A global, eternal and multicultural salvation

IIt was a joy in the second week of January to join with about 2800 others (including 1000 children and youth!) at the first full-program Church Missionary Society Summer School since 2020. The theme of the week was one of CMS’s vales – cross-shaped: “The cross is both the message we proclaim and the life we live”.

It was a privilege to hear some of the CMS missionaries share about the impact of the cross on their own journey of faith and cross-cultural service. Some spoke of the overwhelming sense of Jesus’ love in giving himself on the cross, and that a life of serving him is an inescapable – and joyful – expression of thanks and praise in response. Others spoke of the way in which the seeming foolishness and weakness of the cross is, to those who have experienced its forgiveness, the wisdom and power of God.

Ephesians 2:11-22 points us to another dimension of the achievement of Jesus’ death on the cross for our sakes – global, eternal and social implications:

His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility (Eph 2:15b-16).

The cross displays the love of God, that he would give his Son for the world; the cross provides the atonement of God so that sin is forgiven; the cross propitiates the wrath of God so that justice is satisfied. In Ephesians 2:15-16 our attention is drawn to the reconciliation of the cross: peace between God and humankind, and reconciliation between people so that, through the cross, a new humanity comes into existence. What an astonishing achievement!

According to Ephesians 1:10 God’s purpose is to unite all things under his Son. But Paul describes the great sweep of humanity –the non-Jewish, Gentile peoples of the world – as “separate from Christ… foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). The apostle provides a devastating and desperate picture of the spiritual plight of those who are separate from Christ. And yet, those who are far away are brought near (v13). How does this happen?

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. (v13-15a)

It is the blood of Christ that is God’s power to bring about a new humanity. It is in his flesh (v15) that the law is set aside; it is through the cross (v16) that Jesus reconciles people to God. The death of Jesus is God’s power to bring about the peace that reconciles Jew and Gentile, and reconciles both to God in one new humanity.

Unless you are a Jewish-background believer in Messiah Jesus, Paul’s description of the spiritual lostness of the Gentiles is precisely a description of us without the gospel, and of all peoples everywhere without the gospel. There must be mission – locally and globally and cross-culturally – because without gospel mission people are separate from Christ, without hope and without God in the world. Of course, there is religion, but without the proclamation of the cross of Christ, there is no salvation.

In 1786, members of the Eclectic Society – a group of evangelical Christians in the Church of England that included John Newton and William Wilberforce – debated the topic of the propagation of the gospel in Botany Bay. Through their efforts Richard Johnson was placed on the First Fleet to be chaplain to the colony, whose mission was the evangelisation of the convicts, soldiers and settlers, and the original inhabitants of this land.

The chequered and often painful history of Christian engagement with the Aboriginal peoples of Australia is told especially in the highly important works of John Harris, including his magisterial volume One Blood . But let me quote from an Indigenous brother and Bush Chuch Aid’s national Indigenous officer, Neville Naden, who said this at the BCA centenary service at St Andrew’s Cathedral on Sorry Day, May 26, 2019:

There have been a lot of things that have been done in the name of the church that have been ungodly. That goes without saying. But the wonderful thing the church did was to introduce the gospel to this country. A gospel that brings hope where there is no hope. A gospel that brings life where there is no life. Those on the fringes of society are brought into the inner circle of God’s family.

When Jesus died on the cross he did away with the law’s division between clean and unclean. He took all the world’s uncleanness into himself and did away with it, so that the unclean might be made clean through faith in him. Whoever is in Christ is clean, washed, set apart and united to him. Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. What Christ unites to himself, he unites to each other. The law’s demand for separation is done away with in the death of Christ.

Likewise, forgiveness of sin is no longer a matter of Temple and priesthood and sacrifice of animals. Now, it is the blood of Christ that atones and anyone united to Christ by faith is sprinkled clean by his blood. Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Those saved by the same blood of Christ are united to one another by his blood.

In our multicultural nation, churches made up of people from many cultural backgrounds are a powerful demonstration of the truth of the gospel. What I mean is, our culture rejects the idea of one truth – assuming that this involves a cultural (if not colonial) hegemony. We are told that humanity is and should be a mosaic of different perspectives and insights and worldviews and religions. But when the message of “no other name by which we may be saved but the name of Jesus” is proclaimed, celebrated and confessed by churches made up of people from many cultures, languages and ethnicities, that radically confronts our world and its assumptions and holds out the living reality of a Saviour for the whole world.

The picture of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language” gathered around the Lamb on his throne in Revelation 7, teaches us that heaven will be multicultural but also a new humanity reconciled to God and each other through the cross, so that in many languages they sing one eternal, glorious, joyful song: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” SC