Sermon details
- Scripture
- Acts 17:22-34
- Speaker
- Keith Goad
- Date
- 31 March 2024
- Length
- 41 minutes
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The God of life
He is risen. He is risen indeed. Good morning. It's good to be with you. As we think about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we're going to be thinking about how the resurrection relates to God, how it relates to us as we seek to live the new life Christ has purchased for us. Jesus rose from the dead so that we might live with him forever. Jesus rose from the dead so that we might follow him in this life. Jesus rose from the dead so that we might know him and make him known. Brothers and sisters, this is one of 52 weeks we come together, 52 days of the year, every Lord's Day, to remember the resurrection, to consider the God who made us has given us his own son so that we might have new life in him. We gather on the Lord's Day to remember because we're forgetful, We gather on the Lord's Day to remember Christ here today, more specifically and intentionally, because the resurrection is really the capstone of Christ's earthly ministry. As we think about who Christ is and who he claimed to be and what he claimed to do, if the resurrection is true, it's all true. If Christ isn't risen, then we're to be pitied above everyone else. If he's not risen, there was no virgin birth. He was not a sinless man. And his death accomplished nothing for those who believe in him. We are still guilty and will face judgment before God. But if Christ is risen, he is the Lord. He is the only begotten son of God. He descended into the womb of a virgin, taking upon Himself our nature so that He would live the life we could not. And He would die on the cross to pay the penalty for the sins we committed. And three days later, He rose to give us new life. I want us to really focus in on the resurrection because it is Easter Sunday, it is Resurrection Sunday, it is the Lord's Day where we set aside the time to meditate upon it, but if you're a believer, this is the centerpiece of the new life Christ has purchased for us. The resurrection is now why we follow him and we seek to live a life that practices repentance, We seek to grow closer to the God who has given us his own life. If you're not a believer today, if you come with doubts, if you come with questions, if you come with curiosity, if you come without faith in Jesus, I wanna just boil the Christian faith down to one question. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Because if that's true, it's all true. If Jesus is risen, this is God's word and everything he has said in it is for us to believe, to trust, to obey. I chose this sermon because Paul is reasoning in Athens with those who would not be familiar with many of the gospel truths. I wanted to step back and consider how the resurrection teaches us about who God is. We can see the resurrection is a gift from the God of life. has really made a statement on who God is. He is the God who gave us life. And even after we chose death, he sent his son to give us life. He is the God of life. And as we consider Acts 17, the God who made us calls us to repent so we might know him and the life Christ secured for us with his resurrection. The God of life calls us to repent so we might know him and the life Christ secured for us by his resurrection. As we look to Acts 17, I want us to see three basic truths. First, God has made himself known. God has made himself known. Second, God has made all people to know him And third, God commands all people to repent. First, God has made himself known. If you turn in your copy of scripture to Acts 17, you'll see here that there's a new setting. Paul's in Athens. This is the philosophical center, the intellectual center for the Western world. He's in Greece, the civilization most known for the great thinkers of philosophy. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. What we see there in verse 18, the Epicureans, the Stoics are mentioned. The Stoics were the folks who said if you practice the right kind of self-control and limit your emotions and your feelings and you limit the things you feel you need, you're able to have a control, a rule over your life. The Epicureans, Well, they would be kind of the original YOLO folks. Or my college students tell me they don't say YOLO anymore, it's full send. That's new to me. What they're saying is best wrapped up in eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It's realizing all there is, or they believe all there is to life, and so just consume and enjoy. Notice in the midst of all these philosophies in verse 18, Paul preached Jesus and the resurrection. Now, if we go back to verse 17, as Paul's custom, he would go to the synagogue first. He would go first to the Jews because they had already received God's word. They have the first books of this Bible. They already had heard of who God is and how he created and how he made promises. And so he would go into the synagogue and he would reason with them from scripture. And I believe what he does there is he opens up God's Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, God's Bible. And he would show them that Jesus fulfilled all those promises. He would show them how Jesus is the Lion of Judah, the Lamb, the Passover Lamb, who was able to save Israel out of Egypt. He is the Shekinah Glory that led Israel through the wilderness. He would show them all the different ways in which Jesus is the one they've all been hoping for and longing for because they already had God's revelation. There's a whole argument that we could see from there. If you're not a believer, just wrestling with, how is it that God fulfilled all of those Old Testament promises? But, well, our text is for those who do not know who this God is. Paul is invited to the Aragapis. My speech impediment always kicks in on this word. He's invited to speak there where the people come to hear new ideas. Now, they think this philosophy is new because they don't know the Old Testament. It's not new. It's new to them. But this is where they would all come and have great philosophical discussions. Well, we can see Paul's already been provoked by all the different gods. Paul even says, you've worshiped an unknown god, but here I proclaim him to you. As we get this scene, it's hard for us because we don't have idols like this. We don't have statues with names and identities that we worship. We should think of philosophy in this way as something that's over-analytical. Philosophy is really seeking to just love wisdom. That's what the word means. To know how to embrace a wisdom that will give you a happy life, to live the best life. And that's where the Stoics and Epicureans represent two different ideas. If you really think about the setting in our day, this would be like the self-help section in our bookstores. all those different religious ideas, all those different principles and steps towards a happy life. Paul saw that this people, they were very religious because they had many idols. We realize we're also very religious and we think we've progressed past idolatry because we don't have actual idols we worship, but our idolatry is found in the self-help book. Our idolatry is that we can learn some principles, and we can take care of our own selves, and we can take control, and we can learn how to do it with our own ability. Western society, we're very religious, just in a weird, agnostic, atheistic way. We've refused God, we've rejected God, but we love the self. We love our own ideas. We love seeking to be committed to a series of ideas that we think will solve our problem. Well, we're never going to reach the happy life because the primary problem we have is inside of us. The primary problem we have is that we have a heart darkened by sin, a rejection of God. Our primary problem is that we will worship anything but the God who is truly worthy of worship. Friends, the good news of God this morning is that we no longer have to keep searching and finding the next new steps that might lead to a happy life, the next new fad or religious idea or philosophical idea or 12 rules for a good life. No, instead of trying to find who is this unknown God, as Paul says, he's made himself known. The God we're all longing to know, the life we're all seeking to enjoy and to know, God has made it known. God has made himself known. He has made himself known in his word. God's own son has come to reveal God. God has commissioned the apostles, Paul, one here, to proclaim this word, and now we have God's word written. God doesn't want us to seek spirituality that I think is too often just seeking and never expecting to find anything. No, it's meant to be a certainty. There's meant to be a certainty to it. God speaks so that we can have confidence in what he says. A good parent always speaks with certainty about the things that matter most to the children. God who created us speaks with certainty so that we know who he is and we know who we are. So we know how to believe in him and it's personal. He makes himself known. Well, now Paul is going to proclaim this God, and the second point is God made all people to know him. God has made himself known, and now we're gonna see the message of who Paul is proclaiming as God, and well, who God is making himself known to be. This is verses 24 to 29. I want you to notice in verse 24 and 26, there's important statements, God made. Verse 24, it's the God who made the world. And verse 26, and he made from one man every nation and mankind. God is creator. He's made us. Important, the Jews would have already assumed that, but he's gotta go all the way back to the most foundational truth of the faith, that we depend upon God. And notice there, verse 24, The first made statement,
the God who made the world and everything in it.
Let's refer to what we call Earth. The land, the seas, the plants, the fish, the birds, every human. He's both Lord of Heaven and Earth. He's the God who created the stars, the moon. We don't worship the stars and the moon because they were created by the one we're supposed to worship. Really behind all this is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. God created everything out of nothing. He's not a mechanic who decided to just take what's already existed and put it together in some way, but he spoke and things came into existence. The sun, the moon, the stars, human life. Now some people ask, well, who made God then? Well, no, that's the whole point. It's a good question. But it misses the whole point that everything was made but God. He depends on no one and nothing. He is existence himself. Everything was created by him, but he is independent. He is self-existent. He is from the very beginning and is eternal. The point we should carry away from this is we are dependent on him and he is not dependent upon us. I believe that's one of the first real problems we assume is that somehow God needs us. No, in every way, we are fully and absolutely dependent upon God. He created everything and needs nothing. Notice how clear he makes this in verse 25.
He does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything. Since he gives life, He gives to all mankind life, breath, and everything.
He's completely independent, self-existent, and we depend upon him. Drop down to verse 28 just for a moment, and just notice there he's quoting, he's quoting from Epimenides of Crete. In him we live and move and have our being. Now that is a pagan philosopher who said many things that are wrong, But now this one statement is forever canonized as a true statement for us. And I highlight that as God has created us and we're fully dependent on him. That simple statement is worthy of your memorization. Our life, our movement, our being, it's all dependent upon him. Now this is the time of year we're all putting in gardens to be self-sufficient. We're all thinking about how we're gonna be ready and what we've done to prepare and be ready. Okay, it's amazing that God designed us to do so much, but you're merely mechanics. You're merely taking what God has given you in ability and stuff and being a good steward of it. You have nothing without God. We're fully dependent upon him. Acknowledge the most basic truth today, I am not God, I depend fully on God. He does not need anything I bring to him, but everything I need is supplied by him. If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, recognizing the God who has given us all we need, that is the beginning of wisdom. The second great God made statement. The first one is that he has made everything. He depends upon nothing. He does not need us in what we bring with our hands. Well, the second God made statement is verse 26.
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And he made from one man, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined a lot of periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring.
" Notice here, there's one man. This is Adam. God has created Adam. He breathed life into him. He placed him in the garden. And from Adam came all men. And then God set up all different boundaries. As we became divided, God set up the different boundaries and nations. There is one humanity, is the basic point of what he's getting at here at the beginning of the text. There's not different humanities. There's one humanity. We all come from the same source. God, who created Adam. This is the foundation for the Christian ethic, love your neighbor as yourself. The reason you love your neighbor as yourself is that you're the same. There's not different humanities. As we think about sin, the sin against God is often that we don't depend upon him. The sin against humanity is often that we think of them as others, some other kind of thing, not realizing we're all equal, made in the image of God with dignity and honor. The point of the idea that there's diversity, that people are spread all over, is that they might find the one proper end of all humanity, and that is to be with God, to know him, to seek him. Notice that this is significant. Verse 27, he established from one man all people who then separated to different nations and boundaries, and he himself has established those differences. But in verse 27, the purpose, that every single one made in God's image, every one God has given life, that they might seek him, perhaps feel their way toward God and find him. There's a beautiful underlying truth here. God created us for himself, not because he needed us, not because he depends upon us, but because he created us to enjoy us and for us most of all to enjoy him. We're supposed to find him because we need him. Now that feeling, we need to be careful not to take kind of the idea from Star Wars or New Age that, you know, just trust your feelings. Look inside and you'll find God. The word really has more to do with when you're in the dark and you're blindfolded, you're trying to feel your way down a hallway so that you don't step on one of your kid's Legos or hit a door that's open. And it isn't promising you can feel your way to God. That's really the end of what God created us for, to be with Him and to know Him. There's a way in which God has designed us to be in His presence. That's the way it ought to be. He's not speaking of man's ability to discover God. We need to put this with what Paul says elsewhere in that we've all suppressed the truth that God has revealed to us. We've rejected God. We've all wandered our own way in sin. But the ultimate goal, the ultimate is that we would be in the presence of God. Verse 27 continues, he's not far away. In him we live and move and have our being. Every breath you take is dependent upon God giving it to you personally. Every life, every moment of life we have is God giving it to us powerfully. He supplies our very existence He's not a deistic God. He's not a God who's up there, out there, and might be mildly interested sometimes. No, he's a God who's near. He knows our every thought. He established all the boundaries of the nations. He puts kings on thrones. He's very active. He is near. He sees our pain. He sees our joy. He hears our prayers. It even speaks of that relationship. We're his offspring. That doesn't make us gods. He made us lower than the angels. We're his offspring in that he has breathed in us his very own life so that we might know him. He's not a harsh master. He's not a distant father. No, he's a loving God who we depend upon. Now, notice verse 29. to give an application from these two God-made truths. Being then God's offspring, whom he made to know him,
we ought not to think the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.
Since we are God's offspring, we have life from him, we ought not think of him like things he's created, We ought not try to imagine him and somehow try to make another representation of him. Now, he's speaking of making an image of God out of stone, gold, silver, and these kinds of images would have been around him. He's calling them out for the way they have sought to worship him. We don't make an image like this. But we probably do have some idea of who we think God is. Everyone here has come in with some idea of who we think God should be like or is like. The warning is, how are we imagining God in a way that is false? Everyone in here has some idea of God that needs to be made more true. And if we come in here without knowing God and receive from whom he is, from his word, then we have all kinds of bad ideas of who God is. Really, when we imagine God, it's always interesting when you hear somebody who says, this is who I think God is from their own experience. God normally looks and sounds just like them. That's what we do, because that's our best thoughts. All we can do is try to ascribe them to God. There's a psychological theologian named Feuerbach who said everyone just makes God the projection of their own values. We see this happening all over the place. Again, our worship is one of the self. We have idolized how we imagine ourselves in our culture. We have made that a religious commitment, that however we feel inside, that needs to be honored and valued and upheld with a religious fervor. Or we see how people view a politician who shares their ideals and we honor and value that politician with a reverence that has a religious zeal. Both of those are us projecting our ideals into who and how we worship. The weirder one is how we worship these sports teams. Why? We're prone to self-worship. We're prone to think our ideals must be the greatest of ideals and, well, God better match up. Here's the good news this morning. You can worship a God who's greater than your greatest thought. You can know the true God who is truly glorious and great. He has made you to think about him well. He has made you to know him. He's made you to have great ideas and thoughts, but he's also created you to know him truly, with certainty. The problem we have when we limit who God is based upon our own imagination is that it's going to be a false God. It's going to be a God who merely mirrors and mimics us. There's two reasons why we're not to make an image. God's already made his image. It's us. We are his image bearers. We are supposed to be reflecting him. Secondly, we're not to make an image because God is greater than whatever we imagine him to be, it will be a false representation. Let's pull these things together. The God of life made us to know Him, to seek Him. The God of life, the God of all the heavens and the earth, in Him we live and move and have our being. Friends, we're wonderfully made. It's amazing how God created us with such value and purpose and how we rejected Him and turned away from Him. Today, God is making Himself known. He is your creator. He is the God in whom you live and move and have your being. You could leave here today no longer wondering who God is, but receiving who God is. No more curiosity that's merely fruitless pondering and speculation. No, there's truth to be received from a faithful God. No more being limited by what you think God could be. You can know the God who speaks and makes himself known. Now, the big theological truth here is there is one God, he's made all of us, he's made us to know him, but in our sin, we constantly make him something other than what he truly is, and well, this leads us to our last point. Verse 30, the God who made us, that God commands us to repent. The times of ignorance, God overlooked, beginning in verse 30.
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this, he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
Notice the time has changed. A significant time change has taken place because we've moved from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. A significant time has changed because we were waiting for the promised Messiah to come, but now He has come, He has been born of the Virgin, He has died on the cross, He has risen again. There is a different time for these Athenians, for these philosophers who did not have the Jewish scriptures at this time. their time of ignorance is past. They're no longer ignorant of who God is and who they are and that God created them. The time of their not knowing about the true God and how much they depend upon him, that time has gone. And it's overlooked by God. And I don't believe what he's saying here is all those who died without knowing who Jesus was, their sins are now all of a sudden forgiven. No, it's the time of using ignorance as any kind of an excuse is past. God's wrath has been revealed universally according to Romans 118. God has made himself known to all people at all times in his divine power and we suppress that truth and we refuse to honor him. I believe here this is where the boundaries are important back in verse 26. Because God made himself known to a particular people with a particular boundary, and it was designed that everyone would come and hear of this good God, but those people were not that faithful. Well, the time of ignorance is over because now all people everywhere ought to hear the command, repent, because Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. Now, notice how universal that is. All people, every kind of image bearer, everyone who's made in God's image, and everywhere, all nations, all continents, all countries, there is a wonder of universal truth. Everyone God has made, everywhere, is called to repent. And the repentance is turning away from the gods they've imagined, the life that they've imagined, the philosophy that they've embraced that is opposed to God, and repentance is really turning towards the God who gives true life. Repentance is turning towards the God who's truly worthy of worship. Repentance is the word you get to hear today. It's an invitation. It does assume you're doing something wrong. But if we're all honest, don't we all realize there's sin inside of us that we don't have control over? There's words that burst out in anger. There's lust that rage. There's gossip that spews forth. There's sins inside of us we don't have control over. Jesus came to free us and heal us and save us from that inside problem. We all, over against other humans, and even against God sometimes, we spew out venomous hatred that we don't have any control over, that's assumed common knowledge of there's something seriously wrong with all of our hearts. What God is telling us is much bigger than that. It's not just that there's a sin problem inside of you, but you've imagined him wrong. The invitation is to come out of that sin, to come out of that imagination, and come into healing. Forgiveness, to know the true God. And the why is so important.
The time of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
It's an act of faith to turn away from what's destructive and towards what is life. But his reasoning why, verse 31, because it's fixed. It's settled, it's absolute, there will be a day of judgment. There will be a day of reckoning where you will stand before one man. As we were all born from one, as we all came from one man, Adam, there's one man from whom we will all be judged. It is fixed, we will stand before Almighty God. We will stand before the appointed one, Jesus Christ, and we will have to give an account for how we imagined God wrongly. how we lived our own lives according to our own way, rather than believing in Him. Ignorance will not be an excuse. The call this morning is to believe in Jesus, the new Adam, the new beginning of a new humanity. He rose on this first day of creation, Sunday, to bring about new life. Jesus, the Son of God, the one new man, who gives us a new hope. There's some universal truths we must grasp that are foundation for the gospel. All people were created by one God. Second, all people have sinned against that creator. Third, all people will face a certain judgment. That's the universal truth. Everywhere, all people, all times, one God. And here's the one exclusive truth. There is salvation in only one name. It's Jesus Christ. He alone has come with the power of God to die for our sins as a perfect human, to take the penalty we deserve, and he alone has risen again to give us hope of salvation, to give us new life. He's the one we'll stand before in judgment. He's the one who promises He can forgive us and give us new life. There's only one name. There are universal truths, and there is that one necessary, all-important, exclusive truth. There is salvation only in one name because He alone died to truly forgive sins, and He alone has risen again so that we might have new life. Now, it all comes down to the resurrection. I've tried to reason with you so much from the text in terms of who we are and who God is and who Paul is proclaiming from God who he is. Let's try to boil everything down to the resurrection. If you're not a believer this morning, this is really what I want to wrestle with. There's two basic scenarios that what may have happened 2,000 years ago. Jesus may have just been a man who was a really good teacher. And he had disciples. And he was falsely accused, and he died on the cross, and he remained dead. And those disciples decided that they might, may have stolen the body, that's what the priest claimed. But those disciples, they decided they're going to make the story up that he is risen. And then they started to spread that news, and they all were willing to die for that news, and the church that's been persecuted over and over again, it's still alive and thriving under persecution, even though it's all built on a lie. So either the disciples lied, and they were willing to die for that lie, and the church is built upon that lie, or these disciples who were absolute cowards up until the point of Jesus' death. They understood nothing. It's pretty frustrating when you read the Gospels. Why don't you get it, guys? They were absolute cowards. They denied Jesus. They fled from Jesus. They left Jesus alone. These 11 and eventually 12 and 13 guys, they fled, and they knew Jesus didn't rise from the dead, so they started making up stories, and they lied about it, or they truly saw him. What's amazing is God's design was that women would show up and be the first witnesses. Those who would not have a voice in a public court, they were the first witnesses of the resurrection. You don't make up a story like that. The other option is these men were transformed to proclaim a gospel and were willing to die, and most of them did die for the good news that Jesus is risen. I press that in because there's a historical argument there. I don't believe I can reason you to faith. I just want to provoke you enough to say, this is so important. Either he's risen and you must believe in him, or he's not. And we're all to be pitied. But it's worthy of your time to take that Bible that's in front of you. Please take it with you. Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or all four. And ask over and over again, God, who are you? Is Jesus your son? Did He die on the cross for my sins? Is He alive? That's the question I want you to leave with. That's the question I want you to ask others about around you. It boils down to if Jesus is risen from the dead, He's your only hope. He's the only Savior. And you can believe in Him and be saved right now. I pray you would repent of whatever false god you might have and believe in Jesus. Christian, are you convinced Jesus is raised from the dead? Are you seeking to set aside all the different ways we imagine God and truly know him who is risen and revealed himself and the king of kings who shows us and tells us how to worship him? We should be longing to practice repentance by setting us off whatever false notion of God or false notion of what He expects of us. If you've stopped repenting, you've stopped following Jesus. We're called to live a life of repentance that's setting off sin so that we can draw closer to God. I hope what you walk away with this morning is hope. The false views that we so easily adopt of God are enslaving. God sent his son to purchase you with his own blood and to rise again so that you follow him, so you have joy, so that you enjoy the freedom of God, so that you learn how to follow him and have confidence in God, so that you know you can go enter boldly into the very throne of God in his name. Too many believers welcome to that love and confidence and that joy and perseverance. They struggle with doubt, fear, self-infliction. That's you this morning. Welcome is repent, come out, come closer to the God who you have known and can know with joy and confidence. Our first made statement was that God does not need us to serve him. We need him. The beautiful call of Jesus Christ is to now believe and serve him. And let's make sure we don't get anything confused here. We do not serve him because he needs us. We serve him because we need him. The call is to come to him who knows you who desires to be known by you so that you can grow into God, grow into Christ, and serve him, again, not because he needs us, but because we need to be near him. Will you pray with me? Father, we pray as this morning ends, I pray the sun would not set without hearts being settled in repentance. Lord, we pray for those who come with doubts, fears, anxieties, those who are asking questions of who you are. Lord, make yourself known. We thank you that you are the God who has spoken so that we may know you. Lord, may we all leave here with greater assurance that since Christ is risen, there will be a judgment and we can have certainty that knowing that judgment is coming, we have new life to enjoy forever. Father, we thank you that you have not left us in our sin and our death, but you have given us your own son. who is our hope. Lord, we pray we would draw closer to you, to know you and to make you known. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
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