David Platt Adds Social Justice to the Great Commission

For two thousand years, the commission given by Christ to the church in Matthew 28 has gone by the moniker, Great. The Great Commission is Jesus’ instruction to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the Triune formula and teaching them everything Christ commanded of us.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

This is the church’s commission to do the work of evangelism (which is implicit in the verses) and discipleship (which is explicit in the verses). The church has always understood that the Great Commission is about Gospel work, both in its proclamation and its further instruction.

David Platt, however, has added a heap of works on top of the Gospel that’s to be proclaimed in the Great Commission. Platt recently resigned from his position as the President of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, and so it is frightening to see a man responsible for overseeing thousands of missionaries experiencing severe mission drift and appear not to understand the Great Commission.

Platt, as cited two days ago by the leftist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) on Twitter, said:

The Great Commission recognizes “injustice” as that which is committed against God on behalf of wicked men, and the death of Christ as the payment to satisfy God’s justice. The Great Commission speaks nothing about societal injustices, just as Jesus said zero about social justice.

The contention of those of us against “social justice” (which is the same as the Social Gospel as taught in the 20th Century and Social Religion taught in the 19th Century) is that these newly-woke Social Justice Warriors in the New-Calvinist camp are supplanting, ignoring, changing, and marginalizing Gospel work in the name of doing good deeds. As Platt asserts ‘injustices’ have something to do with the Great Commission, he validates our concerns.

Frankly, the Gospel never would have spread across Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the Earth if the early Christians listened to the advice of David Platt and tried to set about righting societal wrongs. They preached the Gospel, which is Christ crucified and his resurrection for the redemption of individual men.

David Platt is speaking this week at the G3 Conference aside the men who signed the Dallas Statement on Social Justice and at the invitation of Josh Buice, who helped to draft the statement.