Acts 17:16-34(ii)

Athens in Paul’s day was strikingly similar to our own society. All views were welcome; none were right, none were wrong. It was a society with every shade of belief. As Paul went round the city, he noticed it was “full of idols” and he was “deeply distressed” at what he saw. His response was to engage with it in two ways.

Firstly, he went into the synagogue to preach to those gathered there. They were, in a sense, a captive audience with a biblical heritage he could draw on. Secondly, he went into the market place, where the ordinary Athenians were, and reasoned with them too. There he came into contact with some Epicureans and Stoics who were very keen to debate and to listen to new ideas.

They wanted to know what he babbling about so they asked him to appear before the Areopagus. Here is a great opportunity to explain the gospel to some of the leading figures in the town! We’re going to look at how Paul approached that situation, in order to learn something of how to handle what is a similar situation in our own society.

This account is clearly a summary of what Paul said; his actual speech may have lasted as long as a couple of hours. Each point here would have been greatly expanded and explained. We can see how he may have expanded the points by reading his letters which have many of the same points (e.g. Rom 1).

Before we look in detail at what he said, notice what he did as a whole. Having been attentive to the situation as he walked around Athens, Paul is now creative in how he shares the gospel with them. He counters their telling of the big story and conveys the Bible’s big story. He didn’t trot out a pre-planned formula for telling the gospel but engaged creatively with them.

One thing he did was use terms his audience were familiar with, words that meant something in how they told the big story of life, even quoting one of their poets. But he gave those terms a new twist. We need to learn how to do the same with today’s buzz words and use them to convey genuine reality.

1. God the Creator
Given that he is dealing with people who believe that there is a god (or gods), Paul counters their views by conveying the biblical reality of God. What is especially important is what he says about this God; he declares that he is “the God who made the world and everything in it”. He focuses on God as Creator.

He didn’t argue with his hearers about how God created the heavens and the earth, a subject on which they held many views. What he did was stress the fact that God is Creator of all. That’s an important difference. The creation debate can regrettably downplay the fact that God is the Creator by concentrating too much on the way in which he created. Scripture never does that; the emphasis is always on the fact that he is the Creator, on theology and not science.

Paul then goes on to assert that the God who is Creator of all is also “the Lord of heaven and earth”. There is no rival to the one true Creator God. There isn’t a pantheon of gods in the heavens; there isn’t a great struggle going on between rival deities; there is one God who made all and who is Lord of all.

Furthermore, God is entirely self-sufficient. He is “not served by human hands, as if he needed anything”. He is not in danger of going hungry if we don’t feed him; nor can he be manipulated by the offer of a bed for the night in some temple or other.

He is the God who does not need us. He is not enriched by our serving him; we can add nothing to him and can take nothing away from him. Here is God in his self-existent glory!

And this is the God Paul proclaims: one who made us and is in every respect above us. But although above us, he is not uninterested in us; he is not remote in that sense. Rather, he “himself gives all men life and breath and everything else”. He is involved with us on a daily basis.

So much of this is contrary to how Athenians thought and so vastly different to how so many think today. Either God is so far away he can’t be bothered with us or else he’s simply there at our beck and call, a kind-of heavenly emergency service.
If people are to be challenged with the gospel, they’ll need to know about the true nature of God. Years ago this wasn’t so necessary; if people didn’t believe in God, it was the Christian God they didn’t believe in. But now all sorts of things are doing the rounds and we need to get across a truly biblical picture of the one true God. Maybe we need to dwell more upon this ourselves in order to share it with others.

2. Man the Creature
With that understanding in place, Paul moves onto its natural corollary: if God is the Creator, man is his creature. In vv.25-28 Paul shows that we all utterly depend on God for everything. He is sovereign over the whole of history and over the ordering of the world. Far from being absent, he has been intimately involved in his world. As such, he is the only legitimate God of all peoples.

And why has he done what he has done? “So that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him”. Not only does that show us something of God’s heart and the destiny of all history, it also hints at mankind’s great problem: we’re adrift from our Creator.

We need to know who God is and what he is like; we also need to know who and what we are: creatures in need of their Creator but estranged from him by sin.

3. Jesus the Judge
And here Paul moves into more direct confrontation with his audience. Ignorance of God is not simply a personal tragedy; it is an assault upon the one true God. Such ignorance is not neutral; it is utterly sinful, since it denies God his place and his praise. To pick up Paul in Rom. 1, all people are guilty since “what may be known about God is plain…because God has made it plain”. Ignorance of God is culpable.

Their profound ignorance of God was highlighted in their altar “to an unknown god” in their thinking that “the divine being in like gold or silver or stone”. The fact that we are his creatures should make us realise how foolish such ideas are. And yet we don’t! Still today gods of silver and gold are worshipped, albeit in different forms.

Here is the desperately ugly nature of sin: it is first and foremost idolatry, the de-godding of God. And this is what we need to get across to people in our treatment of sin. It doesn’t simply ruin society and the lives of individuals (an atheist could make that point). It is a denial of the one true God in his glory; it is an outrage against him.

And as such, sin invites judgement: “he has set a day when he will judge the world by the man he has appointed”. Hard as it may be to share, the gospel message is not simply about how we get to be happy but about how we get to be saved from destruction.

This is why we need someone to reveal the one true God to us and to reconcile us to him; this is why we need someone to die in our place and to rise from the dead in triumph over sin and evil.

This is where Paul begins to speak of Jesus (v.31). He doesn’t start with him because he needs to do the groundwork first; they need to understand about God and themselves in order to see where Jesus fits in. Many who we meet today are in the same need. We must be careful to lay that foundation.

4. Response
But declaring the resurrection gets Paul short shrift. These folk wanted to escape the physical world, not be brought back to it! Faithfully telling the gospel in ways that are relevant and compelling will invite rejection. We need to be prepared for that and cling to the non-negotiables of the gospel.

But there were some who followed Paul and began to walk the road of discipleship. It was worth the effort and the ridicule. What counted was not the esteem in which the philosophers of Athens held Paul but whether any of them would respond to the gospel message and be saved. And, praise God, some were.

May it please him to give us the same wisdom and boldness that Paul had and to have the joy of seeing many saved in our day too. Amen.