Missiology and Eschatology: Marriage or Monstrocity?
Notes
Transcript
Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions The Seventh Commandment
233 Therefore, let everyone know his duty, at the risk of God’s displeasure: he must do no harm to his neighbor nor deprive him of profit nor commit any act of unfaithfulness or hatred in any bargain or trade. But he must also faithfully preserve his property for him, secure and promote his advantage. This is especially true when one accepts money, wages, and one’s livelihood for such service.
234 Now the person who greedily despises this commandment may indeed pass by and escape the hangman. But he shall not escape God’s wrath and punishment [Galatians 6:7–8; 1 Thessalonians 5:3].
The above was preached with regard to the 7th Commandment - “You shall not steal.” It also is sound teaching for the text that informs my response to Question #8:
1 Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
In his preface to The Proper Distinction of Law and Gospel, Rev. C.F. W. Walther presents us with the following: “To God nothing is an accident. He knows events before they occur, and He determines beforehand the limits of each happening. While in no causal relation to sin, God had foreseen in eternity its entrance into the world and in eternity had prepared those safeguards against the ravages of sin which He afterwards proclaimed in the form of compassionate, merciful, comforting promises which He made to men in their ruined condition under sin. How these two forms of the divine will can coexist in God passes our comprehension, but that they always do exist in God at the same time, God has declared throughout His written revelation. In fact, the entire Bible which He breathed into the holy writers, from Moses to John, is nothing else than a continuous account and exposition of both His holy and righteous and His good and gracious will. While the former has been called the Law, the latter has been given the endearing name of the Gospel, that is, the goodly, or godly, spell, or tale—so good that it could come only from God. The entire Scriptures, which are chronologically divided into the Old and the New Testaments, are topically, or logically, divided into the Law and Gospel, both of these running through both Testaments.
Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther, William Herman Theodore Dau, and Ernest Eckhardt, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel: 39 Evening Lectures, electronic ed. (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000), xix–xx.
Question #8 “Should the mission of the Church have an eschatological focus?”
Given that God has spoken in several places regarding eschatology, it is fair to say that the end of the story is significant to God. For starters, here is a definition of the term:
ESCHATOLOGY The study of the end times, including death, the intermediate state, the afterlife, judgment, the millennium, heaven, and hell. Also refers to the time of Jesus’ second coming. The word eschatology comes from a combination of Greek words meaning “the study of last things.”
Having defined the missio Dei, God’s sending of His Son and of the Spirit, leading to Christ’s sending of the Church in the power of the Spirit as part of the fruit of the His death and resurrection, and knowing that God entered this missio, not as a reaction to sin, but before there was a Creation that could sin, we can and, I believe, must answer this question in the affirmative.