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God’s Mission 1: God is a missional God

Here's some ponderings on church & mission. From the same essay as the previous posts on the kingdom of God.
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God is a missional God. The unfolding story of the Bible portrays God on a mission to re-establish his rule over his rebellious creation. He enacts his missionary purposes mainly through choosing, commissioning and sending human agents to represent him, and working through them to achieve turning points in salvation history. He sent Moses to rescue Israel from Egypt. He sent the prophets to call his apostate people back to him. These prophets foretold that God would send a Spirit-anointed Servant-Messiah, who would enact a final redemption which, while focused Israel, would spill over to the “ends of the earth”.
Christ is God’s missionary par excellence: the Son, sent by the Father, in the power of the Spirit. His mission is to accomplish final deliverance for God’s people, by fulfilling all the expectations of the old testament. He achieves his mission by establishing God’s kingdom through dying as a penal substitute for his people, and rising to give them new life. This climactic stage in God’s mission, this missio dei, demonstrates that God is missional in another, deeper way: he sends himself, in the person of his Son.
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