Adapted from the talk as a book chapter, in the speaker's voice. It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Before the talk
Jonathan MasterKevin DeYoung is senior minister of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina. Any of you who have read him know how gifted he is to write with a light touch and great clarity. We give thanks for his ministry, and I would be remiss not to thank the Lord for his friendship; those who know him know him to be an honest, clear thinker and a good friend.
My assigned topic is “The Son: Sent to Redeem the Nations,” and I want to take it in two distinct parts: first, the Son who is sent; then, the Son sent to redeem the nations. Each part has a text from the apostle John. A warning: the first half is some heavy mental lifting, more theological; the second is more exegetical. Don't check out.
“When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’” (John 17:1–3)
The Son who is sent
The language of sending is so frequent in John's Gospel that it is easy to overlook, as if it were just an epithet rolling off Jesus' tongue. But verse 3 is a striking sentence. Eternal life is to know the only true God, God the Father, and to know Jesus Christ, and what is said about Jesus Christ is that he has been sent. The Greek word pempō is used thirty-two times in John, thirty of them by Jesus. Another word, apostellō (from which we get apostle), appears in more than twenty-five verses, mostly on Jesus' lips, and it is the verb in John 17:3, 8, 18, 21, 23 and 25. Hours from his crucifixion, praying this glorious high-priestly prayer, what is uppermost in Jesus' mind and heart is his relation to the Father who sent him.
I first read this observation in Sinclair Ferguson. In the Upper Room Discourse, John 14–16, Jesus is at the end of his earthly life, about to die for the sins of the world. It is his last evening with his disciples before his resurrection. What does he want to talk about? He sees fit to tell them about the glories and inner workings of the Trinity. It is crucial to Jesus' identity, in these dozens of occurrences, that we understand the Son as one who has been sent.
You won't find the English word mission in any major English translation. And yet in a sense it is there, because mission comes from the Latin mittere, to send, which translates these Greek verbs. Read John 17 in the Latin Vulgate (as I'm sure we all do) and you will see misisti, “you have sent,” again and again.
Theologians have almost entirely lost sight of what are called the divine missions. A notable exception, not an easy read but one I commend, is Adonis Vidu's The Divine Missions: An Introduction. The mission that precedes every other mission is the sending of the Son by the Father. When we hear mission we think immediately of a task or an operation, and by extension that is part of what we mean by the mission of the Son. But the Son has a task because he is, first of all, one who has been sent. Jesus takes great pains to explain that he did not simply come into the world, as though he had fallen from heaven, or as though the Son decided by his own will to come. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit have one will, sharing one essence. So why are we told dozens of times that he was sent?
“The divine missions” refers to the Father's sending of the Son, and the Father and Son's sending of the Holy Spirit. How should we define a divine mission? Augustine says it is the manifestation of one of the divine persons. Vidu adds a crucial piece: a mission is the manifestation of a divine person in our world through union with a creature. The Old Testament is full of theophanies. And God is omnipresent; his presence is already everywhere. So what is new about the sending of the Son? It is not only the manifestation of a divine person, but in union with a creature. The Son is sent and united to a human nature, the divine Logos joined to humanity in what theologians call the hypostatic union: two natures in one person. The Spirit is not incarnate, but he unites us to Christ, who is incarnate, fully God and fully man.
A mission results in a divine person, the Son or the Spirit, becoming present in the world in a new and unique way. God is always transcendent and always omnipresent. The Father did not send the Son because God's presence was lacking in the world or because he could not be near his creatures any other way; his presence fills heaven and earth. But in the incarnation there is a new and unique manifestation of his presence: Immanuel, God with us.
If your heads are getting full, let me help them get fuller. You thought “the Father sent the Son” was simple, but think about it for thirty seconds and it gets harder, not easier. Be Bible people and theology people: think about hard things for more than thirty seconds, and don't reach too quickly for “mystery.” I heard John Piper say years ago that mystery is a good word after you've thought about something for several years, not thirty seconds.
Here's the problem. On Tuesday I flew from Charlotte to Philadelphia to speak at Westminster Seminary, and last night American Airlines sent me from Philadelphia to DFW. When I am sent, I go to a place where I was not and leave a place where I no longer am. If you think of the Father sending the Son like that, your theology gets badly messed up. The Son did not leave heaven in order to come to earth. Every Christmas we sing, “Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown”; I checked, and the Trinity Hymnal we use changes the words, for which I'm glad. Did the Son come down? Yes; that is biblical language. But if he left one place so that he was no longer in heaven, he would have divested himself of omnipresence, and so would no longer be God sharing the Father's essence, and worshiping him would be idolatry. A great deal is at stake. Of course we don't mean that when we sing the hymn.
There is a doctrine called the extra Calvinisticum. The Lutherans named it that because they said it came from Calvin, but you find it in Augustine and Aquinas. It says that when the Son became incarnate and assumed a human nature, the fullness of his deity was not confined or circumscribed by that human nature. There is an “extra,” a life beyond those bounds. In becoming what he was not, the Son did not cease to be what he was, and he retains every attribute of deity. In his earthly ministry some divine attributes were hidden, but they were not abdicated; that is why the Mount of Transfiguration is an unveiling of who he really is. So the Son neither left one place nor arrived at another where God's presence had never been.
We should think of the sending of the Son as the visible, in-time manifestation of his eternal begottenness. (Chad touched on this with the Holy Spirit; it's my fault we took these out of order, since I was away yesterday.) The mission in time is the visible appearance of the eternal procession. For the Son, the procession is his eternal generation, his eternal begottenness, which is easier to say what it doesn't mean than what it does. It is the communication of the divine essence from the Father to the Son. That makes some sense: when we are begotten, our parents' nature is communicated to us. But the analogy breaks down, because the Son's begottenness had no beginning and involved nothing physical or material. The manifestation in time of that eternal begottenness is that the Father sends the Son, and that is what we call mission: the Father sending the very image of himself into the world.
Think of the Son's sending from two perspectives: that of the one sent, and that of those who perceive his sending. The Son was sent so that he might reveal the Father who sent him, and so that the disciples on earth might perceive and believe in the One sent and the One who sent him. “This is eternal life”: not only to know God, but to know God's Son, and to know that God sent his Son into the world, so that in seeing and beholding the Son you are seeing and beholding the Father.
There is only one will in God, because will is a property of nature. So the divine missions are the result of our triune God willing the Father to send the Son, willing the Son to be sent by the Father, and willing the Spirit to be sent by the Father and the Son. You can't picture it too concretely, as though the Son said, “Yes, sir, Father,” because then you are picturing persons with separate wills. God's works in the world are appropriated to particular persons (the Father did not die on the cross; the Son was not sent at Pentecost), but they are the expression of one will, and a profound expression of the love of our triune God: his condescension to his creatures and his desire to be known and worshiped by those made in his image.
Three implications
Why does this theology of the divine missions matter for missions in our ordinary sense? Three quick implications.
First, our view of missions must be thoroughly Trinitarian. The Spirit's mission follows the completion of the Son's. Jesus says in John 16 that he must go to the Father so that he can send the Spirit. In the incarnation the Son's presence is local, because a human body cannot be everywhere. But the Spirit of Christ can be everywhere. So Pentecost could only come after the ascension. The outcome of the Son's mission is the Spirit's mission; in a sense the Son's mission is complete, yet it continues in the Spirit's mission. Many theologians have spoken of the Spirit as, in a manner of speaking, the shared love of the Father and the Son. And, careful not to be too concrete, you can think of the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father in mission, reaching down into the world to bring sinners to himself: first the Son, whose mission is completed when he returns to the Father, and then, in the joy of that completed mission, the Father and Son together sending the Spirit.
Second, our view of missions must be thoroughly church-centered. We've heard that throughout this conference, and here is one more theological angle. The Spirit does not have a mission separate from the Son's. Some want to say that the mission of God is much broader than the church, as if there were a churchly mission, and then, above and beyond it, a much broader mission of the Spirit. How could that be? The Spirit is sent after the Son, by the Father and the Son. And what is the church but the body of Christ? The Spirit's work in the world must flow through the completed mission of the Son and through his body on earth, the church. There cannot be a mission of God outside the church; otherwise there would be independent divine missions and a rift between the persons of the Trinity in their eternal relations of origin.
Third, our view of missions must be consciously dependent on the divine missions. Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” (Whether all of us are “sent ones” in the technical sense is another discussion; I don't think we all are, though we all take part in the Great Commission.) A missionary, by the very word, is one who is sent: not one who stands up and says, “I will go” on his or her own accord, but one sent out, as the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit.
And here is good news: the church's missionary work in the world is the continuation of God's work. Because the canon is closed and nothing outside it is the word of God (good as the Canons of Dort, the Westminster Standards and especially, for some of you, the London Baptist Confession may be, they are not inspired), we can imagine that God did his thing back there, and now it's up to us to do ours and tell people about it. No. It is still God's work in the world: the mission of the Son, and the Father and Son sending the Spirit, to whom we bear witness.
Notice how John keeps joining the language of sending with the language of giving. “Since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” The Son, sent from the Father, has been given authority and a privileged place at the Father's right hand. And he does not come to earth empty-handed, but with an elect people already given to him. That connection ought to give us great joy, stick-to-itiveness and optimism in the church's mission. When the Son was sent, he had already been given names: all those given to him before the foundation of the world. We are sent because the Father first sent the Son.
The Son sent to redeem the nations
“Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and amazing, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is finished. And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire—and also those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, ‘Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations! Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.’” (Revelation 15:1–4)
Never forget that the Bible is a hymnbook. There was singing at creation: when God laid the foundation of the earth, “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (surely that was in Lewis's mind in The Magician's Nephew; I hope Netflix doesn't ruin it). In the middle of the Bible are 150 psalms. Before them are the songs of Moses, Miriam, Deborah and Hannah. Angels sang at Jesus' birth. We speak of Mary's song, Zechariah's song, Simeon's song. There appear to be hymns to Christ in John, Romans, Philippians, Colossians, the letters to Timothy and Hebrews. Doxologies are scattered throughout, and Revelation is full of songs. And now we sing to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. The drama of redemptive history is a musical.
Missions exists because the nations of the world have nothing to sing about.
To riff on John Piper's famous line: missions exists because the nations have nothing to sing about. They have national anthems and sports anthems; they surely have “Happy Birthday” in other languages. But they have nothing of eternal significance to sing about. In these four verses we have a sea and a song, familiar images and words, but with important lessons. Let me highlight three things and then come back to John 17.
Something about our salvation. By this point in Revelation God's people have been hunted by the dragon and the beast; there are pictures of war, devastation and opposition. Now we see the tranquility of heaven. The saints are called “those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name.” Conquerors. Think of the seven letters: “To the one who conquers…” Whenever I teach Revelation I tell people you can all understand it and never forget it, because some of you have its symbol on your shoes: the swoosh. Nike is Greek for victory, and the verb here is nikaō. So when you see those shoes, think propaganda. I like it.
Christians are those who overcome. If you find in your heart a burning desire to conquer something, to be in control of something (and we do need Christians who wield power well), the Bible says, first let's see you overcome yourself and your sin. That's what I'd like to hear in the “manosphere”: a call to overcome the temptation of worldliness, which is a far greater threat than any earthly nation or political party. That's what the dragon is after: your heart, your body, your soul.
These conquerors stand beside (some translate “on”) the sea of glass, the sea of crystal. What is it? Genesis describes creation deliberately as the separating of the waters: “God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse” (1:7). In the flood the rains came down from above and the fountains of the deep burst open below. Ezekiel 1:22 sees over the heads of the living creatures “the likeness of an expanse, shining like awe-inspiring crystal.” In other words, earth's ceiling is heaven's floor. You can't find it on a SpaceX rocket, but that is the biblical imagery. The saints now rest above this glorious, tranquil sea, and it is mingled with fire, a sign of both salvation and judgment. The saints in heaven are, quite literally, above it all.
Have you ever stayed on an inland lake so still that one stone sends ripples across the whole surface? Or, flying here, you hit turbulence on take-off and landing, but once you are above the clouds it is always blue sky. God's providence is a bit like that. If you could see what God sees, it is blue sky: tranquility, a perfect plan. We live most of our lives in the take-offs and landings, among the storms, but there is a providential plan and a heavenly rest to come. Joel Beeke quotes John Flavel: “Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backward.” I'd say most providences are like that.
Here is God's people rescued and redeemed, singing the song of Moses, sung when they passed through the sea God tore apart and calmed for them: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him.” The song of Moses and the song of the Lamb have two names but are one song, a song of deliverance. Ours too is an exodus, from bondage to the world, the flesh and the devil. And whenever in this life we taste something of that heavenly tranquility and triumph, it should come out in worship: “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy.”
Something about singing. Notice that the singing is to God. Yes, we address one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs; our singing has a horizontal plane. But it must all have a vertical thrust. We sing because there is One worthy of singing. The One we want to impress, and must impress, is God.
The singing is also about God. People complain about modern songs being all “I, me, my.” Well, the Psalter has plenty of I, me and my. The problem isn't a song that says “I” or “me.” It's good to express what we feel about God; it's important to feel things about God. (I'm a Presbyterian; we have one or two feelings. It's good for us.) The problem is when our singing never gets around to saying anything about God. The song of the Lamb teaches. If you are responsible for singing in your church, that is part of your teaching and discipleship ministry. Ask: what would our people know of the great doctrines of the faith after twenty years of only the songs we sing? Would they know the Psalms, the songs Jesus sang? How much good theology? Set the bar higher than “no heresy there.” You can do better than heresy-free. Give your people songs that will help them die well.
And the singing comes from the people of God. You've probably heard it said that the main sound in Sunday worship should be the sound of the congregation singing. Get that right and it will help you sort out a lot of other things. You can use different instruments: those organ pipes (I hope they get cranked up later; we could sing “A Mighty Fortress”) or a guitar. You'll struggle to argue that a guitar is forbidden, since the word for “harps” here is kithara, more like a professional lute. If you can find a professional lutist, sign them up. But what is the great triumph in heaven? Not a rock concert, not an organ recital, but God's people singing with the heavenly beings, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders. Ask of everything: how does this help us sing? Light the room so people can see one another singing. Keep the volume where people can hear one another. Sing songs untrained people can sing. One of the best things a pastor can hear about his church is, “My, those people love to sing.”
Something about our Savior. It is the song of the Lamb, not a song from the Lamb but a song about the Lamb, and in it the conquering saints tell us much about him. I count seven attributes: he is almighty, just, true, sovereign (King of the nations), holy, righteous, and singular, God alone, with no other. And our response, in verse 4, is to fear, to glorify, to worship.
“All nations will come and worship you.” If you know Revelation, you know the nations are in for a rude awakening in many chapters. They will be judged. Chapter 16 brings Armageddon and the destruction of the kings of the whole world. In chapters 17 and 18 Babylon, standing for worldliness, is cast down. In chapter 19 the rider on the white horse makes war on the peoples of the earth. There is bad news coming for the rebellious nations, and unimaginable good news if they have ears to hear. In chapter 14 an angel flies overhead with an eternal gospel, crying with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory,” and by chapter 15 some evidently did. God's elect will. They may need to hear it a hundred times, and they may not respond until you and I are dead and gone, but some will hear that eternal gospel and fear God and give him glory. Psalm 86 promised it: “All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God.”
If you've been in the church a long time, you are used to this: you go to church and you sing. But where else does this happen? A two-minute national anthem before a game, a team fight song, karaoke in a bar one night. Where else do hundreds and thousands of people say, “You know what I can't wait to do? Sing together!” We do, because we have something to sing about. When Israel dug a well and found water in Numbers 21, they sang, “Spring up, O well!” In Judges 5, when God gave victory over Jabin and Sisera, Deborah and Barak sang to the Lord. They sang in Hezekiah's day when the Passover was restored, in Nehemiah's day when the wall was dedicated, and in Ezra's day when the foundation of the temple was laid: “He is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.”
Don't underestimate what we are doing Sunday by Sunday when we sing. Revelation depicts a holy army. They are conquerors fighting the dragon and his two beasts. Earlier the 144,000 are a numbered people, and when are censuses taken? When you count an army. Why are they described as those who have not defiled themselves with women? Not because sex is sinful, but because the Old Testament army kept itself free from that inevitable distraction when it went out to holy battle. This is a holy army. Well-meaning Christians sometimes talk as if Sunday is just a refueling station where you get your marching orders, while the real work happens elsewhere; as if you should feel almost guilty to be at church, or could get it just as well online. But when we sing we are engaged in holy, joyous warfare. Every Lord's Day God's people celebrate the resurrection, the victory of our Lamb, our captain and Savior Jesus Christ: “Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty!” Because we have something to sing about.
Full circle
That brings us back to the end of the high-priestly prayer: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:24–26).
What is the grand finale of this musical, the sending of the Son? In verse 24 the redeemed see a glory. In verse 26 they know a name. And they have a love within them: not only a love, but the Beloved. The love between the Father and the Son is in us, and the Son himself is in us. The vision of missions can be nothing less than a vision of God. The Son was sent by the Father so that the Word would become flesh and dwell among us; sent into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. The Son was sent so that the nations, at the end of the age and for all eternity, would have something to sing about.
You are not part of something small. Very few of us belong to a church this size; few churches in the world are. If you are in a church plant, or are going to labor overseas and may spend your whole life to see five converts, know that you are part of something eternal, something that reaches into the inner life of our triune God, a mission that ultimately cannot fail.
Have you noticed that Revelation 4 and 5 are deliberately written as a crescendo of songs? In chapter 4 the four living creatures sing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” and whenever they do, the twenty-four elders fall down and sing too. In chapter 5, when the Lamb takes the scroll, the living creatures and the elders sing together. Then, verse 11, the voice of many angels joins them, myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, not with a whimper but with a loud voice: “Worthy is the Lamb!” And finally, verse 13, every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” And the four living creatures said, “Amen.” So should we. Let it be, and let us worship.
Father in heaven, your word reveals riches that exceed our finite minds and yet thrill us with wonder upon wonder. Give us good heads, good hearts and obedient wills. And thank you, thank you, that we have a song to sing. In Jesus' name, amen.