Imperishable Inheritance

Why devote so much time to defend­ing the impu­ta­tion of Christ’s right­eous­ness when there are so many unreached peo­ple groups and mil­lions of peo­ple who have no access to the Gospel? I will men­tion two things. One is that over the past twenty years of lead­ing a missions-mobilizing church I have seen with increas­ing clar­ity that teacher-based church plant­ing and not just friendship-based church plant­ing is cru­cial among peo­ples with no Chris­t­ian his­tory. In other words, doc­tri­nal instruc­tion becomes utterly cru­cial in plant­ing the church.

This is not sur­pris­ing, since embed­ded in the Great Com­mis­sion is the com­mand, ‘teach­ing them to observe all that I have com­manded you’ (Matthew 28:20), and since Paul planted the church in Eph­esus by rea­son­ing daily in the hall of Tyran­nus for two years, ‘so that all the res­i­dents of Asia heard the word of the Lord’ (Acts 19:10). In other words, it is more clear to me now that doing mis­sions with­out deep doc­tri­nal trans­fer through patient teach­ing will not only wreck on the vast reefs of igno­rance but will, at best, pro­duce weak and everde­pen­dent churches. There­fore, pas­tors who care about build­ing, send­ing, and going churches must give them­selves to build­ing send­ing bases that breed doctrinally-deep peo­ple who are not given to emo­tional depen­dency on fads but know how to feed them­selves on Christ-centered truth.

The sec­ond thing I would say about the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and mis­sions is that Paul devel­ops this doc­trine in the book of Romans in a way that shows it is absolutely uni­ver­sal in its rel­e­vance. It crosses every cul­ture. It is not a tribal con­cept. He does this by build­ing part of the doc­trine out of the con­nec­tion between Adam and Christ in Romans 5:12–21. For exam­ple, take only verse 19: ‘For as by the one man’s dis­obe­di­ence the many were appointed sin­ners, so by the one man’s obe­di­ence the many will be appointed right­eous.’ This, along with the whole con­text, shows that what Christ came to do in his obe­di­ence was uni­ver­sal in its scope and sig­nif­i­cance. It is not just for the pos­ter­ity of Abra­ham, but for the pos­ter­ity of Adam’namely, everyone.

The prob­lem Jesus came to solve was a prob­lem unleashed by the first man, lead­ing to con­dem­na­tion and cor­rup­tion for all peo­ple every­where in all cul­tures and all times. This is a stun­ning dis­cov­ery for many peo­ple. The diag­no­sis of what needs to be reme­died is the same in all cul­tures because it stems from Adam, the father of all cul­tures. There­fore the work of Christ to pro­vide a ‘free gift of right­eous­ness’ (Romans 5:17, ESV) to all who will ‘receive’ it is absolutely suf­fi­cient and nec­es­sary for every per­son in every cul­ture every­where in the world. And thus the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion becomes a war­rant for the uni­ver­sal claim of Chris­t­ian missions.
John Piper, Counted Right­eous in Christ: Should We Aban­don the Impu­ta­tion of Christ’s Right­eous­ness? (pgs. 32–33)