Well, I'm all for what they substantiate in the laboratories, and I'm fascinated to read about it. But thousands of years before the technology came about to be able to look at MTDNA, the Apostle Paul said to a group of polytheists, we all came from the same origin. So God is color blind. God is race blind. Nobody's up here and somebody's down here.
The ground is level. We all stand before God and will one day on account of what we've done with Jesus. Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that there are people who hear the truth of God's Word and it's foolishness to them. But it's the simplicity of the Gospel message that results in salvation. In the book of Acts, Paul was talking to a group of people who considered themselves to be sophisticated thinkers. They were atheists and polytheists. They thought they were wise. Paul took the time to explain the truth of God plainly and simply.
You and I have the same opportunity in our culture. This is wisdom for the heart. And today, Stephen has a message called the almighty mover and shaker. Has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God? Have we learned yet that God never learned anything? He has always known everything. He never woke up one day and he said, I think I'll do some math problems. No one in his right mind would, but that's beside the point. He never said, I think I'll brush up on world history.
I'm a little dusty. He is omniscient. That means there is nothing he does not know and has not always known. He is omnipotent, meaning there is nothing he cannot do should he choose to do it. We will never learn beyond a fragment of the nature and the character of God. I think one of the evidences of that is that we will never master the revelation of God, his word. He'll never read this book enough times to where you can finally shelve it and say, there, I've learned that book. I know everything about it now.
No. The more you learn, the more you realize you're just beginning to learn. Even though we will never master the study of God, there is nothing more critically needed today than a study of his character and his nature.
One author provoked my thinking with these words. He said, knowing about the nature and character of God is crucially important for the living of our lives as it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London and set him down without explanation and leave him as one who knew nothing about English or England to fend for himself and to make his own way would be cruel. So we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. Disregard, follow these words, the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life, blindfold as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.
This is the sure way that you can waste your life and lose your soul. The tragedy is, ladies and gentlemen, our generation is stumbling about blindfold because the study of the character of God has basically been removed from the curriculum of even the average evangelical church. Theological propositions and terminology is relegated to the halls of higher learning, certainly not a body of people.
Certainly they wouldn't be interested in discovering the deep things of God. And so unfortunately our pulpits have been trivialized into personality displays and they've been turned into therapeutic lecterns that simply dish out practical one, two, three steps to fix everything from their marriage to your finances to your automobile to your health, good nutrition and hygiene and on and on and on while the most important study is neglected. This book has become a manual, as it were, on how to live a happy, prosperous life rather than a manual on how to come to know and to worship an awesome God. I want to read you another quote by somebody that I pick up periodically. He's in my library. I know where he is and I read a few pages and then walk around a bit. This is not bathtub reading here. And he will provoke your thinking with his book, The Trivialization of God.
You ready? Visit a church on Sunday morning, almost any will do, and you will likely find a congregation comfortably relating to a deity who fits nicely with its propositions, who conforms to individual spiritual experiences. But you will not find much awe or sense of mystery. The only sweaty palms will be those of the preacher unsure whether the sermon will go over.
The only shaking knees will be those of the soloist about to sing. Yet the New Testament warns us, offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire. Today, reverence and awe have been replaced by a yawn of familiarity. The consuming fire has been turned into a candle flame with no heat, no blinding light, no power for purification.
Why? Because we prefer the illusion of a safer deity, and so we have whittled God down to a more manageable size. Well, I want to propose this morning to you that God cannot be trivialized if you know him.
If he becomes an unknown God, he will become a small, insignificant, less than omnipotent God. And for that reason, I have been excited about this passage of Scripture that we have been studying now today for our third time. But I want you to turn again to Acts chapter 17, and I want to invite you to take your study notes out because we're going to define some theological terms that may be unfamiliar to you, and the definitions of some of these are provided. So far, we have uncovered in Paul's sermon two points. The first point is, my God is more than a monument. That is, he is more than some piece of stone or some stump of wood. He is the living and true God, Lord of heaven and earth. Paul addressed those Athenian intelligentsia with the news that they were worshiping an unknown God.
He happened to know that unknown God's name, Iesus, and he preached Iesus, Jesus, and the resurrection. Then point number two that we looked at last Lord's Day could be summarized by saying, my God made it all. All that we see reveals, cries out, the heavens declare the glory of God.
They shout the message. And so Romans will be where Paul picks up that theme and he says, all the world will be without excuse. For all the world had general revelation of God's character. That is, they had nature, they had the universe, they had the world that they saw was ordered and logical and magnificent, and yet they refused to bend their knee to a creator.
Instead, they worship the stump and the brook and the sun and the moon. So all will stand before him. And so he goes on here as he talks about my God is more than a monument, and he talks about my God making it all.
And now for today, the third point, and that's all we'll have time for, my God is the almighty mover and shaker. Now in order for the God of the Apostle Paul, this unknown God to be the mover and shaker of planet earth and all that there is, a couple of things have to be true of this God. Number one, he has to be transcendent.
And he also has to be imminent. You can easily divide these verses along those two theological expressions of the nature and character of God. Now when we say that God is transcendent, we mean that God is over and above all of creation. We also mean that God is separate from creation. He is a distinct, superior spirit being. There isn't a little piece of God in a tree or in a brook or in everyone who's ever lived.
God is a distinct spirit being who created all there is, and he rules over all there is. While he is everywhere, he is not in everything. Now notice what Paul says of God.
Verse 24, let's pick it up there. The God who made the world, therefore he has to be separate from the world. And all things in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, that is, he is transcendent over and above his master, does not dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by human hands. Now that doesn't mean that we as human beings cannot serve him with our hands. It simply means that God doesn't depend upon our hands for his existence.
He can get along without us. That's what we refer to as the self-existence of God. He doesn't need you to survive, you need him. You don't, as I observed in Japan and unbeliever's homes, with their God shelf burning incense to the deities, unknown, somehow related to their ancestors, you don't have to satiate him. He isn't asking for the work of our hands, Paul says, in effect. He is demanding the worship of our hearts. Now notice the next phrase, as though he needed anything. That's a little tongue in cheek, a little cryptic comment, as if this powerful God needed anything. In fact, the original word needed anything, prosodeo, my, could be rendered or amplified as if he needed anything in addition to what he had, or as if he wanted anything.
Now we're very unlike God on this point, aren't we? If I asked anybody in this audience, you know, if I got you in a corner somewhere and I said, is there anything you want? He'd come up with at least one or two things that he might not have gotten last month. If you asked me or my wife, is there anything you want? I know my wife would say a storage space, a closet. I'd say a book.
I've had my eye on a set of books I'd love, and you'd come up to me, I'll give you the name of them, and now we can work something out. We never say, there, we have enough. In fact, 12 months or so ago, you probably thought, you know, if I made a couple bucks more a week, I'd be there. So now you make a couple bucks more a week.
Now what? See, we can't use the word prosdeo, my, to ourselves. We cannot talk about our self-sufficiency.
We are anything other than that. God is the only one who is able to say, I have enough. In fact, David wrote of him in Psalm 50, every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. He said, I know every bird of the mountains and everything that moves in the field is mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine and all that it contains, this transcendent God who rules over all is self-sufficient and self-existence. Now notice the middle part of verse 25, since he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. Now we've talked about in the past sessions about Paul's tact and diplomacy. Remember how he approached the Athenians and they had surroundings? Well, he approached the Athenians and they had surroundings. In fact, Paul, as he spoke, had surrounding him thousands, tens of thousands of statues and gods and goddesses cut into the reliefs of buildings and statues, and the Parthenon was within view, and all of that was there. And he got up before them and he said, man, I can tell that you're very religious, which was a nice way of confronting them and approaching them.
I can't believe all of these ridiculous idols. And we talked about his tact and diplomacy. Well, it's at this point that Paul begins to fire missiles into the fortress of the Athenian polytheistic belief system.
He fires his first one here. He says that God, my God, the unknown God to you, gives to all life and breath and all things. Now to the Greeks, they had given Zeus the honor of being the divine resource. Life, comes from Zeus. In fact, the Greek word for life is zoe. Zeus gives zoe, would be their chant.
Paul says, no, that's not true. My God, the unknown God, Iesus, the one who rose from the dead, is the divine resource. He provides all life.
And so at this point, he begins to kind of rub them a little wrong, but he's going to get the truth in there. Now, why is it important that we today understand the transcendence of God, that God is separate from His creation, that He is above and over as sovereign, all His creation? Well, for one thing, that is what gives us the proper view of all things, gives us the proper view of creation.
I've sort of hinted at this in the past, but I think this is a good place to say a little bit more. You cannot, if you understand the separateness of God, that God isn't in everything and that some spirit entity is in everything. You can't then personalize earth as a mother, deifying as it were, or personalizing her, that somehow we as human beings must protect her in order for her to be happy or fulfilled. I see a bumper sticker here and there that says, love your mother, dash what?
Earth. The other thing is, love your mother, dash what? Love your mother, dash what?
Love your mother, dash what? The elevation of creation simply occurs because the Creator is devalued. But if we understand that a separate superintending person known as the triune God and the second person of that Godhead, we don't worship nature, we worship the God of nature. We don't give adulation to created things, we give adulation to the Creator of all things.
You with me? The Bible makes it very clear that God uses nature as sort of a megaphone. In fact, the Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God. They're sort of a way of delivering general revelation of God's attributes.
Romans chapter one. And so what has mankind done? Placed his attention on the wrong end.
Think of it this way. Wouldn't it be foolish for a guy to be talking to his sweetheart on the telephone? Long distance telephone calls and talk for hours and the bills rack up and man, he can hear the voice of his sweetheart through that telephone. Wouldn't it be foolish for him to fall in love with the telephone? I'm going to marry it. Well, I heard her voice coming through the telephone and I just became enamored with the telephone.
I've asked it to marry me. Well, that'd be ridiculous. Well, that's exactly what unregenerate man has done.
Hearing the voice of God, as it were, speak through nature, they've fallen in love with the telephone instead of the Creator. God is transcendent overall, but there's more, ladies and gentlemen. He is also imminent. Not eminent. That's the synonym of the fact that he is overall. Or imminent, that is, he's coming back at any moment. The spelling is correct.
He is imminent. By that we mean that God is, though separate from creation, he is. Look at the definition I've given you. At the same time, actively involved in human nature and human history, that this great and awesome God is also a personal, loving, caring leader who interacts with his creation. And this is another missile into the polytheistic world of the Athenians. They knew nothing of a loving, caring God, and neither does the world today.
They believe that gods were as lustful and greedy and murderous, that in the beginning, Father Heaven slept with Mother Earth, and the result was all of these gods and goddesses of wind and water and rain and sun and all of that, but they were as conniving and evil as any man or woman. Paul says, my God is intimately involved with the one he's created. He is a caring, loving Lord, so that you can actually talk of this transcendent God with terms like father, shepherd, brother. The last part of verse 25 declares that God is personally involved in giving to all life and breasts and all things. Do you remember how Matthew records the sermon of Jesus Christ as he's preaching? And he is preaching the truth of immanence, although that word isn't found in the text.
It's the theological, categorical term we could apply to that. He's talking about God's involvement in sending the sunshine and the rain and the flowers with their beautiful petals that God is ultimately responsible, and the birds of the air, they don't worry about what they're going to have next month, that God has given them instinctively the ability to provide, but yet he's even concerned about them. And then he says this very politically incorrect statement. He says you, to his human audience, are worth much more than they.
Can you imagine how he'd be quoted today with that kind of value system? You have, he says, more value than a bird. You have more importance to God than a flower. A tree does not have an inerrant right to exist.
You do. That's the value system he places. Imagine how he'd be handled today.
Why? Because we have so misconstrued the Creator, we no longer know how to place value on his creation. Verse 25, he gives to all life and breaths and all things. James writes, every good thing comes down from the Father of lights, every good and perfect gift. He isn't a distant, removed, transcendent, awesome God. He is an eminent, transcendent God, which means he is caring about your life. And my Paul goes on to say how just involved he is. Notice verse 26, and he made from one every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.
Here comes another missile. See, the Greeks believed that they were a master race. They believed they were a special class of people. You had Greeks and you had everybody else. They believed that they were supernaturally originally created from the dust by the gods of their parthenon, that they were special people.
They were the first master race. And Paul says, you're not. This is where he really begins to meddle. He says, you're no different than the pagan beggar. We're all made out of the same clay. We all go back to the same man, the same origin.
That must have provoked their thinking, probably upset a few, but it was a true statement that needed to be made. I found it really fascinating a while back to come across this article, and it talks about the discovery of or the study of two biochemists who are unbelievers. I assume they write this interesting article. Most of the DNA, and I kind of stay with this data, because we'll get to the conclusion that you'll appreciate. Most of the DNA in human cells is in the cell nucleus in the form of chromosomes, but there is also DNA outside the nucleus in mitochondria called mtDNA. The interesting thing about mtDNA is that over generations it changes at a steady known rate of mutation in human beings. Another interesting thing is that mtDNA is inherited solely through the mother. These biochemists examined mtDNA from 147 individuals representing five broad geographic regions of the world, differing nations. They were able then to construct a family tree by analyzing the differences in the mtDNA samples. The data revealed a common ancestral mtDNA. They believe, as a result of their data, that one single female was the ancestor of everyone on earth today, and they've nicknamed her Eve. What a discovery! So it isn't Mother Earth, it's Mother what?
Mother Eve. Well, I'm all for what they substantiate in the laboratories, and I'm fascinated to read about it, but thousands of years before the technology came about to be able to look at mtDNA, the apostle Paul said to a group of polytheists, we all came from the same mommy and the same daddy. We all have the same origin. So God is colorblind. God is race blind. Nobody's up here and somebody's down here.
The ground is level. We all stand before God and will one day on account of what we've done with Iesus, Jesus Christ. Well, you put your Bibles away. I want to illustrate what I'd like to call the preciousness of these theological truths, the transcendence of God, the awesome separate aboveness of God, the self-existent self-sufficient, and yet the imminence of God. Let me read you from a fellow that was a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt's interesting illustration.
He used to visit Roosevelt's in the White House, and he writes this, Roosevelt and I used to play a little game together when I'd visit. After an evening of talk before retiring to our sleeping quarters, we would go out on the lawn and search the skies until we found the faint spot of light mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the great square of Pegasus. Then one or the other of us would recite, quote, that is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It consists of one billion suns, each larger than our sun. Then Roosevelt would grin and say to me, well, I think we're small enough now. Let's go on to bed. You know the wonderful thing about studying God's greatness and majesty that He is transcendent. He is over above all. The wonderful thing about studying and rediscovering how big He is, in the process, we rediscover how small we are, and that's good. He is great.
We are small. We put Him in His proper place, and we give Him honor and majesty and glory. The wonderful thing, in addition to that, is I can take problems that seemed really big to me once I understand how small I am and how small my life is and even the breadth of my life, how tiny it is, and I have this great, awesome, transcendent God. I can take them to Him knowing He can handle billions of problems my size at one breath without even trying. Life was good. And so we, with our little problems, that when refreshed with the truth of His transcendence and then understanding this great transcendent God will work with me.
He cares about me, and you can cast all your care on Him for He cares for you. Then, in understanding those great truths, you can flee to this awesome refuge. You can hide under the shadow of the Almighty. You can rest, for underneath you are everlasting arms. Thank you for joining us today. I hope this time in God's Word has blessed and encouraged you. This is Wisdom for the Heart, and we've gone back to our vintage wisdom archives to bring you this series from the Book of Acts, a series Stephen Davey first taught to the church he pastors back in the 1990s. We wanted to air it again now because we knew it would be encouraging to you. We also want to encourage you with a resource we have entitled, Heart to Heart.
Heart to Heart is Heart to Heart. Heart to Heart is a monthly devotional magazine that includes both articles and a daily devotional guide. It's a great resource for you to keep near your Bible and use every day.
Call us and we can tell you how you can get the next three issues. Our number is 866-48-BIBLE or 866-482-4253. This is a resource Stephen developed as a thank you gift for all of the wisdom partners who support us financially. That group makes this ministry possible, but we also send three issues to anyone who asks. Thanks again for listening. Join us next time back here on Wisdom for the Heart. you
