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Unlike our Bibles, which follow the order of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles. The last word of the Hebrew Bible is the decree of Cyrus to the exiles of Jerusalem: "Let him go up." The gospel of Matthew likewise ends with a command to "Go." The two books end with the same command, but the two commands are different in critical ways.
Cyrus gave the Jews permission to go to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple and the city; his is a command to return. That is not the force of Jesus’ command. The twelve lived in Judea, but at the end
of Matthew's gospel Jesus tells them to leave Judea and go to the ends of the earth. Jesus, the Anointed Emperor of the Fifth Monarchy, and He commands His people to go where no man has gone before.
The Old Covenant had a geographic center in Jerusalem and its temple, and the Jews always hoped to get back to their city. The New Covenant has no earthly center, and Paul's hope, as Pastor Purcell will remind us, was to get to Rome, and thence to Spain. The Old Covenant was centripetal, pulling things toward the center; the New is centrifugal, pushing us out.
We are tempted to stay put, to refuse the risks of going out. We are tempted to enclose ourselves in the immediate, local concerns of our lives. If we succumb to that temptation, we obscure the genius of the New Covenant order and fail in our obedience to Jesus' commission.
Of course, not every believer is called to go to a mission field; but some are. Not every believer is called to the mission field, but our hopes and prayers and labors and resources should be directed where Jesus, the Greater Cyrus, directs them – not to a return but to fields white unto harvest that lie beyond the horizon.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 09:18 AM
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