"When the Lord gave the Great Commission, He gave four commands: 1) Go into all the world and 2) preach the Gospel to every creature, 3) baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and 4) teaching them to do all that He had commanded.
These are not all the same thing. Preaching the Gospel is not the same as baptizing, nor is it the same as teaching all the Lord’s commandments."
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This is a wonderful example of an exegesis not at all supported by the text:
πορευθέντες οὖν μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη βαπτίζοντες αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος διδάσκοντες αὐτοὺς τηρεῖν πάντα ὅσα ἐνετειλάμην ὑμῖν καὶ ἰδού, ἐγὼ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰμι πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας ἕως τῆς συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος Ἀμήν
There are not four commands. There is only the one command, the aorist active imperative to "make disciples" of all nations. It is defined precisely by the two present tense participles "baptizing" and "teaching" which follow it, but also presupposes a third, "when you have gone", which is first in the sentence because you can't get to "the nations" without it. Without going there is no disciple making in the first place, but neither is there any disciple-making without baptizing and teaching out there among the Gentiles. When all is said and done and the dependent clauses are stripped away all you have is this: "Make disciples of every nation".
If you want to know how to make disciples, the participles tell you how it is to be done, at least according to these closing lines of Matthew (28:19f.), where however the words "gospel" and "preach" never occur. For that you'll have to rely on the (supplied) ending to Mark (15:16). Obviously Matthew didn't know of this, and if he did, he didn't follow it for a reason.
The early church's point of view in Matthew is different from Mark's, and Paul's, as it is from the pastor's at St. Paul Orthodox Church, Emmaus, Pennsylvania. In Matthew we are confronted with people who were more keepers of a tradition in Jerusalem than they were preachers of a message in the Mediterranean Basin. But in Paul we have evidence of the opposite tendency: a passion for preaching a message divinely mediated to him quite apart from that apostolic tradition, and sometimes hostile to it.
The latter won the day, but they aren't the same thing.
