(inspirational orchestral music) It's an honor, really, and a privilege for me to be invited to give two lectures in honor of the life of Dr. Robert Saucy, whom I never actually met, I'm afraid, in my own lifetime, but who I understand was a man deeply committed to the scriptures and to the relevance and teaching and clarity of the scriptures in the life of the church, which I think two things would make him first of all, approve of the work that we do within the Langham partnership, as Dr. Wei-han said, that's who I'm working for now, because we are committed to strengthening the ministry of the word of God, especially in the majority world through theological education, through training preachers and providing books for seminaries and students and pastors. If you want to know more about that, just look at the website, just langham.org, and you'll find out more. But I also think looking something at the life and reputation of Dr. Saucy, that he, I hope, would have approved of the title of our lecture, that the whole earth is mine, of course quoting from the Psalms, that the global and missional vision of the Old Testament that we're going to be looking at over these two lectures. But before we turn specifically to the Old Testament contribution to our theology of mission, I want to make two points by way of general introduction to what I've got to say, first of all, to ask the question, what does it mean to read the Bible as a whole in relation to mission? Or as is increasingly becoming the word these days, what is a missional hermeneutic of the scripture? How do we actually see that? How do we read the scriptures as missionally, if that's the right word, I think it is, these days. I remember when I first used the word, missional, in the hearing of John Stott. He raised an eyebrow and said, is that really a word? Because at that time we really only knew mission, missionaries, and missiological. Missional came along a little later, but it's a good word. I think we need it. Can we read the whole Bible missionally? Well, yes, I think we can, first of all because the whole Bible presents to us the story of God's mission. The Bible is not just a book full of doctrines that need to be resorted because they got it mixed up and we need our systematics folks to do that for us, nor is the Bible just a book of rules. In other words, it's the Christian's handbook for how to live, got plenty of commands and rules. But nor is it just a book full of promises, a nice pleasant thought for the day. I was brought up using Daily Light, and I don't object to using the scriptures every day, but sometimes people think that's what the Bible is, it's just a book full of those different resources, when in fact of course, the Bible is a great narrative, or to use the word on the screen, a drama. Which I think is a term that we owe to N.T. Wright and the more popularizing of his five-act drama in six acts by the authors Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, who wrote what I think is a very helpful book, if you haven't seen it, The Drama of Scripture, and there it is. By the way, do excuse my voice. I've ended up with some sort of a cold and that's down here, and it may make my voice a little bit ropy. And also, if you're wondering what the accent is, just so you don't sit there wondering all through the talk, I come from northern Ireland originally. My home is Belfast, that's where I was brought up. And so that will stop you sort of wondering. I'm northern Irish, I'm British, but not English, if you can see what I mean. (audience laughing) There is a difference, it's quite an important difference. Especially when the rugby is on, as it is, at the moment. So Bartholomew and Goheen suggest that this six-act drama of scripture goes something like this, very quickly, to run through it before we move to the Old Testament. First of all act one, God created the heavens and the earth and put human beings into the earth with the kingly job of ruling the earth for God, and the priestly responsibility of serving and keeping the earth. That was the basic function of humanity within the creation. But then as we know, act two of the Bible story, everything went wrong because we rebelled. We chose to disbelieve in God's goodness and to reject God's authority and disobey his commands. And so all of those three relationships between God and the earth, the earth and us, and us and God, all of them are twisted and spoiled, and we live in alienation from ourselves and from the earth and from God. So that's act two, but then act three of course comes along when God in Genesis 12 makes his promise to Abraham, that in spite of the mess that has been made of the world, he's going to bring blessing, blessing to all the nations and all the earth through what he's going to do with Abraham and Abraham's people. And so the whole story of the Old Testament is the ongoing journey of the faith in God and the promise of God to the nations. It's like a great river system, all moving in one direction, until eventually it comes of course to act four, the central act of the biblical narrative, the Gospel, the coming, the birth, the life, teaching, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, in whose life and ministry, death and resurrection, God accomplished what he had promised to Abraham to bring blessing into the world, to restore creation to himself, to abolish death, and to bring about the ultimate solution. But the Bible story doesn't end there, because of course, it goes on in act five to the story of mission, the outpouring of the spirit of God and the mission of the church to all nations. This is of course, where we fit. We're actually in the Bible story. I think it's quite important to recognize that the Bible is not something out there, we are in it. We are part of that story, and we need to live accordingly. Until eventually, of course, act six of the Bible story, when Christ returns and brings about a new creation, the new heaven and the new earth in which a redeemed humanity from every tribe and nation will dwell with God, or rather, God will dwell with us, as it says, in that new creation. Excuse me while I try and get rid of this ropiness. (coughing) So the whole Bible then renders to us this story of God's mission. That means, therefore, that wherever we are in the Bible, we need to see our text, our passage, within the light of this great biblical narrative, it's movement, it's purpose, and it's ultimate destination. That's the first thing, but the second point is that the Bible also has a missional origin, not just as it were as missional story, but that the Bible itself emerges out of God's engagement in the world. So many of the biblical texts arise because the people of God are engaged in this task of living out their understanding of God's revelation and God's redemption, what God has said, and what God has done, and how they respond to that in the context of a world of nations and cultures which do not yet know of God's revelation of God's redemption. Sometimes those struggles of cultural engagement are polemical, sometimes they are internal, but these texts arise out of some issue or need or controversy or threat which the people of God must address simply by being the people of God in the midst of the nations. So the Bible is not just a record of God's mission, it also in a sense is the product of that mission in action. I first became aware of that dimension of the biblical text when I was teaching at All Nations Christian College, which is a college in England, just about 30 miles north of London, where we are preparing, or I was a principal there for a while, preparing men and women for cross-cultural mission. About half the college were from overseas and about quarter from continental Europe, and the rest were British, so a very international community. And everything was done in relation to mission. I remember one afternoon in the faculty meeting, one of the tutors who was an experienced missionary called Martin Goldsmith, used to insist that when the students were required to do their exegesis of some key Christological text in the New Testament, like Hebrews 1, Colossians 1, John 1, and so on, he said they mustn't imagine that they can simply do an objective exegesis of what the text really means and then add some missiological implications as a kind of post-exegetical homiletical afterthought. No, he said, what we must help these students to see is the texts themselves arose out of mission and address missional issues that the apostles were addressing in their evangelistic and church planting work. In other words, mission is in the origin of the text, not just something that is added onto the text later. I was quite struck by that, I sort of had that thinking, why did I never see that before? And of course, it's fairly obvious. In the case of the New Testament, most of Paul's letters were written in the heat of his missionary efforts, wrestling with a theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles into the church, affirming the need for a Jew and Gentile to accept one another in Christ, tackling the baffling range of issues that arose around the Christology of who Jesus of Nazareth was, and so on. And of course, the Gospels were written in order to explain the significance of the life and death, especially and resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, these documents arose out of the missionary life of the church. But Martin Goldsmith's point that he made led me to think, I wonder would that be true of the Old Testament as well? Because at that time, this is going back to the 1980s, I was teaching the Old Testament at All Nations Christian College. And I came to the conclusion that, yes it can, provided we don't limit our understanding of mission simply to the task of sending missionaries in cross-cultural missions of church planting and so on, but if we understand mission to include all that God has created his people to be and do in the world, the mission and purpose of God for his people, then clearly, the Old Testament text reflect that dimension of Israel's existence. The Torah presents a theology of creation that stands in stark contrast to the polytheistic world of the cultures that they lived in. It also tell us the story of the Exodus, of this God Yahweh comprehensively redeeming his people out of slavery, oppression, and injustice in Egypt. The historical narratives present the struggle between the faith of this one living God and the many gods of Canaan and surrounding cultures. The Wisdom texts interact both in an approving and in a critical way, with the wisdom of other traditions that surrounded them, and in their worship and their poetry, the Israelites reflected on the relationship between their God, Yahweh, and the rest of the nations and their gods, sometimes very negatively, sometimes even positively, seeing the nations as coming to the worship of the living God. So yes, it seemed to me, that these texts of the Old Testament, quoting myself from one of my books, that a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of God's purpose for the whole of God's creation, including all the nations. So that in very brief, is what I understand, at least in part, by a missional hermeneutic of scripture as a whole. So we need to come then, to this question, what about the Old Testament faith and a biblical theology of mission? And I want to make four points, which I really only have time to look at the first this morning, and then we've come to the remainders on Thursday. We need to see first of all the Old Testament vision of God. The nature of God, the identity of God, and therefore, to the, of course, the core fundamental affirmation of the Old Testament of monotheism, that Yahweh alone is God, and the missional implications of that. And then secondly, we need to look, and this will bring us on Thursday, to look at the Old Testament vision of God's people and especially why they exist. In other words, asking ourselves the question, who are we and what are we here for, if we claim to be the people of God? And that, in other words, is a missional reflection on the doctrine of election. What does it mean to be the called and chosen people of God? And how does the Old Testament illuminate that particular theme? And then thirdly, the Old Testament vision of God's people and how they should live. If that's who we are, and what we're here for, so what? What does it mean in terms of our practical every day living? And the Old Testament has a great deal to say about ethics, as you can tell from one of the books I wrote, but as I came to understand even after I'd originally written that book, Old Testament ethics are in themselves fundamentally missional, they are in order to shape a people to be God's people in the midst of the nations and to live like God's people. So there's a missional dimension to Old Testament ethics. And then fourthly and finally, the Old Testament vision of God's future for all the nations of the earth. What does the Old Testament say about the nations? And the answer is, it's not just negative. It's not just that God will judge them, though he will. But that God ultimately has a purpose for all nations, going right back to Abraham and before. So that's the direction of travel that we have this morning and on Thursday morning, and so we come first of all then, to this one, the missional self-revelation of God, or biblical monotheism and mission. Excuse me once again, let me do this. It's very obvious in the Old Testament that the people of Israel, Israel of the Old Testament, made some really quite astonishing affirmations about the God who had revealed himself to them. We use the name Yahweh simply because nobody is quite sure exactly how it's pronounced, and that's perhaps the best we can do, but you know what I mean. We're talking about this God who reveals himself by that name and its explanation to Moses. And they make these affirmations in remarkable ways. First of all they affirm without any degree of qualification that Yahweh alone is God and there is no other. That's what it says, for example, in Deuteronomy Chapter 4, this little climax of Moses' great preaching of what God requires of the people of Israel, and he says, ask this now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created the earth until now, from anywhere in the heavens and the earth until now, anywhere, anywhen has anything like this ever happened or ever been heard of before. What, what's he's talking about? Well, he's talking about the Exodus. And he's talking about Mount Sinai, the great act of redemption and the great moment of revelation, those two things that happened in the Book of Exodus. And then Moses says this, Verse 35, you were shown these things so that you might know that Yahweh is God and beside him there is no other. Then, to make sure that the point is driven home, he repeats what he's just said and adds in Verse 39, so know and take to heart this day that the Lord Yahweh is God. In heaven and in the earth below, there is no other. Now sometimes it astonishes me that some commentators want to suggest, well, this is really only monoyahwehism. It's not suggesting there is no other God, it's just suggesting there should be no other god for Israel. I struggle with that somewhat because I just wonder what else an Israelite could have said if what he wanted to say was that Yahweh is God and there is no other God, and Yahweh is him. What else would he or could he say than that Yahweh is God, in heaven above and in the earth beneath, there is no other. Where else is there to be God in, the question provisos. So it's clearly in my view, an emphatic monotheistic declaration that this Yahweh God is the only God. There's a lot has been written on that. There's a whole swath of the books on the development of Old Testament monotheism, in Old Testament theology, which I'll not go into at the moment. But this is simply my view of affirming what it says. But the second point is that because he is the only living God who is there, it is this Yahweh God, therefore, who both owns the world and rules the world. Now once again, that is expressed very clearly in Deuteronomy in Chapter 10, another one of these passages where Moses does a kind of preacher's summaries. You know, ask now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? All God wants is that you fear him, walk in his ways, love him, serve him, and obey him, that's all. That's all that God wants. So who is this God that we are to imitate, that we are to walk in his ways, that we are to obey him, who is he? And so Moses breaks out into a kind of doxology. To the Lord your God, to Yahweh your God, belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. An astonishing claim in the context of that world and that day. Everything you can see, everything that exists, is God's property, belongs to him. And then he carries on for a few verses. And then he comes back to this theme in Verse 16. Sorry, Verse 17, the Lord your God is God of Gods, Lord of Lords, the great God, mighty and awesome. So whatever other authorities might be there, whatever other gods are thought to exist, whoever or whatever they are, Yahweh is God and Lord of them all. So he rules the authorities of the universe as well as owning the universe itself. A most astonishing claim. That's of course, amplified in places like Psalms 24:1, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. Or in Jeremiah Chapter 27, where in the context of an international diplomatic conference in Jerusalem, all the ambassadors of the little nations had come together, convened by the king in Judah, and Jeremiah goes in to that conference, that international diplomatic conference with a great yoke over his shoulders, saying, this is what Yahweh the God of Israel says, that Yahweh is the God who is in control of the earth and everything in it and all the animals and all the people and this God, the God of Israel says, you'd all better submit to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, because he's my servant, says Yahweh. A very unpopular and very undiplomatic kind of message to bring into that context. But it's the outworking of this theology. Or Psalms 96 which calls for the radical displacement of all other rival gods, all the gods of the nations are nothings, but the Lord made the heavens and the earth. He alone must be acknowledged as God. And this of course is what Israel were called upon to witness to, as God says to them when they were in exile in Babylon, when it seemed that their God, Yahweh God, had been defeated because his city was destroyed and his temple was destroyed, and yet into that context come these words to the Israelites, you are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me, no god was formed, nor will there be one after me. I, I am the Lord, and apart from me, there is no savior. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed. I am not some foreign god among you, and you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, that I am God. That's there in Isaiah Chapter 43. That's the kind of monotheistic affirmation about Yahweh the God of Israel, of course, that then flows through into the New Testament affirmations that the Apostle Paul makes. For example, in Romans Chapter 3, when he asks the rhetorical question, so is God the God of the Jews only? And the answer is, of course not. He is the God of all nations, he's the God of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews because he is the only God around. So he has to be. So all this monotheistic theme of the Old Testament makes its impact in the context of the struggle against idolatry, the struggle with Baal, for example, in the pre-exilic period. It makes its impact in the language of worship, when you read some of the astonishingly universal claims of the Psalms, and as we will see on Thursday, it makes its impact in Israel's response to other nations, both in their own international history of the time and in eschatological vision. Now it's important, I think, to say that this monotheistic thrust of the Old Testament is not something merely philosophical. It is, I say, intrinsically missional. In other words, this is not just saying that in some sense Yahweh is a very special kind of God, he's rather transcendent, he's amazingly universal, and let's discuss his claims in a polite interfaith conversation with people of other religions and other nations, and see, in a sense, who's right. No, this claim is transcendent, it is universal, words which Richard Bauckham has used very strongly in some of his discussions of biblical monotheism. It is a truth that not only claims Israel, they were, as it were, mandated to know this, this has been revealed to them, but it's also a truth in which they are called to steward it, they are entrusted with this revelation. Because it also will eventually claim all the nations who must come and will eventually come to acknowledge this truth that Yahweh alone is God for good or for ill, depending on the response to that word. Then they will know that I am the Lord, says Ezekiel, about 80 times, it's his signature word. Then either you will know or then they will know or the nations will know that Yahweh alone is God. And ultimately, of course, as we shall see on Thursday, this is a knowledge which is ultimately for the sake of the nations. It is missional in posture and in principle. One of the ways in which the uniqueness of Yahweh as the God of Israel is expressed is in what he does, not just as it were these claims about him and his identity, but in his function because there are four key things that are said about Yahweh that are claimed to be true of him only. That is, that Yahweh alone is the creator of heaven and earth. There is nothing that he did not create. Not just in Genesis 1, but also in many of the Psalms, and of course, in some of the great passages of Isaiah. But he's not only the creator of all that exists, he is also the sole governor of human history. He is the Lord of the nations. And so that is why the prophets of Israel could make those oracles against the nations that we read. And that we sometimes struggle with to sort of know quite what they're all on about. But the whole principle behind that is that Yahweh is the God who not only relates to Israel, but he calls all peoples to himself, and actually is the one who is directing and governing their histories, too. So even a rather obscure little place, like in Deuteronomy Chapter 2, when God tells the Israelites to move from Sinai and go to the land of Canaan, he says, now you're gonna go through Moab, but don't take any of that, because the Lord has given that to Moab. And you're gonna go through Amman, don't take any of that because the Lord gave that to them. And the Lord drove these people out and put these people in. And these are words which in their wisdom, the NIV has put in parentheses, as if somehow that's not the really important part. Actually, I think theologically, it is really quite important that Yahweh is saying to Israel, yes, I am taking you and putting you into that land, but I am the God who have been moving people around on the chessboard of history for longer than you've even been in existence. He is the sovereign of the nations. And that, of course, comes through in the prophets. For example, the way Isaiah speaks about Assyria, the great power of his day, and simply says, they're nothing but a rod, a stick, in the hands of Yahweh. He is dealing with them and their history. Same of course, about Babylon. So he is the creator of the world, the ruler of the nations, and he is the judge of all the earth. And again, that explains why Amos, in his opening chapter, can speak about how God is calling to account nations around Israel, nations who were not part of the covenant, nations who had not received the kind of revelation that Israel had, but who had nevertheless, being made in the image of God, were held accountable to Yahweh, the God of all nations, for their behavior and will be judged for their behavior. So Yahweh is not just the judge of Israel but the judge of all nations, and therefore ultimately, he is the only savior of all those who turn to him. So amazingly, in those great chapters of Isaiah 40 to 55, having as it were defeated the nations, in argument, in court case, in all the metaphors of those chapters, so in the end as it were, the nations are turning away and running away from God because they realize that their gods are futile and they're under God's judgment. The great cry goes out in Isaiah 45, so turn around to me, all you nations. Turn to the Lord and be saved, because I am a righteous God and savior. And so the nations can actually come and find salvation in Yahweh God of Israel. Their gods won't save them, never have, never did, never will. But Yahweh can. So creator, ruler, judge, and savior, are four of the great affirmations that express this uniqueness and universality and transcendence of Yahweh the God of Israel. We could go into all of those in much greater detail, and in one of the chapters of my book, the Mission of God, I do try to explain them a little bit more in depth. But what makes all this missional? Well, because of this final point. The remarkable thing is that the New Testament comes along and makes exactly these same affirmations about Jesus of Nazareth. And the more I've reflected on this, the more astonishing it is that men and women, people who knew and met and lived with Jesus of Nazareth, this son of a carpenter, this man that some of them had walked with, talked with, eaten with, fished with, you know, they knew him, as a neighbor, as a friend, as somebody they'd grown up with as a boy in Nazareth and around the Sea of Galilee and yet they came to this conclusion which they, as it were, embody, and the way they respond to him, especially after the resurrection, that in Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom they knew as Adonai, Yahweh Lord God of Israel, creator, ruler, judge and savior, in Jesus of Nazareth, this God has walked among us in human flesh. That's something of the mystery of the incarnation. Again, I could take you through quite a number of verses in the New Testament which speak about Jesus in all of these capacities, but some of them you would know very well. John 1, the first opening verses, in the beginning was the word, and all things were created through him and by him. Without him nothing that was made was made. Or Colossians 1, that all things in heaven and earth created by him, sustained by him, and so on. He's the ruler of the kings of the earth, says Revelation Chapter 1. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, says Paul. The day of the Lord in the Old Testament has become the day of Christ in the New Testament. And of course, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, said originally Joel, meaning the Lord God of Israel, Yahweh, but echoes Paul in prison when he's asking the Philippian jailer to put his faith in Jesus. And then makes it explicit in Romans that Jesus is the one who is the saving God. But just to give two examples, which as we draw to a close, one of my favorite is of course, the familiar passages in Philippians, which is very possibly a form of a Christian hymn which the Apostle Paul chooses to quote here. He may have written it himself, of course, there's no way of being absolutely certain. But many people think that he's perhaps quoting an existing Christian hymn and it's about Christ Jesus. And we know the story, he became from God, came down to earth, took the form of a servant, appearance of man, humbled himself, obedient right unto the cross, and then Verse 9, therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name. And there's only one name above every name to any Jewish writer, and that is that at the name belonging to Jesus, every knee should bow, which is I think, is perhaps the way we should translate that, rather than just at the name Jesus, but at the name Jesus now has, the name that's been given to him. At the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And what many people who know that verse well may not know so well, is that's a direct quotation from Isaiah Chapter 43. Sorry, Isaiah Chapter 45, where God had said this, by myself have I sworn, says the Lord, a word that will not be revoked, that before me every knee will bow and by me every tongue will swear and they will say of me that in Yahweh alone are deliverance, or salvation, and strength. And so here is, as it were, the words of a first century writer of a Christian hymn, taking words which the Lord God had spoken about himself, a Yahweh text, a God text, and calmly putting the name Jesus into that text and saying that inasmuch as Yahweh was the only God of all the nations, and the only savior, the only one to whom people must bow and worship, ultimately that is the name and the privilege that is given to Jesus. That's one example. The other one, which is where I will finish, is in Corinthians Chapter 8. And here is quite clearly a missional situation because this is a young church that had been planted by the Apostle Paul in the pagan cosmopolitan immoral city of Corinth, in southern Greece. And they had a problem, these early believers, that is, should they eat meat any longer because they would have to go to the butcher shop to buy it and they knew that an animal, that the meat of the animal in the butcher shop had first of all been sacrificed in one of the pagan temples to one of the gods of Greece. So if they bought and ate the meat, were they somehow as it were, colluding with idolatry and worshiping other gods? And that's the question that they were faced with. And Paul puts it like this, he says, so then, about eating food that's been sacrificed to idols, we know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and there is no god but one. Now that's clear Old Testament monotheistic faith. But in a sense, like Psalms 96 says, the gods of the nations are really nothing. They don't really exist in reality as God. But then Paul goes on, because even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or earth, as indeed, he says, there are many gods and lords. You can see them all around the city, all these statues, all these so-called gods there are there. But for us, says Paul, there is one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live and one Lord. And up to that point, any Jew reading Paul's words would have said, amen, of course, that's what we've always believed. Deuteronomy Chapter 6. Israel, hear, oh Israel, Shema, Israel, the Lord your God is the one Lord. The Lord our God, one Lord. So they believe one God, one Lord. But Paul has, as it were, taken that Shema text, the very heartbeat of Israel's monotheistic faith and as it were, he has opened it up to include Jesus, because he says, one God, the Father, from whom all things came, for whom we live, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things came, and through whom we live. And if you read Richard Bauckham's exegesis of that text, he makes it very clear that the Apostle Paul is not claiming there are two gods, the Father God, and the Son God. No, he's claiming that this one God of Israel known as God the Father of Israel, the Father of his people, is now the God within whose identity we now need to locate the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And so in that sense, the Shema text, the great monotheistic text of Old Testament faith is as you might put it, Christ-i-fied. Christ is inserted, the Christology becomes a theistic theology of Yahweh himself. It's important therefore, to recognize that these early Christian affirmations about Jesus were just as polemical, just as conflicting, as it were, with the surrounding cultural worldview in the context of Greek and Roman society, as were the words of Isaiah in the Book of Isaiah, in the Sixth Century B.C., from where they're quoted. In other words, it was just as problematic and in some senses, even more dangerous, because it was life-threatening to go out into the Roman empire where the claim was made that Kurios Kaiser, Caesar is lord, and a claim, no no, Kurios Jesus, Jesus is Lord. He is the king, the lord, the ruler, the savior. It was just as much as it were, nonsense, to proclaim that in the First Century A.D. as it was for this bunch of slaves, the Israelites in Babylon, an exiled community, their city and their temple destroyed. And yet they are, they're claiming with these texts that Yahweh, their God, alone, is the owner of the earth, the creator, the ruler, the sovereign, the judge and the savior. And so, the New Testament builds this missional theology of Christ upon the strong missional monotheism of the Old Testament. And that's, I think, where we need to root our own Christologies, because what is more missionally important than believing and affirming and living out the consequences that Jesus of Nazareth is the only Lord and God and savior of the world. That is at the very heart of the Gospel, the very heart of our mission. And so the biblical understanding of the universality and the uniqueness of Jesus is based on same truths about the uniqueness of Yahweh, and needs to be seen at the frontline of our missional response to pluralism, relativism, and all the dimensions of our witness in our own context. Biola University prepares Christians to think biblically about everything, from science to business, to education and the arts. Learn more, at biola.edu.