Judged Worthy

 DEVOTION

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

JUDGED WORTHY

Acts 17:29-34

29 "Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone — an image made by man's design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." 33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

NIV

What an interesting way of seeing that we are God’s offspring, as we have already considered, yet because we look like our Father, he cannot be something of our making, but rather we are of his making, by his will we live and breathe and have our being. Paul is saying that although God always existed and from the very beginning the first man and all men since then fashioned some form of idols to worship. Even after many years of man multiplying and filling the earth, and tried to built a tower to find their own way to the heaven, and he confounded their tongues and thus scattered them into becoming many nations, he choose the one nation of Israel some years later to become the one whom he would reveal his true nature to and at the exact appointed time, the Karios, he came in the form of his creation to redeem them. However, all during that time he left the Gentiles, the other nations, to fumble through life without the expressed knowledge of him. They were ignorant, which is not used in a derogatory sense, but rather as in the sense of lack of knowledge about God. Now Paul is saying that all men cannot be allowed to stay in their ignorance as God appointed the time and place to reveal himself to all mankind, all of his creation, and we are living proof of that revelation. Although God took several men in the ancient times onto himself without their going through the process of death and resurrection, such as Elijah and Enoch, and maybe Moses was taken up after death, as he did appear in the transfiguration with Jesus, Paul is saying that Jesus is the only one who man not only saw die, but actually played a role in the plan of God to bring salvation to his creation, and then were witness to the resurrection from the dead, brought back from the place of the dead and lived forevermore. This is proof to all men, although we must say, that many men have rejected this truth as some of them did that day. It is evident even today that many men would still desire to worship images of their own creation, thinking themselves as the center of life, existing from the time of premortal times when they believe they merely crawled out from this soupy substance and evolved on their own into the most complex physical sentient beings on the planet, thus being the offspring of themselves. This is so bizarre, it only proves that man does not want to submit his own self-created authority of his own life and, in fact, desires to have authority over others. Yet, no one, not a single man can raise himself or anyone else from the dead, without the expressed authority and approval of God, by which he demonstrated his authority over death through Jesus. The beauty of this is that as God’s offspring, through faith in Jesus Christ, we too will be raised from the dead, however that appears. However, all men will also be raised from the dead to stand before Jesus to be judged on the single issue of whether they accepted or rejected this truth. We praise God that because we can be and will be judged worthy, because of his grace and that we accepted that grace through faith in Jesus, to entered into his rest.