+Acts 4:23-25

In October 1960, the heads of many states assembled in New York for General Assembly of the United Nations—Khrushchev, Tito, Nasser, Castro, and others were there.Harold Macmillan made a great impression in a memorable speech. In [the] course of it he said that while the leaders of the world were quarrelling, “ordinary folk” needed “the chance to think for themselves about the deepest problems on which man has to meditate during his short individual sojourn on earth—the relations between man and man, and the relation between man and God.”

Everyone wants a utopia, and most feel that the politicians, philosophers, and scientists can make it happen.

Utopia is the name which Sir Thomas More gave to the imaginary island he described in his book (1516), which enjoyed unspoiled social perfection. Yet the Greek derivation of the word is οὐ “not” and τοπος “place.” i.e. no such place has ever existed, or will exist.

Acts 4:23 After they were released, they went to their own people and reported everything the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together to God and said, “Master, you are the one who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You said through the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David your servant:

Why are there wars?

Why are the nations still piling up armaments?

Why, is there such a thing as death?

Why is there disease and pain? Why is there sorrow and unhappiness?

Why a Wuhan lab, an Afghanistan, and the Taliban?

Last week, they started their prayer with the correct theology about God, they saw Him as creator, controller, and conquer.

Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. Acts 4:25–26

The Bible’s answer, as we are reminded by Psalm 2 is, first of all, that there is nothing new about all this; such troubles are not peculiar to the twenty-first century. Our fellow men and
women start with the fatal assumption that there is something special about us because we are living in this century.

Psalm 2; 1Why do the nations rage,
And the peoples meditate a vain thing? 2The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying, 3Let us break their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us. 4He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh:The Lord will have them in derision. 5Then will he speak unto them in his wrath, And vex them in his sore displeasure: 6Yet I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion. 7I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; This day have I begotten thee. 8Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession 9Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. 10Now therefore be wise, O ye kings: Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. 11Serve Jehovah with fear, And rejoice with trembling. 12 Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way, For his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that take refuge in him

We have become drunk on our own knowledge and especially on science.

We think that all our problems are new problems, that nobody has ever had them before. Today’s problems are a manifestation of what has been going on in the world for a very, very long time. War and death, people being maimed, and jealousy and rivalry are all here in the Bible from the very beginning; it is the story of the human race.

In the first three verses the psalmist states the position, and in the next three verses he tells us God’s reaction. we have the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, speaking; and then in the last three verses the psalmist sums it all up and makes an appeal to men and women to listen to the message.

The reaction described in this psalm has been the attitude of humanity to God throughout the running centuries, but it all came to a climax, a focus, in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God.

Here, then, is the message of the Bible for us. We are dealing, remember, with the state of the world.

Why is the world as it is?

Why are we like we choose to be?

When Peer Gynt went to the lunatic asylum he found it hard to believe that the people who were there were mad. They talked so sensibly and discussed their plans with such precision and concern that he felt sure they must be sane. He spoke to the doctor about it. “They’re mad,” said the doctor. “They talk very sensibly, I admit, but it is all about themselves. They are, in fact, most intelligently obsessed with self. It’s all self—morning, noon and night. We can’t get away from self here. We lug it along with us, even through our dreams. O yes, young sir, we talk sensibly; but we’re mad right enough”

Nowhere in the world today will you find any light on your present situation except here. We need governors and officials; we need law and order. But they are obviously in trouble, and they are in trouble because they are viewing the world solely upon the horizontal human level; they are not viewing it in the depth revealed to us by the Bible.

The psalmist’s description of the state of the world. What was true of the world then is still true of the world today. The world is “raging.”

Their raging is like the roaring and the raging of the sea.

Isaiah in a great statement puts it like this: “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt” (Isa. 57:20).

That is a description of the human race apart from God. Have you seen the sea going backwards and forwards, rising, churning up mud and mire and dirt and refuse“the troubled sea, when it cannot rest”?

A perfect description of the people of the world today than just that? We all see this restlessness, this trouble, this perplexity, this being carried backwards and forwards, victims of the latest news bulletin, never knowing what is going to happen, victims of circumstance and chance, tossed about.

Is not that the great trouble in life? Men and women have lost all sense of direction. They are asking, “Is there anything in life? Is it worth living?” Many are committing suicide.

But look at the raging as it manifests itself in terms of the evils of living. Sin is always sin, but sometimes it appears to be fairly quiet and placid. We sometimes look at the sea and do not see any waves.

But the depths are there, the movement, and when a storm blows up, the waves gather and turn into billows that roll and rage, and there is confusion and crashing. You and I are living in an age like that.

People have always sinned, but they have not always raged in their sin as they are doing now. Have we ever seen sin as bad as we see in in our life time?

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Behavior that was once regarded as sinful is now not only justified but gloried in. Men and women have lost all sense of decency and control.

Then take this further question: “Why do … the people imagine vain things?” “Why do the people devise futile and empty schemes?” The psalmist has chosen a word that perfectly describes the world’s plans. They are “empty,” “vain.” Why is this? Because they are cut off from God. God is.

God is the author of being and of life, and if you are not in connection with Him, then you really have nothing.

Anything done apart from God always ends in nothing.

Life! What is it?

Shakespeare puts an answer in the mouth of one of his characters: It is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” “Nothing!” All the excitement and all the sophistication and all that the world boasts and writes so much about, what does it come to? “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The secular world is very confident. It is quite sure that it can produce schemes to put things right. People “imagine” a “vain,” a “futile,” or an “empty” program, and they put it before us.

The world is convinced, as it was in David’s time and in the time of our Lord, that it can make a perfect world and that it can give us all peace and plenty and happiness and enjoyment.

Civilization is the story of the great schemes and proposals of men and women. What do they propose?

Well, away back in the time of the Greek philosophers, people began to dream of an ideal state. In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, describing such a state. “There is no new thing under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9). People have imagined utopias and have planned them out, how you divide up the people, how you apportion various tasks to them, how you govern them, how you teach people to conduct themselves. Utopia—solving the problems of the world!

This is the story of civilization; this is what the politicians have been doing throughout the centuries; this is what the philosophers and the believers in education have been doing; this is what science is claiming to be able to do at this present time. These men and women have abandoned God and are quite convinced that they can order a perfect society. They call themselves “classical humanists,” “scientific humanists,” but they are all humanists. God is not in the picture for them, it is man, the end of all things.

Some are old enough to remember the speeches delivered during the First World War: We would have “a land fit for heroes to live in”; this was “the war to end all war.” We remember the League of Nations, all those brilliant ideas about what we were going to do after the war when there would never be any more trouble.

They said that they were going to renounce war, now we have the United Nations! Look at the energy being put into this organization; look at the enthusiasm. And look how many wars there have been and are still going on. The problem is, how many men and women who are not Christians accept all of this and rely on man to take care of them.

“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things?” it is all due to humanity’s rebellion against God.

“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.”

Everyone is involved in this situation: “The kings of the earth,” “the rulers,” and the “judges of the earth” are all involved, and so are the philosophers, politicians, and the masses of the common people who listen to their teachers. No section of society is left out. In every realm they stand up against God, or they ignore Him. But the common people on the corner are saying exactly the same thing: “Nothing in religion; “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10).

How much strength and deliberation they expend to rebel against God. “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together.” This is the most terrible aspect of the leaders’ behavior. What they are doing is not something unconscious.

Men and women have deliberately rebelled against God; they have “set themselves.” And they are still setting themselves. People meet in their humanistic societies and associations, take counsel together, write their books together, and praise one another.

There is a deliberate organization of evil “against the LORD, and against his anointed”, against God and against His plans and purposes. This is the most appalling aspect of the situation. The trouble with the human race is not just that it is slack or indolent, but that it has deliberately set out with evil intention organized itself in opposition to God.

Why does humanity deliberately rebel against God? Why do people say, “We don’t want God; we don’t believe in Him; God is a figment of our imaginations?

They do it because of the enmity, the hate in their hearts against God.

Romans 8: “The carnal [natural] mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. 8:7). God’s holy laws are regarded as “restraints,” as “cords,” as “shackles.” God made men and women and gave them laws by which to live. We all need teaching, and God in His love and kindness and compassion has given us this instruction.
He has given us the Ten Commandments; He has given us the teaching of the great prophets; He has given us the Sermon on the Mount, and all this teaching is meant for our good.

“The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17). God did not make laws simply to keep us down and to fetter us. He made laws for our benefit, in order to help us, to teach us how to live and how to have a full and enjoyable life, a holy and peaceful life. But instead of thanking God for His teaching, people regard His laws as something intolerable. They say, “He’s making slaves of us. We have it in us to be great, but here is God clamping down on us and making us slaves.” That is why the world is as it is.

Stop and think, if every man and woman and every nation in this world today were living according to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, this world would be the closest thing to utopia there could be on this earth.

So people rebel against God first because of enmity, and because of their self-confidence.

They say, “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast their cords from us “Let us,” appears in the Bible. If you read the eleventh chapter of Genesis, you will find people again rebelling against God. This time they say, “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Gen. 11:4). “Let us”! This fatal self-confidence damns the human race. Human beings look at God and His holy laws and say, “Let us break them, let us smash them,

O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee” (John 17:25). The trouble with the world is always that it does not know God.

“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision.” It is terrifying to think that the great God is looking down upon our world, our “clever” world, the world that thought that Charles Darwin was going to get rid of God. There is only one thing to do with people who can believe a thing like that. It is to laugh them out of court, to ridicule them out of the universe, and God is doing that. We must not forget that He is the Judge. “Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.” Psalms 2.5

There are laws that cannot be tampered with. Put your finger in the fire, and it will be burned. You may wish you could change that, but you cannot. When have you defied gravity?

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. Friedrich von Logau

“There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked” (Isaiah. 48:22). That is why there have been two world wars; that is There will be “wars and rumors of wars” (Matt. 24:6). Why? Because you are defying the God who owns the universe and who “shall judge the ends of the earth” (1 Samuel 2:10).

In the life of our Lord we see how “the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together.” We see King Herod and Pontius Pilate, the old enemies who became friends, joining together with the rulers. We see the heathen and the Jews, all conspiring together against this Christ. They said, “Away with Him! Crucify Him!” And they began to laugh in triumph.

Then God laughed! He laughed them to nothing in the fact of the Resurrection.

And this is only a prophecy, in a sense, of what is yet to happen. “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” V9

He will come back to “judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:31). This world will not be allowed to go on like this forever; it will not always be governed by the devil. No, it does not belong to him, for he is a usurper.

“The rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed v2 ” What does this mean? Who is the “anointed” of God? He is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is “Jesus of Nazareth.” He is God’s Son.

In the light of such a message, it is almost impossible to understand men and women in sin. Though we have arrogantly rebelled against Him, defied Him, hated His laws and regarded them as “cords” and as “bands,” though we have insulted Him to His face, God’s gracious message is still: “God so loved the world” God so loved this world as it is! “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

There is only one answer: The love of God! The gracious purpose of God! God anointed His own Son to be our Savior and our Deliverer, as our Lord Himself said in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16–21).

For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. Rom. 5:6–10

The world rejects God’s love in exactly the same way as it rejected the law. That is the final tragedy: “He is despised and rejected of men” (Isa. 53:3)

The appeal of the psalmist. In the light of all this, he says,

“Be wise now therefore, O ye kings:

Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him” (Psa. 2:10–12).

Listen to this appeal: “Be wise.” Stop and think! Turn off the television for a moment, and the radio, and your music. then “be instructed,” be ready to be taught. Be honest and admit that you do not know where you are, that you do not understand life or death, that you do not understand why there is war and rumors of wars in this enlightened, intelligent, scientific century. Become as a little child and be ready to receive instruction.

Here is the instruction: Realize what is happening.

Be careful, says the psalmist. Be careful lest you lose your way. The world has lost its way, but come back, he says, to this way.

How can you make sure that you do not get lost? By repenting, by thinking again about all these things, by acknowledging your emptiness, your rebellion, your deliberate enmity,

The Son of God is holding out His hand to you now. “Kiss the Son,” Give up your rebellion and turn to and submit to Him.