Before Church
Sunday, April 14,
2019 “God Is in Control”
Acts 17:26-27
And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the
face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of
their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might
feel their way toward Him and find Him.
Late night TV –
always a mistake for us insomniacs – when we find not the soporific effects of
boring shows that lull us to sleep, but the extreme programs that shock us into
wakefulness, like the TV preacher telling us that God is not in control. His premise was simple; with all the evil in
the world, God is not in control of that.
He had a laundry list of evil: rape, murder, thievery, etc., and
justified his idea of no sovereignty in the Godhead by saying that if God was
in control, we couldn’t prosecute wrongdoers for breaking the law, because then
it would be God’s fault, not theirs. That crazy leap of illogic shows the man
doesn’t know his Bible, but he also doesn’t know our God.
Paul, speaking at the
Areopagus, makes the case for the One true God, Who is sovereign, even over
evil. Because whenever we talk about
evil, we have to realize: it’s our fault.
It’s our fault; not God’s. God made the perfect world, God gave it to us
humans, and we ruined it. We invited
evil; we gave satan an entrée into God’s creation and the world hasn’t been the
same since. Every bit of evil is when we
succumb to temptation (I Corinthians 10:13; James 1:1:13-18) and our Lord Jesus
Christ was tempted too ((Matthew 4, Luke 4, Matthew 26:36-46). But God sets the
boundaries for all our troubles and temptations. Look at Job, the devil wanted him, but God
limited the suffering and temptation: the Sabeans who attacked his servants in
the field, the Chaldeans who killed his herdsman and stole his flocks, and the
wind that collapsed his house on his kids were all within boundaries God had
previously set. And when disease invaded
his body, even then God limited its scope – Job’s life was never in
danger. Nor, by the way, was his soul
ever in danger; God had confidence in Job.
Job never cursed God, never succumbed to temptation. Evil only goes as far as God allows it to go,
but humans have historically been all too willing to cave to temptation. That is, and always has been, our fault, our
responsibility, and fully prosecutable in human courts, and in the final
judgment. Paul warns that the Man Who
was raised from the dead has fixed a day when He will judge the world in
righteousness.
Using Scripture and
their own poetry Paul challenges the people of Athens to recognize God as Who
He is; not Zeus, not Athena, not any of the pantheon of Greek gods, but the One
and only sovereign Lord of the universe.
What, then, is the purpose of evil?
Contrast. To repent, to know
ourselves as offspring of God comes from the contrast we see between what the
world should be, and what the world is; what our souls should be, and what they
are. The boundaries God sets on evil
quite simply maximize our opportunities to recognize God, to repent, to believe
the Gospel, and to join His Kingdom, because there is a difference between
being God’s offspring and being His children.
If we were quicker on the uptake, there wouldn’t be so much evil.
God is in control,
and we are His offspring. Isn’t it time
we became His children?
