Paul in Athens

And that's not because I figured out preaching, you know, I've somehow mastered it and I'm just gonna, you know, give you all of my wisdom on that. But you need to understand what preaching is, what Paul's aim was as he goes into Corinth, which we'll read, or we'll study when we get to Acts 18. So next week, we're we're gonna look at what is preaching. What is biblical preaching? What is it supposed to look like?

Tonight, we're gonna look at Acts 17, and we'll begin reading in verse 16. Now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be there. Some of the Epicurean and stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, what does this babbler wish to say?

Others said, he seems to be preaching of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean. Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who live there will spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.

So Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you were very religious. For I passed along and I observed the objects of your worship, and I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God. What therefore you worship is unknown, This I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotment periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place that they should seek God and the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.

Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being And as some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and the imagination of man. The times of ignorance got overlooked. But now he commands all people everywhere to repent Because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness, by a man whom he has appointed.

And of this, he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, We will hear you again about this. So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius, the Erephagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

And others with them. Pray with me. Lord, sometimes I I am stunned by the wealth that is to be found in your word. And this is one of those times there is so much here. Every line is, is packed full of meaning.

Lord, I asked for more than clarity. Lord, I asked that your spirit would come and, and really open up dull minds, hardened hearts to receive truth. Through the study of this text, may we encounter you, Jesus, in a new way. May you be real to us. God, in this moment, I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore.

But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. Before we start, I guess I have a confession to make, always a good way to start a sermon. The very first single that I ever bought, this is back when, you know, you listen to records.

Well, actually that's, that's back again, But you would buy little 40 fives. And the, the very first 45 I bought, I think I was 11 or 12 years old and probably had saved up my tooth fairy money to to buy this. But it was Bryan Adams' 1 Night Love Affair. I love the song, absolutely loved it. I played it over and over and over, and I would go around the house singing 1 Night Love Affair.

The lyrics, you know, 1 Night Love Affair trying to make it like we don't care. We were both reaching out for something. And I'm trying to sing that in my my raspy voice at the time. I had no clue what the lyrics actually meant. None at all.

It was just a tune that I liked. It was fun to sing and and my parents, they just let me sing it because they knew I was completely ignorant of its meaning. Now I've I've reflected a lot on that and it's given me some comfort. Now when I listen to the songs that my kids now sing, you know, they're singing the latest Katy Perry song. They, they know every word. Or is it, is it Keisha's tick tock on the clock? Kesha. Yes. Kesha. There's a dollar sign in it, doesn't it?

Yeah. That's not English. Alright. Or do you know, we were listening to 1 on the radio dancing in the dark. My gosh.

You know, and then I look at Natalie's singing the words to it. But but they're young and they're naive and they have no idea what what they're singing and and I take comfort in that. But a time will come when they'll be ignorant no longer. A day is gonna come when they know the words to these things and they will be held accountable. Yes, they'll be held accountable by God, but I'm gonna hold them accountable to the things that they've seen.

This is This is what this passage is about. Paul is telling the Athenians, the time for ignorance is over. You cannot plead ignorance. You cannot say you don't know what you're doing. You gotta put that out because you know what you're doing.

God's not gonna overlook any of these things anymore. You've been childish in the way that you have lived your life all around these idols and bowing down to them. It's ridiculous. You you know, you have birds that put droppings on statues. Dogs lift their legs to statues, but men bow down to them.

That's childish. And a day is gonna come when you will be held accountable to these things. That's the message. Paul, you know, he he finds himself in Athens actually not by choice. He's just kind of been on the run for a while.

He was arrested and beaten and then chased out of Philippi, He's beat up, and finally, he finds himself in Athens. And he just wants to rest for a little bit while Timothy and Silas come to join him. He sends a note to them. He says, come join me quickly. I'll just I'll just wait.

It's a beautiful vacation spot. I'll just wait here till you join me, and then we'll keep on with our missionary journey. But Paul begins to look around. Gorgeous architecture all around him but then he starts noticing the idols and they're everywhere. It was set of Athens at this time that it was easier to meet a God than it was to meet a person.

That's how many idols there were that just flooded the streets. Then in verse 16, Paul says that his spirit was provoked within him. This This word provoked in Greek is a strong complex word. It's it's paroximo. Paroxino, actually.

It means something along the lines of infuriated, but but it's more than that. This is how I could best explain it. For those of you who have a friend or a relative, a a close friend or relative who might be an addict. And so their life is always in this kind of broken cycle and they come to you one of their times of brokenness. And when you see them, you you hurt for them and you're angry.

You're both. You you have this deep compassion for them, yet you are infuriated at them. So it's this mixture of both hurt, compassion. I am so angry. That's paraxino, which is translated here I think is stirred up or provoked.

This is the same word used in the Greek Old Testament in Isaiah 63 to describe how God feels when he looks at his people committing idolatry. So when the Israelites were going to idols, he uses this exact same word and let me read it to you. He says, I spread my hands out all day long to a rebellious people who walk in a way that's not good following their own devices. People who provoke, that's the word there, provoke Peroximo, who provoke to my face continually. So when God in the Old Testament, when he sees his people going to idols and he knows it's only gonna hurt you when you do that, and he's spreading out his arms.

Come to me. And they're going to these idols. It's this mixture of compassion, love, fury that you would do such damaging things to yourself. So it's not just love and it's not just fury. It's this loving fury.

This is how the church should feel. It's the emotion that the church should feel when we see others pursuing anything other than Christ. There should be this deep, deep love that wells up within us. And then a fury should be both. Because we look at people as they turn to their materialism, as they turn to maybe, the sexual immorality, as they turn to the things that will damage them, that will hurt them, we need to have both of those reactions.

So you need Christ. We should have that anger. Anger leads us to action. And so Paul, he acts. He he can't help himself. He begins preaching. So out goes his vacation. He he goes to the synagogues, and he begins proclaiming Christ, and then he goes to the marketplace. When you hear the word marketplace, don't think of Paul, you know, strolling down Publix or or Winn Dixie, which I think their slogan is the marketplace. He's at the Agora, which is you can buy fruits and vegetables there.

But this is where Socrates used to teach. This is the It's the economic. It's the artistic. It's the cultural, it's the philosophical, the religious center of Athens. And of course, Athens was the center of that in the world.

And so that's where he's going to to proclaim this. Look at verse 18. Says after this, Paul stayed many days longer in oops, I'm in chapter 18. 18, it says, some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him and some said, what does this babbler wish to say? Others said, he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.

It's it's somewhat funny, but these people actually, they don't get it. I mean, Paul's preaching, and I understand that. When when I preach, most of y'all afterwards, you'll come up to me, and you're gonna say, man, I really loved it when you said this. I didn't say that. I usually take credit for it if it's good.

But but it's, you know, I'll hear that throughout the week. A lot of times we just kinda hear things we wanna hear. And so these Athenians are listening to Paul preach, and they just don't get it. There's not a place they could put it or process it in their brain. And so they don't think he's talking about Jesus who died and rose again.

He they think he's talking about divinities. Jesus and this other god named resurrection. And so Jesus may be in his consort or his wife resurrection, 2 different gods. So they're confused. But the idea of someone rising from the dead is just so ludicrous to them that certainly Paul is not talking about this Jesus could have died and rose from the dead.

So they call another god resurrection. And let me just stop briefly here if I can and just say something about the 1st century and their views of resurrection. I know we're supposed to wait to Easter, you know, resurrection Sunday. That's why I'm supposed to unpack this, but give me some leniency. Every Sunday is resurrection Sunday.

We have this tendency, as modern, sophisticated, educated people to look at the people in the 1st century and say, so primitive, so superstitious, they'll believe anything. They're just simple minded. And so they they would have no problem believing that somebody could rise from the dead. We we we kinda cast them in that light and nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the people in the 1st century had more skepticism about the resurrection than we do.

It's not like science has changed. It's not like we we have more scientific knowledge, and that's that's why we don't believe in the resurrection. That they knew scientifically that dead people don't come up. They don't rise from the grave. They knew that.

Like us, they understood that when people died, they stayed dead. The Epicureans and the Stoics believed that. That when people died, they stayed dead. They actually believed that even the soul dies after people were dead. So they didn't even believe in the immortality of the soul, which most people today believe in.

As a matter of fact, there was not any Greek philosophy, any religion or thinking going on at this time that would even consider the resurrection. There was none whatsoever. Homer had actually written, and Homer's the closest thing they had to a Bible, and said, when the dust has soaked up the blood of man, once he has died, there is no resurrection. And all the Jew, although the Jews who are around did believe in a general resurrection Absolutely not one person rising from the dead apart from all of god's people. Total heresy, incomprehensible that one could rise up apart from everybody else.

And they also believe there is no possible way that the almighty transcendent god would ever become flesh. There wasn't a category for them to to process that. So simply put, there was not any cultural, any religious, or philosophical box in the 1st century that Christianity could fit into, let alone grow. I mean, there was none. No room for it.

Yet Christianity thrived. It exploded. It was birthed in a world that was more hostile to it than the 21st century is. Yet, it thrived and it thrived because Jesus rose from the dead and hundreds of credible witnesses saw him, heard him, ate and drank with him, and then told people about this. There there's really no other explanation for this to overcome such skepticism.

As Peter and John said earlier in acts, we cannot stop speaking what we have seen and what we have heard. That's why Christianity exploded. And I say this because I know, you know, looking at around the room, I know I've had conversations with several of you who are skeptical of Christianity. And I just want you to know that there were people like you in the 1st century even more skeptical, even more doubts, yet they were confronted with something. The evidence confronted them in a way they could not ignore it, and it overcame all of that.

And they came to believe in the resurrection. Let's look at how Paul tries to overcome their doubts. He's brought before the Areopagus. Just a little background about them. This is a council of about 30 people.

They represented the religious, philosophical, intellectual elite of the day. They met in, the religious center of Athens. They held tremendous influence and power over everything that happened in Athens. Several scholars pointed this out. They said, this would be the equivalent when Paul is meeting with them.

This is the equivalent of meeting with the combined faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. If he if he could gather them all together, this is the smartest of the smart, the people who who set this set the tone for the discussions are gonna happen all over. And he addresses them. And he begins by saying that he has observed that the people of Athens are very religious. It's so religious, I couldn't help but notice on the way over here, you even worship an unknown God.

And archaeologists have an they've they've discovered actually 100 of these statues, these idols to unknown gods are scattered all throughout Athens. There's a Cretan poet whom Paul actually quotes later who lived, 600 years earlier. And he was responsible for a lot of these statues to unknown gods. Now what had happened, there was a plague that was sweeping through, all of Athens. So they began making sacrifices like you do.

We got to appease some gods angry at us. So they started making sacrifices, sacrifices, and the plague doesn't stop. Well, okay. We got to figure out how do we stop this plague? So, this Cretan poet, he, he said, let's get 300 sheep.

We'll let them go throughout all of Athens and wherever they lay down, we'll sacrifice to the nearest god. And if there is not a god close by, we'll erect a statue, an idol there to an unknown god and sacrifice to it. And so these sheep are going all around Athens, you know, laying down statue there, statue there. And so you had all of these statues to these unknown gods. And so finally, the plagues stopped.

This is how the Athenians essentially covered their bases. Yeah. And they can never really quite be sure that they had, taken everything into consideration that they were completely right. And so just in case we need to set up a few altars here to, to unknown gods, It reminds me of one of my neighbors, one time, not a current neighbor. Those of you here, one of my old neighbors, was as pagan as they, they came And she was cleaning out her attic one time, and she came across all these old bibles.

And so she came to me, she goes, what what do I do with these? I said, what? She goes, well, they're so old. They're kinda falling apart. She goes, but I can't throw them away. I was like, what do you mean? It's like, well, I mean, just just in case. I don't want God to be mad at me or anything. You can't throw away a Bible. How do you dispose of a Bible?

Is there a proper way of doing this? I wanna make sure I do it right. I'm like, you, you can give a rip about Christianity yet something about, I've got to cover my bases. Make sure I don't do this just in case I could be wrong and God could smite me or something. That's what they're doing here.

That's why sometimes what some of the most pagan people put on their Sunday best and they go to an Easter service. Why not? Just to cover our basis. Well, Paul, he uses one of those idols there to tell them about the one true god that they they are ignorant about. And his points are very simple. It's not a hard sermon to figure out. Very simple, but in in an Athenian worldview, it completely turns the world upside down. Everything that he says. He says there's one god. Just one.

He created everything, and he reigns over it all. And it's actually kind of silly to think that he might live in a house that you made or could be worshiped through an idol that you made? In verse 25, Paul then says, nor is this God served by human hands as though we needed anything. Since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And this is and this is Now this is Paul's way of preaching sovereign grace to people who've never heard about grace.

That's what this is. He's telling people, you can't treat God like some lifeless statue that needs your help. You know, that needs you to kinda carry him around, carve him, bring bring him some food and all that stuff. No. God doesn't need anything from you. Okay? Nothing from you. He's the one who gives us. We bring him nothing. The Christian some more servants.

That's that's not the Christian message. Jesus says in Mark chapter 10, he says, the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. It's just another way of saying, you know what? You don't ever give to God. God's the one who gives to you. And you know what you really need him to give you above all else? Sacrificial atonement for your sins. A ransom for your soul. That's what you need. That's what Paul is declaring here.

We don't ever give to God. He doesn't profit from our good deeds. He doesn't profit from our devotion. He does not profit from our worship. I mean, do you really think god's up there going, you know, great. There's a there's another praise song with gcd and eminer that says really gonna add to my glory. He's got a whole host of angels. Yeah. I mean, when we proclaim his goodness, when we sing his glory, it's not great. That's adding to me.

That's making me more glorious. He doesn't need us Because if He needed us, it would mean He lacked something, and if He lacked something, it would mean He was not God. He's the giver. So even when we come to Him in worship, we come to him not giving anything. We come receiving. Say, give us life. Give us joy. Give us your grace. And as we do those things and we find satisfaction in them, God is glorified. We don't add anything to him.

That is grace. That's what Paul is preaching here. And idolatry is fundamentally opposed to grace. Now, idolatry is not limited to the 1st century. We have idols all around us today.

They might not be made of wood and stone, but they're idols nonetheless. Usually they're, they're idols in our mind. Anytime we come to God and we think that we can offer him something like our worship and our tithes, and we could give those things to him in order for him to pay us back, we treat him like an idol. Anytime we make God out to be whoever we want Him to be, instead of the God of the Bible, we turn God into an idol. You know, one of the, the checks you can do to see if, if you're worshiping an idol or if you're worshiping the one true God, you can ask yourself, do I worship a God who can oppose me?

Do I worship a God who, who maybe won't do what I want him to do? Do I worship a god who occasionally rubs me the wrong way? If you if you do worship a god who's rubbing you the wrong way, that's that's a good thing. That's called transformation. It's called sanctification.

It means that instead of making God or rubbing him into your image, God is rubbing you into his image. And so you need a God that's occasionally going to oppose you. Not one who is just like you. A God who's just like you cannot save you. So we need from time to time to be rubbed the wrong way by God. Alright. Looking at the clock. I need to slow down a bit here. I don't I don't want to make Paul's sermon too complex. It's actually really simple.

It's a simple sermon and it's very profound. Let me give his simple points here and I hope you feel the punch of these. Paul says this, there is a God, one God. He created everything, including your life, And you owe everything to him. And one day, he's gonna send his son, Jesus, to judge.

And all of you will have to give an account of your life before the man who created you. That's it. There's a sermon. It's one of I mean, you you cannot, like, attack it from a bunch of different angles, but I really I want you to just sit under that. If you hear that, if that really gets into your heart, you will leave changed people. That affects entirely the way you live. You cannot plead ignorance. You have to repent. And we all need to be reminded of this. Are you all with me?

Can I go 5 more minutes? Are you all good? Are you all here? All right. Alright. Just trying to gauge y'all. Blank stares. 5, 10 more 10 more minutes. We'll we'll we'll go on. Y'all just sleep over? Alright. Now let me go a little more complex. I want you to hear that. I think Paul is alluding to here in his message that the Athenians deep down know this, that every human heart really knows this. His message is full of all these double entendres.

It's brilliant. Now he starts a message this way when he says, you know, Athenians, I see that you were very religious people. Even today, the word religious. What do you mean by that? It's an unusual word for religious here. It can mean pious or it can mean superstitious. And I almost see Paul saying that with somewhat of a smirk. I see you're very religious people. What do you mean by that? It could go either way.

And he says a number of things that could go either way that that might have two meanings to them. And one of those things is when he talks about the worship of the unknown God. Because literally, you can translate verse 23 as this. It's currently, it reads, What you worship is unknown. This I proclaim to you.

Literally says, what you unknowingly worship, what you unknowingly worship, this I proclaim to you. And what he's doing is he's saying, you know what, whether you know it or not, there's a part of you in some way that is actually worshiping the one true god. Not in full, not like you're supposed to, but there there is a part of you that is doing that. I think that's one of the ways that you could take this. There's a lot of people have a huge problem with Paul saying this, but let me tell you why I think think this is happening.

We gotta remember who Paul is addressing. He's addressing the Areopagus, and There was no higher judicial branch you could go there go to. They're the ones who said, this is just, this is not just. This is moral. This is immoral.

This is good and this is bad. There was no higher authority. They are the ones who set that for the Athenians. Now, Paul is saying when you do that, when you make a moral judgment, when you say something is good and something is bad, you are acknowledging that there's a creator. And that falls in his argument.

There is a creator. He created everything. You will be held accountable to him. There is a judge who is coming, And instinctively, I think you know that. Because there's no other way you can look at something and say, that's just and that's unjust.

Because there's no authority you can appeal to. You can't say, well, just nature obviously says that this is just and that's injust because you'd be wrong. For instance, genocide. You can't appeal to nature because all in nature, the strong devour the weak. So so you can't say that.

You can't say, well, I guess it's majority rules. That's the morals of the day. No. Because if the majority wanted to kill the minority, you would still say, that's wrong. And even your most liberal, relativistic morality professor out there will look at genocide, and out of his mouth, he's gonna say, that's wrong.

Where did that come from? How can he say that's wrong? It's coming because there is a creator who's instilled those things in us. And I think Paul is saying, you know what? You're you're close.

You're you're actually in a subtle way Just by making pronouncements and judgments and knowing some things are wrong, you're saying there is a creator, and there is a day we will be judged. I don't give a rip if you say the soul does not go for eternity. I don't give a rip what you say you believe. Deep down, I know by your actions that you're acknowledging these things. Let me connect the dots for you.

The judge's name is Jesus. Then he says, and he has shown that he is the judge and he has the authority to judge because he rose from the dead. And the moment he said that they're off. Because the resurrection in that time was even more unbelievable than it is today. I will he doesn't even get to finish his sermon. Paul doesn't get to finish his sermon. Talks about the resurrection light. Sorry, that's it. Maybe we'll hear you later about this. And maybe we'll hear you later about this.

At least we know one person does come to believe. That person there who's who's mentioned at the end of the chapter, Dionysius, we know from other sources, actually became a bishop in the church, died a martyr's death. Some heard his argument and believed, and the church was birthed here in Athens. You know what? What I want us to take from this, I don't want us to miss the simple message that as you leave here and you get in your car, that's a car that the lord gave you.

As you sing and you take in that breath, that breath is a gift that the lord gave you. As you go to your home or wherever you live, that is something the lord has given you. Everything you have is a gift from the Lord. Your job, your money, your intellect, your abilities, everything is from him. And one day you will stand before the Lord and you have to give an account of what he has given you and how you've lived your life.

And let me tell you, every one of us has failed and that's why we need Jesus who has both of those things that peroxy know, Who has that love and hate combined. I hate your sin, but I love you too much to cast you into hell. I will give my life for yours.

And I thank you're the God who loves us. You're infuriated with our sin, but you love us. And we see that so gloriously displayed in the death of Jesus. God, we want to boast only in his work and not in the works of our hands. Jesus in this moment, I pray through your spirit. You'd be real to us. That as we seem to you, God joy would flood our hearts. As we encounter you, we pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.