Pray with me please:
Lord God, please give me the courage and faithfulness that I need to preach
your word to your people. Amen.
Our passage this
morning begins in the middle of what is one of Paul’s most conspicuous
missionary endeavors. Paul is already in
the middle of the Areopagus—in the middle of the conversational hub of the
intellectual elite of the whole Roman Empire.
He’s in the jewel of academic learning of the whole Western World—in
Athens, a city somewhat past the prime of its glory in Paul’s day, but still
renown for learning, for philosophy and for culture. And still today the city of Athens has
meaning as being a fountain of Western civilization and culture. Up to this point in the story, Paul has been
exploring the city of Athens and talking with the different intellectual
schools—we hear specifically that the Epicureans and the Stoics have mixed reactions
to what Paul has to say. But the Holy
Spirit catches their attention—Paul interests them enough that they want to
bring him to along to where the philosophers get together to talk shop. And this talking shop is somewhere between
respectable intellectual discourse and something like intellectual gossip and
novelty. Our narrator comments,
"Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend
their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new." So these are the leisured, intellectual elite
who have time to sit at Starbucks for hours and pursue over the meaning of
life, the universe, and everything. I think we see here that Paul takes these
folks seriously—clearly he is engaging with them on a deep level with the
things they are interested in, and learns enough about them to speak their
language well enough to get invited to where the real action happens at the
Areopagus. But he sees them for the
human beings that they are and doesn’t take them too seriously—some of these folks are perhaps just as interested in
intellectual novelty as they are in deep philosophical truth.
So,
standing in the midst of the Areopagus, Paul begins his speech: V 23-25 read, “For as I passed along and observed the objects
of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the
unknown god.' What therefore you worship as 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.” This is good stuff—we get to see how on earth
a trained Jewish-Christian theologian appeals to 1st century Greek
philosophers! This is definitely a
cross-cultural experience and definitely an example of Paul understanding his
audience well and speaking to them in ways they can understand. So specifically in these first few verses,
Paul is not appealing to the religious sensibilities of the average joe citizen
of the Roman empire--the average Joe goes to the temple and offers sacrifices
to appease the anger of the gods, or to ask for favor from the gods, or to
discharge his civic duty through piety or prayers for the emperor or city or
the state.. Your average joe probably
does think of the gods dwelling in temples made by hand. It may or may not have crossed his mind as to
why a deity—a being of supernatural power—would need his food or his service in
order to be provided for or taken care of. But the philosophers—the types of people who
are hanging out at the Areopagus—on Mars’ Hill--have talked about it and they
aren’t satisfied with popular piety or the religious status quo of their
day. These folks that Paul is addressing
here are dissenters—at least in part—from the traditional way of thinking about
things. They are the folks who are more
inclined to believe in one god or to believe that there must be an essential
unity behind the pantheon of gods in order for the world to hang together and
make sense. And plenty of them—like
those in the schools of Aristotle and Plato have already decided that God
really couldn’t be a type of being that needed things from human beings. For these folks, God is not a being who is
dependent on human affairs or even necessarily one who is involved in human
affairs or cares very much about human worship.
So in Paul’s interactions with these folks—these folks who still pay
some kind of lip service to polytheism and what Paul considers idolatry, he finds
a point of connection with this questioning and dissenting element of Greek intellectual
culture. It is from there that he starts
to tell them the story of the true God,
the God of Israel whom these Greeks don't know at all but they have begun to
worship, at least in part.
Notice
what Paul does and how carefully he speaks to these men of Athens: "as I
passed along and observed the objects
of your worship, [read—idols and altars to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses]
I found also an altar with this
inscription, to the unknown god." First
of all, Paul references an altar, but
not an idol or a statue. I wonder if it
wasn’t an empty altar with no image but only this tantalizing and ambiguous inscription:
to the unknown god. Moreover, it is the
very confession of ignorance on the
part of whoever made this altar to the unknown god that makes it such a suitable point of contact for
Paul. Whoever decided that this altar
should be there was in effect saying, there is Someone, something out there
that we don't know about it, we cannot see, and we don't really understand, but
we somehow know that this unknown Someone is worthy of our worship. In other words, Paul interprets the very
existence of this altar as a testimony to what he later talks about in Romans
1: “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it
to them. For his invisible attributes,
namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever
since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made." By the sheer creation of the world there is
enough information, enough of a trace of revelation, as Aquinas puts it, to
know that someone has passed by, someone's creative hand is on the world. But—and this is crucially important—there is
not enough information to identity who this Someone is. For that, you need something more--you need a
story told to you by God himself about who he is, what he has done, and how he
plans to draw all people to himself. And
this is exactly what Paul proceeds to do--he tells them the story about who God
is.
The
first element of this story in verse 24 reveals that God is the creator—he is
the one who made the heavens and the earth—so he is Lord, master, ruler of
heaven and earth, but he is also the one who made the human race and the one
who reigns over history and time and has in his hand the rise and fall of the
nations of the earth. Paul proclaims a
universal deity here—this God, unlike all the other gods, knows all the
nations, has made every people, and knows their land and their history. He isn’t a local deity—and the Greeks are
used to this—he is not a god among gods.
Again, this is appealing to the philosopher’s understanding of the
transcendent god. They have a sense
already--Paul did not have to create this discomfort for them--that there is
something deficient among the multiplicity of gods each with their own
territory, each with their own limited power that competes with the limited
power of all the other gods. No, this
God Paul preaches--the one they don't know yet--is of an entirely different
caliber.
But notice what Paul does not do here. He does not mention Israel. He does not even mention the name of
Jesus—which is quite unusual for the proclamation of the gospel story, you
might think. Eventually in his story he
gets to the part where God has appointed one man (who we, the ones who have
been reading the other 16 chapters of the story, already know is Jesus) to
judge the world with righteousness—so there is some degree of particularity in
this presentation of the gospel—it is certainly not a vague story about vague
good news or general benevolence—it is still the story of the gospel
about the man God has appointed to judge the world, Jesus Christ. But Paul does not yet tell them the name of
Jesus. Why not? Because these Athenians have not heard of
Jesus before. They are not familiar with
the ins and outs of the Jewish religion, they don’t know the teaching of John
the Baptist the way other Jews or God-fearers that Paul travels to in Acts
does—they don’t know or rather they don’t yet believe in anything that would
give them a context for understanding a story about the God of Israel, for
understanding a story about Jesus. The
first need of these Athenians, then, is to be given a context for talking about
and getting to know God, for coming to know who Jesus is. And that’s exactly what Paul is doing when he
tells this more general story of God’s involvement in the world and God’s
authorship of history. We are used to
hearing the very specific tale of God’s involvement with Israel—with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob—with promises of children and land and blessing. But Paul knows that God’s very particular
involvement with the people of Israel was always leading to salvation being
brought to the nations. The original
promise to Abraham is “in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” So the God who called Abraham and made Jesus
the Son of David, Messiah of the Jews and Gentiles always meant to bring his
good news and his salvation to this bunch of mostly Greek philosophers in
Athens.
We
know then—because Paul is telling us—that this God is the God of all human
history. So what is the purpose of the
activity of this Creator God--this sovereign Lord of history? What is his
purpose in making from one man every nation of the earth and appointing
specific times and places for each people?
The purpose is for every one of those peoples and nations to“ seek God,
in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him." This I think is the hinge of Paul's message
to the Athenians—it is the climactic moment of his introduction of the good
news of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that
is the invitation to seek and know the Creator of All. It turns out that the "unknown God"
worshiped by the Athenians is not satisfied with being worshiped as unknown--he
wants to be known and he wants to be found.
In fact, that is the very reason why the human race was created--so that
everyone might come to know the one who Created them.
The
very next sentence is even more encouraging:
Not only does this unknown god want to be known, it turns out this God
is actually close by—he isn’t that difficult to be known after all. He isn’t far away from those philosophically
minded Athenians and he is not far from us.
Paul says, "Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for 'in
him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have
said, 'for we are indeed his offspring.'"
So there are three incredible elements of gracious good news here! (One) God wants us to know him and (two) it
is not an impossible task! It is not an
epic quest requiring the exploits and adventures of a Greek hero or
demigod. God has already drawn near to
us—and it turns out the only reason we exist at all is because we live and
exist in him in some way. God holds our
life and our being in his hand, and what do you know, this is something the
Greek poets already knew. This is something they perceived truly about
God even though they did not have the gift and advantage of the Scriptures.. .
. . The third bit of good news is the way in which God is close to us--"we
are his offspring." What does that
mean? It means that God isn’t completely
alien to us. We are like him. We are his children. There is affinity there. He intends to know us as a father should know
his child. And here we do find a note of
opposition to way the philosophers tended to think about god as remote and
distant and untouchable and uninterested in the messy, inferior lives of human
beings. No, it turns out we are the very
offspring of God, the deliberate and free creation of an act of love, and that
ought to serve as the basis for us to begin to understand what God is like.
And
this Paul does use to segue into a gentle rebuke about the idolatry he has seen
in the city of Athens. V29 says:
"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 imagination of
man." In other words, Paul is
saying, "I know you are used to thinking about things in this way, but
really, you and I both know better. If
we are God's offspring, we really can't go on believing that these chunks of
metal and stone have any significance whatsoever. If God is God, then he is not the product of
any imaginative art of human beings--nothing we make up can really capture his
essence and likeness--this business of making idols really doesn't make any
sense. You are philosophers—I know you know better than that, I know you are
dissatisfied with all of this.” Paul
goes on to conclude his speech in v 31 with a most relevant piece of
information: God is commanding people everywhere to repent because he is going
to judge the world in righteousness, which means he is going to judge with
righteous judgment—not the partial and incomplete justice that we now experience—with
the real justice with which only God can judge.
God has been patient with the past chapters of history and with the
religious ignorance of human beings, but now he's bringing things to a close. The second half of v. 31 references Jesus’
resurrection from the dead. It is as if
Paul is saying to them: I know this day of judgment stuff sounds a little
crazy, but God proved it to all of us by raising this man from the dead. And resurrection from the dead of course
implies all sorts of vitally important things: it implies Jesus’ victory over
sin and death, and his victory over all the powers and principalities, and over
all the systems of this world.
This
isn't a cheap gospel of cheap grace that Paul preaches. It is good news because it is a genuine offer
of salvation--it is a genuine call to people to know the living God, to move
from death to life. Paul doesn't avoid
the subject of judgment, but he doesn't have to talk down to the Athenians or preach
condemnation in order to do it. Judgment is not bad news. Judgment is good news because it means Jesus is
going to set things right--he is going to right the wrongs of the world and see
that the peace of his kingdom, the kingdom of God, is established in the world
in the place of the violence and oppression of the nations of the earth. You will only have a problem with judgment if
you want to resist the peace of God or face God on your own terms. Submit to God's kingdom and you will find
that He is your father and you please him by your trust in his Son. Here we see that Paul is able to be serious
and not compromise the integrity of the gospel while still basking in God's
kindness and love for the people gathered at the Areopagus. These things are not in conflict.
The
God Paul preaches here really is very kind in the way he deals with our
ignorance. Even though we learn earlier
in this passage that Paul is grieved by the idolatry he sees in Athens, he
doesn't scorn the people for their mistaken idol-worship. Instead of laughing at the Athenians for
being a bunch of superstitious nuts who even worship a god they don't know at
all, Paul sees and perceives the deeper reality of the Athenians' fumbling after
truth. In true Socratic fashion, they
know enough to admit their ignorance and the Holy Spirit works through this. Paul's response is to commend them for what they have recognized--he fans that
smoldering wick into flame rather than trying to quench it because it doesn't
give off very much light. Maybe it is no
surprise that Paul is humble and winsome in his approach to the cluelessness of
the Athenians because--after all, God was kind to him in his own ignorant
persecution of the church! Paul stoned
Christians and persecuted the church of God and Jesus still went out of his way
to reveal himself and to show mercy to this enemy of his, to call Paul to repentance,
to reconcile him to himself. In Romans
2:4 Paul tells us that it is the kindness of God that draws us all to
repentance, and the whole story of Jesus shows us that God's glory is
manifested in showing mercy to his enemies.
Paul knows this because he is one of the singular most obvious enemies
of God whom God went out of his way to love and reconcile him to himself. So I don't think it was very hard for Paul to
be mindful of the Lord's kindness when he spoke to the Athenian intellectual
elites--even the ones who mocked him and scorned him and disbelieved what he
said.
In
Paul's day, Athens was the intellectual center of the Roman world--Paul was
speaking to the cultural and intellectual elite with the same graciousness and
kindness and sincerity he showed to everyone else. In our day, though--we sometimes get scared
or intimidated—especially by the culturally or socially powerful—and we get either
rigid or cowardly. We start thinking
that being scornful, condemning, critical and harsh of "the culture"
is the way to do apologetics and evangelism --if only we condemn secularism
enough--if only we tell people that they are godless and immoral or unethical
enough--or that they are wrong and their ideas are bad--if only we bully them
with our morality or tell them enough bad news, then surely they will convert
and be on our side! . . . Oftentimes we
even mean well when we try this track—we are deeply concerned when we see these
errors hurting people and we want people to know the truth. The equal and opposite error is to preach a
gospel that doesn’t confront or resist the world system at all, one that is devoid
of the particularity of the good news of Christianity. The first way will assure that no one will
ever hear the good news of Jesus Christ as the good news that it truly is. The other way will assure that no one hears
anything at all. The difficult thing is
to be full of grace and truth as Jesus was and to make sure the
gospel we preach is fully gracious and fully truthful.
The
middle way here rests on understanding that God himself wins people's hearts
through his kindness and through sacrificial love not through condemnation, and
that this requires real faith and courage to believe on our part. God gives a genuine and sincere invitation to
us and he isn't intimidated by our sin or the weakness and brokenness that
marks human life and culture. God will
deal with our sin, and he doesn’t even have to bully us to do it. God is not intimidated by American secularism
or "godless pagan Europe" or the sin of any other nation or people in
the world. He deals very effectively with
his enemies all the time and in Jesus he has a sufficient remedy for the sin of
the whole world, and for every manifestation of that sin in that culture,
whether it is among the intellectual elite or the poorest of the poor. God is powerful and mighty to save, mighty to
revive, to transform, to call to repentance, period, and we are called to have
faith in that. We have hope because we will never be in control of what
God is up to in the world, but we do know
that he is in the habit of raising the dead and turning the world upside
down. If he wants to make revival in
this nation or China or call Europe back to himself, he will do it. The nations are in his hand, they are his
business. But having a grasp on God's
agenda for the nations is not our primary concern. Our primary concern is having the courage and
faith to peach actual good news to our neighbor and love him to the fullest and
to the end.
And
what happens after Paul completes his telling of the gospel story? More or less what happens to Paul in every
city. Some people believe the good news
proclaimed, some laugh at the idea of the resurrection of the dead. They don’t try to stone him or throw him out
of the city—which are some of the more extreme responses to Paul—but normally
only Paul’s own people do that, not the Gentiles. There are a few commentators who believe that
these last few verses are indicative of a mediocre response to the gospel, and
this method of Paul's is "compromised" because he accommodated too
much to the culture. I don't think
there's any textual support for that reading of this passage, and instead this
passage is a triumph of evangelism and a model for us for how we can be
faithful to the gospel no matter how little preparation we think our audience
has for understanding God. Again, our
job is not to be in control of the gospel preached or worry about people’s
response to it. Our job is to be
faithful to the good news and the good Lord that we have received and to do our
best to pass along that story we live in and by with all the grace and truth we
can muster, with God’s help.
Father
in heaven, we praise you for your kindness and goodness towards us and
everything that you have made. We pray
you by the power of your Holy Spirit to enter into a deeper knowledge of you
and your kindness towards us so we can preach the good news of your salvation
and redemption to the ends of the earth, in every situation that we find
ourselves, always having a word of grace and truth to offer to the people
around us who do not yet know you and are in such desperate need of you. In Jesus' name and for his sake, we pray.
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