All Nations

Somewhere in the back of most Latter-day Saint minds lives a mental map of the world with a few conspicuous blank spots. China. North Korea. Saudi Arabia. The logic is familiar: before the Lord can return, the gospel must reach all nations. Matthew 24:14 says so plainly. Those blank spots are the outstanding business.

It is a reasonable reading. It is also built on a word whose meaning has quietly shifted over time. What was once the secondary definition has become the only one most of us hear.

The word is nation.

Webster’s 1828 dictionary notes that a nation, as its etymology imports, is a body of people descended from a common progenitor. The root is the Latin natio, from nasci, to be born. A nation is a birth-group. The political meaning, a territory, a government, a flag, is secondary. It is what happens after the birth-group grows large enough to organize itself into a political entity.

The biblical vocabulary confirms it. The Old Testament word translated “nation” is the Hebrew goy (plural: goyim), an ethnic people, a kindred group. The New Testament equivalent is the Greek ethnos, from which we get our word ethnic. The Great Commission, “teach all nations”, is literally: teach all ethne. All ethnic peoples.

The structure of human community, as the ancient world understood it, runs like this:

Family → Clan → Tribe → Nation¹

A nation is an ethnic people, a human community defined by shared descent, language, and culture. Political borders are drawn on top of this geography, imperfectly, and usually much later.

Matthew 24:14 requires a witness to every ethnic people, not approval from every political government. Read that way, the picture looks considerably different.

There are converts from China, converts from Iran, converts from peoples whose governments have never permitted a single official missionary across their borders. By the ethnic definition, those individuals represent their ethnos in the covenant regardless of what any government has approved.

With the rise of the internet and the movement of peoples across the globe, it is at least possible if not probable that this prophecy is already fulfilled, or very nearly so.

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