At the end of the last article regarding the Mission of God, we said that God’s mission is being carried out even today. God’s mission, as we have seen from the beginning of this series of posts, is that his image would be multiplied and spread all across the earth.
As Jesus comes to the earth, he comes through the people of Israel as a light to all people. He comes not only as a light to the Jewish people, but to all people. The prophecies about the Messiah tell us that even the Gentiles would receive the light from God. They also would be able to receive the light, meaning that they also would be able to come to God.
The image of the invisible God
In the book of Colossians, Paul tells us that Jesus himself is the true image of God:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:15-17
Paul is saying that the Son, who is Jesus himself, is the image of the invisible God. Jesus was a real man who truly lived here on the earth. He spoke and his words were recorded. He lived and served the Father so as to glorify him and we can still read about what he did. In total, Jesus truly represented God on the earth. He is truly the image of the invisible God. He truly represented God here on the earth in the person of Jesus helping each of us to see who God is and what he is doing.
However, Jesus didn’t only act as an image. He wasn’t only a representation of God. Instead, he gave himself as a perfect, sinless sacrifice so that through his blood, he would purchase as a ransom each of us who would put our faith in him so that we would enter into the kingdom of God. This is what Paul was saying as he continued talking about Christ’s identity just a little later in his letter to the Colossians:
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.
Colossians 2:9-12
Jesus was not only an image. He was also, and actually, the real thing. He was God himself who gave himself for each of us, allowing us to be raised from the dead as a result of our sin to be made fully alive in Christ! As Jesus brings us back to eternal spiritual life, he makes us to be a new creation. He makes us brand new, completely spotless and without sin as we stand before God, just as Adam and Eve were without sin before sin entered the world.
The Great Commission
With this understanding, we can better understand that as Jesus commissions his disciples, just before returning to the Father, he is simply restating God’s mission, the same mission that God has been declaring since the creation of the world. This is what he says:
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20
Jesus has been given authority over all of heaven and earth, so he has the authority to not only command his disciples, but to pick up and declare once again God’s plan. He tells his disciples that they are to go and make disciples among all nations. His disciples are to make more disciples. Not in their image, but in his. These new disciples are to be made to be the new creation, a new representation of the image of Christ, following Jesus and doing what Jesus commanded them to do, just as the original disciples were doing. These new disciples of Jesus would, once again, take fully upon themselves the image of God. They would once again fully reclaim the image as they become disciples of Christ.
Where did Jesus tell the disciples to go and make more disciples? Amongst all nations! Jesus intended that everyone, all across the earth, would know him. Every tongue, every tribe, every nation would welcome Christ and be redeemed.
One story, one mission
Jesus is restating the God’s original mission. God had told Adam and Eve, who were made in God’s image, to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth. They would fill the earth with God’s image. Now Jesus tells his disciples to also be fruitful and multiply, except this time, it isn’t a physical multiplication but a spiritual multiplication, making disciples of Jesus, the true image of God.
God’s mission is that his image would be multiplied all across the earth and it has been the same mission from creation, through the nation of Israel all of the way to the time of Christ, and even to us now. We also are under these same commandments, to make disciples of Christ, multiplying and spreading the image of God across the earth.
The arc of the story that God is telling is the same from the beginning to the end. God told his people to multiply his image on the earth and he tells the same even today.
