Everlasting Truth for the Joy of All Peoples

Psalm 117

Praise the LORD, all nations!

Extol him, all peoples!

For great is his steadfast love toward us,

and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.

Praise the LORD!

Who Are the "Peoples," the Nations?

"Nations" and "peoples" in the Bible don't refer to political states like America, Spain, Brazil, China, but to ethnic or language or cultural groupings in these political states. For example, if you go to the website China Source you will see, for starters, a list of sixty Chinese "peoples" (Hui, Dulong, Li, Lisu, Shui, Salar, Yao, etc.). And in the Bible you read about, "the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites" (Genesis 10:16-18).

So when Psalm 17:1 says, "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!" it means, "Praise the Lord, Hui of China! Praise the Lord Bahing of Nepal! Praise the Lord, Baluch of Pakistan! Praise the Lord, Maninka of Guinea! Praise the Lord, Bugis of Indonesia! Praise the Lord, Somali and Dakota of Minneapolis!" These are the kinds of groups Jesus was referring to when he said after his resurrection, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (panta ta ethne, same phrase in Psalm 117:1). These are the groups that Jesus meant when he said, "This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14).

So a huge question for followers of Jesus today is - or should be - how many peoples are there and how many of them are still unreached with the gospel of the kingdom? How many still have no church who obey Psalm 117 and praise the Lord?

Let's just take one reliable research effort, the huge Southern Baptist International Missions Board. For their missionary purposes they calculate 11,227 people groups in the world. Of these, 6,614 have less than 2% evangelical Christians. Of these, 68 peoples have populations over 10 million; 433 populations between 1 and 10 million; 1,452 between 100 thousand and 1 million.

If you hear someone say that the day of Western missions is over, you know something is amiss in their head or in their heart. They may not believe that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is to be praised by all peoples. Or they may not believe that anyone is really perishing without the gospel. Or they may believe that local people can do a better job than Western people (which misunderstands the very issue at stake: there aren't any [or strong enough] local people capable of doing the work: that is the meaning of "unreached"; and nearby reached peoples may be less culturally acceptable than Westerners.). The day of Western Missions is not over. And the day we think it is, will be the day you can write "forsaken" over the doors of our churches. God means for us to engage with him to bring about Psalm 117: "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!"

If you have children who don't know about the "nations," I suggest that you subscribe to the Global Prayer Digest or visit the website Unreached of the Day . Read a story to them and pray for a different people group each day. Oh, may we be a Church and families where children consider short-term missions as normal as vacations and who consider the dangers and burdens and joys of vocational missions a gift everyone should consider receiving.

Oh, that children and teenagers and adults in Christ's Church would break free from our tiny little worlds of family and friends and church and Western culture! Jesus Christ is building his church around the world. We are meant to think and feel and work with Him in this cause. Who knows how many of our personal problems are owing to narrowness of thinking and smallness of affections in relation to God's global purposes. May God give us a mind and heart to know and love and reach the peoples of the world for the glory of our Savior!

Let's not be among the number who do not see that the world and the church have changed dramatically in the last 100 years - the greatest missionary century in history. Listen to Andrew Walls from his book, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History:

[The twentieth century] has seen this great recession from the Christian faith in the West, there has been an equally massive accession to that faith in the non-Western world. [At the beginning of the century] well over 80 percent of those who professed Christianity lived in Europe or North America. Now, approaching 60 percent live in the southern continents of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, and that proportion grows annually. Christianity began the twentieth century as a Western religion, and indeed, the Western religion; it ended the century as a non-Western religion, on track to become progressively more so. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002, pp. 63-64)

We are not at the center. God may or may not be done with us in our self-absorbed prosperity in America. But he certainly is putting others on the Christian map to humble us and call us to confess and rejoice that others may be far more effective in finishing the Great Commission than we are. The dynamics of church and missions will never be the same.

One small example is the way the debate in the Anglican Communion about homosexual clergy is playing out on a global scale. There are more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England and America put together. Their bishops are biblically conservative, and they vote. Who would have dreamed just thirty years ago that powerful, liberal Western bishops would be called to account biblically by the churches they planted in Africa?

This is the new world we live in. It is the world that God is guiding and shaping for his glory. So let's join him in his great global purpose and not be limited in our thinking and feeling and acting to our local concerns. Let's give ourselves to missions, either as a goer or a sender.

This was taken from a sermon, by John Piper, entitled Everlasting Truth for the Joy of All Peoples. You can access it at this website Everlasting Truth