SPEAKER_00: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_01: Please take your Bible with me again to the book of Acts, chapter 17.
SPEAKER_01: Passage that was read for us earlier.
SPEAKER_01: Acts chapter 17.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't catch the Q Bible page.
SPEAKER_01: I apologize for that.
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember what it was, Webb?
SPEAKER_01: 882?
SPEAKER_01: Alright.
SPEAKER_01: If it's wrong, if 882 is wrong, you can blame Webb.
SPEAKER_01: It's his first first Sunday back after being gone for a while.
SPEAKER_01: Well, as the 250th celebration of our country winds down, I think it's appropriate to remember the big picture.
SPEAKER_01: There are around 195 nations in existence today.
SPEAKER_01: And we are just one of them.
SPEAKER_01: Each country, each nation has its own flag, its own government, its own borders.
SPEAKER_01: Most of them have their own language.
SPEAKER_01: They have their own unique history, a story that's been built and put together that shapes its identity.
SPEAKER_01: And many of those national stories, all across the world, highlight those peoples and those nations as the heart of the world, presenting their history as the main event, if you will, and their people as quite distinctive.
SPEAKER_01: The same is true of the ancient and prestigious city of Athens, when the Apostle Paul walked into it around 50 AD.
SPEAKER_01: Athens, Greece, by that time was past its prime.
SPEAKER_01: Rome had taken its place, but it was still one of the world's pivotal places.
SPEAKER_01: Philosophers still gathered in mass in the public squares to argue and debate ideas of all kinds, including religious ideas.
SPEAKER_01: And, as we heard in the passage read for us, idols were everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: And I mean everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: One ancient estimate puts the number of religious statues of altars in the city of Athens around thirty thousand.
SPEAKER_01: Thirty thousand religious altars in one city.
SPEAKER_01: So amid all of those thousands of efforts to capture the people's sense of the divine work in their midst, Paul noticed one altar among all of the countless monuments that said to an unknown God.
SPEAKER_01: I guess they ran out of ideas.
SPEAKER_01: Either that or they were afraid of missing one.
SPEAKER_01: Athens had so many gods that it was perhaps afraid that there was some God out there that needed to be appeased that they did not know of.
SPEAKER_01: So they sort of hedged their spiritual, religious position with an altar to whatever deity might have been overlooked.
SPEAKER_01: In Acts chapter 17, the Apostle Paul speaks to that issue.
SPEAKER_01: He stands before them and announces to them the identity of the God they did not know.
SPEAKER_01: But before telling them about God, he says something about every nation on the face of the earth, including the United States of America.
SPEAKER_01: And it's an important announcement, I think, as our country celebrates its 250th birthday.
SPEAKER_01: That announcement, in my own words, is that God himself sovereignly orders the nations so that they might seek him.
SPEAKER_01: God orchestrates and positions all of the peoples of the world for a particular purpose, so that they would seek him.
SPEAKER_01: Here's how it's stated in Acts 17, verse 26.
SPEAKER_01: And God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place that they should seek God.
SPEAKER_01: The word nation there, he made from one man every nation of mankind is the word ethnos, from which we get our modern word ethnicity.
SPEAKER_01: God made every ethnicity of the human race.
SPEAKER_01: Now, generally, ethnicities stick together, and those over time form what we know today as nations.
SPEAKER_01: And beginning from Acts chapter 17, verse 24 through the end of the chapter, we find four truths about God's plan and purpose for the world's nations that are significant for us to keep in mind.
SPEAKER_01: The first truth is in verses 24 through 26, and that is that every nation comes through one man.
SPEAKER_01: Comes through one man.
SPEAKER_01: Says the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, because he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything, and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.
SPEAKER_01: So the Apostle Paul tells this assembly that the God he's describing, the unknown God to them, doesn't live in massive grand buildings like the Parthenon, that part of it still exists today.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he's the one who actually gives life and breath to the very people who crafted those 30,000 statues.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, the person who thinks he can represent the creator of all things in a piece of wood or a piece of stone has seriously misjudged God.
SPEAKER_01: Then Paul says something about the origin of every nation.
SPEAKER_01: And he made them from one man to live on the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Now we tend to hear that phrase from one man as a claim about human origins.
SPEAKER_01: And it is.
SPEAKER_01: But to the people of Athens, it was a direct confrontation to their identity.
SPEAKER_01: It was, in a way, a slap in the face to the story of the Athenians.
SPEAKER_01: Because they believed that they came from the soil of Attica.
SPEAKER_01: Attica is the surrounding region around Athens.
SPEAKER_01: That means they thought of themselves as distinct and special, as if they evolved out of the ground independently of all other peoples.
SPEAKER_01: Sort of their way of saying, hey, look at us, we're special.
SPEAKER_01: And one sentence from the Apostle Paul undercuts that ethnic conviction.
SPEAKER_01: Because he says, every nation of mankind, every ethnicity comes from one man.
SPEAKER_01: It's most likely that that one man that he's talking about is not Adam.
SPEAKER_01: It could be.
SPEAKER_01: I suggest to you that it's not Adam.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, I think Genesis chapter 10 is the biblical proof for the Apostle Paul's claim.
SPEAKER_01: Because in Genesis chapter 10, that's one of those chapters early on in your Bible that you tend to skip in your yearly Bible reading.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's got a bunch of names you can't pronounce.
SPEAKER_01: In that chapter, there are 70 nations represented.
SPEAKER_01: We call that chapter the table of nations.
SPEAKER_01: These are nations, people groups that come from one man, not Adam, Noah.
SPEAKER_01: And Noah's sons after the flood.
SPEAKER_01: They're all cataloged there.
SPEAKER_01: You can look at them sometime on your own.
SPEAKER_01: All seventy nations are descended from the three sons of Noah.
SPEAKER_01: And the chapter, chapter 10 of Genesis, ends with these words.
SPEAKER_01: These are the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations.
SPEAKER_01: And from these nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.
SPEAKER_01: Seventy nations, all from one man.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this biblical background undermines some common issues that we find out in the world today.
SPEAKER_01: One is that ethnic pride and unique status as an ethnicity loses some of its footing.
SPEAKER_01: Because every ethnic and nationalistic heritage runs back to the same man.
SPEAKER_01: Noah.
SPEAKER_01: But it needs to be held with some humility if we all come from one man.
SPEAKER_01: The error in the other direction is just as much trouble.
SPEAKER_01: Because every nation and every ethnicity bears the image of God because every nation descends from a man made in God's image from whom God designed the nations and sent them out.
SPEAKER_01: The diversity of the nations, then, is a divine design, not a basis for conflict and hatred.
SPEAKER_01: There's one more thing to notice about Genesis 10.
SPEAKER_01: This is more for the context of our summer study in the end of Genesis.
SPEAKER_01: When Jacob's family goes down to Egypt later on in Genesis to be with Joseph in Egypt, the text tells us that they numbered 70 people.
SPEAKER_01: The nations of Genesis 10 are mirrored in the number of people that go down into Egypt.
SPEAKER_01: They're counted in similar terms, that they're sort of numerically mirrored.
SPEAKER_01: So the nations are not a backdrop of what God is doing, they are part of what God is working in his world.
SPEAKER_01: And so the Apostle Paul argues to these philosophers, you're not especially special.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you have uniquenesses, you have identification stories and elements that make you unique.
SPEAKER_01: But you are not especially special because we all come from one man.
SPEAKER_01: The second truth that we find is at the end of verse 26, and that is that every nation lives under the same Lord.
SPEAKER_01: God made every nation from one man to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.
SPEAKER_01: So Genesis 10 tells us where the nations came from.
SPEAKER_01: Genesis 11 tells us how they ended up so divided and suspicious of one another.
SPEAKER_01: Now you know the standard version of Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel story.
SPEAKER_01: Standard story is that the builders were too ambitious.
SPEAKER_01: They wanted to build a tower too high, and that God somehow felt threatened by what they were reaching for.
SPEAKER_01: But if we read our Bibles a little more carefully, we find that the height of the Tower of Babel wasn't so much the problem.
SPEAKER_01: The problem was the reasoning behind the building project.
SPEAKER_01: So think about it.
SPEAKER_01: You know the story: one language, one people, on a plane in the region of Shinar, all coming together for a single building project.
SPEAKER_01: And their stated goal in Genesis chapter 11 is to build a tower with its top to the heavens so that they could make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
SPEAKER_01: Now we need to hear that in light of what God had said twice before.
SPEAKER_01: In Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, God commanded the very first human beings to fill the earth by multiplying and subduing the creation.
SPEAKER_01: Then in Genesis chapter 9, verse 1, after the flood, God repeated that command to spread abroad and to fill the earth.
SPEAKER_01: So the divine design for humanity was to multiply and spread out, exercising their God-given dominion over the earth so that the image of God would be taken into every corner of creation.
SPEAKER_01: But Babel is the organized refusal to obey that command.
SPEAKER_01: They don't want to fill the earth.
SPEAKER_01: They don't want to scatter.
SPEAKER_01: They want to stay together and make a name for themselves.
SPEAKER_01: They wanted one city, one culture, one name, one agenda, all aimed at staying exactly where they were on their own terms.
SPEAKER_01: And God says, Oh yeah?
SPEAKER_01: In response, God confuses their single language, instantly creating multiple languages, and they scatter and become the nations of the world.
SPEAKER_01: At the same time, Babel was divine judgment for refusing to obey God's command.
SPEAKER_01: They refused to fill the earth, so God made them fill the earth.
SPEAKER_01: So on the other hand, it's God's way of fulfilling his intention, even though they meant it as rebellion.
SPEAKER_01: And so the Apostle Paul now builds on that reality in Acts 17, verse 26.
SPEAKER_01: He says that God made the nations from one man, having determined God, the sovereign Lord, determines their allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling places.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is the Apostle Paul's interpretation of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: So this is an apostolic, inspired interpretation of both Genesis and Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_01: I'll show you how this works.
SPEAKER_01: The nations don't settle on the earth merely through the survival of the fittest in ancient migrations, as though God were watching from on high to see where people ended up.
SPEAKER_01: No, the reality is that God determined their boundaries and he fixed the eras in which each nation would exist, in which each nation would exercise its power, and when it would decline.
SPEAKER_01: Deuteronomy comes from Deuteronomy 32, verse 8, where Moses says that the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance when he divided mankind and he fixed the borders of the peoples.
SPEAKER_01: So the scattering at Babel wasn't disorder or things somehow getting out of control.
SPEAKER_01: It was God's hands shaping the divine dispersion of people when they initially refused to obey.
SPEAKER_01: So God's people today need to understand that whatever nation, whatever nation or ethnicity currently occupies your thinking, whatever power seems most out of control, whatever era of history alarms you most, it is all happening within the allotted period that God determined and the boundaries that God fixed.
SPEAKER_01: That can settle some of our worry and anxiety, can't it?
SPEAKER_01: Because no nation operates or even exists outside of God's own governance.
SPEAKER_01: So if you feel, if you feel led to be thankful for your nation or your ethnicity, be sure to be thankful mostly that God is working that out.
SPEAKER_01: Not that man accomplished it.
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what Genesis 11 overturns.
SPEAKER_01: And it's what the Apostle Paul is bringing out to the Athenians, saying, you're not special because of who you are, you're special because God determined Athens, Attica, Greece, God determined the eras and the boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: And that brings us now to our third element in Acts 17 that we find in verses 27 and 28.
SPEAKER_01: That every nation is searching for the same God.
SPEAKER_01: Consider the purpose clause that explains this whole argument.
SPEAKER_01: It's in verse 27.
SPEAKER_01: That they should seek God.
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
SPEAKER_01: He's not saying they will, he's saying that they might.
SPEAKER_01: Hopefully they do.
SPEAKER_01: But God's design is that every nation seek God.
SPEAKER_01: So God's placement of the nations in their territories and in their eras was aimed at a very specific outcome.
SPEAKER_01: That they would look for God.
SPEAKER_01: So the continued uncertainty and the searching of human beings through religion, the thirty thousand statues in Athens and an altar to the unknown God is evidence of a God who built that longing into every nation, to every people.
SPEAKER_01: He made the nations, he scattered them, he placed them in times and in territories he chose, and he built into them a longing for him that only he can fulfill.
SPEAKER_01: Now that phrase, feel their way, describes someone reaching in the dark, trying to locate something that they can sense but can't quite see.
SPEAKER_01: So imagine waking up in the middle of the night and trying to find the bathroom light, right?
SPEAKER_01: You're feeling on the wall and you're trying, you're half asleep, and that's the image, right?
SPEAKER_01: Every nation, every people group, every ethnicity has a built-in searching mechanism.
SPEAKER_01: They know they need to find it.
SPEAKER_01: But because of sin, they end up groping around in the dark for someone they they can't exactly identify.
SPEAKER_01: Their search is based on some kind of awareness.
SPEAKER_01: For the apostle Paul quotes two of the Athenian poets, saying, He's not far from each one of us, for in him we we live and move and have our being.
SPEAKER_01: He says, one of your own poets has said, for we are indeed his offspring.
SPEAKER_01: He quotes their own poets and philosophers back to them.
SPEAKER_01: That's significant.
SPEAKER_01: Because what he's doing is saying, even the most brilliant thinkers who have no scripture available to them, who have no divine revelation, even they have perceived that human existence is grounded in something beyond us.
SPEAKER_01: And the one in whom our existence is grounded is actually not far from anyone.
SPEAKER_01: So he's he's near, but he's pursued through the wrong objects.
SPEAKER_01: He's present, but he's mistaken for something that we can mold and fashion in our own ingenuity.
SPEAKER_01: Think about that for the converse.
SPEAKER_01: Think about what that means for the conversations you have with people.
SPEAKER_01: God installed a spiritual hunger in the people around you.
SPEAKER_01: So that the person constructing their spirituality around whatever feels right, that comes from God putting in them a desire to seek Him.
SPEAKER_01: Or the person who senses that there's something more but doesn't really know what it is.
SPEAKER_01: They're doing exactly what God designed the nations to do.
SPEAKER_01: They're reaching, they're groping around in the darkness for the light switch.
SPEAKER_01: And most importantly, he didn't build that longing in them just to leave it empty, unsatisfied.
SPEAKER_01: That's the whole point of the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_01: That's why the book of Acts shows God's work of sending the gospel to the ethnos, to the nations.
SPEAKER_01: In Athens, Paul is identifying the God that they were searching for but hadn't yet found.
SPEAKER_01: He's declaring to them the gospel of Jesus Christ answers that longing that every person, every nation, every heritage, every ethnicity possesses.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel reaches people who are in one way or another already searching, even though they may not know it.
SPEAKER_01: Now at the end of the chapter, verses 30 and 31, we find the Apostle Paul's reasoning for why this is significant.
SPEAKER_01: That's great and all.
SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: You've given us some background, you've given us some basis for how we fit into all of world history and God's program and God's purpose.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Paul.
SPEAKER_01: So what?
SPEAKER_01: Well, he tells them in verse 30 and verse 31.
SPEAKER_01: He says this is important because every nation, and by implication, then every person is going to be summoned to appear before the judge.
SPEAKER_01: God is overlooked.
SPEAKER_01: But now, see the switch there?
SPEAKER_01: He's flipping the light switch.
SPEAKER_01: Now the light's on.
SPEAKER_01: And now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because here's the reason, he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man that he has appointed.
SPEAKER_01: And of this he has given assurance to all, to all the Ethnos, to all the nations, to all the peoples, by raising him from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: Imagine how fearful it would be to not know the God who will judge you.
SPEAKER_01: So he's standing there, probably, before the unknown altar, the altar to the unknown God.
SPEAKER_01: This is the God who will judge all of you in righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: And you don't know him.
SPEAKER_01: Every nation was made by him.
SPEAKER_01: Every nation was made to bear his image, positioned to seek his face.
SPEAKER_01: And every nation's natural response has been to take the God it was made to know and to reconstruct him in their own image.
SPEAKER_01: So the creature that was made carries its creator's image, and yet it tries to remake the creator in its own image.
SPEAKER_01: Athens' 30,000 statues are an example of that problem that runs through every culture and every civilization in history.
SPEAKER_01: And then the Apostle Paul narrows his argument.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Now listen, God's overlooked your ignorance.
SPEAKER_01: It's good that you had this altar to the unknown God.
SPEAKER_01: It's good that you were seeking that, seeking him.
SPEAKER_01: God made you to do that.
SPEAKER_01: But that seeking of something that's unknown is ignorance.
SPEAKER_01: It's the lack of knowing.
SPEAKER_01: I'm here to tell you now so that you know and that you respond to what you know because God has not only appointed a judge, but he's given proof that that man will judge.
SPEAKER_01: You see, God was patient while the nations wandered around in the darkness searching for him.
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been to somebody's, spent the night at somebody else's home or maybe in a hotel where you're unfamiliar and you can't remember on which side the light switch is?
SPEAKER_01: You're feeling it's gotta be here.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not on that side.
SPEAKER_01: Because you're ignorant.
SPEAKER_01: You don't know that it's not on that side, but it's on this side.
SPEAKER_01: God's patient while you're wandering around, feeling around on the wrong wall.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm here to tell you the light switch is over here.
SPEAKER_01: And God Himself is now available and ready to be found while you're reaching.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the day came when God didn't merely remain near to them.
SPEAKER_01: The day came when he entered their world.
SPEAKER_01: He came himself.
SPEAKER_01: Back in verse 26, God made every nation from one man.
SPEAKER_01: Now in verse 31, God will judge the world by one man.
SPEAKER_01: The first man, the very first one, Adam, is the origin of every person's wandering that extended through Noah to all of the nations.
SPEAKER_01: They carried it with them all across the world.
SPEAKER_01: But the one man now that God has appointed, Jesus, is the answer to everything that Genesis set in motion.
SPEAKER_01: The consequence of Adam's failure runs through the history of nations groping around in the dark on the wrong wall.
SPEAKER_01: They know they need to find the light switch, but they have no clue where it is.
SPEAKER_01: The problem is that they are still answerable.
SPEAKER_01: And they are without excuse.
SPEAKER_01: And that God has appointed Jesus Christ, the Lord of all, to judge all people of all ethnicities of all nations.
SPEAKER_01: That's a problem for those who are groping around in ignorance.
SPEAKER_01: Did you know that in a unique way, Acts chapter 2 in the day of Pentecost is Babel backward?
SPEAKER_01: The Spirit comes to the disciples in Jerusalem, and there are a whole bunch of nations represented in one city on that religious holiday, hearing the good news of the man appointed to judge the world and hearing it in their own language.
SPEAKER_01: So the confusion of languages that scattered humanity sort of reverses in one morning where they're now all hearing the one message designed to save them.
SPEAKER_01: The long search without actually finding has an answer.
SPEAKER_01: And the one who can fill what the nations have been reaching for across every culture, across every century, every altar to an unknown God, the answer is the resurrected Jesus whose appointment God confirmed by raising him from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: If the tomb was still full, you could go about your life thinking, yeah, that good luck with that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to stand before that judge.
SPEAKER_01: But because the tomb is empty, it confirms that God has appointed him as judge.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, it's time for every nation, every ethnicity, and every person to repent and turn to him in humble faith for the salvation of their sins.
SPEAKER_01: Because the unknown God is no longer unknown.
SPEAKER_01: Our summer study in the life of Joseph is sort of one chapter in God's long campaign of pursuing the nations.
SPEAKER_01: God places Joseph in Egypt, the dominant world power at the time.
SPEAKER_01: He positioned him there in a position of slavery and then in prison, working through every element of treachery and suffering that Joseph endured, God arranging it all toward a purpose that reached far beyond the reconciliation of that one broken family of seventy people.
SPEAKER_01: It's through God's work in Joseph that God preserved the lives of many people in the world's nations.
SPEAKER_01: Through the seventy, God saves many from the seventy nations in Genesis 11 and 10.
SPEAKER_01: God appointed Joseph to save people.
SPEAKER_01: Pay attention to that thread throughout the few, the remaining weeks in the summer.
SPEAKER_01: Every time God moves in Joseph's story, something bigger, larger, grander in scale is taking place.
SPEAKER_01: And since Jesus is the ultimate Joseph who was sold by his brothers and killed, the world's nations wouldn't just get grain from an Israelite.
SPEAKER_01: They'd eventually get the bread of life from the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: So understand then that the nations, the nations of the world, the United States of America, are not accidents.
SPEAKER_01: They're not just grand experiments that happen to achieve something.
SPEAKER_01: God made the nations from one man.
SPEAKER_01: He scatters them with the intention to take his image to the far reaches of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: He fixes their times and their borders.
SPEAKER_01: He arranges the whole of human history so that every nation would be positioned to search for the God who made them.
SPEAKER_01: And that invitation in the book of Acts has now gone out from Jerusalem to reach all of the world.
SPEAKER_01: All people, everywhere, are now commanded to find in Jesus Christ the God they've been reaching for since Babel.
SPEAKER_01: That is the invitation to every person, whatever nation has shaped you, whatever family history brought you here to this day, you were made to seek Him.
SPEAKER_01: The United States of America, whatever nation we put in that spot, was made to seek God.
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps more importantly, God has now made himself known.
SPEAKER_01: There's no need for ignorance anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The searching can end.
SPEAKER_01: Pray together.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, we pray for this country in which we are worshiping freely this morning.
SPEAKER_01: We pray for every country around the world, every ethnicity of people, whatever their story might be, their language might be, their culture might be.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, would you convict them of their need to repent and turn to Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: Lord, fulfill in them that longing that can only be filled by you.
SPEAKER_01: Fulfill your purpose for them.
SPEAKER_01: Draw them to yourself so that they might no longer be groping in the dark, but find you.
SPEAKER_01: And not only to find you, but to trust in you.
SPEAKER_01: The one who entered this world, died, was buried, and rose again, and trust you as the judge of all the earth, who rescues his own from eternal judgment.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, may we all be those kind of people who are no longer ignorant, but can say we have found him.
SPEAKER_01: In your name we pray these things.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.