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.
“While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and 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 debate 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.
1. The challenges Paul faces
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. You can see some of those experiences in his accounts in Lystra, 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 again and again and again, 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. If it could be proved you had desecrated a temple, any temple (it didn’t make any difference), you were executed. It was one of the ways the Romans had of trying to keep peace.
In other words, pluralism was imperial policy, and when you read, then, 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. There are many, many ways. Does that sound vaguely familiar?
That lay at the heart of paganism. In some ways, you see, 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.
Moreover, when you get to this mention of the Epicureans and the Stoics.… Did you see them there on the fly? He debated with certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. We hear the word philosopher or the word philosophy today and we think of an obscure department in our larger universities that basically teaches you to argue endlessly about obscure things so you come out not believing anything, and that’s what ordinary lay people think of philosophy roughly, isn’t it?
In the first century, that’s not what philosophy meant. 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. There was this worldview and that worldview and the other worldview, so when they were teaching a philosophy, they were not teaching you simply how to be vague or something like that, although they did teach rhetoric.
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.
Isn’t that what we’re doing all the time? Every time you read philosophy here, read worldview, and you begin to get a little closer to what he’s talking about. 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. In that way, the gods were somehow removed from the hurly-burly of ordinary life.
Therefore, proper Epicurean living, proper living in light of the truth of Epicureanism, was likewise to live a life that was somehow removed from the hurly-burly of ordinary life, not to be dictated to by the pressures of ordinary life. 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. That’s another dimension. A person like Lucretius really moved into a kind of philosophical materialism almost.
The Stoics, for their part, believed underlying all the finite gods and goddesses that were around was one deep god-ness. That’s why the Greeks can move back and forth in their discussions very often between God in the singular and god in the plural. Their vision of this god-ness behind all of reality was almost pantheistic. It was almost aligned with all of reality.
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.
As a result, Stoicism became very high-minded, very morally upright, and very (what we would call) stoical today in the light of suffering and the like, very even, very placid. They can put up with anything because they’re going to live in the light of reason as manifest by this god principle of logos that undergirds the whole universe.
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. There were huge issues that had to be nailed down, Paul thought, before you could actually talk much about Jesus, because otherwise, what you would be saying about Jesus wouldn’t be coherent. It would belong to a certain worldview or philosophy.
In other words, the situations Paul faces here are very much bound up with the particular problems of the paganism of the Roman Empire. The one thing we can say by way of encouragement, nevertheless, is as we abandon in the West our Judeo-Christian moorings, more and more pages of the New Testament speak more and more directly to us.
We might be abandoning these moorings for all the wrong reasons; nevertheless, one of the effects is, in some ways if we listen carefully, the pages of the New Testament speak to us far more directly than they spoke to Christians in this country 50 years ago because we have now moved into very similar sorts of structures.
The ancient world was not postmodern in its epistemology. That was not an issue; nevertheless, in terms of the sheer pluralism and the finiteness of the gods and the vision of spirituality and the vision of spirituality divorced from morality and so on are all very similar to today in many, many ways.
2. Observe the priorities Paul adopts.
What we’re told is he goes into the synagogue and reasons there. That’s part of a theological stance I don’t have time to go into. Paul says, “To the Jew first and also to the Greeks,” and everywhere he goes, if he can find some Jews around, he begins in the synagogue, and if he can’t find Jews around and just finds too few Jews who are meeting by a riverbank somewhere, as in Philippi, then he starts there.
In other words, he starts with people who do share something of his Judeo-Christian heritage, and such people would be either Jews or they would be God-fearers, Gentiles who are now familiar with the Old Testament stories. For that sort of person, when you’re presenting Jesus, you don’t have to begin by talking about the God of creation, the God who is different from the world.
They’ve already bought into it. They’ve read the Old Testament. They already know what election is. They already know what grace is. They already know what law is. They already know the origins of evil. They’ve read Genesis 3. As a result, what evangelism means in that sort of context means insisting Jesus, who Paul describes, really is the promised Messiah the Old Testament Scriptures have long talked about.
When you read one of Paul’s sermons delivered in a synagogue like the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch (the sermon recorded in Acts, chapter 13), you discover Paul devotes the overwhelming percentage of his space to proving Jesus really is the Christ, and if you read the Old Testament right, this Christ had to die, and not only die, but he would come back from the dead. He was resurrected, and there were witnesses to this. That’s the frame of reference in which he lays most of his emphasis when he’s talking with Jews because all the other kinds of things are already shared givens.
For us, likewise, if we’re evangelizing churchy folk who have been brought up in some Sunday school somewhere.… They’re not converted, but they already know the Bible stories, and they still do believe there is one God, and they still believe in the Trinity, and they still believe evil is fundamentally an issue of breaking God’s law and so on.
Obviously, in that context, what articulation of the gospel means is to explain, “Yes, but the reason why Jesus came and lived and died was precisely to bear our sin in his own body on the tree, and the way you receive this is not by being good because you can never be good enough. The way you receive this is by trusting the sacrifice God in his love has already provided. Otherwise, you are heading for judgment. He has said so.”
Then you show your verses. It’s the Romans road or it’s the four spiritual laws or it’s Kennedy’s five steps or it’s the John Root or whatever. We’ve all been through those sorts of steps, haven’t we? It makes a certain kind of coherent sense once you have people on a certain kind of shared platform of given assumptions already. That’s where Paul begins, in other words. He begins by evangelizing people who already largely share the Judeo-Christian worldview because, in their case, they’re steeped in what we call the Old Testament, what they call Torah, the Hebrew Canon.
We’re told 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.
Most of our towns are not built around public squares, but in much of Europe all the small towns are built around public squares, and even a big city like London has its Hyde Park where anybody can get up on a soapbox and begin to declaim. That’s part of the heritage that really comes from the Roman Empire.
In days before newspapers and powerful presses and radios and so on, that’s how people were instructed. That’s where the news was given. That’s where the government voices would give their, “Hear ye; hear ye,” and announce something. That’s the way it was done. That’s also where speakers and lecturers began to lecture.
Then, if you were any good, sooner or later you’d rent a hall and start charging for it. When you charged for it, it was obviously because you were good, so people would send their sons and occasionally their daughters, depending on the city, to learn from these itinerant speakers. If they got a lot of people there, they could up their fees, because, obviously, the chap who charges the most must be the best. Just look at Harvard. That’s the way it works, isn’t it?
Whether you’re the best or not, you think you’re the best once you charge the most, so you can price yourself out of the market, but meanwhile, you keep upping the price as much as you can because that’s also sending signals that you’re the best. Within that kind of framework, you start attracting more students. That’s the way whole schools were founded in the ancient world. There were no universities, but you began with the marketplace, and you sort of moved on from there.
But these people were biblically illiterate. These people had their philosophies, their worldviews, but they were a long way away from anything of the Judeo-Christian heritage, and there too, Paul was evangelizing. Not only in the synagogues, but we’re told also in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. He didn’t wait for them to come to him. He found venues where he was going after them.
That meant he had long thought through, since he had planted quite a lot of Gentile churches, how to do this. Acts 17 does not mark some fresh departure for Paul. It was merely one more example of what he was doing all the time, a particularly significant one because it is in Athens of all places.
What was he preaching? We’re told in verse 18. Paul was preaching the good news, the evangelium, the Evangel, the gospel about Jesus and the resurrection. It’s a technical expression that brings up the whole thing. He was putting the whole thing in place for them. That’s what he was doing. From the point of the view of the opponents, it was a bit hard to take. They couldn’t figure out what he was on about sometimes.
“What is this babbler trying to say?” The word is spermologos, a seed-picker, sometimes used for little birds you find by the side of the road picking up little seeds from some horse droppings and that little seed and some other little seed. It’s nothing coherent. Just a bit here and a bit there. Some eclectic thinker who picked up a scrap here and a scrap there.
From their point of view, he did not have a philosophy. He didn’t have a worldview. From their point of view, 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 which brings us to the third point.
3. The framework Paul establishes
It’s important to remember a decent Areopagus address would go on for two or three or more hours. It takes us a couple of minutes to read this which means all we have here is a summary of his main points. In other words, virtually every clause here is nothing more than the next point in his outline.
This is not the totality of what he said. This is merely the briefest summary, and even then, he didn’t quite finish. He is cut off before he finishes. Did you notice that at the end? We’ll come to that in a minute. If you want to know how Paul would have developed each of these points, in many cases, you can guess pretty closely. Do you know why? Because many of the points Paul makes in these individual clauses, he writes about at some length somewhere else in his writings.
I’ll draw your attention to two or three of them (not all of them but a lot of them). You can guess pretty closely how Paul would have developed the point, but from our perspective, what’s really important is how Paul links these points together, which are preserved in this sort of summary survey form, because together they constitute a kind of worldview, a kind of frame of reference which he puts in place before he introduces Jesus.
That’s very interesting. What does he do? He begins with a certain kind of courtesy, doesn’t he? “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. It’s probably better than being a rigorous philosophical materialist. That’s all Paul means by it. He’s not going to say their religion is as good as anybody else’s religion, but he does commend them, at least, for being in that kind of sphere of things.
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.” He says, “… your objects of worship.” He’s being careful still. “… I even found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God.”
We need to think about this. Right at the very beginning of this section back in verse 17, we discover when Paul went to Athens, as far as we know, for the first time in his life, he was deeply distressed because of all of the idolatry. You must understand Athens was still viewed in the Roman world as the intellectual center of the universe. It was, in some ways, in decline, but it was still viewed as the premier, we would say, university town followed by Alexandria in Egypt, followed by Tarsus which was the town from which Paul came, followed probably by Pergi in Asia Minor.
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. He looks around, and he doesn’t say, “The Parthenon! Fantastic!” It has already been there 500 years.
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. In other words, it’s important to try to assess the culture with Christian eyes rather than with eyes that are merely impressed by architectural triumphs or intellectual bombast and success or fiscal strength or whatever.
Now he comes to one of the things he has observed as he has walked around Athens. He has come across some sort of idol with the inscription, “To an Unknown God.” That one has not shown up in any of our archaeological researches. On the other hand, one can easily understand how it came about. 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.
You have a god of the sea and a god of birthing and a god of communication and a god of war and so on. In fact, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of gods and goddesses. If you wanted to make a sea trip, you offered a sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. If you want to give a lecture, then you give a sacrifice to the god of communication, who was Hermes in the Greek pantheon and Mercury in the Roman pantheon. If you wanted to go to war, you wanted Zeus to be on side. That’s the way it was.
On the other hand, how could you be sure you had covered all the bases? I mean, nobody knew exactly how many gods were finally there. Maybe you’d offend one of them. One of them could trip you up. You’d be in real trouble. Somewhere, somebody along the line had sort of tried to cover their bases by building this altar to an unknown god. “Whatever god is out there.… We’ll offer sacrifices to this one, too.”
That way of looking at the gods makes you live your life in a certain kind of fear, too. The gods are whimsical, somewhat bad-tempered. They’re busy sleeping around. They have their own agendas, and they’re all finite, as well. You can’t quite be sure what they’re going to do, so you try to stroke them with the prescribed religious propitiating sacrifices to make them happy toward you.
What you really don’t want is one of these gods to get mad at you. Then you’re in big trouble. It might even be one you don’t even know, so you try to cover your bases. What Paul sees in all of this, then, is evidence they don’t know God at all. What he says, then, at the end of verse 24 should not be misunderstood.
When he says, “Now what you worship as something unknown—I am going to proclaim to you,” he is not saying, “What you worship in this altar to an unknown god as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you,” as if he is saying, “I’m going to tell you about one more god you don’t really know. This unknown one? I know this one, so I’ll tell you about this one.” That’s not what he’s saying.
He’s saying something more comprehensive. 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.” That’s what he has done.
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. I’m sure at this point you could have heard a pin drop in the Areopagus. Now he begins. This is the frame of reference now Paul establishes.
A) He establishes God is transcendent and the Creator of all.
By transcendent, I mean 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. Do you hear that? 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. Not only is he transcendent and sovereign over all because he made it, he’s the Sovereign over all because he still controls it all. Everything. Heaven and earth. The whole shebang. In that sense, he does not live in temples. He can’t be domesticated by religion.
Paul is not denying here there was a sense in which the God who manifested himself to Israel actually disclosed himself particularly in a tabernacle or in a temple. He’s not saying there was nothing to the temple in the Old Testament, but after all, even when Solomon dedicated the temple, he said, “Behold! The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built?”
The Israelites themselves recognized the temple was not in some way to domesticate God or to limit God. It was, rather, God’s provision of a place where God himself would meet with the prescribed sacrifices with his own covenant people, but it was not in any sense a domestication of God.
In pagan religion, the gods were, thus, 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? That’s a big vision of God. It’s bound up with what we mean today by holiness. It’s bound up with the very godhood of God.
If you want to know where Paul would have gone with this, it would partly be Romans 1, but partly, I’m sure, he would have pulled in some huge chunks of Isaiah 40 and following. Read Isaiah 44 and read Isaiah 45 where the God who is is contrasted with the gods of the idols. That’s the frame of reference in which Paul is living and thinking and moving.
B) He affirms God is the God of aseity.
It’s a word we no longer use, but it was very common in Puritan times. Aseity. It comes from the Latin a se, from himself. He is so much from himself that he doesn’t need us. That’s what the text says. He doesn’t need us. That’s exactly what the text says. He doesn’t need anything.
We’re used to thinking about that a little bit still. We talk about God’s self-existence. With respect to his origins, we say all other things are dependent creatures. I exist because my parents bore me all the way back to the first human beings all the way back to God himself. Sooner or later, I have to acknowledge I am a dependent creature. My existence is not a self-existence, but God is self-existent. His existence depends on no one. He was not made.
Aseity goes one stage farther. It’s saying that not only is God’s origin dependent on no one and nothing, but God’s very being and moving and living and all he does is dependent on no one. He’s the God of the Old Testament who says, “If I were hungry, would I ask you? The cattle on a thousand hills are mine.” If, strangely, God wanted a hamburger, would he ask you for a buck to go to McDonalds? He owns all the cattle that go there anyway. Billions of them. He owns the whole shebang. What does he need your buck for, if he were hungry, and he’s not, so how does he need you?
This is the God of aseity. We need to bring that word back. He is so much from himself he doesn’t need us. Don’t misunderstand me. This does not mean God does not respond to us personally. He is not a non-interactive God. It’s not as if he’s a deist God so far removed from us that he doesn’t choose to interact with us, but if he chooses to interact with us, it’s out of his choice. It’s not because God (poor chap) has a whole lot of psychological needs.
We mustn’t think God is in heaven saying, “It has been a miserable week. I just do hope my people will get their praise right this week. I’ll feel so much better if they stroke me in their praise and tell me how wonderful I am.” I suspect deep down sometimes we almost 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. Poor chap.
He’s not the God who is saying, “I do so want you to repent and become converted, because otherwise, eternity is going to be very lonely.” He doesn’t have any needs. He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need us for his happiness. He doesn’t need us for his well-being. He doesn’t need us for his existence. He doesn’t need us for anything. He doesn’t need us. Stick that in your theological pipe and smoke it.
It’s so very removed from anything you get in paganism where 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.
That’s not the way it is at all! 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.
C) 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.” Didn’t Jesus teach the same thing? Not a bird falls from the heavens without God’s consent. Every hair on our head is numbered. For some of us, that means a rapidly subtracting account. Every time I take a shower, a few more go down the plughole never to be seen again. God still keeps the record straight. He doesn’t have to go to his calculator and punch in a few more numbers and subtract. He knows it all.
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. None.
Then he goes on to say, “This God is not merely a tribal God,” as if he’s sovereign only over the Israelites, for example, or only over the Christians. No. All through history, God determined the time set for all of these people and the exact places where they should live, because after all, isn’t that what you read in the Old Testament? We read again and again and again, although God holds his covenant people to a certain account, nevertheless, he says again and again in various ways, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
After he’s finished using the Assyrians to chasten the Israelites, he says, “I’m going to turn again and rend you for all of your wickedness.” He says the same thing about the Babylonians. He’s going to put down the Assyrians. He’s going to put down the Babylonians. He’s going to put down the Greeks. He’s going to put down the Persians. He eventually puts down the Thousand-Year Reich, and he puts down the Imperial Empire of Great Britain, and he can put down the American empire as well. He’s sovereign and rules over the affairs of the nations, uses even the wrath of man to praise him.
We’re told by the prophet Isaiah, in the days of the Babylonian Empire, even the mighty nations of the earth are nothing more than a fine dust in the balance. What that means, then, is you can no longer think of religion as a kind of tit for tat swap act which is what religion is in pagan thought. You scratch the god’s back and the god scratches your back. You give the god what the god wants and the god gives you what you want. It’s a kind of trade deal.
How do you have a trade deal with a God who doesn’t need anything? How do you have a trade deal with a God who is absolutely sovereign? How do you have a trade deal with a God whose very sanction is necessary for you to continue breathing and for your heart to continue pumping? Whenever you start thinking in terms of a trade deal with this sort of a God, your god isn’t big enough. You have nothing to barter with.
Elsewhere, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4, “What have you but what you received? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” What do you have to trade with a God who owns the whole show, you included? Already, it’s a worldview frame of reference that is changing how you will think what spirituality is, what religion is, and what salvation is. It’s a massive worldview transformation that is at issue.
“God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.” Already now, we are being introduced to something that is wrong with humankind. We haven’t had it spelled out yet. We haven’t had sin introduced. So far, we’ve had God and his sovereignty in his nature, in creation, and in anthropology and so on.
That has been introduced, but now for the first time, you realize human beings are a long way removed from God. How does that work? He’s about to explain, but the point is God works in his sovereignty precisely because he wants people to seek him, we’re told. “In fact, some of your own poets have this right.” Although this God is sovereign and he’s transcendent and he can’t be bartered with, he is also immanent, the theologians say. He’s never far removed from us. He’s with us. He’s inescapable.
Isn’t that what the Old Testament also says? The psalmist asks the question, “How shall I flee from your Spirit? If I fly to the wings of the dawn …” What is meant by that is the rays of the sun on the horizon, and every morning you can go another thousand miles farther to the East and you’ll still see the wings of the dawn. You’ll never get there.
“If I fly to the wings of the dawn, you’ll never get there. If I fly to the wings of the dawn, you’re still there. If I descend to the depths of Sheol, you’re still there. How shall I flee from your Spirit?” God is not only transcendent, but he’s immanent. He’s inescapable. He’s not far from us. He’s with us all the time.
He says, “Some of your own poets have seen that,” and he quotes one of the pagan poets. Of course, what that pagan poet was doing was thinking of a pantheistic world, but Paul has already pointed out he’s not thinking of a pantheistic world. Nevertheless, so far as the words themselves go, “Sometimes your own poets have gotten pretty close to the truth on this matter. In him we live and move and have our being.”
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 really narks 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.
“Do a lot of drugs, and it mucks up your whole future. The society falls apart. Families aren’t secure anymore. If you sleep around, it has this social implication.” We’re trying to show how Christian morality is important for the stability of society to, therefore, introduce the nature of evil to people in a purely horizontal set of relationships, isn’t that right?
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. “I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. I’m a jealous God. You shall have no other gods before me.” In the great vision of Ezekiel 8 to 11, for example, all the idolatry is condemned, and then, after all of the idolatry is condemned, then the social implications of the idolatry are condemned.
In other words, the foundational sin, the foundational evil even in Genesis 3 right at the beginning, was the de-Godding of God. Isn’t that what Satan says to Eve? “God knows if you eat of this tree you’ll be like God.” We want to be in control. We want to be God. We want to develop a form of religion in which God (if he, she, or it exists) exists to please me on my terms, and if we can’t find that sort of God, we’ll invent another one, thank you. That’s the beginning of idolatry. We want a domesticated God.
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.”
The heart of all evil from God’s perspective is not that somebody bashes a policeman on the head. It’s not even that some man rapes a woman or some woman seduces a man. It’s not that. It’s not that those things are not evil. They are certainly evil and they are massively condemned and God holds people to account for them, but in some ways, they are symptoms.
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.
He sinned against just about everybody. He sinned against Bathsheba, and he certainly sinned against her husband. He sinned against the baby in the womb and sinned against the soldiers who he has manipulated. He sinned against the covenant with the people. There isn’t anybody he hasn’t sinned against, so what is he doing standing up and addressing God very piously, “Against you only have I sinned”? In the most profound sense, that is exactly the point.
Sin receives its odium, sin receives it heinousness, sin receives its depth of malice by de-Godding God, and that’s why God stands over against us in judgment. Until you make place in your worldview for a God who stands over against us in judgment, you cannot understand the cross. You cannot. The cross is not designed to make us good without reference to God; the cross is designed to reconcile us to God, and in so reconciling us to God, conforming us, then, to the image of his dear Son in how we live. Paul takes time with the question of idolatry.
Then, he also takes time, if you please, with the philosophy of history. 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, don’t you? It goes round and round and round, and that’s why you need lots of reincarnations. You get reincarnated and reincarnated and reincarnated. Each time you try and cycle up a little higher. After enough reincarnations, who knows? You might come out really splendidly. Gautama the Buddha only took 1,000. Hang in there.
But that’s not what Paul thinks of history. “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. There’s an urgency, now, that has been introduced. Of course, that urgency has been brought about by the coming of Christ and all that has happened in him. He’s just setting up the ground for it.
Moreover, there is a future. He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the Man he has appointed. There is a goal. There is a teleology. There is a final accounting. You can almost cycle around with another turn. You come back to an end. There is a judgment to face, and he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead. Now he has introduced Jesus.
Do you see what Paul has done? Before he has introduced Jesus, he has established an entire framework. That’s what he has done. 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.
4. Observe the non-negotiable gospel Paul preaches.
He doesn’t lay it all out here, but you get some hints. He doesn’t lay it all out because, obviously, they shut him down. They cut him off. Nevertheless, you get some hint of where he’s going. 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. Notice how it ends. 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.” Do not misunderstand that. It is not saying, on the spot from what Paul had already said, a few became followers of Paul and immediately believed. It’s not saying they were converted.
In the ancient world, when a speaker was liked for what he or she said, then a few became followers and disciples of that person and followed them around and went to their meetings and, in consequence, moved into their worldview and, in consequence, believed. What has happened here, you see, is some sneer. Some say, “This is very interesting. If this is correct, there are some huge implications.” They become followers of Paul, and by becoming followers of Paul, in due course, they have everything duly explained and they believe.
When I started doing university missions 25 years ago, people who got converted tended to get converted during the week of missions or the five days of the mission. That’s when people got converted, but nowadays, when I do a mission, it’s far more likely the case, because people are far more bone ignorant, that it takes a while to build things up.
I know the Lord can come down in revival power and sweep people into his kingdom in no time at all, but normally, God is a God of means. Nowadays it takes more time. Often, what we invite people to in university missions is to sign up after the mission for a Christianity explained course or a Christianity explored course, and very, very often, I come to the end of a university mission and no one has been converted but I have 16 to 25 people signed up for these next six-week courses.
Then somebody emails me and says, “We have 11 genuinely converted. Now we’re praying for the other 16.” That sort of thing is going on all the time. In other words, they become followers of Don, and subsequently, they believe. That’s the way it works. Because you’re dealing with people with such an alien worldview that it takes a while to put the pieces in place normally, your evangelism has to start farther back.
