God Loves the Whole World

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in our study of “The Love of the Triune God”. We first saw the complete love of God. God is love. His love is seen in his goodness, mercy, and grace. His love is complete and perfect, meaning that he is love in himself. From all eternity past, God has been a God of love because the Father has always loved the Son and the Son the Father. We then saw God’s creative love. Because God loves his own glory revealed in his Son, his love overflowed in the creation of the universe. The universe is a reflection of God’s glory and goodness. He loves to reveal himself in and through his creation. In particular, he loves to reveal himself to his special creation, humanity, through his creation. And, he also loves to reveal himself by speaking to his covenant people through His Word.

This morning, we move to a new section of our study called the common love of God. Throughout the study, we have wrestled with some challenges that the love of God presents. Chief among them is the objection that unbelievers make to the Bible’s condemnation of sin and warning of Hell. You will often here the objection, “If God is loving, then how could he send anyone to Hell?” I’ve already done some work to answer this in earlier sermons by showing a couple of things. First, God is lovingly merciful to all humanity in his providence and Gospel call. Second, while God’s love is infinite, it is not generic. In other words, while God’s love is infinite in its capacity and reach, it is also ordered. God loves his own glory above all else. In fact, his love for his creation is ordered towards that end - the glory of his name. He loves his Son above all else because His Son is the express image of his nature. As Christians, we often handicap ourselves in a right understanding of God’s love and justice because we tend to say something like, “God loves everyone the same.” This comes from a good place. What I think we mean to say by that is that there is no partiality with God, and that is true. But God doesn’t even say that he loves everyone the same. He also never commands us to love everyone the same. Psalm 5:4-6 says that God “hates all evildoers” and destroys those who speak lies. Psalm 11:5-7 says that God’s soul hates the wicked and violent. Prov. 3:32 says that the devious person is an abomination to God. Malachi 1:2-3 says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” John 3:36 says that all who reject Christ remain under God’s wrath.

We can see from this that there is an order to God’s love. Yes, he loves all of humanity, but that love is not a permission structure for sin. We understand this in our own lives. For one, if you are a Christian, then you understand that your greatest allegiance is to Christ. I was even taught this by my football coach. He told us to love “God, family, country, and football, in that order.” In Matt. 10:37, Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Wow! So, we should love our mamma’s less than Jesus? Yes, because there is an order even to our love. In our own lives, that order is determined by our relationship to the other person. We love Jesus most, then our spouse and children, then extended family, then church family, and then our neighbor. We do not love all people the same, and it is not sinful or a limitation to make that distinction. It is a reflection of the way God loves.

So, back to our question about a loving God sending someone to Hell. In order to answer that question, we need to know the relationship of that person to God. Are they united to Christ through faith? Are they part of the family? If so, then God certainly does love them and would never send them to Hell. Are they rebellious sinners set against the things of God who refuse to worship and serve his Son? Then God’s wrath is on them, and they will be judged forever. Having said that, God is still loving to all of humanity in ways that we often ignore. It is funny that we would wonder how God could be loving and condemn someone to Hell, when God providentially cared for that person every second of every day and gave him good things like family and friends and revealed himself in creation and called him to repentance through the Gospel time and again. God has a common love for all of humanity that we find in the everyday workings of this world, and we take it for granted. This morning, I want to consider that common love from Acts 17:22-31. From this text, I want you to see the common love of God for the whole world in three points: our common source, our appointed setting, and our universal summons.

First, from verses 22-25, see our common source. Paul has been stuck in the great city of Athens. While there, he took a tour of the city and found idols on every street corner. The Athenians had centuries of false worship to pagan gods. They had a god or goddess for everything. They were also highly educated with centuries of philosophy. In Paul’s day, Greek philosophy had divided into two camps. The Epicureans were the atheists of their day. They believed that everything in life was pure chance and that men should pursue pleasure as the ultimate good. The Stoics, on the other hand, believed in the ordering principle of fate. They believed that all things were fated by a divine force, and man’s responsibility was to accept their fate and find inner peace in it. The Greeks loved to debate these differences, and so they regularly assembled on Mars Hill for that purpose. It is in this very place that Paul stands and preaches the sermon we just read. He begins by declaring that he is a representative of the one God that the Athenians didn’t know. In all their religiosity, they’d even tried to cover themselves by having an idol to the unknown god, and Paul says that this one God they didn’t know is the one who made everything. In this statement, he sets forth five principles of this one true God. First, this God who was unknown to the Greeks is the one who made the world. The Greeks believed that the universe was eternal and that the gods were part of the created order. Paul introduces them to the one God that stands outside of the material world and creates it by his Word. Second, the God the Greeks didn’t know is the sovereign God over heaven and earth. Yahweh is not Zues. He is not just the Jewish version of another god. He is the sovereign over all things. Third, this unknown God cannot be contained by a statue or a temple. He is not material. Fourth, he does not need humanity. Again, the Greeks, like the ancient Sumerians, believed that the gods needed men to serve them. The one true God, on the other hand, is the source of everything. Finally, the God the Greeks didn’t know is the God who sustains everyone. Here is where we find the common love of God, even for those who rebel against him. Even while the Greeks were making idols to other gods, Yahweh was sustaining them. God caused their herds that they used for sacrifices to idols to flourish. Even though they sought help from Demeter for fertile crops, it is God who gave them bread. As Luke 6:35 says, “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.”

Second, see our appointed setting from verses 26-29. God’s common love is also seen in the way that he appoints our lives. As we’ve said before, He did not just create the world and forget it. He sovereignly orders each human life. That order is found in five ways here. First, we have a common origin. Paul says that God made all of humanity from one man. We all have a common ancestry in Adam. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that we inherit Adam’s sinful nature. But, on the other hand, it goes to the second way God orders our lives: we inherit Adam’s dignity. Here, Paul quotes a Greek poet, who wrote, “Surely we are all his offspring.” Now, in quoting this, there are a few things to recognize. One, Paul is not endorsing pagan philosophies in quoting a pagan poet. Rather, he is recognizing that all truth is God’s truth, and that God has given to all men a sense of his truth. Two, Paul is not saying that we all are literally offspring of God, as the Mormons believe, or that we have the divine spark, as the Gnostics believe. Three, He is not saying that we are all part of the family of God by default. This does not mean that we are all destined for Heaven because we are all children of God. Rather, what Paul means to bring to mind is the idea that we are all created in the image of God. All of us have unique dignity and worth because we bear God’s image.

Not only did God order our lives in origin and dignity, but he also gave us distinct boundaries both in time and space. In verse 26, Paul says that God has sovereignly placed every human in a specific time and dwelling place. I was born in the year 1980 to Tim and Pat Skipper of Greenville, AL because God purposed it. Sure, there were millions upon millions of variables (biological, social, political) that all led to my birth, but they were all superintended by a sovereign God. That sovereign ordering was done for a reason, which is the fourth way he orders our lives. God puts us in our time and place so that we might seek him. We all have different parents - some good, some bad. We all had different life circumstances - some rich, some poor. Regardless of what those circumstances are, God put you where you are so that you might seek after him. All of the circumstances of your life were meant to drive you to God.

Lastly, God has ordered our lives in such a way that we are always near him. Paul adds this note at the end of verse 27, “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.” This ties in with my sermon on general revelation. All of creation reveals the nature and truth of God. God is not far from anyone because he has revealed himself in his creation. Beyond that, God is but a thought away from every human on this planet. The monk in the monastery and the boy in the slums of India are the same distance from God. They need only pray in their minds, and he hears them.

Finally, see my last point: our universal summons, from verses 30 and 31. Paul ends his sermon with a radical closing argument. He begins by saying that, in previous times, God overlooked the ignorance of the pagans. Yes, they made idols from wood that God had created. They offered sacrifices with sheep that God had provided. And through all of that God was patient. Now, this is not saying that God let all the people of prior generations into Heaven, regardless of what they believed. No, what he is saying is that God did not bring a final judgment on the world at the first act of idolatry. He allowed men to walk in blindness, patiently working behind the scenes to build to a moment where the whole world could be redeemed. And, that moment is now. So, Paul says now the Lord commands everyone everywhere to repent. This call isn’t just for the Jews to whom the Messiah came. It is for everyone. The time is short. In verse 31 he says that God has fixed a day when he is going to judge the world in righteousness. He’s proven he will do that because he has raised the Messiah from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the final proof of the one true God. None of the idols scattered through Athens had ever brought anyone back from the dead. But, the unknown God had. And, that man he brought back from the dead is the one who will judge all nations. So, now is the time for repentance.

This call of repentance is an act of love from the God the Athenians had ignored for centuries. That same God extends this loving call to you today. If you will turn in faith and believe in the man that God raised from the dead, Jesus Christ, you will be saved from that final judgment.

Brothers and sisters, God loves the whole world, and he proves that by calling this world to repent and believe. We are his appointed instruments for that call. So, may we take the love of God to this world and call them to repentance.