Experience: S2 - Day 32

The risk of rejection

Acts 17:24 “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, 25 and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. 26 From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.

27 “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 29 And since this is true, we shouldn’t think of God as an idol designed by craftsmen from gold or silver or stone.

Paul’s comments here are not unlike what he wrote in his letter to the church in Rome, “For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” Romans 1:20 NLT

I like to think of this as Paul saying that God is everywhere, if we know Him and keep our eyes out for Him.  Before this knowledge comes to us, we may experience God when a gorgeous sunset steals our breath, or the first time we hear a baby laugh, or as we shutter at the powerful sound of thunder coupled with the bright light of lightning.  

In fact, I give the Athenians credit for knowing that there are some things in this world that their gods and their knowledge and the stories of their past can’t explain.  So they responded by creating an altar to the unknown.  They admitted there were things they didn’t know and couldn’t explain, and that’s where Paul saw the door cracked open just a tad to be able to share the gospel.

Paul even goes so far as to say that this God they don’t know, the God he is trying to make known to them, is actually so close that it’s in him that we “live and move and exist.” Then Paul shows another example of how he has tried to understand the people of Athens; he has read their poets and quotes them here, “We are his offspring.” I believe Paul showed them great respect by seeking to understand a bit about them before trying to introduce them to God.

All of this would have been new teaching for the Athenians, who believed that there were all sorts of gods, a god for everything under the sun, including the sun.  And since their gods were crafted out of the earth, it was a huge paradigm shift for them to be told that there is actually only one God who created all things and that this one God is also sovereign over all things.

Notice how Paul doesn’t tell the whole story here.  Maybe they weren’t ready yet to hear that not only was it in this God that we live and move and have our being, but that this same God became human, lived, and died to save us from ourselves.  Paul tries to share with them what he knows will challenge them but what he thinks will first connect most with their story.

I just wonder how our evangelistic efforts might improve if we spent less time speaking at people, and more time listening to people.  Then, when the time was right as led by the Spirit, we helped connect God’s story to their story in a way that honored both.  Maybe that would be more like Christ’s method of reaching us, than our method of proving to others how right we are and how wrong they are.

Questions:

1. If you had the opportunity to talk to someone who you knew had never heard of God or had a concept for him, how would you describe who God is?
2. What do you think is one way we can honor someone else’s story? 
3. What do you think our highest value should be when talking to others; to prove to them that we are right, or to show to them that they are loved?  Why does this matter?