The first man to throw out the bait to read this book was Dr. Terry J. Betts, Old Testament professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The bait was not disappointing.

Here’s what grabbed my attention: Wright proposes that God is always doing three things with His people (whether Israel or the church): electing to redeem, calling to obey, and then sending out to reach the world. My own version of this would be calling, commanding, and commissioning. This intrigued me because it wrapped up the grand narrative of the Bible into one story that explains why we have our Bibles and challenges how we do ministry.

When someone hears  the word “missions”, we mentally default to a selfless couple who set across the seas to reach people in far off tribes. But Wright contends that this falls way short of defining the full force of God’s ultimate mission. Although it’s perfectly legitimate to find passages of Scripture like Matthew 28:18-20 or Mark 16:15 to justify missions, Wright tells the reader to take three steps back and ask why does the Bible exist in the first place? Because God is missional. So instead of finding passages of Scripture that talk about mission, he contends that the Bible was written because God is a missional God. Missions were not made for the church; the church was made for missions. God’s heart is missional, and from this heart He produced His holy Word through men so that we could understand His mission not as beginning in Matthew 28, but in Genesis 12, not as being unique to the New Testament church, but being worked out through His people since the day of Abraham.

The parallels between God’s mission through Israel and through the church are staggeringly strong. God elected Israel, redeeming her from Egypt. Likewise, He has done the same for every believer in Christ today by redeeming him or her from their sin. God called Israel to obedience by giving her 613 laws, summarized into the Ten Commandments and condensed into the two greatest commandments, to love God and love one’s neighbor. Likewise, God has called the church to consistent obedience through the New Testament epistles, packed with ethical instructions for holy living. God sent Israel into a new land called the “Promised Land” that they would be a priesthood to the world, that through them the world would know that Yahweh is the one and true living God (Ex 19:6). Rahab the harlot, Ruth the Moabitess, Jonah’s fellow swashbuckling sailors, Nebuchadnezzar, and the magi from the East are just five examples of people who came to know Yahweh through the witness of Jews. Similarly, God has called His church to be a priesthood (1 Pet 2:9), through which others may come to know the Son of God who died for the sins of the world.

The most radical and challenging proposal of Wright comes from his first two chapters: “Searching for a Missional Hermeneutic” and “Shaping a Missional Hermeneutic.” In these chapters, Wright proposes that God’s mission came first, then came the Bible. Instead of seeing mission as a product of the Bible, we are to see the Bible as a product of mission, with Christ as its “hermeneutical matrix” (31). Quoting, Marc R. Spindler, Wright writes, “Missions today must, rather, be seen as arising from something fundamental, from the basic movement of God’s people toward the world” (37). Wright later adds, “The text in itself is a product of mission in action” (49). In short, Wright proposes a missional hermeneutic that culminates in Revelation 7:9-10:

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, saying, "Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

Christopher J. H. Wright. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006. 581 pp.