God’s chosen and special people.

 But you are God’s chosen and special people. You are a group of royal priests and a holy nation. God has brought you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Now you must tell all the wonderful things that he has done. I Peter 2:9

This description sounds great doesn’t it, that is until perhaps it occurs to us that the same phrase was one uttered over God’s people of the Old Testament. The same people over whom Jesus pronounced those scary words like “vipers brood”, “whitewashed tombstones” and other comments along the same line.

The fact of the matter is that we have been chosen for the same reason that God originally chose the descendants of Abram, the father of Israel. In each case God chose that they, and now we, would be a blessing to the Nations. Unfortunately, the Biblical record indicates that the people of Israel did not act on their mandate. Instead of reaching out to the other people around then the “people of God” chose to codify the rules of life that they were living under into law and used them as a measure by which any God follower who strayed their way was to be considered for adoption into the family of God.

It is at this time that Jesus the Messiah arrives upon the scene and makes those above pronouncements. This is the scary bit. He came as a Jewish Messiah, the long awaited King of the Jews, but the Jewish leaders rejected what He offered.

Now for the word of warning, our mandate is to Go, Tell, and Make Disciples. We are also told in the third chapter of John’s Gospel that God expects us to reach out to every tribe with His Good News before the Return of the Christ and the end of days. If we don’t like the world we are living in then there is only one group that can do something about it, us the chosen of God.

There are two truths in place as of today. First is that if the Book of the Revelation is to be held as future, and hence current truth, that we have in excess of 2000 language groups who do not have a verse of the Bible in their heart language.

The second, and this is almost as great a challenge, is that there is no such creature as a second generation believer.  Each of us who name Jesus as King do so because we, not our parents or our country, chose to believe His claims. This means that we cannot rest on the decision we made because if we did that we would potentially be allowing friends and family to quite literally “go to hell”.

There is a third question, one that is prompted from the Jewish experience. They had no idea that God had a curve ball in the mix; Jesus came as the Saviour to the whole world not as a Jewish Messiah for the Jews. What might be our experience if He yet has another one and we fail to live up to our mandate, could it be a bit like the Promised Land where we have another go around until we fulfil our mandate?