Dennis Tuuri

# Destroying Idols in Athens (and America)

You know, we just—most of us who ever said amen—took a vow, we do it so lightly, it seems, but we took a vow to be the sponsors of these children that were baptized today. And did you hear the vow the parents took too? They vowed to raise their children in the what? Nurture and admonition of the Lord. Does this remind you of last week’s sermon at all? Well, hopefully it will, because remember we’re sort of at the birthplace in Acts 17 of our culture, that is our western civilization culture, Athens.

And Paul destroys idols in Athens. And as we look at his methodology, it will help us destroy idols in America as well and in our own hearts. The statement “nurture” is paideia, as I explained last week. This is inculturation. It’s not a simple instruction. It doesn’t mean just teach them the Bible. It means that the parents and the trustees are under obligation, joyful obligation, to raise their children in the culture of Jesus.

And that’s in opposition to—when Paul wrote that—to the culture of Hellenism, Greek philosophy and Roman culture that we see at heart in the city of Athens and in its idolatry there. So in order to effectively be sponsors and for these parents to fulfill their vows to raise these children in the nurture of Christ, it means we have to discern between Hellenistic culture, which is essentially what America has become more and more, and Christian culture and approach a holistic approach to raising our children to the end that God would help us to do that.

We’re going to look at Acts 17 again today and we’ll look at how Paul does this. How is he part of that rock that is Jesus that crushes the idols of the Athenians and in doing so frees them, or at least some of them, certain of them, away from service to idols—which is always enslaving to mankind—and brings them into human flourishing through the culture of Jesus. So we’ll read Acts 17. We’ll begin at verse 22 and we’ll read to the end of the chapter.

And so we’ll just read what Paul says and then the effect of what Paul says in Athens. Very important text for evangelism in our day and age. The only real presentation where we can actually look at what Paul did, speaking to a group of people to effect evangelism with sophisticated or even not so sophisticated pagans. We have some one-on-one interaction we’ll talk about in a few weeks or months with Paul and Festus and Agrippa.

But here, this is kind of a model for Christian witnessing and apologetics. So please stand and open your ears to hear what God says through the Spirit and what Paul said. And may God bless this reading to the end that we can be like him in affecting a Christian culture in our day and age.

So we’re going to get in verse 22. 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 is 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 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, even as some of your own poets 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 were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this example to us, this model, this inspired way of helping us to understand how to interact with the sort of world we are increasingly living in our day and age. Bless us, Lord God, as we attempt to build a Christian culture, to build a Christian ethos in our families, in this church, in our culture. Bless us, empower us, Father, for the witnessing that we’re doing to our friends and relatives, co-workers and others, and to the way we educate our children in the culture of Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. And I will be too. I’ve mentioned this song before, but over two decades ago, Leonard Cohen had a song called “The Future,” and he talked about abortion and other things happening. And he sort of saw where America was headed, where the world is headed. And he said in the chorus, “When they said, ‘Repent, repent,’ I wonder what they meant. When they said, ‘Repent,’ I wonder what they meant.”

You know, Paul gets to telling the Athenians that all men must repent. But he doesn’t start there, brothers and sisters. He lays a structural framework so that they won’t say, “I wonder what he meant by repent.” He makes it clear to them what biblical repentance is. And if we’re going to call on our neighbors and co-workers and friends and our children to repent and to believe the gospel—and if we’re going to preach this to ourselves as well, right? Preaching the gospel to ourselves—then we want to know what repent means.

And Paul puts this notion of repentance in a particular context. And as I’ve said a couple of times now from this pulpit—from this platform, from this communion table—what I’ve said a couple of times is that our culture is increasingly like Athens. It’s like the West, you know, it’s like Rome. Roman culture. We have less and less, and that culture was filled with biblical ignorance. And in our day and age, we have just a tremendous amount of biblical ignorance, particularly of young people.

You know, it used to be that John 3:16 was probably the best known verse in the Bible, right? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes on him . . .” Probably the best known, the best loved verse in the Bible now is “Judge not, lest you be judged.” And that’s where our culture has gone. And so now the big sin is judgment. Now that’s a quote from Matthew 7:1. And most people don’t know that about five verses later it says not to cast pearls before swine.

And it talks about dogs rending you. And these are images of people. And somebody’s going to have to figure out who the pigs are. There’ll have to be judgments made. Yes. So that’s clearly not what he’s saying—is don’t ever judge, don’t make evaluations or discernment. Our Savior says to judge with righteous judgment. But how do we do that? What are the categories? What’s God? And so our culture today, increasingly, when we speak to people, we’re speaking to people the same way that Paul would address those Athenians that he talked to.

So here we have this apologetic method. We could say—that’s probably not a good way to say it—but here we have an example of how Paul does that very thing. And so we’re here and we want to witness to people, evangelize. If we don’t, then we’ve failed at the Great Commission itself. But hopefully that’s what we want to do. And so how do we do it? You know, we ask God, “How do we do this thing? It seems so difficult in Oregon, in the 21st century, in the Pacific Northwest, in the 21st century.”

And so Paul will help us to see that we are trying, in the words of Tim Keller, to discern idolatry in our particular setting, expose that idolatry, and destroy the idols, right? So Paul has discerned idolatry. He’s theōreō. He’s seen underneath the overt examples of idolatry. And he says that those idols and what they represent—economy, commerce, the arts, poetry, beauty, government—that underneath all these parts of their worldview, the Athenians were idolatrous.

So he sees underneath to discern the idols of that particular culture. And he then exposes those idols in his talk in Acts 17. And in exposing them, he brings them to Christ to destroy these idols, that people may be freed from the kind of slavish obedience that idols demand and free to come into a marvelous relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. So in order to do this, this is a great example to help us to understand how to do it.

Paul has talked to the church in Acts 13. Now I asked last week a question: you know, why did he do that? We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes, but he went to the church in Acts 13 with a particular method of presentation. He went to uneducated pagans in Acts 14, a particular method of interaction with them that’s very similar to this, and educated pagans here. And so we can see Paul addressing and preaching the gospel in various contexts, which help us to know what the gospel is and it helps us to know how to present it in the various contexts that we’ll come across today as well.

Now specifically, some of these pagans are called Epicureans and Stoics by this time. There were lots of different people, lots of different worldviews. You know, the Roman culture—they were smart. The Assyrians and the Babylonians, they’d conquer a people. And you know, people are people in a particular place with religion, their gods. People, land, and gods. And the way that the Assyrians and Babylonians would control a people was because they knew that if you just conquer a people and they’re sitting there in their land with their gods, you’re going to fester rebellion and there’ll be problems.

So what they did is they moved the people all over, right? And we see that in the Bible. That’s why Daniel and his friends, you know, are in Nineveh. So they move people around and they broke up allegiances of the places they would conquer by taking some people out and moving other people in. The Soviets did the same thing in Eastern Poland at the end of the war, by the way. Disastrous results for 60 years afterwards.

The Romans thought, “Well, that’s awful expensive. That’s a lot of work. A lot of logistical problems with moving all these people around at the rate at which we’re expanding our empire. Let’s instead move the gods around. Let’s do god swaps. Okay, instead of people swaps, let’s swap their gods. It’s a lot easier.” And they would insist that a town or a province that they captured would adopt some of their gods into their pantheon of gods.

And it wasn’t such a hard thing to do. It was a Hellenistic world. All kinds of gods for all kinds of things. So they’d adopt in some of the Roman gods, and the Romans would adopt some of that particular province’s gods into their pantheon. They did a little god swap. And as a result, if there were any problems, who knows what side the gods are on, because it’s all mixed up now. So as a way of handling rebellion—incipient rebellion—and it was an effective way. But a side effect of this was, maybe this was the intent, but a side effect of this was what we have today in America: statism.

Because since the gods are kind of trivialized by adopting here and there, and they become less important, we don’t have any allegiances to these Roman gods that are deeply felt. The big thing that controls everything no longer is religion. It’s the state. And that’s what we have today. We have a kind of principal pluralism like the Athenians had. And we have as a result of that, statism, where the state is everything. And that’s how it links in to the Affordable Care Act.

You know, of course, of course, everybody wants people to be healthy. But the question is, how do you go about doing that in the most effective way? And I think what many people are saying today—Christians are saying—is the most effective way is not to have the government run it all. And we’ve seen in the rollout all the difficulties. In other words, these issues that we’re talking about in Athens are directly related to what’s happening to you right now. Your premiums may be going up. Your care may diminish as time goes on with this thing. Or you may not even be able to figure out how to get a doctor’s appointment anymore. I mean, it’s certainly been that difficult with the rollout of signing up.

So very practical problems are related to idolatry, and the idolatry—the biggest idol in our country, I think, today, as it was then—was statism, okay? So with that in mind, your outlines now. I’ve got a couple of points on here. First, again, to remind us, the occasion of Paul’s talk on Mars Hill was—he was angered. Probably isn’t the right word, but he was passionate, seeing the idolatry. He was moved to action. And so this idolatry, as I’ve related here, was involved with god swapping, statism, and today we see it through the kind of idolatry of government-run everything.

This is socialism. It’s socialistic healthcare. Now if you like it, that’s okay. I mean, maybe you like socialism. But the point is, it is that. So let’s use the name that economic systems have always attached to a system that’s totally managed, every detail managed by the government. And so is that the best way or not the best way to deliver a good or service? And it seems like it isn’t, and that’s because it reflects the idolatry of the country.

So Paul dialogues with the church and with the citizenry. So the church—I’m using the church. He went to the synagogue. The synagogue was the church, yeah. Moses talked about the church in the wilderness. Paul talks about the church in the wilderness. It was a church, the gathering place where people worshiped Yahweh, who’s the same God old testament, new testament. Why does he go to the church first? I asked this casual question last week.

I want to suggest a couple of answers that may not have come up in your mind. You know, certainly there’s—he was commanded to do so. That’s a good one. Certainly there are redemptive historical things going on. You know, Israel has been the first recipients of the revelation of God, etc. So you’ve got that stuff happening, of course. But two reasons you might not have thought of, but I think are related.

And the first one is the Bible tells us that judgment begins at the house of God. If a person were to come here—if Paul was to come to Oregon City and walk around the city and see the various idols—he could see underneath the actions of people that it’s really idolatry and it’s not trying to please God, the Creator God. He would come to the church and say, “What are you doing? You’re responsible for this city.” Right? Yeah, you are. Whether you know it or not, but the church is responsible for where she’s planted.

Our job is to transform the world, including transform the place where God has planted us. And that was the same thing—that was true of the synagogue. It was a system that was supposed to go out the worship of God and dramatically change cultures, right? And this culture was deep, you know, waist-deep in idolatry, maybe neck-deep in idolatry. And Paul, I think, at least one aspect of why he goes to the church is the church is responsible.

It’s like if a family’s a mess, you know, the elders will probably talk to the dad first because he’s got covenantal responsibilities for the family. Everybody’s involved. The wife is a co-ruler and all that stuff, but he has responsibility. The church has responsibility. It’s our job, people. So that should cause us to want to understand how to do the job and to look at what Paul does to do the job.

Secondly, I think Paul also goes to the church because he wants some help. You know, when you evangelize a community or a city, you’re one guy. That’s not so good. You want other people. Well, where’s the help going to be found? If Paul was to come here today and want to really shake up the city and transform it and lead revival, he’ll come to the church and say, “Hey, you guys, you should repent for not doing a very good job of cleaning up your city, not helping people out.

There are people enslaved out there to various forms of idolatry. What are you doing in your happy home?” Right? And then he would say, secondly, “Now look, we’re going to get at this job and I want you to help me. So when I bring people along, when they hear me speak and start to follow me, I can get them to follow you and end up with your Bible study in your homes and eventually in your churches.” So that’s the role of the church, I think, in this kind of evangelistic effort. And it’s become even more important now to get Christians with you as you go about evangelism.

And then he brings a greater opportunity. So let’s turn now to that greater opportunity to our text and look at the substance of Paul’s talk on Mars Hill. And what he does is he lays out a theology. Who’s God? So he talks about who God is. See, he’s building a structure for understanding repentance and Jesus and resurrection. Those terms don’t mean anything to most people in Oregon anymore. They don’t have categories, or their categories are all wrong.

They’re not what you think and mean by it. They don’t know the scriptures. They’ll say they read the Bible, but the only thing they’ve read is “Judge not.” And so they really don’t know much about the Bible. They don’t know the terms. So Paul carefully builds an understanding of who God is. And then he moves to who you are, who people are generally, and then specifically to them. And then, and only then, does he bring them to an—does he expose fully their idols to them and call them to repent, because now they can understand what they’re supposed to be repenting of, or for.

Yes, Romans 1 says that everybody is actively suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness, but they do a really good job at it. They suppress it in themselves. They’re usually filled with self-delusion so they don’t see what the natural order certainly teaches us. And we have to help peel, you know, the scales off of the eyes. We’ve got to cut the spider wrappings of their own suppression of the truth, so to speak.

And this is what Paul does: first with theology, second with anthropology, and then moves to eschatology. Judgment’s coming. Elijah’s coming. Jesus is coming. Okay. So first of all, he begins with Genesis. So we read—so Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said this: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” Well, actually he doesn’t start quite with Genesis. He starts with a very polite statement.

This would be akin today to you saying to somebody, “I know you’re spiritual. I know you want spirituality in your life, and you might be very spiritual,” right? This is what he’s telling the Athenians. “I know you’re spiritual. You’re very spiritual.” Now it’s neither a compliment nor a slap in the face. And that’s what we tend to think of these things as—one way or the other. It’s not. It’s a polite statement. He’s speaking to image-bearers of God.

Right? All men and women are image-bearers of God. He gives them the glory, the weight of at least being an image-bearer made in God’s image. He treats them with respect. So when he gets provoked about idolatry, that doesn’t mean he goes and shouts at people who are idolators. It means he reasons with them. It means he treats them with respect and courtesy. Now there’s two ditches in this road. You can either go yell at people, or you can just leave them alone in their idolatry and not emphasize that they’re on their way to hell.

There are two ditches. And Paul doesn’t fall into either one of them. He engages them, but he does so respectfully. He says, “I see you’re very religious, very spiritual. As I passed along and I observed the objects of your worship—” He doesn’t call them idols yet. He refers to the objects of their worship. I mean, he’s not trying to seek common ground with the pagan necessarily, but there is a commonality of speech that’s based upon relationship in which he wants to respect the people he’s talking to.

He cares about the Athenians. He’s not doing this just, you know, to fulfill his obligation to his community group. He cares about the people he’s speaking to. And because he cares about them, he’s careful what he says to them. He doesn’t want to, you know, throw—you know, blow up hand grenades in front of them at the inappropriate time. He will call them to repent, but he begins with gracious speech.

Brothers and sisters, some of us really need this. We need to get this graciousness and respect for other people down, or we probably shouldn’t be witnessing a whole lot yet. And others of us need to know, well, the gracious and respectful approach should not keep you in your cowardice from sharing the gospel with him and actually helping him. Either extreme, either ditch, is self-centeredness, right? And it’s not following Jesus and it’s not being a radical Christian. It’s being not radical enough in your Christianity and your love for Jesus and your love for the people that he calls you to talk to.

So he says, “I see your objects of worship. I found an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown God. What therefore you worship as unknown. This I proclaim to you. I’m going to help you out.’” Now, again, we don’t have to know what this altar was, and there’s different explanations of it in various commentaries. It doesn’t really, I don’t think, make a lot of difference. Paul is using this as a jumping-off point to talk to them.

He’s looking for something in his experience and walking around Athens by which to reach them. In part, from what they’re doing, they acknowledge to some degree, to some extent, that they don’t know God fully. So he says, “I’m going to declare him to you,” right? Later on, he’ll quote their own poets. He’ll quote, you know, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young, whoever it is. He’ll quote their own poets, which were sort of like prophets at the time.

And he, it’s the same thing here. He’s using commonality of speech and terms, and he’s doing so in a respectful, gracious way, but he’s doing it in a way to point out to them their own inconsistencies. Okay? You have an unknown god. You ought to try to figure out who this is.

Okay, so he does that. He begins with graciousness, and then he talks about creation, right? He doesn’t start with John 1. He doesn’t start with Matthew, Mark, or Luke 1. He doesn’t start, you know, with John 3:16. He really starts with Genesis. Let me just say a word—heard before—we get into all of this. I don’t have it here, but you could see several charts where they take Paul’s talk and they compare it to a whole bunch of scripture verses from the Old Testament.

And what you would find if you took the time to do that is that Paul’s speech is filled with phrases and terms of the Old Testament. Paul is—it’s so what I’m saying is it’s not just a general revelation argument. It’s a general revelation filtered through the scriptures that he presents to them. He is quoting the Bible, not by quoting the Bible, but because it so fills his life and how he communicates, and he self-consciously then wants to bring to them biblical truth, the biblical story, the big narrative, the meta-narrative that includes every other story.

So he says this: “The God who made the world and everything in it.” Okay, so he starts with Genesis 1. Now this, you know, already he’s upsetting their world because they don’t think a lot about the material world. They don’t like it much. And now he’s saying that God is the one who made the heavens and the earth. He made everything in the earth. Okay? And so Paul is telling—first of all—that God is Creator.

And because he’s Creator, he is then Lord of heaven and earth. He created, made the world, everything in it. He is Lord of heaven and earth. He begins with the sovereignty of God, who’s in charge, the one that made everything. And you know, well, there’s a—there’s a primary, reasonable quality to that, is there not? I mean, if you’re just—if you are, and you’re not—but if you were born a blank slate coming into this world and you looked around and you understood that you certainly didn’t make all of this, well, the last thing that you’d want to start doing is worshiping yourself and whatever your hands made.

I mean, that would be ridiculous, right? I mean, Paul is saying something here that’s overtly obvious once the scales are removed. And so he’s helping them to remove the scales by saying, “Hey, this all got here somewhere. And if you’re personal, what’s behind us? A personal God. And that God is Lord. He’s the sovereign.” Paul doesn’t wait in the presentation. He’s treated them respectfully, but he right away gets at the person of God.

And you can’t talk about God—well, Paul couldn’t—without him being Creator and as a result, Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t 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. Now he goes from God being Creator to God being—having what is a doctrine called “aseity.” I think it’s on your handout as “a-s-e-i-t-y.” A-s-e-i-t-y. From himself. So aseity is a technical term, but all it means is that God has no need of anything. God is complete in himself.

And this is what Paul says. He immediately presents to the Athenians that they’ve got it mixed up. They think God needs them. They think they’ve got to feed their gods. They think God needs their veneration somehow, right? Whatever God is, they don’t really believe in God. God is, at least for one of these groups, the force, right? So he’s like Luke Skywalker, you know, the force, an impersonal force. And so there is no real personal God.

And God, immediately, or God through Paul, confronts them with his own reality. He’s the Creator and he has no need of them. So Paul immediately starts to talk to them about God’s self-sufficiency is one way to put it. Now that starts to rattle the cage a bit of fallen man, because fallen man’s great drive in life—men, you’ll probably admit it, you should admit this—are great goal. What we want more than anything is autonomy. We want to have no need of anything or anybody. We don’t want to be dependent upon our wives or our children, communities, friends. No. If we’re completely individualistic and self-contained, we may deign to have relationship.

We may say, “Okay, I’ll have relationship with you.” But that’s what fallen man wants. He wants to be his own god, and he wants to be self-contained, having need of nothing. And it’s a ridiculous position, of course, because as Paul says, God gives us everything and we have need of everything, right? I mean, the very breath we take in is the gift of God. So Paul talks about aseity, which begins to get at one of the great idols of fallen man, which is that he’s complete all by himself. He has no need of anything.

Well, God’s the one that has no need of anything. And so Paul talks to them about that here. And then he says God—he talks about what we could say is God’s providence, right? God provides things. He takes care of the world. He starts it and then he takes care of it. Creation and providence. But maybe a better word for how Paul approaches providence is sustenance. Sustenance. He says here that God has no need of anything. It says he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

So God is not just sovereign Creator, Lord of heaven and earth. He is loving. He is a loving, giving, sustaining, bounty-producing God, your Lord that you have relationship with. Yes, you’ve got to bow the knee before him, but what kind of God is he? He’s a sustainer of you, and not in bad ways. I just love the way God feeds us. Don’t you? You know, I’ve heard talks before, you know, God could have made it so that we just have to plug into an acid pond somewhere and get all the battery juice we need to keep going for the next day, right? Utilitarian. It’s so messy, food. You got to cook it and prepare it. And you might do it good, might do it bad. But God, his wonderfulness to us, is he gives us stuff that is wonderfully tasty and delicious.

And he gives us this action of eating and drinking to sustain our very bodies. So he doesn’t just sustain us. He sustains us with love and joy and blessing to us. I mean, God is so good. And this is what Paul’s trying to communicate to these people. You don’t know who God is. Let me tell you about God. He made everything. He’s Lord of heaven and earth. Earth is good. And God has no need for you, but he wants to do things for you. He’s blessing you, right? He’s sustaining you. He’s giving you, in fact, everything that you have.

So Paul then talks about God, and then from talking about God, he begins to show them who they are, who man is in relationship to this God. Now he’s kind of hinted at some of this. We could extrapolate from some of the things he said, but he begins then to talk about man, right? So Paul moves on from theology to talk to them about what we would call anthropology.

Let me find my notes. Okay. He goes on to say: “He made from one man every nation of mankind.” That’s really kind of like “one blood.” He—you know, this racism is ridiculous because everybody comes from one man, Adam. Adam and Eve. Okay. So every man is given to them. Every man comes from God. Every nation. He tells them he causes them to live on the face of the earth. He’s determined their allotted periods, the time and the boundaries of their dwelling place.

So now he brings God into history, not just the history of sustaining us, you know, through the created order, but now God is actively involved in periods of time that nations exist or that you as an individual exists. His sovereignty is over every detail. The bird doesn’t fall from the sky without his direct involvement and knowledge. And so God is a God of history. You see, America is becoming more and more, as it moves away from Christianity, a culture of ahistory, no history. It just goes round and round and round. Reincarnation is coming back. There’s no point to any of it. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just one doggone thing after another. Stuff happens.

And so this is the view of history. But no, Paul says, “Let me teach you about what God is in relationship to man. He is a God who is directly involved in history. Okay. In history.” So he takes God out of the theoretical abstract, or away from the pantheistic view they had of a God maybe, but who is basically irrelevant to mankind, and he says there’s nothing more relevant to your life than this God. He teaches them. He unlearns them first about what they’re doing wrong, and he teaches them. He learns them about God.

And he goes on to say 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. So in his anthropology, he says, you know, what the point of this is, is that God wants relationship with you. God has made you for relationship with him, and he’s not real far away. It’s not hard. In fact, he’s right there alongside of you. So he’s made you this way.

Now, something happened, and he doesn’t talk about the fall, but by implication, that’s what he’s referring to here. That man has somehow gotten pretty messed up because of the fall. He doesn’t directly address the fall, but he talks about the effects of it. And the effect is that now we’re sort of lost in our self-delusion. We’re kind of groping for God, but we don’t have to grope far once we reach out to this Creator, Sustainer, Provider, loving God of history. He’s not far away. We’re not going to have to grow up very far or long. He says God is very close to you.

In fact, he says, “In him we live and move and have our being.” As even some of your own poets have said, and also another poet, “For we are indeed his offspring.” Now again, he uses their poets, their singers, their songwriters, their philosophers. You know, he uses their quotations. Now he takes it radically out of context. The last one, when it says that we are his offspring, the original poem was about Jupiter. And so we’re Jupiter’s offspring, right? So Paul takes that out of context. But he says there’s something wrong in that.

You see, and what fallen man does is he takes the truth and twists it, perverts it. And so Paul is straightening things out for them. You’re right. We are his offspring. You’re wrong. It’s not Jupiter, or it’s not some force, or it’s not some pantheistic God who dwells in everything. It’s the personal Creator God who has no need of anything, but who lovingly and graciously made you, provides everything for you, and his purpose is for you now to have relationship with him.

So he takes what they said and puts it in a proper context. I don’t know what Leonard Cohen meant by him saying, “When they said, ‘Repent,’ I wonder what they meant.” I don’t know. I assume it’s something to do with what we’re talking about today. But it doesn’t make any difference. It’s a truth that’s found in some of these poems, writings, things that non-Christians produce that resonate with us, and we can use them because they actually are God’s truth. God’s truth twisted and regurgitated in different ways, but they’re God’s truth.

And he says this wonderful, you know, this statement: “In him we live and move and have our being.” What a wonderful picture. I don’t know if you ever saw Moby Dick or not, or read the book, but Gregory Peck plays Ahab, and he’s out there and he’s pondering, you know, reality and who he is, and he says, “Who moves this hand? I or God?” Or he says something like that. And that’s sort of what this is about: “Ah, who’s doing this? Dennis or God?”

Well, I think this text means that apart from God, I don’t do this. So God is involved in this. Now, I can sin with my hand, but God is involved in our every motion. You know, we’re not alive and then God keeps us alive. We’re alive because God made us alive and he keeps us alive. So God withdraws his breath, then he falls down. Had Chris W. come out years ago and kill our favorite pet. And it’s the kind of life he lives. He had to put one of our dogs down, and it was so remarkable. He, you know, he was very kind, very compassionate. He’s really good at that.

But so he gives Midnight a shot, and Midnight goes, breathes his last, and he’s dead and he’s not there anymore. That dog is not—I don’t know—was going to be in doggy heaven or not. That’s another sermon. But the dog is dead. My mom said it was the same thing. I had a cousin that died of cancer when I was a kid. And you know, as soon as mom went into the room after she died, wasn’t Karen there anymore. It was her body. God will raise up a new body. But you know, God withdraws his breath and we just slump apart.

“In him, we live and move and have our being.” Now, this is a call first of all to recognize the wonderfulness of the God who is very involved in our history and in who we are. It’s certainly that, and it’s a phrase to ponder. And apparently it comes from a Greek poet who probably didn’t even know God. But that’s the way it can be, right? The Lord God uses, you know, fallen men to speak wonderful truths and to create music and poetry that we just love because it resonates with the truth of who God is.

And this one does that. So it should bring us each to a sense of just wonder, a sense of wonder and delight at our life and its relationship to God. So it certainly is all about that. And of course the other thing it does is it should produce then a desire to know this God better who is so intimately involved with me, and a thanksgiving for the gift of life itself, and it should draw us to those sorts of things.

So Paul talks about who God is, and then he talks about anthropology, who man is, right? He talks about man’s alienation. He uses Hellenistic poets positively to talk about who we really are. And they don’t feel that way. So it’s more about their alienation. And he says that all people have a culpable ignorance. They’re ignorant. He says, but this God is self-evident. He’s evident in that you can’t live or move or have your being without him. You should know this. And he’s calling them then, he’s preparing them for the call to repentance. They’re responsible for their own idolatry.

He says, “Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of men.” Not just gold or silver. Anything developed by the art and imagination of man can become an idol to us if it dethrones God. And any of those things we ought not to do. So Paul is exposing their idolatry, and now he’s starting to drill away at it, to explode it and to get rid of it in their lives.

We ought not to have any competitor with God in terms of what makes our worldview run, what’s at the center of it, what do we desire most, what do we seek most in terms of satisfaction. All of these things, these idols, we ought not to think like that. And then he says, “The times of this ignorance God has passed over, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” So he finally gets to repentance, and he says that this repentance comes in a particular historical context.

Another event of history Paul will allude to here, the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that event has changed everything. What’s the good news? What’s the newness of it? Well, salvation’s been accomplished, yes, but that was prefigured, right? I mean, you were saved in the Old Testament still. The new is this statement: that from now on the world will change. God’s no longer going to overlook your culpable ignorance. He’s bringing judgment to all nations of the world, and they will either bow the knee to Jesus, or that rock that we talked about last week will roll right over them in their culture and destroy it.

In fact, it’s got to roll over you in your culture in order to raise you back up in Christ. It’s got to destroy your sense of yourself in relationship to whatever idols, whatever thing is more in charge of your life than Jesus Christ. It has to be destroyed. Then Paul says, “Now is the time, because God has brought a man along and he’s raised that man from the dead.”

And the meaning of that is judgment is here now. Judgment has come. You know, the world is not the same. The last 2,000 years, for 4,000 years, lots of ignorance was looked over by God. All kinds of weird stuff was going on in all kinds of weird cultures, right? And the world has become Christianized now. Not totally, but I’d say 90%. I mean, most of it. And it isn’t Christian. I said didn’t say it was Christian. I said it’s become Christianized. Atheism in America or agnosticism, atheism, is a rejection of a particular kind of God, the Christian God. It’s defined by God himself in Jesus Christ.

Okay. So that’s how things have changed. You know, so we only deal now with the remnants of humanism that’s left over after Jesus has destroyed all the overt idols of the nations. So the only big idol today in every country is statism, control of everybody by a humanistic state. It’s the exaltation of man, but the sort of kind of weird things and human sacrifice, and you know, doing all weeding, doing all sort of strange and nasty things that used to penetrate the culture—the actual worship, as we saw at Lystra in Acts 14, you know, where they’re going to give sacrifices to Hermes and all this stuff. That sort of stuff just doesn’t happen much anymore.

Everything’s changed because this is what Paul said. Apart, an important part of the gospel, the good news, is the news is that it’s not easier to live as a non-Christian today. It’s harder. God’s judgment is more evident. Jesus has come near. God has come near to us in Jesus. And he comes near to bring us wonderful blessings in life and, you know, human thriving and all that stuff. But if we reject him and hang on to our idols, his nearness is judgment.

So Paul brings them to repent, right? Finally, he talks to them about repentance, and he does it by saying that God is in history, and there’s a historical fact that now has happened that is exceedingly significant for you, and your life will never be the same. He told Athens, and it wasn’t. Remnants live on in humanism today, but after Jesus, that’s really the big idol—is just mankind himself, because of what Jesus has accomplished.

And so Paul then concludes his message with the presentation of the resurrection. He says he’s proved that this judgment is here now because God raised a man from the dead, talking about Jesus. So the resurrection is proof of God’s judgment. Part of our witnessing to people is bringing them—is to challenge them—to bring them over time, over a sequence of conversations about who God is and who man is and what history is all about. But to bring them to a point of decision, and they have to know that decision brings with it consequences, you know, blessing or judgment.

For them particularly, and the resurrection, the good news of the resurrection is at the same time a call to repentance and avoidance of judgment. As I said last week, the Areopagus was a big topic you didn’t want to bring up there. All men die. There is no resurrection. Asclepius, one of their poets, said this years before about the founding of the Areopagus. And so Paul now destroys the idol where that—somehow the created order, mankind itself, what is good—is the resurrection, to people that think this world is just a bunch of baloney, that really the important thing is some sort of spiritual truth in the heavens or nothingness. It’s just one thing after another.

Those were, you know, the Stoics and the Platonists, right? That’s who those people were. And so what good is the resurrection? Why do I want that, Paul? And it just shocks them, and they don’t like it, right? And this is, as I said, striking at the cornerstone now of their false philosophies and their false ways of governing Athens. The central fact that God uses to crush all of that is the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And so Paul does that and he brings this to a close. Now, what happens? Well, he’s actually sort of cut off. We don’t know what else he would have said. Important to note, as I said last week, each of these points are probably explained in more detail. So the point that I’ve given you here, or that God gives in this discussion—those are points that you need to be able to flesh out in conversations with people, in teaching your children. Those are the central points of the great story of what life is, who God is, who man is, what history is all about, and how history has changed in Jesus.

That’s the story. And each element in that story needs further development and work. We don’t imagine that Paul gave a four-minute address and that was the end of it. Not at the Areopagus. These are usually an hour or two long presentations. So it’s an outline, and it’s an outline that we should be familiar with, that God might use as we go about witnessing to people in our context.

And then what happens? Well, it says that a few believe. That’s the way some translations put it. That’s a bad translation. The word is “certain people,” and certain people don’t believe immediately, do they? In the text, what does the text say? Look at it carefully. Certain people followed Paul and believed. Now, that’s the way it normally works, right? If you’re talking to somebody—a friend, a relative, a co-worker—you start sharing what the sorts of things that Paul shared, in the loving, gracious way that Paul shares it.

People like you. You’re a bringer of truth. You’re a bringer of care and compassion to them in a world where there’s precious little of that anymore. So they start to follow you, right? We don’t imagine necessarily that Dionysius and Damaris became converts on the spot. What we do know is they liked Paul. They liked what he said, and they liked the character that God had produced in him. And so they started to hang out with him.

And as a result of that, they became believers and followers. And as a result of that, a church grew. And Dionysius becomes, at least tradition tells us, the first bishop of a thriving, large metropolitan church in Athens itself. But that’s the way it happens. You know, we want everything right now, immediate, right? And what God tells us is: no, things take time. The story of the scriptures, the story of your gospel, takes some time.

It takes some structure, building categories before you tell them about Jesus and the resurrection. Before you call them to repent, they have no idea what you’re talking about. And Paul, of course, is calling them to repent of idolatry at the core. But it takes time, and people following you and then believing—that frequently will take time as well, and that’s great. It’s why I’m—we’re so pleased that at some of your community groups, people are just hanging with you, right? They’re following you. They’re hanging out with you guys, and then as time goes on, maybe they become into full belief in Jesus Christ.

So that’s the way evangelism works. So, you know, this is, as I said two weeks ago, this is not complicated. If I presented it in a complicated fashion, please forgive me. It’s as simple as: “Who made you? God. What else did God make? All things. For what reason did God make you and all things? For his own glory. For his own glory, right?” Teaching little kids. And then: “Why should we glorify God? Because he made me and takes care of me.”

That’s what Paul is teaching an age that was totally ignorant. It’s suppression of truth. It’s lack of the scriptural knowledge that had left them totally ignorant, self-deceived about the nature of the God who made them and who they are. That’s the world we go to today. More often than not, yeah, you might talk to a lapsed Christian, but more often than not in the Pacific Northwest, these are the sort of people you’re going to talk to.

And you should not have fear and trepidation about it. You should focus on the big picture stuff here, the meta-narrative, which really you should know about anyway—the Bible—and the story of man, and focus on this presentation that does two things: that has great love, concern, compassion, treats people with respect, but also then teaches them that they have a culpable ignorance for what they’re involved with, and they must come to repentance. And the end result of that is life in Jesus.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful message in Acts 17. Help us, Father, to meditate upon it. Help us to think about it in our community groups. Help us to think about it in our families and more even in the context of our church here. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and love the people that you made, Father, by bringing to them a gospel that is understandable, that is clear, and that if we’re rejected, is not rejected because of our bombast, because of our poor character, because of our inability to talk about the major truths that you lay out in your scriptures.

Bless us, Father, as we seek to apply these things. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.