Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon: The Gospel and Conspicuous Idolaters

**Acts 14**

*September 15, 2013 | Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri*

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Thank you for coming to the reading of God’s word. May he bless us today with a consideration of this text and the topic of evangelism and conspicuous idolaters—people who are very blatant in their idolatry. We’ll be preaching on Acts 14. We’ll read verses 1 to 20. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

So this is moving on from Acts 13 in the first missionary journey of Paul, and we’ll come to our second preaching or declaration of the gospel by Paul in his first missionary journey in today’s text, Acts 14.

Now it happened in Iconium that they went together to the synagogue of the Jews and so spoke that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Gentiles—or the Greeks, rather—believed. But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brethren. Therefore they stayed there a long time, speaking boldly in the Lord, who was bearing witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.

But the multitude of the city was divided, part sided with the Jews and part with the apostles. And when a violent attempt was made by both the Gentiles and Jews with their rulers to abuse and stone them, they became aware of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding region. And they were preaching the gospel there.

And in Lystra, a certain man without strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. This man heard Paul speaking. Paul, observing him intently and seeing that he had faith to be healed, said with a loud voice, “Stand up straight on your feet.” And he leaped and walked.

Now when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.” And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.

Then the priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front of the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates in order to sacrifice with the multitudes. But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and ran in among the multitudes, crying out and saying, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and we preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them, who in bygone generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways.

Nevertheless, he did not leave himself without witness in that he did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” And with these sayings, they could scarcely restrain the multitudes from sacrificing to them.

Then Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there, and having persuaded the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. However, when the disciples gathered around him, he rose up and went into the city, and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful account in this book of Acts. Thank you, Lord God, for the editing your Holy Spirit did to the works of the apostles and Paul’s talks and sermons. And we pray, Lord God, that we would pay attention to this particular message of Paul to gross idolaters. Help us, Lord God, both to forsake our own idols and also to be able to evangelize our neighbors, friends, and relatives with the gospel of Jesus Christ, discerning and then helping them to see their own idols and bringing them to the cross of our Savior where they might be put to death. Bless us, Lord God, to that end in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. That is—that the idols might be put to death, in case there was any misunderstanding of that prayer.

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So in this sermon series, we’re trying to ask what the gospel is and then how we communicate it. And so what we’re doing is looking at Paul’s selected portions—or most of the places where Paul describes the good news that he’s proclaiming—and we’re seeing what it is. And then we’re also seeing how to communicate it.

And so today, of course, the communication is far different than Acts 13, where there were people that were committed to the scriptures. Paul gives an exposition of God’s faithfulness to the covenant. He cites the scriptures, et cetera. In today’s account, you know what he’s doing? He actually is referring back to Exodus and the description of God’s creation, but he doesn’t really explicitly cite the scriptures because they have no basis for that yet. So he approaches them differently. And that’s the point: when we evangelize people, we have to think of who we’re talking to and treat them differently.

It is a different thing if your neighbor, for instance, has some Christian background, right? If they attended a church years ago, if their family were Christians—that’s important information for you to know, and then how they responded to that. And maybe you can really sort of start out with the scriptures with them. But if there’s none of that, and increasingly there’s not in our culture and in our nation, then these verses that we’ll be looking at today and on into this book of Acts about idolatry are excellent ways to look at how to talk about the gospel to people.

So last week from Acts 13, if you’re making a list: the gospel was articulated as, at one point, that God keeps his promises. Now, to people that don’t know the promises, that’s… well, but to people that were waiting for the coming of Messiah, the gospel is that God keeps his promises. He’s a promise-keeper.

The gospel is about Jesus, right? It’s rooted in historical facts. It’s not an idea. It’s a declaration that God brought Jesus into this world—the second person of the Trinity was incarnated—and he lived, and then he died. He was crucified, buried, and he was raised up from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. So historical facts about Jesus are an essential part of the gospel.

The gospel is that the whole world is being put to rights. Now, this is an aspect of the gospel that in our particular time is not so much known. Now, here at RCC, if you’ve been raised here, you probably know this, but it’s not normally thought of as part of the gospel.

Now, last week when we looked at Acts 13, Paul cited Psalm 2: “Thou art my son; today have I begotten thee.” Right? But remember that when Paul does that, he’s bringing in other content. He’s not picking verses out of context the way that we frequently do. The rest of Psalm 2 says this: “I have set my king on my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree the Lord has said to me, ‘You are my son. Today I have begotten you.’” So the verse that Paul is citing is actually not a reference to the resurrection, but actually in context in Psalm 2, it’s to the enthronement of Christ at the right hand of the Father at the holy hill of Zion.

So it really brings in the doctrine of the ascension in a kind of abbreviated way, but there it is. And what’s the significance of the ascension? “Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel. Now therefore, be wise, O kings. Be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all those who put their trust in him.”

So the gospel—you know, the word means good news, and the good news was yes, salvation was now accomplished which had been promised. The good news is, as Paul goes on to preach in Acts 13, that Jesus has forgiven us our sins. And there’s news about that. In other words, the forgiveness of sins was known in the Old Testament. It’s old news that God saves us from our sins. But the good news is now he has accomplished it. They were looking forward to it through the sacrificial system. The good news is now he has actually accomplished the definitive atonement for your sins. That’s a point action in time.

By the way, that’s the significance of a point often missing in a lot of so-called reformed churches: limited atonement, or particular atonement might be a better way to put it—that there was a real atonement on the cross two thousand years ago. It’s an historical event. It wasn’t an example of what God does to sin. It wasn’t a moral lesson for us such that the atonement only happens when we do something. No, the atonement for your sins as the elect of God was accomplished two thousand years ago. Now, that’s good news.

But there’s better news, because the other thing that’s happening—the really significant change—is now being worked out in Acts 14. The significant change is having accomplished death and resurrection and then being raised to the right hand of the Father and enthroned. All enemies are becoming subject to his reign, right? All the nations of the earth now are warned. And Paul warns the people at Lystra. And he’ll do it again in Acts 17 to Athens: “Well, for a while, God sort of put up with you guys. Sort of like that. But not anymore. Everything’s changed now.

Jesus is at the right hand of the Father. And all this idolatry, all this gross idolatry, all this ridiculous stuff you do—that stuff’s coming to an end.”

The good news is Jesus is at the right hand of the Father. The ascension of the Savior-King to the throne. That’s an essential part of the good news. Put Jesus is now in the process—in a way that he wasn’t before—at the right hand of the Father. He is putting the world to rights, as N.T. Wright likes to say it. Putting the world to rights. Bringing justice to victory is the way Jesus talks about it in the Gospels.

Now, that’s what the gospel is, as well as these other things we’ve talked about. And it’s a missing component in much of the broader church in our day and age and some of the churches that we came out of. It was just about personal salvation and didn’t really have anything to do with putting the world to rights. But right from the very first missionary journey, in his first sermon, you know, Paul tells them—he cites Psalm 2 and he reminds us that part of the gospel is things have changed. And he doesn’t quote Psalm 2 in today’s text, but he does say there was a time when God overlooked these things. He’ll say the same thing in Acts 17. He’ll say there was a time when God overlooked these things, but now things are different. Things have changed.

So the good news—an essential component or part of it—is that God is putting the world to rights. Okay, the world is being put to rights.

And then he went on to talk about forgiveness of sins, of course. And then very importantly for our modern context, Paul said that because Jesus had forgiven us our sins, he had freed you from everything else that kept you from what would be called today human flourishing. You’ve been freed. And to a culture that values freedom idolatrously—we might say—but still who value freedom. So do the scriptures. The scriptures want men and women to be free in Jesus Christ.

And the text last week said that the only way—the only way—to achieve human freedom and to flourish as a result of it is the Lord Jesus Christ in relationship with the Father through the Son and the Spirit. So that’s a very important part of the gospel message today. Don’t forget that verse—that in addition to forgiving us our sins, Jesus has freed us from all things which the best of legal systems apart from him, the Mosaic law, could not free us. And if the Mosaic law could not free us, what about the thousands of laws and the tens of thousands of bureaucratic rules and administration of the present government? Can that free us? No, it cannot. It’s enslavement.

So freedom to flourish is an essential part of the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly to our culture and to your neighbors. That’s what you need to tell them: we want you to be free. Not just, you know, free from death and to have eternal life, but free today so that you can be all that God intends you to become in Christ. Freedom to flourish.

And while we didn’t talk about this much last week, the gospel always comes with a warning. At some point in your conversations with your neighbors, your co-workers, your friends, whoever it may be, the gospel demands a response. So Paul in Acts 13 gave them the good news that we’ve just talked about. And then he said, “Now be careful. Be warned. Don’t scoff at this because God will crush you.” So the gospel always comes with a warning. Okay? And today the warning is there too, as we’ll see in a couple of minutes. It’s a little more implicit than explicit, but it’s there nonetheless.

So these are elements of the gospel and the way we communicate it. What we’re learning so far is there’s a difference of authorities being cited. There’s a difference of presentation that’s particularly geared to what’s going on in the people’s lives that we talk to. Kind of obvious, I suppose, but it’s significant for us to point out.

Now, we’re going to talk today about idolatry, and we’re going to talk about it a lot the next few weeks because the text does, right? So this text is about idolatry, and it isn’t just about sin. Well, of course, sin and idolatry are inseparably linked, but there’s a difference, you know. When you present to somebody that you can release them from enslaving idols than if you say you are in violation of God’s law—you’re doing things wrong—now, you have to get to that, right? Sin is a topic you have to enter into. But again, what Paul does with gross idolaters is he tries to release them from their idolatry.

Now, they can only be released to the living God. But the language of idolatry is what the text here in Acts 14 shows. In Acts 17, as we move away from Bible-believing Christians, Paul’s presentation of the gospel seems to be focused upon the idea of idolatry. And in our day and age, to talk to people about what is it that they’re looking to for salvation, health, well-being—what are their ultimate values based on? And then to talk about how enslaving those things can be if it’s not the Lord Jesus Christ, if it’s not God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—you know, I think that’s a message that more easily resonates today. And that’s because it’s sort of what Paul did. It’s sort of how God wants us to approach it.

We don’t talk about idols a lot in church, right? Because we think, well, you know, Zeus, Hermes—who’s doing that anymore? Who’s doing that? So we sort of think of it strictly in the sense of carved images of other deities, whatever it is—second commandment sort of stuff. And we sort of fail to see the relationship of the first and second commandments. The first commandment—to have no other gods—really is a warning against idolatry, little “i,” even while the second commandment against created images, bowing down to created images of our hands—that’s capital “I” idolatry, we could say, to distinguish them.

But in the Bible, the Bible says a lot about idolatry, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. So the suggestion here is for you to consider, depending on who you’re talking to, that rather than talk about sin—which is a theological term that nobody really sort of understands—but to talk to people about their sources of idols. People do understand that. And with a little bit of explanation, you can broaden it out to anything that we look to for salvation. And what is the driving factor in your life?

And of course, what we believe as Christians is what Paul said: turn from dead idols to the living God who can. So that’s the message here in some sense, and that’s what you know we want to kind of emphasize.

Now let’s talk about it in some little bit more detail. And these three-part outline—actually, these three words are taken from a talk by Tim Keller at the Gospel Coalition in 2009 conference. They’re not original to me, and they probably aren’t original to him either, but they’re kind of obvious. So we’ll go through these three points.

**DISCERNING IDOLS**

And so the first point is discerning idols, right? So how do we go about discerning idols? Now, it’s interesting that idolatry raises its ugly head in response to a benevolent work. You know, this can be missed if we just go right to what Paul says to the idolaters. But remember, the setup for this is that they heal a man who has been lame. And he’s thrice lame, right? It says three times that this guy was lame. So it’s a really big emphasis. The text wants us to observe that.

Now, one reason for that is that we’ve had another lame man who was healed by a different apostle earlier in the book of Acts. Do you remember Acts chapter 3, if you know your Bibles? Peter and John are walking by the temple, and there’s a man at the gate of the temple, and he’s lame, and he’s begging, right? He’s asking alms. And so Peter—and actually, it’s interesting because Peter stares intently at him. Paul stares intently at this man in Lystra. So there’s a connection.

Again, remember what we said last week. There’s a connection between Paul’s sermon and his citation of the Psalms and Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost and his citation of Psalms. So there’s a connection being made here. And I think that means that we’re to think of it in terms of us as well—there’s a carrying on of Christ’s work through Peter, Paul, and then the church.

But there’s a connection being made: after Peter preaches his sermon, the next account in Acts chapter 3 is the healing of this lame man, and then after that, he and John get arrested because of it. And so here—Paul, we have the first recorded missionary sermon in Acts 13, and then we have a healing of a lame man, and then we have not imprisonment but death, right? They stone him to death, or at least they think they’ve killed him. So it’s the same sort of pattern that’s going on.

Now, what’s the point? Are we just trying to make us see how interesting the scriptures are? Well, maybe, you know. The scriptures are beautiful, and we should have a love for the beauty of how God lays these things out. But there’s another point. I think there’s a very practical point. Because when God does this sort of thing, he can communicate a lot of things in a small amount of time. He wants us to go back and think about Peter’s healing of the lame man.

And there were two aspects of that healing that were very significant. The first is that the man, after he was healed, leapt and walked into the temple. The imagery, the story, the narrative is: the guy, because of his lameness, can’t get into the temple to worship God. And after he’s healed, he goes into the temple to worship God. Now, this lame man is in a city where they worship Zeus. And they go to the temple of Zeus. But what we want to think of in the healing of this man is he’s healed so that he can approach God now in worship. You see the connection?

So the benevolent deed done by Peter first, and then by Paul later, has as its kind of goal, or its immediate pragmatic effect, the ability to worship God. And so benevolence is tied to the worship of God.

Now there’s a second thing that is talked about with this lame man in Acts 3, and that’s his begging of alms. If you were lame at that time in world history, in antiquity, you know, you didn’t have all these programs set up for the disabled, and so you couldn’t do normal work. You couldn’t do vocation in an agricultural community. And so this man is missing vocation. And so what Peter does—and what we can think of Paul doing to this man in Lystra—is restoring the man to vocation.

Now, that’s what the gospel does too. That’s the gospel of God. The gospel restores us to relationship with God so that we can worship him correctly, and he restores us to true vocation so that we can exercise vocation as we’re called to do. That’s why we’re here on earth—is to exercise our callings and vocations and work.

So when we do benevolent actions, you know, through love—in our own, whatever personal things we do—you know, it’s tied to the restoration to worship and the restoration to work and vocation under worship. Okay. So it seems like that’s important, and to the extent that the Christian church changes people’s lives, you know, they like it. If we restore people to work, they’re not so big about throwing in the worship side of it. But if our benevolent work is aimed at that—to bring people to a restored sense of vocation, not enabling non-vocation, right?—we restore them to a vocation, and we restore them to relationship to God.

If it’s love in the name of Christ—not just love in the name of who knows what, love in the name of Christ—when we do those things, we’re going to get pushed back. The idols of that culture don’t like that because it’s the claim to a different form, a different area, a different view of salvation, healing, and wholeness.

So one way you discern idols is to do good works. When you do good works and you help people vocationally, in relationship to God, and other things as well, when you help people, you will probably then begin to discern how people respond to that and begin to see some of the idols that may be in their life or in the life of their culture. So part of it is that to discern—so that’s the first thing: it will help you to discern idols in the people you’re talking to if you help them, if you start to minister to them, right?

And then the second point in your outline is we have to think a little bit about what’s an idol to discern an idol. As I said, it seems like in evangelicalism, we don’t think about this a whole lot, but the Bible’s filled with it. And I got a couple of scripture references for you there: Jeremiah 2 and Ezekiel 14.

In Jeremiah chapters 2 and 3, God talks a lot about the idolatry and adultery—those things are combined—of Israel in reference to him. And specifically what he tells them in Jeremiah 2 is you’ve made these foreign alliances with Egypt and Assyria for political protection, for military defense. Now, we wouldn’t normally think of that as an idol, but that’s what God calls it. So idolatry, you know, is a lot broader than setting up an icon or going to a temple of Zeus, as it happens here.

In order for Paul and Barnabas—they have to, you know—they get to discern the idols here pretty easily. But for us, it’s a little more difficult sometimes. But if we remember Jeremiah 2—that military alliances can be idols—it helps us to understand, oh, okay, I get it. When we look to something other than God for protection and well-being, then we’re looking at an idol. That’s what happens.

Ezekiel—Ezekiel is even more explicit. And in Ezekiel chapter 14, verse 3, God says, “You’ve manufactured idols in your heart. You’ve invented idols in your heart.” So now God is telling us that idols are not just things you make with your hands and stuff. It’s hard idols. Hard idols.

John Calvin said that in his section on idolatry in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, that “man is an idol factory. His soul is a factory of idols. As soon as we’re born, we start to invent idols in our heart.” Now he’s actually talking about carved images, but you can get a t-shirt where this quote from the Institutes is on it—about how man is this great factory of making idols in our hearts. And in the immediate context he’s talking about second commandment sort of idols, but it’s being used today in a broader sense, properly, because Ezekiel talks about inventing idols in our heart, and Jeremiah says an example of an idol are military alliances that you look to rather than to God to protect you from the forces around you.

So these texts show us that idolatry is far broader than just the sort of things we normally think of. And actually, Romans 1 says that idolatry is who we are. This is what man is. Man is an idolater in his fallen state, right? Because the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen to him in the created order. You know, we think of general revelation and special revelation. You know, Paul talks in today’s text about God’s witness being in what we would call general revelation. But the Spirit’s witness is integrally tied up with the created order. I think we want to be very careful drawing too hard a line between general and special revelation because Romans 1 says that what we would call general revelation—in it, we can clearly see the attributes of God.

We had James B. Jordan at family camp probably twenty years ago, and you—some of you might remember this or listen to the tapes—and he said, you know, that little bird out there is tweeting away—”God made me. He is triune. God is triune. That’s what a bird does, why? Because one of the attributes of God is his trinitarian nature. And God says the created order demonstrates this.” Clearly seen, God’s nature, his invisible attributes are clearly seen.

And what do we do? Well, we exchange the image of God. We don’t want to give him thanks. And so instead, we exchange the image of God for created things—birds, beasts, creepy things, bugs. Now, now don’t think he’s saying there that as long as you don’t worship a caterpillar, you’re doing okay. What he’s saying is any created thing, all of which are good, all those birds, drugs and stuff are good, right? Any good gift that God has given to us is what we like to turn in our hearts and our minds into idols so that we don’t have to rely upon God.

So, you know, idolatry—discerning idolatry—what’s an idol? Well, an idol is what we do all the time. An idol is how we sin. We set up something other than God as a source of well-being for us, and then we begin to worship that thing—in the sense of bowing, not bowing down to it, but actually, you know, it becomes preeminent in our life.

So an idol is a far broader concept than just these things. You know, in the old world there were all kinds of idols. For instance, in the book of Acts, later on, Paul goes to Ephesus, and there’s a temple of Artemis—or Diana—there, and when the gospel comes, the adherents of Diana worship get all worked up, and they have a riot and want to kill them—all this stuff. And what do they—what are they worried about? They’re worried they won’t be able to sell their little shrines, their little things to worship. They’re worried about business.

And unless we understand that Artemis—or Diana—is the goddess of fertility and hence of commerce, right? I mean, if you’re in an agricultural economy primarily, if you’ve got a goddess who will help your crops grow, the goddess really is one of business or commerce. That’s Diana. Okay. And so they have a god—or a goddess in this case—of commerce. What’s their idol? Well, it may be the physical statue that supposedly came out of heaven. But really, underneath it, what God is showing us in the description of the idolaters themselves is their idolatry is commerce. Everything is about commerce to them. If the gospel is going to interfere with commerce, then we’ve got to destroy the gospel bringers, right?

Commerce. You know, there were all kinds of gods. So any of them are taking something that is inherently good—a gift of God—and turning it into something that it is not intended to be used for. Commerce is good. Business is good. But when it becomes ultimate in our life, it’s become an idol.

So an idol is something—a good gift of God—that we take and make into something that is more important to us. It’s a higher power, a stronger one, than God himself. And we’re willing to set aside God for the sake of that thing.

You know, sex gods are common. Why is that? Because the human form is beautiful. The human form is beautiful. It’s a good thing by God. Sexual relations in the context of marriage are a wonderful thing. And so what do we tend to do? We tend to, you know, make them into idols. So the old world had all these fertility, economic, commerce gods and shrines. They had sex gods and shrines. They had shrines to play. They had gods of recreation. They had all kinds of gods, because anything in the world we, at our fallen nature, Romans 1 says, essentially turn into an idol.

So that’s what an idol is. An idol is something that we prioritize above God.

I think this comes from The Excellent Wife. I don’t really remember this quote, but here’s a definition: an idol is something that we set our hearts on that God does not want us to have, or does not want us to have right now. It can be anything, even a good thing. It’s a desire we are willing to sin for. That’s a good thing to remember: a desire you’re willing to sin for. That’s an indication of what an idol is. Okay?

When you sin, Martin Luther said that all the Ten Commandments are based upon violations of the first commandment. When we turn away from God and make another god—an idol—to us, that’s when we lie or steal or murder, whatever it is. That’s what we’re doing. You lie because, for instance, your reputation has become an idol to you. It’s more important to you to be seen in a particular way through a lie than it is to be truthful and maybe your reputation suffers a little bit.

So when we exalt our reputation, we break God’s word. Why? Because our reputation—which is a good thing, a man’s reputation is an important thing—but it’s a good thing that we turn into idolatry when we desire it more than God and more than his truth. See? So you know, we value freedom. We value commerce. We don’t want to stop those things one day a week. And so we sin, change churches, change denominations, set up all kinds of things in our hearts because we don’t want to submit to that thing.

Now, sometimes it’s just a simple knowledge of scripture thing, but this is the idea: to identify what an idol is, it’s something that you’re seeking or desiring that results in you sinning to obtain it.

Colossians 3:5 says, “Don’t be greedy for the things of this life, for that is idolatry.” Desiring things of this life—any of the things—reputation, knowledge, spiritual exercises, anything religion itself, right? I mean, the people in Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time, they came to the temple—”the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord is this.” They had made the temple into an idolatrous exercise for them. You can do that here. When going to church is what you think is the basis for your well-being with God instead of your relationship with him, that could be idolatrous.

So anything, any good thing from God, his great gifts to us, and his best of gifts frequently become the source of idolatries to us. Idolatries are some created thing that men look to for salvation, wholeness, purpose, rescue. As we can tell from the text today, they thought, well, if good comes, it must come from the idol that we’re looking to for this. So they were looking to Zeus and Hermes to bring healing and restoration and vocation back to particular people’s lives.

Athena was the goddess of reason. We can take the good thing of ability to reason and think and make it idolatrous. And that’s what we tend to do. We can take the good things that God has given to us. And that’s what an idol is. An idol is this exaggeration of a particular good thing to a leading place, a controlling place, in our lives. And we end up doing odd things for these idols.

You know, there’s the sacrifice of children in the Old Testament, right? People sacrifice children to idols. Well, people still do that. Yet it’s not unheard of. In fact, it’s somewhat common for men to sacrifice their children for their career. Their career becomes all-consuming, and they end up having very little parenting time with their children, influence in their lives, because their career has become all-important.

Now, the children can become an idol—idolatrous thing—too, right? You can be so concerned about your children that you really don’t exercise vocation properly, and that’s because the children become an idol. Some people—that’s what they want to do in life—is their life really hasn’t turned out the way they wanted. So they’ll live out their hopes and expectations, their idolatrous hopes and expectations, through their children, and their children can become idolatrous.

We had this wonderful wedding yesterday. Wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t it great? Wasn’t it like, you know, a capstone of sort of thirty years of you know watching the saints of God come together and have fellowship and community and rejoice and maintain you know marriage and build godly Christian marriage. I mean, just a wonderful time. But you know, marriage can become an idol as well. It’s a great gift from God. But you know, when your happiness of your spouse becomes more important to you than God, and you’re willing to sin against God for the happiness of your spouse, idolatry has set in. Okay?

So you get the point. Idols are everywhere. Idols, you know, are things that we put our trust in, expect salvation from, et cetera. That’s what I think the scriptures tell us an idol is.

Now, idols bring a great deal of disappointment. I wanted to read this quote. “It is the nature of man to be religious, and it’s the nature of man to sin idolatrously.” And this is a quote from a man who was once seen as the best and most brilliant American writer of his generation. This was a novelist, essayist, and professor of literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His name was David Foster Wallace. And some of you may have heard this quote, but he gave a commencement address, and he was an atheist, but in his commencement address, he speaks truth. He speaks truth.

Let me read you what he said. And this is what he’s probably most famous for is this commencement address. Here’s a portion of it. He said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what we want to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

He wasn’t a believer, but he said one of the reasons why it’s good to believe—which I don’t do—is because all the other things you worship in your life, those idols will eat you alive. That’s what he said. He went on to say—let’s see if I can find my place—yeah, he said, “If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, that’s your real meaning in life is money and things, then you will never have enough. You can’t get satisfaction. You never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing—you start showing, rather—you will die a million deaths.”

I was thinking this morning that maybe that’s one reason why God has us age and things fall apart, and you know, you know, if you worship sex in your youth—that sex will eat you alive because you won’t be able to have those same things. Your beauty will fade. The beauty of your spouse will fade as you get older. And it’s God’s way of training us away early on—if you understand that—away from a potential idol in the context of your life.

Well, so Wallace says everybody’s worshiping something, and he says that whatever we end up worshiping, if it’s not God, will eat us. Exactly right. That’s exactly right. He was not a believer. Wallace ended up committing suicide in 2008, I believe. That’s what idolatry does. He understood it, but he didn’t turn from it to the living God.

So, how do we discern idols? Well, I’ve got in your statement here, Luther and the Ten Commandments, right? So Paul in the text, he doesn’t have a hard time discerning their idols. They show them to him outright. We read that, you know, what happens after he heals this man is this idolatrous reaction of the people that he’s dealing with. Okay? So he has a fairly easy time discerning them. But, you know, for us, as I said before, one way to discern our idols is how we habitually sin. Habitual sin patterns are evidences to us of pretty gross idolatry in the context of our lives. So if you’ve got a habitual sin you’re dealing with, you’re probably dealing with an idol.

So one way to discern what these are in our lives are by looking at what sins are being affected. Another way is through the popular media, right? I’ve been talking about freedom as an absolute idol in the context of America. And this last week, I saw this movie, World’s End. It’s about a pub crawl, and a man saves the world. And from my perspective, as I interpreted the movie in the last few scenes of the movie, what it’s saying is that freedom—not the freedom to do good, freedom to do any doggone thing you want to do—this is what will save the world. And so, you know, you see this reflected over and over again in the popular culture because that has become an idol of our culture, and it was not always thus. This culture did not always see that as one of its idols.

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man said this: “When all that says it is good has been debunked, what says I want remains.” And so that’s what’s happened in the last—Lewis saw it coming—and that’s what’s happened in our day and age. So what anything we want now, our desire itself is the idol that many people now attempt to serve and to exalt.

So there are personal idols, there are cultural idols, and one way to discern them is by looking at sin and what makes you sin. You know, I’d ask you today: are you having trouble, for instance, with your spouse—doing what you know the scripture says you should do relative to your husband or to your wife? And if you are, something’s idolatrous going on in your relationship. Something that’s causing you to sin relative to your wife or to your husband—this is an idol in your life. And if you do not remove that idol, it will, in the words of Wallace, eat you alive. Okay?

**EXPOSING IDOLS**

Now, so that’s you know discerning idols. In Paul’s case, it was fairly easy. They begin to enter into rank idolatry, and exposing idols. Well, first of all, when idolatry happens in the context of Paul and Barnabas, they don’t say, “Well, isn’t that interesting? Let’s do a study on this, and let’s talk about…” They rend their clothes. They have a visceral reaction against that kind of idolatrous action.

Now, we’ll see the same thing in Acts 17, in case you think, well, it’s just because they were worshiping Zeus and Hermes—this kind of rank idolatry. But no, Paul in Acts 17 sees the idolatry of a sophisticated cultural elite city, and he sees that in Athens, and he has the same reaction. He’s provoked. We’ll talk about this next week. Idolatries should provoke us and should move us to want to expose them. Okay? They should move us to want to expose them. So our reaction to idols, our exposing our subjects of who we’re talking to, our evangelism of people—discerns their idols and then exposes their idols to them. And part of that is just disapproval. You get cranked up to where you want to do something about it.

But notice what Paul does here, after they rend their clothes. Here’s his first words to these men: “Men, why are you doing these things?” That’s an interesting sentence, isn’t it? It’s a good sentence to say to someone who, you know, is sacrificing their children for their career. You know, one way to help them expose their own idolatry to them is to ask them why they’re engaging in the conduct they are. Have you noticed you don’t see your kids much? Have you ever wondered why you’re doing that? It’s a way of exposing to them the idols in their lives. And you know, it’s interesting because a lot of people respond very positively to that kind of interaction, right? I mean, you sort of know, “Oh yeah, I should be spending more time with my kids. Oh, should be nicer to my wife. Oh, whatever it is.” So you know, people will respond to that usually in a positive way if we move to evaluating their idolatry and then move to expose their idolatry to them. We can do that.

So Paul does this first of all by asking them to reflect on what they’re doing. “Why are you doing these things?” Reflect. Okay. So reflection, I think, is part of what happens in the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who are engaged in idolatry. And then he engages in a system of reasoning, right? “Why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you.” You’re worshiping us, but hey, we’re just like you. So they begin to debunk their idols through a line of reasoning is what Paul is doing here. We’re men just like you, and we preach to you that you should turn. So you know, he begins a line of reasoning, and then he calls for them to turn from their idols.

And this is now moving into the destruction of idols. Our purpose is to destroy the other person’s idol by getting them to turn to the living God. And this is what Paul begins to do.

Then, “Why do you these things?” Call for reflection. “We are men with the same nature or passions as you. We’re just like you.” You know, a debunking of their idol. And then a call to change. The gospel requires response. “We preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God.” That’s the summation Paul gives of how he presented the gospel to these people.

If you want to sum up the gospel, it’s to turn from dead things—or from useless things, rather—to the living God. They’re useless. They’re nothing, right? An idol is really nothing. Paul says that idols cannot help you. It cannot bring satisfaction. It cannot bring health, education, and welfare if it’s the state being your idol. But God can. He’s the living God.

**DESTROYING IDOLS**

And so, to destroy the idols: we discern them. We expose them. And our goal is to destroy idols in people’s lives through the proclamation of the gospel and calling people to turn to the living God.

And then Paul talks about this living God who made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them. So he says, look, the things you’re worshiping in the world, there’s everything has been made by him. So you have to take the things that you’re worshiping and put them in a proper relationship to the living God who gave us these very things. So it’s a call to submit the things we may properly desire—they may be good things—and to bring them under the subjection of the one who created all things.

The doctrine of creation is essential in the proclamation of the gospel to those who are outside of the church, outside of a commitment to scriptures. It is part of destroying the idols of the culture round about us—putting the thing they’re going after in its proper relationship to the one who created them.

And then he says, “In bygone generations he showed—he allowed all nations to walk in their own ways.” It’s a warning. In the past you could walk in your own ways, but that’s not happening anymore. So he gives them good reason to turn from their idols. And then he warns them that the judgment of God is imminent in their lives if they don’t turn from these idols.

And then finally, he tells them about the goodness of God. “Nevertheless, he did not leave himself without witness, in that he did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” See, general revelation—but it’s really pretty special revelation, isn’t it? He gives us rain. He gives us food. He fills our hearts with food and gladness—everybody—because the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen in the created order. And what is the attribute he’s pointing to at the conclusion here? He’s pointing them to the love of God. The created order is not something that we just have no relationship to; the created order is the demonstration of God’s love to us. God’s love to us.

We destroy the idols of those we’re talking to by first discerning them, secondly exposing them to the people we’re talking to, and then third, calling on them to turn from those things to the living God and telling them who that God is. He’s the God that made the beauty of women, for instance, or the beauty of men. He’s the God that made commerce possible. It’s a great thing. He’s the God that made civil states even. But why are you idolatrously looking to the state for health, education, and welfare? He puts all things under a proper relationship to the Creator God.

And then he says that this creation itself is a witness of the Holy Spirit. It’s, you know, general revelation just leaves it a little short, I’m afraid. He says the created order itself is a witness of God, the witness of the Holy Spirit to you that God is good. Good. He’s not going to be like the idols that you serve, eating you alive, as Wallace said. He’s going to be freeing to you. He’s going to bring blessing to you. Submit your idols to him.

So the destruction of idols around us has to do with essentially calling them to turn to the living God who is good and who is loving.

Now, look at verse 18. “With these sayings, they—he could scarcely restrain the multitude from sacrificing to them.” But they seemed to do it; they actually did seem to restrain them. They were successful in this method that they were using. And what they did, they were successful in stopping idolatry. That’s our goal with our neighbors, with our friends, with our neighborhoods, with our culture, with ourselves. It’s to destroy the idols and get us to turn from those things to the living God.

But then along come the Jews again, and they stir the people up, and then they kill Paul. They stone him and they drag him outside of the city and they leave him for dead. A wonderful little postscript here, isn’t it? Because it’s a picture of the healing of the lame man—of turning from worthless dead things to the living God, right? It’s a picture of that because Paul is dead and comes back to life. I mean, he wasn’t really dead. They thought he was dead, but the image, the story, the narrative is that God brings life to a dead world. Paul’s identification—there’s an identification, as it were, going on here.

And then the wonderful thing about the way it ends—and sometimes you do beat a strategic retreat, right? But did you notice when we read this what Paul does when he’s raised back up? Yeah. He rose up and went into the city, and the next day he leaves the city. He goes back to the idolaters because he’s concerned about them. He’s got them to stop, you know, becoming idolatrous. And he wants to show them now, “Hey, look, my God, he raises me up from your death sentence, and here I am.” And he brings more good news to them.

He, in the words of Charles Spurgeon, this great Scottish pastor—he, in the words of Chalmers, runs to the roar of the lions, right? The lions are in the street. The devil prowls about like a lion, seeking whom he may devour. And what’s our response? To hide from the lion in the street, to be slothful? No. The text goes on to say, “Resist, steadfast in the faith. You run to the roar where the lion is attacking other people, and you run to that point of conflict.”

And that’s what Paul did. He goes back into the city that had just stoned him, dragged him out, left him for dead. He goes back to those people, right?

David, when David fights Goliath—children, I don’t know if you know, you know, this part of the story, but when we finally get to where David and Goliath are going to fight, Goliath comes out, and what does David do? Does he hide around a rock and then throw his little sling? No. The text tells us that David ran at Goliath and then hit him with the stone. He ran to the roar. He ran to where the problems are. He ran to where people needed saving, or in this case, in the case of Goliath, he needed to destroy that idol of the Philistines. He runs to the roar.

May the Lord God give us that kind of courage. May our reputation not be so idolatrous that we’re afraid to share the gospel with our friends and neighbors. May we not think that our reason—may our reason not be idolatrous to us, and think that we’ll never be able to really fully explain things to our neighbor. The Lord God uses Balaam. He talks through the voice of a donkey, right? He can use your voice. May we run to the roar.

Whatever weapons we’ve got—a little slingshot—to save our neighbors, to free them from idolatry, to turn them to the living God, who in his very demonstration of the world we live in is showing us over and over and over how good he is, how loving he is, how he fills us with food and gladness.

May the Lord God give us the strength and courage, the desire to save people, to make well, to turn the weak knees and lame feet, to fix them the way your prayers and the work of the doctors fixed my leg. May we want to do that for our neighbors enough so that we can think about who they are—discerning their idols, exposing their idols to them, right? Asking them, “Why are you doing this particular thing? Can’t you see? And can’t you see that thing won’t give you satisfaction?” And then destroying their idols by turning them to the living God and his witness through all the created order. The very things they’re treating as idols are evidences of God’s goodness to them and to us.

May the Lord God grant us wisdom to turn from our idols and to be used by God to bring the only message that can destroy idols—the message of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. We thank you, Father, for calling on us and equipping us to discern, expose, and destroy idols as we encounter them in our lives and in the lives of those that we love and care for and are trying to witness to. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.