All Authority in Heaven and on Earth

Today, on Renewing Your Mind... When our mothers raised us, they taught us that if we don't have anything good to say, then what?

Then don't say anything at all. Well, when we evangelize, when we do mission, when we go and preach the Gospel, we have to preach the hard things. And that's hard, because we don't want to hurt people's feelings. And yet, if we're going to explain the good news of the Gospel to our friends, co-workers and family members, we have to share the bad news—that is, that they, like us, are sinners and in need of a Savior.

That's a hard thing to say, especially in a world where tolerance and inclusion are high priorities. Today and all this week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Burke Parsons is taking us phrase by phrase through the Great Commission. And today he explains how the sovereignty of our Triune God is one of our greatest motivations for missions and our greatest assurance of success. Let's continue our study of the Great Commission with Ligonier Teaching Fellow, Dr. Burke Parsons. What are our motives for missions?

What are our motives for fulfilling the Great Commission? In our last time together, we talked about how love of God and love of neighbor is one of our motivations for mission. Now, I think if most Christians were being completely honest, they would say, well, I do love the Lord.

I know I don't love Him with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, but I do love the Lord and I strive to love Him with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind. But then if we ask ourselves honestly and ask one another and we're to be honest, we would say, I don't love my neighbor to the degree that I should. And I certainly don't love my neighbor as myself.

Now, we could talk about those who are our closest neighbors—our families, our spouse, our children. And perhaps then we would say, yes, I love my spouse. I love my bride as myself. I love my bride more than myself.

I love my children more than myself. But when it comes to neighbors, we don't often feel the goodwill and love towards our neighbors that we ought to. We often feel ill will. We often don't care about their salvation as we ought to.

We're more concerned about our own embarrassment and telling our neighbors about sin and hell and the gospel of Jesus Christ and that Christ is the only way to the Father and without Him, no one can have access to the Father. But the truth is there are numerous motivations for missions and numerous motivations for fulfilling the Great Commission. One is love, love of God and love of neighbor. But another one of those motives Jesus gives to us here in verse 18 in the Great Commission. And He gives us words of comfort, assurance. He gives us words wherein He describes His own authority and His own sovereignty over the nations. Let's look at it together in verse 18 of Matthew 28. Matthew records, And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Now those first few words are significant. We don't want to just jump right into Jesus saying all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.

Those first words are significant. Remember I mentioned last session how it seemed that the disciples were a little bit far off. Well, here is where we get that, where Jesus is now coming to them. It seems that He walked over to them. He came to them.

And what did He do? Don't forget these disciples were hesitant, even fearful, doubting perhaps, weak in faith. And Jesus comes over to them. Perhaps He put His hand on their shoulder. Perhaps He put His hand under their chin and said, Get up and look at Me. Perhaps He came to them and He bent down and He put His hand on their back and said, It's okay. We don't know what Jesus did or said, but all we know is that He came to them and He spoke to them. Now the way in which this is phrased here, the way in which these words come together in the original language is really beautiful because it reveals how Jesus is giving them words of reassurance.

This whole scene is the disciples. They're hesitant, doubting, lacking faith, perhaps fearful, perhaps nervous about what He's going to say. Is He going to talk with them about how they let Him down? Is Jesus going to rehearse for them their sins, doubting Him, denying Him, scattering from Him? Is He going to chastise and rebuke them? Well, Jesus doesn't do any of those things. He doesn't bring up their past sins. He doesn't shove them in their faces. He doesn't wave His finger at them and say, You disciples who are faithless.

Now He called them faithless previously, but here He comes with words of assurance. They were reluctant, perhaps. They were fearful, perhaps timid. Perhaps some of them even crying, perhaps shaking, wondering what was going on. They were in the presence of God. And Jesus comes over to them and speaks to them.

This language and the way in which Jesus approaches His disciples here on this mountain in Galilee is significant because it's significant not only for the disciples, significant not only for the early church, but even significant for us because most of us don't feel that we are equipped. We don't feel that we are worthy and we don't feel simply that we're good enough to take part in the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Most of us don't feel like we're much good at all.

We don't feel most of the time like conquerors. We feel often like failures, don't we? We don't have the assurance that we really want to have the full assurance that God gives to us in Christ and by the power of the Spirit. We often doubt ourselves. We're often timid. We're often worried about what people will think of us. You know, that's one of the reasons that evangelism and missions is so hard because it's hard to go and tell people hard truths. When our mothers raised us, they taught us that if we don't have anything good to say, then what?

Then don't say anything at all. Well, when we evangelize, when we do missions, when we go and preach the gospel, we have to preach the hard things and that's hard because we don't want to hurt people's feelings. And so in going, we need assurance. We need a certain measure of confidence, but it's not a confidence because of our own personalities. It's not a confidence that exudes from within us. It has to be a confidence and a strength and a boldness. And a boldness doesn't mean brazenness. It means caring more about what God says than what about man thinks of us. It's a boldness that only comes by the power of the Spirit. It's a strength and a confidence that only comes by the Lord giving us that strength and that confidence, overcoming our timidities and our fears. And so Jesus comes and He speaks to them.

And what did He say? He said to them in very plain and clear words, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Now you can see that word all as it appears three or four times depending on your translations in verse 18, all authority in verse 19, all nations in verse 20, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded.

And so we see this language throughout, and even at the very end I'm with you always or all the days. There's a universalistic aspect here. There's an all-encompassing aspect, Christ's authority over all, going to all nations, going everywhere, teaching them to observe all that Christ commanded.

The scope of the Great Commission is great because in part of this word all, because it is saying that we are to go everywhere and to do all that Christ has said to do, and Christ will be with us all the time, all the days, always. Now Jesus doesn't say, some authority has been given to Me. Now we can go back in the Gospel of Matthew and we can recall a time when Jesus was offered some authority. Where was that?

You remember? In Matthew chapter four, turn there with me and we'll see how it is that in Matthew chapter four, Jesus, in this time of temptation, the devil led Him up to a high mountain, it says. Now we don't know what mountain it was or where it was. Could it have been the same mountain that Jesus was now there with His disciples in Galilee?

Well, we simply do not know. And where Scripture closes its mouth, where the Lord does not reveal, we must close our mouths and be silent. But here the devil takes Him away on a very high mountain. Matthew chapter four in verses eight and following we read, again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to them, all these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship Me. Then Jesus said to him, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. And the devil left Him, and behold angels came and were ministering to Him.

So the devil brings Him up on this high mountain, shows Him in some spiritual and mysterious way all the kingdoms of the world and all their splendor and all their glory. And the devil said to them, all these I will give you. Well, what was Satan offering Jesus? He was offering Him some authority. He was offering Him the kingdoms of the world. Now ultimately they weren't the devils to give, but Satan tempts Jesus with this to worship Him. If He would only bow His knee and worship the devil, if He would only serve the devil, then Satan promised to give Him all the kingdoms of the earth.

And the Lord rightly rebukes Him and says, Be gone, Satan. You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. Jesus quotes the Old Testament as He does throughout His ministry. And He says, God alone you shall serve. I will not commit the sin of idolatry, even for all the kingdoms of the world. And then in Matthew 28, turn back there with me.

In Matthew 28, Jesus says, I've not just been given some authority, I've been given all authority, all authority in heaven and on earth. Now that language is language that we see throughout Scripture. The language that is used there is a rhetorical device called Amerism.

And Amerism is a rhetorical device wherein two contrasting words are used to express an entirety or a completeness of something. And so when we talk about searching for something or for someone, we'll say sometimes, I searched high and low. What does that mean? We searched everywhere for it or everywhere within a particular context, right? And the very first words of Scripture, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

That's Amerism. What does it mean? It means that He created everything. It's not simply pointing out that He created the heavens and the earth, He created those, but He created everything. And so here in Matthew 28, we see this same rhetorical device being used by Jesus, all authority in heaven and on earth, all authority everywhere. Now this is significant because what we see Jesus saying here is that the basis, the foundation of the great commission that Jesus is giving the disciples is established on Jesus's authority over all. Jesus's power and Jesus's right over all. Jesus told the disciples, I have overcome the world, so do not fear. Jesus is here saying, all authority has been given to me.

And what does that infer? It ensures that this has been given to Him, not by the devil. It has been given to Him by the Father. This is one of the reasons for which Jesus came, to have this authority given to Him in His incarnation, in His perfect life, fulfilling all the righteous demands of God's law, that in going to the cross, His death might be a substitutionary, sacrificial atonement for the sins of His people. And in doing so and being raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit, all authority from the Father was given to the Son. So Jesus is here saying to the disciples, I have all authority, all right, all power, all dominion.

And what is a one word definition summary for all those words? That Christ has sovereignty over the nations. Christ is giving to His disciples this charge with the very foundation of the sovereignty of God over all things and over all peoples and over all nations.

You see, dearly beloved, this is one of the great motivations for mission. It's one of the great motivations for fulfilling the great commission, is that God is sovereign, that God is all powerful, that God has all authority. Now oftentimes when we hear about the sovereignty of God, when we hear about God's sovereignty and election and reparation, when we hear about God's sovereignty over our own lives and over the lives of those we dearly love, our families, our wives, our husbands, our children, when we hear about the sovereignty of God, typically we think that the sovereignty of God and evangelism or the sovereignty of God and prayer are conflicting and contradictory.

But they're not. They go hand in hand because without the sovereignty of God, we wouldn't know Christ. We wouldn't evangelize or fulfill the mission of God. We wouldn't pray. We wouldn't worship. We wouldn't know God.

We would remain dead in our sins and trespasses. Now I know that's a hard concept and a hard doctrine for many people today as it was for me. It was for me for a long time and I struggled through it and fought against it and kicked against it and fought with all the free will I could muster against this doctrine because I didn't like it. I didn't think it was biblical.

I thought it didn't represent God rightly and biblically. But when we see the sovereignty of God in Scripture carefully, as it's laid out for us on every page from beginning to end, we see that the sovereignty of God is the impetus and the reason and the foundation that any of us knows God, that any of us has life, that any of us is regenerated, born again by the power of the Spirit, that any of us prays, that any of us knows the Lord, if any of us evangelizes and fulfills the Great Commission, it's all founded on the sovereignty of God. You see, the sovereignty of God and understanding God's sovereignty in salvation, understanding that God has chosen before the foundation of the earth those who are His, He has chosen some to be His own, it's one of the great motives for evangelism. It's one of the great motives for mission. It's one of the great motives for going to the ends of the earth because we know that God has a people for Himself and every tribe, tongue, and nation.

It motivates us to go. Love of God and love of neighbor are one motivation, but not the only motivation. The second motivation is God's sovereignty in salvation, God's sovereignty in election, that we know that He has told us He has authority over all, sovereignty over all, and that He has a people for Himself in every tribe and every tongue and every nation.

So we go. The difficulty is, for us, is that we don't know whom God has chosen, do we? We don't know who is among the elect of God. It's not as if we can go up to people and sort of look at them and we see a mark on their faces or perhaps a mark on their shoulders that identify them as the elect of God. We can't determine who are the elect of God. We don't know who are the chosen in God, and so we go to everyone.

We go to every tribe, every tongue, every nation, because it doesn't matter people's ancestry or background or color or socioeconomic class. The Lord loves the world. He loves the nations, and He has people from among the nations who belong to Him that He chose before the foundations of the earth. And our call is to be faithful as secondary agents to go and to fulfill the mission of God, to proclaim the gospel. And as we proclaim it with the external call of the gospel going forth, with the free offer of the gospel to every man, woman, and child, so God in His sovereignty and by His Spirit does that great regenerating work of that internal call of grabbing a hold of someone's dead, stony, rebellious heart and saying, You're mine. And He rips out those hearts of stone, and He gives us pliable hearts of flesh that He molds.

And He gives us His Spirit, and He conquers and He invades and He says, You're mine, and You've been mine since the foundation of the earth. But we're called to go and proclaim and to herald. We're called to go and announce the good news of what God has done through Christ by the power of the Spirit, trusting our sovereign Lord who has people everywhere to do His mighty work of regeneration, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification.

So this motivation for evangelism, this motivation for missions is at the very foundation for why we go. Because the Bible says that whosoever believes on the name of Jesus Christ will be saved. Now we know this from John 3.16, but it's not only in John 3.16.

We see it in Joel chapter 2 and 32. We see it even in Romans chapter 10, where Paul, pulling from Joel, says the gospel is for all people. This news of salvation and how sinners can obtain the righteousness of God is for all people, to all who call on the name of the Lord, the prophet Joel says, to everyone who calls on the name of the Lord. And so we go to everyone, hoping and praying and striving and never giving up, especially on those that we most dearly love, never giving up and saying, ah, they must not be among the elect. No, we keep praying and we keep striving and we keep proclaiming the gospel until there is no more hope, because we must die before we die, for there's no chance thereafter, as one theologian has said. So we keep praying and we keep going and we keep proclaiming and we keep preaching.

We keep pointing people to Christ by our own lives and by the gospel of Jesus Christ pronounced from our lips. Now, one of the most significant things about verse 18, what Jesus says is that He says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And that's not something we should just pass over quickly because what Jesus is doing in saying that He is actually fulfilling prophecy. He, as He does throughout His ministry, throughout the gospel accounts, He quotes the Old Testament in order to show these Jewish disciples, to show Israel how it is He is the fulfillment of the scriptures, how He is in fact the long-awaited one, how He is in fact the Messiah, Hamashiach, how He is the one about whom the scriptures foretold. And so where does He take us in quoting almost verbatim a portion of a passage from Daniel chapter 7. Look with me at Daniel chapter 7.

Jesus throughout the gospel of Matthew refers to Himself as the Son of Man. That language comes from Daniel's prophecy. Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, before the incarnation of the Son of God, Daniel prophesied.

And in Daniel chapter 7 verses 13 and 14 we read, Daniel's vision, I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of Man. And He came to the ancient of days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and His kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Isn't that glorious?

Isn't that absolutely beautiful? That Jesus in stating that all authority has been given to Him in heaven and on earth is saying, this is what I was destined for, this is what I came for, that all authority would be given Him. And notice that in all of Jesus' life and ministry, what do we see Jesus doing? We see Jesus serving, don't we? We see Jesus washing feet. He even said, I came not to be served, I came to serve and to give my life a ransom for many. We saw Jesus doing the things that a servant would do, even to a point where others said, no, no, don't do this. I'm not worthy of this.

Don't wash my feet. Jesus came as a servant. Though Jesus came as a servant and though Jesus lived and died as a servant, He now says that He will be served, that He has authority and sovereignty.

He has full rights over the earth and now He will be served as the Lord God almighty. Will we be faithful in serving Him? Our Savior's authority serves two purposes when it comes to the Great Commission. First, the world is His and He has the authority to command repentance. Second, He's our Lord and we are compelled to obey His command.

Are we obeying willingly or grudgingly? I know that when it comes to personal evangelism, fear often gets the better of us. We're thankful for Dr. Burke Parson's reminder today that Jesus' authority motivates us for missions. The Great Commission is our focus this week here on Renewing Your Mind, and we'd like to send you a DVD of this five-part series. Simply contact us today with a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can do that one of two ways.

You can do that by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. I know that many of you probably have close friends or family members that you love, that you care for, and that you hope will come to faith in Christ. In a recent letter to Ligonier donors, our president, Chris Larson, wrote about that. He said, The painful tragedy of the darkened mind is evident as those we dearly love self-destruct in sinful labyrinths of their own making. We grieve when righteousness is cast aside because of the harm it can mean for our families and our neighbors. Through tearful pleas, we warn that their feet will slip in due time. Well, today's message by Dr. Parsons is a great reminder, isn't it, to pray for those we love, and it's why studying the Great Commission is so important. Again, we'll be happy to send you this five-part series for your donation of any amount. You can reach us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. Well, we'll continue our study of the Great Commission tomorrow, and we'll look at what it means to go and make disciples. That's Wednesday, here on Renewing Your Mind.