God of All Nations
Notes
Transcript
24 God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. 25 Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. 26 And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27 so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28 for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
Title: God of all Nations
Background: To the Unknown God
There is Only One God of all the Nations..
One Person deserving of worship.
24 God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. 25 Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.
God placed worship in the heart of man.
Describe Muslims, praying multiple times per day...
There is Only One God of all the Nations..
We can learn from how the Apostle Paul in Athens..
we can pontificate or express judgement in a dogmatic way, but what Paul did was different.
We see from Paul’s example:
When reaching the heathen (unbeliever):
We are not to pontificate but to communicate.
Start not with dissimilarity but rather about commonality.
Do not immediately alienate, but find ways to relate.
But with the Gospel be precise - NO COMPROMISE!
2. One Source of all Humankind.
26 And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,
From one man - Adam..
Craziness of wokeness - even saying humankind is being changed by the woke police.. Justin Trudeau referred to it as “womankind” at some point.
has determined their preappointed times — empires have come and gone, but the heritage of different people groups have been preserved — explain ethic origins (lost tribes of Israel) and examples.. I believe no one race in all of humanity is lost to God.
To Ishmael, the ancestor of those in Saudi Arabia: “I will make him a great nation”
“and the boundaries of their dwellings”
God scattered humanity in the tower of Babel.
It is the Lord Who formed the nations:
8 When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations,
When He separated the sons of Adam,
He set the boundaries of the peoples
According to the number of the children of Israel.
God intentionally scattered so that they will someday be gathered by Him.
Unity man’s way or God’s way.
God’s way of unifying man is through a spiritual gathering through the One Person Who He appointed.
There is Only One God of all the Nations..
3. One Way of Salvation
Paul declared that God: “has determined mankind’s preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,” why? for this reason - verse 27:
27 so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;
Purpose of the national boundaries:
He didn’t gather them all to one place..
so that they should seek the Lord..
that they may grope for Him and find Him… groping in the dark..
The image of groping in the dark, God has placed eternity in the hearts of men,, like a GPS in the middle of their darkness..
God purposed this so that in spite of their diversity and differences, geographical, political, social and cultural boundaries GOD WILL BE GLORIFIED THROUGH...
The effective working of the cross of Jesus through the gathering of nations:
10 that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him.
There is Only One God of all the Nations..
28 for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
Paul quoted two pagan poets - Epimenides of Crete and Aratus a Cilcian poet..
The immanence or the nearness of God in humanity.
The Imago Deo
Imago Dei - The image of God in humanity.
The only unifier of all of humanity that God approved of is the Lord Jesus Christ, and the basis of that unity is the Gospel. Our greatest commonality is that all have sinned, but we are all loved by God
The Gospel still saves, the Apostle Paul went through great lengths, finding ways to relate, evoking this commonality in the image of God in all of humanity through the love of God..
The original poem from where St. Paul took the phrase “we are His offspring” is from the work of the poet Aratus called Phaenomena, and it goes like this:
“It is with Zeus that every way has to do, for we are also his offspring.”
Note something, Paul did not shy away from using this poem, even though it is in reference to a false god - Zeus. He did not take the stance of condemnation.. so should we not avoid nor condemn people from the nations who worship a false god.
What Paul did was he pointed them away from Zeus, to the One true God. That is what we do, we point people away from their idols - whatever the name would be -, the Name of Allah, the name of materialism to the Name of the One True God of all the Nations - the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen!
The unifying message is the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
According to Oswald Chambers:
“The key to the missionary message is the remissionary aspect of Christ’s life, not His kindness and His goodness, and His revealing of the Fatherhood of God; the great limitless significance is that He is the propitiation for our sins. The missionary message is not patriotic, it is irrespective of nations and of individuals, it is for the whole world. When the Holy Ghost comes in He does not consider my predilections, He brings me into union with the Lord Jesus.” (Oswald Chambers)
“A missionary is one who is wedded to the charter of his Lord and Master; he has not to proclaim his own point of view, but to proclaim the Lamb of God. It is easier to belong to a group which tells what Jesus Christ has done for me, easier to become a devotee to Divine healing, or to a special type of sanctification, or to the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Paul did not say — “Woe is unto me, if I do not preach what Christ has done for me,” but — “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” This is the Gospel — “The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” (Oswald Chambers)
The Gospel and its preaching is why we exist as a church. Soon there will be a gathering of all the nations under the rulership of the One True King - The Lord Jesus Christ!
Image of the gathering of nations here.