The Exalted Lord Sends Out His Ambassadors
THE EXALTED LORD SENDS OUT HIS AMBASSADORS
MATTHEW 28:16-20
The promise of Christ’s presence with us by the Holy Spirit is still available for us to know today.
There is no account of the ascension in Matthew’s Gospel. The “mountain to which Jesus had directed” the disciples (28:16) is traditionally identified with the mount of transfiguration (17:1) and is so commemorated on the summit of Tabor. In any case, here as in 17:1 the mountain is a place of revelation (cf. also 5:1).
The statement that “some doubted” is ambiguous in Greek, in that it might refer to others than the eleven, but not certainly so. But Jesus reveals himself to them as the exalted Lord, vested by God with universal authority, and in the exercise of that authority he commissions them to be his ambassadors among “all nations” (cf. 24:14). No longer is their mission restricted to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” as it was during the Galilean ministry (10:5f.); all limitations have now been dropped. Their mission is to be mainly one of instruction—making disciples of all the nations and teaching the disciples thus made to keep all the commandments which they themselves had received from their Lord.
For the later prosecution of this teaching ministry this Gospel provided an excellent manual. The baptism into “the strong name of the Trinity” was specially appropriate for Gentile converts who “turned to God from idols”; Jewish converts and others who already worshiped the living and true God were called to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and were therefore baptized specifically in (into) his name (Acts 2:38; 8:16, etc). In the discharge of their commission the disciples are given the assurance of thcir Lord’s continuing presence with them “to the close of the age” (28:20).
William Carey, addressing the Northamptonshire Association Ministers’ Fraternal in 1791, proposed Matthew 28:19-20 as the subject for discussion, and in particular: “Whether the command given to the Apostles to teach all nations was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of all the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent.”
Compare Matthew’s narrative of resurrection appearances with those of Luke, John and Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5-7).
Consider the commission of the eleven disciples to teach all nations in the light of Paul’s account in Galatians 1:16; 2:1-10, which indicates that the Jerusalem leaders were entrusted with the evangelization of Jews, leaving Paul and Barnabas to evangelize Gentiles.