That was all they knew; and even that they did not know; they contradicted themselves and each other about it. After a time they began to think that Odin, and not Tuisco, was the All-Father; all was dim and far off to them. They were feeling after him, as St. Paul says he had intended them to do: but they did not find him. They did not know the Father, because they did not know Jesus Christ the Son; as it is written, ‘No man cometh to the Father, but through me;’ and, ‘No man hath seen God at any time; only the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.’
Many other heathens had the same thought and the same word; the old Greeks and Romans, for instance, who many thousand years ago spoke the same tongue as we did then, called him Zeus or Deus Pater; Jupiter; the heavenly Father, Father of gods and men; using the same word as our Tuisco, a little altered. And that same word, changed slightly, means God now, in Welsh, French, and Italian, and many languages in Europe and in Asia; and will do so till the end of time.
That, I say, was all they knew of their Father in heaven, till missionaries came and preached the Gospel to them, and told them what St. Paul told the Greeks in my text.
Now, what did St. Paul tell the Greeks? He came, we read, to Athens in Greece, and found the city wholly given to idolatry, worshipping all manner of false gods, and images of them. And yet they were not content with their false gods. They felt, as our forefathers felt, that there must be a greater, better, more mighty, more faithful God than all: and they thought, ‘We will worship him too: for we are sure that he is, though we know nothing about him.’ So they set up, beside all the altars and temples of the false gods ‘To the Unknown God.’ And St. Paul passed by and saw it; and his heart was stirred within him with pity and compassion; and he rose up and preached them a sermon—the first and the best missionary sermon which ever was preached on earth, the model of all missionary sermons; and said, ‘That God whom you ignorantly worship, Him I will declare unto you.’
Now, here was a Gospel; here was good news. St. Paul told them—as the missionaries afterwards told our forefathers—that one, at least, of their heathen fancies was not wrong. There was a heavenly Father. Mankind was not an orphan, come into the world he knew not whence, and going, when he died, he knew not whither. No, man was not an orphan. From God he came; to God, if he chose, he might return. The heathen poet had spoken truth when he said, ‘For we are the offspring of God.’
But where was the heavenly Father? Far away in the clear sky, in the highest heaven beyond all suns and stars? Silent and idle, caring for no one on earth, content in himself, and leaving sinful man to himself to go to ruin as he chose?
‘No,’ says St. Paul, ‘He is not far off from any one of us; for in him we live, and move, and have our being.’
Wonderful words! Eighteen hundred years have past since then, and we have not spelt out half the meaning of them. It is such good news, such blessed news, and yet such awful news, that we are afraid to believe it fully. That the Almighty God should be so near us, sinful men; that we, in spite of all our sins, should live, and move, and have our being in God. How can it be true?
My friends, it would not be true, if something more was not true. We should have no right to say, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ unless we said also, ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.’ St. Paul, after he had told them of a Father in heaven, went on to tell them of a man whom that Father had sent to judge the world, having raised him from the dead.—And there his sermon stopped. Those foolish Greeks laughed at him; they would not receive the news of Jesus Christ the Son; and therefore they lost the good news of their Father in heaven. We can guess from St. Paul’s Epistle what he was going on to tell them. How, by believing in Jesus Christ the Son, and claiming their share in him, and being baptized into his name, they might become once more God’s children, and take their place again as new men and true men in Jesus Christ. But they would not hear his message.
Our forefathers did hear that message, and believed it; they had been feeling after the heavenly Father, and at last they found him, and claimed their share in Christ as sons of the heavenly Father; and therefore we are Christian men this day, baptized into God’s family, and thriving as God’s family must thrive, as long as it remembers that God dwelleth not in temples made with hands, and needs nothing from man, seeing that he gives to all life and breath and all things; and is not far from any one of us, seeing that in him we live, and move, and have our being, and are the offspring, the children of God.