Are We God's 'Offspring?'

Tom:

This is our Understanding the Scriptures segment, we are in the Book of Acts, chapter 17, and we’re going to pick up with verse 28.This is the apostle Paul addressing the unbelievers to the most part of Mars Hill.This is in Athens, outside of Athens.

Dave:

This is the true God.He’s telling them, Oh, you’ve got an altar to an unknown god, well, let me tell you who he really is, this is the God that you don’t know.Not that their altar honored him, but, I’ll tell you about the God you don’t know.

Tom:

“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. 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.”Now Dave, let’s talk about being the offspring of God because a lot of people say, Hey, we are all children of God.

Dave:

The expression, We are His offspring, doesn’t mean that we are begotten by God through some natural process like God has a wife, but it’s very clear, you read it other places, that means that God created us.He created man in His image out of the dust of the ground, formed him out of the dust of the ground and created him.Now we have something called, theistic evolution out there, which Hugh Ross claims he doesn’t believe.He believes in progressive creationism, which I don’t see any difference….But he’s very popular these days, and let me quote him:“My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic hominid seem to have existed for thousands of years previously.It is conceivable that God created Adam out of one of them.”Now, first of all we have death before sin.

Tom:

Yeah, in his view.

Dave:

Romans:5:12Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
See All..., clearly says, By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin.So now we have ancestors of Adam and Eve, it says, for thousands of years.So Adam and Eve are standing on a pile of fossils, dead bones are buried everywhere on this earth in that perfect environment in a perfect garden before Adam sinned.Now that’s a contradiction to the Bible.

Tom:

It’s more than a contradiction, Dave, it’s what did these so-called hominids do, did they kill each other, was it the survival of the fittest?What went on then?

Dave:

Well, they must have lived without sin if sin came by Adam and Adam was descended from them.But when He says we are His offspring He means God directly created us.We didn’t come by some evolutionary process, some intermediary form, but we are the offspring of God.In other words, He made man in His image, and then He put Adam to sleep because He said it’s not good for the man to be alone, and a lot of animals that Adam named, and He took a rib!It says so!I’ll take the Bible for what it says.God took a rib out of Adam, and she comes from his side.It’s a beautiful picture of Christ, you know, that spear into His side, and His Bride comes from His side.He bought his Bride with His blood, and they are one flesh.Okay.So, that’s pretty specific stuff, and also it’s a beautiful picture of what Christ actually did for us in redeeming us.And he says, no, they were descended from these hominid, you know.Well, they may be hominid and this is evolutionary process and apparently, none of those other hominids were quite close enough to what God wanted, but now Adam and Eve, they’re the next generation after thousands of generations, and what do you know, they looked good enough to God, they are close enough to what God wanted, so He puts a human soul and spirit in them.That is not what the Bible says!Now when we begin to play fast and loose with the Bible, Tom, we’ve got problems, because Adam occurs, I think, thirty times in ten books of the Bible, and Jesus believed in a literal Adam and Eve, that the existed, that they were created exactly as Genesis says.Now if that’s not true, and Jesus was that naïve, He was wrong, He didn’t understand modern science, He didn’t understand what Hugh Ross now knows, and these progressive creationists, or theistic evolutionists that Jesus is not God—that He couldn’t possibly be our Savior, and we have a very basic problem as to what sin is.You know, Tom, I wish I could quote exactly, but I remember the American Atheist Magazine, how many years ago?Seventy some years ago, I think it was in the 30s, they said one of their purposes was to do away with Adam and Eve.And if I can try and remember, you do away with Adam and Eve, and in the ruins you will find the sorry remains of Jesus of Nazareth, and all this idea of redemption.Okay, that’s how serious it is.So, we’re His offspring, this is very important what Paul is saying.

Tom:

Dave, lets’ go back to verse 28, where Paul writes, “In Him we live and move and have our being”, I mean, that’s telling us about a characteristic of God that affects everybody.I mean, God is holding all things together by His Word.

Dave:

In Him was life—talking about Christ—the life was the light of men.Our life comes from God, He’s the only one that has life.This is why Christ, the sinless man but also God in one person, He was the only one who could die for our sins.He was the only one who had life, we’re all dead, we already died through Adam’s sin and our own sin, and God is the one who is the giver of life.Now Tom, I may have mentioned I am writing a book right now, Cosmos Creator and Human Destiny.That’s one of the real mysteries, and what I point out in the book, and I’m sure others have pointed out, although I haven’t read it, but mathematically you couldn’t get the molecules, the essential molecules of the chemicals lined up in the right order to put together a cell, the smallest cell, it’s mathematically impossible to happen by chance.But even if you did, suppose you got it all together, where does life come from?They don’t know what life is.We don’t know why we die.We begin to die when we are born, and one of the arguments that the evolutionist uses against the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, says, yeah, but you can’t use that with natural selection because these are living beings and they have self replicating cells and they can repair themselves and no reason why they should be going down.No, there isn’t, no reason why they should die and we don’t know why they die.And the dead body that lies there has all of the chemicals in the right place, in the right order, but something is missing, and that life comes from God.He is life, He has life, there’s no life anywhere else.You can’t find it anywhere else, it’s not a quality of matter.So anyway, this is very profound.“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.”In other words, He’s the one who gave us life.

Tom:

Dave, we’ve got about a minute and a half left, but I want to set something up for next week, maybe we can talk about it.Verse 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.”Youknow, we now have another so-called Biblical movie dealing with the nativity of Christ, and here again we have somebody trying to represent the Bible.

Dave:

Artistically, in fact.

Tom:

Yes.

Dave:

Yeah, well, I think God came before we did so you can’t create your own God as the pagan idol worshippers did.And yet, Carl Sagan, remember, he said:“If we want to worship something higher than ourselves, doesn’t I make sense to worship the sun and the moon?”No, it doesn’t, that’s paganism.That’s where these people are, Tom, and this is what Paul is dealing with on Mars Hill.