It’s easy to look back to the resurrection on Easter Sunday and say how marvelous it is that Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago, and then go home to your dinner and leave it at that. But if Jesus rose, and if He is the Lord that His resurrection declares Him to be, this is the Lord who tells you to go into the world and to tell others that He is risen from the dead.
Furthermore, Jesus doesn’t make the Great Commission vague, because He tells us how to do it. First, he tells us that we are to make disciples of all nations. The New English Bible says that we are to make all nations Christ’s disciples; and that’s right, because it points to that moment of personal response to Him who is the Savior. It’s not our disciples that we go to make. We don’t go to make people Presbyterians or Baptists or Methodists; we go to make them Christians as Christ Himself takes the message to their hearts. And we do that by preaching the Christ of the Scriptures, the divine Christ who died for our sins, who rose again, who is coming again one day in glory. This is the Jesus that saves, no other Jesus. And this is our task.
Second, we are to baptize them in the name of the triune God, in that of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; in other words, to be united to the Lord Jesus Christ is to be united to God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit as well. It’s to be identified with each person of the Godhead.
Moreover, baptism is a public act. You see, it’s possible to become a Christian secretly. We’re told even in the Scriptures of those who became Christians secretly but didn’t tell others for one fear or another. One wonders whether you can continue that indefinitely. At some point or another either the secrecy kills the testimony or the testimony overcomes the secrecy. It’s one or the other, but there are times when we believe and do that secretly. But you cannot baptize secretly. Baptism is a public act. It takes place in the church. It’s a declaration before others that you are now united to the Lord Jesus Christ in saving faith. So as we go with this Gospel message, we do not go with an individualized message that says you can be saved and have no relationship with other Christian people. What we’re instructed to do is not only to bring them to the Savior but to bring them into the Church of Jesus Christ as well.
And then the third thing follows upon that. We’re to teach them, as Jesus says, “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” What are these things? They are what we find in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament because Jesus is the one who has given them to us through His Spirit. That was true before His incarnation, and then at the time of His incarnation, he told the New Testament disciples that He was going to send the Holy Spirit to do the same thing to them, to give them a new corpus of writing. We turn both to the Old Testament and the New Testament and we find it to be a body of writing in which the things of the Lord Jesus Christ are recorded.
