Once we understand the Great Commission as a function of kingship, we are in a better place to assess this agenda throughout the rest of the Old Testament. God’s reign is universal, and from the beginning, His plan of salvation aimed at all the families of the earth, never overlooking the fact that He “shall inherit all the nations” (Psalm 82:8).

Properly conceived as grounded in God’s own kingship, the Great Commission begins before humanity’s fall away from communion with God. On the sixth day, man was commissioned by God to fill and subdue the earth, and to rule over the creatures (Genesis 1:28). Accordingly, one might justly define the Great Commission as “ruling and subduing” the earth and its creatures—an understanding we will need to unpack.
To be sure, the phrase “ruling and subduing” has deeply negative connotations in our modern world, filled as it is with memories of horrific tyranny and the abuse of power. Nevertheless, we should note that this commission was given before the descent into sin and misery, precisely within the context of man in union with God—that is, given to man as bearer of the image of God (v. 26), created both to fellowship with God and to mediate the blessed reign of God over all the earth.
The theology here is twofold. First, Adam is to gather up all creation into the seventh-day praise and adoration of God—that is what it means to “rule and subdue.” He is charged to set apart (“sanctify”) creation increasingly until the whole earth is holy, filled with the abiding glory of God.
Second, there is no blessing to be enjoyed, be it ever so marginal, that does not derive from the reign of God—that is the joy of what it means to “be subdued,” especially so after the expulsion from life with God. For this reason, we gladly teach our children that Christ executes the office of a king “in subduing us to himself” (WSC Q&A 26).
The Great Commission bestowed upon Adam entailed that his kingship would be in the service of his priestly office, namely, that he would “rule and subdue” for the sake of gathering all creation to the Creator’s footstool in worship. The Sabbath consummation was the heart and goal of the sixth day’s commission.
Once we understand the Great Commission as a function of kingship, we are in a better place to assess this agenda throughout the rest of the Old Testament. God’s reign is universal, and from the beginning, His plan of salvation aimed at all the families of the earth, never overlooking the fact that He “shall inherit all the nations” (Psalm 82:8).
Here, the role of Genesis 1–11 as a prologue to Israel’s narrative cannot be overemphasized, for Israel’s own identity and sacred calling springs from this universal context and is ever determined by it. After the nations are scattered into exile from the tower of Babel, God calls Abram in Genesis 12, promising that through him “all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). This promise is later reiterated to Abraham: “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice” (Genesis 22:18; see 18:18). It is then vouchsafed to Isaac (Genesis 26:4), and then onward to Jacob as the father of the twelve tribes of Israel (Genesis 28:14).
Coupled with this promise is the undercurrent of kingship. Abram had been promised that “kings will come from you” (Genesis 17:6), and a genealogy is followed that will blossom forth into the line of David. Eventually, through Israel, a king would arise to gather the nations back into the presence of God.
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Our response to this work of the Spirit should be clear: serve the church. Don’t worry about trying to figure out what your “spiritual gifts” are. Simply serve the church in any way you can. The Spirit has providentially gifted you to do so, so serve, and marvel at the ways the Spirit of God has uniquely gifted you to minister to others.

The primary work of the Holy Spirit today in a Christian’s life is his sanctifying believers to be “spiritual”—to be characterized by inner life and external behavior that conforms to the will of God.
However, another result attributed often to the Spirit in the New Testament is gifting. Some gifting was special empowerment for leadership of God’s people. This unique gifting given temporarily to key figures like prophets and apostles often resulted in revelation, special miracles, notable power, and even less extraordinary gifting like boldness and courage. Often this empowerment was described as being “filled [pimplēmi] with the Spirit,” where the Spirit is the content of the filling.
It was by means of this extraordinary Spirit filling that key individuals prophesied. And in the same way, by means of this unique Spirit filling  the disciples spoke in tongues (Acts 2:4), the disciples were given extraordinary boldness to speak the Word of God (Acts 4:31), and Paul was equipped for his apostolic work (Acts 9:17). This kind of filling and gifting is unique and ought not be something we should expect today.
But this is also true of the more ordinary Spirit filling (plērēs/plēroō), where this language is used to describe the Spirit’s work in every believer’s life to sanctify him through his Word and equip him for service. For example, by means of this ordinary Spirit filling, Jesus was given strength to resist temptation (Lk 4:1–2), the first deacons were equipped to serve (Acts 6:3), and Stephen was given courage in the face of death (Acts 7:55).
Furthermore, the New Testament uses several terms to describe gifts that are given by the Spirit of God to believers:

pneumatikon—“spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 12:1)
charisma—“grace gifts” (1 Cor 12:4; 1 Pt 4:10)
diakonia—“service” (1 Cor 12:5; 1 Pt 4:10)
energema—“activity” (1 Cor 12:6)
doma—“gift” (Eph 4:8)
merismos—“distributed gifts” (Heb 2:4)
phanerosis—“manifestation” (1 Cor 12:7)

As can be seen in the representative Scripture references listed above, many of these terms are clearly used to describe the same thing. First Corinthians 12 in particular makes this clear, where the same concept is called “spiritual gifts” (12:1), “grace gifts” (12:4), “service” (12:5), “activities” (12:6), and “manifestation” (12:7). Similarly, 1 Peter 4:10 uses both “grace gifts” and “service” to describe the same thing.
First Corinthians 12 explains that these gifts are given “through the Spirit” (v. 8) or “by the one Spirit” (v. 9), and that they are “the manifestation of the Spirit” (v. 7). Since these passages explicitly ascribe the giving of these gifts to the Holy Spirit, other passages that discuss such gifts may also safely be attributed to a work of the Holy Spirit.
Clearly 1 Corinthians 12 is a key passage that helps us to understand the nature of these gifts. Several important points can be drawn out concerning gifts of the Spirit. First, Paul emphasizes their variety (vv 4, 5, 6). The Greek word translated “varieties” in each of those cases is the word from which we get our English word, “diversity.” And the word translated “apportions” in verse 11 is the verb form of the same word translated “varieties” earlier.
Second, Paul emphasizes that the Spirit gives such gifts to every believer: “to each” (v 7); “to one,” “to another” (v 8); “to another” (v 9), “to another,” “to another” (v 10); “to each one individually” (v 11). This is also clear through the rest of the chapter as he emphasizes the important function of every member of the body, each of whom has been gifted.
Third, both the use of the term diakonia (“service”) as a term for such gifting and the whole point of Paul’s discourse in this passage make clear the purpose of Spirit gifting: service within the body of Christ. He says directly in verse 7, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” Thus, we could define these gifts are Spirit-given abilities “given for service within the ministry and outreach of the local church,”1 including miraculous gifts (e.g. prophecy, miracles, healing, and tongues) and non-miraculous gifts, which Stitzinger describes as abilities that “operate within the natural realm of order even though God’s hand of providence is involved”2 (e.g. evangelism, teaching, mercy, administration, etc.).
How Does the Spirit Give These Gifts?
Now most cessationists claim that only so-called “miraculous” gifts have ceased, but other gifts of the Spirit continue, such as teaching, hospitality, evangelism, etc. I believe that is a perfectly acceptable position considering the purpose of the gifts. However, I will make a brief case here for why I believe all gifts supernaturally given by the Spirit have ceased in this age, though he continues to gift his people providential through natural means.
This is admittedly a minority position, even among cessationists. Most who hold to a cessationist view limit the cessation of gifts only to what they describe as “miraculous sign gifts”—prophecy, healing, tongues, etc. The argument, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that these gifts were provisional in nature, given temporarily to unique individuals like prophets and apostles at key transitional periods in the progress of God’s redemptive plan. Their purpose was to bring God’s people and purposes into order during times when new revelation was necessary and “epochally significant”3 events were happening in history.
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Written by James R. Wood |
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
If we assume that being winsome will win a favorable hearing, then heated opposition will tempt us to doubt Christian moral teaching. Most people are not ready to be perceived as unloving, hateful, and a menace to society. But that is what, in many circles, publicly affirming traditional moral teaching will get you.

It looked like an April’s Fools’ joke. It had to be. On April 1 a Princeton University student reported in a student newspaper that a social club recently changed its visitors’ policy as a result of a particular lunch guest. That guest was Robert George, distinguished Princeton professor, prominent conservative, close friend and traveling debate-partner of Cornel West, who is also a top-tier gentleman. His mere presence, it was claimed, “caught [members] off guard,” jeopardized the “inclusive environment” of the group, and deeply upset a constituency within the club.
We are left to read between the lines to discern what about Prof. George was so upsetting for these students. One would have to suppose it wasn’t his friendship with Prof. West or his polite demeanor. The narrator of these events suggests the reason relates to Prof. George’s criticisms of “left-wing ideological convictions.” Thus, this “inclusive” space was compelled to exclude a distinguished guest due to his conservative views.
This whole affair serves as a symbolic reminder of “negative world” realities. In contemporary North America, publicly affirming traditional Christian moral teachings that would have been mostly innocuous just 15 years ago is now likely to get you labeled as antisocial, as a threat to the general welfare. According to our post-Christian neighbors, such persons must be pushed to the periphery of polite society. Their views are deemed not only bigoted and backwards, but unsafe. You can be as respectable, kind, and winsome as Robert George, and you will still be declared off-limits.
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Churches cannot have it both ways. They cannot simultaneously wash their hands of all responsibility, piling it onto their pastor and/or elders, whilst at the same time having strong and vociferous views about whatever they do.

One of the many terrific things I have discovered since being a pastor is that everything one does is probably wrong. Nothing quite brings it to the fore more than something-must-be-done syndrome. SMBD is usually the refrain you hear when somebody has identified and issue, and it may well be a real and live issue, but doesn’t want to do anything about it themselves. What SMBD typically means is the pastor should be called in to do the something that nobody else wants to do.
A fair question at this point might be, why exactly don’t you want to do anything? The answer is usually pretty obvious. Either the conversation required is a particularly awkward, and therefore unpleasant one, and nobody wants to have that sort of conversation. Otherwise, though someone might be willing to have that awkward conversation—for the sake of the gospel, no doubt—they suspect that everyone else, who see the issue but are unwilling to address it themselves, will have lots of opinions on the particular solution one lands upon. Whilst someone might be willing to have the immediate conversation, awkward as it may be, they are not prepared to face the inevitable pile on that will ensue afterwards as the world and their wife determine whatever you did about it was definitely the wrong thing to do.
For this reason, almost nobody—despite what your church covenant might say and people affirmed they were committed to doing when they become members of your church—puts their hand up to do anything. So, the assumption goes, the lot must fall to the elders, and usually the pastor for the stated reason that he has time though often the unstated reason that he’s the one that gets paid to put up with this nonsense.
So, the pastor goes and has the awkward conversation about whatever it might be and what ensues is totally predictable. I have variously been told that I was being heavy-handed by going and having a conversation with someone and, at the same time, slack and uncaring by having not had a conversation sooner. I have been told before that church discipline needs to happen but nobody, including the person saying it, is willing to vote to enact anything. I have been told that SMBD countless times but whatever something you happen to land on, it is definitely wrong and when you lay out all the possible options (even clearly wrong ones), none of the actual, possible options in front of us—ranging from doing nothing at all about serious sin right the way through to removal from membership and everything in between—all are deemed inappropriate whilst remaining adamant something must be done.
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I have been rebellious and sinful, absolutely, but I have been forgiven and adopted into God’s own family through Jesus Christ. Whatever I’m wearing, wherever I am, this is my identity. Whatever I’m wearing, whoever I’m with, I want to live this identity out faithfully in every word and every action.

I was sitting in a meeting this week when a thought randomly crossed my mind about how odd it would be if I had come in wearing the clothes I had on earlier that same day, when I went to swim laps at the pool. My goggles and togs didn’t raise any eyebrows at the pool, but they would have at the meeting. And if I had shown up at the pool with my meeting clothes on, that would have drawn a bit of attention, as well.
Clearly, there are appropriate things to wear at appropriate times. When I get this wrong and realise that I’m overdressed or underdressed or somehow looking out of place, I’m embarrassed (though I’ve never worn swim togs to a meeting). This is true of clothes, but it can also apply to the demeanour I put on in different settings. In a formal meeting, I try hard to remember to be formal in my manners and speech. I don’t shout in a setting like that. But I do shout at the basketball court, and I’m even louder on a roller-coaster. I happily make silly faces for small children, but I don’t make any faces like that for airport security officers. Clearly, there are appropriate ways to behave at appropriate times. When I get this wrong and realise that I’ve acted or spoken in ways that do not fit the circumstance I’m in, I’m embarrassed.
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In prayer the Spirit perfects our requests, petitions, and praises and brings them to the Son, who in his authority as the righteous Son of God has access to the throne of the Father, where he makes our prayers his own.

Prayer is an essential means by which we can commune (fellowship) with God—and not just God as an abstract being, but God as a personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each member of the Trinity gives himself to us in the work of prayer. Indeed, prayer wouldn’t even be possible if not for the Trinity.
Theologian Carl Trueman writes,
The New Testament makes it quite clear that the human act of prayer is intimately connected to the trinitarian actions of God and is in fact enfolded and subsumed within that larger divine action.[1]
We wouldn’t even pray at all if it were not for the Spirit.
Thus, in Romans 8:26 Paul declares that the Spirit intercedes for believers in their weakness, when they do not know what they should pray for. Even more fundamentally, we wouldn’t even pray at all if it were not for the Spirit. Prayer is a discourse not simply between us as creatures and God as our creator. Prayer is a discourse between us as children and God as Father. And we would not be able to recognize God as our Father if it were not for the Spirit:
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:15–16).
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In a world marked by coddling and canceling, let’s call up the next generation. The gospel is true. God is real. The church that reaches the next generation will not be riddled with insecurity but will hold out, with confidence and humility, a serious faith.

Not long ago, I sat across from a pastor of a church known for its attractional (church growth) ministry philosophy. We discussed the methods common to seeker-sensitive megachurches in the 1990s and early 2000s—the attempt to find points of connection with the culture through sermon series based on popular movies or TV shows, the edginess of starting a service with a secular song to demonstrate cultural IQ (and how rocking the worship band was!), and the strict policing of language that could come across too “churchy” or off-putting to the newcomer.
Many of these well-intentioned efforts were built on showing how “relevant” or “in touch” the church was with the world around it. Today, these methods are cringeworthy. Young people who visit a church expect to experience, well, whatever church is. The strangeness is the appeal. Now that fewer people have any family background in church, no one hears a worship band cover an Imagine Dragons song and thinks, “Wow! This isn’t my Grandma’s church!”—in part because Grandma is in her 60s and never darkened the door either.
Young Churchgoers Today
Listen to Gen Z churchgoers today and you’ll hear conversations about powerful worship songs that facilitate an experience with God, about the realness of the preacher who just “tells it like it is” from the Bible, and about the beauty of church architecture and older traditions and recitations.
When young people accept the invitation to visit a church, they’ve already committed to experiencing something unusual. Attempts at being overly accommodating or making the church seem “cool” come off as desperate and insecure. If your ministry is seeker-sensitive and attractional today, remember that the churchiness of church is a draw, not a turnoff.
Unfortunately, many pastors have yet to figure this out. Too many churches still think the way to reach young people is to replicate the entertainment you can get anywhere else, or to lean into the social activism you find at the local university, or to offer the practical advice a podcaster delivers better.
Serious Faith
Young people are swimming in pools of superficiality, with torrents of information flooding through their magical devices. Adrift in a sea without navigation, in a world where moral strictures have been blown up in the name of freedom, many long for paths of formation, growth, and maturity.
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Injustice can consume us; it can corrode us, our character, our trust, our very soul. It can dominate our thinking. It can sabotage our ability to trust God. And so in his kindness God offers more than binding up our hurt. He offers to take that awful pain, that deep injustice, and use it for good. Sin and Satan will not have the last word.There was an item on the news this week here in Ireland about a man charged with almost 100 counts of historic sexual offences. He was due to stand trial on Monday, but was killed in a car crash on Sunday. He smashed into a tree, no other vehicle was involved and the suspicion is, in light of the coming trial, that it was deliberate.
Hundreds of hours have been put into investigating the charges, preparing evidence, interviewing the witnesses. All that has ground to a halt. And far more significant is the emotional pain and anguish of victims reliving all the horrors of their past with the hope of some sort of justice and closure—all of that has been ripped from them, and the past left like an open wound.
News reports said that “as the victims learned of [his] death…they were distraught and angry he would not face justice.”
That’s understandable, it just doesn’t seem fair does it? It seems like an easy way out—if that is what he intended. And if it isn’t what he intended, it still seems that he got off easy, doesn’t it?
There is something hardwired deep inside us that longs for justice—as if the compass bearing of our hearts is configured to point to the true north of ultimate justice.
I don’t know anything about this case, but I do know many are in similar situations. They have suffered deep injustices; the people who perpetrated them have got off scot-free. Maybe the guilty are still alive, maybe they have been laid in the grave, but in either case they haven’t had to answer for what they did, and their escape taunts their victims. It seems grotesque—a double pain and insult.
Does the Bible offer any help?
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