Antioch Series Part 3: Sojourners On The Earth
“Those that were scattered”… Arguably the most influential church in history was started by a small band of refugees who, in the midst of their most painful season, took a simple step of faith and obedience that changed history.
Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch… But there were some of them…who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. – Acts 11:19-21
Luke, the writer of Acts, gives us no insight into how the decision was made for these displaced believers to reach out across the “dividing wall of hostility” to share the gospel with people who were ethnically, culturally, politically, socially different than them, but I am sure that the journey of their displacement from the Jewish “hub” Jerusalem and their pilgrimage throughout the Greco-Roman world had much bearing on their eventual conclusion to preach the gospel to “the Hellenists also” and thus…change history.
What was it that God was doing with this company of people that prepared them to pioneer the apostolic missions base of the New Testament? I believe that was God using their displacement according to His purposes and for His glory. I would go as far as to say that it was necessary for them to go through their scattering in order to dislodge some fatal value systems they inherited from the Jerusalem church that would have prevented them from ever becoming the Sending Center they were destined to be together.
What was God aiming to dislodge and ultimately expel out of the hearts and minds of these Jewish believers by driving them from house and home, out of the bubble of “Jerusalem Christianity” as refugees into cities and towns to which they did not belong? I believe the Lord was warring against two subtle and lurking enemies of the gospel that were settling into the culture back in Jerusalem.
What was this monster hiding in the shadows right under Peter and James’ noses?
Well, it is Pride, but it has two ugly heads named Nationalism and Ethnocentrism (Racism). They were and still remain the biggest enemy of the gospel and of missions.
These enemies of the embryonic missions movement had to be dealt with in order to see the fullness of what the church in Antioch was intended to be. In this blog, we will tackle the first, and in the next blog, we will take on the latter.
Nationalism - exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups; loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially: a sense of national consciousness
NATIONALISM IS AN ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
When you believed in the Lord Jesus and were baptized into the faith, you were re-born into an entirely new reality called “the kingdom”. Jesus says in the gospel of John, chapter 3, that you were “born from above” into a kingdom and a city that is from heaven.
Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again [anōthen // from above] he cannot see the kingdom of God." ... That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. - John 3:3, 6
Jesus Christ, the God-man, was born of a woman but inherited a divine nature through the virgin birth from heaven outside of the curse of Adam’s fall. He would live the life of complete agreement and total obedience to the Father that the first Adam failed to do. Then, He would allow men fueled by demonic rage to execute Him as a criminal in order to pay the price of our broken covenant by death on a cross. In this, He removed the requirements of the curse from us by fulfilling the law on our behalf and its legal demands. By dying sinless, He could both pay our debt and take into Himself the entire created order under the curse of Adam, including you and I. He, the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, would take us into Himself on the cross, not only dying for us but dying with us and as us. When He came out of the grave, He did not come out by Himself but instead brought with Him an entirely new order and creation that was re-born. What you formerly were and what you formerly belonged to has died in Christ on a tree. Paul tells us in Colossians 2 that we have died to the stoicheion of the cosmos. (Col 2:20) This literally means that you no longer are governed by or belong to the fundamental principles and elements that govern this universe.
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. - Galatians 2:20
You have died in Jesus and God has raised you with a new nature, not inherited from the first Adam but received from the perfect Son, the Second Adam, your older Brother, Jesus Christ. You are altogether new and unique from what you once were. He has justified you as righteous, holy, and blameless because your life now is Christ’s, and by nature, you are joined with the Godhead.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself... - 2 Corinthians 5:17-19
You are not from here. You were born from beyond the cosmos. The New Jerusalem has birthright citizenship. Therefore, nationalism at its core is anti-gospel because it is a lie that deceives the believer into thinking that where they live is where they are from and the culture they are surrounded by is the culture they belong to.
The New Testament writers confronted this stronghold head-on; this was no side issue to the Apostles.
Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting…But my kingdom is not from the world." - John 18:36
For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world--our faith. - 1 John 5:4
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. – 1 Peter 2:9-11
For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself. – Philippians 3:20-21
But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. - Galatians 4:26
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, - Hebrews 12:22
Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God… - Ephesians 2:19
Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. – 2 Corinthians 5:20
This is the reality of the “sent-ness” of every believer. You do not belong to your nation, culture, or social sphere; instead, you have been sent as an ambassador of the New Jerusalem to those realms to live out your days as a representative of the city that is to come.
Most of us live our lives with far too little awareness of the heavenly realities around us. Most of us go through day after day and seldom feel the impact of the magnitude of what we are caught up in by belonging to Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the Ruler of the universe. We woke up this morning and stumbled out of bed into the cosmic significance because of the finished work of the cross. We give little thought to it, and consequently, our lives often lack the flavor of eternity and the aroma of something ultimate.
When we lose touch with our heavenly citizenship, we default back to our Nationalistic existence that finds its identity and feels its passions and claims its ownership over our political parties, economic statuses, social spheres, and cultural biases. When this happens, we lose that heavenly aroma on our lives and we can no longer be “peacemakers” standing between two opposing parties and bringing them together at the foot of the cross of Jesus. We forfeit the ministry of reconciliation when we become entrenched in the rhetoric of one nation opposed to another, one political party opposed to another, one race opposed to another, etc… We lose our ability to evangelize what we have antagonized, marginalized, or tried to run out of town with a court order or zoning law.
Nationalism confuses “the kingdom” with “my nation and its government.” When this happens, the church abdicates its role and authority and looks instead to the government or a political party as the manifestation of “the kingdom.” We look to presidents, kings, senators, and legislators to write laws that create the “Christian utopia” we expect to enjoy by coercing, pressuring, or smothering anyone in opposition to our “way of life.” When we confuse the advancement of political ideas with the advancement of the gospel, we as believers promote that government and that nation as the primary catalyst for the advancement of the kingdom in the earth. So the nation, as we want or suppose it to be, must advance at all costs, especially at the cost of other nations. This is at its core anti-gospel and the enemy of the Great Commission.
When these lines begin to blur in the mind of the believer, the enemy of the state or the political adversary becomes the enemy of the church. This will inevitably produce prejudice and animosity towards any nation or people that are perceived to be a threat to “my nation” and “my way of life.” The litmus test of Nationalism in the church and in the heart of the believer is in whom we declare to be our enemy. This dangerous mixture of nationalism and so-called “Christianity” that identifies its enemy in opposing ethnic or political entities has born devastating and evil fruit throughout history. If we look in the rearview mirror, we will see Crusades, Inquisitions, and Genocides. One does not have to dig too deeply to find the origins of thought that massacred 6 million Jews during the holocaust to be nurtured and endorsed by the church of that nation all in the name of God and country.
This violent spirit will, in turn, cause the church to sell her birthright to disciple all nations (Matt 28:18) for the bowl of soup of political rhetoric and cultural biases that have little or no priority in the gospel. In short, nationalism makes the main thing the tertiary thing (the gospel), and the peripheral things become of “supreme importance.”
Whether we as believers in America can admit it or not, the money does not lie. How much money, time, and passion the church in America spends on frontier missions and the advancement of the gospel among all peoples versus the money, time, and passion we spend on partisan politics, cultural wars, or maintaining our social-economic status does not even compare. As we say, “the proof is in the puddin’.”
All of the men and women commended for their faith lived and died in the light of the New Jerusalem and understood that they lived on the earth as “sojourners.” They lived in light of how they would reign in the age to come. This is Christianity 101. This enabled them to hold loosely to material possessions and national identities and emboldened them in radical acts of courage and love with martyrdom spirit.
By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God... These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared for them a city. - Hebrews 11:9-10, 13-16 ESV
Only the cross frees us from Nationalism. Only in the denying of oneself, picking up the cross, and following Jesus can those thick cords of nationalism begin to break off of our hearts and minds. Through their suffering and pain, these scattered, sojourning believers in Antioch had experienced a revelation of the power of that cross. Clinging to national and ethnic identities had to be dislodged by the shaking of displacement and persecution. God, in His sovereign kindness, would allow them to be scattered from the comforts and securities of home, familiar, and roots so that they would be able to experience the reality of “seeking a homeland” and being “sojourners on the earth”. They had to experience the reality of having no homeland for themselves to discover that in fact, they belonged to the “city to come.”
For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. - Hebrews 13:14
Antioch could have never been a “plant” of the Jerusalem church. If it was, it would have carried this ethnocentric and nationalistic culture with it. Those two realities would have choked out the destiny of the missions movement in the prophetic womb of this company of believers. The mandate to the nations of the earth would have always taken a back seat to needs at home. The gospel would have been primarily unto building their ministries and their nation. Their interpretive grid for the blessings of God would have caused them to spend it on themselves with no second thought about the unreached nations of the earth.
Instead, God took them on a journey of understanding the cross, doing a work in them through years of displacement that would culminate in arriving in Antioch and preaching to the Greeks also. And when the Holy Spirit would say to them a few years later, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them."(Acts 13:2-3), there would be no competing value, prejudice, or indifference that they would have to first untangle before they could joyfully send their best to the ends of the earth.
