Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I don’t know who the bigger sinner is here.… Pat, for saying all these wonderful lies or me, for enjoying them. I have a friend in DC who comments on the book, The Gagging of God. He says, “It takes Carson 600 pages to gag God. Who will gag Carson?” I guess it all depends on your point of view.
I wouldn’t have brought it up but now that it has been mentioned, I don’t expect to have a heart attack on the spot. That’s what they thought it was, but it was something called myocarditis, which can be serious short-term but on the long-term affects very little. As long as I get enough rest for the next two or three months, I suspect I will be around to inflict you yet.
If I slip out after a meeting or something like that, it’s because I’ve gone back to rest. All of my life, I’ve been one of these people with minimal sleep, and I don’t like beds in principle and that sort of thing, but for the next two or three months I’m supposed to behave. A condition of my being here, as far as the doctor was concerned, is that I do get some rest. If I disappear, that’s where I’ve gone.
I’d like to begin this evening by reading Acts 17, verses 16 and following. This passage is well known, but it is certainly worth thinking through again. Hear, then, what Scripture says.
“While Paul was waiting for them …” That is, for Silas and Timothy. “… in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’
They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 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. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
“For in him we live and move and have our being.” As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.” 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. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.’
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
It is a remarkable passage, this one, for here we find Paul evangelizing in a context of biblical illiteracy. Compared with Acts 13, where you have in Acts the longest record of any of his sermons, the difference is stunning. In Acts 13, you find him evangelizing in a synagogue, so now he is evangelizing Jews and Gentile God-fearers and proselytes.
That is, to use our categories, biblically literate people, people who were brought up in the Old Testament. They knew what the storyline was of the Old Testament. They didn’t have to be introduced to those sorts of things. Here we come upon a Paul who is evangelizing intelligent people who are completely and totally biblically illiterate.
As our culture moves into a way of looking at things that is grounded much more on biblical illiteracy than a kind of heritage of Judeo-Christian presupposition, suddenly Acts 17 is going to appear more and more relevant to us and Acts 13 a little less relevant. Let me begin with the realities Paul faces, the priorities Paul adopts, the framework Paul establishes, and finally, the non-negotiable gospel Paul preaches.
1. The realities Paul faces.
We’re told, “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Even that small verse is rather remarkable. As far as we know, this was the first time Paul had ever been to Athens. In terms of the prestige of the day, Athens was still viewed as the first city of learning, followed by Alexandria in Egypt, followed perhaps by Tarsus or one of the cities around the area where he himself lived.
He was brought up in a literate community, but Athens was still, though it was on declining terms, widely viewed throughout the empire as number one. I don’t know what number one is for you. Cambridge, Massachusetts? Maybe you won’t admit it, but.… Those Eastern Seaboard types we may not like here in the Midwest; nevertheless, some people have some notion of what the number-one institution is. There were no universities as we think of them, but in terms of center of learning, Athens was still viewed as number one.
Moreover, it was the place of great beauty. The Parthenon was there and still flourishing and great sculpture and great art and great discussion centers and great culture and great music. Athens was a fairly small town, but nearby was Sparta, which was on the ascendancy in terms of culture and so on.
A. Idolatry.
When we find Paul arriving he’s distressed because the city is full of idols. In other words, here is a man who is not easily seduced by the glamour or the wealth or the learning or the impressive architecture or the inherited, literary tradition of any culture. He looks around and what hits him the most and distresses him greatly is the sheer idolatry of the place.
I remember when I first went to Cambridge, England. I was just a boy from Canada, a bit of a hick in many ways. Suddenly, to get off the train in Cambridge and look at St Bene’t’s Church which had been there for 1,000 years and King’s College Chapel with its glorious example of perpendicular architecture and to look in the windows of Emmanuel College and on one side see figures in the colored glass of the great fathers of the church (Saint Augustine and Irenaeus and so on) and on the other side great Puritan heroes, all there (William Perkins and John Owen and so forth).
It was very easy just to be impressed by the aesthetics of the place. It took me about six months to get orientated enough to start looking at things from a more biblical frame of reference. “Is this a city that pleases God or is it a city of great idolatry?” Look at some of the things Paul inevitably faces here. He faces pluralism. Many of us in the Western world have, until fairly recently, simply assumed the rightness of a prevailing Judeo-Christian heritage.
Of course, for many Christians in many parts of the world, they can’t assume any such thing, but many of us were brought up in a world where that was still the case. Even when I started doing university missions 30 years ago, if I were evangelizing an atheist, he or she was a Christian atheist. That is, the God he or she did not believe in was the Christian God, which was another way of saying all of the categories for discussion were on my turf.
Nowadays, less so still in some places of the Deep South or some smaller communities in the Midwest but overwhelmingly so on the coasts and increasingly so in places like Omaha, we are a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-religious, highly diverse society. There are all kinds of advantages. It increases your restaurant choices, for example. There are some wonderful advantages, but on the other hand, it does produce a whole new set of challenges when it comes to bearing witness.
You are now not bearing witness simply to a failed Catholic or a failed Lutheran or a failed Baptist; you now increasingly, especially on the coast but increasingly in a place like this, too, are bearing witness to someone from a background in Hare Krishna or a background in Islam or a background in Hinduism or a background in Buddhism.
Just the sheer pressure of trying to know where to lock into discussion with people of such diversity is itself a bit of a challenge, isn’t it? Don’t you sometimes feel woefully inadequate when you start meeting some new mate at work who comes from goodness knows what background? You don’t even share the same religious language.
In the Roman Empire, this was part of imperial policy. The Romans, when they took over some new territory, arranged for god swaps. They insisted some of the local gods be adopted in the Roman pantheon of gods and some of the Roman gods be adopted by the locals. The reason, of course, was that often when there is rebellion in the ancient world there is some sort of psychological alignment of people, land, and local gods.
If you could arrange some god swaps, if war broke out you’re not quite sure on which side the gods are fighting. We don’t do anything quite that way today, but on the other hand, there are overwhelming cultural pressures on us today to say all religions are basically saying the same thing, we’re all going to the same place, and they’re all equally valued.
Even though they are formally saying massively contradictory things, there are huge pressures for a kind of philosophical pluralism, and it is assumed you are massively intolerant if you say, “I don’t think so. I think some are better than others, and I think one is right.” You’re bigoted by definition.
In fact, there have been some fundamental shifts in the nature and definition of tolerance, which I will mention briefly tomorrow morning as one of the things we have to deal with in this respect. Paul faced all of that in the first century. Almost all pagan religions at high intellectual levels assumed it was remarkably ignorant and arrogant to say any one philosophy or any one religion was the only way. Does that sound vaguely familiar?
B. Biblical illiteracy.
Here Paul is dealing with biblical illiteracy of the very first water. The people I evangelize in university missions nowadays don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. I do biblical evangelism by expounding Scripture. They don’t bring Bibles; we print up what we’re going to use and put it on each seat or give it out to people at the door on the way in.
You have to explain the big numbers and the little numbers. They don’t know chapters and verses. They don’t know anything. They’ve never heard of Isaiah, they’ve never heard of David, and if they’ve heard of Moses they confuse him with Charlton Heston or the new cartoon figure. This is not simply in way-out types.
We have a close friend in our church in suburban Chicago who is a teacher of grade 5 students, and she reported last year at Easter she was trying to explain a little bit to these students what Easter meant to Christians. It was discovered about a third of the students in the class did not know Easter had any connection whatsoever to Jesus or to Christianity. It was just a cool holiday. You have Christmas and then you have Easter.
One of my students a year and a half or so ago was downtown with his fiancÈe, and she was wearing a gold chain around her neck with a little wooden cross suspended from it. As they were walking down the streets of Chicago a teenager stopped them and said, “What are you wearing a plus sign around your neck for?”
You have to understand I’m not mocking such ignorance. It’s just the state of affairs. You cannot now assume any common ground, so that in university missions nowadays the very limited religious vocabulary the students do have in every single case means something different from what I mean.
Faith, truth, Jesus, hope, God, righteousness.… In every case, it means something different from what I mean. You start realizing, then, the challenge of evangelism is becoming pretty massive. On the other hand, Paul faced all of that, too. What a first-century intellectual Greek meant by god was not what he meant, by truth was not what he meant, by spirit was not what he meant, by religion was not what he meant.
Moreover, it’s not as if Paul is trying to evangelize people who are like empty hard drives: all you have to do is write the right files on them, then they’ll know, and then they’ll operate. Rather, they are more like hard drives that already have all kinds of files on them that are going to conflict massively with the files you want to write on them.
In other words, they’re not blank slates and you just tell them the truth and they’ve got it. Inevitably, they have some other worldview. They have some other frame of reference, some other way of looking at things. Inevitably. None of us are blank slates. That’s what the text here says.
He argued in the marketplace daily, and then.… Verse 18: “A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to argue with him.” When we hear the word philosopher, we think of a professional educator in a small department in a big university teaching esoteric subjects to undergraduates and befuddling them gloriously, but in the first century, philosophy meant something closer to what we mean by worldview.
The point of education was to train people up in a whole worldview, a way of looking at things, so an Epicurean philosophy was an Epicurean worldview. It’s the way you look at the whole world. You understand yourself and your place in it and who the gods are and how to behave in it and so on, and Stoicism likewise. It was a whole frame of reference. It was a way of looking at things.
These traveling teachers and lecturers, these traveling preachers, would set up shop in these places, and if they were good they began to charge some money, first in the marketplaces and then with their lecture halls. Their aim was to take on the youth of the town and train them how to think and look at all of reality. It was a frame of reference, so it’s important to understand what kind of frame of reference was involved.
The ideal of Epicurean philosophy was an undisturbed life. It was thought that the gods were made up of atoms that were so small, so tiny, and so fine they lived in the interstices between all of the other atoms, and thus, were sort of removed from the normal physical world. It was another dimension, and ideally, that’s the way you should live: untroubled by too much involvement in human affairs.
As the gods are nicely removed from the hurly burly of life, so human beings should also be removed from the hurly burly of life. What the gods do doesn’t really matter all that much to this world; what the world does doesn’t matter all that much to the gods. It’s just another dimension that is marginalized off to the side, but over against this vision, Paul in these few lines presents a God who is actively involved in this world as its Creator, its providential Ruler, its Judge, and its self-disclosing Savior.
Stoic philosophy thought of god as all-pervasive, more or less in a pantheistic sense, a god somehow belonging to the heart of life throughout everything (a god principle), so that the human ideal was to live life in line with what is ultimately real with the life force in all of reality, to conduct life in line with this god or this principle of reason which must rule over emotion and passion. Stoicism was marked by high moral discipline, high precept, great earnestness, a high sense of duty, and yet, it had no personal god.
Against this vision, the god Paul presents, far from being pantheistic, is personal. He interacts with the universe. He approves and condemns. Instead of focusing on universal reason that we tap into with our human reasoning, Paul contrasts divine will and sovereignty with human dependence and need and idolatry.
It’s an entirely different worldview. It’s a different way of looking at everything. The fact of the matter is Paul could not possibly clearly explain who Jesus is and why he came until people had understood the biblical storyline, the biblical worldview, the biblical way of looking at things. If you’ve already bought into a Stoic worldview and then you announce Jesus, what are you going to understand about Jesus?
If you’ve bought into an Epicurean worldview already and that’s your frame of reference and then somebody tells you about a Jesus who lived and died and rose again, what on earth does it mean? It’s not tied into anything that makes sense of Jesus. Paul understands, therefore, that he has to evangelize at the level of worldview, of changing a whole frame of reference. These, then, are the realities Paul faces. I will deal with more of these tomorrow in terms of our own structured reality in the Western world and how we can go about them.
2. The priorities Paul adopts.
I will just mention a couple of things here in passing. He does not stand by and merely wring his hands. He begins, as usual, in the synagogue. Verse 17: “So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks …” He begins with the people who were closest to him.
He has some theological reasons for doing that, but from our point of view, that’s akin to evangelizing people who are biblically formed, who have some sort of background in Christianity, who have been “churchified” somewhere, who have some sort of Judeo-Christian culture that is still strong upon them. He does evangelize those people, too. In some senses, they’re the closest to us, aren’t they?
We’re told he’s also evangelizing, reaching out more and more in the marketplace with those who happen to be there, until finally, he’s dragged in to this Areopagus where he faces condescension, sneering: “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” You can hear the self-righteous sneering and condescension coming down the pages across 2,000 years, can’t you?
3. The framework Paul establishes.
What does he say? Paul gets his chance to speak, and he begins with a compliment. “I see that in every way you are very religious,” he says. I suspect we would say today, “I see in every way you are very spiritual.” Religious does not have a good overtone to our ears today, does it?
Nobody wants to be thought of as too religious, but we live in a culture where spirituality is in again, whether it’s programs on TV about angels or being improved because of the vibrations of crystals or the force (“Let the force be with you”) or whatever. We all have our form of spirituality, don’t we? You have your form of spirituality, and I have my form of spirituality, and so on.
Paul recognizes this is better than a kind of raw materialism or a raw naturalism. He’s not saying it’s all something he agrees with. He’s about to tell them where he disagrees, but he begins with a certain kind of a courtesy. “I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”
You need to understand why he would have found this. In the pagan world, you see, gods operated in various domains, so if you want to take a sea voyage you want the god of the sea on your side, so you offer up appropriate sacrifices to Neptune, the god of the sea. If you’re going to make a speech, you want the god of communication on your side. Hence, Mercury in the Roman world or Hermes in the Greek world.
If you want to go to war, you want Zeus on your side or in the Latin world, Jupiter. You want the right god for the right kind of thing. There are gods for getting good marks at school and there are gods for being physically successful, for being successful in business, for having a fat baby. There are gods for everything. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gods. Thousands of gods! Finally, in Hinduism, millions of gods!
You can’t possibly get to know them all, but there might be one out there that could really trip you up. I mean, it might be some domain of life where you haven’t given it any thought at all and that god might be really narked because you haven’t paid him or her the respect that is his or her due.
Clearly, this sort of altar was meant to cover that possibility (“to an unknown god”). It indicated people living in a certain kind of fear of the gods. These gods all demand their cut, as it were. They all demand their worship. They all demand their corner. They all demand their praise. They all demand to be stroked. They all demand their sacrifices.
If I miss one and I blow my life because of that.… So we have an altar to an unknown god, but Paul sees this as a horrific indication that they don’t know anything about God at all. It’s a terrible mark of ignorance of God. He’s not going on to say, “Well, let me tell you about this unknown god. Let me add one more god to the pantheon. I’ll tell you about the one you don’t know.” That’s not what he’s saying at all!
He’s saying their ignorance is manifested even by having to put up an altar to an unknown god. “So let me tell you what God is really like,” he says. Now, of course, inevitably he has a spellbound audience. Critical, no doubt, and ready to jump down his throat, but these are intelligent people who see he has a certain point. Now he begins. What does he cover?
It’s important to remember speeches to the Areopagus were not 12-minute “sermonettes for Christianettes.” They were major discourses. They could go on for two and three hours. Even if he was cut short before he finally finished, clearly he had a full go. That means each of these clauses is probably a point that, in fact, he expounded at length.
In other words, we can read through the Areopagus address in about two minutes. Undoubtedly, he expounded each of these points at greater length, and in most cases, we could have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing he said, because somewhere else in his writings he treats most of these themes. We’ll come to the idolatry theme, for example, which he treats at great length in Romans 1 and 2.
In most cases, we have a pretty good idea of what Paul would have said if he had time to unpack it, so let’s go through it and unpack it just briefly to see what sort of things Paul is getting at here. He says, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”
A. Paul establishes that God is the Creator of everything.
There were various Greek ways of looking at that. There were various Greek myths, Greek theories, depending on the school of thought, depending on the philosophy. It was very common to believe the ultimate God actually made some lesser gods and one of these named the Demiurge (the demiourgos) actually made the physical world.
The reason for such thinking is that many Greeks thought matter was intrinsically entrapping, intrinsically not good, even bad, so it was impossible to imagine a great, good God would actually make something bad. It was easier to imagine he made various intermediaries who eventually were low enough to trip up and make something like the world.
Instead, Paul pictures a God who has made everything (absolutely everything) because, you see, in Paul’s thought, as in the Old and the New Testament generally, the grounding of all human accountability is in the doctrine of creation. Have you ever talked to one of your friends at work? You’ve tried to share something about your faith and what the Lord means to you.
This friend says to you, “Charlie, look. I know this Jesus stuff means a lot to you, and I’m happy for you. We all have to find our spirituality our own way, don’t we? For you, it’s Jesus, and for me, well, quite frankly, I don’t need it, but if I have to go do anything, it’s crystals. I like their vibrations, and I like the great outdoors, the god of everything.
When I go fishing I feel close to God. If Jesus helps you, I’m pleased for you, but I don’t like it when you shove your Jesus down my throat, and if you keep shoving your Jesus down my throat, quite frankly, I’m not sure I want to be your friend, either. Back off and give me some space!” Have you ever had somebody tell you something like that? Now what do you say?
Well, it might be the point of wisdom to back off and not be rude and be courteous and make sure you go fishing with him sometime. All those things have to be said, but surely, sooner or later, don’t you have to smile and say, “There’s a sense in which the one thing I can’t do is back off because God made you and you owe him, and the fact that you don’t look at it that way is already a terrible evidence of how desperate your situation really is”? Don’t you have to say that sooner or later?
Because, you see, in Scripture it is precisely the fact that we have been made by God and for God that grounds our accountability to him. I’ll come back to that one again tomorrow, too. It’s extraordinarily important. If we think of God as another being more or less as we are but slightly souped up, perhaps, then he is a colleague, a peer, and we have the right to stand in judgment of him as he has the right to stand in judgment of us, but if, instead, we have been made by him and for him, to think in some other terms makes no sense at all.
Let me give you an illustration. I know an Irish lass who, three or four years ago, finished her degree in history and was going to teach history in a school in a really tough part of Belfast. She was teaching 13- and 14-year-old boys in a rocky part of town, fresh out of university (22 or 23 or 24). Of course, it being the United Kingdom, they still teach religion in the schools. How much religion includes Christian religion depends on the school, and in this particular school, they had to find somebody who would teach some Bible.
They usually gave it to the youngest person on staff. They didn’t have anybody decently trained. Guess on whose shoulders it fell? This poor lass right out of university trained in history but nothing else now has to teach 13- and 14-year-old boys Bible from a rocky part of town where they couldn’t sit still for any time at all. She was having a hellish time. She didn’t know what to do.
After three or four weeks of misery, she brought in a big bag of flour and some salt, got some water, made up some plaster of paris, put the boys’ desks together in groups of four to six, and said, “Look. We’re going to start a long experiment here. You can make creatures. You can make them look like people. You can make them look like animals. You can make them look like space aliens. You can make them look like anything you like, but you make these creatures. Make them out of the plaster of paris. Make them.”
They started making them. Some looked more or less human, and some were, frankly, obscene, and some were grotesque. You know, 13- or 14-year-old boys from a bad side of town. What do you expect? She thanked them for them all and made sure they were properly labeled. Overnight, she baked them in the oven so they were nice and hard.
The next day she came back. “Now, you have to paint them and start a notebook giving each one’s name and a bit of their history and how they interact. Do they belong to the same family? Start forming them into communities, giving something of their history and background. Who is the father of whom or the cousin of the first cousin or the second cousin twice removed? Build up a whole genealogy, a whole little community of these creatures. We’ll see which of the best desks wins.”
She got some competition going. They began to decorate these people and clothe them and so on. Within three or four more days, she had them building streets and roads and a little lake and a whole community and so on. She was getting them to build a whole little world. She came in after two or three weeks of this, and she said, “I’ve been thinking. These are pretty small creatures. Don’t you think they need some rules? I mean, they could do a lot of stupid things, couldn’t they? They could hurt themselves or hurt one another. What do you think would be appropriate rules?”
One little lad put up his hand and said, “Don’t jump in the lake; you’ll dissolve.” Another one put up his hand and said, “Don’t go too close to the edge of the desk. If you fall down, you’ll shatter.” She eventually wrote these all out and got them in a big discussion. They came up with 28 rules. The next day she came back.
She said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about these 28 rules. These are very little creatures. How are they going to remember 28 rules? Do you think we can simplify them, bring them down to just a handful that makes a lot of sense?” One little boy stuck up his hand and said, “Do everything I say when I tell you.” Well, she thought that was a pretty good generalizing form, so she put that down and so forth. The discussion went on.
The next day she came in and said, “I’ve been thinking again. I wonder how you would react if one of these little creatures now, as you come into the classroom and you look down on this world you’ve made, looked up at you in the face and said, ‘I don’t like you. This is my world. You don’t have the right to tell me how to live. You don’t live here; I live here. If I want to go swimming in the lake, I’ll go swimming in the lake. It’s no part of your business to tell me what to do! You’re just a big bully, actually!’ ”
She built this up and built this up, and you could see the little boys getting squeamish in the class, beginning to steam, and finally, one of them burst out and said, “I’d break his bloody leg!” Then she opened the Bible and read Genesis 1, 2, and 3. Do you understand? It is the doctrine of creation that grounds our accountability before God. We did not make ourselves. We were made by him and for him. Not to acknowledge that is already the primal sin. It is to think that you are god. It goes all the way back to the garden. Isn’t the first temptation to say, “You will be like gods”?
- Paul establishes that God is sovereign over the whole thing, not simply one domain. He is the Lord of heaven and earth, and moreover, he does not live in temples built by hands. This is not denying God manifested himself in the great temple of Solomon or the like. No, that’s not the point.
The point is a lot of pagan religion thought of the gods as basically forms of domesticating all of life. The gods are in the temples, and they have their prescribed priests. You offer the right sacrifice and then you get the right blessing, and that’s how life is regulated. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat payment scheme.
“You scratch my back; I scratch yours. You scratch the god’s back; the god gives you the blessing.” They all have their domains. Thus, the gods themselves are domesticated. Just as you’re domesticated by the gods, the gods are domesticated by you. It’s a tit-for-tat scheme. That’s the essence of pagan religion, and God help us, there are not a few evangelicals who think of God something like that, too.
They don’t admit it, but deep down they start thinking, “You know, if I just get my prayers right, if I just pray appropriately and have my devotions properly, if I attend church the right amount, then God is bound to bless me, isn’t he? I mean, I’m a nice Christian man for goodness’ sake. Of course, he’s bound to bless me.”
That’s a kind of tit-for-tat relationship with the Almighty, but the God who Paul presents won’t be so easily domesticated. He says, “He does not live in temples built by hands.” Then, in case we haven’t got the point, 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.” Do you hear that? God doesn’t need you. That’s what the text says. He is not served by human hands.
Thus, the God of the Old Testament says, “If I were hungry, would I ask you? If I wanted a McDonald’s hamburger, am I going to ask you for a buck? The cattle on a thousand hills are mine. I own the whole flipping world. In what sense do I have to approach you for anything? How do you add anything to God?”
You see, we are not to think of God in the pagan way, as having a whole lot of psychological needs that only we can address. “Dear old God is up in heaven feeling quite miserable unless we get the form of our praise right. If only we used guitars and drums (or if only we don’t use guitars and drums), then finally God is pleased. Bless his heart. Otherwise, he’s a bit of a grouch. If you don’t praise him enough or get enough prayer time in he’s bad-tempered, because he has his psychological needs, too.”
Is that the way we’re supposed to think of God? You cannot add to this God. Now don’t misunderstand. I am not saying for a moment this God does not interact with us. We’ll see in due course that he does. I’m not saying this God may not stand in judgment over against us. Of course. I’m not saying this God cannot love us. He does!
I am saying this is done out of the free choice of his own sovereign will. It is not done because he has deep psychological needs which only we can meet. He’s not sitting up there in heaven saying, “Eternity is going to be so lonely unless you agree to come up here with me.” He doesn’t need us. That’s what the text says. He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need you, and he certainly doesn’t need me. That’s what the text says.
In fact, it’s just the reverse, he says. He gives us everything we need. “… life and breath and everything else,” the text says. That’s the first lesson people must learn with respect to the God of the Bible. Every breath you draw is by his sanction. Every bit of food you eat, every relationship you enjoy, and every day of life is by his sanction. Life and breath and everything else.… You are utterly, utterly dependent on him, and if he says, “Time’s up,” you’re gone.
In other words, the relationship between sovereign Creator and dependent creature cannot ever be reversed. It is the mark of our deep, deep rebellion that somehow we lose sight of the fact we are, first and foremost, dependent creatures. One of the things that happens when we really do close with Christ, when we really are reconciled to God, is we begin to recognize afresh that God is God and we are his creatures and he is sovereign. This is so different from the pagan world of finite gods and tit-for-tat religious arrangements.
B. Paul establishes a doctrine of human beings.
From a doctrine of God and of sovereignty and of providence, Paul establishes a doctrine of human beings, of anthropology. “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.” Well, that’s very interesting, too. In a lot of Greek myths there were different origins and backgrounds for the different races … they came from different sources or they were created by different gods, or whatever.
But Paul says the entire human race finally comes from one pair, and thus, he has no track of racism. None. Absolutely none. He is establishing again our creatureliness and our dependence upon God and, then, God’s sovereignty over all the nations. Not just the Jewish nation or not just some part of the Greek nation. “He determined the times set for all of them and the exact places where they should live.”
So far, Paul has not actually introduced the question of sin. If this was all you had read so far, you might have thought, “The world should be a pretty fine place. What’s the matter with it?” Now you get to the first hint there is something wrong, and he will explain in more detail what’s wrong in a moment.
“God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him,” which now assumes they are somewhat alienated. Without expressing why, it now assumes they are somewhat alienated and that God’s sovereign sway over all the nations was at least, in part, so people would actually pursue him.
Of course, when you keep stressing God’s transcendence and otherness and greatness, there is a danger you’ll think of him as so distant and so important and so other that he is not close, but Paul won’t allow that either. Paul will insist God is not only transcendent (that is, above space and time since he made everything), but he is also immanent (that is, he is with us, in us, around us, inescapable; he’s not far from each one of us).
That, too, of course, is reflecting Old Testament thought, isn’t it? When the psalmist can cry, “Where shall I hide from your Spirit? If I fly to the wings of the dawn …” That’s a Hebrew expression for the morning rays. “If I go as far east as the morning rays or as far west as the declining rays, your Spirit is there. If I descend to sheol, the depths of death itself, you are there. I can’t escape from you.” He says, “This even some of your own poets have said,” and quotes pagan sources.
C. Paul establishes what’s wrong with the world.
“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.” He’s talking about idolatry. You who read your Bible regularly, in the Old Testament what is it above everything else that really narks God? Isn’t it idolatry? When we try to present the morality of the Bible to the world all around us, what we very quickly do is move to the horizontal dimensions of idolatry.
“Don’t you understand if you steal from one another then the whole society falls apart? If you lie to one another, there’s no trust anywhere and the whole society falls apart? It becomes litigious. There are no handshake deals anymore because nobody can trust anybody, so you have to have more and more lawyers, building more and more structures of things to protect everybody. Don’t you understand that?
Of course, if you have adultery everywhere then there is no preservation of the family, and soon, if you don’t have preservation of the family, it spills out in the second and third and fourth and fifth generation of kids who are not brought up properly. Don’t you understand that? You see, the Bible is really important because it gives you the structures that stabilize society.”
Isn’t that what we say to show the relevance of biblical morality to the world around us? Of course, that’s all true, and of course, all those themes are biblical in some sense, but the core sin in the Old Testament, the thing that really makes God angry, is the de-Godding of God, the de-throning of God, idolatry.
In Paul’s terminology, putting something of the created order in the place of the Creator. That’s why covetousness can be called idolatry. If you really want something.… If you really want a Maserati or you really want a certain promotion at work or you’re just desperate to have whatever it is so that consumes your whole horizon, that for you becomes god. That’s idolatry.
In the beginning, there is God, and the creatures who were made in his image were rightly related to him. Each loved him with heart and soul and mind and strength. Because each was rightly related to him, each was rightly related to each other. If one woke up in the middle of the night, the mind would naturally go to this God and look at things from his point of view, his perspective. He was the object of adoration and veneration and obedience.
Now, with the beginning of sin, what happens is not just a breaking of a rule. Now each one thinks he or she is at the center of the universe. (Not literally, but you know what I mean.) Supposing I held up either your high school graduation class picture or your college graduation picture and said, “This is your graduating class,” where will your eyes go first?
Or supposing you have a real knock-down, drag-out argument, one of these one-in-five-year or eight-year or ten-year arguments, with an employee or an employer or a spouse (a real nasty argument, a horrible thing) and you go away seething and you think of all the things you could have said and all the things you should have said and all the things you would have said if you had thought of them fast enough. You replay the whole argument over in your mind. Who wins? I’ve lost lots and lots of arguments; I’ve never lost a rerun, and neither have you.
Now, with each person being the center of the universe, then God gets de-Godded. “God, if he, she, or it exists, jolly well exists to serve me, and if, in fact, this God makes too many pretentious claims, then I will find some other sort of god. I will define God differently. I will make my own god.” You’re at the beginning of all idolatry.
If I’m the center of the universe, boy, that means you’re not, and if you and I clash.… I’m the center of the universe. There are offenses and war and rape and greed and lust and malice and battery and assault and theft, and it doesn’t end, and it doesn’t end. All because I will say, “I will be god.”
That’s why Paul goes after idolatry here. It’s not, you see, because he doesn’t like little clay models of things or he doesn’t like little stone figurines that go up his nose. Paul understands at the heart of all iniquity, of all sin (social and vertical) is the de-Godding of God, and God’s wrath is upon us because of it because he is God.
Let me tell you frankly (we’ll come to this point again tomorrow at length), you cannot get agreement on what the solution to the problem is unless you can get agreement on what the problem is. The hardest thing in university missions today, and I suspect one of the hardest things for you as you try to evangelize in a secular world, to get across is not the deity of Christ. It’s not some kind of notion of creation. It’s not the notion of the Trinity.
The hardest thing to get across by far is the notion of sin, because our postmodern world has relativised things so much, so frequently, so persistently, and so repeatedly that the one thing you’re no longer allowed to say is that somebody else is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing, so whenever you introduce categories of sin, you will sound in this culture inevitably as if you are the killjoy; the self-righteous, arrogant hypocrite; the bigot; the Elmer Gantry. That’s who you are.
But if you don’t get across a biblical view of sin and idolatry and judgment and the wrath of God, how on earth are you going to get across the significance of Jesus’ work on the cross? If you cannot get agreement on what the problem is, you will certainly not get agreement on what the solution is.
Thus, if you try to present Jesus before you get that frame of reference in place, you will always end up, intentionally or otherwise, with a domesticated Jesus, a nice plastic Jesus who comes along and makes your life right. “He died on the cross because he loves you so much, and he takes our sin.” It’s all true, and that might mean a lot to you, but what does it mean to a complete relativist to say, “He takes our sin”? It doesn’t mean a blessed thing! Paul understands that and he spends time on it.
D. Paul establishes a philosophy of history.
Most Greeks thought of life going around and around and around … not teleological, not going in a certain kind of direction with a final judgment point or a final end point. They thought of life going and around and around and around. Reincarnation is based on that perspective, of course, and rising numbers of people today believe in reincarnation here in the West, too, don’t they? Life goes around, and then you get in the next round what you deserve from this round, and then you get the round after that, and according to your karma, be it unto you.
Paul doesn’t look at it that way. Paul develops a whole teleological view of history. Creation he’s already had, and then he speaks of the present. From this present, “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now …” Now something so fantastic has taken place. There’s a new state of affairs that has been introduced. “… now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” All men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.
“For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.” A final judgment day at the end. A whole linear view of history culminated by a final judgment day. Then he introduces Jesus. “He has given proof of this to all men by raising that man from the dead.”
In other words, this is the framework Paul adopts. He understands he has to present something of the storyline, something of the big picture, the frame of reference that makes sense of God, human beings, the nature of the problem (namely, sin), and the judgment that is finally coming before he actually introduces Jesus as the solution. Otherwise, if you introduce Jesus as the solution before anybody has a clue what the problem is, the Jesus you announce will inevitably be misunderstood.
Tomorrow we’ll look at ways of doing that sort of thing, because it can be done in 10 minutes and it can be done in 10 hours. It can be done briefly or it can be done comprehensively, but I suggest to you increasingly, if we’re going to take our evangelism seriously, one of the things we must do is engage more in what increasing numbers are calling worldview evangelism. That is, there is a whole frame of reference that has to change.
In the past that wasn’t necessary because, in the Western world at least, so many of us had bought into a Judeo-Christian worldview in which we accepted there was a God and there was such a thing as morality and there was such a thing as wrong and right and the Ten Commandments were important and sin was awful and guilt was real before God and there was a judgment finally to be faced.
That was all part of the given, and even if you denied it, it was part of the heritage people knew about, but increasingly, those things are not given. They are not known. They are not absorbed. They are not recognized. Thus, if you present Jesus without those things in place, the Jesus you think you’re presenting is not the Jesus they’re hearing.
Paul understood that in the first century, and our missionaries have understood it for some time. We train our missionaries in cross-cultural communication because we’re sending them off to Thailand or some place. The difference is now Thailand is here. That is, increasingly, we are in a situation in the Western world where you can no longer count on the prevalence and triumph of the Judeo-Christian heritage, so you have to begin further back in your presentation of the gospel.
4. The non-negotiable gospel Paul preaches.
One of the things that is so striking here is that Paul introduces Jesus with reference to the resurrection. “He has appointed this man and ascertained it, guaranteed it, by raising him from the dead.” Paul was not a stupid man. He understood perfectly well that for many Greeks the notion of the resurrection would be an oxymoron like … boiling ice. It doesn’t happen.
When I was a student reading chemistry and mathematics at McGill University in Montreal, we had a lot of competition between the science faculty and the engineers. The science people, of whom I was a part, developed a lot of oxymorons. We said, for example, that civil engineer is an oxymoron. We thought mechanical engineer was a bit tautologous. It was saying the same thing twice. We had all kinds of nasty comments along those lines and … relax … they had nasty things to say back to us.
To have a crucified and resurrected King, a resurrected being resurrected by God, was an oxymoron for most Greeks, because you see, resurrection has to do with a body. The body is intrinsically to be viewed with suspicion. If Paul had simply said, “Jesus died and then continued to live immortally,” then all of his hearers would have nodded sagely and said, “Yes. Deep. Deep. Wonderful.” Of course, if he had said that, he would have been saying the truth, too, wouldn’t he? Jesus did continue to live immortally.
But Paul understands that to come to grips with the Christian gospel means coming to grips not just with Jesus’ immortality but with his resurrection. Why he thinks that’s important he himself spells out, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15. We don’t need to go into that now, but for Paul it’s a non-negotiable part of the gospel.
What that tells us is, when it comes to articulating the gospel, while it’s important to read the culture aright and to build in the worldview that makes sense of who Jesus is, it’s also important not to compromise the actual content of the gospel, no matter how uncomfortable it is for some of our hearers.
You have to understand what the non-negotiable gospel is, and you can present it with all the wisdom and tact and humility in the world, but you must present it or you are not evangelizing, you are not gospelizing. Gospelizing (evangelizing) is the presentation of the gospel. Unless you have a very clear grasp of what the gospel is (what is non-negotiable to it) it’s so easy to present a dilute form of it that says something like, “The gospel is about how God loves us so much he can put our marriages back together.” Well, it’s true, but it’s not quite the gospel.
Paul understands this gospel is non-negotiable, and even if it means some people walk out on him, he’s prepared to pay that price. Look at the last couple of verses. Some sneer at Paul. They don’t have a category for it. A resurrected Messiah is an oxymoron, so some sneer, and others say, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”
We’re told, “At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed.” Do not misunderstand this verse. This verse almost certainly does not mean, on the basis of what Paul had said so far, they became Christians. Paul had given very little of the gospel. He just worked up to it, you see, at that point, and then the whole thing broke up.
No. It says they wanted to hear Paul again, so they became followers of Paul and, in consequence, believed. You see, in the ancient world when you heard a lecturer you liked, then you went and heard him again, and then you went and heard him again, and then you went and heard him again. You became a follower of that person and then believed.
When I started doing university missions a quarter of a century ago, those who got converted at them were mostly converted during the mission itself, during the two or three days of the week itself or whatever that I was actually there, because they came in with a churchified background, and then some gloriously really did get converted at those meetings and have gone on in the faith to this day.
Fair enough, but increasingly that’s not what happens. You see some people converted like that at universities nowadays, but nowadays so often people are so bone ignorant about anything that at the end of the two or three days or week or whatever it is they become, as it were, followers of Don. That is, they want to hear more on this matter.
We sign them up for a Bible exploration course, a Christianity explained course, or a Christianity explored course. There are all kinds of 6- or 8-week little courses they can take in the evenings, at lunch hours, or whatever. In consequence, because they become followers to find out more about what happened, in due course they believe.
What that suggests is if you’re going to evangelize deeply ignorant people with worldview evangelism, you have to start thinking on the long haul. You’re taking people from much further back, so you have to get them into the right kinds of Bible exploratory courses and introduce them to Jesus in many different dimensions and fronts before the barriers come down and the prejudices of an essentially alien worldview are overcome by the sheer power and truth and glory of the gospel.
Do not misunderstand me. I know perfectly well that in time of revival the Holy Spirit can sweep along and convert all kinds of people instantaneously, and he doesn’t need this course or that course, but by and large, God is a God of means, and the fact of the matter is, in this particular instance where Paul is dealing with biblical illiterates, Scripture tells us those who did not sneer became followers of Paul and, in consequence, they believed. That is one of the things we aim to achieve, therefore, in our efforts at evangelism. I’ll leave more time for question and answer and discussion tomorrow, but for now let’s call it quits and bow in prayer.
Lord God, we freely confess we all stumble so often, so easily in this matter of evangelism. Sometimes we’re embarrassed that people will laugh at us. Sometimes our ignorance means we hush up because we don’t know what to say. Work in us by your Spirit so we have an overwhelming love for those whom we seek to evangelize, so it is not so much that we are trying to win arguments as trying to win people for Christ’s sake.
Help us always to think of ourselves not as those who are gifted in apologetics but as poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread. Within this framework, Lord God, may the instruction of your Word so fill us and overwhelm us that we discover we cannot be silent. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
