The Bible and Missions

1. The Missionary Message of the Old Testament

17 h One The Missionary Message of the Old Testament “That Book is not the book of a nation, but the Book of nations, because it places before us the fortunes of one nation as a symbol unto all the rest, because it connects the history of this one people with the origin of the world, and by a series of earthly and spiritual developments, of facts necessary and accidental continues it unto the remotest regions of the farthest eternities.” —Goethe The missionaries have a Book which they take with them on all their wanderings; unless, in truth, it be the Book, which drives them forth on their great adventures. Certain it is that the biggest word for missions is the one spoken by the Book. Underneath all the smaller special appeals of the ages, of races and nations, of terrible sufferings of and appalling needs, is the great diapason of the Word—“go ye; I am with you.” Reading the Bible meticulously for proof texts and argument , it is possible to escape its unmistakable drift; reading it in the large and simply as it was written, its missionary message is inescapable. For the church to recapture this great Word is to regain that “first, fine careless rapture” in which the early church set forth to win the world. If, leaving all little mission studies for a time, we could bend The missionaries: their Book God’s mission textbook 18 / The Bible and Missions our minds and souls and strength to the study of god’s mission study textbook , the world could no longer fetter the church. The missionary character of the Bible is clearly seen in two great categories: (1) in its essential character; (2) in its expressed purpose and plan. The Bible is in its very subconscious subconciousness missionary . Not only because of what it advocates or purposes or states, but because of what it is, the Bible is the great missionary charter of the church. Just as in measuring a person it is not so much their conscious words and deeds that count, but their very atmosphere and selfhood. The Bible being what it is cannot avoid becoming the Book of humanity. It is foreordained to universality. Take its topics. They are the great fundamentals in which all men alike are concerned; life and death, sin and righteousness, god and the soul. It sets out to answer questions that rise in the soul of all people—savage and philosopher, saint and sinner, white and black alike, and will not be silenced. Whence am I? What does life mean? Where am I going? To what purpose is it all? Its answers have a quiet authority like the mountains, which do not ask our poor consenting. Consider its style: so styleless that the Book can be translated into any language without loss of energy; so devoid of ornament that its poetry in all its naked beauty is poetry to Occident as to Orient; so free from all self-consciousness or pose that its narratives need depend on no adjective or descriptive phrase to heighten their effectiveness or drive home their point. Some of the most precious treasures of the world’s literature are pale or tasteless in translation because their beauty is so largely in the marriage of thought to sound and rhythm. The Koreans say of the Bible, “It cannot be so beautiful in any other speech as in our Korean. It speaks to our souls.” Of no other great literature can it be said that in translation it actually supplants the original in the world’s esteem. Great in its reticence the Book is adapted to a long life of continued influence . Consider the handicap which any sacred literature written in the world’s childhood has to surmount; those impossible cosmogonies of the egyptians, the greeks, the Romans; that central mountain of Buddhism with its seven Missionary character of the Bible twofold I. The Bible Missionary in Essence and Substance The Missionary Message of the Old Testament / 19 encircling ocean belts, each millions of miles in circumference; that Chinese view of the great Demiurge at work on his world: His breath made the wind, his voice the thunder; his left eye the sun, his right eye the moon; his legs and arms and fingers and toes into the four quarters of the earth; his blood into the rivers; his muscles into the strata of the...