Acts 17:16–34

16Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols. 17So he reasoned in the synagogue with Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with them that met him. 18And certain also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him. And some said, What would this babbler say? others, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. 19And they took hold of him, and brought him unto the Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new teaching is, which is spoken by thee? 20For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. 21(Now all the Athenians and the strangers sojourning there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.) 22And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, in all things, I perceive that ye are very religious. 23For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you.

The challenges

As the gospel of Christ moved out into the larger Roman world, it was no longer trying to convert Jews only who shared Paul’s grasp of reality by reading the Old Testament, but now it was winning people to Christ who had never read the Old Testament, never heard of Moses.

Paul has already had large experience with this because he has been an apostle to the Gentiles. For example, where he and Barnabas are accused of being the gods Zeus and Hermes who have come down to them somehow. Paul has confronted paganism but it’s important to recognize how deeply seated this paganism was in the empire.

The empire was extraordinarily diverse racially, politically, and religiously. It was so religiously diverse the Romans actually enacted law that made it a criminal offense to desecrate a temple. In fact, it was a capital charge.

Pluralism was imperial policy, the debates back and forth between Christians and pagans in the first three centuries, without exception the pagan side is arguing Christians are extremely arrogant for thinking theirs is the only way to salvation, whatever salvation is. To them, there were many, many ways. That sounds vaguely familiar.

That lay at the heart of paganism. In some ways, we’re returning now in the Western world increasingly to a pagan outlook where there are many, many ways. You choose your own way, and everybody has to be tolerant of everybody else, and we’ll execute anybody who isn’t. That becomes a kind of neopagan frame of reference in which we live and move and have our being today. It has merely returned to what Christians faced in the first century.

Paul faced pluralism.

There were many, many religions in the ancient world. There was a kind of principled diversity organized by the government. The Roman policy when they took over a new turf was to arrange a god swap. They insisted some of the gods in the local area be adopted into the Roman pantheon and some of the Roman gods be adopted at the local level. The reason was political.

What this did, in effect, was foster a policy of principled religious pluralism throughout the entire empire so that at the end of the day the final thing to worship gradually became the state itself. Not much different from what is going on in our world, today in media, principled pluralism is on the agenda everywhere, and it is a doctrine which you almost dare not question. It is the new plausibility structure, as the sociologists would tell us.

When we get to this mention of the Epicureans and the Stoics you hear and think, philosopher.

In the first century, Philosophy meant something like what we mean by worldview. Philosophy was an important discipline precisely because it shaped how you think, and there were competing worldviews in the marketplace.

They taught you a worldview, and there were competing worldviews, so how you thought the gods began and how you thought the world began and how you saw what was the matter with the world and all of that had a frame for how you lived.

These were all worldview questions, so when Paul is disputing in the marketplace, he’s disputing with other worldviews.

The Epicureans who are mentioned here believed the gods were composed of atoms so fine that these atoms lived in the interstices, the spaces, between the other atoms.

Some Epicureans became almost functional atheists because, if the gods were removed enough from ordinary life, then you don’t have to worry about what the gods say so much.

For the Stoics, God was not a transcendent other removed. He was, rather, part of the undergirding life force of everything, and this life force emerges in various individual gods, and there is a logos, a reason, a science that this god discloses in all of reality, and how you live should be in the light of this reality.

Over against such views, Paul wants to introduce a personal, transcendent God who is not identified with the universe. On the other hand, he’s not so removed from the universe that he lives in little molecules or little atoms that are hidden from the rest of reality. Rather, he made the whole flipping thing, and he’s still in charge of the whole thing.

The problem of evil is not a problem of being matter. The problem of evil is rebellion against this God, and history is not going round and round in circles the way a lot of Greeks thought. It’s heading in a certain direction.
the situations Paul faces here are very bound up with the particular problems of the paganism of the Roman Empire.

Paul’s first Audience

He goes into the synagogue and reasons there. Paul says, “To the Jew first and also to the Greeks,” he starts with people who do share something of his Judeo-Christian heritage,

Paul also evangelized in the marketplace. That means something more than shopping mall, because the marketplace was not only a place where they bought stuff; it was the place where news was exchanged and where orators spoke up. There were no universities in those days. What you had were traveling itinerant speakers who spoke in the marketplaces or in town halls, public squares.

That’s where the news was given. That’s where the government voices would announce something. That’s the way it was done. That’s also where speakers and lecturers began to lecture.

Paul was preaching the good news, the gospel about Jesus and the resurrection.

Those who heard him said, “What is this babbler trying to say?” The word means a seed-picker, sometimes used for little birds you find by the side of the road picking up little seeds, a bit here and a bit there.

From their point of view, he did not have a philosophy. He didn’t have a worldview. He was just a seed-picker, an amateur, picking up little scraps and throwing them in and not making a coherent picture, but he was getting under their skin, and sooner or later, they wanted to hear more from him. That’s what then precipitated the Areopagus address.

Paul’s second audience.

When he comes to the Areopagus, he faced massive biblical illiteracy, he is dealing with people who, despite all of their intellectual pretensions, had never heard of Moses. They had never read the Old Testament and didn’t know the Bible’s storyline.

Those listening in the Areopagus had profoundly alien worldviews. When you become biblically illiterate, it is not that your mind is a complete blank waiting to be informed. When you become biblically illiterate, you replace what was there by other things.

It was very important in the Greek mind to have a kind of synthetic worldview.

There were competing worldviews, and they were debated in the marketplace of ideas, but it was not an esoteric subject. It was something everyone grappled with. Thus, when they begin to accuse him of being a babbler, the word suggests he was an eclectic thinker.

Their first charge against him was not that he was introducing a new philosophy (that is, a new worldview) but that he was almost incoherent. His categories were so alien. For, you see, not only were they polytheists, believing in many, many, many finite gods, they were by and large pantheists.

In the Greek mind, underneath all of the manifestation of these gods, there was one god who was virtually indistinguishable from the entire order

Now along comes Paul who starts talking about a personal, transcendent God. They don’t have categories for that, and many of them are dualists. They believe matter is, in principle, bad and spirit is, in principle, good, and Paul is talking about a resurrection. That is, coming back to something that is, in principle, bad. They don’t have the categories, so he must not only inform them, but he must unlearn them.

Christians today are where Paul was then

Today we face not only rising biblical illiteracy but outlooks and perspectives that are massively opposite to a Christian outlook, many never heard of Moses either, or else they confuse him with Charlton Heston. They don’t know anything about the Bible’s storyline.

Where do we start with these people?

Sin is a snicker word, it brings no shame. In the latest polls, less than 20 percent of Americans now believe definitions of sin ought to be connected with God.

That means sin is increasingly understood to be sociologically defined or defined by the interpretive community or defined by the individual, which means there is no absoluteness to it. There’s no defiance of God to it

How Paul address them

We need to remember a decent Areopagus address would go on for two or three or more hours. So, here in the text we basically have an outline of Paul sermon.

He begins with a certain kind of courtesy “Men of Athens! I perceive that in every way you are very religious,” he says. Religious is not a good term in our ears today in the culture at large, but replace the word religious with spirituality and you see what Paul is doing.

“You good folks of America, I see that in many ways you are very spiritual.” Everybody glows with the commendation. It doesn’t mean a blessed thing, but at least you start off on the right foot.

Then he begins to show a problem. “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship …” A very neutral word, your objects of worship. He doesn’t say, “Your flipping idols.” I even found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God.”

Paul is an intellectual himself, a brilliant man brought up in two cultures and with at least four languages. Now he comes to Athens, the sort of Mecca of the intellectual world of the empire.

Rather, he looks at the culture and assesses it from godly eyes and is distressed by what he sees rather than impressed by what he sees. He’s distressed because of the idolatry.

, “To an Unknown God.” The point is, in a pagan world, in a polytheistic world, there are many, many, many gods, and the gods tend to exercise authority over particular domains.

When he says, I am going to proclaim to you, he’s saying, “Your whole domain of worship, your whole domain of the divine, your whole domain of Deity is clearly, profoundly unknown to you, and I’m going to introduce him to you. You’re very religious, but your own idols show you don’t know God, so let me tell you what God is like.”

In one sense, although he has been polite and come in very gently, it’s a confrontation. He’s not playing around. There’s a worldview clash going on here.

He establishes God is transcendent and the Creator of all. By transcendent, God is above time and the entire physical universe. He’s above time and space. He can’t be restricted. He’s not part of us. This isn’t a pantheistic Deity. He’s not the life force in all that is. He’s above it all. He exists apart from it all. He is there before any of that exists. In fact, all of it exists only because he made it. He is both transcendent and the Creator. The God who made the world and everything in it. He was there before any of it was there, and he made it all.

He’s the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. he does not live in temples. He can’t be domesticated by religion.

In pagan religion, the gods were, in some ways controlled by the particular sacrificial structures of the mediating priests. In that way, the religion was domesticated, but how are you going to domesticate the God who made the whole thing in the first place and sovereignly rules over the whole lot?

Paul explained, he is the Lord of heaven and earth. He is a providential ruler. He is not lost in a pantheistic sea indistinguishable from the rest of created order. He sovereignly rules over the lot. He does not live in temples built by hands. He is finally not domesticated by religion. He transcends that. You must not think he is the sort of God who can be controlled by erecting a temple in his honor and then pulling the appropriate strings so that somehow this God will give you just what you want. He’s beyond that.

Moreover, he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. This God is not like some of the Greek gods, whimsical and bad-tempered unless you stroke them in a certain kind of direction. He is self-sufficient. He is self-existent. He is happy in himself.

I suspect deep down sometimes people think we’re doing God a favor with our praise choruses. If we get our praise right, then God’s pleased. If we don’t get our praise right, the poor chap is psychologically limited and might be a little angry with us. God is so very removed from anything you get in paganism.

In paganism all the gods are finite and their happiness depends on how they interact with all the other gods and how they interact with human beings. You have to get all that sorted out right and stroke them right or else all the gods are miserable.
He doesn’t need us. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for us. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t interact with us. Paul will come to that, but you still have to begin by saying, in eternity past, God existed and he was perfectly content, and as much as all of his righteous holiness insists he erupts in anger against sin today, in his very being he is content.

He is sovereign. He doesn’t need us. We don’t add something to him. When we bring him the glory that is his due, it’s not because we’re making up for a psychological lack, a hole in the heart of his being which can only be filled by our praise. He doesn’t need us. In fact, the reverse is the case.

We need him. Do you hear what he says? “

And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Because, he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” In other words, we need him for every breath we draw, for every mouthful we take, for all of our interaction, for our sustaining life. Are we not told of the exalted Christ that he upholds all things by his powerful word?
Paul looks around the room, and he says, “Every breath you draw is by his sanction.”

Then he moves on to anthropology. “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth.” That’s interesting, too, because a lot of the different gods, a lot of the different worldviews, a lot of the different philosophies had their own creation nits that were bound up with who the particular people were, but Paul insists instead there is one God behind the entire human race, and the entire human race is descended from one pair. There is not a hint of racism there.

“This God is not merely a tribal God,” as if he’s sovereign only over the Israelites, for example, or only over the Christians.
He says, “Some of your own poets have seen that,”

Paul quotes Aratus of Cilicia, a philosopher-poet from the third century BC, who said of Zeus, ‘ “we are his offspring” ’. The poet will have understood these words in a pantheistic sense, but Paul appears to have viewed them in the light of the image of God theology in Genesis 1:26–27

Paul recognized that a search for God had been taking place in the Greco-Roman world, but condemned the result—the idolatry which was everywhere present and the ignorance of the true God which it betrayed (vv. 22–25). In short, he indicated that the search had been ineffective because of human blindness and stubbornness

Now, Paul comes to what’s the matter. He comes to the heart of the problem. Verse 29: “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill.”

How does Paul deal with the question of evil? He tackles the question of idolatry. That’s very interesting.
When you read the Old Testament right through quickly, what is it that really angers God? What is it that brings down his wrath? Above all, it’s idolatry. That’s not the way we think of evil. When we try to present evil to the world around us, we’re far more likely to begin with the social ramifications of sin.

The Bible talks about all those horizontal relationships, but what is it that really goes right up God’s nose, metaphorically speaking? It’s idolatry. “

Isn’t that what Paul says as he works it all out in Romans 1:18 and following? “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men which they have ungodly committed. They suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. Though they had knowledge of God, they denied him.”

They are the symptoms of the de-Godding of God, which is why David, after his horrible sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, has the cheek to write, if you please, in Psalm 51, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At one superficial level, that’s not true.

A lot of Greeks thought history went round and round and round in cycles. You find the similar sort of thing in many forms of Hinduism, It goes round and round and round, and that’s why you need lots of reincarnations.

“In the past …” He has already talked about creation (the beginning) and the fall, and from where we stand in the past, God overlooks such ignorance. God let pagan nations go on with remarkable freedom, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

There is something new that has happened in recent times, something brand new which now makes God insist all men and women everywhere from every tongue and tribe repent.

Moreover, there is a future. He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the Man he has appointed.

Before he has introduced Jesus, he has established an entire framework. If you introduce Jesus before you get the framework in place, what you’re saying about Jesus will always be misconstrued because your categories aren’t right to receive him.

He starts talking about the resurrection. Paul’s not stupid. Paul knows full well resurrection is not a big hit in Greek thought.

You may have more popularity but you don’t have the gospel. The price is too high. It says some of them sneered when the meeting was over, but some followed. We’re actually told, “A few became followers of Paul and believed.”

They become followers of Paul, and by becoming followers of Paul, in due course, they have everything duly explained and they believe.