Your unknown God

“My King…is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  I wonder, do you know Him?”

-S.M. Lockridge

 

“We’re going to read from the 22nd verse of Acts 17…

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus* and said, ‘Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious.  For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription:
TO AN UNKNOWN GOD

 

Now what you worship as something unknown, I’m going to proclaim to you.

 

The God who made the world and everything in it, is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.  He’s not served by human hands as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives men all life and breath, and everything else.  From one man He made every nation of man, that they should inhabit the whole earth.  He determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live.

 

God did this so they could seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him, and find Him, though He’s not far from each one of us.  For in Him we live and move and have our being, for even some of your poets of said, ‘We are His offspring.’

 

Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image made by man’s design and skill, in the past God overlooked such ignorance.  But now He commands all people everywhere to repent.  For He has set a day where He will judge the world with justice by the Man He has appointed.  He has given proof of this to all men by raising Him from the dead.

 

When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered and other said, ‘we want to hear you again on this subject.’  At that, Paul left the council.”

 

At the turn of the century, the famous Methodist preacher, Sancster, once said, ‘Preaching is in the shadows, the world does not believe in it.’  We would have to say, ‘Preaching is in the shadows, the church does not believe in it.’

 

The great need of the hour is for those who have God’s hand lean upon them to respond to the oppurtunities of the moment in a way that gives their best to the task.  So that what you have is a divine encounter, an invasion of the supernatural, a waft of the supernatural taking place whereby in this monologue, there is actually a divine dialogue.  It is not the dialogue of a man with men and women, but it is the dialogue of the living God with the souls of men and women.  Who, quickly forgetting the one responsible for the monologue, find themselves saying ‘These are strange ideas!  These ideas seem to be impinging upon me in a way I cannot fully explain.”

 

You’ve been very investigative, Paul says, I applaud you for that.  You’re asking good questions and thinking down the right lines.  But what his listeners have been unable to to discover by investigation, he says this information is now disclosed by revelation.”

 

-Alistair Begg

 

Paul accomplishes several things here.  One, actually, being the point behind my last post.  Let me set up the stage for you again.

 

Paul is meeting with the people of Mars Hill*, who are willing and interested to hear the gospel.  They know there is a possibility of something to be gained by listening to Paul.  Paul notices an altar that is to be used for an unknown god.  Essentially, if there’s something you don’t know intellectually or emotionally but neither can you deny it’s existence, you would offer up to that god using this altar.

 

He then goes to explain to them who God is in a way they can understand.  He uses simple terms and even their poetry to have them comprehend what he’s talking about.  They understand and accepted everything he was saying, even the part about God commanding every person and nation to repent; because His gospel is open to everyone.  But once Paul mentioned the resurrection of the dead, he lost their interest.  Why?

 

They were not seeking God.  They were seeking an emotional answer (the highest personality in literature) or an intellectual answer (the largest problem in higher criticism).  If Paul had expounded anymore on the poetry of being the children of God, he would have had a captive audience.  If he had talked more on the existence and physicality of God he would have had a captive audience.  But he chose to talk about the supernatural, the raising of the dead, a miracle that cannot be explained but by faith.  The emotional people sneered at him at the lack of self-centered existentialism in the resurrection of the dead, and the intellectual people do what intellectual people do best, “That’s an intriguing concept, let’s talk about this later and maybe consider it some more.  Maybe.”

 

God forbid we should have faith and the passion that drives us to it so that we may seek Him as He really is.  We determined that almighty God come down and meet us on our terms so that we may put Him in a box we can put our arms around.  I’m not sorry…but God is both omnipotent and sovereign.

 

If you haven’t found God yet, it’s because you’re not seeking Him as He is.  But you don’t know how?  You don’t know God?  Is He still an ‘unknown god’ to you?

 

What can you do?  Let His passion completely overtake you.  Give Him your broken and contrite heart, because these things He will not despise.  And THAT is a promise.  If you simply give up and come to Him as you are, He will explain much.  And what He doesn’t explain He will give you the faith to make it through.

 

Who better else to serve than than the only loving God who gives us faith to surpass all human understanding?

 

Unknown