because the culture tells us but also because of our flesh? Because it’s uncomfortable to have a message that’s confrontational?
Kyle: It’s easier maybe to go in and help a village financially than it is to confront a sin problem because the latter requires courage and the great likelihood you’ll be rejected. Whereas if you’re just coming in to financially raise the living status, who’s going to stand at the crossroads and oppose you?
Scott: One thought I had as you were talking is that atheists can do that. Also, when we’re preaching the gospel, it’s not our message—it’s God’smessage. It doesn’t come from us, where I can bring my expertise, say, as an engineer, to improve people’s quality of life, and it all depends on me. It’s not, “Isn’t that great? I’m awesome. I’ve done this for these people.”Rather, as I’m coming in to the degree that the Spirit uses my faltering, flailing efforts to represent God in preaching His Word in a given circumstance, that’s going to bring God glory because God did that. You can’t trace the regeneration of a person’s heart through poorly spoken Chinese to this guy’s awesomeness in being able to execute that plan.
That’s an effect of the missio Dei that we see. It’s the de-prioritization of—and really, it’s going to end up ignoring the imperative of the Great Commission and just treating it as a few verses out of a big Bible. “Maybe a small percentage of people can do that: go and proclaim and make disciples. But the rest of us, we will pave the roads and dig the wells and paint the schools.” Again, a “good-hearted” atheist can do that, so you should really question what’s different about these efforts from what some other NGO could do.
What I’ve been thinking is perhaps a helpful way to keep us laser focused on the Great Commission is to say that there’s missionary work and then there’s support work. You don’t devalue all of the wonderful support that the person who is preaching the gospel on the field needs. Not at all. You need the doctor. You need the member care in the missions agency. You need the structure, normally, to help with the mission. But if you get the focus off of what the mission actually is, you’re going to end up having less and less desire to actually do the hard work that the Spirit requires of us in the Great Commission. The hard work is cross-cultural, international evangelism. The easy thing is to sit back and let other people do that.
Getting Israel Wrong
Chris: It’s safe to say that most of the evangelical church today is Old Testament illiterate, so depending even on the church denomination or the theological movement that they’re in, they might not have a high understanding of Israel and God’s purposes for Israel’s Messiah to be the light to the nations. They might already have a disconnected understanding of the Great Commission compared to the whole flow of God’s kingdom program from the Old Testament. Okay, then, what are some of the risks for missions work today for getting Israel wrong or for not understanding the Old Testament in the way you guys have produced in your pieces?
Kyle: I think it’s an under-discussed topic. I recently wrote a paper in which I said a lot of approaches sort of reduce Israel to merely being the midwife for the Messiah. It’s sort of like we just want to get them out of the way so we can get to the nations because that’s what God really wants to do. Israel was just sort of a bump in the road and, “Whew, we’re past that stage.” I think that’s anachronistic and wrongheaded because, at least as I would understand it, God still has a plan redemptively for Israel and that “building the kingdom” came first through a geographical, ethnic entity that was covenanted with God and intended to bring His blessing.
One of the risks is that we tend to flatten out God’s intention as it’s diachronically revealed through Scripture. What we end up doing is, in some cases, inverting God’s intention for the Abrahamic covenant. It’s almost as if the Abrahamic covenant was never really about Abraham, never really about Israel. It was really only about how we could get to the nations. But I would say, God is a very patient God who’s willing to wait centuries for history to work itself out. We’ll get to the end where God wins; that’s guaranteed. But along the way, He is pleased to allow things to slowly unfold, organically unfold, and has an intention for the nation still.
I think Romans develops this quite well, as Paul is thinking through that whole issue. Israel has been confined to unbelief for a period so that the Gentiles can experience the richness of blessing, but does that mean that God has disbarred His covenant people? By no means, he says; He’s going to bring blessing back to Israel [Rom 11:11–32].
What I think ends up happening is a certain ethno-hubris that Paul was warning about. He says, “Do you think that you are better than the vine? Don’t you remember that you’re a wild olive branch that’s been grafted in? And don’t you realize that if you don’t believe, if you aren’t faithful, that the same thing can happen to you?” [11:17–22]. We end up disparaging God’s intention and salvific plan, in some ways unwittingly, by acting as if the relationship is inverted, that we’re the vine and Israel was the anomaly.
All that to say, I think we have to keep things in the right sequence, with the right purpose, and we must understand that God has given us the blessing of salvation in this period of time because it was part of His plan all along. But we shouldn’t jettison the Old Testament or act as if Israel was just a blip, a momentary phase; it’s part and parcel of what God’s intending to do from an eternal perspective.
I know that’s a minority view. When you think about Israel’s role, probably a lot of missiologists wouldn’t even enter the chat with that idea, that Israel has a role in missiology, but I think that is the case.
Josh: I think what you’re saying is maybe hard for a lot of evangelicals because it takes so long to get to Jesus. We want to read the book of Acts back into the Old Testament. What does it require of us to not do that? What is it that a believer needs to have to be okay with God’s timeline?
Kyle: Yeah. I think a good understanding of biblical theology is a nice starting point because it helps us to see how God organically unfolds revelation. There’s a, to use a fancy term, a diachronic dimension to it. That is, it unfolds over time. When we’re in the middle of the movie and it’s a suspenseful moment, we sort of want to get to the end and see if there’s really a monster in the closet or not. But good storytelling takes you there slowly and does it skillfully.
I think there’s a rush to judgment sometimes to assume that it was never about Israel. That Israel, in thinking they had or will have a role, were just operating from a fleshly mindset. I think that’s a vestige of Neoplatonism; it tends to dichotomize what God was doing spiritually from what He was doing physically.[1] I think you have to integrate both. That’s how I would understand the kingdom—the physical and the spiritual are actually combined. It’s seeing them together.
Josh: I’m thinking also in terms of people who never hear the name of Christ. That’s still a problem on this side of the Great Commission. If Ihave a man-centered view of history—a me-centered view of history, essentially—I cannot trust God to get to the saving that I want Him to. So to understand what God is doing in all of Scripture, I think we are being called to have a higher view of God and a more God-centered view of history, including salvation history. He’s trustworthy with His saving work.
Scott: Yeah. I would just add one thing. I think originally the question was, “What do we miss when we don’t have the Old Testament in our view of what God is doing, including about Israel?” We’re missing depth. There are pan-biblical ideas, which really get their depth in the Old Testament. And if we were supposed to get a different idea once we reach the New Testament, well the New Testament would have to make it very, very clear that the former biblical idea was being rejected and we’re going in a different direction. The covenant people of Israel is an example of that.
So whatever the New Testament is telling us, I come from the perspective of, unless it’s very clear that we’re repudiating what has come before, we’ve got to go with this depth that we have with God beforehand, all this mileage that we’ve gone with Him in a certain direction. “We get our grounding from the Old Testament,” says the New Testament. We have to have a systematic theology that’s built on our biblical theology.
I think it’s okay to say that we recognize there can be, in the details, some differences of opinion. We step back and say, “Wait a minute, we agree on 95% of stuff here,” so that we really keep the bigger picture in mind. The role of the modern state of Israel, for example, can be a bit of a different question. Or take the so-called Holy Land. Some people say, “Well, there’s no such thing. Everywhere Christians are, that’s the Holy Land.” Well, simple answers are not always right.
You want the fullest possible answer. We want to make sure that we’re being thoroughly biblical in every way. But when we’re being thoroughly biblical in every way, “All Israel will be saved,” says the New Testament [Rom 11:26]. Paul was at pains to maintain that point in his fullest letter to explain the gospel and God’s program, so that’s where I land.
Contested Texts in the Old Testament
Josh: We’ve covered a lot of the Old Testament today—passages like Genesis 12 with the Abrahamic covenant, the Sinai event in Exodus 19, Israel’s “Canaanization” in Judges, the histories in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, the Servant Songs of Isaiah, the exile in Jeremiah, and special issues in Ezra, Nehemiah, Jonah, and Ruth. Are there other texts that are contested over the issues of whether there’s a Great Commission in the Old Testament and of “one holy race”?
Scott: Well, normally, the discussions about ethnicity just don’t bother with the Bible much at all. With your assistance, I think we covered a lot of the texts that needed to be talked about because they were the most contentious. You know, how is it okay that Ruth can come in when she’s a Moabite? She’s pretty clearly within ten generations [Deut 23:3]; you can’t shimmy out of that. Well, the Bible, meaning Nehemiah, under- stands these prohibitions not as the rabbis did. And we’ve shown that. If there are other more minor issues, they fall under the texts we covered.
Kyle: I would agree. There are other isolated incidents where one could argue there is a mission mandate. One text would be 2 Kings 5, when an Israelite girl is abducted by the Arameans and made a slave to Naaman the commander’s wife. Naaman hears about how he can find healing for his leprosy through the God of Israel, so she is sharing the good news in a foreign land.
But like Jonah or Ruth, these incidents to my mind seem to be one-offs, where through providential means, an Israelite is taken to places where he or she has a voice to testify to the one true God. That doesn’t overturn the whole program, which is primarily a come-and-see kind of role. Even in the case of Naaman, he has to go to Israel to experience the blessing—and he wants to take the dirt back with him [2 Kings 5:17]!
Josh: Because that’s where the Lord’s presence is, right? And he’s become a worshipper of Yahweh. [2]
Kyle: That’s right.
Scott: And it’s also true that those texts can be an encouragement, on this side of the Great Commission, that wherever God has you, you’re supposed to be a witness. You could be a slave in the dungeon like Joseph. But as he says, what his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good [Gen 50:20]. Whether you’re a slave in a foreign land, an exile or at home, a missionary or a supporter of missions, Christians are called to be witnesses of Jesus Christ [Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8].
I just hope our two contributions will do a service. My prayer is that it would be effective in calling people back to a biblical vision for these thing
[1] Neoplatonism was the dominant Greek philosophy from the third to the sixth centuries AD. Though it was the philosophical basis for much opposition to Christianity, its influence can also be seen in several prominent theologians of late antiquity, most notably, Gregory of Nyssa, Victorinus, Ambrose, and Augustine. See Everett Ferguson, “Neoplatonism,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 583–84; Randy Alcorn, “Christoplatonism’s False Assumptions,” in Heaven (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2004), 459–66.
[2] From a complementary angle, John Oswalt writes, “Old ways of thinking die hard, and the thought that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was in some magical way linked to the soil of Israel was fixed in his mind. So, if he were to worship Yahweh as the One God, he would need to do so on Israelite soil. We would like to see him recognize that if Yahweh is the only God in the universe he can therefore be worshipped anywhere in his universe, but—we are still grateful for Naaman’s determination to worship no other god. He is going to match his actions with his confession.” John N. Oswalt, 1 & 2 Kings, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025), 2:124. Though Naaman is an encouraging instance of Gentile faith, he is not presented as a model of worship to follow. The point remains clear that Israel’s witness to the one true God was not yet centrifugal.