Word of Salvation – November 2023

 

PAUL AT ATHENS

 

Scripture Reading: Acts 16:17-34

 

Introduction

Let me begin this sermon with an admission. I’ve never preached on the whole of Paul’s speech at Athens before. I’ve made a couple of attempts at preaching on just parts of it, but never on all of it. And the reason for this is simple. I’d never really understood it. 

But now at last this late in life I finally have the confidence to preach to you about Paul’s speech in Athens. Just recently I began to see how the lead up to the speech so perfectly sets the stage for the speech itself:

• At the outset we read that Paul’s spirit was provoked within him when he saw that Athens was full of idols. In his speech he tackles idolatry head-on.
• Some of the philosophers thought he might be a proclaimer of foreign divinities because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. His speech ends with Jesus and the resurrection. 
• The philosophers ask him, “May we know what this teaching is that you are presenting?” That’s exactly what he does in his speech. 
• They also say, “We want to know therefore what these things mean.” In his speech he is careful to meet that request.

So there are parallels everywhere between the background to the speech and the speech itself. But what I found so puzzling is that the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who play such an important role in the backstory seem to disappear from the scene almost immediately. Or do they?

A. The Backstory

To solve this puzzle, I’ve been boning up on the Epicureans and the Stoics over the last number of weeks. I was hoping that they might be the key that opens up the entire speech.

1. So let’s begin where Luke begins, and that is with the Epicureans. If you google the word ‘Epicurean’, you will probably be referred to a restaurant or a chain of restaurants specialising in fine food and drinks. Often they are associated with a winery and fine dining. So we associate ‘Epicurean’ with someone who has a refined taste when it comes to food and drink. This is how one dictionary defines ‘epicurean’: “fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.”

The problem with such a definition is that it bears very little resemblance to the Epicureans of the ancient world. Epicurus, who founded the movement in about 300BC, would have been quite horrified at such a definition. Yes, Epicurus did talk about pleasure, but for him that had little to do with the sensual pleasures of eating and drinking. For him pleasure had to do with tranquillity, living an undisturbed life, a life free from pain and trouble, and a peaceful state of body and mind.

But how do you achieve that ideal? How do you reach that idyllic state of the tranquil life? For starters, don’t get involved in public life or in politics. Don’t marry and have children. It’s all too disturbing. Withdraw from society and live a simple life. But even more importantly, get rid of false beliefs. The only sure way to knowledge is via the five senses, through what you can hear, see, smell, taste and touch. So get rid of any superstitious hopes and fears about rewards and punishments in the afterlife. All that we can be sure of is the material world and the void. Epicurus did believe in the gods. They live undisturbed between the worlds. They lead a blessed and perfect life, free from any concern with this world or any other. They did not create the world, nor did they have any involvement with it.

2. Then what about the Stoics? What do we know about them? We all know what it is to be stoical about something. It’s when we have a stiff upper lip. We put a tight lid on our emotions. It’s when we follow that British slogan which I believe came out of World War 2: “Keep calm and carry on.” And that’s exactly what people did. I once met someone who had lived through the London Blitz of 1940. He told the remarkable story of a grocer. One night the whole front of his shop had been blown out by a bomb blast. The next morning he put a sign in front of his shop, “More open than usual”! That has to be Stoicism at its best.

But there’s more to Stoicism than keeping your emotions in check. It was a carefully worked philosophical system. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics emphasised knowledge, but this knowledge was gained not so much through the five senses as it was by logic and reason. For the Stoics God was defined as “eternal reason . . . or intelligent designing fire or breath which structures matter in accordance with its plan.” God is within the cosmos and directs its development down to the smallest detail. God’s actions are not random and unpredictable, but orderly, rational and providential. 

It is therefore the duty of human beings to live in agreement with nature and so with the cosmos as a whole. This is the way that every wise person will live. He knows how nature works and he knows how his own life works. He lives in harmony with nature and with reason. That is the virtuous life. For the Stoic, to be virtuous was the only good. Not to be virtuous was the only evil.

3. As you can imagine, the Stoics and the Epicureans were rivals. Both movements began in Athens around 300BC and in Paul’s day they were very influential. They had established schools throughout the Roman Empire and especially in Rome itself. You could study their philosophies almost anywhere in the civilised world, but if you wanted to do the equivalent of postgraduate studies, the place to go was Athens. It was still seen as the intellectual capital of the ancient world. It was what today we might call a university town like Oxford or Cambridge or Princeton. 

So what did these intellectual heavy weights think of Paul? The Epicureans spoke of him in pejorative terms, “What does this babbler wish to say?” The word ‘babbler’ was Athenian slang. It was used of someone who has no sophistication and who seems to pick up scraps of information here and there. 

The Stoics were somewhat more polite in their evaluation of Paul, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities.” They also seem to be the more confused of the two groups. Paul was preaching the gospel of Jesus and the resurrection. Now in Greek the word ‘Jesus’ is of course a masculine noun, but ‘resurrection’ is a feminine noun (Anastasis). From it we get the English name ‘Anastasia’, which also means ‘resurrection.’ So the Stoics thought that Paul was preaching about a divine couple, Jesus and Anastasia, Jesus and the goddess Resurrection. These would have been strange divinities indeed.

But the Stoics’ comment also had a sting in the tail. It was on the charge of introducing strange divinities to Athens that Socrates had been condemned to death several centuries earlier. So they decide to take Paul to the Areopagus, their council hall just off the marketplace where Paul has been evangelising.

They are probably driven by curiosity as much as by anything else. So on the way they tell him what they want to find out, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?” That sounds like a more polite way of asking, “What does this babbler wish to say?” And then they continue, “For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” This seems to be a more detailed version of the Stoics’ concern that Paul seemed “to be a preacher of foreign divinities.” Notice that both groups want to know. How ironic! They are admitting ignorance. Their philosophies are all about knowledge, but when comes to what matters most they are ignorant.

B. Paul follows the Epicureans and the Stoics to the Areopagus. The stage has been set. The audience are all ears. His speech is about to begin.

Although Paul has been so upset by all the idolatry in the town, he addresses his audience very courteously, “Men of Athens,” he says, “I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” It’s not the kind of religion he would have preferred, but he still treats its adherents with respect. For us there’s a take home lesson right there. As soon as people feel you are looking down on them, you’ve lost them. But more than that, there may be something in their religion or worldview that can be a segue to the gospel. 

Paul sees this in their altar to an unknown god. He uses it to remind the philosophers of their ignorance, but he also uses it as a stepping stone for his message, “What you therefore worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (v. 23). And you will notice that Paul sticks to his theme. His message is all about God. He proclaims the living God in five ways and at the same time he exposes the absurdity of idolatry. As he does so, his speech covers the entire gamut of the history of salvation from creation to judgment day. What then are the five ways Paul speaks about God?

1. Firstly, God is the Creator. “God made the world and everything in it,” says Paul. Now we must realise that the teaching about God as Creator was directly opposed to Greek ideas. Both the Epicureans and the Stoics believed that the physical universe was eternal. Even though they had some sense of the divine, it was not the Creator-God Paul believed in and he wants to make that crystal clear from the very beginning.

So let us not waver on this point either. God is the Creator of heaven and earth. That may not be a popular view today, but it is one that we must never surrender. It is foundational to our beliefs as Christians. It’s sad to see how many Christians today have capitulated to the Theory of Evolution. They give it the fancy name of theistic evolution. But, my friends, it’s not an option. I speak from some experience. When I was a university student, I held to it and so did many of my Christian friends. But I soon learned an important lesson. If you hold to evolution, even if it’s an evolution that involves God, you will never win an argument with an unbeliever. Now I know that evangelism is not all about winning arguments. But there are times when it can be very important.  Some of you may remember the debate on the ABC’s Q&A program about a decade ago, where the Catholic Cardinal George Pell debated the atheist scholar Richard Dawkins. Pell gave up way too much ground on evolution. From then on Dawkins had the debate all on his terms. Evolution is simply not an option for Christians.

2. Secondly, God is the Sustainer. “He is the Lord of heaven and earth,” Paul announces, “since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and all things” (vv. 24-25). God continues to sustain the life that he has created and given to his human creatures. Take all this together, that God is Creator, Lord and Sustainer, and idolatry becomes ludicrous. Paul makes a grand claim, “God does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything.” Now why is this such a grand claim? Remember, this is Athens. Not far from the Areopagus there’s the marketplace with temples to Zeus and Ares and Apollo. Up on the Acropolis overlooking the city, there are temples to the goddess Athena and another to the deified Roman Emperor Augustus. Not to mention that there are idols galore. It’s hard to imagine what a bold statement Paul is making here! No doubt the collective blood pressure in the hall where he is speaking is beginning to rise. This must have been insulting to any born and bred Athenian who is paying attention.

There’s another take home lesson here for us as well. Let’s not think that idolatry was some ancient and primitive religious sin that doesn’t happen anymore. An idol is a God-substitute. Any person or thing that occupies the place that God should occupy in your life is an idol. Think about it. Your career can be your idol. Your family can be your idol. Ideologies can be idolatries. So can fame, wealth, food or drugs. Remember what the apostle John wrote right at the end of his first letter, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

3. Thirdly, God is also Ruler of the nations.  Look at what Paul says in v. 26, “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.” As the Creator, God not only sustains life, but he also rules the nations. All of them can ultimately be traced back to the one man, Adam. In this sense they are all equal. There is no room here for any sense of racial superiority. In God’s sight Greeks are no better than barbarians. Athenians are no better than Spartans. It is God who determines “the epochs of their history and the limits of their territory” (NEB). In other words, it is God who decides when nations rise or fall. No matter what dictators and tyrants may say, it is God who controls both the history and the geography of every nation. 

And he rules the nations in such a way “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might 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” (vv. 27-28a). Our sins have separated us from God. Yet God is not distant. He is not unknowable. He is not uninterested in this world. What Paul is saying here is a poke in the eye for the Epicureans. Remember how they thought of the gods as uninvolved with the world and living somewhere out there between the stars. Well, that’s not Paul’s God! And he lets them know it. God is involved and he is near to each of us.

 “For,” says Paul, “in him we live and move and have our being” (v. 28a). In a footnote in the ESV it says that these words are “probably from Epimenides of Crete.” This also means that possibly they weren’t, and that’s what most scholars think today. The quote is difficult to trace, and there’s no reason why Paul could not have spoken these words himself.

4. Fourthly, because he is the Creator, God is the Father of all human beings. This thought begins halfway through v. 28, “As even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring’.”  This is not a quote that has been lost in the mists of time. You will notice that Paul speaks of ‘poets’ in the plural, and he is exactly right. One of those poets is Aratus in his poem ‘Phaenomena.’ Aratus had lived about 300 years earlier not far from Paul’s hometown of Tarsus. What the ESV doesn’t say in a footnote is that this is also a quote from Cleanthes. Cleanthes was actually one of the founding fathers of Stoicism and Aratus was a Stoic poet. Both of them had written, “For we are indeed his offspring,” and no one quite knows who did it first. But now here’s the thing, and it will surprise you, they had both said this about the god Zeus! Aratus had written a poem about Zeus and Cleanthes had written a hymn to Zeus. And that’s where Pail gets his quote!

And this is exactly the point. Here Paul is dishing it out to the Stoics just as he did to the Epicureans a few moments earlier. His argument runs something like this, “Even on your own assumptions, you Stoics, what I am saying is true.” He knows how to use their own words against them. Listen to how he continues in v. 29:

“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.” If you were only to take your own thinking to its logical conclusion, you would be as dead set against idolatry as I am. How can the God who is our Father by creation be an image of gold, silver or stone? It makes no sense. 

Again we can take a leaf out of Paul’s book here. He speaks to the Stoics by quoting other Stoics. 

We can begin telling Muslims about Jesus by showing them what the Koran says about Jesus and the gospel. 

We can do the same with Jews by using only the Old Testament to show who Jesus is. 

You can demonstrate to the Jehovah’s Witnesses that Jesus is God by using their own New World Translation of the Bible. 

You can evangelize atheists by quoting Richard Dawkins. He was such a sharp critic of religion, but when he was pushed to give his own theory of origins, he finally replied that we are here by one giant stroke of good luck! Really?

5. Fifthly, God is the Judge of the world (vv. 30-32). But before he judges the world, God commands all people everywhere to repent. Paul tells the Athenians that God overlooked the times of ignorance. They had ignorantly, and yet sinfully, worshipped idols. But God had overlooked their idolatry in the sense that he had not treated them as their sins deserved. But now that Paul has spoken, that time of time of ignorance is over. Now they are fully responsible for their idolatry. So now is the time to repent. Now is the time for them to turn from worshipping idols to serving the true and living God. 

Now repentance is always difficult. But do you know what kind of repentance is probably the most difficult? It is what someone has called “academic repentance.” The hardest idol to break is the idol of an unbelieving system of thought. Let me give you an example. Back in the 1950’s Dr W. R. Thompson was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, an elite group of scientists. In 1958 he was invited to write a foreword to the centenary edition of Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, which was due to be published the following year. His entire foreword turned out to be devastating for evolutionists. Here is part of what he wrote:

As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution.

Dr Thompson goes on to point out that in Darwin’s theory there are “these fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.”

You would think that after such a blistering critique of the theory of evolution the scientific community would have experienced a change of heart. But today the theory seems more entrenched than ever, especially in education systems around the world. And brave is the one who would dare to contradict it. Academic repentance is very difficult.

Paul is speaking largely to an academic audience. But he is urging not just academics to repent. He reminds them that God “commands all people everywhere to repent.” And that includes you and me. God calls us to change our minds and to change our behaviour. That’s hard. Repentance is difficult. And yet it is ever so necessary. Who of us has “taken every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5)? Who of us sets our minds only on what is true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise (Phil 4:8)? Who of us always behaves so well that we never have any regrets and have no behavioural patterns that need to change? Who of us plans to have Lord’s Supper today because since the last Lord’s Supper we have scored an A+ in Christian living? None of us, I hope. You see, we all still need to repent, not just at the beginning of the Christian life but for the rest of our lives. And why is that? 

Paul continues in v. 31, “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.”

Why must we repent? Because one day we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ and give an account for what we have done with our lives. One day we will all meet our Maker who will then be our Judge. That is the Day towards which the history of the world is moving with ever greater speed. And woe be to us if we have not repented of our sins and believed in Christ for our salvation! Woe be to us on that Great Day if all we can appeal to are the filthy rags of our own good deeds rather than to the spotless life of Christ who died for the sake of his own!

But how do we know God will judge the world? Because he will do it “by the man he has appointed: and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

This is Paul’s punchline. This is the climax to his message. This is the gospel’s greatest claim. It is the resurrection of Jesus. This sets Christianity apart from every other religion. Buddha never rose from the dead. Mohammed never rose from the dead. Confucius never rose from the dead. But on that first Easter morning Jesus did, and that’s why we can be assured that one day he will return to judge the living and the dead!

Paul’s sermon has been all about God. God is our Creator, Sustainer, Ruler, Father and Judge. Paul has refuted the Epicureans and the Stoics at every point. How do they respond?

C. The Audience’s Response

Paul has reached the grand conclusion to his message. But it’s not as though you could hear a pin drop. The Epicureans were mocking and scoffing, sneering and jeering. That’s the typical response of those who have no comeback.. They cannot refute Paul’s argument. They have no rebuttal. So they just try to laugh it off.

Once again, the Soics are more courteous, but they brush Paul off all the same. “We will hear you again about this,” they say (v. 32). 

At this point Paul walks out of the assembly. Was he making a statement? 

But then to our surprise some people join him. One of them was even a distinguished member of the Areopagus by the name of Dionysius. Then there was also a woman named Damaris, who was probably another person of high standing. And there were some others as well.

We’re happy to see that Paul wasn’t left all alone, but it does seem a rather meagre response to his brilliant and powerful speech. Earlier in Acts 17 the reactions to Paul’s preaching had been far more encouraging. When he preached in the synagogue in Thessalonica some Jews believed, “as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women” (v. 4). Paul had a similar experience in Berea. When he preached in the synagogue there, “many Jews believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men” (v. 12). Compared to his successes in these towns further north, what Paul experienced in the Areopagus may have come as something of a disappointment.

The response in Athens though does remind me of an event earlier in my life. When I was at university, I was very involved with the Evangelical Union, a Christian group of about 500 on campus students. The EU was convinced that every generation of students should have a chance to hear the gospel. So every three or four years they would conduct a mission to the university. 

When it came to my generation of students, I was in my second year. So we invited some great speakers. We saturated the campus with posters and fliers and leaflets. We contributed financially. We prayed. We asked our churches to pray for us. We personally invited our fellow-students to come along. But when the great event was over and the dust had settled, we were disappointed to learn that only eight students had professed Christ as a result of that mission. A huge event, lots of planning, but few conversions.

I know that some of you who have studied at university here have had similar experiences. You had some great Christian events on campus. You may even have invited all your classmates to attend. But sometimes there was little response, and only a few people came to know the Lord. Campus ministry can be tough. For academic types repentance can be very difficult.

Conclusion

In closing let me say something that’s for everybody here. It’s that we live in a society that does not like confrontation. Sometimes in the church we are afraid of confrontation because of the damage it can do or because it was done poorly in the past. And out in the world Christians may avoid confrontation because it can bring on mockery and ridicule. But there are times when confrontation is called for. That’s when Paul’s message at Athens can be such a great model. There’s an art to confronting others, and Paul was a master of it. He said what needed to be said, but he did it, 

• Courageously and courteously,
• Clearly and respectfully,
• Truthfully and tactfully.

May we all learn to do the same!