Part 1 Rediscovering the Three Great Commissions for a Post-End Times Kingdom Agenda

The people of God all over the word are at an inflexion point: "What is the next great move of God". I offer you the three fold agenda for a multi-generational roadmap ahead. It is the end of the "end times"....now what? Major changes ahead and we the Church must rediscover God's agenda to plan for the long term future.

This is the first in a series I want to explore on the direction of the church for the years ahead. It is always popular in church to hear preaching about "the signs of the times" as a predictor for "The Coming of Christ".

Back in the 1970's we the Boomer generation really believed we were the "end time" generation. All the signs pointed to it. And then life and history went on and we are delighted to be grandparents and wonder "how did 50 years go by so quickly and what ever happened to the rapture and the end times"?

So dedicate this series to the next generation who will also face 50 years going by but into a far worse future than the last 50 years of excitement and technology growth. Most of what was built in the world whether corporations, governments or economies or money...were built on sand and are even now in a process of collapse. And how do we rebuild the "waste places of the earth" as God's dominion?

But first I must lay the foundation to get vision for the future....the long term future.

There is a foundational truth that must govern all our thinking about human purpose, institutional life, and the ordering of society: God is the sovereign Owner of everything that exists. This is not a peripheral doctrine relegated to the margins of theological reflection; it is the bedrock axiom upon which the entire biblical worldview is constructed.

Before we can rightly understand what we are to do in this world, we must first establish with clarity and conviction who owns this world and what is His agenda for His creation.

The Psalmist declares with ringing clarity in Psalm 24:1, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."

Here is divine ownership stated in its most comprehensive form. Every grain of sand, every ocean depth, every mountain peak, every human heartbeat all of it belongs unreservedly to the Lord God Almighty. He did not merely create the world and then step back as a watchmaker who winds a clock and departs. He remains, in the fullest and most active sense, its Owner, its Sustainer, and its Governor.

Yet divine sovereignty does not negate human responsibility: it defines it. Herein lies the magnificent challenge that Psalm 115:16 opens before us:

"The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord's: but the earth hath he given to the children of men."
The sovereign God who owns the earth has, in an act of extraordinary grace and calculated purpose, entrusted it to humanity. This is not ownership transferred but stewardship delegated. God retains the title deed while assigning to His image-bearers the responsibility of tenancy. We are not independent proprietors; we are commissioned viceroys.

This tension of God's absolute ownership and sovereignty held together with humanity's delegated authority, is not a theological contradiction to be resolved but a divine design to be embraced. It means that God, as the exclusive Owner, holds the singular and unchallengeable right to set the agenda for His creation. We are not free to determine the terms of our tenancy. We do not negotiate the conditions of our commission. We receive our mandate from the One to whom the earth belongs.

What, then, is God's agenda for His creation and for those He has entrusted with it? Scripture reveals that God has organized His redemptive and creational purposes around three great commissions, each assigned to a divinely ordained institution, each bearing the authority of the Sovereign Himself. These are not competing mandates but complementary ones a threefold cord of divine purpose that, when braided together, reflects the comprehensive glory of God over every dimension of human life. In what follows, we shall examine each commission in turn:

1) The Dominion Commission - Genesis 1:26 "have dominion and subdue the earth"
For which God has ordained all government authority and nations

2) The Fruitfulness Commission Genesis 1:28 "be fruitful and multiply"
For which God had ordained marriage and the family,

3) The Discipleship Commission Matthew 28:19 "Go into all the world and make disicples"
For which God has ordained the Church.

A The Dominion Commission

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." — Genesis 1:26

The word "dominion" in the Hebrew "radah" carries the sense of active governance, management, and responsible oversight. It is royal language. God is here installing humanity as His vice-regent over the created order, granting to men and women a share in His own kingly authority over the earth. This is not a license for exploitation; it is a call to wise and faithful stewardship.

The dominion mandate flows directly from the Imago Dei — the image of God. Because we bear the image of the King, we are appointed to represent His kingly rule upon the earth.

This Dominion Commission is fundamentally a civic and creational vocation. It encompasses all those activities by which humanity orders, governs, develops, and preserves the physical world: agriculture, science, architecture, jurisprudence, the arts, commerce, and the governance of peoples.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, articulates the abiding significance of this civic dimension when he declares that the governing authorities are "ordained of God" and that rulers are "God's ministers" (Romans 13:1, 4). Human government, properly understood, is not a merely secular or neutral enterprise; it is a divine institution commissioned to carry forward the Dominion Mandate by establishing justice, maintaining order, and preserving the conditions under which human flourishing — and the proclamation of the Gospel can occur.

It is deeply significant that this commission comes first in canonical order. It is the broadest and most foundational of the three. Every nation, every government, every civic structure — whether or not those in power acknowledge it — exists within the framework of God's creational sovereignty. The nations do not exist merely by their own will or the force of history; they exist because God, in His providence, has ordered the boundaries of their habitation (Acts 17:26).

Every law code, every system of justice, every institution that restrains wickedness and promotes human welfare is, in some sense, an echo of the Dominion Commission an acknowledgment, however dimly perceived, that the earth is the Lord's and must be ordered according to His purposes.

We must recover, in our time, a robust theology of civic engagement. Too often the people of God have retreated from the public square, ceding the governance of nations to those with no reference point beyond human wisdom and earthly power. But the Dominion Commission is not suspended in the age of grace; it is redeemed and reoriented by it. When believers engage faithfully in civic life , when we vote, advocate for justice, serve in public office, speak truth to power, and labor for the common good, we are not departing from our spiritual calling; we are fulfilling one dimension of God's comprehensive agenda for His creation. We do so, as those who know the Owner, with humility, wisdom, and an ultimate accountability that secular governance does not possess.

B. The Fruitfulness Commission: Marriage, Family, and Children Genesis 1:28 — Fruitfulness as Sacred Vocation

The Dominion Commission does not stand alone. Immediately following God's declaration of humanity's creational mandate, we encounter the second great commission, which provides the essential human infrastructure through which the first is to be carried out:
"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
— Genesis 1:28

Notice the deliberate sequence: God first creates male and female together (v. 27), then He blesses them together, and then He commissions them together. The Fruitfulness Commission — "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" — is not given to isolated individuals but to a married pair. Its fulfillment requires the covenant union of a man and a woman. Marriage is thus not a human invention that God subsequently approved; it is a divine institution that God deliberately established as the vessel through which His creational purposes would advance. The family, flowing from the marriage covenant, is God's chosen mechanism for filling the earth with His image-bearers.

The significance of this cannot be overstated in our contemporary cultural moment. We live in an era that has systematically deconstructed the institution of marriage, redefined family along lines of therapeutic preference, and severed the essential connection between sexuality, covenant, and procreation. But the Fruitfulness Commission reminds us that these are not merely sociological questions or matters of personal lifestyle; they are theological ones. Marriage and family are not human institutions that God merely sanctioned — they are divine institutions that God Himself ordained as instruments of His creational and redemptive agenda.

When Jesus is challenged about divorce in Matthew 19, He does not appeal to Mosaic legislation as the ultimate standard; He reaches back to creation itself:

"Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?" (Matthew 19:4-5).

Our Lord is making a stunning claim: the pattern of marriage established in Genesis is not a cultural artefact of a patriarchal age; it is the creational design of God Himself, and therefore normative across all times and cultures. What God joined together in the garden, no social revolution has the authority to put asunder.

The Apostle Paul deepens this understanding magnificently in Ephesians 5, where he reveals that the marriage covenant between a husband and wife is not merely a social contract but a profound theological mystery:

"This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32).
The husband's sacrificial love for his wife mirrors Christ's self-giving love for the Church; the wife's willing submission to her husband reflects the Church's joyful submission to Christ. Every Christian marriage, therefore, is a living parable of the Gospel, enacted in daily covenant fidelity before a watching world.

The implications for pastoral ministry are profound. When we teach marriage faithfully, when we counsel couples through difficulty, when we celebrate the birth of children as covenant blessings, when we structure our churches to support and strengthen families, we are not engaged in mere social conservatism. We are cooperating with the Fruitfulness Commission, advancing the agenda of a Sovereign God who intends to fill His earth with image-bearers who know and reflect His glory.

The home is not a retreat from God's agenda; it is one of His primary mission fields. Parents who raise their children in "the nurture and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4) are discipling the next generation of those who will in turn fulfill all three commissions. The family is, in this sense, the nursery of civilization and the seedbed of the Kingdom.

C. The Discipleship Commission: The Church and the Gospel to All Nations
Matthew 28:19-20

The third commission is, in one sense, the crown and capstone of the other two. It arises from the gravest crisis in creation's history — the Fall — and addresses what neither governments nor families can ultimately provide: the reconciliation of sinful humanity to a holy God. The Discipleship Commission, given by the risen Lord Jesus Christ on a Galilean hillside, is the mandate that defines the Church's unique and irreplaceable vocation in the world:
"And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen."
— Matthew 28:18-20

Let us attend with care to the foundation upon which this commission rests. Before issuing the command to go, our Lord makes a declaration: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." This is no modest assertion. The risen Christ is claiming comprehensive sovereign authority over the entirety of creation over every government, every family, every nation, every spiritual power. And it is precisely because of this authority that we are to go. The Great Commission is grounded not in human confidence or institutional capacity but in the unlimited sovereignty of the One who sends us. He who owns the earth (Psalm 24:1) has delegated His authority to His Church for the proclamation of the Gospel.

The command itself — "teach all nations" — employs the Greek verb matheteusate, meaning to make disciples. This is not merely an instruction to evangelize in the sense of delivering information about salvation; it is a commission to form fully-orbed followers of Christ who are taught to observe "all things" He commanded.

Discipleship is comprehensive. It encompasses the mind, the will, the affections, the relationships, the civic life, the family life, the whole person in every dimension of existence. The Gospel is not a private transaction between the individual soul and God that leaves the rest of life untouched; it is a totalizing claim of a sovereign Lord upon every aspect of human existence.

Notice as well the geographic and ethnic comprehensiveness of the commission: "all nations." The Greek word is "ethne" — every people group, every cultural identity, every linguistic community across the face of the earth. This commission will not be completed until the redeemed from every tribe and tongue and people and nation have been gathered into the family of God (Revelation 7:9).

The Church exists not for itself, not for its own comfort or cultural preservation, but as the sent community of God, bearing the life-giving word of reconciliation to a world lost in sin and darkness.

The Discipleship Commission is not given to governments, and it is not given to families, though governments can protect the conditions in which it is carried out, and families can be its primary context of initial formation. It is given specifically to the Church, to the community of those who have themselves been discipled by Christ and empowered by His Spirit. This is the Church's unique institutional vocation, the mandate that no other human institution can fulfill and that the Church dare not surrender or subcontract. We may partner with governments to promote justice. We may celebrate families as the seedbed of faith. But the proclamation and teaching of the Gospel, the making of disciples, is the Church's irreducible, non-negotiable commission.

It is worth pausing to note the extraordinary promise that attaches to this commission: "lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The commission that seems most humanly impossible to reach every nation with the Gospel of a crucified and risen Saviour is accompanied by the promise of the omnipresent Lord Himself. The Church does not go alone. She goes in the company of the One who possesses all authority in heaven and on earth. This is not a commission that outstrips the resources available to those who fulfill it; it is undergirded by the very power and presence of God.

Implications to be explored....

The Church has been doing a wonderful job for hundreds of years in fulfilling the proclamation of the Gospel message.

But now we live in the digital, internet age when most of humanity is connected and information as to the message of the Gospel is freely available. But it is time for moving the agenda of the Kingdom of God forward.

I want to in subsequent blogs in this series explore ideas....

We need to move from proclamation preaching to discipleship making. That means getting out of the mindset that after we have preaches in all the world then that is it, Jesus comes and we all go home, work finished.

We need new strategies for community that leads to discipling and not just conversion.

We need to have an agenda for the family and marriage that goes beyond counselling and teaching. We need to challenge the whole attack on the stability and growth of the family. Why are young people marrying so late. Why so few children. Why so difficult to own a home? What about our children? Who is influencing and discipling them? Why is the middle class family dying out?

Dominion and governance? Why are corporations and government growing and families are not? Why do corporations get tax privileges that families don't. Why is our monetary system built on debt and dependency. Why is capital accumulated at the top and impoverishment at the bottom?

These are the challenging issues that lie ahead in a changing world that the Church needs to confront. Because it is our unchanging foundational 3 Commissions that the Lord has given us and it is time to expand our borders and our ministry.

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