He Did Not Leave Himself Without Witness

Prologue to the series “Let Us Reason Together”

There is a little town in Acts chapter 14 called Lystra, and I have come to believe it looked more like our town than we might guess. No synagogue. No crowd of Scripture scholars. Farm people, working people, folks who knew rain and crops and livestock and hard winters. And when the apostle Paul stood up to preach to people who had never opened a Bible in their lives, he did something worth noticing. He did not start with the Bible.

He started with the rain.

“He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17, NASB).

Paul told those farmers that God had witnesses in their fields and on their supper tables long before a missionary ever walked into town. The rain was a witness. The harvest was a witness. The full stomach and the glad heart were witnesses. God has never been silent. He has witnesses everywhere, and in these opening pages I want to introduce you to four of them. You already know all four. You have known them your whole life. You just may not have known they were testifying.

Witness One: The Beginning

Here is something you have never seen, not once. You have never seen something come from nothing. You never saw a fence build itself, a barn raise itself, or a pot of coffee brew itself. Everything that starts got started by something outside itself. Fence posts do not set themselves.

For a long time, a doubter could shrug and say, “Maybe the universe just always was.” Science itself took that escape away. The universe had a beginning. Space, time, matter, all of it, had a starting point. It started.

Well then. Whatever started it cannot be part of it. It cannot be made of matter, because matter had not been made yet. It cannot live inside of time, because time began with everything else. And it must carry power beyond anything we can measure. Sit with that list for a minute, outside of space, outside of time, not made of matter, powerful beyond measure, and then answer the question honestly. What do we call that?

The scholars call this the cosmological argument, and they speak of God as the Uncaused First Cause. Moses said it thirty-five centuries before the scientists caught up to his first three words. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

Witness Two: The Settings

It is not just that the universe exists. It is that everything in it is dialed in.

Any man who has sighted in a rifle knows the principle. An eighth of an inch at the muzzle is feet at three hundred yards. Any man who has set the timing on an engine knows it too. Right settings matter, and fine settings matter finely. Now hear what the physicists tell us. The settings of this universe, gravity, the forces that hold every atom together, are balanced on an edge finer than any gunsmith ever dreamed. Move one of them a hair, and there are no stars, no dirt, no crops, no us.

Now, somebody is thinking, “Preacher, I have smacked a TV into working.” So have I. But be honest about what happened. You smacked it until it worked, a hundred tries at one loose dial. The universe got one throw, at dozens of dials, and every one of them landed dead-center on the first and only try.

Or think of it this way. Walk any beach and you will find patterns in the sand, ripples in rows, pebbles sorted by size, the tide is a patient artist. But you have never once walked a beach and found seashells spelling out SEND HELP NOW. Waves can make order all day long. Waves never write a message. Order can happen. A message means a mind.

The scholars call this the fine-tuning argument, or the argument from design. David just sang it. “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands” (Psalm 19:1).

Witness Three: The Rulebook in Your Chest

Every person reading this knows that some things are not “wrong for you.” They are wrong. Period. Cheating a widow out of her savings. Hurting a child. Wrong in every county, every country, every century, and wrong even if every government on earth voted tomorrow to make them legal.

And notice something about the man who claims there is no real right and wrong. Wrong him, and see how fast he appeals to the very rulebook he says does not exist. Nobody hollers “that’s not fair!” louder than the man who insists fairness is just an opinion.

But a straight line that everybody measures by had to be drawn by Somebody above everybody. You cannot call a stick crooked unless you have seen a straight one. A real moral law requires a real moral Lawgiver.

The scholars call this the moral argument. Paul said God wrote it where you could not lose it, people everywhere “show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness” (Romans 2:15).

Witness Four: The Hunger

Every people ever found, on every continent, in every age, worships something. Nobody had to teach the human race to look up. You have to work hard to teach it not to.

And you know this hunger personally. It is the ache the bigger paycheck did not fill. The ache the new truck did not fill. The ache the bottle never filled and busyness only muffles. You have fed that hunger everything this world sells, and it is still hungry.

Now think about hunger itself. Hunger does not put supper on the table, but hunger proves supper exists. Thirst exists because water does. Tiredness exists because sleep does. Every ache built into the human body points to something real that answers it. So what shall we say about an ache built into every human heart for something this world does not stock?

The scholars call this the argument from desire. Solomon named its source. “He has also set eternity in their heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The ache is not a malfunction. It is a homing signal, installed at the factory.

What the Witnesses Cannot Do

Four witnesses, and every one of them speaking every day of your life. But here I have to be honest with you about what these witnesses cannot do, and Psalm 19 is honest about it first.

The psalm splits right down the middle. For six verses, the heavens are telling, the skies declaring, day pouring forth speech to day. Then verse seven changes subjects without warning: “The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul.” David listened to both voices, the sky and the Scripture, because he needed both.

The stars can tell you that God is real and that God is strong. The stars cannot tell you His name. The stars cannot tell you that He loves you. And the stars cannot forgive a single sin. Creation can summon you to court. It cannot settle your case.

So God did more than leave witnesses. He spoke, and gave us His Word. And then He came, and gave us His Son. The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and then the glory of God put on skin, walked among us, and went to a cross. The stars tell you He is strong. The cross tells you He is love. And the same Jesus who satisfies what rain and bread cannot said it plainly: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst” (John 4:13-14).

Your Assignment

Four witnesses have testified. The only question that matters now is what you will do with what you have heard.

Here is where I would ask you to start, and it costs you nothing but a few minutes. This week, on one clear night, step outside and look up. Leave the phone inside. Just stand there a few minutes under that sky, and ask yourself one question.

What are the heavens telling?

They have been preaching every night since the beginning of the world. This week, listen to one sermon that is not mine.

And then turn the page. Because in the chapters ahead, we are going to take on the hardest questions people ask about our faith, one at a time, and the witnesses you met here will be taking the stand.

Walshville Christian Church. If you want to talk about any of this, honestly and without an ambush, my door is open.