God's Purpose: Praise From All Nations, (#1): The Ages of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, Moses & David

"God's Purpose: Praise from All Nations" is part one of a three part sermon series on God's intention to bless all nations and peoples of the earth as the background for the church's call to world evangelism or missions. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has had a purpose for blessing all of His creation, and all mankind—the height of His creation—for His glory. Through all past dispensations, in this current dispensation, and in the coming dispensations, He has been and continues to work His plan for that end. The disciple-making church of Jesus Christ fits within a larger background.

Before the Fall God commanded Adam and Eve to fill the earth with a righteous people for His praise (Genesis 1:26-28). From the creation of the world God had a purpose to fill the world with His holy image-bearers, holy men, for His glory and for their inestimable blessedness. Immediately after the Fall, God Himself—the preincarnate Son, who would Himself enter humanity as the Savior—preached the gospel to the entire human race at the time—Adam and Eve—allowing, after the Fall, every living man to hear the good news about salvation through Jesus Christ (Genesis 3:15).

Between the time of Adam and Eve and the time of the Flood, the gospel was available worldwide. The extremely long lifespans of Adam and his descendants means that, if there are no gaps in the Genesis genealogy, the life of Adam’s son Seth overlapped with Noah’s life for 34 years; if there are minor gaps in the genealogy, there would still be only a small number of generations that passed away between Adam and the Flood. Jude 14 records the bold preaching of Enoch in this period. Noah himself was “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). People everywhere would have heard about the ark that may have taken him 120 years (Genesis 6:3) to build and which cost him the constant mockery and derision of the world and almost certainly exhausted his life’s savings and all that his family had saved up to that time; the Ark itself picturing the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation that is in Him. The Gospel was available to all the fallen sons of Adam in the pre-Flood world!

After the Flood, Noah knew the gospel and passed it on to his children. Immediately after coming off the ark Noah offered sacrifice, a sign of his faith in the sacrifice of the coming Messiah to save him from sin (Genesis 8:20ff.), and God blessed the entire world through that sacrificial offering which pictured the coming work of Christ, promising that He would not destroy the world again with a Flood.

Immediately after the judgment at Babel (Genesis 11) Moses recordsthe opening verses of Genesis 12:

1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

Galatians 3:8 explains:

And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.

The promises made to Abraham began to be fulfilled as God called Israel to Himself, redeemed Israel from Egypt, and brought His redeemed people into the Promised Land. The word would have gotten around about the plagues in Egypt, Israel’s salvation from the hand of the most powerful nation on the earth at the time, the crossing of the Red Sea, the drying up of the Jordan, the sun standing still, etc.

Consider where Jehovah put the nation of Israel. He put His nation right where Asia, Africa, and Europe come together, right where all the trade routes through that area would need to go, the best possible place on the face of the earth for Israel to be a light to all nations.

Israel regularly sang about God’s purpose for bringing all nations whom He made to Himself:

1 O praise the LORD, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people. 2 For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the LORD endureth for ever. Praise ye the LORD. (Psalm 117)

Israel’s psalms are full of the evangelistic purpose of Jehovah to reach all the nations, to bring them all to submission to and faith in the crucified and risen Messiah and through the Messiah to be saved by Jehovah (Psalm 2; 22; 72). Old Testament Israel longed for and sang about this purpose of God for all nations, the Lord Jesus sang these inspired, infallible prayers to the Father, and psalm-singing churches today continue to sing to the Father the inspired missionary songs that the Savior of the world sang Himself, understanding the psalms better now than was possible in the Mosaic dispensation, in light of Christ’s having already come.

The dispersion of Israel to all nations of the earth also contributed to spreading the gospel.

Don't forget parts 2-3!