Dennis Tuuri

We return again today to Acts 17 for the sermon scripture. You remember that Paul in Acts 17 addresses the Athenians on Mars Hill addresses those men who did not give thanks for the wondrous works that God has done for them. And we have just celebrated a season of thanksgiving this past week and hopefully that’s a reminder to us that’s the hallmark of the Christian faith to give thanks to our creator and redeemer for all things that he’s accomplished for us.

Please stand for the reading of his word. Acts 17:16 and following.

Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and with the devout persons and in the market daily with them that met with him. Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him, and some said, “What will this babbler say?” Others said, “He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods,” because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.

And they took him and brought him into Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears. We would know therefore what these things mean.” For all the Athenians, and strangers which were with them spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshiped with men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath, and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell in all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said, for we also are his offspring. For as much as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone given by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance, God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the dead.

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked and others said, “We will hear thee again of this matter.” So Paul departed from among them. How be it certain men clave unto him and believed. Among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. After these things, Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth. Thus ends the reading of God’s word.

I mean, we pray now through the song of illumination that God would illumine this text to our hearts that it may change our lives and then that we might change our culture as well.

Let us pray through song.

“Come let us reason together,” so says the prophet Isaiah. And so according to Larry Y. Woody in his commentary in the book of Acts, so also said Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most powerful political men of this past century. Lyndon Baines Johnson would frequently, as he tried to lobby for his particular proposals from a position of power in the Senate originally and later as president, would say “Come let us reason together,” and by that he meant “Let us talk over your ideas and my ideas and come to a compromise and then achieve political advancement in terms of our particular designs and goals.”

That is not what Isaiah meant. But all too often in our day and age, biblical evangelism is seen more along the lines of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s quotation of “Come let us reason together” than Isaiah’s quotation. Isaiah’s quotation goes on immediately in the context, and you always want to put the context on such verses to remind people of their sin. “Come let us reason together, though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.” Reason with man to show him his culpability and guilt, not to come to some sort of common consensus or common ground and lure men into a relationship with him.

They come only to relationship with God through repentance, through a reasonable apprehension of their own sinfulness, guilt, and culpability before God.

Biblical evangelism is our topic today. And I bring up Lyndon Baines Johnson not simply as an illustration of the improper way that evangelism is all too often done in our country today and across the world, but also because he was a politician. And as Paul addresses the men in Athens, he does so in the spirit of Isaiah, not in the spirit of who would later become Lyndon Baines Johnson.

He goes to the Athenians saying, “Let us reason together. Your sins are as scarlet. You are under judgment for those sins and that will happen right quickly and you must needs repent of those sins.” And when Paul went to the Athenians, he went to the philosophical and political center of the Greek world. Paul was addressing the Areopagite as we mentioned last week. The Areopagite was the council of men who were the philosophical and religious leaders of society, maybe as few as thirty men, and they also formed then the ideas of religion that would form the basis for the political structures of Greece as well.

The scriptures show us in this context that religion, philosophy and politics are all of a piece. They’re all related to one’s worldview. And Paul addresses that worldview in his evangelization of the men on Mars Hill.

Now our day and age is in many ways similar, not altogether the same but in many ways similar, to the days in which Paul met with those members of the Areopagite on Mars Hill. He is brought specifically by two groups of philosophers: the Epicureans and the Stoics. The Epicureans thought that life came about by chance. The universe happened as a result of chance plus time. And they also thought that man’s highest end was pleasure. Now in the schools of thought of the higher men that actually formed the schools of Epicurean thought system, they didn’t mean by that sensual pleasure, but that’s usually the way it translated down into followers of this particular religious and philosophical school.

Those people were pleasure seekers and they thought there were some gods in the sense of forces outside there, somehow related, somehow in a different plane than us. But they were essentially unrelated to what we do. They were indifferent to the affairs of men. The Stoics believed that God permeated everything. On the other hand, their aspirations were the highest moral good. And they eventually said that they were fatalistic. They said that pain and pleasure are essentially the same thing. And so there was a detachment on the part of the Stoics.

Well, in our day and age, we see men given over to believing that we came about through chance, or that we came about through some sort of fatalism and that we’re somehow one with God and the entire created order. Both groups essentially were equated together in their denial of what we have come to talk about through the writings of Cornelius Van Til as the creator-creature distinction.

Greece was permeated by monism—people that did not see a distinction between God and man essentially, but everything was of a piece. And either there were these forces to be ignored as we seek pleasure and that’s all this came about by chance, or God was everything, but either way it kind of came to the same thing: a denial of the creator-creature relationship. And we stand in the context of a culture today whose religious, political, and philosophical thought systems are very much akin to the Greek patterns.

And so we look at this message then as a model message for us. It is an important thing for us to understand. Now we live in a little different times because we live in a culture that has slipped not from Plato ultimately but has slipped from a biblical perspective, and so we live in a culture that is familiar with the word of God. And so it is not a one-to-one correlation. But I do think that in Paul’s evangelism of the Athenians as demonstrated on Mars Hill, we have here a model for biblical evangelism for ourselves.

And my talk today is on Athens: biblical evangelism. And you know how we’ve gone through the first and second missionary journeys and I’ve tried to take each city and put a particular title to it, emphasizing what happens there. And here with Athens, I want us to think of Paul’s address in Athens as biblical evangelism—a model for us particularly.

Paul addressed two groups of people. The first group was the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks. And those people he always argued from the scriptures that Jesus is Messiah. We’ll see that again and we’ll talk about that again in the weeks to come in the third missionary journey and also in Ephesus. But then Paul also addressed pagans who had no stated belief in the scriptures, the Old Testament scriptures.

And we increasingly in our day and age find ourselves addressing those sorts of people. So there’s a distinction to be made when we talk to people in the context of the institutional church and those outside of the institutional church. And when we think of evangelism, we think of it primarily in terms of those outside of the institutional church. So there are correlations between what Paul does here and our evangelistic efforts here at home and also abroad as well.

So let’s look at this text and my outline. I don’t have one today printed up for you, but you can make it yourself. Just take a pencil and write at the top: Biblical Evangelism. And there are four points to this outline. The first is motivation. Biblical evangelism—what is the motivation for biblical evangelism? The second point is preparation for biblical evangelism. The third point is the message or means of biblical evangelism. And the final point will be goals. So motivation, preparation, means or message, and then the goal. All of this having to do with biblical evangelism.

Let’s look first then at the motivation for biblical evangelism. This is really review from last week. What is Paul’s motivation for evangelizing the community of Athens? Was it his great love for humankind? Was it because he loved mankind so much that he wanted to save them from their fate? Was he a humanist at heart? No. The text makes clear that Paul’s motivation was theistic as opposed to humanistic. He was God-centered, not man-centered.

Now, man is God’s image bearer. We want to have compassion. We want to feel people’s pain and all that stuff, but that is not to be our primary motivation. Our primary motivation is the glory of God. If you’re a humanist and that’s your drive for biblical evangelism, you’re going to be one frustrated person because God is not a humanist.

God takes a portion of humankind—and I think in terms of the created history, it is a very insignificant portion. Now, that means that there’s a lot of years left to go. What I’m saying is I think God saves most of the world. But nonetheless, God takes a portion of people and casts them in everlasting torment, pain, and hell. And so God is not a humanist. He is not there for the benefit of humankind, every last person. And if that’s your motivation for evangelism, you’re going to be frustrated. And it’s going to determine that your means also will be askew, right from the get-go.

The text here as a model for biblical evangelism wants us to see that our motivation should be the glory of God. Paul was grieved and angered by the idolatry of the Athenians. And we’re told that very explicitly. Paul’s motivation is to get men to repent from their idolatry. Same thing—and remember in Lystra, Acts 14:15 and following, the other model for the pagans from the first missionary journey. Lystra was where the pagans worshiped him as a god, and the second missionary journey correlated to Lystra is Athens. And in both, in Lystra he said he wanted men to turn from idolatry to the living God. His concern is the glory of God, not the well-being of humankind. He is angered and grieved by the idolatry of men.

Now, again, I mentioned last week that idolatry in the scriptures is broader-based than we think of it. These Greeks were primarily monists. They didn’t really believe in a multiplicity of ultimate gods. They believed that God was everything, but they still were idolaters. The scriptures tell us in several places in the New Testament that covetousness is idolatry. Scriptures tell us Samuel told Saul that stubbornness is as idolatry. And I want to just read a quote here from Rushdoony.

This is not, you know, this is under the same point of motivation, but I wanted to get you to prod you a little bit here to think of idolatry a little broader than what we normally think of it as. Rushdoony writes:

“This idolatry involves any kind of attempt and every attempt by man to be guided by his own word rather than God’s law word. This is often devoutly and piously done. Many parents are sinfully patient or indulgent with their lawless children, or husbands with wives and wives with husbands, in the fond hope that God will miraculously change the wayward one. ‘I am in continual prayer,’ they will assert, adding that all things are possible with God. But this is a fearful arrogance and sin. Indeed, all things are possible with God, but we cannot live in terms of what God might do, but only in terms of what his law word requires. To wait on conversion or move supposedly in hope, is a sinful substitute, however much piously disguised, for obedience to God and the acceptance of reality under God. Such a course is to make our hope the law word and God’s law word of none effect.”

Okay. So what he’s saying is that idolatry has a lot of different faces. And he’s saying that when we take God’s word and say, “Well, we’re not going to discipline our children, for instance, or we’re not going to discipline sinning people in the context of the institutional church, or we’re going to just let a wife or a husband sin and just sort of hope and pray for them and hope that all things turn out well,” Rushdoony is equating that with idolatry. Why? Because it’s the substitution of our word, our hopes, our desires instead of God’s law word as the directing, controlling principle and commandment in our lives. So idolatry is broad-based.

And if you look at this as an example of biblical idolatry, then you’ll recognize that just as Paul went to the synagogue of his day in Athens first to talk to them about idolatry, so there’s also a message to the institutional church of a need for people in the context of it to repent from idolatry.

Well, in any event, Paul’s motivation for biblical evangelism that he engages himself in is the glory of God. And that glory of God will cause us to be both grieved and angered when people break God’s word and set aside God’s law word for their own word or for their own hope or their own desire. That’s what idolatry is.

So our motivation as we think of our neighbors—our motivation to evangelize them should first and foremost be an assertion of God’s glory, a jealousness for the glory of God that drives us to want to speak to them and hasten the process of either their conversion or their judgment. We bring a gospel word that is both conversion and it is also judgment. It converts the elect, but it also is condemnation to those who reject God. And we’ll see that very pointedly next week when we talk about Corinth.

So the motivation has always got to be the glory of God.

Secondly, preparation. And again, this is somewhat of review from last week. The motivation is the glory of God. There are steps, however, of preparation before we engage in biblical evangelism. Paul had a great understanding of the culture in which he spoke the gospel word. So one of the first elements of preparation for biblical evangelism is a knowledge of the people whom we’re evangelizing.

Paul knew. He had surveyed, he had theorized about the Athenians based upon his looking around the city, seeing what they were doing. And of course also Paul was very well schooled in his own upbringing as well. And so he understood the thought systems and the philosophical systems of the Greeks.

Paul had in his evangelism a need to prepare himself so that he could speak intelligently to critique the people and the persons that he is addressing. We’ll see that’s a big part of biblical evangelism—is critiquing what the other person is asserting is his God, his worldview, his assertion, his idol essentially. If you don’t understand that, you cannot critique it. And so, as you think about evangelizing your neighbor, you want to think about him and you want to think about how he fits into or what his particular religious worldview is like. Okay? You got to think about that a little bit. You can’t just go to everybody down the block and approach them all the same way. Paul didn’t do that.

Now, Paul did have some basic themes that he wanted to get across. He wanted to get across the creation of the world by God, the sustaining of the world by God, and the judgment of the world by God. But he put that in a context that was specifically geared to critique the people he was addressing. And so with the Athenians, he critiques them on their particular ground.

So as part of biblical evangelism, we got to do some thinking, some analysis based upon the scriptures of what a person, how a person particularly errs, what’s his particular slant on his rebellion against God? That had to be done and is part of preparation. Now that partly is a cultural thing. Most people in America would fall into a particular way of looking at things these days much the way that the Athenians did. Monism is a very prevalent view—that everything is all, that there’s no distinction allowed.

But in any event, an understanding of one’s culture and a particular understanding of the person that you’re going to be speaking the gospel message to is very helpful as preparation for biblical evangelism. So first of all, there’s a knowledge of the subjects. Matthew Henry in speaking on this said that this knowledge of the subjects, the knowledge of the Athenians, enabled Paul to beat them at their own weapon and to cut off Goliath’s head, so to speak, with his own sword.

How can the adversaries of truth be beaten out of their strongholds by those that do not know them? You got to know where they’re going to take refuge as they flee from the word of God in order to beat down that stronghold and leave them in a weakened position. They still may reject it, but the point is that we want to, so to speak, cut off Goliath’s head with his own sword. We want to understand what the person is thinking and then show him the futility and the foolishness of his attempts at God.

So first of all, a knowledge of one’s opponent. Secondly, a knowledge of the means of dialogue with that particular person. When Paul went to Athens, he entered into a discourse, a dialogue, a Socratic exchange. Essentially, Paul used the existing modes of communication, the avenues by which he could present biblical evangelism, the message of the scriptures to the men and have it heard. He didn’t do it his way. He didn’t just stay in the synagogue and expect the Athenians to meet him there. He went to the place where people commonly conversed about such things, which was the marketplace. And then he was given opportunity to speak at the Areopagite.

So with your neighbor, you don’t want to say, “Well, I’m not going to think about how he may hear me.” You want him to hear you. You want him to hear your message. And so whatever your neighbor or this culture provides by way of interchange and dialogue, that’s the vehicle or avenue you want to make use of. And maybe it’s going to the pub with somebody. A lot of people do that. That’s where they go and have their exchanges about philosophy and life. And we can go to the pub and even maybe have a glass of beer or two as we discuss the scriptures with them. That’s one avenue of dialogue some people take. Maybe it’s going to a sporting event. Maybe that’s where they like to take time between halves or whatever it is and do their discussing of worldviews.

So we want to have a knowledge of the worldview, the idolatry of the person we’re talking to, and secondly you want to have a knowledge of the best vehicle by which they like to discuss such things. We want to go into their home, so to speak, into their arena, because that’s where they’re going to be a little more open to hear things of the scriptures.

So biblical preparation involves a knowledge of the worldview of your person you’re talking to and a knowledge of what means of communication are available to present the scriptures.

Third, there is a need to have a proper attitude. We talked about this last week. Paul is not abrasive with the Athenians. Now, his message is going to be very offensive, but he’s not going to be offensive in his own person. He treats them with a degree of respect in the terms of his basic interchange with them. Now, his ideas will be quite offensive. And as you present the biblical message of salvation, you will be offensive to those in the world around us because it runs head-on against them.

It’s a clash of worldviews. It’s worldviews in collision. That’ll be offensive. But you don’t want to be offensive in your manner of speech. You don’t want to be rude. You don’t want to be abrasive. You don’t want to be short. You don’t want to cut the other person off. You want to give him glory, weight, honor. That’s what he expects as an image bearer of God. That’s what he deserves. You want to enter into dialogue with a proper attitude. You want to be humble, as we said from First Peter 3, a spirit of meekness that we don’t give offense with our person. Our words will be offensive of course, but we want God’s word to be offensive, not us in and of our person.

So the third thing is to get our own attitude and perspective correct. And then finally, you have to know what you believe. If you’re going to critique the other person’s position on life and what he believes and why he should live his life the way he does it, and you want to offer him the biblical alternative, you got to know the biblical alternative.

So the four steps of preparation for biblical evangelism is: a knowledge of the person’s God, a knowledge of the means of communication with him by which you can talk about that God and the ineffectiveness of him, the foolishness of his God. Third, a proper attitude, a submissiveness, a winsomeness as it were, a not getting yourself in the way, an inoffensiveness of your manner. Your speech will be offensive, but an inoffensiveness of your manner. And then fourth, a thorough knowledge of the biblical worldview itself, a knowledge of your own Christianity. That’s the biblical preparation for biblical evangelism.

And now the means of biblical evangelism itself. And the text tells us that Paul was angered by idolatry, that he entered into dialogue with them in the context of Socratic exchange. And then it tells us specifically what he told them on Mars Hill. And this is where we want to spend most of our time: biblical means or the biblical message.

And let me first of all give you an overview of what I’m going to say and then we’ll go back over it. First of all, Paul wants to give the message of the scriptures to the Athenians. He wants to tell them the whole Bible. Sounds like a little much, doesn’t it? But that’s what he does really. He begins, as the biblical revelation itself begins in Genesis, with God as creator. He then moves, as he goes through this sermon to the Athenians, this dialogue, from God as creator to God as sustainer. “In him we live and move and have our being.” He determines the bounds of all the habitations of the nations. He sets these things in order. God not only creates mankind and the created order, he sustains it. Okay, that’s the second big biblical model.

And then finally, God is the judge of mankind as well. Just as the scriptures move from creation in Genesis to judgment in the book of Revelation, and in the middle God is sustaining and determining the bounds of the nations. So Paul’s message is that comprehensive to the Athenians. Now it doesn’t have to go into depth on all those things, but that’s the basic message, the biblical message that Paul wants to give the Athenians. But he puts that biblical message in a particular context.

So first of all he has a biblical message, the content of the scriptures. In other words—secondly though, the context. And that actually should be point number one. Point number two is the context for presenting the biblical message of God as creator, sustainer and judge. And that context has several elements to it.

First of all, in the context then for the biblical message, if you’re creating an outline, the context for this begins with his assertion of man’s religiosity. Man is a religious being. Secondly, man is limited. He is a creature. Third, he is culpable for his rejection of God.

So he’s going to—he wants to put the biblical message in the context first of all of some assertions about man. Man is religious. Man is limited. He is a creature, and man is culpably ignorant of God. Okay? He knows enough to convict himself of sin before God. So against that he presents then a critique of the man he’s speaking to, the culture he’s speaking of. And he shows them that they’re religious, they’re creatures, limited as a result, and they are culpably ignorant in their sin.

And against that message, he presents the message of God himself. And this is the context in which he places this idea of biblical revelation. He says that God is the creator, not the creature. God is not limited, as opposed to the limitedness of the person who he’s speaking to. God creates man. And so God has an authoritative word, as opposed to man’s word which is not authoritative. It cannot be authoritative. It is limited and, plus being limited, it’s twisted because of his rejection of God.

So Paul, in the context of placing the Bible’s message of God’s creation, God sustaining mankind and God judging mankind, he puts it in the context of antithetical clashing worldviews—the worldview of man versus the worldview of God. He critiques the Athenians on what they believe and shows that they’re religious, they’re limited, they’re creatures, and they’re culpable in their sin. And over against that, he says that God is not limited. God’s the creator. God is good. You’re evil. And God’s word is authoritative as opposed to your word, which is always unauthoritative.

And having set up those two contrasts, Paul accentuates the difference. So he’s going to put the biblical message into the context of opposing worldviews, and then he’s going to accentuate the difference between those worldviews. And he uses God’s sustaining of man, his providence, as the means by which to accentuate the difference between God’s word and man’s word of flux. God’s word of no change. He says, “God is—in him we live and move and have our being.” And by saying that, he asserts God’s not just his creating everything but his active involvement in everything. And he also uses that to show man’s increased culpability for his sin.

Okay. So he accentuates the difference between the worldviews and then he brings it to culmination with the message of judgment and resurrection. He is there to speak about Christ and the resurrection, but he puts it in the context of the whole message of the scriptures: creation, providence, judgment. And he puts it in the context of opposing worldviews—man’s word of flux and change and is not a fixed word; God’s fixed word. Man’s being a creature, God is the creator. Man is limited, God is not limited. God sustains man, and yet man rejects God and is culpably ignorant of him. He drives that antithesis home and he brings it to a culmination with judgment and the resurrection.

That’s the overview of what we’re going to talk about. And let’s now get into a little bit more specifics on some of these matters.

So you’ve got in these points then, as I said, Paul will move through the entire realm of really a summation of the complete word of God. Paul is not like modern twentieth-century Christians. He doesn’t start with the gospels. He doesn’t start with “Jesus died for your sins and was raised up.” He doesn’t start by saying that “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” In fact, he says if you don’t repent, God has a terrible plan for your life. He doesn’t start with a New Testament message. He starts with Genesis and he moves from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to judgment. And so the overview are those three actions of God in history.

Now, in a little bit broader than that, we could say that he begins with creation. He moves to providence. He then talks about man’s dependence upon God, man’s sin, and then God’s judgment of man. And again, that’s the biblical message from beginning to end.

So Paul’s means of evangelism and, as a model for us, our biblical evangelism should encompass all of the big themes of the biblical message from Genesis to Revelation. Pretty easy to remember really—creation to judgment and then God sustaining man in the meantime. But Paul does this by first of all addressing and critiquing the Athenians themselves.

He begins in verse 22 and he says, “I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.” Talked about this a little bit last week. What Paul begins with here and puts the context for the biblical message is recorded for us in verse 22 and 23: “I perceive in all things you are too superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship him, I declare unto you.”

Their word is ignorance, but they are religious. Paul points out that—all men, because they are created by God, are religious beings. By virtue of their being created by God, they are religious beings. But Paul also knows that by virtue of their sin, they have a degree of ignorance to them. They suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness.

And so Paul, as he wants to place the context for the biblical message, does so by critiquing the Athenians’ own system. This is what I mean. You’ve got to understand a little bit of what the person’s telling you. And the Athenians say, “Well, we do this kind of worship.” And Paul says, “Well, you see the implications of this. Let me point it out to you. You don’t even know what God it is that you’re building the altar to. You are so ignorant of God that you don’t even know who you should declare this altar should be designed to worship.”

“Now, I know you were religious men. Don’t try to tell me that you don’t care about religion and who God is. I know you do. And he gives examples to them. Again, you have altars. You worship. All men worship something. And it’s our job to point out to them who they worship. Because as they’re not worshiping the God of scripture, they’re worshiping in ignorance. And if you press home to them that ignorance, that brings conviction from God’s word to bear upon them as you try to evangelize them.”

So Paul tells them first of all that they are culpably ignorant of God. All men are religious but also all men are sinful. That’s what he asserts in those first two verses. He points out to them the theological inadequacy of their particular worldview. They worship this way; he says if you worship that way to an unknown god you’re worshiping in ignorance.

So he begins—he will not address the big themes of scripture until he brings a sense of conviction to the people he is speaking to of the inadequacies of their own system. He’s going to try to critique, destroy, call into question in their own mind what they are doing. He’s going to show their insecurity of what they assert—that they cannot know all things, that they are limited and hence are culpable before God.

Now he points out to them this ignorance; however, that is a culpable ignorance. He goes on, after he speaks of their culpable ignorance, to speak in verse 24 of God who created the world. You see, in verse 23, really the last half of verse 23: “whom therefore ye ignorantly worship him declare I unto you.” That is really the key phrase of the entire biblical message of evangelism here. He wants them to know of their ignorance and then alongside of their word of ignorance, he wants to affirm God’s authoritative word.

And so after critiquing these men, Paul moves then into an assertion of God’s authoritative word. Now, this is going to be offensive. And as you speak to people today about the Lord Jesus Christ, if you engage in this particular method, which I think is the model for us in most of our intercourse with Americans today, this is going to bring a degree of offense to people.

The Athenians were sort of like Americans. They would put up with experts in particular fields. “Well, if you’re good at nuclear physics, you can talk to us about that. If you’re good at medicine, you can talk to us about that.” But Paul here was asserting the absolute authority of God’s word and declaration to them over all things. And that’s the one thing the Athenians didn’t want to hear about. And it’s the one thing that men in our culture today do not want to hear about.

They want to hear, “I’m okay. You’re okay. We all have our positions. We’re all legitimate. We’re all to be respected and we don’t want to discriminate against one another.” But Paul brought—he accentuated this difference between the Athenians and the Christian worldview. He said, “You worship in ignorance, but him declare I unto you.” The word “declare” is an authoritative term. It means that he declares it with the authority of God’s word.

And we talked last week about how this message correlates with biblical messages. And so Paul isn’t talking about his word here. He’s pointing to the revealed word of God as the source and authority by which he challenges the Athenians. He speaks with the absolute authority of God’s word.

And so Paul in the opening stages of his message to the Athenians contrasts the word of God with the word of man. And he shows the Athenians that they’re religious. He says, “You’re too superstitious,” that word means worshipful, and it could be in a negative sense or a positive sense. He points out their religiosity, but he also points out their ignorance. And alongside of that ignorance, he says, “I declare God unto you.”

And then in verse 24, he begins with the assertion of God’s creating everything: “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshiped with men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell in all the face of the earth and have determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation.”

Paul, having set up the antithesis between man’s word and the Athenians’ word and God’s word, pointing out their ignorance but God’s total authoritative knowledge, pointing out their limitedness and God’s creating everything, drives home this antithesis with a conviction of sin. Paul is involving himself here in setting up two competing systems of thought before the Athenians. He’s presenting the claims of King Jesus versus the claims of men. And as he begins into this discourse, you wouldn’t know this apart from a knowledge of the Athenian system, but he drives home again conviction of sin to them when he tells them that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell in all the face of the earth.”

The Athenians, like so many people, were racist. They believed that the Athenian race had sprung from better seeds, so to speak, than other races. And Paul confronts that particular sin of theirs, their pride, head-on.

It’s an amazing thing to me, by the way, just as a side point here, how often in the history of man, racism rears its ugly head. I was watching a show the other day on the Jews being hated by the Nazis. The Nazis thinking the Aryan race was superior. I remember my shock at finding out that much of World War II, the Japanese involvement was involved with the belief that the Japanese race was superior to all others. We have in our day and age white supremacists who think that the whites are the lost tribes of Israel by virtue of their physical race, that they’re better than other people, that they have souls and black people and yellow people don’t.

We have on the other hand Lewis Farrakhan and the black Muslims who believe that the blacks are the ones who are the original creation, that the Quran and the scriptures, the account in Genesis, talks about dirt and dirt is black and so black people are really the original creation and that the whites are Congo races, etc. The Jews of course are hated by everybody. It is an amazing thing though, and you go back to the Athenians, even at the height of Greek knowledge, and they were racist essentially, that their race was better than other races.

And so Paul attacks that very explicitly in this particular verse.

As I was meditating upon this, I was thinking that when I was in junior high—I believe it must have been junior high because it was a foolish kind of sophomoric thought—I remember thinking of the race problems and everything and I wanted to. I had to write an essay on what I wanted to do with my life. And what I wrote in this essay was that I wanted to get rid of racism. And my means of getting rid of racism was to marry a black woman. I thought that got to be the way that, you know, that’s the way people would have to get rid of racism in our day and age.

And I thought the other day after—Lonnie was here preaching—what a wonderful thing God has done. He’s taken that twisted, perverted sense of a knowledge of God and the knowledge of God’s creating of all things that I had as a sophomore and brought me into a position of understanding indeed that the cure for racism is the Lord Jesus Christ. And in the context of this church, we have literally had—and this is a small church, but we have literally had red and yellow, black and white together in this church worshiping the same God and with essentially a knowledge of the elimination of racism because we all know that we’re here by the grace of God and saved by his grace.

Well, Paul drives that home. And this is another means by which Paul, having set up these two words, man’s word and God’s word, drives home this antithesis between God and man by pointing out the sinfulness of the racism and speaking of God’s creating of all men, creation of all men by God, and so we’re all common in that sense.

Paul’s approach was to accentuate here then, having set up the difference, the antithesis between himself as God’s representative and the philosophers and religionists of Athens, he accentuates that difference through the rest of the talk.

Now notice here that Paul—what Paul, as we said last week, does not do. Paul does not here give a historical or rational argument for Christ’s resurrection. Paul does not appeal rather to brute facts. Paul does not appeal to the inner peace that Christians know. Those are two of the large tools used in evangelism by the church today. But Paul makes use of none of those things.

All those things are true and they have a place in biblical evangelism. But Paul wasn’t trying to get the Athenians to interpret brute facts with their own worldview in place. He wanted to rip out that worldview because he knew the worldview—man’s rejection of God or man’s acceptance of God’s authoritative word. That’s the basis by which all facts are interpreted. So he didn’t just give them historical facts and try to prove to the rational mind that God was acceptable to them. No, that leaves them as the judge. Neither on the other hand did he appeal to the inner peace and tranquility that Christians would know, that God can give you a better life, a better conscience, etc.

Again, there if man makes the choice for God based upon that, then he’s choosing on his own autonomous will. He’s not really submitting himself or bending the knee to the authoritative message of God’s word. So Paul appeals to not to brute facts, nor does he appeal to the inner sense of the peace that Christians have. Both those things are true. But Paul’s approach was to accentuate the difference, to speak in terms of worldviews in collision and help them then by demolishing their own perspective and showing them the foolishness of their own particular worldview.

And as I said, he begins to accentuate that difference by talking to them in terms of race.

Paul asserts the sovereignty of God in this section of his presentation. God has created all things. He’s made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell in all the face of the earth. Hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. Apollo—Paul has a couple of things here. First, he asserts the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, both in the creating of all things and in the sustaining of all things.

And then Paul drives home the ignorance, the culpable ignorance of the Athenians. In verse 27, he says essentially, “You’re groping after him. And yet it’s not God’s fault you’re groping after him. He’s near unto every one of us.” The message of who God is plain even through general revelation. But man has suppressed the truth of God in unrighteousness. And so his ignorance of God is culpable.

Now he asserts here, as I said before, the sovereignty of God. Very important to see this. He says that God made the world and all things therein and he sustains all these things as well. He says God has need of nothing. Now this is very much the message of the entire scriptures. In Isaiah 40 we read, “All the nations are counted as nothing before him. They’re regarded by him as less than nothing and meaningless.” Isaiah 46: “I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is no one like me. Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying my purpose will be established and I will accomplish all my good pleasure.”

The continual message of the scriptures from one end to the other is that God is sovereign and has no need of anything. Indeed, as the elders lead the worship of God in the book of Revelation, the cry goes out, which we have repeated very often in our liturgies in this church: “Worthy art thou our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power for thou did create all things and because of thy will they existed and were created.”

The assertion of God’s creation is an essential task of the biblical evangelist. And with that, the fact that God has need of nothing. I pointed this out last week, but in the context of him being creating all things, it says “not as if he needed anything.” Now, I’m going to read here a text. This was given out by a large church in San Diego or Santa Ana, I guess, back in the late seventies.

Let me just read. This is a typical evangelism tract of many churches today:

“In the beginning, God created choice. Before God made anything—earth, sky, or man—he had already made up his mind that man was to have a choice. Not limited choice like what color socks to wear today. God gave man complete power of selection. So complete that man could choose or reject God. God placed himself in a rather risky position when he armed man with such a tool. He gave man a weapon to use against God. Can you imagine something you’ve ever made saying, ‘I don’t want you, not even for a friend’? God gave man that very option even though he knew what man’s choice would be. God knew that his creation would turn away from him and hate him.

But he always realized there is no better way to prove love than by risking the alternative of rejection. Genuine love requires decision because genuine love cannot be demanded, ordered, or regulated. It must be voluntary. This tells us something about God. God doesn’t do things just for kicks. He must have felt in some sense a need of being loved. Do you think it’s fair to consider that God needs us or to conclude that God needs us? I think so. But he never downgrades the caliber of his love by trying to force us to love him.”

Now, this is typical. And if you don’t see something real wrong with this kind of message, you don’t understand what Paul is telling the Athenians here. And you’re not ready to witness to your friends and neighbors in the context of this culture. This is, in the words of David Chilton who quoted this in his book on Revelation, speaking charitably, he says this is blasphemous nonsense. It asserts man’s power and sovereignty and God’s limitedness. Paul asserts just the reverse. Paul says that in the beginning, God didn’t create choice. God created all things and all men for his own purposes. And as a result, God has need of nothing.

The Arminian perspective that man is the determiner of where his eternal destiny will be and what the fate of the world will be, that perspective frequently is linked to this heretical concept that God has need of humankind. I remember at a big Bible church on the west side of Portland hearing this very same message essentially in the children’s program there, that God made man because he needed fellowship. He wanted somebody. He needed somebody to interact with. He was kind of lonely before he made man. This is blasphemous and it’s the result of improper biblical evangelism.

Biblical evangelism says that God created all things. He is absolute sovereign. He has no need of the Athenians whatsoever. They are the ones with need. They’re the ones who have ignorance. They’re the ones who are groping about in the dark and who are coming up with absolutely ridiculous assertions such as an altar to an unknown god or such as that we are God.