Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Pastoral Ministry from Acts 17:16-34
I would like to invite you to turn to Acts 17, beginning at verse 16, and I shall read to the end of the chapter. Hear, then, what Scripture says:
“While Paul was waiting for them …” That is, for his helpers Silas and Timothy. “… in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them said, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’
They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.’ When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
This is one of the most interesting of Paul’s sermons reported anywhere in the New Testament. Sometimes we find him, elsewhere, speaking in a synagogue, and then he is addressing biblically literate people, that is, people who already have some knowledge of the Bible then available, what we call the Old Testament. You find one of his long addresses along these lines in Acts, chapter 13, when he is speaking in a city called Antioch, Pisidian Antioch.
There he has a lot of commonality with his hearers. They already believe in one God. They’re not polytheists, they’re monotheists. They believe in one God, and they believe that this God made everything, and they agree as to what the nature of sin is, and quite a lot of other things, and so in some ways his sermon is more narrowly focused; but here you find him addressing a crowd of bright polytheists, that is people who believe in many gods, who are culturally pluralists, that is they are people who insist there’s not just one way, and this in the ancient equivalent of a university town.
Now there were no such things as universities in the contemporary sense, but still Athens, thought it was in its fading days, was still widely regarded as the premier intellectual city of the world, followed by Alexandria in Egypt, and this is where we find the apostle in this address. We may begin by observing …
1. The realities Paul faces.
Verse 16: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” As far as we know this is the first time he was ever there, so he could look at the Parthenon, which you can go and see, for example, today. It was already 500 years old; and yet remarkably, he doesn’t comment on the glory of the architecture or find himself wonderfully impressed by the history of literature that this city has produced or how it has built up a certain kind of direct democracy. It’s been a remarkable city.
No, no. He’s distressed because the city is full of idols. It’s remarkable how, even though for the first time he visits this intellectual center, he is trying to read the culture out of his confessional stance. He’s looking at it as a Christian, and as he looks around and begins to prepare for what becomes this major address, there are certain things about this city that you should be aware of.
It was a pluralist city, that is to say it was not only a place where there were many gods, but all the various religions and philosophies insisted in the strongest terms that there was no one way. In fact, for the first three centuries of the church’s life, that was one of the strongest criticisms brought against Christians. You can read them in the second century and in the third century, “These Christians think that Jesus is the only way. How narrow-minded and bigoted.” It has some vague overtones of things we may confront today.
Not only so, it was a place of biblical illiteracy. That is to say, although these were obviously very bright people, none of them would have read Moses. None of them would have read what we mean by the Old Testament, by the Bible. Their literature was really quite different. These people would have been familiar with Homer’s Illiad, The Odyssey, and a long history of literature that had brought them down to this very day. But the Jewish stuff? The material that is part of the Christian heritage? They wouldn’t even be aware of it.
That has more than a few resonances today too. When I speak on university campuses or in some other sectors of the Western world, increasingly I meet people who don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of Abraham or Isaiah. They may have heard of Moses, but then they’re likely to confuse him with Charlton Heston or the latest cartoon character.
There is no understanding of biblical history at all, and almost all the vocabulary words that are part of Christian God-talk mean something different: spirit, faith, God, Christ. Repentance, isn’t that an alien word? Sin? Sin is sort of a snicker-word. You don’t use it in normal conversation. It’s sort of a taboo subject, but you might hear, “Ha-ha. She sinned.” It’s a snicker-word.
Thus where do you even begin to hold a conversation? How do you start getting across what you understand the gospel to be? There may be some of you who are in that camp today. The Christian vocabulary is very strange in your view. How does Paul even begin to go about addressing these situations?
Moreover, he is not addressing people with a blank hard drive in their brains. It’s not as if they have no religious conceptions. Of course they have conceptions. Here they’re called Epicurean and Stoic philosophies. We read in verse 18: “A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him.”
Now it’s important to understand that in the ancient world, philosophy was not an esoteric subject studied in universities, and often either analytic or primarily destructive, asking questions. Philosophy was the pursuit of wisdom through worldviews, that is there were different philosophies around, but all of them were designed to teach you how to live. They established an entire frame of reference, a view of God, reality, what you should believe, right and wrong, the nature of what human dilemmas were and the solutions, and so forth.
The Epicureans, for example, believed that the gods were made up of atoms so fine, so small, that they lived in the interstices between the atoms that make up the physical universe, and thus all you see is made up of these whopping big atoms, and the gods are made up of tiny little wee atoms, and are thus removed from the hurly-burly of life. Thus the appropriate way to be aligned with these gods is likewise for ourselves to be removed from the hurly-burly of life and pursue fulfillment in being detached from things.
So there is a certain kind of analysis of human dilemma and how to fix it, you see. The Stoics believed in god almost in a pantheistic sense, a god who is somehow related to the principle of reason or rationality in the entire universe, pervading everything, and this god (perhaps in a personal god, it’s not always quite clear in the sources), this god operates out of reason and we should therefore be suspicious of passions which build you up to have expectations and disappointments.
Stoicism was governed by high moral integrity, sometimes with overtones of self-righteousness, but a certain freedom from ups and downs, because people tried to distance themselves from expecting too much and loving too much or caring too much about anything, because then you are setting yourself up to be disappointed.
Whereas Paul comes along and pretty soon he talks about a God who, far from being pantheistic, is personal, distinct from the creation, and he’s our final Judge. Instead of focusing on universal reason tapped into by human reasoning, Paul contrasts divine will and sovereignty with human dependence and need.
Over against the Epicurean gods who were nicely removed from the hurly-burly of life, Paul presents a God who is actively involved as Creator, sustaining, providential Ruler, self-disclosing Savior, and final Judge. They’re entirely different worlds, and he is convinced, as we’ll see, that you can’t talk very clearly about Jesus until you have a frame of reference in which Jesus makes sense. So these are some of the realities that Paul faces. Then notice …
2. The typical priorities that Paul adopts.
He begins where he usually begins; he begins preaching the gospel in synagogues where there are Jews and converted Gentiles who are already biblically alert. We read in verse 17: “He reasoned in the synagogues with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks.” But at the same time he understood that the gospel was for everyone, and so he also reasoned, we are told, “in the marketplaces, day by day, with those who happened to be there.”
That was his pattern pretty commonly, that is he tried to begin with the synagogues, but at the same time the marketplaces were the places where you not only bought things and met people, but where you set up your little soapbox and you would give addresses. You started to speak publicly there and a crowd would gather, and if you had enough of a crowd then you might actually start renting a hall. We read elsewhere about the school of Tyrannus, for example.
That’s the way these things began, and if you began to get a really good reputation for speaking you could have a whole hall with people paying to send their children to go and listen to you. The marketplace was the obvious place to begin to sort of get an audience, and thus he is familiar with how to present the gospel in a context that is biblically awake and alert and familiar and also in a context where nobody has a clue what you’re talking about.
You’ve got to begin a lot farther back to begin to explain things. That’s what he’s doing, and then when he’s challenged he actually lays things out in some detail, and that’s where we want to spend most of our time this morning.
3. The framework that Paul establishes.
He’s challenged by some of the intellectuals who take him to a meeting of the Areopagus, and apparently they find what he has been saying in the marketplace pretty obscure. Some of them suggest he’s just a babbler. The word is actually used for birds that go around picking up little seeds. “He’s a seed-picker.”
The idea is he has no coherence to his thought; that is, he’s an eclectic, who picks up a bit here and a bit there and a bit there, and he says some good things here and there but it doesn’t make sense. It’s not coherent. Whatever else these ancient philosophies had, they aimed for an internal coherence that was comprehensive … a comprehensive, admirable, coherent worldview, and here’s Paul saying some things that they couldn’t register anywhere on their radar, and they dismiss him as a seed-picker.
Now what Paul was actually preaching, we’re told, was the gospel. That’s what we’re told, “the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.” We’ll come back to that at the end. They bring him to this intellectual circle, the Areopagus, and ask him to unpack things. He begins. Now, before we run through this quickly, it’s important to remember that Areopagus addresses in the ancient world had a reputation for going on for a long time.
Two or three hours would be quite common. Relax, but that’s the way it was in the ancient world, and you can read this Areopagus address in about two minutes, which means that every clause is almost certainly merely part of the outline. What you’re getting is the outline of where the whole thing is going, yet interestingly enough you can very substantially fill out what he would have said because almost all the points he makes he himself fills out in other parts of his writings that have come down to us.
I will indicate two or three of them as we go along, so it’s not as if we have nothing but the outline itself. Here we have the outline, but we know what Paul did with these various points, and we can thus fill out the flow of his argument. He begins with a certain kind of courtesy. It’s not the same courtesy we would use today.
“I see that in every way you are very religious.” We would say, today, “I see that you are a very spiritual people.” Spiritual, today, doesn’t mean a blessed thing, but it’s a positive word. Today religious doesn’t mean very much, but it’s a negative word. Paul is using one of these expressions that is generally positive without committing himself to very much.
“As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship …” Even there his language is very carefully chosen. “Your objects of worship.” He doesn’t want to say that they’re gods, and he doesn’t quite yet want to call them idols, though eventually he will. He speaks neutrally of their objects of worship.
“I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god.” Now what’s going on here? You must understand that in the ancient world, the various gods had their domains, so that if you wanted to make a sea voyage you offered a sacrifice to the god Neptune, the god of the sea. If you wanted to make a speech, then you offered a sacrifice to the god of communication, on the Greek side Hermes, on the Latin side Mercury. Each of these gods had their domains, but there were thousands of gods, just as in Hinduism today there are millions of gods.
You can’t possibly know them all, and of course they all have their domains. You might think you’re covering things by offering appropriate sacrifices for appropriate components of your life, but you might miss one and then that god or goddess could be bit irritated and trip you up, and therefore someone along the line thought, “Let’s have a generic altar here, an altar to an unknown god.”
But Paul sees this as a mark of ignorance about the whole spiritual world. He says, “Yeah, you’re religious, but quite frankly you are worshiping in ignorance, and I want to tell you what is really involved. He’s not saying, “I’m going to introduce one more god, the unknown one. He is saying, “God, as he is, transparently is unknown to you, and I want to talk to you about it.”
So he begins. What does he say? “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.” Already he establishes one God who makes everything, who is sovereign overall, and who cannot be domesticated by religion. Look at that very closely. It’s stunning how much is packed in to these little clauses.
He’s the God who made everything. There were various creation myths in the Greco-Roman world, different theories, and some people thought that one god made one race and another god made another race and another god made another nation-group. Some others thought that there is an ultimate god way back there somewhere, but he is so far removed from anything material. He wouldn’t stoop to make anything material.
Material is often assumed to be bad in the Greco-Roman world, not always, but pretty commonly, so he made other gods who made lesser gods, who made still lesser gods, we don’t know how many times, all the way down to a pretty small god called a demiourgos, a demi-urge, who finally made what we call the universe.
Can you see what this is doing? This means that the ultimate god is removed from the very sphere in which we live, so that although Paul’s God is very big, he’s sovereign over the whole lot and made the whole lot, in consequence he’s also far more intimately involved with us. Moreover, this is ruling out any sort of dualism, in which you have a god principle and a demonic principle, a good and a bad in constant fighting and tension. No, no.
Paul insists there’s just one God, just one, who made the whole shebang, and if you examine what he says elsewhere about this, he says that he made it all good, for he reads his Genesis 1 and his Genesis 2. He made everything, and there is nothing intrinsically bad about matter. He made it immediately himself. This one God made things immediately himself, and he’s sovereign over the whole lot.
It’s not as if he’s sovereign only over some small sphere, or that he’s delegated things through an endless procession of gods down to some minor god while he himself is so infinitely removed from our universe. No, he’s sovereign over the whole lot, and he “doesn’t dwell in temples built by human hands.” Now Paul is not denying, for example, the authenticity, the reality of the Old Testament temple and before that the tabernacle. That’s not the point.
The trouble is that so many of the local gods were really seen as being located in a particular land and even in a particular city, even in a particular temple. That’s where they lived, and it was part of the domestication of religion that built a kind of tit-for-tat arrangement. “I scratch the god’s back, the god scratches my back. I give him the right sacrifice, and then the god gives me the right blessing.” He’s located. He’s small.
When Solomon builds the temple in the Old Testament, he understands perfectly well that this temple must not be allowed to domesticate God, which is why he prays at the dedication of the temple, “Behold! The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built?”
In other words, the Old Testament writers understood that the tabernacle followed by the temple was not in any sense a place where God was domesticated or to which he was restricted. Rather, it was the place where God chose to meet with his people in acts of sacrifice and in demonstration of symbol-laden approach to him through the blood of animals, all of which became part of the storyline that led ultimately to Christ, but it was not to be seen as a place that somehow restricted God in some sense.
So that’s the first thing that he says about God. He’s the Creator. He’s one. He’s sovereign over the whole lot, and he can’t be restricted by religion. And he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breathe and everything else. Now, what he has really done is picked up the notion that at the end of the day this God doesn’t need anything.
He’s not part of a tit-for-tat arrangement, which is so much of what religion is about. You try to please God, and then God blesses you. May God forgive us; there are many Christians who ultimately live their lives that way too. If I have long enough devotions, then somehow I’ll have a good week. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m all for having devotions, but if those devotions are set within a framework of a tit-for-tat relationship in which you wrest blessings from God by somehow stroking him, getting on his good side, then it’s really a form of ancient paganism.
Because that way of thinking about God presupposes that God has these huge needs, whereas Paul understands God doesn’t need anything. It’s not as if he needed anything. That’s what the text says. The Puritans had a word for that. It has largely fallen out of use in the English language. We need to bring it back in. It’s the word aseity, from the Latin a se, from himself. He’s the God of aseity. He’s so much from himself that he doesn’t need any external being.
We know something of that in origins. We say that God is self-existent, that is his existence depends on no other being. All the rest of the created order, the entire created order, is dependent upon God, but God himself is not dependent upon any other being. He’s self-existent. Aseity goes one step further, and looks not only at the beginning of all things, but God in every conceivable relationship. He is the God who doesn’t need us.
In other words, to be very blunt, God doesn’t need even our worship. It’s not as if on Wednesday he’s starting to pull out his hair saying, “I can hardly wait till Sunday when they get out their guitars and start worshiping me again. I’m having a very bad week and I need to be stroked.” He doesn’t need me and he doesn’t need you.
Now don’t misunderstand. That’s not to say that God is impersonal, or that God does not interact with us as a person, but his interactions with us, whether in righteous wrath or in great love, his reactions are not functions of any deficiency in him, such that he has needs which must be addressed by that which we bring to him.
On that basis you can arrange a kind of religion that is steeped in a tit-for-tat swap, but if God doesn’t need anything, then religion can only be of grace. God gives. He doubtless holds people accountable. He doubtless will respond in judgment, and because of who he is, this God responds in love, but it’s not out of some deficiency in him, for in eternity past he was entirely happy.
It’s not as if 50 billion trillion years ago into eternity past, if I may speak of eternity in the categories of time, God was saying, “Boy, sure will be glad when the time arrives when I can make a universe so somebody can talk to me.” Already in eternity past the Father loved the Son and the Son loved the Father. God was the God of holiness and love in eternity past. He doesn’t need us.
That changes your entire conception of God and of religion. Now suddenly religion as it is widely known, as it is widely practiced, seems abhorrent and small. It diminishes God and it’s a kind of swap arrangement. That’s all it is. It doesn’t understand even the rudiments of grace. In fact, the relationship is entirely the other way.
“He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” We are utterly dependent creatures, not only in our origin but in every domain of life. Every breathe you breathe since coming into this room is by his sanction. Every heartbeat. Jesus himself elsewhere insists that if a sparrow falls from the heavens, it’s by God’s sanction. Every time I take a shower a few more hairs go down the plughole, never to be seen again. God has them all numbered. He keeps track, not only of mine but of yours and yours and yours and yours.
He’s utterly sovereign, and we are dependent creatures. The first responsibility of human beings is to recognize our creatureliness, and the first sin of human beings is not to recognize our creatureliness, and so having talked about God and his relationship to the creation, he then goes on to talk a little more about human beings.
“From one man he made every nation, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.” In other words, this God is not just a parochial God. He may have had his own covenant people, but he is the God of all. After all, isn’t that taught again and again in the Old Testament as well? It’s always true for every nation that righteousness exalts a nation, that sin is a reproach to any people, and God holds nations to account.
Then, after you have talked about this God being so sovereign and so big, after you’ve kept saying this again and again, there is a danger of thinking of him as being so transcendent that he is removed from us. He becomes a kind of deist notion of God, just a bit so far removed that you’re not quite sure how he interacts with us. Now we’re told that God is also immanent, that is he is inescapable. He is close. He is everywhere. He’s not far from each one of us.
In fact, God arranged things so that people would reach out to find him, which is the first hint that there is something wrong in the universe. He hasn’t explained yet what it is. It’s the first hint that there is an alienation between God’s creatures and himself. In fact, he can even quote pagan sources.
They don’t know the Bible. In due course he will teach them the Bible quite gladly, but at this point, just as when I’m on a university campus I can start quoting Jacques Derrida or whoever, so also Paul can quote minor Greek poets of his day and use their words to say, “You know, sometimes there’s real insight in your own body of historical literature here.
They mean something a little different from what Paul means, but Paul is explaining what he means by these words. “We are his offspring.” Then for the first time, in verse 29, Paul introduces what’s wrong with the universe. It’s not the fact that we’re made of matter. It’s not the fact that our atoms are too big. It’s not the fact that we’re too subjected to emotions, to passions; what we really need is just to use reason.
He says that the problem is idolatry. That’s what he says. “Since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill.” Now of course that was the form in which idolatry presented itself at the time, but idolatry in the Bible is a huge concept. Idolatry in the Bible has to do with the de-Godding of God.
It’s displacing God from the center, which is why Paul elsewhere, for example, can see covetousness as idolatry. That is, if you want something badly enough so that’s what you pursue, then for you what you are pursuing becomes god. In fact when you read the Old Testament right through rapidly, if you want to find out what is characteristically said to make God wrathful, to make God angry, it’s not injustice, although that sometimes is said to make God angry. Read Amos. Read Isaiah 2.
It’s not pillage and war, though he is said to be a God of peace who brings about peace, and he holds the nations to account, not least the superpowers, when he addresses Assyria or neo-Babylonian Empire and says that they will be held to account for their barbarisms. Oh, yes.
Those things, in one sense, can make God very angry, but what is characteristically said to make God angry is idolatry, because that’s the de-Godding of God. That’s why Jesus says the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, because that’s the one command you always break when you break any other command.
It’s why God is always the most offended party whenever we sin. We’re always breaking the first commandment. Always, always, always. In a perfect world we would love him so wholly, so truly, so fully, that everything else would flow out of that, out of our obedience for him, out of our God-centeredness.
Our love for neighbor, our love for the good of others would all flow out of that. The fundamental sin is idolatry. Paul recognizes it, and he’s taking on this culture because of it, as every culture has to be taken on over the sin of idolatry, and then he introduces a philosophy of history.
Some people thing that history goes round and round and round in circles, and you get on and you get off and you get on and you get off, and you call that reincarnation, and you hope that in the getting on and the getting off, that eventually you rise higher and higher and higher and things so that eventually you get absorbed into God himself, but the Bible insists that history is much more linear.
It has a beginning when God created everything, and it has various points of intersection where God disclosed himself or called people to himself or held people to account, to the great climax of the coming of Christ and what he did, as we’ll see, and this history is still rushing forward to a final judgment with a heaven to be gained and a hell to be feared.
So he insists, now, there is a philosophy of history. He’s mentioned what is in the past, and now he says in the past God overlooked the ignorance of the entire pagan world. He did not come down in immediate judgment, “… but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” That is, now something new has happened in this stream of history. It’s not just a cycle going round and round and round. Now something new has happened, and he’s about to tell what it is.
If we didn’t have just an outline here, can you imagine how this would be building up to a big drama at this point? “This is the past, but now something wonderful has happened. I’ve come to tell you the good news. Something dramatic, something wonderful has happened, and this wonderful thing that has happened is bound up with the fact that God has set a day in the future when he will judge us all; all nations, all peoples, all men, all women, without exception.
He will judge us all. There is a day and a time that has been appointed, and in anticipation of all of this he has given proof of this dramatic change by raising one man from the dead.” Thus, for the first time, he’s introduced Jesus. Now at this point he is interrupted. He’s interrupted. That brings me to my last point …
4. The non-negotiable gospel that Paul preaches.
He sets a framework, the framework that Paul establishes, and now the non-negotiable gospel that Paul preaches. Paul had to know.… He wasn’t stupid. He had to know that an awful lot of his hearers would be offended by any notion of a resurrection from the dead. Give me a break! If instead he had talked about the immortality of Jesus, that would have been all right.
Supposing Paul had said, “And indeed, in anticipation of this last day, he has guaranteed that one man, the God-man, this man Jesus from Nazareth, lives immortal.” The whole crowd would have said, “Preach on, brother. Let’s have your next point. Deep. Deep.” But Paul understands that the resurrection of Christ from the dead is bound up with the immutable gospel, and he will not trim the message, even though he knows full well that some are going to be upset.
For example, if you believe that matter is intrinsically bad, it’s very difficult to believe that God would bring back somebody from the dead. Would God have lost his mind to do such a stupid thing? The death has brought freedom from the material world. Now he can enter into the immortal domain and be free from the constraints of the body. Why would God want to bring somebody from the dead? If somebody is brought back from the dead, it can’t be God who is doing it.
Yet the Christian gospel insists that this person not only died for our sins, but was vindicated by God in his resurrection from the dead, and Paul won’t compromise the gospel. In other words, although he reads the culture very sensitively and understands how to address it, he is also fully aware that there are some offensive bits in the gospel that the culture is not going to be ready to hear, at least not all of them, and so actually his address is halted at this point.
Some people say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s just a bit over the top.” They’re already sneering. They’re ready to leave, and so we don’t have the rest of his address. But others are saying, “We want to hear more. We want to hear more.” So Paul left the council, and we read, verse 34: “A few men became followers of Paul and believed.” Now don’t misunderstand this passage. This is not saying, “So a few people were converted on the spot. They followed Paul and believed.”
Rather, the said, “We want to hear you again.” So they did what people did in the ancient world when they liked a speaker. They became his followers. They went and learned more from him, and in consequence, then, they believed. I’ve been doing university missions for 30 years, and it once was the case that if people got converted during a university mission, they got converted during the week of the mission when I was there or some other chap who was speaking.
But nowadays, by and large, that’s not the case. It’s partly because most students on a university campus today are so ignorant of even the most elementary biblical things that it takes awhile to build up the structure of things for Christianity to make any sense at all, so what tends to happen is you build up the structure and have lots of discussions and then give some more addresses and have more discussions, and people become interested enough that they then sign up for some further courses.
They work through the Gospel of Mark together, or they work through the Gospel of John, or they get into an evangelistic Bible study. They start seeing the whole sweep of the redemptive history that is presented in the Bible, and in due course, maybe weeks later, sometimes months later, they become Christians, or to put it in Acts’ terms, they become followers of Don and then believe, even though with our mobility today Don has left, and they become followers of the local pattern of things, and in due course they really due meet the living God.
Now I must end by saying a couple of things. It is very important to understand where Paul was heading here. You must not think that he was preaching the resurrection and not the death of Christ. In this case he was establishing a frame of reference and he came to Christ as the Resurrected One who brings in the last day of judgment as a way of getting to the death, but you know that he was going to get to the death because of what is said earlier in the chapter.
He was being challenged by the Athenian philosophers in the Areopagus because, we are told in verse 18, “He was preaching the good news, the gospel, about Jesus and the resurrection.” By the time this is written that could only mean one thing. It’s the sort of thing that Paul himself unpacks everywhere.
He says, writing to the Corinthians, “I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” which meant for him also the resurrection. Or when he writes to the Corinthians to outline what the gospel is about in 1 Corinthians 15, he said, “I delivered to you the matters of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was raised the third day, according to the Scriptures.”
Do you see? The death and the resurrection hung together as the matters of first importance, as what the gospel is all about, because what he wants to say is that the good news is that this God, who does not owe us anything, who cannot be bought by religion, nevertheless comes to his rebel brood in the person of his own dear Son and buys back his people by bearing their death on their behalf and the sacrifice of Christ, the death of Christ, this sin-bearing death of Christ on behalf of others is vindicated publicly by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
That’s where he’s going. It’s the non-negotiable gospel. So if all of this is still strange to you, if you have come in this weekend and some of what I’ve said is as strange to you as it was when Paul preached it to Athenian philosophers 2,000 years ago, it may be that you are ready now, already, to close with Christ, and what you must do even where you sit is raise your whole heart to God and say, “God have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”
But it may be that this is still so strange, yet you would like to hear more, like these people. You would like to hear more, and you need to become followers of Paul and in due course, believe. What that means is you really do need to find out more. You need to talk with people here who will be glad to get you into an appropriate Bible study and find out what this gospel, this good news, is about. That’s what you need to do, to find out, and to pursue it.
Nobody is going to put you in a corner, buttonhole you, or shake their fists in your face, or get angry, but that’s what you need to do. You need to find out about this God who has made everything and who holds us to account at the end of the age and who, in his great mercy, has disclosed himself as the Saving God in the sending of his Son to bear our sin in his own body on the tree.
And for many here who have been Christians a long time, do you see what this has to say to us as we start trying to explain the gospel to people today? Have you not had experiences when you start trying to explain the gospel and you just feel as if you’re ships in the night, zing, going right by each other?
You’re just on a different planet. You start talking about things that are precious to you and they completely and utterly and totally misunderstand, and you say, “Where do I start? We don’t have the same vocabulary. We don’t have the same expressions. We don’t have the same goals.” Do you get some of those frustrations too? “What do I do? Where do I start?”
Some months back I was on CNN for a Larry King segment. They have evangelical talking heads every once in a while, and once in a while I’m a talking head, and this one came up at the last moment in a bit of a hurry, so they sent a car for me. I live in the far north side of Chicago, and they sent a car for me to get me down to the studio on time, and you know how these things work.
There’s somebody in a studio on the East Coast, and another talking head is on the West Coast, and I was the talking head in Chicago, and on the screen you see them all, and all I see as I’m in a narrow little booth is a camera in front of me, and in the limo on the way down to the studio I was reading papers so I wouldn’t look like too much of a twit on national TV and paid no attention to anything, just to read these papers.
Then I did my little segment, and then the car was taking me home again, and so this time I was relaxed, sprawled out in the back seat and talking to the driver. It turned out he was a nice guy. He was a Jewish chap, about 59, he told me, and he wanted to know more about the program because his wife was working on a Ph.D. in religion and he knew this had something to do with religion.
We started talking about this, and it turned out that he had one daughter. He had lost all his own family in the Holocaust, but he had one daughter who was 33 who, some weeks earlier, had flipped her SUV in a storm in Kansas, and she was brain-dead. The only question was when they pulled the plug.
I said to him, “How are you handling this?” He said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that molecules bounce. I mean, that’s just the way it is. Molecules bounce.” I said to him, “Is that what you would say is the explanation of the Holocaust too? Molecules bounce?” Oh, he was outraged, as I wanted him to be.
“That was evil! That was disgusting! That was horrible! It was past-finding-out evil, and you want to call that molecules bounce?” I said, “No, no. I don’t want to, but I see that you have a place for outrage then, do you? Aren’t you outraged by the death of your daughter?”
“Are you saying that the death of my daughter was evil?”
“Of course that’s what I’m saying. It was an unmitigated disaster. The apostle Paul himself says that death is the last enemy. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. We ought to be outraged by it. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. This doesn’t mean that she is more evil than other people because she happened to die first.
That’s not what the Bible says, but the Bible does say there’s a place for outrage in the face of death, because it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. But the same Bible speaks of good news, as well. Tell me, would you look at things differently if you were convinced that your daughter lives forever? Would you, then, look at things differently?”
“Oh, yes!” He said. “I know just what you mean. She has a lovely garden in her place in Kansas. I think she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Once again, zing. Do you have those sorts of experiences? We all do if we’re sharing our faith, and you wonder what sort of planet you’re on. It’s not the same field of discourse. Listen. What I’m talking about this morning, if you’re a Christian, is not rocket science. I’m not talking about something deep and difficult.
I’m talking about learning to get across the most rudimentary, elementary structures of what the Bible says, the things that we assume in our Christian faith if we’re Christians at all, to other people so that they can see the framework in which we understand who Jesus is. That’s what is required in an age of profound biblical illiteracy. That’s what the heart of Christian witness is when we’re dealing with people who no longer share our frame of reference. Let us pray.
So help us to grow, Lord God, in self-conscious obedience to the God who is our Maker. You are our Maker and our Redeemer and our Judge, and we do not fear the judgment only because you are our Redeemer, or else we are undone. We come to you not because we bring you so much and contribute to your well-being, but because you have called us to yourself and reconciled us to you by the person and work of Christ.
We are debtors. We are those who have received wonderful grace, and like poor beggars, we want to tell other poor beggars where there is bread, so give us a growing ability to share this glorious gospel with others around us. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
