Sermon Notes on Acts 17:22-31

Who/what is God and why should we care?

This week, as I was preparing for this sermon, I went to a web site from the Florida State University High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee that I had not visited for quite some time. It offers a fascinating slide show that begins with what our universe would look like from 10 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy and it ends at the sub-atomic level inside a carbon atom in the leaf of an oak tree near their lab.

Now you might wonder why in the world would I be looking at such things as I was preparing for a sermon. It’s because this sermon is about God. What is God really like and why we should care about God at all.

The first thing that occurred to me as I made the journey from 10 million light years away is that we have no business saying ANYTHING about God. We, who live on a planet that is invisible to the naked eye from 1 light year away…we who have a tiny flash of time and an even tinier bit of information from which to form our ideas and opinions…we human beings who only know what a few acquaintances, friends, and relatives have taught us…we have an immeasurably small and a completely biased image of God so how can we presume to say anything about the One who spoke all of this vastness into existence?

Since existence itself comes from God (God’s very name in Hebrew, Yahweh, means, “I cause to be”) how can we, with our little bits of consciousness, even begin to claim that we have it right and that others have it wrong?

If we are going to say anything about God it ought to be with complete humility and with the understanding that anything we believe or hope or think comes to us purely by grace.

Some believers are very threatened by what they believe science is saying about God because, occasionally, scientific theories will appear to contradict what is written about God in the Bible and other sacred writings. I have absolutely no problem with the scientific pursuit of truth and with some of the theories that seem to be in tension with the biblical perspective on things. Why?

The scriptures were written in a pre-scientific age. All that people could observe and understand was what they could see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears. They didn’t know what light was let alone how far it could travel in a year. Is it any wonder that they described what the Holy Spirit revealed to them in non-scientific terms? Is it any wonder that they wrote down profound truths about creation and the origin of all things in images and languages that they could understand? Even if the Holy Spirit would have place a picture of the Milky Way galaxy and the big bang directly into the minds of the earliest believers, they would have had no language to describe what they were seeing other than the language of their time. They would have had to tell stories to communicate a truth that was beyond their powers of description.

I actually believe that it takes a great deal more faith to be an atheistic scientist than it does to be a believer in God and science.

The atheist has to state that all of this vastness, the amazing complexity and beauty and order that is our universe, just happened. The atheist has to believe, by faith, that there was no cause, there is no reason that things ended up as perfectly as they did. According to the atheist, it all just happened with no cause and for no reason. Now that takes a lot of faith.

For us as believers, who accept (also by faith) that there was a first cause for everything we see, that there is a reason for the perfection and order we see around us, science actually becomes an evangelistic tool. The closer science comes to discovering the truth about the universe, the closer science must come to God.

It’s a little bit like a team of experts who are dismantling an exquisite Swiss watch so that they can learn the art of watch-making. If they are paying attention, they can’t help learning something about the designer of the watch.

As we stand together at the edge of this vast universe, humbled by everything we are learning and discovering, is there anything we can say with some confidence about God?

1)      It certainly seems reasonable, especially in the scientific age, to believe that God exists. In my mind it takes a lot less faith than believing all of this came into being with no cause and for no reason.

2)      As forms of life on earth become more complex they become more relational, more loving, more personal. It seems reasonable to believe that God is loving and personal and that the Holy Spirit is shaping life to become more like God.

3)      The resurrection of Jesus Christ was God’s “flare”, an unmistakable sign to us that God is real, God loves us, and that God came to walk among us in the person of Jesus Christ.

It is incredibly humbling to reflect upon how small we are in the universe. It is even more humbling to ponder how little we know and how little we can hope to learn in this brief life. But, in Jesus Christ, God has given an amazing gift. We can know all that we need to know about the God who made us and who loves us so much.

Any human being who believes that they have God all figured out, who believes that they have it right and everyone else has it wrong, is committing idolatry, they are creating a god according to their own specs.

But in Christ we can rejoice that the God of the universe loves us and has made the ultimate sacrifice so that we would know. Amen