by John Piper
4. By focusing on all the people groups of the world, God undercuts ethnocentric pride and throws all peoples back upon his free grace rather than any distinctive of their own. This is what Paul emphasizes in Acts 17:26 when he says to the proud citizens of Athens, “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.” F. F. Bruce points out that “the Athenians . . . pride themselves on being . . . Sprung from the soil of their native Attica. . . . They were the only Greeks on the European mainland who had no tradition of their ancestors coming into Greece; they belonged to the earliest wave of Greek immigration.”48
Against this boast Paul countered: You and the Barbarians and the Jews and the Romans all came from the same origin. And you came by God’s will, not your own; and the time and place of your existence is in God’s hand. Every time God expresses his missionary focus for all the nations, he cuts the nerve of ethnocentric pride. It’s a humbling thing to discover that God does not choose our people group because of any distinctives of worth but rather that we might double our joy in him by being a means of bringing all the other groups into the same joy.
Humility is the flip side of giving God all the glory. Humility means reveling in his grace, not our goodness. In pressing us on to all the peoples, God is pressing us further into the humblest and deepest experience of his grace and weaning us more and more from our ingrained pride. In doing this he is preparing for himself a people—from all the peoples—who will be able to worship him with free and white-hot admiration.
1. I use the word “win” in the sense that Paul does in 1 Corinthians 9:19–22. The use of “save” in verse 22 shows that this is what he has in mind: to be used by God in love and witness to win people over to faith in Christ and so to save them from sin and condemnation. “For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”
2. The word “nations” in this chapter does not refer to the modern political state as in the “United Nations” or the “nation” of England. We will see that its biblical meaning has to do with an ethnic group that may or may not have political dimensions.
3. I use the word “evangelize” in the broad New Testament sense of speaking the Good News of Christ and his saving work. The speaking is with a view of bringing about faith and establishing the church of Christ (Rom. 10:14–15; 15:20), but true evangelizing does not depend on a believing response (Heb. 4:6). For a remarkably thorough historical survey of the concept, see David B. Barrett, Evangelize! A Historical Survey of the Concept (Birmingham, Ala.: New Hope, 1987).
4. Ralph D. Winter, “The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in Mission Begins,” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, 3d ed., ed. Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1999), 346.
5. Ralph Winter, “Unreached Peoples: Recent Developments in the Concept,” Mission Frontiers (August/September 1989): 18.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. See note 38 on this difference of perspective and its effects.
8. Harley Schreck and David Barrett, eds., Unreached Peoples: Clarifying the Task (Monrovia, Calif.: New Hope, 1987), 6–7.
9. See below in this chapter for a discussion of what reached and unreached means.
10. Galatians 2:14 appears to be an exception in the English text (“If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”). But the Greek word here is not ethnos but the adverb ethniks, which means to have the life patterns of Gentiles.
11. Following are all the singular uses in the New Testament: Matt. 21:43; 24:7 (= Mark 13:8 = Luke 21:10); Luke 7:5; 23:2 (both references to the Jewish nation); Acts 2:5 (“Jews from every nation”); 7:7; 8:9; 10:22 (“whole nation of the Jews”), 35; 17:26; 24:2, 10, 17; 26:4; 28:19 (the last five references are to the Jewish nation); John 11:48, 50, 51, 52; 18:35 (all in reference to the Jewish nation); Rev. 5:9; 13:7; 14:6; 1 Peter 2:9. Paul never uses the singular.
12. For example, Matt. 6:32; 10:5; 12:21; 20:25; Luke 2:32; 21:24; Acts 9:15; 13:46, 47; 15:7, 14, 23; 18:6; 21:11; 22:21; Rom. 3:29; 9:24; 15:9, 10, 11, 12, 16; 16:26; Gal. 2:9; 3:14; 2 Tim. 4:17; Rev. 14:18; 16:19; 19:15; 20:8; 21:24. When I use the term “Gentile individuals” in this chapter, I do not mean to focus undue attention on specific persons. Rather, I mean to speak of non-Jews in a comprehensive way without reference to their ethnic groupings.
13. Following Dibelius this is suggested by F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of Acts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 358. But Lenski is surely right that the very next clause in Acts 17:26 militates against such a translation: “. . . having determined allotted periods and boundaries of their dwelling place.” This naturally refers, as John Stott also says, to various ethnic groups with “the epoches of their history and the limits of their territory.” R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1934), 729; John Stott, The Spirit, The Church, and the World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1990), 286. The point of the verse is to take the air out of the sails of ethnic pride in Athens. All the other ethn have descended from the same “one” as the Greeks, and not only that, but whatever time and territory a people has, it is God’s sovereign doing and nothing to boast in. “Both the history and the geography of each nation are ultimately under [God’s] control” (Stott).
14. See note 38 in chapter 4.
15. My survey was done searching for all case variants of panta ta ethn in the plural. The following texts are references to Greek Old Testament (LXX) verse and chapter divisions, which occasionally do not correspond to the Hebrew and English versions: Gen. 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; Exod. 19:5; 23:22, 27; 33:16; Lev. 20:24, 26; Deut. 2:25; 4:6, 19, 27; 7:6, 7, 14; 10:15; 11:23; 14:2; 26:19; 28:1, 10, 37, 64; 29:23; 30:1, 3; Josh. 4:24; 23:3, 4, 17, 18; 1 Sam. 8:20; 1 Chron. 14:17; 18:11; 2 Chron. 7:20; 32:23; 33:9; Neh. 6:16; Esth. 3:8; Pss. 9:8; 46:2; 48:2; 58:6, 9; 71:11, 17; 81:8; 85:9; 112:4; 116:1; 117:10; Isa. 2:2; 14:12, 26; 25:7; 29:8; 34:2; 36:20; 40:15, 17; 43:9; 52:10; 56:7; 61:11; 66:18, 20; Jer. 3:17; 9:25; 25:9; 32:13, 15; 33:6; 35:11, 14; 43:2; 51:8; Ezek. 25:8; 38:16; 39:21, 23; Dan. 3:2, 7; 7:14; Joel 4:2, 11, 12; Amos 9:12; Obad. 15, 16; Hab. 2:5; Hag. 2:7; Zech. 7:14; 12:3, 9; 14:2, 16, 18, 19; Mal. 2:9; 3:12.
16. Karl Ludwig Schmidt argues that the mishpehot are “smaller clan-like societies within the main group or nation.” Gerhard Kittel, ed., Geoffrey Bromiley, trans. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 365.
17. Paul may have chosen to use panta ta ethn because this is how the Greek Old Testament translates the promise of God to Abraham in three of its five occurrences (Gen. 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; but not 12:3 and 28:14, which translate it pasai hai phylai). But Paul’s words do not correspond exactly with any of these five texts, so he may well have been giving his own composite translation from the Hebrew.
18. The evidence for this would be, for example, the repeated use in the Greek Old Testament of the phrase “houses (or households) of the families,” which shows that the “family” (patria) is a larger grouping than a household. Cf. Exod. 6:17; Num. 1:44; 3:24; 18:1; 25:14–15; Josh. 22:14; 1 Chron. 23:11; 24:6; 2 Chron. 35:5; Ezra 2:59. See below on “How Small Is a Family?”
19. This is a psalm to the king and refers in its final application to Christ the Messiah, as is shown by the use made of verse 7 in Hebrews 1:9.
20. Quoted in Johannes Verkuyl, “The Biblical Foundation of the Worldwide Mission Mandate,” in P
erspectives on the World Christian Movement, 33.
21. To these reflections could be added Paul’s crucial words in Romans 10:14–15 concerning the necessity of people being sent so that they can preach so that people can hear so that they can believe so that they can call on the Lord so that they can be saved. See the discussion of these verses in chapter 4.
22. One cannot help but sense that John means for us to see a great reversal of the idolatry so prevalent on the earth, expressed, for example, in Daniel 3:7. Nebuchadnezzar had erected an idol and called everyone to worship it. The words used to describe the extent of that worship are almost identical to the words John uses in Revelation 5:9 to describe the extent of the true worship of God: “All the peoples, nations, and languages fell down and worshiped the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.”
23. Psalm 85:9 LXX. See a discussion of this text earlier in this chapter.
24. The United Bible Societies Greek New Testament (4th ed.) and the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament (27th ed.) chose laoi as original. The NRSV reads “peoples,” as do the commentaries by Heinrich Kraft, Leon Morris, Robert Mounce, and G. K. Beale.
25. From all the uses of panta ta ethn in the Old Testament that Jesus may be alluding to, at least these relate to the missionary vision of the people of God: Gen. 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; Pss. 48:2; 71:11, 17; 81:8; 85:9; 116:1; Isa. 2:2; 25:7; 52:10; 56:7; 61:11; 66:18–20 (all references are to the LXX verse and chapter divisions).
26. Similar associations are found in Pss. 2:8; 67:5–7; 98:2–3; Isa. 52:10; Jer. 16:19; Zech. 9:10. But four different Greek expressions are used in these texts, only one of which (Jer. 16:19) is the exact wording of the phrase in Acts 1:8.
27. The Greek Old Testament translates the Hebrew mishpehot (families or clans) with phylai, which is translated “tribes” in Revelation 5:9. So it may look as though this is not a different category of group. But in fact phylai is usually the translation of the Hebrew shebet, and the Hebrew mishpehot is usually translated suggeneia. Therefore, we should take seriously the difference between mishpehot and “tribe,” especially since it is clearly a smaller unit according to Exodus 6:14f.
28. Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk, Operation World: When We Pray God Works (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 2001), 15.
29. David Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions—AD 30 to 2200, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 27–28.
30. Ibid., 16.
31. Ralph Winter, “Unreached Peoples: What, Where, and Why?” in New Frontiers in Mission, ed. Patrick Sookhedeo (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 154.
32. See note 24.
33. Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2, 369.
34. I will deal with two problems only briefly here in a note because they are not part of biblical revelation and do not seem to have much bearing on the missionary task: (1) One is whether all the peoples will be represented at the throne of God even without missions because infants in each of these peoples have died and presumably will go to heaven and come to maturity for the praise of God. (2) The other problem is whether all clans and tribes will in fact be represented at the throne of God since many clans and tribes no doubt died out before they were evangelized. With regard to the first problem, I do believe that infants who die will be in the kingdom. I base this on the principle that we are judged according to the knowledge available to us (Rom. 1:19–20), and infants have no knowledge available to them since the faculty of knowing is not developed. However, God does not ever mention this or relate it in any way to the missionary enterprise or to the promise that all the families of the earth will be blessed. Rather, it appears to be his purpose to be glorified through the conversion of people who recognize his beauty and greatness and come to love him above all gods. God would not be honored so greatly if the only way he got worshipers from all the nations was by the natural mortality of infants. With regard to the other problem, it may be true that some clans and tribes disappear from history with none of their members being saved. The Bible does not reflect on this issue. We would be speculating beyond the warrant of Scripture if we said that there had to be another way of salvation for such tribes besides the way of hearing and believing the gospel of Jesus. (See the support for this in chapter 4.) Rather, we would do well to assume, in the absence of specific revelation, that the meaning of the promise and the command concerning the nations is that “all the nations” refers to all those who exist at the consummation of the age. When the end comes, there will be no existing people group that is left out of the blessing.
35. Winter, “Unreached Peoples,” 12.
36. “What Does Reached Mean? An EMQ Survey,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 26, no. 3 (July 1990): 316.
37. The KJV translates, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” But “the whole creation” is more likely. The closest parallel to this Greek expression (pase te ktisei) is found in Romans 8:22: “We know that the whole creation [pasa he ktisis] has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” The words and word order are identical; only the case is different, dative in Mark 16 and nominative in Romans 8. For my purposes here, we do not need to settle whether Mark 16:9ff. is an early addition to the Gospel of Mark. Verse 15 represents one biblical way of expressing the Great Commission.
38. “Make disciples of all nations” might be taken to mean: make the whole nation into disciples. But the wording of verses 19 and 20 points in another direction. The word “nations” (ethne) is neuter in Greek. But the word for “them” in the following clauses is masculine: “baptizing them [autous] in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them [autous] to observe all that I have commanded you.” This suggests that the discipling in view is the winning of individual disciples from the nations, rather than treating the nation as a whole as the object of conversion and discipleship. This was affirmed strongly by Karl Barth, who lamented that the interpretation that took ethn in the sense of corporate discipling “once infested missionary thinking and was connected with the painful fantasies of the German Christians. It is worthless.” Karl Barth, “An Exegetical Study of Matthew 28:16–20,” in Classics of Christian Missions, ed. Francis M. DuBose (Nashville: Broadman, 1979), 46.
39. This problem, of course, does not exist by definition for Ralph Winter and other mis-siologists who define a people group as “the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” Winter, “Unreached Peoples,” 12. In other words, if an unevangelized “family” is culturally near enough to another evangelized “family” that the gospel can move without significant barriers, then by definition this unevangelized family, according to Winter, is not an “unreached people group.” It is simply part of a larger reached group that needs to evangelize its members. The difference between Winter’s approach and mine is that I am simply trying to come to terms with the biblical meaning of “families” in Genesis 12:3, while he is defining people groups in terms of what missionary efforts are needed. The two approaches are not at odds, but the difference may result in my calling a “family” or clan an unreached people group in biblical terms (one of the panta ta ethn to be discipled), which Winter, however, would say is not “unreached” for specifically missionary purposes.
40. These terms are not as frequent in the literature as they were when the first edition of this book was published in 1993, but some churches (including the one I serve) and organizations still use them as helpful tactical guides. The “E” stands for evangelize: E-1—people basically “like us”; E-2—people who are not like us but speak the same language and overlap significantly in culture (e.g., a suburban white church in relation to a black urban center); E-3—people who speak a different language and have a very different culture (regardless of how near or far away they live).
41. Biblically, rea
ching every clan in a region is a missionary task regardless of its cultural nearness to other reached clans. But missiologically, this effort may not be seen as part of the missionary task. What is needed perhaps is more refined distinctions in our language. Paul certainly saw his missionary work as finished before every clan in Asia was evangelized. Yet if the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19 includes “all the families of the earth” in panta ta ethn, then the missionary task in that sense is not complete until all the clans are represented in the kingdom.
Practically, it is probably wise to emphasize the Pauline strategy as the essence of missions.
42. “Go, for I will send you far away to the ethne” (Acts 22:21).
43. I have labored to demonstrate this from Scripture in chapter 1 and in Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 1996), 255–66; and The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2000), 97–119.
44. The story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 does not mean that God disapproves of the diversity of languages in the world. We are not told that apart from the tower of Babel God would not have created different languages in the world. Blocking an act of pride (Gen. 11:4) was the occasion when God initiated the diversity of languages in the world. But that does not mean that the diversity of languages was a curse that would need to be reversed in the age to come. In fact, the diversity of languages is reported in Genesis 10:5, 20, 31 before the tower of Babel is mentioned in Genesis 11. What we learn is that God’s plan of a common origin for all peoples on the one hand and his plan for diversified languages on the other hand restrains the pride of man on two sides: Diversity restrains the temptation to unite against God (as at Babel), and unified origin restrains the temptation to boast in ethnic uniqueness (as, we will see, in Athens). The miracle and the blessing of “tongues” at Pentecost was not a declaration that in the age of promise the languages of the world would disappear but rather a declaration that in the age of promise every obstacle to humble, God-glorifying unity in faith would be overcome.
