We Are the Nations

Thank you again for the opportunity to preach from God’s Word this morning.  I would like to read from Psalm 67.  Thank you, choir, for singing Psalm 67.  Psalms are meant to be sung, but let’s read Psalm 67 anyway.   

Psalm 67.

“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make His face to shine upon us, that Your way may be known on earth, Your saving power among all nations.  Let the peoples praise You, O God;  let all the peoples praise You!  Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for You judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise you!  The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, shall bless us.  God shall bless us; let all the ends of the earth fear Him!”

This is the Word of the Lord.

As we make a beginning this morning, here is a call to missions.  As we read in Romans chapter 10, verse 14 – How will they know unless someone tells them?  How will the children know?  How will the families know?  How will the extended family know?  How will the neighbor in the city and the nations know?  How will they know unless someone tells them?

I think this is the missional call of Romans chapter 10, verse 14, but it’s also the missional call of Psalm 67.  It is our call for today.

Yet today we continue to wrestle with another question – How will they know unless someone is legally allowed to tell them?  We have been hearing stories coming out of China.  How will they know unless someone is legally allowed to tell them?

There are over 3 billion people in the world with no access to the Gospel unless someone tells them.  Often the doors are closed.  Fewer and fewer countries want missionaries and many Christians today do not even believe anyone should be a missionary.

I find it amazing when I visit PCA churches and you bump into a church that actually is not convinced that they still need to send missionaries to the nations.  In my own country, Zimbabwe, where it is becoming more and more difficult for missionaries to renew their work permits, how will they know unless someone tells them?

John Stott in his book Authentic Christianity and the Contemporary Christian, he writes about the missionary calling of the Church and he argues in there that God Himself is a missionary God and therefore the Church of the New Testament is a missionary church.  He concludes by saying the following:  Mission lies at the very heart of God and therefore at the very heart of the Church.  A church without mission is no longer a church.  A church without a mission is no longer a church.  It is contradicting an essential part of its identity.  The Church is mission.

Psalm 67, our text for this morning, will help us understand our missionary calling and the psalm that does in two ways.  The first two verses, as you read them verse 1 and 2, they make up what you could call the very heart of the psalm.  There the psalmist is asking God to be gracious to His people Israel, to bless them and to make His face to shine upon them.

Then the rest of the psalm, verses 3 to verse 7, is the hope.  Martin Luther called it the prophecy, the hope that flows from the first two verses.  The hope here is that all the nations of the world will worship God.  That’s the prophecy.  All the nations of the earth will worship God.

Look at verse 3 – let the peoples praise You, O God, let all the peoples praise You.

Anytime we see a word like “peoples” in the plural as we read the Old Testament, and especially in the Psalms, it’s talking about all the nations of the earth outside of Israel.  These are Gentile, pagan nations.  Sometimes they are the enemies of Israel.  They are peoples who are not ethnic Israel.  We’re talking about all non-Jewish people.  The Apostle Paul calls them strangers to the covenant of promise in Ephesians 2, verse 12.  Sometimes the text calls them “peoples” or sometimes it calls them “nations” or “foreigners” or “all mankind.”  At times it calls them the “ends of the earth,” or sometimes the Bible will actually mention the people group by name, like Egyptians or Cushites or Hittites or Philistines. 

The Bible, I think, has a lot to say about all the nations.  Once you get to understand this, you will begin to see the nations everywhere as you read Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.  In fact, in the immediate psalms leading up to Psalm 67, you’ll notice that there’s an all nations theme that is very difficult to miss.  You only need to take note of the language.

Go back to Psalm 64, verse 9, and look at that little phrase, “Then all mankind fears.”  God’s justice for His people Israel gets the attention of all mankind and in response to God’s work, what happens?  All mankind fears Him.

Psalm 65, verse 2 – O You who hears prayer, to You shall all flesh come.

So the God who hears is not just a hearer of Israel but of all flesh, all flesh shall come to God.

Psalm 65, verse 5 – O God of our salvation.

But more than that, He is the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.

Psalm 65, verse 8 – God’s power is displayed.  Why?  To what end?  So that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at Your signs.

Then Psalm 66, verse 1.  There is a command to all nations – Shout for joy to God, all the earth.

Psalm 66, verse 4 – All the earth worships You and sings praises to You; they sing praises to Your name.

Then verse 8 – Bless our God, all peoples.

In Psalm 2, which is all about the Messiah, one way that God the Father honors the Son, the Messiah, is He says to Him, “Ask of Me and I will make the nations Your heritage and the ends of the earth Your possession.” 

The same idea is repeated again and again and you only need to look at Psalm 22, for example, verse 27.  As a result of the Messiah’s suffering and exaltation, David writes, “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before You.” 

Verse 28 – For kingship belongs to the Lord and He rules over the nations.

So Psalm 67, verse 3 is just joining an already established theme, an all nations theme, and we read “let the peoples praise You, O God.  Let all the peoples praise You.”

Verse 4 – let the nations be glad and sing for joy.

Verse 7 – let all the nations, let all the ends of the earth fear Him.

That’s the hope of Psalm 67, that God will be worshiped by all of the nations of the earth.  That’s the hope.  This hope, this prophecy, flows from the very theological heart of Psalm 67.

What is the heart of Psalm 67?  Here it is in verses 1 and 2 – “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make His face to shine upon us, Selah.”  And Selah means stop for a minute and think.  Haven’t you heard this from somewhere?  This is not the first time you’ve heard these words.  And yes, we’ve heard them before.

Psalm 67 verse 1 sounds like one of the most famous blessings in the Bible, going back to Numbers chapter 6.  In Numbers 6, verse 22, God told Moses to command Aaron and his sons to speak God’s blessing on Israel.  God told him the exact words to be spoken.  Aaron and his sons serving as priests were to say to the people of Israel, in verse 24, “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.”

Three of those same phrases in Numbers chapter 6 are repeated in Psalm 67, verse 1 – gracious, bless, make His face shine.

But notice the difference in Psalm 67.  Instead of these words being spoken in the second person, “you,” they are in the third person, “us.”  The psalmist is taking the position here as a representative of all Israel and he’s invoking Aaron’s blessing on the people and he says “may God be gracious to us, may God bless us, may God make His face shine upon us.”

That’s amazing by itself.  But look at verse 2.  This blessing has a purpose.  The psalmist is saying apply Aaron’s blessing to us, God be gracious to us and bless us, and make His face to shine upon us.

Then verse 2 – so that Your ways may be known on earth, Your saving power among all nations.

In other words, bless us for the sake of the nations.  I’m asking You, God, to do good to us in order that the nations may see You and know You.  Bless us so that we will be a blessing to all.

That’s the heart of Psalm 67.  That’s where the hope of all nations praising God comes from.  Here’s where Psalm 67 starts to uncover what I think is a central message in the whole storyline of the Bible.  We exist not only for ourselves to know and enjoy God but also so that others may know and enjoy God, which means as a Church we have a missionary calling.  We have a purpose that extends beyond ourselves.   This has been God’s will since the very beginning.  He is worthy of the worship of all nations.  So He will have it.  God has determined that His people be the means to how He will have that worship.

In other words, the Church is God’s primary means of bringing salvation to the world and bringing the nations to come worship the Lord our God.  In other words, the people of God have always had a missionary calling.  A missionary calling to magnify His glory among all the nations.

One thing the Old Testament history makes clear is that Israel failed in this missionary calling.  Israel failed terribly.  This is one reason this missionary theme is picked up boldly in the Psalms and the prophets.  The only way that Israel could fulfill the missionary calling is if God Himself intervened, if God did something.  And He did.

In the book of Psalms, you’ll notice there’s at least 175 references to the nations, and in the prophets, when men like Isaiah spoke on behalf of God about the future God would bring, God say things like this in Isaiah 45, verse 22 – Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!

In Isaiah 56, verse 7 – My house shall be called a house of prayer for who?  For all peoples.

Isaiah 49, verse 6 – God, speaking to Israel, His servant, says, “I will make you as a light for the nations.”  Why?  “That My salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”     

Isaiah 66, verse 19, with God saying – I will send survivors to the nations, to the coastlands far off, that have not heard My fame or seen My glory and they shall declare My glory among the nations.

Verse 23 – All flesh shall come to worship before Me, declares the Lord.

So it has been His plan from the beginning, a plan to be accomplished through His people.  Yes, Israel failed in that calling.  But what does God do?  Well, God sends His Son.  Jesus came to this world as the offspring of Abraham through whom all the nations of the earth could be blessed.  Jesus Himself became the true and better Israel.  He emboldened the missionary calling of Israel and He by calling all people to Himself, He began to create a new Israel, reconstituted, and a new covenant.

That’ why He called the 12 disciples, like the 12 tribes of Israel.  At the beginning of the book at Acts, when Jesus commissions His Apostles, He says you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

Kevin, thank you for praying about the nations and just how the Gospel spread to the ends of the earth, Acts chapter 1, verse 8.  And we actually see this happening in the book of Acts through the Church, the Church of Jesus receives the missionary calling of Jesus Himself, the calling God has always meant for His people.

We see unfolding in Acts as the Gospel advances to the nations from one nation to another, the Gospel advancing to the Gentiles, to the foreigners, to those outside ethnic Israel, one nation after another, one continent after another.  In Acts 18 when the Apostle Paul says he is going to preach to the nations, guess what he quotes.  He reads from Isaiah 49, verse 6 – I have made you a light for the nations that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

This is amazing because it means that what God first spoke to Israel and then was fulfilled in Jesus is now applied to the followers of Jesus.  We are blessed to be a blessing.  God’s saving power to us is so that the saving power of God could be known through us.  All nations will hear God’s fame and see God’s glory.  Why?  Because Jesus by His Spirit is at work through His people, the Church, us.  We have a missionary calling to spread His Gospel to all nations so that all nations alienated from God, separated from God, and separated to one another, as we read in Genesis 11, becomes Revelation 7, a great multitude from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing together before the throne and before the Lamb, and crying with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God.”    

So Psalm 67 is, in fact, the future, isn’t it?  It’s where everything is headed.  I always say to people, one reason why even our brothers and sisters in China continue to preach the Gospel with courage is because they know how it’s all going to end.  Psalm 67 tells us where everything is headed.  Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise You.

So for us this morning where are we in this unfolding story of redemption?  Yes, we have a missionary calling to take the Gospel to all the nations, but we need to realize that we in this room this morning, we are the nations.  Often we forget that we are the nations.  This is how far the Gospel has gone.

As Kevin was praying, and mentioning these countries, we are the nations.  We are those outside Israel who have been grabbed by the Gospel and if we are thinking biblically, we are the ends of the earth.  We should never think that our role in global missions is us doing a favor for the peoples way out there.  Instead, we owe our very existence to global missions.  We have heard the Gospel because global missionaries were sent.  It’s because Jesus did have a witness to the ends of the earth.

Which means that our work in global missions is not us trying to start something new.  It’s not us trying to be all clever and creative.  We just want to join in on the grace that is behind our very existence as believers.  We have inherited a missionary calling.  We have been welcomed into this calling.  God has blessed us so that we can be a blessing.

Here is how John Stott summarizes this missionary calling for us.  For those who grew up during my time, John Stott was Uncle Stott in Africa.  He was on every university campus and some of us were discipled through that.  Here is how he summarizes this missionary calling – the God of the Old Testament is a missionary God, calling one family in order to bless all the families of the earth, the Christ of the gospels is a missionary Christ.  He sent the Church out to witness.  The Spirit of the X is a missionary Spirit.  He drove the Church out from Jerusalem to Rome and to the ends of the earth.

The Church of the Epistles is a missionary church, a worldwide community with a worldwide vocation.  The end of the Revelation is a missionary end, a countless throng from every nation, worshiping the Lord.

Here’s our challenge this morning as I conclude.  Everyone gets to do it.  Everyone has to be part of it.  Remember Stott said a church without a mission is no longer a church.  You might as well as say a Christian without a mission is no longer a Christian.  How then can they call on the One they have not believed in?  How then can they worship the One whose loving kindness they have never experienced?  How can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard?  How can they hear without someone preaching to them?  How can anyone preach unless they are sent?      

Come.  Let’s pray.  Lord, we thank You once again that we are the nations, we are the Gentiles, we are the ends of the earth.  We are those who were outside the covenant of promise and yet You have brought us in.  How we pray this morning that You may open our eyes to see how You have blessed us to be a blessing.  We cry out to you that You would give us a vision for the nations, that Lord, we open our eyes to see how the harvest is ready and that through us You have a message to the nations.  Help us, dear God.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.