To the Ends of the Earth

Today's Scripture

Revelation 7:9-10 — "After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'"

Genesis 12:3 — "...and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

Matthew 24:14 — "And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come."

The Big Idea

The Bible lets us do something no one else gets to do: read the last page of history first. It shows a crowd too big to count, from every nation and language, worshiping the Lamb. The missionary story — heroes, failures, and all — is the story of that promise being kept. The task is unfinished. The outcome is not in doubt, because it was paid for at the cross.

Reflection

Reading the last page first

Some people flip to the last chapter of a mystery novel before they start. It feels like cheating. But in Revelation 7, God hands the whole church the last page on purpose: "a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Revelation 7:9). Notice what John does not say. Not "a multitude, if things go well." He has seen it. It is as fixed as a sunrise.

And it is the oldest promise in the book. Four thousand years ago God told one childless man, "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). Isaiah widened the lens: "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6). Jesus set the schedule: "this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). One promise, running through the whole Bible like a fuse.

Adoniram Judson staked his life on it. America's first foreign missionary spent six years in Burma before a single person believed, then nearly two years in a death-row prison. Asked whether the mission had any hope, he answered:

"The future is as bright as the promises of God." — Adoniram Judson, quoted in The Life of Adoniram Judson

Not as bright as the current statistics. As bright as the promises. By the numbers, Judson's mission was a disaster for a decade — no converts, two dead children, a prison cell. By the promises, it was simply early. Today Myanmar has millions of Christians, and Judson's Burmese Bible is still in use. He read the last page first, and it held.

That is what hope means in this story. Not optimism — optimism reads the trend lines. Hope reads the promises.

What ten days have taught us

Look back down the road we have walked. A cobbler prayed over a homemade map and expected great things from God. Five college students made a world-sized decision under a haystack. Hudson Taylor put on Chinese dress and headed inland. Livingstone opened a continent — and colonial powers marched in behind him. Africans took the translated Bible and built the largest Christian continent on earth. Korea caught fire from books. Five graves in Ecuador became a church. The movement sinned, confessed, and was outgrown by its own converts, until the typical Christian became an African woman.

What holds that tangled story together? Philippians 1:6 — "he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." Paul wrote that about a little church in Philippi, but it is God's signature habit: he finishes what he starts. The work was carried by flawed messengers, opposed by empires, and tangled with human pride at nearly every step — and the promise kept moving anyway. This story's hero was never Carey or Taylor. It was the God who began the good work.

That should free us from two opposite mistakes. We do not have to inflate the missionaries into flawless saints, because the outcome never rested on their goodness. And we do not have to despair over their failures, because the outcome never rested on those either.

Jonathan Edwards, whose writings helped light the whole movement, made a resolution as a young man that the missionaries kept without ever reading it:

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." — Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions

That is the only sane response to a promise this certain. Not anxiety. Wholeheartedness.

The task that remains

But the last page has not arrived yet, and the gap is real. A "people group" is a community with its own language and culture — the "every tribe and language" of Revelation 7, counted one by one. Roughly 7,000 of them — by some counts, three billion people — still have little or no access to the gospel. "No access" does not mean they heard and said no. It means there is no church down any street they will ever walk, no Bible in the language they dream in, no believing friend to ask. The full Bible exists in about 700 languages; thousands of languages still wait.

Paul described the ambition that closes such gaps: "I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named... 'Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand'" (Romans 15:20-21). Two thousand years later, that ambition has not expired.

So whose job is the remainder? Charles Spurgeon refused to let the question land on someone else:

"Every Christian here is either a missionary or an impostor." — Charles Spurgeon, "A Sermon and a Reminiscence"

An impostor is someone pretending to be what they are not. Spurgeon's point is not that everyone must move overseas. It is that no one gets to receive this message and treat it as a private possession. Most of us are senders, pray-ers, givers, welcomers of international neighbors — but no one is a spectator.

And the cost is still the cost. Amy Carmichael, who spent fifty-five years in India rescuing children from temple slavery, asked the uncomfortable question in a poem:

"Hast thou no scar?... Can he have followed far who has no wound nor scar?" — Amy Carmichael, Toward Jerusalem

C.T. Studd, a celebrity athlete who walked away from cricket fame and a fortune to serve in China, India, and Africa, explained the math that made it reasonable:

"If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him." — C.T. Studd

Before you call that fanaticism, reread the sentence. It is just logic. If Jesus is God, and if he died for me — then what, exactly, would count as giving too much back? Jesus attached his own presence to the assignment: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations... And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:18-20). The command comes with company. That is why ordinary plodders could do it for two centuries.

The sacrifice already made

Here is the strangest thing the great missionaries said about their costly lives: they refused to call them costly. Near the end of his life, Livingstone — who buried his wife in Africa and died there himself — told a Cambridge audience:

"I never made a sacrifice. We ought not to talk of 'sacrifice' when we remember the great sacrifice which He made who left His Father's throne on high to give Himself for us." — David Livingstone, address at Cambridge, 1857

That is the gospel at the bottom of the whole movement. The mission does not begin with our going; it begins with God's. The Son left home first, crossed the farthest distance — heaven to a manger to a cross — and paid for every person in Revelation's crowd. "You ransomed people for God from every tribe and language," the song says. Past tense. The multitude is not a sales target. It is a purchase being collected.

That also tells us where the story is finally headed — and it is not, ultimately, missions. John Piper put it in three sentences that have redirected a generation:

"Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't." — John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad!

Missions is temporary scaffolding. Worship is the building. The point of two centuries of boats and translations and graves was never activity for its own sake. It was to gather more voices for the song in Revelation 7:10 — "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!" One day the last language will learn that song, the scaffolding will come down, and the crowd no one can number will do forever what it was made for.

Until then, nothing offered to this work is wasted. N.T. Wright says of all labor done for the risen Lord:

"You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Every translated verse, every prayer for an unreached people, every dollar and casserole and airport goodbye gets folded into God's new world. As Paul promised: "be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58). The cobbler's map, the haystack, the five graves by the river — none of it was in vain. Neither is whatever part has your name on it. The promise will not fail, because the Lamb has already been slain — and the Lamb gets what he paid for.

Going Deeper

Write Revelation 7:9 on a card or a phone note where you will see it this week. Then choose one people group or country from these ten days — the Waodani, North Korea, an unreached group you look up tonight — and adopt it for seven days of one-sentence prayers. Before you close this plan, answer Spurgeon's challenge honestly in writing: one line, beginning "My part in this story right now is..." Small is fine. Spectator is not.