The Christian Mindset - Part 3 — Art Katz

Paul’s Spirit Stirred by Idolatry in Athens

Chapter 17 of the Book of Acts, about the middle of the chapter, describes Paul in flight. He was sent away, it says, in the 14th verse, to go to the sea, and they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens, and receiving a commandment unto Silas and to Mophias for them to come to him with all speed they departed.

So here's Paul brought by circumstances in which he had nothing to do, in the course of his apostolic life, brought to a place he perhaps did not intend to visit, but what is to ensue now is a divine encounter because God had his man in his place in his time.

And it begins with this very critical 16th verse,. Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. This is the beginning of the whole enormous encounter.

He saw something that stirred his spirit. He saw a whole city given over to idolatry. And I just want to say that this is not the obvious sight of anyone who would happen to be passing through Athens.

Every city in the earth today, including Cass Lake, is wholly given over to idolatry. But how many Pauls are there whose spirit within them wints as they see it? This is not just natural human observation, this is seeing by the eye of the spirit that affects the spirit of God within the spirit of a man.

Paul was acutely sensitive and conscious to anything contrary to God. And he immediately discerned the whole city given over to idolatry. And it pained him so much that he grieved. His spirit was stirred in him.

Other translations are even more graphic. He was grieved, he was cut to the quick, he was pained at that sight. Therefore he disputed in the synagogues with the Jews. What does idolatry have to do with the synagogues of the Jews?

And the answer is everything. Because there's no place where idolatry is more apparent than in the houses of religion. So this is a logical connection. It's not an accident that the first expression of his grieved spirit is to dispute in the synagogues with the Jews.

Spiritual Sight Must Produce Spiritual Action

So here's something we need to observe already. When Paul saw something, it wasn't that he just clucked his tongue and felt bad about it. What follows from Paul's seeing or Paul's observations are Paul's acts.

This is the book of acts. And that too is part of a biblical mindset. That God gives us things to see and to understand, not just that we should contemplate them in ourselves or for ourselves, but that they should eventuate in acts that affect and bring a change or result.

So the whole pattern here is a remarkable thing. I think many of us think that if something is spiritual, it's not to have practical consequences. The practical thing is what we call secular, and the spiritual thing is what we call contemplative.

The spiritual thing is something inward or personal, but the practical thing is outward and physical. Paul never saw any such distinction. He only saw one thing. We need to see that one thing too. And seeing that one thing that results in an act or consequence in a practical way that affects life and society is the spiritual mind.

And I... Shall I repeat that? That's a really important point. That's why we've left all of the decisions to the world. And they've allowed us to make the decisions on the church. If we're going to paint the building, change the carpet, invite a speaker.

But the things that pertain to war and peace, to the rise and fall of economies, to the whole character and conduct of nations, to life and death itself, that is reserved for secular men in secular councils by secular wisdom.

We are allowed by spiritual wisdom to determine whether we're going to have an evangelist or whether the church will have a program. You understand what I'm saying? It's a false distinction that God never intended, that Paul never would have tolerated.

And that we need to understand and to alter. So I'm really happy just to see this progression. Verse 16, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw. His eyes were open. He was not a man who would say, well, I'm not of the world.

What they do out there, that's just tough. I'm just concerned for the church. His eyes were open to see what was going on in the world, and he knew that the earth was the Lord's, and it cut him to the quick to see that men who were made in God's image were given over to idolatry.

The whole city. Athens was the crown of civilization. The proudest thing on the face of the earth, the glory that was Greece. So if idolatry was rampant in this supreme place of civilization, what could we expect any place else in the world?

He was jealous for the honor of God in the earth, and therefore he was hurt, therefore he disputed with the Jews and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. Talk about getting right into the nitty-gritty of the secular world, in the market.

He didn't confine his conversation only to the synagogue, he went into the market, where we need again to go. When Peter was released from prison and the angel said, go and stand in the temple and speak all the words of this life, it wasn't that Peter was sent to the temple because it was religious, he was sent to the temple because that's where the public congregated.

Go and speak all the words of this life. Paul was in the marketplace, disputing, and this is again where the word of God, the mind of God, the views of God, need again to be brought. And so from there certain philosophers of the Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him, some said what will this babbler say, others some he seems to be a set-aforth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.

He didn't think that that subject was too spiritual to express in a secular setting. He didn't bring a social gospel that just spoke about improving the physical condition of men or a community program.

He brought the most sacred tenets of the faith right into the secular place, the most hairy, the most utterly supernatural, the ickiest, the most offensive. He brought as a practical matter-of-fact thing to the consideration of men in the deepest secular place, which is exactly where God intended it to be brought.

The resurrection is not just a doctrine that we can comfortably speak of within the context, within the context of a church. It's an awesome reality that needs to be brought to the consideration of men deeply in the world.

Paul knew that the prince of this world ruled over the world, but he knew also that God loved the world. And one of our mistakes has been to think that because we are not of the world that we should be indifferent to the world.

Paul was not indifferent. He came into it and brought the thing that it most desperately needed to hear. The reality of God and his views. So he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection, and they took him and brought him to Areopagus saying, may we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is, for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears, we would know therefore what these things mean.

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, that deserves applause, because I think we need to appreciate that Paul is being borne up by the circumstances.

He's being carried. He was brought first by believers to Athens to escape persecution, and then by circumstances he's now being brought by Greeks themselves to the chief place of confrontation, Mars Hill.

It's not something he asked for, something he anticipated. He's caught up in God. But he's a man instant, in season and out. He says that we should be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks of us, the reason for our hope, and now he himself is on the spot.

And what is he going to say? By what wisdom shall he give answer? It's a once and for all opportunity, never to be given again. History is going to be affected by this. Men are going to be eternally lost and damned on the basis of the hearing, receiving, rejecting of Paul's statement.

God is going to bring forth out of this future heroes of the gospel, the effects of whose ministry will be felt elsewhere in Europe, even to this very day. As I mentioned last week, that Dionysius, who is mentioned by name in Acts 17, as cleaving to Paul and believing, is reputed by church tradition to be the same one who was a martyr in Paris on Montmartre, the hill of the martyrs in Paris, which is completely lost to the Parisians today, but is supposed to be the same man saved in Athens on the hill at Athens, becomes the man who brings the gospel in the hill in what is today France and was then pagan Europe.

So this is very consequential, besides serving us and giving us a basis for understanding in a text, there is no way that we can see the enormous implication through time and through eternity, through one encounter.

The Eternal Consequences of Present Faithfulness

We need to have that sense, do you know why? That is a biblical mindset. Before we came to this building tonight, as we prayed at home, we prayed something like that, Lord we know that there is going to be an amplification, a consequence of this night far beyond those who come, far beyond Cass Lake, far beyond the state of Minnesota.

We don't know, we can't imagine what it will be. It may come through someone who is in this room tonight and who is going to be peculiarly touched by something expressed or done and affected in a certain way that maybe sometime in the future, ten years hence, in a certain crisis that may come, something will be quickened to them by what is being sown tonight in their hearts that will give answer for someone else in terrible crisis and save them out of death.

And maybe it will be more than an individual. Who knows, maybe it will be consequential for many or the tape going far beyond this room. There is no way to estimate what will be the reverberation unto the day of eternity by anything that happens in any particular moment of time.

Are you understanding me? If we really believe that, how ought we to live? Another thing that we prayed tonight was, Lord save us from thinking that this is just an ordinary evening, that this is just a, this is not a big encounter, this is not standing before thousands, it's just a handful of souls, local saints, others, the curious, you know, it's just a class, a lecture.

We can pray but we don't have to really get deeply in prayer as if everything depends on it. It's not one of the larger things, it's just, you know, that's already a secular attitude. That by its own human opinion determines the value of any certain thing in a scale that it establishes, usually in terms of numbers.

The greater the number, the greater the value. But how many were in Monticello when Paul spoke? Or who met him in the marketplace or in the synagogue? If we're measuring by numbers and that determines the value or the importance, we have already surrendered to a premise by which the world, the secular world itself, determines its values.

Got the picture? How desperately do we need to be returned or restored to the radical spiritual mind? Because if we had it, our whole life would be different. There would be nothing that we would consider insignificant or unimportant.

There's nothing that we would think that we could perform on the basis of our own ability because we have the experience or the skill. We would have such a sense of the manifold possibility of any single event that we would be continually invoking the blessing of God and the presence of God and saying, as Paul said continually, who is sufficient for these things?

People think that Paul was some kind of, I don't know what, outstanding spiritual man that we can't even begin to approximate what he was. Because he's just a rarity. We could never hope to aspire to be anything like him, but that's wrong.

Someone has said that the world has yet to see what God can do with any man and woman who is totally yielded to him, who totally would say with Paul, who is sufficient for these things, and who not only preaches the resurrection and Jesus, but lives by the resurrection and Jesus in the secular place.

Resurrection Life in the Secular Classroom

Did I ever tell you how I tried that as a high school teacher? For those of you who have heard this before, my apologies, but I just feel like interrupting myself with this little anecdote because I was quite young in the faith.

See, I'd heard about the resurrection. I believed it because I was a young believer. I believed everything that God said, but was it a doctrine or is it a reality? Is it something that happened 2 ,000 years ago when Jesus broke the fetters of death and burst forth out of the tomb?

Or is it something presently available to those who believe for the very actualities and realities of their life in every situation? See, what was happening to me is I had five classes a day of students who didn't want to be there.

I taught a compulsory class on American history. I had kids, black and white, of every kind of shape and description. They were out of it. Crocked on drugs, prostitution, it was a metropolitan school.

They were dull, they were up all hours, they hated teacher because he was white, and in that context I was required to teach. And what accentuated everything was that I was not content merely to be a teacher of history, even a good teacher of history, because I was now a believer, the Spirit of God was in me, and I recognized that God was wanting to transact something more than names, dates and places.

We need to recognize what a ministry public school teaching is, and that the teacher has greater access to the lives of young people than do their pastors. And things come up in classroom situations that are so revealing and such openings for the Spirit of God to move.

If we really believed and thought that the Spirit of God can move in a secular classroom. And I could keep you up for the rest, this whole session, filling the time with one anecdote after another of how the Spirit of God moved in my classes.

The whole, virtually the whole youth section of our assembly church was filled with converts out of my classes. I had day classes of teenagers and I had an adult night class, and God went to town in both places.

I saw Him challenge and shake, I saw the convicting presence of the Spirit of God come right in through the material. We had a discussion on life after death one day that was out of the history, world history, about what the Egyptians believed.

And we began to discuss what death is. Is it only the final cessation that comes, what we call death, when you bury the body? Or does death have yet other meanings? Can you know death even while you live?

What does the Bible mean when it says that the wages of sin is death? Is that a valid question to ask in a secular class? Can the Bible be brought in as a source and a text, as being worthy of the consideration of men, as well as what some atheist and non-believer had to say on any subject?

God just began to take that. You could just feel the atmosphere heightening under such conviction, the kids even forgot what time it was or when the bell was going to ring. And before we knew it, I had seven cardinal sins on the blackboard, and that the wages of sin is death.

And I said, what's the answer to save us from dying? I said, some of you guys are in death right now because of those very sins. Sin is reduction of life. Sin is restriction. You're already experiencing that right now.

What's the answer? Dead silence, but what a silence, what a hush, holy hush. And some kid piped up in the back room, Mr. Katz, he said, didn't we read when we studied Israel that they practiced sacrifice for sin, something like that?

Oh, yes, I said, yes, we did, didn't we? Picked my Bible up off the desk, turned to Isaiah 53, began to read Isaiah 53, he went to the lamb, went to the slaughter as a lamb. By his stripes we're healed and the whole of the atonement of God.

And one of the last things that was said before the bell rang was, because you're not going to a church, God has brought his church to you. And I gave an invitation to receive the Lord and to have the sins wiped away.

I took the eraser and I went to the board and I wiped away the sins. Seventeen kids raised their hands and followed me in a prayer for salvation. Other such adventures, wholly unplanned, unpremeditated, I don't know if I would have had the courage, let alone the intelligence of how to take a secular subject as a means of leading kids to a place of eternal salvation.

But it was beyond my intelligence, beyond my planning and beyond my courage. And of course there was complaint. You want to hear how God answered that? By the same wisdom? Because by that time, and shortly thereafter, I was getting rather frequent invitations to the principal's office.

It's interesting that the ones who complained were Christian parents. By and large, few if any complaints from Jewish parents or others, but Christian parents of a certain kind were offended by the super naturalness of the God that I was proclaiming or setting forth in the course of our discussions.

It was getting their kids stirred up, and they didn't like their kids getting agitated about God and getting interested why it might actually interfere with their prospect for middle class success. What if he decides to become a missionary instead of an engineer?

Then what? His whole life is ruined. Have you ever heard, I don't know if you believe this, but there are Jewish parents, I've heard this many times from Jewish believers, who have said to their kids, formerly drug addicts and just the most desperate specimens, I would much rather see you continue in drugs or even dead than you should have called on that name.

You've ruined your life. Isn't that remarkable? Well, I was called up to the principal's office. He was a Presbyterian lay preacher, something like that. Getting warm in here, isn't it now? And he said, he was really steaming, getting these calls.

Mr. Cassie said, don't you know you're going beyond the rules and regulations? I thought, yeah, that's right, I am. I was stroking my chin, and then I look up and I said, without any deliberation, I said, but what would you do if you were at a beach and you saw someone going down for the proverbial third time, crying for help, with the water coming out of their nose and ears, and just a moment away from death, and there was a sign on the beach that said, no swimming allowed.

What would you do? Get out of my office, he said. Yes, there's a rule and regulation, but when it's a matter of life and death, you need to set aside, or the Lord transcends the limitations imposed by men.

It's another statement of why there is so desperate a need for the sacred to come into the secular. The fact that men have raised up their laws and their regulations shows how far we've allowed their definitions to prevail.

And one of the most melancholy practices is to be found in evangelical churches on Sunday night when they have an evangelical meeting, to those who are believers already saved, hoping that maybe somebody will come in through the door.

So the message that should be going out to the secular world in the secular place, stand and speak all the words of this life, is being rehearsed with the same believers, week after week after week, who are already saved.

So much are we boxed in by the definition and the restraint that society has established to protect its own interest, while the issue of life and death and eternity goes unattended. One of the reasons that we allow it, without complaint, is that we are not really that persuaded about the issues of eternity.

We do not really burn for the sense of hell that awaits those who have never called upon his name. It's a doctrine, which we technically believe in very much the same way that we believe resurrection.

But we do not believe burningly to the place where our spirit can wince within us as we see the condition of our students before us, and therefore we dispute daily, or open our mouths or give the Spirit of God the opportunity to move in a place where he's not expected and to bring up the nets himself.

Living by Resurrection Power

Well at any rate, given the kind of situation that I was in, the students who didn't want to be there, and the other kinds of opposition, it was exhausting to carry on five times a day. So you can learn to coast as a teacher, you can put your assignments up on the board, turn to a chapter so and so, do problems two, three, and four, and then pick up your newspaper and read it from the desk.

But if you're going to lecture, if you're going to speak, if you're going to lead this discussion and seek to bring something forth out of that, that's tremendously demanding. And five times a day is an exhausting thing.

And I never made it to the fifth class. By the third class, my legs would go weak, my voice would go hoarse, my mind would go numb, and I realized if I'm going to make it to the end of the day, I've got to restrict myself and parcel myself out a little bit at a time.

But as I became intrigued with the issue of resurrection, I asked, how far could I go if I come to the end of myself and trust God, would his resurrection life be available to me that I might say that I live by him?

Because there's a scripture that says that as Jesus lived by the Father, so ought we also to live through him. This is the love of God taught us, that God gave his Son, that we might live through him.

Do I dare try it? And what if that life doesn't come? And what if I'm there by the third or fourth hour of class with my face sticking out? No voice, no strength, no ability. I'll tell you what, if you don't have a command over the class by your very presence and your look and the energy of your life, those students could just about come up out of their seats and let you have it.

Because I had never forgotten when I was a merchant seaman how a flock of pelicans were flying over where we were in Florida, and some character picked up a big heavy nut and bolt and threw it up into the midst of that flock and hit a bird.

They were flying so peacefully together in formation, but when that one bird was struck and fell out of formation and went into a nosedive, to my utter shock and amazement, the rest of the birds that had been flying peacefully with it now came down to attack it and began pecking this thing to death, the wounded and weakened member.

I had never forgotten that sight. You know what I thought? If I ever get weak before these kids, if they ever sense that I'm losing control, that I don't have the voice and the authority, and I'm beginning to wobble and my mind goes dull, they might just about get up out of their seats and let Whitey have it.

Do I dare take the risk? Well, I was going to trust God for the resurrection, and I came that day and I pulled out all the stops. I just gave everything I had. I talked. I led. I carried on. By the second period, I could feel that the third period I was really weakening, and there came a perilous moment, hey, you better be wise and conserve your strength.

You better not be too extreme and take this risk. Remember God understands you're only young in the faith, but that still small voice that was beckoning, and I went all the way. I gave everything I had, and I ran out.

My voice went. My mind, I couldn't remember my name. I didn't remember what period of the day it was. I just lost my whole presence, and my legs were weak and sagging, and I was just about to go down, and I thought in that last moment, I began to see them coming up out of their seats in that last utterly pitiful moment.

In that moment, I want to tell you, something came into me, a strength, a power, a source of life. I could just feel from my legs up, the strength not only came back, it exceeded what I had before. My throat cleared completely.

My mind cleared. I had real command presence. I knew where we were going, and we moved into another dimension. We shifted gears, and we moved into a transcendent dimension on the basis of his resurrection life.

I just want to go on record, and I've said this before, I want to say it tonight. I think that the issue of the resurrection is going to be the issue at the end of the age. We know that there's going to be a world church, an apostate church, and we know there's going to be a true church, and the two are going to be in collision.

I think that the difference is not going to be the difference in vocabulary. They will all speak the same essential doctrines, but the difference is going to be a church that is moving in the life and the power of the resurrection, and those that are moving in that which is human and opposed.

That issue is not going to be decided in a final moment, it's an issue that's being decided day by day now, even in the way that we conduct ourselves, in things in which we think we do not need the power or the life of God.

We need to come to a transcendent place, we need to shift gears, to believe for and expect and move in that life. When Paul preached to the Greeks, Jesus and the resurrection, he was not just technically speaking the subject, he was demonstrating it even as he was speaking.

Because I'll tell you what, if he did not speak the resurrection and the power of the resurrection, I don't know that he would have come down from that hill. It says, some clave unto him and believed, indicates that they were not just persuaded by technical arguments or the technical truth, they clave unto him and believed suggests to me that they saw the very reality and the demonstration of the words in the man who proclaimed them.

He didn't just speak the resurrection, he demonstrated it, and it's a place where we need to be. To expect it is part of the spiritual mind, to come to a transcendent place above human energy and ability.

So Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, and that's where we spoke and discussed last week, said what? What would you say, having this one opportunity? What are the right words, if you're not going to have this chance again?

You'll have to get the tape, I don't want to go back over that material, but it's not at all what one would expect. It's not a conventional evangelical sermon. He seems to rub his hearers the wrong way, he insults them, I perceive that in all things you're too superstitious.

Him whom you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you. It was not a nice statement calculated to appease men or to warm them up toward the speaker as we see so often in our church and conference practice.

It was almost offensive. It was offensive, but they were the words that God gave out of God's own wisdom that do not need to be explained to those through whom they're being spoken. It was the strategy of God and not of Paul, given in the moment by the life.

We just came back from a weekend's ministry around the Minneapolis area, New Ulm, places like that, Redwood Falls, and we stayed at the home of a dentist who came to two of the full gospel meetings, Friday and Saturday night.

After Saturday night's meeting he said, this meeting was altogether different from last night's meeting. I said, yes, that's right, and if you'll be with us tomorrow morning, you'll see something altogether different from tonight.

Why is that? Because each has its own requirement, and God measures out what is appropriate, not just in the word, but even the manner of speaking, the atmosphere, the whole course of each of those occasions was totally different, given of God, which is as it ought to be.

If there's something that's coming with predictable regularity, we can suspect it is probably more nearly the work of man than the work of God. In the beginning, God created, and we ought to see that creativity still, if it indeed is his life that is being expressed.

God as Creator and Lord of Heaven and Earth

Okay. The last thing that we discussed at the end of last week's meeting was verse 24. In the midst of various pages it said, Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious and superstitious in all respects, for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, To an unknown God, where therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and all things in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all life and breath and all things.

That may just sound like a little piece of preaching, or a nice true statement, but it is loaded. It contains a whole theology. It contradicts the whole wisdom of the Greeks. It introduces a totally different perspective of men who like to believe that God is unknown and beside that unknowable, and that the world itself is a kind of chaos or cosmic accident that just came into being in an unexplainable way.

If God is unknown, how then can you understand creation? And therefore, whatever order there is, whatever sense there is, whatever purpose there is, has got to be provided by men rather than by God. I'm going to repeat this because this is so important.

The issue of whether the universe is an accident, a chance creation, or whether it is the creation of God, is tremendously important for everything that follows. If it's an accident, then men themselves, finding themselves in it or on it, are required to fashion their own life, their own morality, their own ethics, what they think is right.

What else shall they live? But if there's a creator who is God, by that very fact, if he made the heavens and the earth, there must be a purpose. There must be a way that he intends for men to live in the earth that he created and the men whom he fashioned in his own image.

So this is not just simply a statement about the origin of something. It has an implication for life now. And so it's no accident that we find Paul saying that God who made the world and all things in it, which means he made you Greeks too, don't take credit for yourself to think that your life is your own.

Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. The issue of creation is the issue of lordship. And not just Lord of the heavens. See, we don't mind everything. Okay, so God made the earth.

Okay, praise the Lord. That's nice. And it would allow him even to be the Lord of heaven. But the Lord of earth gets a little sticky because that's where we live. And what we do not want is his lordship on the earth where we are.

We want to be self-willing, freewheeling, independent, autonomous men doing our thing. So in one statement, Paul cuts right into that whole secular Greek mentality. He's not just making a chance remark about the origin of creation.

He's showing what the implication is, since he is the Lord of heaven and earth. I don't have the ability or the time just to tell you of the consequence that flows from these two different views, secular or spiritual, about the issue of creation.

The whole rise of dictatorships, of Nazism, of fascism, of elite minorities leading mankind down into rivers of blood, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism, every one of the ideologies of modern times is a direct result of the fact that men believe that the universe is an accident which leaves a vacuum for man to fill.

But what kind of men, elite men, a leader, a fuhrer, an ideologist, a Karl Marx, to lead the rest of the fools into the brotherhood which ends up into being unspeakable death. If there's no God, then men have a complete vacuum to fill themselves.

But if he's the Lord of heaven and earth, that changes everything. One of the ways in which this conflict has a final expression is when someone who believes as Paul does, falls into the hands of those who believe as the Greeks do.

And it's remarkable that the torture and the horror that is perpetrated on believers by secular men, I just read that this afternoon in a report from Richard Wurmbrand, how in Nicaragua, assemblies of God people, a man watched his daughter being raped, he had his eyes gouged out, other men were found dead with their bodies mutilated, their sex organs cut off, stuffed into another, the most horrendous, unbelievable, demonic torture of believers.

They're not just content to kill them, but there's something in them that's malicious, that's bitter, that wants somehow to rub dirt in their face, and I can't articulate this, but my spirit senses and understands why.

It goes back to this. They want to hear these men recant. Yes, we never did really believe it was only foolishness. They want some contradiction because these men represent something that is so contrary to everything upon which their secular life has been predicated.

They can only get them to contradict it, to disparage God, even to curse God because of their suffering. Where is your God? Look how we're treating you, and he does not interfere, and we have complete sway over your body even to this torture.

But you know what the testimony of saints has been through the generations? They die gloriously, even at the hands of those who abused them pitifully. And the same thing took place in the crucifixion of Jesus.

He wasn't just executed. He was tortured. He was marred more than any man. He had no comeliness that we could desire him. The world and its hatred against God, who is the Lord of heaven and earth, had opportunity to ventilate its hatred and bitterness against this stubborn fact, against that one who represents this view.

We're not just talking about an idle difference of opinion. We're talking about something that strikes at the heart of the whole way in which men order their thought and live their lives and have their values that goes back to the issue of is God the creator of the universe and therefore also the Lord of heaven and the earth?

And can you believe that he is the Lord of the earth and yet he's allowing you to suffer at the hands of those who despise him and not interfere for your release? The remarkable thing is that the glory that is revealed and that kind of patient endurance and suffering is the final revelation of the God who is the Lord of heaven and earth.