5-1 “Into all the world”
The great commission was radical stuff to its initial hearers. Instruction about religious matters in those days was usually restricted to a privileged group of initiates. But the Lord Jesus invited His followers to proactively take the message to absolutely everybody. And the essentially radical nature of that request echoes down to our days too. If the command to preach the Gospel had not been understood at face value, the majority of recently baptized brethren and sisters outside the Anglo-Saxon world simply would not exist. If we are only to preach to our own local community, there is no way the Gospel would have been spread to the many nations to which it has gone in the last few years. It would have remained in the white skinned, English speaking world. Or to throw the question a stage further back, it would never have gone outside the Middle Eastern, Jewish world of the first century. As all involved frequently testify, God's blessing has powerfully rested on those who have sought to spread the Gospel world-wide. Ways have been opened, resources provided, which would have been humanly impossible. God does not seem to have been watching the Gospel extension activities of recent years with indifference, feeling that we've got the wrong end of the stick in our efforts to fulfil the command to " go into all the world" .
Even if some preaching work appears not to bear fruit, this shouldn't discourage us from the essentially outgoing spirit we should have in spreading the word far and wide. Many of the parables have an element of unreality about them, designed to focus our attention on a vital aspect of teaching. The sower parable has 75% of the seed sowed on bad ground, due to the almost fanatic way the sower throws the seed so far and wide, evidently without too much attention to whether it lands on responsive soil or not. His emphasis was clearly on broadcasting the seed far and wide. We should desire to see the spread of God’s ways, His Truth, His will, the knowledge of the real Christ, to as many as possible. The Kingdom of God refers to that over which God reigns. We are “a colony of Heaven” in our response to His principles (Phil. 3:20 Moffat). We are to pray for His Kingdom to come, so that His will may be done on earth (Mt. 6:10). The Kingdom and the doing of His will are therefore paralleled. His Kingdom reigns over all in Heaven, for there, all the Angels are obedient to Him (Ps. 103:19-21). By praying for the Kingdom to come on earth we are not only praying for the Lord’s second coming, but for the progress of the Gospel world-wide right now. Not only that more men and women will hear it and respond, but that those who have accepted it might work God’s will rather than their own to an ever greater extent. Whether or not we can physically spread the Gospel is in this sense irrelevant; our prayer should be, first and foremost if the pattern of the Lord’s prayer is to be taken exactly, for the triumph of the Gospel world-wide.
There’s a growing idea in many churches that you can only preach if you are ‘authorized’ to do so by some committee or group of elders. The personal relevance and reference of the great commission means we can rightly ignore this. In fact, such an attitude is really a preservation of Roman Catholicism. In 1184 at the Council of Verona, Pope Lucius III declared that the list of heretics should be extended to include those who “preach without permission”. And the same is being said today in essence; ironically, by those who are the most condemnatory of the Catholic church.
