17: God’s Strategy For Civil Conquest 7 of 7 - CITY

God gave Moses and His people a Great Commission in the Old Testament – to physically conquer all the nations of Canaan (Joshua 1:1-9). God (Jesus) gave His people a Great Commission in the New Testament – to spiritually conquer all nations (Matt. 28:18-20).

Both Great Commissions were humanly impossible unless God had not said with both Commissions: “I will be with you!” The ultimate goal for both Great Commissions was virtually the same:

* The ultimate goal of the Great Commission in the Old Testament was for God to be King (1 Sam. 8:7).

* The ultimate goal for the Great Commission in the New Testament was for God to be King – King Jesus (1 Tim. 1:17).

In the Old Testament God’s people made progress in their Great Commission but they did not fulfill conquering all Canaan. There were parts of Canaan that they never conquered. With Jesus’s Great Commission, since the time of Christ, there have been some city-states and nations that have been true Christian nations. This was especially true in the first couple centuries of America’s history and some nations in Europe about that time, and some other nations in even earlier centuries.

Even though most cities or nations today may not be Christian, that does not mean that cannot happen today. What if Martin Luther had thought that in Germany? Or John Calvin in Geneva? Or Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich? Or John Knox in Scotland? Or John Carver in Plymouth Colony? Or John Winthrop in Boston? Or countless others before or after these Christian leaders – they all established Christian city-states or nation-states.

All these Christian leaders had one thing in common - they followed all of God’s 7 biblical strategies for their successful civil conquests, including this last strategy - God’s “city strategy.” We see this city strategy in both the Old and New Testament. We’ll look at it first in the New Testament.

New Testament – City Strategy

The New Testament Apostolic strategy was NOT to focus on rural areas but reading through Acts and the Epistles you see they only focused on cities. Building God’s spiritual army in a city, the Word inevitably spread to all the rural areas.

In Jesus’s Great Commission of Acts 1:8, Jesus made it clear that His disciples were to initially focus on a single city, Jerusalem, before they targeted other cities in their nation or world (Acts 5:28):

“They filled all Jerusalem with their teaching!”

The Apostle Paul clearly had a strategic city strategy. On his first missionary journey he never spent any time in rural areas but targeted four cities: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. In these towns he established committed congregations and appointed their leaders. In time they impacted their nation Galatia, which Paul later wrote to all of them in the Book of Galatians.