And Then the End Will Come: The Promise of Matthew 24:14Sample

Day Two: God’s Heart for The Nations

From beginning to end—from Genesis to Revelation—God’s Word proclaims his heart for the nations. 

In Genesis 22:17, just after Abraham has presented Isaac for sacrifice, God promises to bless him and to multiply and prosper his descendants. Then he promises, “through your offspring, all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me” (v. 18). 

If we turn to the end of the Bible, in Revelation 7:9 John has a vision of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” 

We see the same thing over and over in Scripture: in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the New Testament. If you do a search on the word “nations” in the Bible, you’ll find that it is often accompanied by the words “all” and “every.” Over and over again, God declares that his gospel promises apply to all nations. Every nation—all of them—will be included in his kingdom. 

At the Great Wedding Feast of the Lamb, when Jesus and his church are united forever, the multitude will contain men and women from every nation on earth—not one will be left out. 

When Jesus issued his “Great Commission”—“go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19)—he was commanding his apostles—and us—to make true all of the promises God had already made throughout history to the nations.  

When we think of the word nation, we think of a country, like France or India or China. But the word has a different meaning in the Bible. In the New Testament, it’s the Greek word ethnos, from which we get our English words ethnic, ethnicity, and so on. An ethnos is a group of people who share a common ethnicity, ancestry, heritage, culture, and/or language—an ethnolinguistic people group.

According to Finishing the Task (www.finishingthetask.org) there are about twelve thousand of these biblical nations scattered around the world and Jesus has commanded us to tell all of them his good news.