Pastor John, in the last podcast you talked about the importance of the historicity of Adam in the local church especially. In this episode I want to follow up and ask you about Adam in relationship to global missions. Why does the historicity of Adam matter for missionaries? When I was preaching through Romans, this is now what, eight or nine years ago, probably more than that, took me eight years to get through.

I got to chapter 5 and I had never thought before that time how amazingly relevant Romans 5, 12 to 21 is missiologically. It begins just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to all men for all have sinned and then he goes on to compare Adam and Christ as the heads of two different humanities.

All of us are in Adam because he's our head and those of us who receive the grace that is in Christ Jesus are in Christ Jesus and thus he's our new head creating a new humanity. What that said to me was every single tribe, every people group in the world, thousands of them, if you go in there and learn their language and learn their culture and find a way to communicate with them you never have to fear that the message you bring is somehow irrelevant for them in their culture because they all, you can tell them this, you preach this, there was an original human being from which we all came.

That's the way Paul goes about it in Acts 17. And your problem is exactly the same as my problem because your great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-grandfather rebelled against the Creator God and he fell in sin, has been bent against this God ever since and that God has sent his son Jesus Christ into the world so that that disobedience could be remedied through his perfect obedience and through the death by which he covers all the sins.

That structure of thinking of justification through Christ and condemnation through Adam is not culturally conditioned. You may have to find words to say it but that reality is universal. That's why this teaching is so amazingly relevant for missions because missions is dealing with how can we present good news to people who know nothing, they don't know anything about the story of Christianity and we can root that story in their original father and our original father and the Son of Christ, of God coming into the world and bearing the guilt of their father and our father and so it crosses cultures in a remarkable way.

That means that when missionaries prepare for wherever they're going, their focus shouldn't be merely on linguistics and anthropology and culture. There's so much emphasis today on believing that that our success is going to hang on whether we are savvy enough in all of those mythological dimensions and those are important.

I don't want to minimize them but theology and understanding the scriptures in particular Romans 5 that we've just talked about is really crucial so missionaries should be people who really care about this kind of biblical theology because when they grasp what the Bible really says they will find themselves not just on this issue but on many issues amazingly able to tap in to the very nature of the people they're talking about because the Bible is so profoundly rooted in what is real and what is true.

It's never going to be irrelevant to devote yourselves to the study of the scriptures as well as all the cultural dimensions of preparation. Thank you Pastor John, and for more on this theme see Pastor John's sermon, "Adam, Christ, and Justification, Part One," delivered on June 18th, 2000. You can find it in the DesiringGod.org resource library under "Sermons." And if you have a question for Pastor John please send it to us via email, send it to AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening. Thank you.