Apostolic Foundations (1 of 12) — Art Katz

Apostolic Numbers and the Restoration of All Things

This is really very special, as the pastor said, and that he gave us 12 times together is not insignificant. 12 is the apostolic number. 12 is the foundational number, the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 stones that had to be restored in the altar of God.

So I love that number and I love the theme that God has given. And don't think that I've got this all laid out. I'm just proceeding with trembling from session to session, trusting with you for the unfolding of God.

That's how it must be if indeed this is going to be an apostolic and prophetic occasion. And the first thing that's been quickened to me before I even get to my text is to read you a scripture from 1 Thessalonians to raise the whole level of our expectation, seeing that this is an hour of the restoration of all things before the Lord can be restored who is pent up in the heavens.

And it says in 1 Thessalonians 1 verse 13, and for this reason we also constantly thank God that when you receive from us the word of God's message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.

I would almost take the liberty of adding that, who believe that. It performs a work in you who believe that, that this is not just man's word, but God's very word. If you have that quality of faith to believe that, this word will work a work in you.

And it's by that work, from word to word and work to work, that we ourselves are shaped by the hearing of a word as event that raises the whole quality and level of our life and brings us ourselves to apostolic stature.

So I'm saying that not just for tonight, but for all these nights, and henceforth that every time we come into the assembly of God's people, we should come with this expectation that no matter whether it comes with a Brooklyn accent or something Germanic or Scandinavian or too blue or whatever, it's the word of God, and not the word of men, that performs a work in them who believe that.

That's apostolic faith, that's apostolic believing, and that makes the word into an event. So I'm going to pray with that introduction. Precious God, how audacious for Paul to say that about himself and his own speaking.

How audacious, more so even for us, Lord. And yet, we're emboldened to do it, Lord, because if this is not you, if these are not your days, if you have not appointed them, if you have not chosen the foolishness of this messenger, my God, and this congregation of your saints in their whole nondescript and average constitution and makeup, then what are we about?

Lord, we're asking largely, we want God's word, we want events, we want change, we want calling and significant employment of our lives. So, possess this frame, my God, and bring forth the word as your own word, in content, in tone, in form, in spirit, all together, Lord, let it be your speaking, and we'll thank you and praise you for the remarkable and unique privilege which is ours, to hear it and to receive it, in Jesus' holy name, and for your glory and honor, and God's people said, amen.

Paul's Mission and the Apostolic Context of Acts 17

Well, my text tonight is Act 17 at Athens. Am I sounding okay, natural, and, you know, okay? If you are not here for Sunday, I would really recommend that you get the tape, because everything is built on what precedes it, and we go on in this unfolding, and God sounded some themes, he set the tone, he began to alert us to the resonance and the multifaceted meaning of this glorious word, apostolic, and what ascending is from an apostolic body, what constitutes that, and what are the elements that must take place before God's spirit speaks into the congregation to say, separate unto me, Paul and Barnabas, for the work wherein unto I have called them.

And we're not going to follow them step by step, but as the Lord will direct, this is not the first journey in Act 17, it's another, but it is the result of having been sent, and Paul is actually in flight in Act 17.

Those of you who are knowledgeable know that Act 16 saw Paul and Silas in prison, in dungeon, with their feet set fast in stocks and their backs having been torn in strips by 39 strokes of a cat and nine tails, having been dragged to the marketplace for having confounded the powers of the air and having set free a woman who was a piece of merchandise manipulated and used by men.

And so in obedience to the heavenly vision they found themselves suffering already, and there was a remarkable and miraculous release that came through their praise in their darkest hour. Maybe we'll take up this text at another time.

And then Paul continued on, there's outrage, there's strife, there's contention, there's panic, there's hysteria, the authorities go berserk, they say, those who have turned the world upside down have come here to us also.

And as I said in the Sunday speaking, that that's what distinguishes apostolic ministry from every other. It needs be only two men, but they need the sense of God in the moment of his timing, prepared and having been brought to stature, that distinguishes that from the proliferation of ministries that are everywhere about us today, hardly causing a beep or an echo.

Because two men so sent will turn the world upside down. And so picking up in chapter 17, Paul in flight, having passed from Thessalonica and into Berea, where he received somewhat better and more cordial reception, and still he was pursued and hunted, and in verse 14, then immediately the brethren sent Paul away to go to the sea, but both Silas and Timothy remained there.

So those who conducted Paul brought him to Athens, and receiving the command for Silas and Timothy to come to him, with all speed they departed. Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw the city wholly given over to idols.

Therefore, and I'm just quoting the King James, I'm reading another edition, I like the King James better, therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshippers and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there, quote and unquote, who happened to be there.

Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him, and some said, what does this babbler want to say? Others said he seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods, because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection, and they took him and brought him to the aerial pagus, saying, may we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak?

For you are bringing some strange things to our ears, therefore we want to know what these things mean. For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time and nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.

Then Paul stood in the midst of the aerial pagus and said, let's pause right there. As if this were some kind of chance occasion and just a kind of stumbling about and some circumstantial thing by which Paul found himself in a location which he had not intended to visit.

But I want you to understand that this is every much in the intention of God as Berea, as Thessalonica, as Philippi, and as any other place where Paul goes, whether he goes because he sees a vision at night of a Macedonian beseeching him, a direct and explicit operation of the Spirit of God, or he goes circumstantially in flight, being taken even by other men.

And I want to say that I'm not presuming either upon God or upon Paul. If he were here he would say amen, because for such a man and such a mentality and such an apostolic consciousness and perception, nothing is by chance.

Nothing is happenstance. Everything is the ordination of a sovereign God who attends to every detail. And if God has not one means to get his man to the explicit and the appointed place, he has yet another.

Therefore, nothing is accident, nothing is wasted, and nothing is out of its time. I want to ask you tonight, and I'll be asking you continually for twelve weeks, is that your consciousness also? Do you have that abiding sense of the sovereignty of God?

That if you miss a plane or some undue and untoward thing takes place, that we're not to chide or be chafed in our spirits or murmur under our breath, but to rejoice for the inadvertent thing that God will turn to his glory.

And if I were not so conscious of the time, I would give you illustration after illustration of missing planes, of coming a week early to a wedding, nonsensically, only to find that I'm there for some purpose other than a wedding, and so on.

And even the circumstances that have to do with my being here now is exactly of that kind. Going back to the occasion when I had a headache, working on a critique, a book report for a seminary requirement that was mounting, and then being asked that same night, as it just happened to be the night that the elders and wives were meeting from this church, Art, why don't you share what it is that you're working on?

And so I came with my head just aching, and this is not ordinary for me. In fact, when the time came to share on what I felt was such a subversive theological piece, so universalistic in its whole spirit and temper, so seductive and vile all the more because of its subtlety, I could barely bring my thoughts together.

My head was virtually coming off my shoulders, and these precious elders and wives of this congregation had to surround me and pray for me and deliver me from the affliction that came from this intellectual and spiritual exercise.

And then I shared. And that sharing evidently was so impressive that the tape got to your pastor, and then I was invited to be shared to the combined seminary school classes, and one chance comment out of that sharing triggered these days.

We need to put on another mindset and not see ourselves as victims of circumstance, even when it's ungainly or unpleasant. It's not pleasant to be in flight from persecution, and yet it's the very thing that God employed to bring his apostolic man to the appointed place and in the appointed time.

Can you imagine Paul having written letters in advance to the four gospel businessmen in Athens to say that I think that around such and such a time I hope to be in your area? I'm a fairly well-known conference speaker, and if you should have an occasion to employ me, unheard of.

He never lifted a finger in his own behalf or in the promotion of his own ministry, and yet God had him in the right place and in the right time. And I don't have a word tonight, you need to really perceive this by the spirit, what it means to stand in the midst of these philosophers at Mars Hill.

And it's not because I'm artistic or literary that I want to underline this, but because it is the chief place. It is the critical conjuncture of time and place for God's men facing everything which is opposed and calculated to be against the wisdom of God.

And that these men, though they are not Elimus, the sorcerer that we spoke of Sunday, are every bit as much a representative of the kingdom of darkness and of the powers of the air as he. Though they're clothed with philosophical gob and speak another kind of wisdom that doesn't seem to be as alarming, yet is it in its nature every bit as antithetical and opposed to the kingdom of God and the purposes of God as the witchcraft and as the sorcerer.

Apostolic Confrontation With Worldly Wisdom

Paul is always in the place of confrontation and encounter. This is the epitome of the world's wisdom, the Epicureans and the Stoics. This is Athens, this is the seat of humanism. This is everything indeed that the world yet continues to celebrate and maybe the vocabulary has been changed and we don't use the word Epicurean and Stoic, yet if I had the ability and the time, I think I could make a case that every present day philosophy and mindset that talks about if it feels good, do it and do your own thing and however it's so expressed will find a direct linkage to the philosophies of that day.

In a word nothing has changed and in fact what we need to see is that we ourselves are on collision course, that God is preparing us as an apostolic body for our encounter on the Mars hill of our own generation and that indeed such an encounter needs come and it would have perhaps already have come if God could have found some corporate entity that could be to the spirit of this age where Paul was to the adversaries of God in his own.

We need to recognize that we're called to confrontation and to encounter and that we're on collision course and that when we come to the requisite maturity and apostolic stature and ability in God and fearlessness already having occasioned persecution by the very character and content of our life and this expression, we'll find ourselves also being brought to such a place.

Are you following me? Okay. Then Paul stood in the midst where man could not have obtained by his own arrangement had he stood himself on his head and had he written letters and made every kind of advance preparation God provided in his own artless way by the men who brought him.

I want to bring you right to the point of uttermost significance in the anatomy of an apostolic event. The point of inception. It says while Paul waited for them at Athens, he didn't think he was there for anything in particular.

He was buying his time waiting for his colleagues to catch up with him whom he commanded, it says in verse 15, to be brought to him. How do you like that kind of authority? And yet it's not offensive.

And while he waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him. I think the King James says his spirit was grieved as he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Here's the point of the inception of an apostolic event.

While he waited, he saw. This is a man with his eyes open. This isn't one of these faint super spiritual types that trips on eggshells and is so ethereal that a gust of wind can blow them away. This is full orbed apostolic man and as we'll read later, who even quotes the Greek poets and says that even as your own poets have said, that here's a man who is familiar with the philosophies, the poetry, the whole tenor of the age in which he is serving God.

He saw the city wholly given to idolatry. You say well Art, that's Athens, that's Greece, that's a pagan center of the ancient world, but St. Paul is something other. It's not other at all. It's just as much given to idolatry as Athens was, only we have not the eye to see it as Paul did.

We have not an apostolic seeing and we still naively think that idolatry has something to do only with pagan altars and shrines and icons and objects and things of that kind. You need to understand in essence what the whole idolatrous thing is that permeates the spirit of our age and has permeated the earth since the fall of man.

And why does it say, and therefore disputed he in the synagogues with the Jews. What has that to do with seeing the city wholly given over to idolatry? Everything. Therefore, seeing the city wholly given over to idolatry, therefore disputed he in the synagogues with the Jews.

Why? Because the synagogue is rampant with idolatrous substitution for the true worship of God. And lest something rise up of an anti-Semitic kind in which you cluck your tongue knowingly about the synagogues of the Jews, I mean also the synagogues of the Gentiles.

I mean any religious establishment that offers to men a religion of convenience, a cheap dollar in the collection plate kind of Sunday or Friday night religion that requires nothing in terms of true relationship or service to the Most High God.

That gives men a modicum of psychic and emotional satisfaction that produces something ethereal through the combination of organs and stained glass windows and amplifiers or by whatever means and lets them feel that they have done their Sunday thing and are now free for the golf course or the football game.

That's idolatry in its very heart. And when we shall have ourselves an apostolic heart, what is the nature of that? One that continually pounds with a jealousy for the glory of God and cannot stand to see something that competes for the attention of men, calling itself worship and is not.

And if you don't think that this kind of idolatry can even be practiced invoking the name of Jesus, then you're naive indeed. We need to see apostolically if we're going to be employed apostolically. I believe that if Paul was not grieved in his spirit, there would not have been the event that I have so few minutes to describe tonight and may have to spill over into next week.

The Spirit's Grief and the Call to Apostolic Courage

Being grieved in the spirit. I love that phrase. And this is not some petulance. This isn't some kind of man who's personally offended or something has offended his Jewish or his aesthetic or religious sensibility.

He's offended because he's an apostle. He's offended because of the jealousy for the love of God and the knowledge of him and because he knows that those who have been seduced by an idolatrous substitute are doomed.

He cannot stand it. When God finds such a man, you can believe he's going to be brought to the place of confrontation. He's not going to be leaving Athens clucking his tongue and praying a ceremonial prayer, hoping for some betterment of their condition.

He's going to find himself right in the more right in the thick, right, right in the juncture of this filthy and vile wisdom that purports to be religious and is not. And they brought him. What will this babbler say?

I think that the technical translation of babbler is rogue picker. Some kind of Jewish, I don't know what oddity, some threadbare thing that floated in. And we know that the Greeks had a traditional contempt for Jews anyway.

In the superiority of their own civilization and the unfathomable mystery of this monotheistic people. So what was this Hebrew to them? He had no impressive credential. He was at the off scourings of the world.

And that's all the more reason why he's to be employed to confound that which is considered to be wise and esteemed of men. If you don't have this sense of God's delight in pitting his wisdom against the wisdom of this world and choosing the thing that's foolish and weak to confound the thing that is wise and mighty, you have no understanding of why I'm here tonight.

A pathetic piece of this juncture and crumpled condition almost always. And I think that we need to prepare ourselves that that is going to be our essential configuration, particularly in the moments of confrontation.

It's not when you're all revved up and resonating with the power of God because you've been in the congregation of God's people and you've been singing his choruses gloriously. It's when you feel terribly alone and absolutely isolated and weak and in a strange place and feeling strange yourself and your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth and it's like ashes.

There you have to confound those who are wise, the philosophers. I had to pick out the two volumes from the Encyclopedia Britannica where I'm staying to look up Epicurean and Stoics and my God, it ran for pages.

Sophistry itself is a Greek word, meaning a play on wisdom that has not really to do with a quest for truth, but just something celebrated for its own sake that gives the appearance of the love of truth.

Paul was meeting something head on and that spirit prevails in the world today and prevails also in the religious world and when God confronts it, he's going to confront it apostolically, which is to say, foolishly, Paul stood in the midst and said, and we ought to pause and say, hey, put your hand over the rest of the text, don't read it.

What would you say? What would you say if you were given a once and for all sublime opportunity to be in the chief place and to have the ear and the attention of these men who abound in the wisdom of the world and to penetrate with the wisdom of God?

What would you say? God has a plan for your life. I want to be respectful, there might be a time when that kind of statement would be appropriate. There might be. But what we need to really understand and to appreciate the moment the more and the man the more and the operation of the spirit the more, the spirit of the resurrection life and power of God moving through an individual who has voided himself of his own Jewish wisdom, who was the prized student of the Rabbi Gamaliel, who had Jewish credentials in his own right that would shame the totality of our seminary professors together and counted all that dung that he might win Christ and when he stands in the perilous and exacting moment in which wisdom will he speak?

I can just tell you from my own much briefer, less full experience, that choice will always be before you. Whether to condescend to the thing that is trustworthy, experienced, you've trotted it out before, it works, you'll be saved at least utter embarrassment, there won't be an absolute failure, but neither will there be a glory.

Just as I have to have to hear in the in the daily chapel services at the seminary, my dear professor speaking about faith and everyone reading his sermon, I'll believe them about faith when they come before the congregation of faculty and students without a prepared manuscript and speak out of their hearts by the spirit of God according to the word that indeed they can speak of faith.

But they're afraid to die. You say, what are you talking about, no one's going to shoot them, listen that's the easy way to go. The real dying is to remain and to turn beet red and feel the sweat trickle down your brow and trust that the floor will open and swallow you when you're standing before eight or nine hundred people and begin to hem and horn and jerk and stutter and stagger and can't find your tongue and forgot what you were going to say and what your illustration was and even the scripture disappears from the page.

Much safer to come prepared with a manuscript that you've read and read and prepared and even spoke to in a mirror to get the right resonance of voice and articulation and gesture than to stand there like some well-begun thing trusting the resurrection life of God to find expression through your personality as if it's a once and for all thing and eternity is at stake and it's not just the chapel service.

Hey, are you guys taking notes? If you think it's just the chapel service, you have disqualified yourself from being apostolic. What do you mean just? Will you call tonight just the Bible study? It's just?

There's no such thing in the apostolic lexicon. Everything is an eternal moment fraught with significance and I'll tell you if we believe that there'd never be a dull moment in our lives and God intended us to believe it and so to live.

Come on cats, you're given to exaggeration, I see. You have a hyperbolic flair, you mean a chapel service is a once and for all eternal moment or a Bible study time? Come on guys, if you could see as God sees, only he knows what is being transacted in an hour like this.

What is going into the spirits of men? What kind of release? What call of God? How many times have people come up to me afterwards and said, Art, while you were speaking, not even the word, while you were speaking, the spirit of God said, if we don't believe that God's word is an event, we'll get what we don't believe.

I want, God wants to see our whole expectancy lifted. He wants us to live as a people who believe that every moment is appointed of God and that it's wrought for eternal consequence. You say, but Art, but Art, who's sufficient for these things?

The Resurrection Life Versus Prepared Manuscripts

Oh, hallelujah. How long has God been waiting for your Lutherans to ask it? Now you know why Paul's, breathed it continually, Lord, who's sufficient for these things? Who's sufficient for 12 weeks with a church at a crossroad and his whole destiny and future is at stake and the tapes are going to go far and wide beyond this church and into the nation and the world.

Who's sufficient for these things? Who's sufficient to stand in the midst of Mars Hill in a once and for all, perhaps never to be again given opportunity. If you're not trembling and if you're not saying who's sufficient for these things, neither are you apostolic.

If you've been celebrating Paul, you sap because he's Jewish, because you think that automatically is a synonym for boldness and that somehow this is an explication of some innate ethnic racial quality, you've missed it.

This is a beggar and a ragpicker, a babbler, but he babbles the things that are given by the Spirit of God in the appointed moment and nothing else. How would you have begun? You know how Paul began? I perceive that in all things you're quite superstitious.

Whap! Hey, listen, I used to be an intellectual, Berkeley grad. You want to get an intellectual, philosophical type mad? Tell him that he's superstitious. What an indignity. That's how Paul began. With an insult, I'll tell you he would flunk out of probably every present-day evangelical training school for missionaries, but I'll tell you he arrested their attention.

What will this babbler say? He'll tell you. I perceive in all things you're too superstitious, too religious in the wrong way. I think the Amplified says, very reverent to demons. I'll tell you something about going up to Mars Hill.

You're never assured you're going to come down. Hey, let's not forget that. There are mountains that men like Paul have ascended from which they have not returned. You can't go up and confront the wisdom of this world with that kind of audacity and boldness and be assured that men are going to let you go.

And you know what Paul thought about that? Nothing. Nothing. He was without fear. He was without concern for his own life. He did not take into consideration what would be the consequence of his words for himself.

How would you like to see pastors, ministers, and teachers like that? You've got one. But I'll tell you, 99 of other places, they do take their words into consideration and think, hey, how is this going to affect them?

How will they receive this? Will they misunderstand me? Will they withdraw their tithes? Will they seek another place? Don't you love a man who speaks what God gives him without any concern for the consequence as pertaining to himself?

That's apostolic. How are you coming? Shall we take a 1 through 10 scale and say how are you registering on that? Are you about 8, 9? Or do you tremble? Does your lip quiver? If someone looks at you the wrong way, misunderstands you, raises an eyebrow.

Hey, if we're not going to make it in the ordinary intercourse among ourselves as believers, if we're fearful of each other, and we're walking in a guarded way and calculating what we shall say so as not to offend or be misunderstood or be misperceived, how shall we be a mouth for God in a confrontation with a hostile world?

The thing that has kept you from apostolicity is your Scandinavian lucerness. Your concern to be nice. Your own life. You've determined what is appropriate. How dare you? There's only one who has that right.

There's only one wisdom that can determine what is appropriate in any moment. It's the Most High and no other. You say, oh, I believe that. But I don't have the faith to believe that he'll mediate it for me in appointed moments.

Oh, you little faith. What do you mean, little moments? Hey, I'll meet you outside after the service. Little moments? That's like saying just the Bible study. What is little, apostolically speaking? Small talk unheard of in the kingdom of God.

Our conversation ought to be resonant with the life of God. Our, quote, small talk is life-giving. We ought to be instant, in season and out to reprove, to correct, to exhort, to rebuke, if necessary, and to have it received by others as very love itself.

Preach the word. Speak the word. Paul said to Timothy, he wasn't talking about Sunday services. He was talking about facing the saints and speaking to them the things that are needful whether it's an exhortation or a rebuke.

And we've become so spoiled to think that speaking is a sermon that will be biblically sound and general and not pointed at us that we would get offended and bent out of shape if someone spoke to us a direct and a corrective word.

Guys, we've got a long way to go to prepare ourselves for Mars Hill. And where is the place of preparation? But the congregation of the saints itself. If we're walking on eggshells here, if we're pusillanimous here and fearful here and intimidating each other here, what shall we be then in the place of confrontation in the world for which we have been called?

Exposing the Unknown God and Religious Substitutes

I perceive in all things you're too superstitious. For as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. You can believe that if it's an object, it can't be worship.

Isn't that right? It's incongruous, it's a contradiction of terms. You can't worship an object. Don't you think Paul knew that? Don't you think that there's a sarcasm, something sardonic, there's an irony in his statement, as I observed your objects of worship, he's already needling them and giving them a jab in the kishkas.

Oh, you understand that? Good. He's already setting them up for the one-two. Therefore, the one whom you worship without knowing him I proclaim unto you. I don't like that translation so much. Whom you therefore ignorantly worship, him or he I proclaim unto you.

Doesn't that sound arrogant? Telling these men that they're worshiping ignorantly? I proclaim unto you. It's a man acting in his competence and in his expertise. It's like the letter that I wrote to that head of the American consulate in Zimbabwe, in Africa, who told me that, called me at five o 'clock in the morning long distance, that he could not approve the visa applications of two Africans, one black and one white, who wanted to come to our prophetical school in Minnesota.

And for no good reason other than he felt suspicious. And after he hung up, the Lord began to stir my heart to realize that this man is exceeding his official right. And I wrote him a letter. I said, sir, I'm required to speak to you out of my own competence because I wouldn't expect you to understand that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof and the nations and those that dwell in them.

And that therefore God has established government for the governance of the nations and for order. But you have exceeded God's limitation. You have gone from being an official to being officious. They got their visa.

Not without outrage and shrieks and howls. But something had to be brought to the attention of a man in the authority and the competence that is ours as the church. Him whom you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you.

Not only in word, but Paul is the thing incarnate. He's the thing in itself or in himself. His very being, his boldness, the word that comes from him that is extemporaneous, the uncalculated statement, the insult, the cleverness, the incisiveness is itself a demonstration of the God whom they ignorantly worship.

And you know what we need to know? Not only do they worship him ignorantly, but willingly ignorantly. Willfully ignorantly. It's not an accident they choose to worship a God who is unknown. You say, why is that?

Because an unknown God makes no requirement at all. No demands. He's just an abstraction, if he's anything. And a God who is abstract does not speak, does not require. Don't you think Paul saw through this whole cop-out thing, this thing that sounds at its face value to be so spiritual, monuments with inscriptions to the unknown God, this obsequious deference, excuse the language, to spiritual reality which is a phony and a smokescreen, a fog, that saves men from any excruciating demand of being in relationship with the God who is.

They prefer that he remains unknown. But Paul is not going to allow them that luxury. Will you? Some commentator wrote, they were willing to leave open a place for the unknown, but this unknown must be thought of as the utterly unknowable and indeterminate.

Doesn't that sound so spiritual? God is so magnificent and so distant, who can know? He's some remote power, higher powers, I've heard rabbis say. That sounds like lofty, ethereal and spiritual language.

And maybe it impresses some, but it didn't impress Paul at all. He saw piercingly, right through the subterfuge, of men who love to celebrate an unknown God and to keep him unknown. It's a metaphysical sham.

And then how so? What is the implication if these are philosophers who celebrate ethics being Stoics and Epicureans, when their whole stance and their whole posture toward the ultimate question of reality, which is God himself, is phony, feigned and cop-out?

Where is their ethics then? You know the famous line from Shakespeare? Excuse me, these illusions, where he's watching the ditch-digger and he comes up with the skull of the old court jester, Yorick, and he holds the skull in his hand, this Hamlet who has just returned from university, whose father had been killed, and he feels the weight of it, and he remembers how, I sat on your knee, but now, alack and alas, where be your jibes and your gambles now?

Where are your jokes now? Where are your hot-shot puns now, you dead skull? You know what Paul might have said to these philosophers? Where's your ethics now? Where's your self-celebration as being intellectuals who have an ethical standard when this thing reveals how phony you are and deceitful in an unwillingness even to know a God who desires to be known, and yet to celebrate that myth, that subterfuge, that sham, by inscribing monuments to the unknown God.

You've been found out and revealed by my coming. This God whom you ignorantly thought to worship, Him I declare unto you. And I'll bet by that time, if they could, they would stick their fingers in their ears and run for their lives because they did not want to hear.

I'll tell you what, there's not one of them who was there that day in Moss Hill who heard this rag-picker who shall ever stand before God with excuse. And so must it also be for us who are an apostolic people called, among other things, to confrontation at the end of the age.

And those to whom God brings us as event, as the thing in itself, as the reality of the very God from whom people flee in their cop-out desires to avoid the implication of true faith and true commitment will no longer stand with excuse because they have met us.

They've had an apostolic encounter and they are forever without excuse. That's more than four spiritual laws. Forgive my coming back to this. The whole thing is the man in himself. Him I declare unto you.

That's either presumption or arrogance or it's just simple statement of fact of one who knows him in great intimacy and can make him known. I don't think God was offended at all by Paul's declaration and he won't be by ours either.

Human Existence and the Knowledge of God

Lord forgive me for rushing that. That sublime statement. It will take weeks to go word by word over what has just poured out of Paul's impassioned soul without preparation, without advanced calculation.

It is just a gush of his own knowledge of what this whole existence is about that in one fell swoop moments tells philosophers who do nothing but seek to hear some new thing their whole lives long in idle babbling and seeking knowledge and never coming to the knowledge of the truth what the whole purpose of human existence is.