Have Our Being

 DEVOTION

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

HAVE OUR BEING

Acts 17:24-28

24 "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

NIV

It is interesting that we are his offspring, which makes us his children, which is seen throughout the entire scriptures. Just as through our earthy fathers, as well as those of us who are fathers have our own offspring. In Greek that is the Genos, which is defined as kin or can also be seen as a nation, a people, race, family, stock, as of the same stock the same breed. This fits perfectly with the fact that God created us in His image, or we should say in their own image for we know God is triune in nature, being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, although they are three persons, they are one, whom we know as God. Paul is making that very point, that we have our very breath, our very being due to God. If there were no God, then there would be none of us. We cannot exist unless God himself gave us life and breath and everything else. Of course, we are descendants of Adam in the physical sense, however, it is because God formed Adam with his own hands and breathed His very breath into Adam that we have this same breath, the very breath of God within us. It is also interesting that in Greek the word Karios appears, which we have just heard used recently. God is the one who sets the appointed time and place that we should live. This can be seen in a couple different ways. First, God set the time and place for each nationality and when they should become that nationality, and how they came to live in a certain part of the world. This would mean that although he chose the Jews to come to earth in the form, which in Greek is Morfee, the form by which a person strikes the vision, the external appearance. This, in and of itself, is extremely important in the sense that Jesus was in the Morfee, the form of man, but that he was fully in the Morfee, the form, or nature of God. The second way we could see this appointed time and place is in an individual sense. This would mean that we were born, a descendent of Adam, which makes us the children of God, the kin of God, of the same family, that being our Father who caused us to have life in our very being, having life and breath in our being. In the earthy sense, we did not choose the time or place of our birth, as it was of the will of our earthy father. So it is in the case with our being the child of God, it is not by our own will that we are his children, but by the will of him who created us to be his offspring, at just the time and place, the Kairos of his making. This should give us, and it does, that we are exactly in the time and place by the will of God, and everything else in our lives are by his will. We might think that we have some choice, or things in our lives are determined by our will, but first and foremost, we could not will our birth, not our rebirth, for without God we would not have had either, nor anything else in our lives, for he is the absolute authority over our very being, for in Him we live and move and have our being.