Dennis Tuuri

of those that we learned when Reformation Covenant Church started 30 years ago yet prepared us for battle as this church was formed. I pray God that today’s text and its setting and understanding will prepare the generation of young adults that we have gathered around us for the battle that they have to face. No less fearsome and in fact more difficult I think. But today’s text will help them and us as we seek to press the claims of Jesus Christ in our particular culture.

Today we turn to Acts 17. We began this with just verse 16 two weeks ago and today we’ll move into Paul’s actual discourse on Mars Hill. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Acts 17:16. I’ll read through the first verse of chapter 18. Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.

Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him and some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears.

We wish to know them, therefore, what these strange things might mean.” Now, all the Athenians and the foreigners who live there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. So Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription to the unknown God.

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you, the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. Nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods of time and the boundaries of their dwelling place that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.

Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being as even some of your own prophets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked. But now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.

And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also was Dionysius, the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. Bless us, Father, with open ears this morning. Give us alert minds to focus upon what Paul tells us here. Help us to be transformed, Lord God, by this word. May your Holy Spirit illumine our eyes to understand it and change our hearts and stir our hearts so that we might engage in the present day battle that the Lord Jesus Christ has placed before us. Bless this text, Father, to our hearing. In Jesus’ name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom not ours. Amen.

Please be seated. What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The church with Plato’s Academy. The Christian with the heretic. Our principles come from the porch of Solomon who had himself taught that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. I have no use for a stoic or a Platonic or a dialectic Christianity. After Jesus Christ, we have no need of speculation. After the gospel, no need of research. This sort of research. When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe anything else. For we begin by believing that there is nothing else which we have to believe.

So spoke Tertullian, a church father in the 3rd century. And this phrase has come down through the ages. What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? Well, Paul goes to Athens. This is the thriller in Manila. This is the big bout. This is like the Super Bowl of Super Bowls, you could say, because here we have Athens, the great cultural center of the Hellenistic world. Hellenistic because the Greeks didn’t call themselves Greeks. They called themselves Hellenes. So Hellenistic refers to the Greeks. But this is what it is. And this Hellenistic culture had pervaded the civilized world. And when the Romans take over from the Greeks politically and become the rulers of the new empire, they’re really a Greco-Roman Empire because the Romans pretty much preserve Hellenistic culture.

And Paul now is in the heart of darkness. We could say the heart of darkness. Yeah. Our legislators don’t see Athens as the heart of darkness. Our schools don’t see Athens as the heart of darkness. They continue to look to Athens and particularly in its early years from where Paul saw it, the philosophies you know of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and all the different men that came forth from them and the political systems that were formed.

We continue to look at them in Western civilization as sort of the beating heart of who we are as opposed to Jerusalem which we sort of look at, Old Testament laws, weird. I don’t know about that. Honestly, our culture seems to prefer Athens to Jerusalem. Our Christianity is not. Our Christianity says that we must go to Athens, be provoked by the idols we see there, and be moved to begin to dialogue with men.

That’s what the word reasoned with them that Paul did was all about. We should be moved to dialogue with the people in our culture. We should want to discern the idolatry of our day, right? To expose it to the people we’re seeing and to destroy it.

Yavor was right last Sunday. Get ready to go to India. Missionaries, get ready to tell the Indians to eat their idols. Eat their cows. Have some steak. Cook it up. That’s what we do. We say, “Consume your idols because your idols are simply being misused things. Cows are great. Steak is good, right? Hamburgers. Yes. Sorry if you don’t think so, but it is good.” So this is what we want to do and this is what Paul is doing here. He is crushing idolatry in Athens. He’s not having a little civil discussion with him. He is, but his goal is to crush the idolatry at the heart of this Hellenistic culture.

You see, to deal a death blow or rather to build on the death blow that came in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Now, we’re doing this series on evangelism. This is who we are. Paul is doing what the Holy Spirit communicated to him bringing Jesus. Who is this that comes from Edom, the warrior Jesus? And that’s who we are as well. We’re just like Paul. Well, he’s, you know, very sophisticated, very knowledgeable.

But you know what he does here is simple. It is simple, brothers and sisters. Once you get out of the way that you’ve got to know all about the people you’re talking to and all their philosophies and all their points of view and you get down to the simplicity of the matter. What Paul says here, honestly, you know, he no doubt unpacked it further and adults can do that and educated adults can do this. People that know their Bibles can do this even better.

But honestly, what he tells us here is found in the kids catechism, the little kids catechism. Your outline today is from, I don’t know, 1994 or something. Busy week plus I thought, well, this outline seems to take us through the text. Okay. And when I preached this sermon way back when, Charity was two and a half years old. And so she used the little kid’s catechism, right? Who made you? God. What else did God make? All things. Why did God make you and all things? And she would say, for his own glory. Because she couldn’t pronounce glory. She was two and a half. For his own glory. Why should you glorify God? The catechism goes on. Because he made me and he takes care of me.

That’s what Paul says here. This is the apologetic. This is the evangelism. The underpinnings of the evangelism of Paul is just that creation and providence and then he builds towards judgment.

Now that’s not complicated. It’s not complicated. But you know the biggest problem for us is not preaching the simple gospel and even providing a basis for the understanding of it that’s simple and based in creation and providence and judgment. That’s not our problem really. Our problem is we sort of like Athens, too. Or at least we don’t get provoked at it as much as Paul did. We kind of want this dial kind of a little bit of both going on.

Our goal is not to crush the head of our idols of the people and our idols, right? I mean, we can say it is, but being moved into action. This is our problem. And part of that is confidence. And I hope today to give you confidence in the ability to do that. But you know, you got to have you got to have a mindset that this is what God wants you to do.

Now, in the book of Daniel, Daniel was given this vision. Nebuchadnezzar interprets it for him of these four progressive kingdoms. And the last one is kind of a mixture between Greece and Rome. It’s the time which Paul was living. And you remember what happens in the vision, right? God had provided a home through these empires for his people. But then along comes a rock and the rock destroys this statue representing these empires of the world. The Greco-Roman world was hit by a rock. That rock is Jesus Christ. And that rock grows to fill all the world.

Brothers and sisters, that’s evangelism. We’re a rolling stone rolling through idols, crushing them and building the manifestation of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. That’s what Psalm 2 says. And that setting of it puts us in the right warrior mentality to do it. That’s our job. We’ve got people here from the Ukraine. We’ve got a guy here from Kazan in Russia, right? We got even Alaska represented. Yo, represent Alaska. Walters, not Walters, I’m sorry. Alyup also represents today. Okay. Well, that’s who we are.

See, each one of these areas—Ukraine, Poland—gross idolatry everywhere. But these men and women who come to us from there, they’re sent back with their role there as rocks destroying the idols of that culture. And let me just make a point, and Paul knows this. You know, he knows that AD70 is coming. Remember the talk he gave in Acts 13:40? Remember we talked about that? 40 years after the resurrection of Jesus comes the destruction of Jerusalem. He knows what’s going on and he applies it in a particular way that was particular to his time and place. But we know the same thing that the rock is growing to fill all the world.

Definitively rolled through things in AD70, but it rolls through the world when we open our mouths and speak.

And we got a little problem. Tertullian says, “Well, what do we have to do with the academy with Plato’s academy. You know, we have the porch of Solomon. See, you’ll notice as we read through the text, there are Epicureans and there were Stoics. There are a lot of other groups there at the time. The Epicureans are followers of Epicurus, his teachings. But the Stoics are followers of Zeno. So why aren’t they Zenoanians? Because he taught at the Stoa or the porch. And so Stoic philosophy is the philosophy found taught and developed at the porch by Zeno teaching there. And so this is why Tertullian says we have the porch of Solomon. We don’t need those guys, right?

And what he’s describing as I’ve talked about is this Hellenistic culture that the church warred against. And Tertullian was saying we don’t want syncretism with that.

Now when we read in Ephesians that we’re to raise our children in the nurture of God, that’s the paideia of God, the school, you know, that some of our families have started, Paideia, it’s the nurture of God. And it doesn’t just mean teaching little facts. It means inculturating. This was the word that was used to inculturate the citizenry of Rome and the countries they would conquer in Hellenism. Hellenism was the culture. It was the paideia and it was what we might think of today as a worldview.

These philosophers, you know, weren’t, you know, lecturers in some university hall. They really were developments of various worldviews is a better way to think of it. And the problem we have today, one of the huge problems is we’ve got this now adulterous and idolatrous public school system that inculturates in Hellenism. Well, you know, a 21st century American version of Hellenism. But that’s the culture. There is a culture. There’s an inculturation that happens in the public schools.

And if you think you can get Johnny home for an hour in the evening and provide him with the culture of Jesus to effectively combat that, good luck. Good luck. So, one of the central battles that we have is talking to the church and the church talking to her members and saying, “We’ve got to inculturate our children. Not at Athens, not, you know, at Plato’s Academy, not at the porch of Zeno, not at the government schools, which is really more the porch of the NEA, right? The teachers union, which is socialistic, anti-capitalist, certainly anti-Christian, anti-family. Is that where we’re going to send our kids? It’s nuts.

And here we sit, 30 years of speaking this message, and in the same place today. Not really much more penetration into the public schools getting Christians to pull their kids out because this text is not understood, preached, and applied. But this is what it’s all about. If we can’t be responsible for the inculturation of our own children in Christ and instead trot Johnny and Julie off to the public schools for inculturation, we don’t have a prayer. And that’s why things are falling apart.

But you know, it’s interesting because the way things have fallen apart in this country make this text very relevant. Don’t worry about the outline. We’ll do a couple of weeks here. So, don’t worry if you’re starting to get that nagging feeling. Tri’s going to do two sermons again today. No, I’m trying just to do one. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the rest of this stuff next week that we don’t get to today.

But, but see, here’s the deal. So it’s very important, this text I think is of critical importance to us to learn as we wish to engage in intentional missionality, evangelism with our neighbors, coworkers, their cities, whatever it is.

Why do I say that? Well, when I was a kid, this text wasn’t as relevant. I mean, it’s always relevant. It’s the word of God. But the sort of world that Paul was now addressing at Athens, this is the sort of world we have become—postmodernism, right? They were kind of postmodern. You know, there were all kinds of worldviews. It wasn’t just Epicureans and Stoics or all kinds of worldviews being taught all over the map.

You know, some people would abstain from anything fleshly as a way to be good. Some people would engage every physical desire they have. I mean, it was all over the map, right? And the one thing that was not really tolerated was the idea that somebody might be right in the sense of other people being wrong. The exclusivity of a claim to truth, worldview, life. This was the only verboten topic. That sounds familiar because those are the days in which we live.

You know, if you went to most of the people in Athens and talked about Moses or what was going on with Jesus, they got no clue. What you’re talking about. They have no categories for it. They don’t have the education for most of them at least in what that little sect does over there in Israel, you know, at Jerusalem. They’re just ignorant about the whole thing. And over the last 30 years, largely because of the public school system and the breakdown of the family, another government deal, most young people today, they don’t have a clue.

You can’t talk to them the way that I would have witnessed to people 30, 40 years ago, you just can’t do it. If you do, you’re going to be highly ineffective. Now, God’s arm is not shortened, right? You can go up to a guy who has no clue, no nothing, and in 15 minutes or shorter, the Holy Spirit can convert him like that. But God normally uses means. He normally uses means. And so what I’m saying is, you know, for you and me witnessing in this particular world, this text has taken on a tremendous significance.

Because our world now is kind of like that Hellenistic culture that Paul encountered in decline by the way. A culture in decline politically and sort of in decline but that love beauty and art and education and all that stuff. You know, we’re sort of like that now in a way that we weren’t before. And so this text has a tremendous significance for us today and the development of how we talk to people. How we talk to people.

So hopefully this text will—we’ll you’ll be reading it the next week or two. You’ll be thinking about it, maybe going over the outline and be preparing to try to think through how can I apply this text when I talk to my coworker, my neighbor, my friend, my relative, whatever it might be. So, it’s important text. We want to get the right attitude toward it. It’s the armory of God, right? So, we come together on the Lord’s day and one thing God does is he gives us AK-47s. He gives us, you know, hand grenades. He gives us heavy armament.

Uh-oh. That triggered no doubt some NSA recording device. They’re at church handing out AK-47s. Well, I speak metaphorically, of course, but no less I mean, it’s an important metaphor to understand. Yeah, the church is a hospital. We take care of people here, and you should receive comfort when the gospel is presented to you. But the church is also an armory. You should be equipped for living your life and particularly in this sermon series for the work of evangelism. And so we’ll attend to this text in that particular way.

One other thing by way of introduction is that it will be helpful to you to remember or if you weren’t here to read the way that Paul interacted with the kind of overt pagans at Lystra, you know, who thought that, you know, he was Hermes and Barnabas was Jupiter or Zeus or whatever it was. You know, he says the same thing here. And in fact, sometime today or next week, we’ll read that text again.

So, now we’ll begin to work our way through this outline. Give me just a moment to rearrange my papers. And so, if you look at your outline. Now, I’ve got an overview of the text. And first thing we talk about on the outline is the occasion of Paul’s talk on Mars Hill. By the way, let’s get that out of the way, too. Mars Hill, I read it Areopagus. What’s the difference? Nothing. It just depends on translation. Areopagus is more of just a transliteration of the term. It translates out to Mars something. Maybe a hill, maybe an overlook, maybe a perspective. I’ve Mars Hill. So some translations translate it Mars Hill, some of them translated Areopagus. So in one sense there’s no difference.

On the other hand, when we get around to talking about one of the converts as an Areopagite, that is different. The Areopagus was the physical place, but then also was used to describe the council of rulers who would rule Athens. Originally established at 12, maybe 30 by this time—maybe still 12, I don’t know—but there was a ruling council and so they were known as the Areopagus and members of it Areopagites. They were like rulers and most citizens of Athens would rotate through this thing right, or at least the smart ones, the educated ones, the philosophers.

So you had three groups of people in—well actually four—but three basic groups of people at Athens. You had the citizens and the citizens, you know, basically ran the city. And they did a lot of that running through the Areopagus, the council of 12 to 30 citizens who had run things, citizens. Then you had foreign residents living there, right? And these are not citizens, but they’re still respected people and they’re sort of involved in the discussions. They are here as well. And then the last group are the slaves. And they’re not mentioned in this text. They’re not usually part of these kinds of discussions.

So in any event, so what is the occasion for this discourse at the Areopagus, the Mars Hill, and in the context. And one last thing, they’re not really ruling much anymore, right? Because they’ve been conquered by Rome. And so, politically, you know, they don’t have much going on. But they love to talk about something new. Okay.

The occasion of Paul’s talk on Mars Hill, verses 16 to 21. First of all, he was angered by the idolatry of Athens. And we talked a lot about that two weeks ago, but I’m telling you, you know, the text tells us this was like this. So he then did evangelism and the motive for him doing the evangelism in this text is tied directly to his being stirred—emotional distressed—by the idolatry of the city where he was.

And if we can’t get stirred and distressed by the idolatry of the public education system the way it’s being done today or by what we see in Portland, then we’re probably not going to be very motivated. This is the occasion for Paul’s discourse. This is what led up to it was his listening. Right? We said this part of evangelism. First step, listen to who you’re going to talk to. I mean, that involves seeing. The point is discerning what’s going on.

Before you can crush and destroy an idol, you have to discern the particular idolatry, right? And so this is what Paul does. He listens. He observes. And he doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t spend his free time waiting for his buds walking around the city saying, “Man, that’s great architecture. Wow, look at that Parthenon. Look at that beautiful statue of whatever god or goddess it is. Look at that stuff. Man, this city is cool. It’s a great place to visit.” That’s not Paul. Shouldn’t be us. We’re in the midst of something like this. We got to be alert. We’re Christians. Our job is to change the world. It’s a dirty job. Someone has to do it.

Well, so Paul does this. He listens to it and he then is motivated to action.

And then secondly, Paul dialogues with the church and the citizenry in verse 17. So he reasoned in the synagogue. Now, that’s interesting right there, isn’t it? It tells us something about his being upset with the idols. He wasn’t so angry that he went off and started shouting at people and telling him what horrible city they were. That’s not the kind of evangelism Paul did. Now, sometimes, you know, okay, different methods, different times, all that stuff. But in this case, if we’re looking at this as an apologetic strategy for what we do, we note at least and maybe commit ourselves to responding to gross idolatry, not by grabbing people and shaking them literally.

We’ll get to that in the presentation of the gospel. Paul certainly shakes the Areopagus. He ends his message with the one thing you couldn’t do there, which is to talk about the resurrection. Well, I mean, it wasn’t as if it was a free speech issue, but when the Areopagus was established, well, I’m getting ahead of myself, but you know, one of the instructions was when a man died, there is no resurrection. There’s a poem many centuries earlier than this that discusses this and says this solemnly at the establishment of the Areopagus. Very important to remember this truth. When a man dies, there is no resurrection.

Paul knew that no doubt that poem and so he’s certainly going to shake him up because his conclusion of his talk, unless it was cut off, he might have been going on then to talk about Jesus which he never brings up. He brings up the Christ. He brings up Jesus by allusion, but not the name. Maybe he was going to get to that when he’s cut off. We don’t know. Probably what we have here is kind of bullet points like my outline of Paul’s talk. Probably with each of these major points he makes, he develops it fuller. But in the providence of God, this was what we have.

But the point here is that because of his being properly provoked by the idolatry of his of the culture of Athens his—what he does then is he reasons with people. He dialogues with them. He treats them with respect. We’ll see the same thing when he gets, you know, taken before the Areopagus and talks there. He treats them with respect. He treats them as image-bearers of God. He doesn’t shout at them, shake them, whatever it is, right? He honors them. He gives them weight and glory as image-bearers of God. He enters into dialogue with them.

That’s so important. Right? Now, so there’s a bit of a balance here, right? So sometimes when we talk to our neighbors, we’re all accommodation and we forget that we’re supposed to, you know, protect the honor of God and free this neighbor from gross idolatry. And sometimes we get so taken with that we forget we’re supposed to, you know, dialogue with him and not just say, “Here, here, here, here, here, believe.” I don’t know about you and your particular proclivities or tendencies right. But you should know about—you know, a man has got to know his limitations, as a famous American character. If Paul can quote poets of idolatrous nature I can certainly refer to movies. So a man’s got to know his limitations and you got to know which way do you lean so that you can counter that tendency.

And if you typically don’t reason with people, try to reason more the next time you talk to somebody about the faith. And if you typically all you do is accommodate, try to get a little more indignation going and concern for the person and the enslavement of their idolatry.

By the way, that’s one other important point of similarity between this text and our times. Paul doesn’t tell them here that they broke the law of God, right? We’ve already read the talk. He doesn’t say that. He doesn’t talk about sin. He talks about idolatry. And now if we define sin in one way, it’s the same. But if sin is a violation of God’s law, that’s a subset of idolatry, right? You know, idolatry is whenever I decide to dethrone God in any particular issue in my life. So that’s idolatry. I’m doing something for some other desire I have and that makes me dethrone God for a moment in that thing. And that’s what Paul talks about.

We’ve been talking—we I’ve been saying this for the last few weeks—Tim Keller makes this same point in his book, Center Church, that when we talk to our culture today, at least when you talk to a culture 50, 60, 70 years ago that was primarily Christian, you might talk about idolatry. You could just as easily talk about sin and God’s law. But today, you know, what we do is probably what Paul does and that is idolatry kind of becomes the major theme.

So, in terms of a training manual for evangelizing kind of a postmodern sort of world like today, this text seems to commend to us focusing on their idolatry. That’s what Paul does from beginning to end.

So, but he reasons with them. Okay? He reasons with them. So he reasons in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.

So now couple of things here. Synagogue and the devout persons. That’s the gentile god-fearers. Remember that there’s two groups in church. Church had Jews and then they had gentile god-fearers. And not all gentile god-fearers converted and became Jews. They were gentile god-fearers. There were a separate class that was cool with God. No division about that or a division that God has placed still in the world between Jew and Gentile, which he’ll get rid of in AD70. He got rid of it definitively at the cross and then he’ll get rid of that plan, that polarity of two different groups of people, Jews and non-Jews. He’ll do away with that in AD70. And the whole history of Paul’s epistles is primarily a discussion about how those two groups now are one and the same in Christ.

But in any event, at this time, so these were good people, Gentile god-fearers attached to the synagogue. And the question is, and this is a question at the bottom of your handout today, why does he go to the church first? And yeah, I’m calling it the church. This is God’s people comprised of Jews and Gentiles, and it’s kind of like the church. And Paul goes to the church first. Now, why does he do that? You know, there’s probably some historical redemptive reasons why, but there’s another reason why.

I’m not going to tell you what it is from my perspective. You can think about it this week. If you’ve got community groups going this week, you can talk about it. Why does he go to the church first? And is that a strategy or a tactic for us today? When we’re evangelizing a city, should we go to the church in that city first? That’s a question. Okay, we’ll talk more about that next week. Okay, he also reasons in the marketplace.

This was not a mall. I thought about this. It’s probably more, as I understand it, as I understand what I’ve read about it, it’s probably more like when we would go to Poland and be in a city square, you know, in Warsaw. So, I just love these city squares. So, there are shops, right? And there’s civic offices. The rulers are sitting in there, the city building. You got people selling things, you got people talking about things, a lot of conversing going on, you got maybe people getting up on a soap box and talking about things.

You got in another time when my daughter Charity was with me, you had thousands and thousands of people playing on guitar, Hey Joe, in this huge city square. Okay. Broke a Guinness record—most guitarists playing and singing Hey Joe or a song at any time. So the marketplace is sort of like that. What they had in Athens was that kind of a thing. A lot more life going on, a lot of stuff happening. It’s not like Paul goes into the shopping mall at Lloyd Center and starts talking about the gospel with everybody. That’s not it. It’s a different kind of a deal.

So it’s sort of taking it in and additionally it’s kind of like going to Oxford. Because the city square would also have schools of philosophy attached to it, right? There’d be people teaching there presenting their worldview. That’s what these were kind of worldview stuff. So all that’s going on.

Now notice that what Paul does is he goes to the marketplace every day. He’s making good stewardship of his time. He had a lot of people to rescue from the judgment to come in AD70. He goes to the marketplace every day. And that by the way is a good way to remember a motivation for our neighbors. We don’t know when they’re going to die. And if they die in their sins, they’re going to hell. Not our culture is not just papered over death and removing it from sight. It’s certainly—where do you hear anybody talking about hell?

Well, maybe some scary movies, but it’s not taken seriously. It’s some joke line that the Christians used to believe in, and most Christians don’t even believe it anymore. If you believe in the judgment, which is what Paul gets to at the end of his talk, if you believe in the judgment, that it’s not just punch your ticket, you’re done. Thanks very much. Hope you had a good ride. That’s the end of you. It’s not that you’re going someplace, heaven or hell.

And the neighbor you want to talk to and haven’t quite gotten up the gumption to talk to them yet, if they die tonight in their sins, they’re going to hell. Yeah, I know it’s God’s sovereign election. I understand that. But so are you. And you’re part of God’s sovereign means to talk to people. So anyway, he uses—does it every day with those who happen to be there. Well, that’s an interesting turn of phrase, too.

And I don’t want to make too much of this, but I do think it’s significant for evangelism. He doesn’t necessarily target a particular group. I mean, sometimes it’s okay to do that, right? But he doesn’t do that. Whoever happens to be there whom God brings along, right? As you’re walking in your life whom God brings along. You look for who happens to be there and you make use of that opportunity. It’s pretty simple stuff, but it’s easy to forget it.

It’s easy to start thinking in terms of tactics and polling and demographics and how the politicians do it. And we want to talk to a particular demographic and all this stuff. Or we want to set up some very, you know, controlled environment to talk to somebody about Jesus. Uh-uh. Whoever was there, Paul talked to them, right? He talked to them.

So this is part of the occasion leading up to his actual discourse in Athens and it has—it’s rich as a training manual for us in our evangelism.

Okay. So he dialogues with them, creating a greater opportunity for the gospel verses 18 to 21. So the text goes on to say, so he’s doing this simple stuff, stuff you and I can do, right? You and I should be doing this. He’s doing that. And look what happens next. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. As I said, a lot of their schools would be right there off in this marketplace.

And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. Okay? So, he’s noticed and there’s different responses to him. And now, a babbler, what they mean by that is, you know, a bird picks up seeds here and there. And that’s what the word literally means referring to one of these birds that picks up seeds.

And so, they would see various philosophers and worldview spinners coming through and talking. And some of them they simply dismissed as people that hadn’t really done study, but just had picked up an idea here or there and tried to float it out there as their new philosophy or worldview. So this was a babbler. Well I won’t say that. Okay. So some people say that and some people think he’s a preacher of new divinities.

Jesus and the resurrection. Probably the text is telling us that they thought both Jesus and the resurrection were divinities. Okay. It doesn’t mean the Jesus who was resurrected. It’s plural. He’s preaching new divinities. And the word for resurrection is actually feminine. So maybe they’re thinking Jesus and his consort resurrection. I mean, that’s what they’re thinking because they don’t have categories.

And when you talk to people in the streets in Portland, you may get the same kind of understanding of your words. I once—I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. I once took LSD with a girlfriend. Long time ago. Long time ago. Do not advise it. Seriously. This girl took a while, but she lost her mind and killed herself. So, you know, cautionary tale. But while we’re on the effects of LSD, she thought, you know, she was into some kind of weird thinking about what the world was and stuff.

And I kept trying to dialogue with her to bring her back to reality. It was near impossible because every time I’d say something, something—she had a new set of glasses, a new brain interpreting what I said, not according to the traditional terms and we were unable to communicate. Simply unable to communicate, you know. Now, what I should have done is just had her whatever it was Jimmy Carter advised somebody to do on Saturday Night Live or whatever it is. I probably just go. But the point is the same thing’s here. The culture, you can think of it, it’s got a drug. It’s lost its memory of Christianity for the most part. Now, that’s not always true, but for the most part, certainly in Portland, and you’re just going blah blah blah to them. Or even worse, you’re saying blah, and they’re interpreting as a divinity. So, they think you’re talking about an idol Jesus and his idol woman with him, resurrection.

Now, we do know from this, of course, that’s what Paul is talking about. He’s proclaiming to them the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus. So, you know, this sets up our interpretation also. I hope this isn’t tedious for you, but this sets up what we know Paul to be doing in the rest of Acts 17. You know, there’s goofy people. There’s so many goofy people in every direction. But there are particular kind of goofy Christians who think that Paul here just fails in his presentation at Athens because he’s too philosophical. I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous position.

If you’re tempted to believe it, come to me and I’ll give you seven or eight reasons why that’s not true. And this is one of them. We know what he was doing in Athens. We’re already told that before he gets to there. He’s preaching Jesus. He’s declaring Jesus and the resurrection. Now, he takes that resurrection stuff in a little different direction than you and I would take it at the end of his talk on Mars Hill, but that’s what he’s talking about.

So, they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?” Every time I read this, I think of Lemony Snickett, right? You know, there was one set of characters in one of the books and the whole thing was what was in and what was out. You know, this kind of dress very out. Culottes very in. You know, the fashion of the day and whatever isn’t the fashion of the day. Oh, no. That very out. We want what’s very in. That’s the way this culture was. They wanted new stuff, man. Keep giving us new ideas. We get tired of the old stuff. We want new ideas and we kind of know we’re not doing all that great. We got a bunch of weird worldviews here, but we’d sure like another one. If you got it, bring it. Bring it to us. Okay.

So, that’s what they’re thinking, right? May we know this new teaching is that you are presenting for you bring some strange things to our ears. They’re not putting him down. They’re complimenting him. Oh, this is strange stuff, man. Bring it. Come to our meeting. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.

It’s weird, isn’t it? It’s really funny. But and it’s again, it’s kind of like our culture is more and more.

And then commentary from the writer. Now, all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. Now, of course, this is exaggeration for a fact. I mean, they ate, they did other things, they had to work, whatever it is. But this is what their primary deal was. What’s new. What’s the new hit show going to be after Breaking Bad? What’s the new ideas that may float by us? What’s the new sensory experience in concerts? Right? Maybe you got a robotic thing going on. You—what’s new? What’s jazzed? Right?

In a way, in a way, honestly, they sort of were evolutionary long before Darwin. Some of these worldviews actually kind of believe that there is this development. And for this development to happen, you got to hear the new stuff. The new stuff. The new stuff. Paul’s going to give him something very new that will be always very in at the same time.

But here’s the big point here. He does the simple little things that anybody could do and when he gets around to giving his talk, he does the simple little presentation that Charity could almost do and she was two and a half. Okay. So, yeah, it’s sophisticated. There’s other things going on. I understand all of that, but at its core, Acts 17 is simple. It’s simple and we get all bollocked up because we think we got to understand the Epicureans and the Stoics and Hellenism and all this stuff.

Paul cuts right through that like the sword of Damocles, right? To quote their literature again, or he cuts the Gordian knot with a sword. How do you untie the Gordian knot? The gospel, the word of God, the sword cuts it right through. Simple stuff.

So, we’ve got what we need. You’ve got what you need—creation, providence, and from that a theology of God and men, which is what Paul will present. And then the last part, he’ll talk about judgment. Remember, the gospel requires response. And he’s telling them, hey, things are changed now. This new news, it’s great news. There’s a whole new world now. But you know what? You don’t get with the program? Now God’s going to bring judgment to you. And the proof is the resurrection. The proof of judgment. Your judgment if you reject God is the very resurrection that brings us such hope as well.

Now, that’s simple stuff. Creation, providence, judgment, understanding kind of the basic idea of who God is and who man is and what he’s supposed to do to respond to God. And then the call for the question, right? So, you got to decide, are you in or are you out? You know, and it—you don’t get to vote on it. What’s going to happen as a result? You think you can—you’re in love with your democracy. There’s no vote on that. One vote, God’s. He determines it. This is simple stuff. We could all do it.

And then secondly, he gets a great opportunity, right? He gets to go to, you know, the rulers, gets to go to speak to Obama’s cabinet. Sort of like that sort of a thing. But why? Because he’s faithful in the little thing. Because he’s so concerned about the honor of God in the city being demeaned through idolatry. And he’s so concerned that these people have deluded themselves and brought themselves, sold themselves into bondage to nothingness, which is what idols are. He cares about them and he cares about God’s honor and glory so much.

He does whatever he can. He talks to whoever is hanging around, right? He enters into conversation simply. And because he makes use of the little opportunities that present themselves in the marketplace, he gets into invited for a great opportunity. Now, that’s that’s God working with us. He gives us small things to do. And if we’re faithful in small things, he’ll give us more. You want to do the great thing for God, be faithful in the small things.

Look for the small opportunities. Whoever happens to come across your path, in the case of Paul presenting the gospel, look for the small opportunities that you can do faithfully to the glory of God. And God will—God will let you change the world. You know, we’ve got this Paideia school, classical school, and I don’t know, I’m sure the story is much more complicated than this. But from my perspective, Dorothy Sayers gives this little tea talk back in England in what the 40s, I think, and she talks about the way education used to be done.

And she talks about this classical approach and this what we now call the Trivium. Maybe I guess she did too. They called it that. She just talks about it. And you know, a number of years later, pick will get a transcript of the talk. Journal of Christian Reconstruction, by the way, is one of the ones that reprinted that talk of hers. And what’s happened? A whole classical school. Now, I know it’s a little more complicated, but that it almost is that simple.

A whole classical Christian school movement develops across the world, not just America, the world. And just because some woman wanted to make use of her tea talk for something a little more interesting than soccer, or whatever it was they might talk about that day. Small faithfulness provide great opportunities. And may the Lord God remind us of these truths as we go into this week. We want to be mighty warriors, then do the small things.

What happens in war with soldiers? Train, train, train, train, train, train, train. Small things, small things, small things that seem ridiculous at the time. They do it. They do it. They do it. And when the war comes, boom, they’re ready. When the fight’s on, they’re ready to go. Right. Ali is lots of training. You just see the flash. Guy spent incredible amounts of time. Muhammad Ali, greatest fighter in the history of boxing in America, at least I think. Lots of time practicing. So when he gets into the thrills at Manila or whatever battle it is, he can do his thing.

May the Lord God remind us of these things so that we would be faithful in the small things this week, looking for whoever we come across to talk to about the gospel of our savior ready to destroy idols through simple acts of faithfulness to him.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for today. Thank you again for this text. We pray you’d bless us as we think about it this week and in some of our homes study it, talk about it. Bless us, Lord God, next week to the end that we may be faithful to proclaim the gospel of our savior to our present dark age. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.