The Mission of God as the Gospel

Tue, Feb 4, 2025
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I have been working and thinking a lot about mission and gospel recently, and the more I dig, the more I scratch, the closer the two grow together in my mind. It may sound alarming, so please bear with me, but what if we push the two concepts together to the point of making them one and the same?

(This article is a draft and should be taken more as a question and a reflection than as a conclusion)

To get there, we’ll need to clarify what we mean by three key ideas: missio dei (the mission of God), the gospel, and the Kingdom of God.

Missio dei thinking is probably the most significant development in the theology of missions from the 20th century. It puts mission the Trinity, and God’s action, at the very center of mission. The latin missio has the meaning of sending, and translates the two New Testament Greek words apostelo (from which we get apostle) and pempo. Sending is one of the main ways the members of the Trinity interact: God the Father sends the Son (John 20:21), the Father and the Son send the Spirit (John 14:16).

God sends his people throughout the whole history of the Bible. He sends Adam and Eve out of the Garden. He sends Abraham out of Ur. He sends Joseph, and later his brothers, to Egypt, and sends Moses to bring their descendants back to the promised land. He sends prophets to exhort them, he sends the whole people into captivity and then (a selection of them) back to Israel. All of this is done while the people are waiting for him to send the Messiah, to innaugurate the Kingdom of God. And every one of these acts of sending is done for the purpose of restoring his people and his creation: through exhortation, through mercy, through chastisement, through justice, and by his own saving hand.¹

After Jesus is sent to innaugurate and announce the Kingdom of God, he then sends the Church to continue his whole work:

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:21)

What is the Kingdom of God?

We can tend to think of the Kingdom as being synonymous with the Church (which is a very old interpretation that was strong throughout the middle ages. The Westminister Confession of Faith also holds this view, WCF 25.2) However this position is somewhat lacking. The Hebrew term malkuth, translated in the Greek translation of the Old Testament as basileia, which is then used in the New Testament, has a dual meaning of both the geographical region of a King’s reign, as well as the fact of his exercise of his authority and dominion. The Jewish eschatological expectation was for God to send the Messiah, who would re-establish God’s reign in Jerusalem, expelling the foreign oppressors. In this sense, the constitutive element of the Reign of God is God’s presence. While this is certainly the case of the Church (Christ is present among us by his Spirit), God’s reign is more than that.

When Jesus began his ministry, he “came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news (Mark 1:14-15)”. In both Mark’s and Matthews Gospel², this happens at precisely the same moment in the story: Jesus was baptised by John, the Spirit descended on him and drove him into the wilderness. He fasted and was tested by the Satan, then he went to Galilee and began his public ministry.

Luke’s gospel also follows precisely the same chronology, but here, Luke does not say Jesus preached the Kingdom of God in Galilee. Instead, Luke has him in the synagogue, reading from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth (which is in Galilee):

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16-21)

Why is Luke’s story different than Matthew and Mark’s story?

It isn’t.

Luke shows what Matthew and Mark tell. The first two gospels tell us Jesus was talking about the Kingdom of God. Luke shows us what he was saying about the Kingdom. It is the anointing of the Spirit, it is good news to the poor, it is release of captives, healing of the blind, liberation of the oppressed. It is the year of the Lord’s favour. It is the repair of all people, damaged by the fall and the curse, in Jesus. It is, finally, the true year of jubilee.

This is what salvation is for Jesus: it is abundant life. My ministry speaks of salvation as four relationships of shalom, shalom meaning peace, wholeness and harmony. Shalom, which has begun now and will be completed in the New Creation, means the restoration of our relationships with God, with one another, with the created world, and with ourselves. Salvation is holistic, because the Kingdom of God is the holistic reconciliation of all things to God in Jesus:

… through [Jesus] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:20)

This touches on the past, the presence, and the future elements of salvation. We can now be reconciled to God through Jesus’ sacrifice. We are gradually being reconciled to ourselves and one to another as we are sanctified. We will be fully reconciled to all three as we are glorified, and we will be freed from our bondage to decay, and from the curse of Genesis 3, when Jesus makes creation new at his return. This will be the final exodus, our final sending out of our the Egypt of oppression, into the perfect, renewed promised land. Salvation cannot be complete while any sin, or any consequence of sin, remains: we will be freed not only from our own sins, but from the sins of others, and from the curse that God placed on the world because of sin.

This is the good news – the good news of the Reign of God, of the complete restoration of all things. Of abundant life, restored in all of its dimensions.

So mission, then is God’s sending within the Trinity, and his sending of the Church “just as the Father has sent me” – to do all the same things Jesus did: to heal, to restore, to proclaim forgiveness of sins. But the key to understanding the mission of God is remembering that the mission is, and always remains, God’s. He invites us to join it, he sends us to participate in the sent work of Jesus and the Spirit, but God is the one who is working. David Bosch defines mission like this:

It is missio Dei. It is trinitarian. It is mediating the love of God the Father who is the Parent of all people, whoever and wherever they may be. It is epiphany, the making present in the world of God the Son (cf AG 9). It is mediating the presence of God the Spirit, who blows where he wishes, without us knowing whence he comes and whither he goes (Jn 3:8). Mission is “the expression of the life of the Holy Spirit who has been set no limits” (G. van der Leeuw, quoted in Rosenkranz 1977:14). So mission concerns the world also beyond the boundaries of the church.³

Clearly the three concepts are closely linked. But is it defensible to say that the gospel of the Reign of God is the Mission of God?

I think we can build this claim by weaving together several strands. First, we remember that the constitutive element of the Reign of God is the presence of God, who is currently present in the Spirit, who is sent. One of the basic senses of Reign is the active exercise of dominion – and God actively exercises his dominion by sending Christ, the Spirit and the Church. Salvation is the liberation from sin and all of its effects, which God accomplishes through sending Christ and the Spirit, and in which the Church participates. And finally, our salvation is past (justification), present (sanctification) and future (glorification), which God accomplishes in these three times, by sending Christ, the Spirit, and again, Christ.

To put it all together, then, it seems consistent to me to say that the good news of the Kingdom of God is that God is on mission, actively sending and sent, to reconcile all things to himself in Jesus. The call of this good news is to join, to participate, to receive the Kingdom, and to be sent in turn to live it out.