Why Adam Matters for Global Missions

00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, in the last podcast you talked about the importance of the

00:00:07.360 | historicity of Adam in the local church especially. In this episode I want to

00:00:11.040 | follow up and ask you about Adam in relationship to global missions. Why does

00:00:15.240 | the historicity of Adam matter for missionaries? When I was preaching through

00:00:20.520 | Romans, this is now what, eight or nine years ago, probably more than that, took me eight years to get

00:00:27.600 | through. I got to chapter 5 and I had never thought before that time how

00:00:36.320 | amazingly relevant Romans 5, 12 to 21 is missiologically. It begins just as sin

00:00:47.520 | came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to

00:00:53.280 | all men for all have sinned and then he goes on to compare Adam and Christ as

00:00:59.880 | the heads of two different humanities. All of us are in Adam because he's

00:01:06.280 | our head and those of us who receive the grace that is in Christ Jesus are in

00:01:12.280 | Christ Jesus and thus he's our new head creating a new humanity. What that

00:01:17.760 | said to me was every single tribe, every people group in the world, thousands of

00:01:25.120 | them, if you go in there and learn their language and learn their culture and

00:01:29.520 | find a way to communicate with them you never have to fear that the message you

00:01:35.040 | bring is somehow irrelevant for them in their culture because they all, you can

00:01:41.080 | tell them this, you preach this, there was an original human being from which we

00:01:45.880 | all came. That's the way Paul goes about it in Acts 17. And your problem is

00:01:51.880 | exactly the same as my problem because your great-great-great-great-great-great-

00:01:56.560 | great-great-grandfather rebelled against the Creator God and he fell in sin, has

00:02:01.840 | been bent against this God ever since and that God has sent his son Jesus

00:02:07.840 | Christ into the world so that that disobedience could be remedied through

00:02:13.120 | his perfect obedience and through the death by which he covers all the sins.

00:02:17.560 | That structure of thinking of justification through Christ and

00:02:22.840 | condemnation through Adam is not culturally conditioned. You may have to

00:02:28.600 | find words to say it but that reality is universal. That's why this

00:02:33.400 | teaching is so amazingly relevant for missions because missions is dealing

00:02:39.240 | with how can we present good news to people who know nothing, they don't know

00:02:44.080 | anything about the story of Christianity and we can root that story in their

00:02:50.840 | original father and our original father and the Son of Christ, of God

00:02:56.440 | coming into the world and bearing the guilt of their father and our father and

00:03:01.760 | so it crosses cultures in a remarkable way. That means that when missionaries

00:03:10.320 | prepare for wherever they're going, their focus shouldn't be merely on linguistics

00:03:17.840 | and anthropology and culture. There's so much emphasis today on believing that

00:03:22.520 | that our success is going to hang on whether we are savvy enough in all of

00:03:28.000 | those mythological dimensions and those are important. I don't want to

00:03:31.840 | minimize them but theology and understanding the scriptures in

00:03:37.760 | particular Romans 5 that we've just talked about is really crucial so

00:03:42.000 | missionaries should be people who really care about this kind of biblical

00:03:47.040 | theology because when they grasp what the Bible really says they will find

00:03:53.240 | themselves not just on this issue but on many issues amazingly able to tap in to

00:03:58.840 | the very nature of the people they're talking about because the Bible is so

00:04:03.280 | profoundly rooted in what is real and what is true. It's never going to be

00:04:08.640 | irrelevant to devote yourselves to the study of the scriptures as well as all

00:04:12.760 | the cultural dimensions of preparation. Thank you Pastor John, and for more on

00:04:17.120 | this theme see Pastor John's sermon, "Adam, Christ, and Justification, Part One,"

00:04:20.960 | delivered on June 18th, 2000. You can find it in the DesiringGod.org resource

00:04:26.040 | library under "Sermons." And if you have a question for Pastor John please send it

00:04:29.440 | to us via email, send it to AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. I'm your

00:04:34.160 | host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.

00:04:37.600 | Thank you.

00:04:38.600 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Why Adam Matters for Global Missions

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