Have you ever discussed a case in your college ethics class where 5 people are tied to the railroad tracks with a runaway train fast approaching? You are in charge of the switch at a fork in the tracks that changes the tracks and thus the path of the train. If you don’t change the path, the people will die. If you do change them, there is one person tied to the second track who will die. It usually comes down to how you justify saving the 5 people on the first track by rerouting its path and thereby killing the one person on the second track.

Well, in a challenging chapter from Let the Nations Be Glad, John Piper uses an interesting ethical case of his own to show that the gospel turns worldly notions of love and greater good on their heads. The challenging part of the message is that many believers today operate with false notions of God’s love and are astonished to learn that his purposes to glorify himself in missions might not include saving the five for the one either.

Piper points to two sinking ocean liners with hundreds of people on there who cannot swim. You are the head of a rescue team that comes upon the first boat to find all of its passengers hopelessly scrambling to save their lives . You engage your rescue boat’s crew to save as many as possible. Then you are confronted with the fact that there is another ship some distance away and that the passengers there are in the same situation as these people except no one to rescue them. What do you do? What is the most loving thing to do? Piper argues that in the end it is very likely that you would keep the team where it was in order to maximize the time and energy you would lose in getting over there because in the end saved lives are saved lives. Therefore you would not save any from the second boat.

Piper argues that what we discover from Scripture is that God in fact does leave the first ship to save some from the second. This difficult truth reflects what is at the heart of God’s call upon the life of every missionary, to go to “all the nations.” A missionary is essentially sent out to leave the place of great harvest and easier labor (a reached people) to go and reap a harvest from a place with more difficult ground and with likely fewer results (an unreached people). God’s heart for his people to be ransomed from every tongue, tribe and nation (Rev 7:9) means that his priority is on the spread of his gospel to all the peoples (or people groups) of the world and not on the most individuals saved. I found this to be tough to understand at first but essential in our understanding of God and his call on our lives to go to “all nations” (Mat 28:19).

I want to finish this post by setting a challenge:

To those who are wrestling with the call to missions in their lives - will you consider that the Lord might be calling you to minister in another place around the world where faithful ministry means 50 converts in your lifetime versus the potentially greater impact that you would have as a minister here

OR

To those who are confident with the call to missions in their lives - will you consider that the Lord might be calling you to minister to a people who have never heard the gospel before and do not have the gospel or the Bible even in their heart language though you might have a greater harvest in a different place overseas?

This is a challenge indeed. ….all for the glory of God in the face of Christ to be displayed through the power of the Spirit among all the peoples of the earth!!! “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” Ps 96:3

-Nick Miersma for the Missions Team
(Excerpts taken from Let the Nations Be Glad, the chapter entitled, “Supremacy of God among ‘All the Nations’”)