Act 17:23 For as I passed by, and beheld your
devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
Act 17:24 God that made the world and all things
therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples
made with hands;
Act 17:25 Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as
though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all
things;
Act 17:26 And hath made of one blood all nations of men
for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before
appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;
Act 17:27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply they
might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:
Act 17:28 For in him we live, and move, and have our
being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his
offspring.
Act 17:29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of
God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or
stone, graven by art and man's device.
Act 17:30 And the times of this ignorance God winked
at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:
Act 17:31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which
he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained;
whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from
the dead.
C.S. Lewis really
impressed me when he wrote about his devout atheism and how logic proved
atheism wrong. An atheist shouldn't be
afraid to confront that logic and refute it with their logic.
God exists. Here in
Acts, Paul is talking to the people about their UNKNOWN GOD, telling them that
he knows who this UNKNOWN GOD is. He
ultimately tells them the UNKNOWN - yet KNOWN by him- God has appointed a day when
He will judge the world in righteousness by Jesus Christ His declared only
begotten Son who He raised from the dead.
IF this is true…
shouldn't we comprehend that we need to repent? Ignorance is no longer an
excuse. IF this is NOT true and there is no day appointed for the world to be
judged in righteousness then there is NO harm in contemplating things others
who USED to believe that way but no longer do, have to say. So let's look a
little at Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis…
'1. The Law Of Human
Nature Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can
learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say.
They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to
you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone,
he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in
first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of
mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every
day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes diem is
not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him.
He is appealing to some kind of
standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And
the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard."
Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really
go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He
pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person
who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different
when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets
him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties
had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or
morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And
they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they
could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to
show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying
to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong
are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed
a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football. Now this
Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.
Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things
like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older
thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they
really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are
governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the
creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body
could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man
could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. We may
put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several
different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to
disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if
you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than
a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which
he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those
laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his
human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic
things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses. This law was called the Law of
Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need
to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd
individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people
who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole,
they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one.
And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said
about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the
wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we
did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by
right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more
have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair. I know that some
people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is
unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite
different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between
their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of,
say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans,
what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to
our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of
another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need
only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean.
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or
where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest
to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made
five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish
to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone.
But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.
Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should
have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply
have any woman you liked. But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you
find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will
find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise
to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's
not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do
not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the
particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not
matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong— in other words, if
there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an
unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they
say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else? It seems, then,
we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes
mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they
are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication
table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is
this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any
exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other
work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the
ordinary human beings who are left: I hope you will not misunderstand what I am
going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be
better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact
that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed
to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There
may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the
children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the
money—the one you have almost forgotten—came when you were very hard up. And
what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done—well, you never
would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be.
And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I
knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it—and who the dickens
am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping
the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping
it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The
question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that
they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in
the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be
so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we
believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so— that we
cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try
to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad
behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that
we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to
ourselves. These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human
beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in
a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in
fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two
facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe
we live in.
I hope you read
that, in fact if you're reading this then I'm pretty sure you did. C.S. Lewis
has a way with words, he has insight I believe has been God inspired. For a
little bit we are going to continue with studying Mere Christianity- maybe not
the whole book, but a bit of it because so many people today simply don't
believe and yet there is no rational reason for them not believing other than
Satan has deceived them horrifically.
Please God, please
open our hearts and minds to Your TRUTH, please! Please bless all who are
reading this and seeking to know the TRUTH in YOU!
Please Lord, we do
repent of our sins, of our failings, so many failings.
Cleanse us, use YOUR
righteousness because we have NONE.
Please, Lord.
In Your name always!
AMEN.
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