The First Great Missionary… Moses
Wisely, many missionaries and organizations follow the missionary model utilized by the Apostle Paul. A favorite passage to use is the Mars Hill account in Acts chapter 17: Paul knew the Greek culture; he challenged the Athenians on the grounds of their philosophies; he identified the unknown God, and he preached the Word. It’s a great strategy: identifying cultural beliefs and confronting them. But this strategy didn’t start with Paul. It actually started with Moses.
That’s right. Moses.
BEGINNING WITH THE STORY OF GENESIS –
While leading the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity after 400 years, Moses tells the people God’s creation account that he had penned with inspiration. Up until this point, they had never heard the true, inspired creation story. Surely they had passed down versions of it from Adam and Eve, but after 400 years in slavery immersed in Egyptian, Canaanite and Mesopotamian religion, the story was corrupted and defiled. So during the march to the Promised Land, carrying their patriarch Joseph’s bones in their midst, Moses reads the first two chapters of the Pentateuch.
“Moses wrote in direct reference and opposition to the story in which the Israelites had been living prior to the wilderness wandering. Moses counters all these views: some directly, some obliquely. He re-stories their world. In doing so, he tears into the strongholds of any would be rivals. And as he is tearing down, he is replacing, building the necessary foundation for an entire culture of understanding.”1
In the small space of two chapters, Moses corrects 14 of the Israelites’ errant beliefs about the creation of the world, who God is, and why man was created. All of these were Israelite beliefs that Moses acknowledged, confronted and then defeated with God’s powerful words:2
There were no cosmic battles fought before the world was created.
Creation was completed each day not to be reenacted again.
God controls creation with mere words; he never fights for power over it.
Only Yahweh is deity.
God was not created, nor did he create himself.
God didn’t need help creating the world.
God exists independently from his creation.
God is sovereign and cannot be manipulated.
The world was made through speech; no part of it birthed through a promiscuous union.
Mankind has great significance and value as God’s image-bearers.
God did not create man because he needed help with his work.
Man was created to be God’s representative and co-heir, not his slave.
The whole earth is God’s place of rest. He doesn’t reside in a man-made temple.
Mankind does not work in order to provide rest for the gods; God provides rest for man.
Though each point has its own story, here’s a snippet of point number 2: In Egyptian theology, the sun god went to battle every night to fight for control over its enemies. When the sun rose in the morning, this symbolized defeat and control over the enemies. Every night the creation story was re-enacted as the sun set during the battle for control and then rose in the morning at its completion.
“…AND THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY. GENESIS 1:5”
“[Moses’] placement of evening before morning is unusual. Rather than summarizing the day, the order seems to lead us to the next day by summarizing the night. The reference here may be aimed as a polemic [aggressive refutation] against the Egyptian understanding of the nighttime battle of the sun god with chaos and his enemies. Genesis challenges this by presenting the night-to-day transition smoothly without conflict, chaos or question. Day seven is described as unending just as God’s rest and our ultimate rest with him are unending. Such an ongoing rest directly contrasts the prevailing Egyptian theology of the sun’s struggle for life, rule and daily order.”3
Within just two chapters, Moses dismantles the prevailing religious beliefs of God’s people by writing in direct opposition to current held beliefs. Fourteen idolatrous teachings are set up and demolished. By the time Moses is done reading to the Israelites, all the strongholds of Egyptian, Canaanite and Mesopotamian beliefs lie in ruins. Yahweh alone rises triumphant.
Scripture from Moses to Paul and everywhere in between is teeming with this type of re-storying: know the culture, know the deities and beliefs that hold a people captive, then raise up God directly against the false narratives to defeat them.
Going into a culture and preaching Christ without knowing anything about the people has no precedence in Scripture…
We choose instead to support those following in the established footsteps of Moses, Jonah, Jesus, Paul and many others throughout Scripture. We desire to see missionaries trained in how to identify worldview values, strongholds and core beliefs of a people group, and how to put the God of the Bible to battle with the gods of their religion.
One Bible teacher said it best, “How in the world are you going to teach them to ‘take every thought captive in obedience to Christ’ if you don’t even know what’s holding them captive in the first place?”
“We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God.”
- The Apostle Paul, first great missionary. 2 Corinthians 10:3-6
1Mike Matthews: A Novel Approach (2017)
2Johnny Miller, John Soden: In the Beginning We Misunderstood (2012)
3Johnny Miller, John Soden: In the Beginning We Misunderstood (2012)