MAKING THE LORD KNOWN (PART 3)

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“From one man, He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”

Acts 17:26

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

What would you tell someone about God if they didn’t know Him?

As we look at this six devotion series, "Making the Lord Known", we find the Apostle Paul giving us a roadmap to success in explaining God to others. So far, here’s what he has told a body of ruling elders called the Areopagus after being invited to speak while in Athens:

Contrary to their belief system, there was only one God who was the Maker and Master over every single person because He created them. This God not only created everyone but He created everything else in heaven and on earth, ruling and reigning in superiority over all things which made all things accountable to Him and Him alone. And since God is superior to everything else in creation, He is the only One who possesses the power to do all things, making all created things dependent on Him. Finally, in yesterday’s message, we were reminded of how the one and only God calls us to serve but not in a sense of providing Him anything because God is not reliant on any person for anything. Rather, our Lord gives us life and all the provisions we need to live it in accordance with His will while serving those He brings us to help.

This is the God the Athenians were unaware of, the God who was unknown to them, and He’s still the God over all creation today.

Now, this would have been a good stopping place for Paul and he would have led those in attending the session of the Areopagus with what they needed to hear in order to know God. But as we see in today’s message (and will see in the three that follow), Paul still had much to say when it comes to revealing God to those who had no knowledge of Him prior. Look again at our single verse for today:

“From one man, He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” Acts 17:26

Here, Paul makes sure his listeners know that although God created all people, it wasn’t just an immediate, full populating of the earth by a spoken word or wave of His hand. Certainly, God could have done this if He wanted but the creation story started with one man and one man only as we read in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis:

Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there He put the man He had formed. Genesis 2:5-8

It started with Adam and because God didn’t wish for him to be without companionship, he created a woman and named her Eve. They were the Bible’s first couple and all mankind trace their lineage back to them. Therefore, no man or woman should ever wonder about the beginning of their ancestry. Their family tree will always be rooted in Adam and Eve. From them, the world was populated, leading to nations rising up as the whole earth became inhabited. In Biblical times, populations outside of the Jewish nation wouldn’t have understood their God-initiated heritage. Paul was seeking to make sure the Greeks knew that the God they were learning about was the One responsible for their very lives. Without Him starting creation through the first couple, no one would be existent.

But note that it wasn’t enough that God created all people from one couple. Remember that He reigns and rules in power over all created things, and so God is always in control. It was true at creation, it was true as Paul addressed the Athenians, and it remains true today. God and God alone is the God of the past, the present, and the future. He marks out the appointed times in history and the boundaries of land His people will occupy. And so all things happen in His time and at the place He wants them to happen.

God dictates everything. Period. And no person has any right questioning how God is moving in life and ordering events in history. All these events are conjured up by a perfect God and so the events happen in the perfect way He intends them to; in His way, not the way that we think they should go. There’s a huge difference between the two.

In the beginning, God. 

These are the first four words in the Bible. He and He alone was at the beginning of everything we know, fashioning heaven and earth and all created things with His almighty hands. He made people in His own image in order to achieve His purposes and those purposes became what we know as history, formed wherever God placed His people.

The Athenians were getting a full knowledge of the God who had been unknown to them through the words of the Apostle Paul. Tomorrow, we’ll look at why God did things the way He did and I hope you’ll come back as we continue this series. Have a blessed day.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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