Go ahead. Well, um, I had to find the water. I'm glad I have the opportunity
to be here. For my sake, I hate it for you that you missed Tim,
but, uh, That's the way things have worked out. Glad you showed
up anyway. And I'm anxious that the Lord
will be pleased, as He said, to bless us. To bless us all
to hear and to bless me to preach. And I put it that way because
the preacher is hearing as well as preaching. And I hope that my heart hears what
my mouth says. because there have been times
I've preached. And it blessed the people. But I didn't get
anything out of it. It's the way we are in the flesh
anyway. I'm reminded of a conference at 13th Street Baptist Church. If it was not during the years
that I was a member there, it was shortly afterwards. But Brother
Scott Richardson, it was his turn to preach. And he got up
and he said, well, I hope I do a good job. I don't want to embarrass
the Lord. I don't want to embarrass Henry. And I don't want to embarrass
myself. And so I feel a little bit like
that. But one of the delights of being
a preacher of the Gospel and a pastor of a congregation of
sheep such as I am and such as he is, this is, I know, if I
preach the Gospel, you'll like it. I don't have to be anything. And I'm real good at that, not
being anything. So let's turn to Acts chapter 17. Acts 17.
There we go. Now I can hear me a little bit. Acts 17. When I was
a young man, well, a kid, teenage years, but there was
a phrase that was common, at least in the area I came from,
and whenever there would be a family reunion or a church dinner or
something, you know, if there was a particularly good dish,
you know, the women would be talking and talk to the woman
that made it, you know, and they'd say, well, was that a mix or
did you make it from scratch? And, of course, any self-respecting
woman would hope that she could say I made it from scratch, you
know, And of course, as a kid, I knew what it meant, but I didn't
know why it meant that. I was actually, I looked it up
today. It is associated, you've heard about starting from scratch,
and that comes from horse racing. Because horses, you know, they
would say, well, they must start from scratch. This horse has
to start from scratch, which was a line they'd scratched across
the racetrack. But there were horses that were
handicapped, and I don't mean that they had something wrong
with them, but they weren't as good as runners, and they, you
know, they would start 10 yards ahead or whatever. So starting
from scratch simply means starting from the very beginning. Well,
about 40 years ago when I was, well, I was, let's say, a much
younger preacher than I am now, and it would be about 40 years
younger. And I was one of the young men in Henry Mahan's preaching
class, and we would preach on Saturday nights. Two of us would
preach each Saturday night. It was just a way for us to get
some experience. And the people that showed up
were the old war horses of the faith. If we messed up, we weren't
going to mess them up. And I remember considering in
my mind, what would it be like to preach the Gospel to people
who didn't know anything about the God we worship, the gospel
we believe, like many missionaries do when they go into areas that
are Christianity, Judaism, none of it has ever been heard of.
How would you preach the gospel? And I used this text of scripture
and I entitled the message Scratch Gospel. This is the gospel from
scratch. from the very beginning. You
know, here in the United States, most of the time we're preaching
the gospel or preaching, we are preaching to people who have
at least some familiarity with what we're talking about. They
might be completely mixed up and have it all twisted and distorted,
but they know of the name of Jesus. They know more or less
of the God of the Bible. So we're not starting from scratch.
We're usually starting with them having some information. But you know, when Paul went
out preaching, often he was confronted with people that didn't know
anything. And this particular scripture
came to mind when I asked that question, what would it be like?
And it's good for us to learn this. How do you teach the truth
to people who don't have any of it? And the reason it's good
for us to learn this is when our children come into the world,
that's exactly the position they're in. They don't know anything.
We have to teach them from scratch. How do you teach people who don't
know anything? You know, I've been the pastor
up there for 34 years, and I know some people in town, but I hardly
have any regular contact with anybody except the people that
come to our church. And we can talk, and we talk
within the context of already knowing all this stuff. And sometimes
you get out there among people that don't, and you're kind of
tongue-tied. What do I say to this person?
I can't mention justification. That's a word they're not familiar
with, at least not in the context of like gospel. And so here it
is. Here's an example of what would
amount to preaching the gospel from scratch. If you look at
verse 16, It says, now while Paul waited for them at Athens,
and that's a couple of the entourage that traveled with him. He'd
gone on ahead of them and he was waiting for them in Athens.
His spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given
to idolatry. So what do you have? He's in
Athens. Very few people in Athens knew
anything about the God of the Jews. And none of them likely
knew anything about the God of Christians. I realize it's the
same God, but Christians certainly viewed God differently than the
Jews, the unbelieving Jews of that day. And Paul usually began
in synagogues. And why would he go there? When
he was traveling around, he'd find the synagogue in the city.
Why? He didn't have to start from scratch there. He would
go where there were people who already had some understanding,
and some of them would have been believers after the Old Testament
sort. They had the faith which is the gift of God, but they
had not been informed of what God had done in finishing what
He had more or less just started under the Old Covenant. And Paul's
general message when he would go to the synagogues is, Jesus
is the Christ. Christ being the Greek equivalent
of the Hebrew word Messiah. Well now, if you went up to a
Gentile and said, Jesus is the Christ, he'd go, huh? What are
you talking about? But you said that to a Jew, they
knew what you were talking about. And even here when he's in Athens,
it says verse 17, therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the
Jews. There was a synagogue in Athens.
There were some Jews there. Whether any of them even had
Old Testament type faith, but they'd been taught. They knew
the Old Testament. And so in fact, you look back
here at Acts chapter 17 when he was in Thessalonica in verse 3 it says
he was opening and alleging, and this is in the synagogue,
that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead
and that this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ. Now that was his message. The
apostolic message was two-fold. Jesus is the Christ and Christ
is all. Now that pretty much sums up
what the apostles went out and preached. And so Paul did start
in a synagogue, and it said he preached there with the Jews
and the devout persons, and by that he would mean Gentiles who
worshipped with Jews, believed that the Jews had the right God
and worshipped with them. And said, and in the market daily
with them that met with them, just out in the open air, you
know, anybody that would listen to him, he would talk with them. But here's what happened. Then
certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered
him, probably when he was in the marketplace. He's talking,
some people are gathered around, and here come these people, they
call them philosophers. It doesn't mean exactly what
we mean by philosophers. They did philosophy for the most
part, they were windbags. They went around, and in fact
it says, you know, they would sit around looking for something
new. They wanted to hear something
new. They were like the, many of these so-called intelligentsia
of our days and, you know, you listen to them and you think,
intelligence doesn't belong as part of their name, you know,
but whatever is new catches their ear and you hear something new. But notice what they said about
him. Some said, what will this babbler say? Already they are
against him. Now understand this, as we go
into the world, preaching the gospel, we are
going into a world like Athens, full of idolatry. When we go into the United States
of America, the so-called Christian nation. We are going into a nation
full of idolatry. And unfortunately, many of the
idols are named Jesus. You say, Jesus is an idol? Theirs
is. He's a fiction. And as we'll
see, he fits the description that Paul gives, you know, this
Jesus of most of America, fits the description that Paul gives
of the idols that the Athenians were worshiping. Powerless, do
nothing. And so we're going out and really
even though We're using many of the same words that they use.
We don't mean the same thing about them. Well, we don't mean
the same thing by those words. So when we're talking to them,
we are actually confronting a nation of idolaters. Now, let's not
use that as a judgment of them by us. It's an assessment, but
we were idolaters until God gave us faith. back there in Rock Valley, I've
said, you realize that our children are born idolaters. And even
though they go to this church and hear me preach, they remain
idolaters until they believe the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. One of the things that probably
any believer would confess is that when Their heart was opened
to the gospel. It was not just a matter of changing
some doctrines. They realized this is a different
God than I believed in up to now. You might, you know, someone
might want to say, well, what they had was a faulty version of the true
God. I understand that, but a faulty version of the true God is a
false God. We are all born idolaters. And so when we say that they
are idolaters, we're not saying we're better than them, as though
somehow or another we weren't so stupid as to be idolaters.
No, we were, until God sent the truth to us and revealed Himself
to us. So when we go out there, we need
to understand we're taking the Gospel, and with many, we may
as well assume we're starting from scratch. Because though
they call their God by the same name we call our God, it's somebody
different. It's somebody with different
characteristics. And then when we go out in the
world, we should expect the same kind of reception that Paul got.
Those who are already established in the world as the wise and
the prudent, the high and the mighty of whatever sort, they're
going to mock. And they're going to mock not
because they listen to what we say and think about it, they're
going to mock simply because we're not saying what they're
saying. They said, what will this babbler say? Now, I like
looking things up in the original languages and that word babbler,
it's a seed picker. And the picture was of a bird. You know, they get on the ground
and they're finding little bits of grain. And they're saying,
you know, this guy, he's just like a bird out there. There's
nothing to him. There's no rhyme or reason to
what he's saying. But they hadn't even listened
to him yet. But they listened to him enough to know that what
he is saying is not what they were saying. So, of course, he
must be some kind of useless idiot. Expect that. I occasionally, you know, like
I'm on YouTube, and I'll listen to where someone put up a hymn
or something like that, and it's a beautiful and good hymn, and
I'll make some comment about it. And the other day I noticed
someone had put a laughing emoji as a comment on what I said.
And I was almost tempted to say, and maybe I did, and reply back,
why did you think a laughing emoji? And I knew the answer.
He thinks it's ridiculous to believe that. Am I mad at the guy? No. I fully
understand why he thinks what I said was ridiculous. After
all, if you tell a blind man about color, he'll think, what
are you talking about? There ain't no such thing as
color. That is, if he's a blind man and nobody else has ever
told him that. He can't see what we see, so when we say what we're
seeing, He must be crazy. I don't see that. They said, we're still in verse
18, "...he seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because
Paul preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection." Now, here's
one thing I do like about Paul's preaching, and it's true, of
anyone who will faithfully and plainly preach the gospel in
this world, people will recognize this is a different God. Now, the translation here says
strange. It doesn't mean weird, strange.
The word actually, you hear it now in our society because if
you are at all opposed to any form of immigration, they call
you a xenophobe. And that's because the Zeno,
that's from a Greek word meaning an alien. And that's the word
being used here. This is an alien God. It's a
different God. It's not the God of Athens. What's
He doing here? Why is this God immigrating into
our city? We have our gods. He doesn't belong here. Who invited
Him? He's bringing in. spiritually
speaking, an illegal alien. And they said this because He
preached to them Jesus, told them who He was, and then preached
the resurrection. Now understand, the concept of
the resurrection was stupid to the Greek mind. And when I say
stupid, it wasn't because they didn't believe such a thing as
a resurrection could be. You know, they weren't unbelievers,
you know, the skeptics of our day. They just said, oh, you
can't raise the dead. That was not their point. Greek
philosophy said spiritual things are good, material things are
bad. So it's good when you die because you're released from
your physical body and you go back to what you previously were
before you were born, this pure spiritual being, essentially
a kind of a God-like being. So you talk to them about the
hope of the resurrection. Why would we hope to be raised
from the dead and put back in this body we already don't like? So that's why, you know, this
is a strange God. What we count would be bad, they're
holding forth as their hope. And their Savior is a Savior
because He's a man who rose from the dead. It didn't make any
sense to them at all. So it says, they took Him and
brought Him unto Areopagus. Now, the Greeks and the Romans
had the same gods, but they had different names. And the Greek
god Ares is the same as the Roman god Mars. So here it calls it
Areopagus. And then you read a little bit
later, verse 22, it says, Mars Hill. In the Greek New Testament,
it's exactly the same words. I don't know why they did it
differently. Maybe they thought, well, we'll do it a Greek way,
and we'll do it a Roman way, and everybody will know who he's
talking about. But they looked to the heavens, and their astronomers
noticed that there were certain lights in the sky that moved
predictably. They were always in the same
place. But then there were some. that wandered around. And they may call them, the Greek
word for wanderers, planaro, I believe it's like that, but
anyway, we call them planets. Again, all they're seeing is lights
in the sky. And some of them maintain their position. And
then there were some that each night they were in a different
spot. And they thought that was gods. Those were the gods. And, you know, was it the second
planet from the sun? Mars. Mars was the god Mars,
or in Greek, Aries. So Areopagus, they took him there
and said, may we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest,
is? They said, alright, you've been
out in the marketplace, you're just out in public telling people
stuff, you didn't come here first, Let us give it the smell test. It doesn't have our approval.
So you come up here to our place and you tell us what your new
doctrine is. Of course, what he had for them
wasn't new doctrine. It was a doctrine older than
time itself. You know, I hear people say,
oh, you've got to go back. You need to go back to the ancient
ones, and they'll mention reformers. No, that's way too recent. Like,
go back to the church... No, too recent. Well, go back
to the Bible days. Well, that's good, but understand,
our doctrine is older than that. We need to go back to the Old
Covenant. Still, too young. You've got
to go back to before in the beginning. Jesus Christ is the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world. He said to the Jews, and it was
symbolic of Him saying it to His spiritual Israel, I have
loved you with an everlasting love. He had already loved them
for eternal years. How can that be when there is
a finite amount of years in the path? Because He loved them before
time existed. Now that doesn't make any sense.
How do you talk about before time? Before time, there was
no such thing as before. But that's the only way we can
say it. It's old. They thought it was
new. It's new to them. But it's the oldest truth there
ever was. And He says, Thou bringest strange,
once again, those alien things to our ears. We would know therefore
what these things mean. Now, be glad if you go out there
and speak to this world and they say, that's not what we believe.
Especially when you're talking to professed Christians that
you know that they're not... That's not what we believe. That
means they understand something about what you're saying. You
know, we could go out there and preach in such vague terms. We
would be telling the truth, but they wouldn't notice the difference.
When I first went to pastor there in Iowa. Now, that's a very unusual
place. It was settled by the Dutch,
and they brought their reformed religion with them. Remember,
what is commonly referred to as the five points of Calvinism
came out of Holland. And so you're talking so far
as sovereign grace doctrine and the five points that we summarize
it under. These are the descendants of
the people who wrote them down. And so there's all these reformed
churches. And so what I'm saying, when I talk about sovereign grace,
Yeah, we believe that. Talk about free grace. We believe
that. Well, people would visit. Because, you know, again, we're
new, we're odd. We've got to hear this new thing,
you know. And some people would come up and ask me, you know,
start asking me questions, and usually they were questions that
didn't mean anything. And I kind of developed a habit,
I would try to deflect their questions, give it the vaguest
answer I could, and say, what you need to do is come hear me
preach. And I'd say, and it'll take you
about three weeks. You come three weeks running,
because I had noticed this. Person come three weeks. If they
came back the fourth, they were likely staying. I don't know
what there was about three weeks, but I guess they could establish
a line. They saw where it was going.
But there were many that they'd get that third week and we'd
never see them again. Second week, we'd never see them again.
It took that long for them to understand this is different. Now, I don't know what it was.
I don't know what I said. But somehow or another, this
is not what we've heard. And even the ones that stayed,
they stayed because this is not what I've heard. But it rings
true. Be glad when they say you bring
certain strange things. That means it's getting through.
If they pat you on the back, yeah, that's what we believe.
It went over your head. Maybe I didn't do a good job
of saying it or whatever. Because I know we're not saying
the same thing. Now verse 21, for all the Athenians
and strangers which were there, once again, the same word, people
that weren't native to Athens, They spent their time in nothing
else. Now this is all these philosophers
who thought themselves the best things on two legs and they were
essentially worthless. Men who used up air for no good
reason. But they lived for nothing else
or spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to
hear some new thing. Have you heard a better description
of American Christianity? What's the next new thing? For
a while, it was Calvinism. You had the new Calvinists. It
was the new play toy. So people got excited about it.
And websites came up about it. And ministries developed around
it. And at first, when you see this thing, oh, this is good.
This is good. Before long, you find out this is just their new
toy. And it's been much to the disgrace of the truth and to
Christ, but many of them were found to be the most despicable
sorts of people, caught up in scandals. And that always brings
reproach on the name of Christ, and you hated to see it. But it's just, what's new? And that's all they were looking
for, because they were getting bored of what they had. Drew agrees with me perfectly,
I know, on this thing. One thing that I love about the
church in Iowa that I pastor, I've been saying the same thing
to them for 34 years and they come back every week to hear
it again. And you walk in there and say something new, you've
got some angry people on your hands. Or at least puzzled. What was
that? They don't want anything new.
And you know something, when you have found the truth, you
don't need anything new. 2 and 2 equals 4. I'm not going
to go to a symposium of people discussing whether or not it
could mean 5. Because it doesn't. I don't need anything new. I
don't need new arithmetic. Why? Well, because arithmetic
doesn't change and neither does the gospel. So Paul stood in
the midst of Mars Hill, verse 22, and said, Ye men of Athens,
I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. Now,
Paul is using a good tactic in speaking when you want to communicate
with people. And that is, he began where they
were. He didn't start talking to them
about things they couldn't identify with. Now, once again, You know,
this is Elizabethan English. It's not modern English. When
we think superstitious, we think something different. All he was
saying is, you're very religious. You're very religious. Okay. All he's done is make a statement
that they would agree with, and maybe even glory in. He didn't
just come in and punch them in the face. He said, I see you're
very religious people. Verse 23, for as I passed by
and beheld your devotions, once again, instead of devotions say
shrines. All their places, little places
of worship. And these idolatrous places,
I mean where they literally had images and stuff, you'd be walking
down the street and there'd be this little alcove with Some
God, you know, and people could stop there and worship. I was
in India. You'd be driving down the road
and off to the right, you know, off the side of the road, you'd
see one of these little, kind of like a cubby hole, and they've
got an image of something in there. And that's what he's talking
about. They were all over the place. And he says, and I found an altar
with this inscription to the unknown God. Now probably most
if not all those people gathered on Mars Hill knew exactly the
place he was talking about. Remember, you do have something
in common with human beings. You are a human. You have a place
of connection with them. Not spiritually, but humanly. And it's always good to start
where you agree. with what you do have in common. Now, then Paul says, Whom therefore
ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you. Now, again, Paul
is not insulting him. We use ignorant as an insult. It was just a statement. After
all, they were the ones who said they don't know these gods. And
that word unknown, Down here, it's the same Greek
word when he says ignorantly. You worship Him without knowing
who you're worshiping. Now, Paul knew, and you and I
knew, that whoever put that shrine there did not have our God in
mind. It didn't matter. Paul just saw
an unknown God. Let me introduce you. It's God that you're worshiping
without knowledge. Let me tell you about Him. Now,
if you get nothing else out of this sermon, get this. Preaching
the gospel is declaring God. That's what we're doing. We're
not setting forth a plan. And by that, I realize God planned
everything. But I mean, I grew up in free
will fundamentalism, that God's plan of salvation. No, God. That's what we're preaching.
We're declaring to the world a God they don't know. And it's
important that they understand that's what we're doing. We're
not just bringing to you a new perspective on the God you've
already believed. We're declaring to you a God
you don't know. A God we didn't know until He revealed Himself,
until some preacher came to us and told us about Him. And why
it's so important, the reason it's so important to set forth
God as He is, is this. Your view of the Gospel and salvation
is going to depend on your view of God. You know, we talk about,
people say, Arminianism is bad, you know. There's arguments about,
can Arminian faith save? And I got into one of those debates
and I said, that's the wrong question. The question is, can
the Arminian God save? Faith doesn't save anybody in
that sense of the word. We're saved through faith, but
not actually by faith. We're saved by God. So the question
is not, can Arminian faith save? The question is, can the Arminian
God save anybody? Well, the Arminians will tell
you, well, He can't save you unless you, well, since whatever
follows afterwards, we're not going to be able to do it. You
may as well stop with, God can't save you. We're preaching a God that can.
Whether or not He will is up to Him, but there's no question
that He can. And that's what Paul began to
describe. A God they did not know. He says, verse 24, God
that made the world and all things therein. Now, he's preaching
to pagans. He's preaching to those who worship
multiple gods. And these multiple gods are involved
with certain aspects of creation, but not all of it. They didn't
have a single god who was responsible for everything. For instance,
Mars was the god of war. And if you remember from your
Old Testament, you had those who said, well, our God's God
of the hills, and their God's God of the valleys, or it was
the other way around. They were fighting with Israel. And they said, OK, let's go up.
And like I said, I forget these details in these stories. One
was the hills, one was the valleys. And they thought if they went
to wherever their God was supposed to rule, they could win. What
they learned was the God of the Jews is God everywhere. When Elisha was dealing with,
the ministry that God gave him. And Elisha's name means, My God
is Yah, which is a short version of Jehovah. My God is Yah. And that's what he was sent to
the northern tribes to declare because they were giving themselves
over to the worship of Baal. And that whole thing that happened
at Mount Carmel, that was a poke in the eye to Baal. What was
Baal the God of? Storms. Rain. And what did Elijah do? He stopped
the rain. And all he did was pray. He prayed
to the one God and shut Baal up. And then he goes, meets him
on Mount Carmel, and there's all these prophets of Baal. There
was 450 of them. And they dance around all day
and cut themselves. and act crazy, nothing happens. Elijah said, whichever God answers
by fire, he is God. And everybody agreed, okay, that's
the terms of this content. Who answers by fire? Elijah puts
that altar together, pours water on it, I mean, did everything
against it ever burning. And then he prays a very simple
prayer, no cutting himself, No melodramatics. And it says, the
fire of heaven fell. And in all likelihood, what it
was, I'm not saying God couldn't have done something completely
out of the ordinary. It's like lightning. And if it
wasn't real lightning, it sure enough looked like it to everybody.
Well, that's supposed to be Baal's power. Behold, it's the power
of Jehovah. And, you know, it says it licked
up the water, the stones and everything. In other words, it
just vaporized everything. What was he saying? Baal is no
God. He's not God of anything, anywhere. Jehovah is God everywhere, over
everything. He made the heavens. He made
the world and all things therein. When he uses the word world,
it has a broad range of meaning. The word actually means order
or arrangement. But he's talking about the whole
universe. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He made the scriptures in another
place that says He made the heavens and the earth and everything
in it. And to them, when you say heavens and the earth and
everything in it, that's everything there is except God. The heavens
and the earth and everything in them is all there is other
than God, and God made it all. Now, John spoke of the Word,
and in speaking of Him creating, he said, through Him were all
things created, and it's a really contorted, even in English, but
it says, and there was not anything created Yeah, there was not anything
that was not created by him out of all the things that were created.
That's essentially what he's saying. Now what that tells us
is the word was never created. And that was his point that he
was trying to press. But if a thing's created, God
created it. But God was never created. Because
that would mean he had to create himself, because he created everything
that's created. And not to get overly philosophical,
though I enjoy doing that, what he was basically saying is our
whole reality, what we experience and call real, all of it God
created. And he says, since he created
it all, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, he rules
all of it. The first two things Paul tells
them in this scratch gospel is that God created everything and
he rules everything. People say, now, don't press
that sovereignty business. It's not an issue. Paul thought
it was, and the Holy Spirit thought it was, because I'm sure this
is a summary of what Paul said. And so when the Holy Spirit's
inspiring Luke to write a summary of the message, one of the points
he includes in the summary is He is Lord of all. He's Lord
everywhere. You say He's a strange God. You
say He's an illegal immigrant here in Athens. No. This is His
place. All these other gods, they're
the aliens. They're the ones who invaded.
When I was thinking about this, I thought of saying, this is
the Lord Jesus invading Athens. No. All the other gods invaded
the place. He's taken it back. One of the
Reformed scholars of about 1900, a guy by the last name of Kuyper,
he made a statement And I think it's been misused, maybe even
didn't mean it exactly as we want to, but he made this statement.
He says, there is not a square inch of the earth that Jesus
does not step on it and call it mine. The earth is the Lord's
and everything in it always has been. He made the place. How
could it be anybody else's? People even say, you know, this
creation, God created it. Don't press that. You know, we
live in a modern day. It's not important. The Holy Spirit thought it was
important. It's one of His badges of divinity.
The psalmist says, all the gods of the nations are idols, but
Jehovah made the heavens and the earth. He didn't say all the gods of
the nations are idols, but Jehovah is the real God. He knew by saying
that Jehovah made the heavens and the earth. He was declaring
beyond doubt, He's God over all, blessed forever. And it says, why do the heathens
say, where is your God? Because they could show you where
their God was. He's down in the corner of 5th Avenue and 3rd
Street, the little shrine on the right, right there, look
it, there He is. Well, they'd look at the Jews who did not
have these images of their God. They said, well, where's your
God? And He said, well, He's in the heavens. He's done whatever
He pleased. His sovereignty is a badge of
divinity. If you can't do what you please,
you're not God. If you don't do what you please,
say you could, but I'm not going to. I'm going to leave it up
to man. If you don't do what you please, you're not God. And this is the God Paul is declaring
to them. and said, seeing He is Lord of all, He doesn't dwell
in temples made with hands. Now what's He starting to do?
Well, He's starting the attack. He showed what they had in common.
And now He's saying, here's what we don't have in common. Here's
what's different about you. You've got all your gods in these
little shrines and temples all over the place. But the One who's
Lord of all, Lord of not just all the earth, the heavens, you're
not going to put Him in one of your temples. Now the Jews had
a temple. And when Solomon built that temple,
it was said that was the most glorious temple on the earth
in that day. But in the dedication of it, Solomon said, the heavens
of the heavens can't contain you, much less this building
I have built. The most glorious temple ever
built, you can't put God in it. It was a symbol. That's all it
was. That's not where he dwells. Neither
is he worshipped with men's hands as though he needed anything.
You ever hear a preacher say, God has no hands but your hands,
no feet but your feet? Well, he's in a lot of trouble.
A lot of trouble. If he's dependent on these hands
and these feet, because they generally get me into mischief. God doesn't need us. It's a wonder
He's pleased to use us. But He accomplished His will
not through us, but in spite of us. It's a wonder to me that
God bothers with preachers. He could do a lot better job
by Himself. But He glorifies Himself in taking worthless individuals,
in taking liars. Let God be true and every man
a liar. That was just a statement of fact. He takes liars and uses
them to tell the truth. You say, well, if they're telling
the truth, they're not liars. They're liars by nature, and if God wasn't
in them overcoming what they are, they'd lie to you. I would
lie to you. And so God glorifies Himself
in using us because it's almost like He handicaps Himself. I
can do this with one arm tied behind my back, or both arms.
I can work through these people. He doesn't need anything. He
doesn't need you. He doesn't need me. He didn't make the universe
because he was lonely and wanted somebody to associate with. No.
God has no deficiencies. He lacks nothing. That's why
we can say, the Lord is my shepherd. I won't lack anything. It's because
He doesn't lack anything. It's He that gives to all life
and breath. in all things. He doesn't need us. We need Him. We take a breath. Why? God gave it to you. It says in the Scriptures, I'm trying
to remember it in the King James way, but it says man is altogether
vanity or something like that. But that word vanity, is breath. You know what you got? That's
all you have. You don't know if you get the
next one. You'll get it if He gives it to you. But He doesn't
have to take it from you. All He has to do is not give
it. In Him we live. We have our life, our breath,
everything we've got, we get from Him. And then He says, "...and He
hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the
face of the earth." Well, He's saying everybody's the same.
Now this is a remarkable thing for a Jew to say. He's saying
there's none of us any better than the others. We're all made
by the same God. They have different colors, ethnic
characteristics and all that, but when it comes right down
to it, we're the same thing. We all descend from Adam. He's
made us from one blood. Now what does that mean? There's
only one kind of man. There's only one kind of salvation.
Paul says there's one God and one mediator between God and
men. Now, what he didn't say, but what's implied in there,
there's one God, there's only one kind of man, and there's
only one mediator between God and men. And the reason we only
have to have one God and only one mediator is everybody's the
same. They need exactly the same thing.
We don't need a lot of mediators. We don't need patron saints for
travelers and patron saints for this or that, mediating for them. Why? Because we all are exactly
the same and need the same thing. One mediator gets us all to the
one God. What's he bringing us down to?
And Paul's method of argument is very good. He starts, we're
all alike in this, or here's a point of contact, but He keeps
pulling it down step by step. There's just this one Creator,
one Lord. He doesn't dwell in temples made
with hands. He's not worshipped by what we
can give Him. In fact, we need Him. And all
of us are exactly the same, Jew, Greek, Roman, Barbarian, Scythian,
whatever. We're all the same thing. He's
determined where we live and when we live. And He did this. I'll admit, this is a Scripture
that's a little difficult for me. It says that they should
seek the Lord. He appointed the times and the
abounds of their habitation that they should seek the Lord if
happily they might feel after Him and find Him though He be
not far from every one of us. You know, when Peter said there's
some things that Paul said that are hard to understand, this is one
of them. But, here's what I think he meant by it. He determined
when and where everyone should live. And that had a lot to do with
whether or not anybody knew about him. Do you realize if you were
not born in Israel, you would likely, at this time, you would
likely never hear about this God. There's a lot of problems in
the United States. And I don't care what your political beliefs
are, you probably think there's a lot of problems in the United
States. I'll agree with you. It's a mess. But do you realize that one of
the reasons you and I believe the Gospel is because God had
us born here at this time? Because despite all the troubles
the United States has and despite the widespread faulty versions
of Christianity, still there's more of the real thing here than
anywhere else. And even if you heard one of
the altered versions, at least you knew there was a God. Now,
I realize none of this means anything if God doesn't bless
it. But when it says, all things work together for good, that's
what He's talking about. God arranged everything about
your life so that you'd find Him. And one of the things He arranged
was where you were born, where you lived, and who you bumped
into. For in Him we live, move, and
have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said,
for we are also His offspring. For as much then as we are the
offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is
like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's
device." He said, even your poets, who are not poets in the sense
that roses are red, violets are blue, the word comes from, it
means to work with. And these were wordsmiths. They
were very clever in writing. They might be writing prose,
but they were very good at it. And he said, even one of your
wordsmiths said, we are the offspring of God. Once again, he's pulling
a little from what they believe. And he said, well, if we are
the offspring of God, why do we think that God looks like
these idols we make? And you look at some of them.
They're awful looking things. Grotesque beings. We're the offspring of
that? Now, again, Paul says things
probably that aren't going to have an immediate impact on him,
but if they'll think about it, if we're the offspring of God,
what is an image of God going to look like? Us. You know what it says of the
Lord Jesus? He is the image. of the invisible God. And that
word image is idos, from which we get our word idol. Idols were
images. Why did God forbid the Jews from
having idols? Because God was going to make
his own. And since we are the offspring of God in that He created
us and in a very special way He created us, He said let's
make man in our image, gave to him a nature like unto God. God
is spirit and therefore we're not merely animals, we're not
merely the top of the food chain most of the time. We have a nature
called spirit that connects us with God. And so when God would
make an image of Himself in this world, what does He make? A man,
a human. Now at the times of ignorance,
God winked at, He overlooked, but now He commands all men everywhere
to repent. Oh, for how many thousands of
years did God just more or less ignore what was going on in the
world? He worked with a few people here and there, worked with the
Jewish nation, but now God's image has come to the earth.
He has done the work that only God can do. Okay, God's not going
to overlook this anymore. It's not going to be confined
to the nation of Israel anymore. It's going everywhere. All men
everywhere are called on to repent. And the repentance they're called
on, at least in Athens, ditch these gods. Worship this one. Because He hath appointed a day
in the which He will judge the world in righteousness, by that
man whom he hath ordained, his image in the world, whereof he hath given assurance
unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead." He
says, the very thing you all call foolishness is that which
God did with this appointed man to prove that on an appointed
day, He's going to judge the world. You are going to stand
before this man and give an account. As soon as he mentioned the resurrection,
they got all up in arms. I don't know what else Paul planned
on saying. Maybe he would have gone on to say, but this man
by whom you'll be judged is the one by whom you may be saved.
But as soon as he said resurrection, back to that again. But friends,
this is what the world needs to know. They need to be told
about God as He is. Because they'll never understand
the Gospel as it is until they understand God as He is. He's
the Creator. He's the Ruler. He's God over
all. He doesn't need anything from
us. Everything we need, we've got to get from Him. He's not
going to be worshipped by the things we do with our hands.
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said He is Spirit and He must
be worshipped in Spirit. We're spiritually dead. Once
again, we're back to needing Him to enable us to worship. And that's the God that very
few American Christians know anything about. They've got a
needy God. Thanks be to that God. He revealed
Himself to us and taught us we need Him. Not just to get us
through the tough times. Not just to make sure we have
food. We need Him for absolutely everything. But we have, through
the knowledge of Him, everything we need for life and godliness. Now that's a God I can trust.
May His name be praised.