One Nation, Under God?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcZ5zteUKKw

Acts 17:26-27

45:25

|Transcription: Yesterday was the celebration of our country's two hundred and fifty years of existence. I have a friend from another country who told me, you know, our country is way older than yours. And I said, yeah, but does your country have a flag on the moon? Did I say former friend? To say it more seriously than that, the United States occupies a relatively unique role in world history because of its founding. It is in many ways a nation born out of a Christian worldview with Christian ideals and ideas. And what does that mean when I say our country was born out of a Christian worldview? What do I mean by that? I don't mean to argue that our Founding fathers could all subscribe to the Nicene Creed, or that they were evangelicals, or they were or were not deists or whatnot. What I mean is that the bedrocks of an understanding of building a nation to promote freedom, life, and liberty under the sovereignty of God, are all evident in our country's founding in a way that is unique in world history. It doesn't mean that the US is perfect or has been perfect. Obviously, a Christian worldview is not compatible with perfect people doing perfect things. If you are describing a worldview where nations are perfect or only good, then that is certainly not the Christian worldview. What I mean is that our nation was intended to act christianly from its founding. And I do want to say right out the gate that for the most part, no two colonies from the original thirteen colonies would have agreed on what it means for a nation to act christianly. But what united them was a desire for that to be true. Never the less, they at least agreed that whatever it means to act christianly, it was a good idea and a noble endeavor. That was not a consensus. That was easy to find in the night or in the seventeen fifties through the seventeen sixties is when revolution began to be talked about and the seeds of discord were spread through the colonies. It was also a time of revival. Those two decades, the seventeen fifties and 60s revival was breaking out. Scores of people were leaving the established churches, the denominational churches, which were essentially Anglican, Church of England, Episcopal, whatever you call it. That was the main denominational church. That church was funded by tax dollars. The colonists were taxed, and most of the colonies, their tax money was collected by the colonial governments and used to further the denominational church, the Church of England. But as revival was spreading, you see so many people leaving the denominational churches becoming Baptists becoming Methodist or Wesleyan. They. They called it under John and Charles Wesley, preaching, becoming evangelical. They believed the gospel and responded with faith and fled the Anglican Church. And what they found was generally persecution, especially in Virginia. The Baptist Church was exploding in growth. Here. The Methodists were exploding further south and further north. But in North Carolina and Virginia, it became a hotbed of Baptists growth as people were converted out of the Anglican Church, out of the state church, they were baptized and they begin to form Baptist churches with Baptist preachers. And those preachers were often arrested and put in stocks and whipped and flogged and all of that because they were preaching against the state church. They were preaching that you didn't have to pay taxes to fund the Anglican Church. Sometimes we think that the Baptists and the evangelicals would have been on the side of the revolution, and the Church of England people would have been on the side of England. But that is really the opposite. In the seventeen fifties and 60s, the opposite was true. The King of England understood that, and he began pardoning the Baptists that were in jails in the United States. He began. He was a lot. Most of the Baptists were Black Baptists. This was the start of the Black Baptist movement in North Carolina. In Virginia. These people were arrested and the king was the one advocating for their freedom and even paying to send many of them to Africa. And they almost started a missions movement in Africa as he was relocating them. So what changed? Well, in the late seventeen sixties, early seventeen seventies, Thomas Jefferson, Madison and others in Virginia hatched a plan. They approached the Baptists and the the Wesleyans, the Methodists, and they kind of made a deal with them. And if you know much about this history, you will know this is very much oversimplifying it, but Americans are very good at oversimplifying things. It's one of our strengths. Basically the plan and the proposal was, what if a new nation was formed? And in this new nation there was a concept of religious freedom. What if this new nation didn't tax people to fund the state church? What if this new nation didn't make you pass some kind of religious loyalty or religious oath test? There would be no religious test to see your compatibility to serve in it. The Baptists had been cut out of colonial government. Most of the colonists, most of the colonies, demanded some kind of religious purity test, which the Baptists would, of course, fail. You would have to understand the articles of the Anglican faith and subscribe to the Anglican tradition. And the Baptists wouldn't do that. And so they were cut out of the government. But what if we made a nation where that wasn't true? That plan began to grow beyond that, even to this basic question, if a nation that did not mandate worship through a specific church, did not tax people to build that church, did not enforce worship through that church. Would that nation ultimately end up doing more religious good for the world than a nation that conscripted people and taxed people and funded a particular church? Because until this point in world history, that argument had always been flipped. There was always the idea that if the government taxed to fund the church and the government oversaw the church and compelled people to the church, that was the way to guard purity of worship. That was the way to advance the kingdom of God in this world. I mean, basically every nation believed that. But what if the opposite was true? What if a nation that advanced liberty and defended religious freedom, that did not tax and did not make people pass a religious purity test? Is it possible that nation would end up doing more for the gospel than the reverse? That was the great experiment. That was the paradox that brought the American experiment into focus. Would more freedom and liberty end up ironically, leading to more pure worship? And so the Baptists got on board and the American experiment was born. I want to tie this to acts seventeen this morning with. The question is, is this one nation under God? Is there something unique about the United States and their experiment? I'm going to enter into that question. Not through Israel and not through the Gospels, not even through the epistles, but through a conversation with Paul in the Areopagus in Athens, which was in many ways the center of the Greek Empire. The Greek Empire by this time had been swallowed by the Roman Empire. But Athens was a thriving city, and the Areopagus was the place where the prominent politicians, the prominent political leaders, religious leaders, philosophers, scholars of the day they went to debate. They were on public display there. It was the kind of capstone of the Greco-Roman philosophical and political worlds. And that's where we find ourselves in acts seventeen. If you're not familiar with the book of Acts and what's happening here, this is not the story of the gospel. Jesus has already been crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended into heaven. That happened in Jerusalem. But Jesus commanded his disciples to go into the world preaching the gospel and to make disciples of all nations. The book of acts explains how that happened. It tracks the Christians as they left Jerusalem and traveled around the Mediterranean basin. Some went to to Egypt, some to Ethiopia. Some went up through modern day Turkey. Asia Minor is what it's called in the Bible. And others made their way all the way through Turkey to Greece, ultimately to Rome and Spain. The Book of Acts is a story of how that took place. We're jumping in more or less, more than halfway through, but kind of in the middle of it in acts seventeen, Paul is here in Athens. Verse twenty two let you know. And he's speaking the Areopagus. As I mentioned, this is the place where the scholars and the politicians and the philosophers of the day gave speeches about their worldview. Ethical speeches, religious speeches, political speeches. People in the Roman Empire did not argue about politics on Facebook. And yet somehow they still figured out a way to live. Instead, they argued about politics in the Areopagus. This is where that took place. And here we find Paul right at the heart of it. He says in verse twenty two, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. So let me describe the Areopagus. It's a hall. The seats go down and it is filled almost. People are almost boxed out by the number of, I would call them idols. The number of idols that are. There are statues that are there. There are bust. There are heads, there are sculptures, there are statues, mostly of people. There may have been some of animals, mostly of people. The Greeks did not have a bright line between deity and humanity. For the Greeks, the transition between being a mere man to being a god was ambiguous but possible. The transition between being a god to man also fairly easily accomplished. And so they had. They deified some of their political leaders. They had political leaders that died without claiming to be a god that were were deified. Later, after their death, they had political leaders that claimed to be godlike, at least in this life, that they deified then and there, and at their death they made statues of them, and they, in a sense, worshipped them as if they were gods. And of course they have all the, you know, the Zeus and all of the other gods of the Greco-Roman world. They were, of course, gods that became men. And the lines were blurred. And they had statues of them all over the place. That was the Areopagus. That was, in a way, what the scholars aspired to and the politicians aspired to. Maybe one day they would be viewed in a God like fashion. And so Paul is speaking there, surrounded by these statues of all of these people that are deified. And Paul says, very understated. It's kind of a funny line, isn't it? Men of Athens, I perceive that you're very religious. I think it's meant to be a little funny. He says, I passed along through here, and I have observed in verse twenty three the objects of your worship. But I also found this altar with the inscription to the unknown God. So most of these are statues, but there's one that is an altar, he calls it. I don't think they did sacrifices on it. An altar here would just be like the pillar that goes up, but without the statue on it, it's just empty. But it's got a nameplate on it. And the nameplate says to the unknown God. Why do they have a statue to the unknown God? A skeptic would say that they have a statue to the unknown God just to cover all their bases. I mean, they're their gods, after all. We're fighting each other. The gods were often at war for, you know, people's control and affection. And some gods control the weather and others war and others, the seas and all kinds of stuff. If you alienated a god, or if you failed to worship a god the right way, perhaps you would be punished or things wouldn't go well for you. But there's so many gods you wouldn't know if you're missing one. And so they just made one. The unknown God. That way, if any God personally felt slighted, you could say, oh no, we did worship you. We forgot your name, God, so and so. But we have this one that was for you all along. Honest. Like the emergency Valentine's Day gift you might keep in your house somewhere. Of course, I had this. That was that was what the skeptic would say. This is the the Greek philosophers might not say that. They might say, no, there's just so many deified forces in the world. It's impossible to recognize all of them. It's a it's a confession of our own limitation. They might say that, but Paul doesn't argue with them about it. He just pounces on it. Really. He says, you have this the unknown God, how fortunate you're confessing that there's a God you don't know. That's the very God that I happen to be an expert in. Paul says, what are the odds? What therefore you worship as unknown. I am here to proclaim to you. So Paul uses the statue for the unknown God as his launching point into preaching the gospel in the Areopagus. And he says, The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth. He does not live in temples made by man. He starts with the theology of the thing. He begins with a theological lesson that the God that you don't know is the God that I do know, and he's the God that made the universe. For Americans, we are basically coming from a Western worldview, kind of a Judeo-Christian worldview. People call it that. What they mean by that is kind of the foundation of our understanding of God is that he's the creator of the universe. So this whole exchange is odd to us because they have thousands of gods, but none of them created the universe. In fact, all of them were created by people sitting right there like they forged them. They went to work. They shined them. There might even be people polishing them in the background during this speech. So for Paul to say, you have a lot of gods, that's swell. But I know the one that made the world that would strike us as very odd. Like that's the lowest bar possible for what it means to be the true God is the creator. But for them, it was the one thing they didn't know. They made all of their gods. And Paul says, I'm telling you there, you make all of your gods, but there is a God who made you. He is the Lord of heaven and earth and everything he says in verse twenty four that is in it. And listen to me. Paul says he does not live in a temple made by men. The God who spoke the universe and the sun and the stars into existence does not live in a house made by people. There are echoes here of David's request to build a temple for God, where Nathan says yes, and then God says no. There's echo here of Solomon's dedication of the temple. There's echoes here of the church being the body of Christ, of course, but Paul doesn't draw attention to any of that. There's just echoes of it that we pick up on. They certainly wouldn't have. Paul is just making the point that the God who made you doesn't need to live in a house built by you, nor in verse twenty five is he served by human hands as though he needed anything. Well, that's going to be an awkward thing to say. If there are people shining the other statues behind him, like the true God doesn't need his head polished every week. The true God doesn't need to be dusted. The true God lives in heaven and he gives verse twenty five to all mankind, life and breath and everything. He gives you all that you have, your light, your air, your breath, the sun, the seasons, all of it is a gift from the God that you don't even know. That's Paul's theological lesson. This is the great paradox in Christian theology that God is transcendent and immanent. It's a fancy way of saying that God is unknowable but known. God is so far above us and beyond us we cannot possibly know him. We can't describe him in any accurate way whatsoever. He is out of our existence. He is not like us in any way. And yet he reveals himself to us. He makes himself known by making us in his image and then giving us his word. That is a paradox. God is unknowable and yet reveals himself. He's unknown but makes himself known. The fancy way of saying it is he's transcendent. He's beyond us and above us, and yet he's immanent. He's at hand. And that's what Paul's going to go in this in this speech to them, he says in verse twenty seven, we'll look at this later. But he's actually not far from each one of us is the end of verse twenty seven. He lives in heaven, and he made you, but he's all that. Not all that far away from you, when all is said and done. He comes to us in Christ. Paul stresses here the. All mankind. Have you found yourself speaking the gospel to a room full of politicians and scholars and philosophers in the Roman Empire that don't even know who Jesus is. Where would you start? It would be tempting to start with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon. It would be tempting to tell the story of Israel that God made promises that would bring the Savior into the world, and that Savior was born in Jerusalem, right across the Mediterranean Sea from us, right? Right down there. You can sail there in a month. That's where he was born and that's where he lived. But that is not where Paul goes. He doesn't start with the patriarchs. He does not mention Israel. He starts with the nations. And that will be our outline. One nation under God. Let's get into what Paul says about nations here. First, that God makes nations. That's where Paul goes. He doesn't start with Abraham, but he starts with the basic fact that God made nations. Verse twenty six from one man. And here I believe he's talking about Noah. Every nation of mankind is to live on all the face of the earth. God determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. Nations did not exist in the Garden of Eden, but they did exist coming off of the flood, off of the ark is when God built nations. Nations come from Babel. They didn't come from Eden. In the Garden of Eden there was Adam and Eve. There wasn't national divisions. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from the garden. Their children would be born and would grow up right outside of Eden. There were not nations. They were born into. The descendants of Adam and Eve were not citizens of a country. They were inhabitants of earth, not of Eden as the people begin to spread. Of course they spread in violence and murder. Cain murders Abel. There was no country or government to defend Abel to prosecute Cain. Abel's blood cried out from the ground for vengeance, but there was no government to hear the cry. God marks Cain and tells everybody not to deal with him and sends him away. The result of that in Genesis four is that there's bloodshed filling the earth. Lamech boasts about how many people he killed. You think Cain was something? He killed one guy. Look at how many Lemek killed. And the earth becomes filled with violence. By Genesis six, God says, I'm not going to dwell with mankind forever. I'm capping their days at one hundred and twenty years. That's it. One hundred and twenty years from God's decree in Genesis six, he's going to flood the earth and wipe out the people that he made one hundred and twenty years. Sounds like such a long time for us. It's longer than a lifetime. But not for Noah. They live so much longer. That would be our equivalent. You know, we have the dog years calculator. This is the NOAA years calculator. That's God saying you got ten years. I'm going to deal with your violence for ten more years and then kill you all one hundred and twenty years later. God floods the earth. They come off of the ark. This is where governments come from. They come off of the ark and God establishes governments. Of course, people are supposed to expand and fill the earth. They don't. They build up because they still think God might flood them again. They build up. God scatters them by confusing their languages. People coalesce around people that speak their languages. That gives the earth ethnic identity, language, identity, culture is all going to come from that and national boundaries. That's the point. God covers the earth with nations coming out of Babel. This is what Paul's talking about in verse twenty six. God made every nation to live on all the face of the earth from this point forward. Genesis ten four nations will. Expense of the earth. From this point forward, Genesis ten four nations will expand and contract. They will make empires. They will lose kingdoms. They will swallow, expand, starve and die. Some will grow and gobble others, and others will be gobbled. They come and go. All of that growth, all of that decline. The ebbing and flowing, the waxing and waning. It is all at the sovereign plan and will of God. That's the point. In verse twenty six, God determined the allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. Now, I want you to think through the theological question that Paul is hitting them with. It might not be obvious to you. Paul is addressing, if there is a God who lives in heaven and is sovereign over the nations of the world, how come there are nations that don't know him. If God is indeed good and powerful, how come Athens, the Greek Empire, we're not dealing with some, you know, far flung country in some corner of the world. We're talking about the center of civilization here, the Greek Empire. How come these people in the Areopagus don't know about the God who made everything? There's an American version of that question. You might hear people ask if the gospel is true and God is real, what happens to people who die who have never heard it? That's the American version of this question. In other words, if God is so good and the gospel is so true, how come there's so many people that don't know about it? And what happens to them? Paul is sitting in a room filled with idols in the most powerful nation in the world, and he's telling them, the God who made them, they don't even know about. How did that happen? He's answering that by telling them the story of nations that God made nations. He takes them back to the ark, that you have your empire because God gave it to you. We live in a world now with an explosion of globalism as kind of an ideology or worldview. Globalism treats nations as arbitrary. Globalism views borders as inconvenient, manufactured by men, not reflecting any kind of actual reality or cultural distinctions or anything like that. But that is so far from the truth. Nations are not arbitrary. They are designed by a sovereign God. That is Paul's point in verse twenty six. God made from one man every nation. Nations are made by God. God made them. He scatters them, but he never ignores them. Which leads to our second point God makes nations. Secondly, God governs nations. He governs them. He determined the allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. God placed them in the world where he wants them to be. Now, in the Post-flood world, nations are one of the most common blessings we have. We often don't think of nations as a blessing, but you just go back to Genesis four, five and six and you realize what a blessing nations are. You have a government that checks evil, that protects life. I mean, this goes back to the ark when Noah gets off the ark. Do you remember the first thing he did? He offered sacrifices to God. He had two of every animal in the ark, but the animals that he had that were designated for worship, he had way more than two. He comes off the ark and he sacrifices them to God. And the aroma was pleasing to Yahweh. God then establishes nations. He repeats to Adam and Eve the command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, he tells them to have offspring. He then establishes government to protect human life. And this really that, that little section there at the end of Genesis eight through Genesis nine, that's the foundation of government. The government. You see in there what the purpose of government is supposed to be. Worship does not exist through government. God doesn't make nations and then command worship. He receives worship and then makes nations. The first function of government, then, is to protect the freedom of conscience, to worship. Worship predates government. It's not regulated by it, but it is protected by it. The capacity to worship should be protected by government. You get that from the order in Genesis eight and nine. Secondly, the government is supposed to protect your food. The next thing God says is eat the animals. That wasn't said before the flood, but it is now. Eat the animals and eat all the plants and delight in food. I mean, this is one of the most underrated things the government does, protects our food. You know, we're all kind of libertarians at heart. We're like, boo to the government. They do too much boo to the government. But we're so thankful for the FDA you grilled yesterday. Wasn't that steak delightful and not rancid? You know, you have a government worker to thank for that. That's one of the things God makes the government to do. And then to protect the family, you're going to have property you can give down to your kids. Your kids are going to have a a place to call home. Nations will exist, just like the family gives your kids a safe place, a home where they live. Your nation gives your family a safe place, a culture in which you grow up in. You have food and ethnicity and culture, and at the very least, nations give you a soccer team to root for. Amen. And then to protect life. Whoever sheds man's blood by man's hand shall his blood be shed that did not exist before the fall. Do you remember before the fall, I said, Abel's blood cried out for vengeance. But to who? And so the earth fills the violence after the flood. I said before the fall. I meant before the flood. After the flood. Now there will be nations that respond. When nations get evil, they get checked by other nations. Nations exist to keep other nations in line. Notice what's missing from the establishment of government. Notice what's missing from God's covenant to Noah. Something obvious should be missing. There's nothing about the Savior here. There's no salvation here. When God talks to Adam and Eve, he tells them, one of your offspring will crush the head of Satan and be the Savior. When he talks to Abraham, he says, your offspring seed singular will bring blessing to the nations. When he talks to David, he says, your body will be my house, the Savior will be your son, and also your Lord. And I will dwell in him, and he will be my house. When he talks to Solomon, it's about the wisdom becoming incarnate. When he talks to Isaiah, it's about the suffering servant, a Savior who's both God and man. When it talks to Zechariah, God describes a Savior who will be crucified in our place. Those are the kind of prophecies we're used to in the Bible. When he talks to Noah, he does not talk. God does not talk about redemption through Noah, but about government through Noah. And that shows you you're on two different tracks in the Bible. Now, coming out of Genesis ten, there's the story of the nations that goes this way. Then there's the story of the gospel that goes this way through Genesis eleven and twelve. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, the prophets. That's the story of Christ. Over here you have the story of the nations. It's very interesting which way Paul uses in the Areopagus. He doesn't start with David. He starts with nations. Nations will grow and they will check each other. They will be the tool for checking evil in the world. That's their function. And they will even check each other. People often ask me, especially around July fourth. I feel like I'm asked this every year if I think the American Revolution was sinful. And that's an easy question to answer because I say, yes, everything is sinful all the time. Way more sinful than we think. Is that being said, when we think of the American Revolution, you have to take your mind back to like in the seventeen sixties and 70s your typical colonists had never been to London. His family hadn't been to England in four generations. They paid taxes and they had a government, but they weren't paying taxes to London and their government wasn't in across the Atlantic. Their government was in Williamsburg. I remember when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the first time my soccer coach got called up in the the National Guard and deployed out there. He came back and told us all that when he first landed in Kuwait, when he first entered into Kuwait, the Iraqi government had leafleted Kuwait with a bunch of these maps. They had redrawn maps of the Iraqi nation, and it had Kuwait as a province of Iraq, and they dropped the maps out of airplanes to all the Kuwaitis could have them. And my coach told me, yeah, that was not a really persuasive argument for the American soldiers that were there. Like, you don't you don't look at a map that has Kuwait as part of Iraq and think, oh, it must really be part of Iraq. Now it's on a map. I'm sure many of you are familiar with George Washington. When he was first sent as part of the. The British military force sent to expel the French and the Indians from Pennsylvania. He went out to what's now Fort Necessity, and has an encounter. His encounter with the French and the Indians, and he showed them. I'm sure many of you know the story. He showed them the map that he had that was given to him from England. It was a map of Virginia, and it had the borders of Virginia and everything except the North and the South border just extended indefinitely to the West. He had a map of Virginia with two lines. Just kept going forever and ever and ever. Do you think that's going to be persuasive to the French and Indians? You have a map with lines that go to infinity and you're claiming territory over that? Of course not. God appoints the boundaries of nations, and when nations grow beyond their boundaries, other nations check them. That's the way God made the world. It's not sinful to check another nation that grows beyond its borders. It's the way God designed nations to work. C.S. Lewis writes about this in the four and the four loves that. It's very possible that in most, if not if many, if not most conflicts and wars, you have two nations that are both acting righteously by checking each other. That's the way God designed the world to work. If C.S. Lewis is too abstract or philosophical for you, I have a more practical illustration of this. When one nation grows beyond its borders. When one nation outgrows its place and goes out of its bounds where it should not be, it gets penalized by the other nations. You'll notice the score is one zero USA in the corner there. Third. When nations grow, God checks them with other nations. And finally, God gathers people from every nation. God gathers people from every nation. God let the nations go their own way. They made idols, stones, things to worship brick, things to worship, creeping things to worship. They worship animals. They worship the creation rather than the creator. That's what they do. And that's because as the nations go their own way, they have common grace. They have the stars that tell them there is a God that made them. They have a conscience that convicts them about sin. They have a conscience that tells them it's wrong to lust and to lie and to murder and to steal and to covet. They know those things are wrong, but they can't help themselves. And so they're walking in sin and they don't know what to do. So they invent things of what to do. They invent objects to worship. And look how Paul describes this. And first of all, in verse twenty six, he says, God determines their boundaries. God determines the borders of their dwelling place. God uses nations to check nations. Why does he do that? Why does he let the world grow to where the Areopagus is filled with idols? Why does he let the nations grow? So that most people in the world don't know who Jesus is? Why does he do that? The answer is in verse twenty seven, so that they would seek God in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find them. That word feel it's the word for grope that you would do in the dark. Maybe you're sitting in your couch in this night and the power goes out. There's no lights outside and everything is dark. You know, you've got a flashlight over in the other room. You know, right where the door draw that is. So you're feeling your way across your living room. You've had that table in the middle of your living room floor for fourteen years, but somehow when the power's out, you forget it's there. You trip on the Ottoman, you step on the cat, you're feeling the walls to get to that drawer, and you're taking out all the other things. It's this kind of word. This word captures that. It's this word of desperation that God lets the nations go their own way. So they're convicted by their sin. They know they're wrong. They know they're lost. They know they need help. They know they need a savior. But they don't know where to look. They're feeling the wall. Looking for the light switch. They're looking for the flashlight. They're tripping over all kinds of things. Why? So the hope that one day the light will come on. That's what verse twenty seven says. One day the light might come on. Do you remember I said the two lines diverge? In Genesis ten, you have the story of the nations and the story of Christ. It's interesting to me that Paul in the Areopagus does not follow the story of Christ. He follows the story of the nations. But here in the Areopagus around the world, thousands of years later, the two lines intersect again, don't they? He enters with nations to talk about. Now the light is on. This is the Great Commission. Before Jesus ascends into heaven. He says, go into every nation preaching the gospel. Make disciples from every nation. Tell them all about Jesus. And when people get converted, it doesn't undo their ethnic or their national identity. It doesn't erase national boundaries or anything like that. But when they get converted, it makes a new people, a new nation, so to speak, inside of a world filled with other nations. We become a royal priesthood, a holy people set aside with a fellowship and a relationship with each other in Christ, a union in Christ that is bigger than any national boundary. Of course, that doesn't make national boundaries irrelevant. Obviously not. That's Paul's entry point here, but it makes the preciousness and the commonality of Christ so much more potent. So yeah, people are in the dark looking for some way to have their sins forgiven. And then with the ascension of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in Acts two, the light comes on and now the light is shining in the dark places. Not everybody responds to the light. Many people have the encounter with the the gospel and close their ears and close their eyes and run and hide from the light, because they don't want their evil deeds exposed. Yes, they know they're lost. Yes, they know they're in the darkness, but they don't want to come to Christ if he's the light. In the book of acts, you have the idol makers who reject the gospel, because if it's true, they'll be put out of work. I mean, that's an extreme example of it. But that is all over so many people's lives that they don't want to come to Christ because they like their life. They know they're lost, but they like their lost life better than the light. Nevertheless, Paul says, God is not far from us. In verse twenty seven, he's coming near through Christ. Verse thirty one, he's going to fix. Well, verse thirty, the times of ignorance of all the nations God has overlooked. And now he commands people everywhere in every nation to repent. He's fixed a day in which he will judge the world. And now he gets to Jesus for the first time through his appointed son, who died on the cross and rose from the grave. And that's where the Areopagus turns the lights out and say, we don't want to hear about the resurrection. They make fun of him. Verse thirty two, when they heard about the resurrection, they made fun of him. They mocked him. But you know what? Some people get saved through this. This is why God made a world with nations. It checks evil. It becomes a blessing to people. Nations are a blessing and they check evil, but they also create the staging ground for the gospel to demonstrate its transcendence over the world. Sometimes people use language like of a Christian nation. And I didn't say the US was a Christian nation. I said we were founded from a Christian worldview with the kind of the great baptistic Christian enterprise of seeing. What would a nation be like? Would it actually produce more worship, facilitate more worship by doing less? That was the great American experiment. But I didn't say it was a Christian nation. I don't like the phrase Christian nation for a few reasons. When you're talking about is a person a Christian? It's a binary choice, isn't it? Paul tells the Corinthians, I determined when I look at somebody to size them up, black and white, saved or not saved, just determine that. And that's how I'm dealing with people right now. Have they been regenerated or not? Yes or no? That's how Paul deals with people. That is not the language the Bible uses of nations. Nations aren't regenerated, they are not baptized, but they are used by God. And it follows that not every nation can be used by God in identical ways. They're all used by God to check evil in some respect. But some nations better facilitate worship and better facilitate Christian ethics or whatever language you want to use than others. And that is the heart of American exceptionalism. That's why it's legitimate to use the language of American exceptionalism. It's not that America has a special covenant with God that other nations don't. That's not true. It's not that the eagle in the book of Isaiah is the the bald eagle for the US. I had somebody try to convince me that recently. My gosh. It is that God, through his providence, has uniquely and unusually used this nation to send missionaries around the world to translate Scripture with the goal of getting it into every language in the world, to establish churches around the world, to defend religious liberty and advance the freedom to worship around the world, to create a publishing movement that gets the Bible into every language around the world. A preaching movement that fills pulpits around the world. A political movement to spread liberty in the American concept of God's purpose for the nations around the world. And it is a movement that has rocked the world for the Lord. Again, that doesn't mean that everything has been done perfectly or there has not been evil or injustice in our country's past or present. That's obviously not true. But first Peter two seventeen says that we should be able to honor the emperor. Romans thirteen says, just be thankful for the good that God has done before you, in you, through you, and ultimately for himself and for you, for his glory and for your good. America has been used by God uniquely to advance the gospel in the world. Other nations send out missionaries. Of course they do, but not with our founding story. That understanding of our country guards us from nationalism that guards us, from saying that our country has a unique relationship with God in terms of being a Christian nation. It keeps you from that error, because that error begins to erode all the freedoms that were gained by the early Baptists and Methodists. It also guards you from globalism. Globalism says, hey, all the nations are interchangeable. Who cares? Both of those are errors. We are not the new Israel. The United States is not the new Israel. We are not the one nation under God, but neither are nations accidental or arbitrary, and they're also not ultimates. One day every nation will be in heaven worshiping the Lamb who will be the King of all. So this weekend we do rightly thank God for the United States of America. Acts seventeen reminds us that the United States of America is not the center of history. Christ is. And America exists because he ordained it, and America flourishes because he sustains it. And America may very well one day pass away, just like Babylon or Persia or Greece passed away, I don't know. We know that nations rise and fall at the will of God. That's what this verse teaches. And we also know that the kingdom of Christ will never pass away. And on that day in heaven, Americans will stand beside Nigerians and Chinese and Iranians and Peruvians and Bosnia and Herzegovina. And people from every other nation not waving flags, but casting crowns before the Lamb. Lord, we are grateful that the gospel does go forth into a world with nations. The light penetrates the borders. The gospel transcends the cultures, the languages, the peoples. It redeems people from every tribe and every nation and every tongue. What a promise. What a plan, what a strategy from Paul to not even take them back to Abraham and Isaac and David, but just to go to Noah and the nations. Here we are, thousands of years after Paul, staying in a nation that has been truly used by you. We're thankful for that. I pray for anyone here this morning that has never wrestled with the truth of the resurrection of Christ. It's what Paul's conversation down in the Areopagus, and I pray it would not shut our conversations down. I pray that the hearts here would believe that Christ is resurrected from the dead. That gives shape to the rest of the world. We're thankful for Christ and it's in his name we pray. And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc dot church. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to TMZ dot edu. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.