SCRIPTURE: Acts 17:22-29 MSG He makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make him.

THOUGHT: The Athenians had a god for everything and everyone. You might say they were ‘god-creators’ rather than trusting a Creator God. Paul’s second strategy was not only positioning God accurately, but also positioning culture accurately.

Robert Webber wrote a fabulous little book called Who Gets to Narrate the World?  I was hooked from the title, but the gist is that it’s God’s world, so God’s big story, or meta-narrative arches above it all. We get invited into God’s big story to participate in God’s purposes in the world, not the other way around.

Like ancient Roman and Greek culture, we have a pantheon of gods, of choices for our loyalties, of tribes offering a place to belong. Each offers a narrative, a worldview attempting to explain the world without God, or without God’s full narrative. Only Christianity offers the whole, big story – and in our generation we have accommodated to culture (or reduced the whole story to bits and pieces) to the point of losing it.

Someday soon, as the meta-narrative continues to fray, we may be starting from scratch again: God makes the creatures, the creatures don’t make God.

SONG: All Things Rise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLttio7yWCo

PRAYER: We forget, oh God. We go along, year after year losing a piece of the story here, believing a lie there. Decades turn into lifetimes and centuries and millennia. You’ve told your story faithfully, sometimes forcefully, but we continue to forget. We continue to find other gods who will serve our whims. Forgive us our small stories and present us again with truth: you make us, not the other way around.