All of Scripture expounds the cause of world missions.
We easily notice it in the New Testament, but what keeps us from recognizing the missiology foretold in the Old Covenant? Are there blinders covering our eyes, perhaps unconsciously, that prevent us from discovering the missionary enterprise prophesied from Genesis through Malachi?
I believe the answer is a resounding “yes”—but what could those blinders be? I think we often read our Old Testaments with the erroneous belief that the biblical text is promoting a “Jews-only club.” It is easy to understand why. I want to briefly survey four passages of Scripture, two from the Old Testament and two from the New, in order to understand the full picture of God’s mission. My hope is that the clearer light of the New Testament will take the blinders off our eyes.
First, in Joshua 11:19–20 we read,
There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. All the others they took in battle. For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that He might utterly destroy them, and that they might receive no mercy, but that He might destroy them, as the Lord had commanded Moses.
The context, of course, is Israel’s conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. By God’s just commandment, the armies of Israel were to completely wipe out the inhabitants of the land. And here the Holy Spirit says that it was God’s own sovereignty that hardened these Gentile nations so that they would not obtain mercy. It would be easy to walk away from such a text with the impression that God did not care about the Gentiles.
Second, in Psalm 147:19–20, the psalmist rejoices that, under the Old Covenant, the only language group to whom God gave his Word was Israel, in their native Hebrew:
He declares His word to Jacob, His statutes and His judgments to Israel. He has not dealt thus with any nation; and as for His judgments, they have not known them.
God chose not to give his special revelation to the Gentile nations. The psalmist even punctuates this statement at the end with a triumphant, “Hallelujah!” or “Praise the Lord!” (verse 20).
The New Testament clarifies God’s intention. When Barnabas and Paul entered the city of Lystra during their first missionary journey, the inhabitants mistakenly concluded that they were Zeus and Hermes, gods incarnate, and were preparing to offer sacrifices to worship them. The missionaries were, of course, horrified by this, and they tore their clothes and ran into the crowd to insist that they were mere men and should not be worshiped. They pleaded with them,
“Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them, who in bygone generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. (Acts 14:15–17, emphasis added)
Paul was saying, in essence, “God revealed himself to your Gentile forefathers in the Book of Nature, but he allowed them to walk in their own ways and did not reveal himself to them through the Book of Scripture.” One could mistakenly assume that God was concerned exclusively for the nation of Israel but did not love the Gentiles. But this is not what the whole counsel of God teaches! “For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16).
This leads me to a fourth and final passage, Ephesians 2:11–16:
Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh—who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands—that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.
Under the Old Covenant, God erected a kosher wall to divide Jews and Gentiles into two distinct and separate peoples. This wall consisted of practices like circumcision, kosher diets, and special feast days set apart for God on the Jewish calendar. There were at least two purposes for this. First, Yahweh intended to protect his chosen people from syncretism. The temptation to abandon fidelity to Yahweh for the polytheism and sensual worship of the gods of Canaan was strong, as was the tendency to incorporate heathen practices into the pure worship of God (cf. Deuteronomy 12:29–32). But secondly, the Lord also intended to preserve the Messianic Seed through the lineage of David until the Messiah was born.
From the beginning, God meant for this kosher wall of separation to be only temporary. When Jesus died on the cross, he abolished the Old Covenant, and the temporary, positive laws associated with it were dismantled. The distinction between Jew and Gentile was eradicated, for the gospel not only reconciles believing men to God, but also believing men to other believing men, regardless of their ethnic or cultural heritage. And this was God’s purpose from all eternity, because when he chose his elect people, he selected them from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation on earth (Ephesians 1:3–14; Revelation 5:8–10; 13:8). Paul alludes to this very truth in Ephesians 3:3–6 when he says,
[B]y revelation He made known to me the mystery…which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets: that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel. (emphasis added).
Paul does not say that the mystery of the Gentiles being ingrafted was unknown in previous ages, but that it was not revealed with the greater clarity that we now find in the New Testament. It was always God’s intention to send his Messiah through Israel alone, but he was not sent for Israel alone. He was sent to be both the glory of his people Israel and a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:5–6; Luke 2:25–32). May God’s Holy Spirit remove the blinders from our eyes with the full light of the New Testament, so that we can see the cause of world missions clearly foretold in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms (cf. Luke 24:44–47)!1
[1] For more on this see Jerry Slate, Jr., Steve Martin, John Miller, and David Vinson, Reforming World Missions: Recovering a Biblical and Confessional Missiology (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2026), 33–111.
