Scan the Plan, Stan

Want to avoid confusing contradictions in scripture? Make sure you read each part of the Bible, keeping in mind the whole.

The background starts in the beginning. Genesis 1-11 covers 2000 years in 11 chapters. Genesis 12-50 covers only 400 years in 39 chapters. Beginning in Gen 2, Adam and Eve were in innocence in the Garden of Eden. That age of innocence ended in failure with the fall into sin.

Next, in Gen 3-6, God dealt with the growing human race by leaving them to act according to conscience. But it got so bad that God wiped out the entire world except for Noah and started over with him and his family.

So in Gen 7-11 God dealt with humanity under a system of human government. Government failed to fulfill God’s plan and went totally in the opposite direction (Gen 10), so God came down in judgment, confused the languages and separated the nations.

So starting in Gen 12 God does something different again. He takes one individual (Abraham) and makes him a promise based on Abraham’s faith. God begins to fulfill that promise miraculously with the birth of Isaac. So now God begins a process of redemption that starts with one family, to redeem the whole human race.

By the time you reach the book of Exodus, that family has grown into a nation. God now deals with them according to the law through a sacrificial system. As you read the rest of the historical books of the OT, you see that nation fail under the priests (in the book of Judges), then under the kings (Kings and Chronicles) and finally under the prophets (the last 17 books of the Old Testament).

So when Christ arrives in the "fullness of time," at least five different ways of dispensing salvation have been tried (five “dispensations”) and each one ended in human failure. God’s answer is to take it upon himself to redeem mankind, and he does so when Christ comes. This begins the dispensation of grace.

Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise of a Jewish Messiah. So he first had to go to the Jews to offer them the kingdom. The four gospels record how they rejected both the kingdom and the king, and crucified him. God simply turned that into part of his plan, and inaugurated a “mystery,” which he explains to Paul as “the church age.” In the dispensation of the grace of God, the kingdom of God is spiritual, and the blessings of the new covenant are given to Gentiles without them having to fulfill any Jewish obligations.

Paul explains this in Romans 9-11 as God’s way of making the Jews jealous in order to draw them back to Christ. This will be successful, but not until the end of the church age, after the church (which is the body and bride of Christ) is raptured to be with him before the Second Coming.

Maranatha. Even so come, Lord Jesus.

Commander's Intent

A soldier's every move is predicated upon hours of forethought and planning. After the commander-in-chief approves the order of battle, a soldier will find his personal orders specifying the scheme of maneuver and field of fire. Each battalion is told what to do, what materiel to use, and how to set up supply lines to replace its munitions.

There's only one problem: no plan survives contact with the enemy because the enemy always gets a vote. Consider the variables: weather changes, a key military asset is destroyed after it is deployed. In short, the enemy is unpredictable. Churches fail like armies fail. They put their effort into creating plans that become useless once the enemy is engaged.

So in the 1980s the US Army reinvented its process by instituting a concept called Commander's Intent (CI). CI is one succinct, clear and concrete statement that appears at the top of every order. It specifies the plan's goal. It diagrams the end-game and gives the ultimate objective. It is not just the desired outcome, but the ordered one.

CI: Break the will of the insurgency in Anbar Province.

CI: Put Third Battalion in Saddam City to clear the neighborhood of insurgents so political leaders are secured.

The beautiful thing about knowing the CI is that it means your plans are never rendered obsolete by the unpredictable. You may lose the ability to execute the plan (involving the timing of men and materiel), but you never lose the responsibility of executing the Commander's Intent. So if there is just one soldier left in Saddam City, he'd better be doing something to protect the political leaders as they pass through it.

CI manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels of the army without requiring detailed instructions from the High Command. If you know the intention of the order, you are free to improvise to arrive at its fulfillment. If people know the intent, they can engineer their own solutions to accomplishing the task.

Boo-yah! That's why we have church buildings, Sunday School classes, and pass offering plates, even if some of the early churches did not. And this is why I get questions about discipleship like:
· Why doesn't Paul use the word discipleship in his epistles?
· Is the Matthew 18 Great Commission for the church today?
· Are we wrong to build entire ministries geared toward making disciples?
· Can we model our discipleship ministry after Jesus without violating any dispensational boundaries, or is Matthew 28:18-20 just for Jesus' Jewish apostles in their immediate post-resurrection ministry?
· Isn't discipleship more of a "Kingdom" (with a capital K) idea for the apostles, than a "mystery" idea for the church...yadda yadda?

The fact you are asking the question shows you missed it. Matt 28 (and this is not the only place) is the CI. Watch!

"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 always, even unto the end of the world. Amen." Matthew 28:19-20

What is the Commander's Intent? Not going. Going is only a plan. Why? Because it does not survive contact with the enemy.

Still don't agree? Then go. Going in itself accomplishes nothing except putting you in another place. So while that is part of the plan, it is not the CI. Neither is baptism. A lot of "churches" baptize as the centerpiece of their sacraments, but that doesn't even make someone a Christian.

Only when you "teach all nations" (make disciples of everyone, not just Jews but also Gentiles) are you fulfilling the Commander's Intent. The CI is discipleship. Then why doesn't Paul talk about discipleship in his epistles? Because Jesus is dealing with the descriptive, but Paul is talking about the doctrinal.

Four words in the Hebrew and four words in the Greek are all there is to describe discipleship. The descriptive approach will note that the word disciple is used proportionately almost as much in Acts as in the Gospels, but is not used after that. Don't get seduced into the Dark Side of the dispensationalist Force by believing the Great Commission was strictly a Kingdom (of heaven) approach.

Add-in the methodological because discipleship is the CI from Gen 1:28 on down. If Paul did not repudiate a concept (as being incompatible with "the mystery of the revelation of the gospel of the grace of yadda-yadda"), then it is still valid today. If you do not take that approach then you end up building a theology based on inference. The verses don't say what you say they say, but you infer certain things to be true so that it will all make sense to you. Things like two bodies (or two churches—Kingdom and Mystery), or yadda yadda.

The Commander's Intent is discipleship. That is why, in Acts, Paul and Barnabus set out for the regions beyond to "make disciples" of all nations. In the epistles, theology and methodology have not changed, but Paul now calls the disciples, saints. Why? Because they were a different audience! In Paul's epistles he is dialoguing in the Greek mindset. So Paul morphs Jewish rabbinical practice into a Gentile, biblical "in the church" principle.

Discipleship is now saintship, and that is the Commander's Intent. It is not so much that dispensations have changed, but the makeup of the church changed because of the dispensations. So we focus on saintship and build ministries focused on making saints. But Jesus mostly called that discipleship because that's what rabbis did. But that wasn't inconsistent with the original commission to multiply and replenish the earth with the goal of recovering dominion (CI).

Paul did not know Jesus after the flesh. That is why in the epistles he calls us Gentile disciples, "saints," instead of disciples. Hope this makes sense, because since Paul didn't need to reinvent the wheel, he knew we were smart enough to read the gospels for ourselves and be able to recognize a methodology (in Jesus) that did not conflict with his (Paul's) theological descriptiveness.

But maybe more than just theological descriptiveness, because Paul was dealing with Gentiles, and they had issues that the typical Jew did not. So besides the doctrinal descriptiveness, what Paul did was to wrap discipleship (sainthood) around the idea of the new/old man, putting on/off, and what I call "the vices in his verses" (Paul's several "vice lists"). This is how the CI is translated down into the actions of the individual soldier!

So in Matt 28 Great Commission terms, Paul's "going" (of which he did a lot, along with baptizing and teaching where he went) was in order to use evangelism as a tool to make disciple-saints and form them into churches. Making babies alone is not fulfilling fatherhood. So evangelism without discipleship is not really making saints.

All discipleship is, is making saints through spiritual parenting. That is the Commander's Intent, and it turns evangelism and discipleship into two sides of the same coin, just like repentance and faith, trust and obey, etc.

I asked a hyper-diaper one time, "So what part of the Great Commission do you not do? As far as I know, you are still baptizing (though some hypers do not), and yet you still say 'I doesn't believe in the Great Commission' because 'it is not for the church' and therefore, 'we [KCBT-ers] are not taking a stand on the word of yadda yadda.'"

The CI transcends dispensations. How did the hyper-diapers miss that, all these years?