ONE BLOOD

ONE BLOOD 

Continuing the narrative in Acts seventeen from verse one we see that Paul and Silas and Timothy arrive at Thessalonica in the northern part of Greece, where Paul preaches in the synagogues as usual, teaching from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, and many Jews and devout Gentile Greek men and women believed. But Paul and his company encountered the usual opposition from unbelieving Jews who stirred up a rowdy mob that attacked the house of Jason, Paul’s host in Thessalonica, and arrested Jason for shielding Paul whom they charged with ‘turning the world upside down’ because he taught that there was another God greater than Caesar. Jason finally helps Paul escape the city and Paul and Silas and Timothy travelled to Berea where their Gospel is welcomed by the discerning Bereans who searched out and verified the Scriptures that Paul taught them – and again many devout Greeks, both men and women believed. However, the angry Jews from Thessalonica heard that Paul was preaching his Gospel again in that place and they pursued Paul and his group all the way to Berea and stirred up another rowdy mob. So Timothy and Silas helped Paul escape by sea to Athens in the southern area of Greece, and told Paul to wait for them to come to him when they could.

All that troublesome threat and harassment turned out to be another providential arrangement by The Holy Spirit to get Paul to talk to the Greek philosophers in Athens who followed the teachings of the Epicureans and the Stoics. They all believed that there were gods but that the gods were merely symbolic of their preferred self-serving philosophies. The Epicureans espoused the search for happiness and pleasure and their gods were caricatures of their pleasure seeking. The Stoics on the other hand believed in detachment from Epicurean sensuality along with an indifference to pain or happiness which allowed them to focus on more important religious matters with their gods and idols. Every day Paul went out on the streets and talked with anyone who would listen about Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. Followers of both those Greek philosophies were curious about this new God of the resurrection that Paul spoke about, so they arranged for him to meet them at the Areopagus, which was an open hill area used as a court for political and religious discussion and debate. And they asked him about these strange new things he was bringing to their ears.  

Paul had noticed an inscription to one of their gods that they called ‘the unknown god ‘and that god was the one that he decided to bring to their attention. Paul fully understood the Greek spirit, which was obsessed with seeking knowledge and wisdom, and he also understood their problem with their so-called gods. He knew that while they had defined and labelled gods for everything they wanted according to their philosophies and ideologies, their deepest human need to know God went totally unmet, and their unknown god had nothing to say about their self-serving beliefs and ideologies. 

Paul the Greek scholar was familiar with that earnest search for God in his own mind and heart and he had come to know their so-called unknown God personally and he was able to bring those people the revelation that their unknown god was the one true God revealed in Jesus Christ. In debating with these Greek philosophers Paul sums up the history and the destiny of humanity from the very beginning of history and reveals the hidden answer to the search in every human heart which is to know God (Ecclesiastes 3:11 eternity in their hearts). He set about revealing God to them as the one who does not dwell in man-made temples, and who has no need for statues or idols, since he gives life to all living things. He revealed God as the one who is vitally interested in every human life, and who has created all people from one blood or from one created human life in Adam. 

This was not the way that Paul preached to the Jews. Paul would only sum up their history from the time of Abraham and of once being slaves in Egypt and being delivered from slavery through Moses who gave them the law and the Commandments. He would tell the Jews that their promised Messiah for whom they had always been searching had arrived in the here and now in the person of Jesus Christ. He would tell them that God was in Christ forgiving them of their sin and joining them to God as a new Creation in Christ through the Holy Spirit, and the sad but happy fact was that some would believe him and become faithful followers, and some would not. 

When Paul spoke to those men from Athens at the Aeropagus almost two thousand years ago he was speaking down through the ages into our world at this current time in history with its materialistic mindset and ideologies and its obsession with political and cultural and social identities that all compete for attention and prominence and power. Paul told them then as he tells us now that God has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might search for Him and find Him, for he is close to each one of us’ (Acts 17:28).

That means for us here today in this here and now life that we can find fulfillment in him as ‘God with us‘- Jesus, and in verse twenty nine he even quotes one of their own Greek writers who said, ‘In him we live and move and have our being, as we are his offspring. And Scripture goes on to say Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or something shaped by art and man's devising. In past times God may have tolerated man’s ignorance about these things, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent from that ignorant and self-serving mindset and to put away false and imagined gods and ideologies and to believe in and worship God in Christ, and He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead. (vs 31)"
Paul here presents God as the reality of all realties who now exists as the glorified person of Jesus Christ who has risen from the dead and who wants to exist and live within and through our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit. It was when Paul preached the resurrection of Jesus that some mocked him. But others were open to this truth and said, ‘We will hear you again on this matter’. The Bible says that a number of faithful people became followers on that day. That is such a happy but sad reality about the acceptance and rejection of truth that we still see around us today. 
 
Paul’s words to them and to us can turn this current world upside down once more - a sovereign God is in command of our lives, no matter where we live, what we are doing or what the surrounding circumstances are, and he has a purpose and destiny for each one of us in all those things to seek and to find and to know God. Paul said – ‘we are all of one blood’ - all of humanity in Adam - the entire global community of all nations and tribes and ideologies including the evils of terrorism that incite war to the death. Nonetheless as the Bible says about everyone on the earth in any and every circumstance of life that their reality of all realities is that they may search for God in the hope that they may find him ‘in God they live and move and have their being’ – even when they do not know it or even want to know it. That truth must not be left in the setting of an unknown god as - it is to be declared to everyone and lived out by those who will believe that their lives are hidden with Christ in God. Is this a fantasy of Paul’s – or is it indeed the reality of all realities for all people.

Paul also declared in his later writings to us something further to this, that it was no longer just him that was living in God - but that it was Christ who was living through him. And this is the mystery of an unlimited God being made manifest through a weak limited human being.
God once lived as pure Spirit Being in the Trinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in Heaven, and this pure Spirit Being was totally unlimited in all respects. But when Christ became incarnated and born from above in the person of Jesus into the earth God changed his Being from pure Spirit Being and became embodied through a limited human being in Jesus Christ who said he was ‘the fullness of the godhead bodily’. Jesus told people ‘If you have seen me you have seen the Father’ then Jesus died and rose again. 

And the Father and the Son then sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts as the Spirit of the glorified resurrected human Jesus so that we can believe like Paul that God lives in us as Father and Son and Holy Spirit (Ephesians 3:19). We may well hunger and desire that we can live our lives through Christ but how much more must we realize that God yearns and desires to live the fulness of his Godhead life through us. It is not our limited humanity that stops God from having his Being embodied in the earth as well as in heaven. It is our unbelief that God could or would do such a thing – but, We have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the glory will be of God and not of us’ (2Corinthians 4:7).
Paul presents us with the reality of all realities, that by faith we can embody and impart the life and presence of God into our world around us. That is the reality sitting deeper than the material reality that we see and touch with our physical senses. We may be sitting in our car held up in traffic and that may appear to us as our frustrating or tedious reality that affects our thinking and our emotions. But there is another reality beneath that one, which is the fact that we are going somewhere with a sense of purpose, perhaps to get to work, or to meet up with other people, or to have our car serviced, or to arrive at an appointment. But the reality of all realities that lies beneath that is that we are embodying the living God, who is where we are and who desires to do what he knows will bring his will and his power and his love into the blessing of what we do. This becomes our knowable reality as we believe in the activity of his good will that graces that moment.
As we share communion today we are not simply partakers of the one blood from Adam but are partakers by faith of the one blood of Jesus Christ. The cup we drink is the blood of the New Covenant that gives us new life. The bread is his body, and we can embody that truth. As we sit together in the grace of that communion moment we can realise the reality of all realities that we embody the father, Son and Holy Spirit and can bring that reality into the lives of those in our world as we go out from this place.