A Different Kind of God

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As I’ve been studying for this series on worship, it’s kind of gone in a different direction than I had planned. I think I expected to talk a lot about the how of worship, and really what I’m seeing in the scriptures is a need for a lot of the why of worship. And so we may talk in the coming weeks about how to worship God.

There may be some of that as well. But today we’re going to look at one of a few lessons, I think, on why we worship God. And last week, if you’ll remember back to last week, when I talked to you about what worship is, I tried to drive home the point.

I’m tongue-tied, really tongue-tied for some reason this morning. I tried to drive home the point that worship is not songs, that’s part of it. It’s not music, although that’s part of it.

It’s not really just an activity that we do together on Sunday mornings, although that’s part of it as well. What worship is, is the orientation of our hearts toward God, or really anything. We will worship all sorts of things.

Human beings will worship all sorts of things. It’s in our nature to worship. And when mankind chooses not to worship the one true God, then what we find is that we’ll try to fill that space in how we were created with anything else.

We’ll try to worship something else just to fill that longing of our hearts to worship something because it’s what we were created to do. But if we’re going to worship God, it’s again, it’s not just an activity that we do on Sundays. It’s not just the songs we sing.

Worshiping God is the way we orient our lives and our hearts toward Him on a daily basis. Whether we are focused on serving Him, whether we’re focused loving Him, whether we’re focused on seeking Him or not. That determines our worship.

And then what we do when we come together and we sing songs and all that, that’s great, but that is an outgrowth of the worship that takes place on a daily basis. And as I said, we’re going to do that with something. We’re going to orient our lives and our hearts towards something.

It may not be God, but we will worship something. Folks, even the atheist worships something. It may be themselves, it may be their intellect.

It may be their money. But folks, hear me on this. Everybody is orienting their lives towards something.

There’s something that they are pursuing that is the central focus of their lives. Everybody is worshiping something under that definition. And so, you know, we look at some of the things that people worship instead of God.

And we see where people worship self. People worship money. People worship stuff.

People worship status. People worship celebrity. People worship their families.

People worship all sorts of things. I’m sure you could sit there and come up with a list of things, and you could think of some things that I’m not even thinking of this morning. But everybody worships something, and there’s no end, there’s no limit to the number of things that people will find to worship.

And in that regard, humankind really hasn’t changed at all from its earliest days, and it certainly hasn’t changed. Human nature hasn’t changed since the early days of Christianity. As you look at Acts 17, where I’ve already asked you to turn, we see in this passage, we see in this chapter that the Apostle Paul was in the city of Athens 2,000 years ago, and he stood on what’s called Mars Hill.

Some versions of the Bible call it Mars Hill. Some versions of the Bible call it the Areopagus. That’s not a contradiction.

It’s the same place. It was named by the Greeks the Areopagus after Ares, the god of war, who happens to be the same God as the Roman God Mars, who’s the God of war. So it just depends on which culture you’re writing from, which language you’re speaking.

But he stood on this hill in Athens where all the great minds of Athens gathered to discuss philosophy and theology and all the things that really matter. They got together to discuss these things, and he was speaking to a group of people who, just like in our day had no shortage of gods to worship. Now the difference was they acknowledged that these were gods.

They acknowledged that these were things they were worshiping, and they had built shrines to them, and they had named them. But Paul stood on the Mars Hill, and he looked out at all the things that people were worshiping, and he began to speak to them about the things that they were worshiping. And in verse 22, which is a little bit before we’re going to start reading, As he’s talking to these people, he called them very religious people.

Now, some of your versions may say very superstitious. They were very religious, and their religion was based on superstition. So I don’t really see a contradiction there.

But he points out they’re very religious people. They’re worshiping all sorts of things. He saw them worshiping all these gods, said, you’re very religious people, and he drew their attention.

Instead, he used that as a springboard to draw their attention from all their false gods to the God of Israel, away from the gods of Greece to the God of Israel. And folks, just like Paul tried to explain to the Athenians then, we’ve got to understand today there’s only one God, there’s only one anything that’s worth worshiping. Again, we’re all going to worship something.

Everybody in the world is worshiping something. But there’s only one anything that’s worth worshiping. And so we look at starting in verse 24.

as he’s talking to them about the God that they don’t know. They even had an altar to the unknown God. There was a God they didn’t know and understand, and they were worshiping this God ignorantly just in case they missed one.

Just in case they missed one. And Paul says, let me tell you about the God that you don’t know. So we start in verse 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, nor is he worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, since he gives to all life, breath, and all things, and he has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, 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. For in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, for we also are his offspring. Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising.

Truly these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising him from the dead. Okay, so he’s trying to make the point here of comparing the God of Israel to the false gods of Greece in hopes that the Athenians will understand that there’s only one God who’s worthy of worship.

And from this, from this comparison, we can see how all of the false gods of our culture also fall short in comparison to our God. Our God is so remarkably different that all the gods of modern society, all the Greek gods, all the Roman gods, all of them, they all fall short in comparison to the God of Scripture, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And as we look at this passage, we see a few different things about our God that Paul points out to the pagan worshipers on Mars Hill.

And first of all, we see that God’s relationship to us is different. We serve a God who has a different kind of relationship to us than all these other gods. If we look again at verses 24 and 25, he says, God who made the world and everything in it, since he’s Lord of heaven and earth, he does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, since he gives to all life and breath and all things.

So in verse 24, Paul is describing the matchless power of God, that God is capable of things that the human mind can’t even imagine. He certainly is capable of things that the Greek philosophers couldn’t have imagined a God was capable of. Their gods were not all powerful, okay?

Even in their own thinking. Of course, we would say that because we don’t believe they’re real. But even in their own thinking, their gods were not all powerful. And there were two prevalent schools of thought in Greece at that time, which, again, times have not changed all that much because they’re pretty close to the schools of thought nowadays.

But there were two prevalent schools of thought in Greece at that time. One said the entire universe came into existence by itself. Just kind of, there it is, through a random chance.

That sound familiar? People still think that today. Then there were other Greeks, other Greek philosophers and scientists who thought that the universe just has always been.

It never came into existence, it just has always been. We hear that today also, and my thought there again is, how did it get there? So they weren’t looking at this from a standpoint of, oh, our gods created all of this.

No, their gods just happened to be there, and this was already here, it came into existence. And Paul says, oh, no, no, our God is different. God created the universe.

He created all of it. He made the world and everything in it. This was something they couldn’t say of their gods.

Their gods might create stuff. They might create some of the things in the universe, but they didn’t believe their gods created the universe. They weren’t that powerful.

Paul says, our God, the God of Israel, created heaven and earth and everything that’s in it. And he says he’s Lord of heaven and earth. As he says he’s Lord of heaven and earth, he’s talking about how God rules over everything.

The God of Scripture rules over everything, Paul says. The Greek gods each had their own little area that they were over. Nobody was ruler over everything.

He said he made it. It’s his. It all belongs to him.

It all bends to his will. So what Paul is saying is that in contrast to the piddly little Greek gods, there is no limit, no check on God’s power and authority. None.

That the God that they worshipped ignorantly, the God they did not know, the God that Paul has come to tell them about is a God who is limitless in power and authority. I’ve said to you before, there are things God can’t do. Now don’t run me out of here as a heretic.

The scripture says God can’t lie. God can’t sin. There are some things God can’t do.

He’s only limited by his own nature. The only thing God can’t do is stop being God. The only thing God can’t do is that which is against his nature.

So he’s not going to lie to us. He’s not going to sin. He’s not going to do anything unjust, but there is no external limit on God.

Nobody else that says, God, you can only do this. Good luck with that. All right?

Good luck with telling God what his limits are. So Paul’s describing already a God that boggles their minds, and he’s pointing out that God isn’t limited to a temple made by human hands. Okay, their gods sat in little temples, or big temples in some cases.

Their gods were sort of contained in these temples. And yes, the God of Israel had a temple. At this time even, he had a temple.

And that’s where people would go for their corporate worship. That’s where people would go for their sacrifices. And God inhabited the temple.

But as we read through the New Testament and even in the Old Testament, we don’t get the idea that God is limited to that temple. God was always in the midst of his people. God is not limited to a temple.

God inhabits the entirety of heaven and earth. There’s no place that God can’t go. So he wasn’t stuck in one of their temples.

There’s no building that could bind him. The whole universe is his. And what’s more, he’s glorified throughout the heavens and the earth, which he made himself.

Again, the Greek gods would have certain things that would glorify them. The kids and I have been reading the Odyssey at night. It’s funny that we started doing that, then I come to Acts 17 because all of a sudden I’m thinking, oh, I understand what he’s saying about the Greek gods because you see, and that’ll factor into the sermon a little bit this morning, you see how petty they could be and you see how limited they were.

There’s one, the sun god Apollo had sheep that were his pets and that’s where he got his glory from, from his herd of sheep. And the Greeks could diminish his glory by stealing from his flocks. Folks, our God is not just glorified in a temple and not just glorified in a herd of sheep.

Our God created everything and receives glory from it, and we can’t diminish his glory one way or another. Now we look at verse 25, and he contrasts God with all the gods that are fed, that are washed, they’re dressed, etc. every day by their worshipers. And this still goes on in our world today.

There are people that will take their little statues out of their little boxes in the morning, and they’ll wash the statue. and they’ll dress the statue and they’ll put the statue in its seat of honor and they’ll bring food to the statue. The statue is utterly dependent on them to take care of it.

But our God, Paul says, is not worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything. Unlike these other powerless myths, both in the Greek, in ancient Greek society and today, these powerless myths, unlike them, God is not dependent on us for his care. God is not dependent on us for his care.

hear this, God does not need you. I know that sounds like a harsh thing to say. God doesn’t need me.

God doesn’t need you. Now, he loves us, and he desires a relationship with us, and he chooses to use us in his plans, but he doesn’t need us. It’s not as though we say no to God, and his plans all fall apart, all right?

It’s not as though we stop worshiping God, and suddenly he’s helpless. No, No, God does not need us. We are dependent on him for our life, for our breath, for our very existence.

He says in verse 25, he gives to all life and breath and all things. Now, the Athenians, the Greeks that he’s talking to, they could relate to their gods almost as equals. Almost as equals.

The gods were more powerful than mere mortal human beings, but they had all the same faults. They had a lot of the same limitations. And beyond this, the Greeks could manipulate their gods, and the gods needed their worship and their ministry.

They needed them. Our God doesn’t need us. In the Greek world, they worshipped their gods because their gods needed them.

We don’t worship God because he needs us. We worship God because we need him. That’s a really important thing to understand when it comes to our God being different.

Our God relates to us differently. Our God is not chasing us around saying, please, please, please, I need you. Our God is saying, here I am, you need me.

We have a God who doesn’t need us. We have a God that we are utterly dependent on, and we have a God who loves us enough that he revealed himself to us. We have a God who loves us enough that even though he didn’t need it, he made it possible for us to have a relationship with him, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later on.

Let’s look at verse 26. He’s made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him and find him, though he’s not far from each one of us. Not only is God’s relationship to us different, but God’s rule over us is different.

God’s rule of us is different. He’s made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. Now this is one of those verses that I point to when I hear people who claim to be Christians spouting some kind of racist ideas.

God made all of us from one blood. He made all of us descended from Adam and Eve. But what God has done, He made all of us, and He has orchestrated human history.

He put us where we are. And He put the nations, each of the nations where they are. And He put us here to interact with one another and for the nations to trade together, to go to war together.

He set the boundaries of empires. We look at some of the most powerful empires in history, and we see where in the book of Daniel, they were prophesied in succession that you’d have the Babylonians, and then they’d be conquered by the Persians, who’d be conquered by the Greeks, who’d be conquered by the Romans. God knew all of this was going to happen before it ever did, because God set all of this in motion before these countries were ever even thought of.

And what God has done, what Paul is describing here in these verses, is how God intervenes in human history, and he’s always done this. Now, you contrast this with the Greek gods who couldn’t have pulled anything like this off. When they intervened in human history, it was never for anything good.

As the kids and I have been reading the Odyssey, which if you’re not familiar with that, it’s about the aftermath of the Trojan War. You remember the story about the Trojan horse where the Greeks conquered Troy not by breaking through the walls but by tricking the people of Troy. giant wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers.

They thought it was a peace offering. And so they rolled the horse inside the walls of Troy. When all the Trojans went to sleep, the Greek soldiers climbed out, opened the gates of the city, let the rest of the army in, and slaughtered everybody.

The Odyssey is about the aftermath of that story, as one of the Greek generals is trying to get home, Odysseus. In that story, and many others, you see how the Greek gods are just selfish, they’re petty, they’re manipulative, They’re always acting on whatever whim strikes them in the moment. According to their stories that they believed, the entire Trojan War started because three of the Greek goddesses were arguing over who was the fairest of them all.

And what is that movie? Is that Snow White? Yeah, so think of the witch in Snow White and how petty she was.

That’s what their gods were like. And they sent thousands of men to their deaths, not to defend an ideal, not to protect a country, but because they were arguing over who was fairest of them all. That doesn’t sound like anything I want to worship.

Skeptics get all over God over some things that happened in the Old Testament and say, well, I can’t believe God allowed this. I can’t believe God said that. Yet God had an overarching plan of preserving the Jewish nation alive to send his son to save mankind.

And so, yes, sometimes God said, go wipe out the Canaanites. After God had given opportunity after opportunity for the Canaanites to knock off their evil, but instead they were determined to exterminate the Jews, and so God said, go get them. You know why?

Because God had an overarching plan for the good of mankind. I don’t hear the same skeptics eviscerating the Greek goddesses for sending thousands to their deaths just to prove who was the fairest of them all. They were so manipulative.

Whatever felt good to them at the moment, they were like four-year-olds. Our God instead has regularly intervened in human history to carry out his long-term plan for people to come to know him and to be reconciled to him through Jesus Christ. That’s God’s plan. You know, when you look at verses 26 and 27, he says he’s made all the nations of the earth.

He’s determined their pre-appointed times and boundaries of their dwellings. He set the borders. He said when this nation would rise, when this one would fall, he’s been over all of that.

Verse 27 tells us his justification or his motivation. Verse 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. God’s plan has not been just, oh, I woke up this morning and I think I’ll do this to mess with the little people in Greece.

God’s plan from eternity past, God’s plan has been to intervene in human history and work things and orchestrate all things together so that some of us would come to a point where we would find him, where God could reveal himself to us, and we would find him, and where we would trust him, and where we would be reconciled to him, and rescued from our sins, rescued from death, and rescued from hell through Jesus Christ. And God has always been at work to make that happen. God’s rule over mankind is different from what the Greeks thought the rule of their gods were. So God’s had this long-term plan for people to know him and be reconciled to him.

And the ancient Greek gods, their plans could be thwarted. Part of the plot of the Odyssey is that the sea god Poseidon hates Odysseus and wants to destroy him, and the goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is protecting him and helping him get home. One of the two is not going to get their way.

He’s either going to get home or he’s not. So their plans could be thwarted. God’s plans can’t be thwarted.

He’s all-powerful. And even the very fact of Paul’s presence in Athens at that time, As he’s talking, 2,000 years ago, he’s standing here at the Areopagus, at the Mars Hill, and he’s talking to these people about their gods. Even the fact that Paul is there witnessing about Jesus Christ to the people of Athens is a demonstration of God’s rule over humanity and over the nations of men so that God could reconcile them to himself.

Because think about this, in the 6th century BC, so about 600 years before this, the prophet Daniel wrote about a Greek king who would conquer the known world. Then about 200 years after that, Alexander the Great became king of Macedon at age 19 or 20, and he began marching through, taking over all these Greek city-states, and he eventually conquered the Egyptians, the Israelites, the Persians. He marched as far as India and conquered everything in his path.

And when he came to Jerusalem, apparently one of the high priests marched out to meet him and said, you are the fulfillment of prophecy. And Alexander, from what I understand, treated the Jews with kindness because of this. but they said you are the fulfillment of prophecy but God 200 years before it happened God spoke through the prophet Daniel to warn his people this is coming Alexander, he didn’t name him by name but Alexander is going to come and he’s going to conquer the world and he’s going to spread Greek culture and language everywhere.

Alexander lived for 13 years as ruler then he died, his kingdom was split up as Daniel said it would be and it was overtaken by the Romans. And the Romans came in and conquered much of Alexander’s empire. And according to God’s plan, as it says in the book of Acts, the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, the Romans collaborated with the Jews to execute Jesus Christ on the cross.

It’s part of God’s plan. And this all happened in the Roman empire, where the peace that the Romans instituted made it possible for people to travel. The Greek language that was still there made it possible for all these people to communicate, and it all led to when God raised Jesus from the dead, he had already opened all the doors that were necessary for a Greek-speaking Roman Jew like Paul to travel throughout the empire preaching the message of Jesus’ resurrection to people who could understand him in Greek, including to a Greek audience in Athens.

The very fact that Paul was there and able to travel to Athens was thanks to the Romans. The very fact that Paul was able to speak to them was thanks to Alexander the Great, introducing Greek all throughout the world. The fact that Jesus Christ was crucified was thanks to the collaboration of the Romans and Jews.

God had been working on this for centuries. The very fact that Paul is there preaching in Athens is testament to how God has been planning this and bringing things all together for so long. God is so different from all of mankind’s other gods because he doesn’t get some kind of weird amusement out of messing with people just for his pleasure.

He works in our lives to orchestrate things so that people can come to know him and be reconciled to him through Jesus Christ. In other way, God is different because his rule over us is different. Third of all, God’s requirements for us are different. We see in verse 28, verses 28 through 31, it says, for in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, for we also are his offspring.

Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art or man’s devising. Stop there for just a minute. In verse 28, he’s talking about how God gives us life and he gives us breath.

God is, in fact, the very reason for our existence, Paul says. Contrary to the Greek gods who weren’t all that powerful, Paul says the God of Israel is the only reason we exist. He’s the only reason our hearts continue to be. He’s the only reason for every breath of air that gets sucked into our lungs.

It’s because God exists, and he’s chosen to bring us into existence. He created us, and he gave us the opportunity to relate to him as his children. He talks about us being the offspring of God.

He gives us the opportunity that we don’t earn or deserve to relate to him as a child, as children loving, to relate to him as children to a loving father. And even though mankind often rejects that opportunity. And in verse 29, he talks about since we’re the offspring of God, we shouldn’t see his divine nature being something that we can carve out of gold or silver or stone or wood.

If you’re looking for the power of God in your life, basically this is what Paul wants them to understand. And I think we need to understand this too. If you’re looking for the power of God in your life, you’re not going to find it in things that were made by man.

You’ll find the power of God only in the one who made me. So he tells them, quit looking at your little statues and your carvings. Quit looking at things that you made and look at the one who made you.

We see in verse 30 that throughout human history, mankind has worshipped all these false ideas, these false concepts of God. He said there were these times of ignorance. And God let it go on for a little while.

Truly these times of ignorance God overlooked. Some translations say these times of ignorance God winked at. He let it go for a while.

He didn’t swoop in and destroy us immediately because God is gracious and wants to give us an opportunity, wants to give us time to repent and be reconciled to him. He allowed this to go on temporarily, but he calls now for it to stop. He calls us to a change of mind.

It says, calls all men everywhere to repent. That means change our mind. Stop worshiping other things and recognize that we’re supposed to be worshiping him.

Quit thinking it’s okay that we worship all these other things and recognize that it’s something God calls sin and it separates us from him. and I’ve explained to you before repentance is not get your life cleaned up repentance is not feeling bad for your sins I think the cleaning up of our lives is something that God does as a result of repentance I think that feeling bad for our sins is something that comes as a result of repentance but repentance itself according to the biblical Greek is changing our minds realizing that all along God has been right and we’ve been wrong recognizing there’s a problem and that only he can fix it. So God calls us to that change of mind because in verse 31 there will be a day when he’ll judge sin because he’s appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained.

The man whom he has ordained is Jesus Christ. You may think, well, I thought he was God. He is. He’s God who became a man without ceasing to be God.

And that’s difficult to wrap our minds around, but that’s what the Bible says happened. So he will judge the sin of the world in righteousness by Jesus Christ. And he’s given assurance of this to all of us by raising him from the dead. You want proof that God is going to judge the world through Jesus Christ?

Look at the fact that he raised Jesus from the dead. That proves all of Jesus’s claim. That validates every claim that Jesus ever made throughout his ministry.

And so Paul was talking to a group of people who routinely, they routinely had to bribe their gods for their favor. If they wanted something from their gods, they had to bribe them. And most other gods and religions, even today, have requirements of what we’re supposed to do for them in order to earn their favor.

Most other religions and most other gods say, this is what you’ve got to do to have God’s favor. This is how you earn it. The God of the Bible instead is a loving father who freely offers every good and perfect gift, who freely offered us the ultimate gift, which was reconciliation to Him through Jesus Christ, His Son.

Folks, unlike the Greek gods who required bribery, who required you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, we have a God who His requirements for us are different. He requires a change of mind and He requires faith. God’s gifts don’t, unlike all these others, God’s gifts don’t come to us as a result of bribery.

They come as a result of His grace, simply because He’s loving enough and gracious enough to offer these things to us. You may be wondering, why all this talk about the comparison between the God of Israel and the gods of Greece? Why all this talk about that in a series on worship?

What does that have to do with worship? Well, first of all, as I’ve already told you, you’re going to worship something. It’s just, it’s your human nature.

And just like the people at Mars Hill, people in the United States in 2018 have no limit to the number of things that we could choose to worship. We have all sorts of options out there. There are tons of gods, tons of