.. A World That Thinks Everything
... A WORLD THAT THINKS EVERYTHING
IS RELATIVE
Vaughan Roberts in his excellent little book, Distinctives quotes the lyrics from a Boyzone song - No matter what they tell you; no matter what they say; no matter what they teach you, what you believe is true. That’s the spirit of our age. It doesn’t matter what your personal beliefs are, as long as you hold them sincerely, no one else has the right to question them. And anyone who tries to tell you that what you believe isn’t true, and that you should believe something else instead is an arrogant bigot.
So, everything must be tolerated. There’s only one thing that must not be tolerated and that’s the person who says that they have knowledge of the true truth against which all other opinions must be measured.
It’s called relativism because everything is relative. One of our congregation could tell you about the standard kilogramme. There are, I think, two lumps of metal that are kept in very special conditions, which weigh a kilogramme. All other kilograms are set by these standard ones. It’s no good the United Kingdom’s government saying, "Sorry but we don’t like that French thing, we’re going to make our kilogramme a little heavier but we’re going to do it sincerely". It would cause mayhem. However would we do trade with France. Imagine if there wasn’t such a single standard. You could go shopping in town tomorrow and every trader would have his own personal opinion of what a kilogramme was. One gets it from the weight of his wife’s handbag; another from weight of his trainers after a run on a wet day. There would be no fixed standard everything would be relative. You might go to one trader and ask for a kilo of spuds and hardly be able to carry them, and to another and find that you could carry them in a small sock.
In that realm you’re not interested in personal opinion - you want the true kilogramme, and nothing else.
Imagine this in another realm. You’re on a long-haul flight in a Jumbo jet and it’s getting stuffy. You’re in the seat by one of those emergency exits. A passenger approaches the door and puts his hand on the handle as if about to open it. It’s his first flight; he’s from a village in Mongolia and has no appreciation of decompression; of planes falling out of the sky from 35,000 feet. You ask what he’s doing and he says he’s about to let some air into the plane, because it’s stuffy. No matter how sincerely he holds this belief, you will do everything in your power to stop him. You’ll stop at nothing to impose your understanding of truth on him. You’re so convinced of your version of reality that you might smite him on the head with your laptop computer. A bit intolerant in an age of relativism, don’t you think? After all, you’ve never actually seen decompression apart from a couple of Hollywood films.
So, how does all this work in the realm of philosophies and religion? Is there a God? What’s he or she or it like. Is the Christian God of three in one worth considering? What about the Star Wars god - may the force be with you? How about Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism? May be there are no gods, just matter. Well, maybe because no one can be certain or prove their point, perhaps there’s no truth in any of these religious claims, or perhaps there’s truth in all of them. And if you say, “My opinion is that there’s a bit of truth in all of them and we should just respect everyone’s opinion” how do I know that there’s some truth in your opinion? These are vexing questions.
But this much we can say, that Christian people are under great pressure in our society to stop making truth claims. By all means tell us your personal opinion, but don’t tell us it’s true truth. Vaughan Roberts tells of one philosophy student whose university professor wrote this on the bottom of a piece of work, “Remove the parts of this essay that contain absolute values and you will receive a much higher mark”. That’s pressure. And from the top of our society to the bottom, this subtle and not so subtle pressure is being exerted all the time. So, we need to be sure of our ground.
1. the preacher who got provoked
In Acts 17 the apostle Paul arrived in the Greek city of Athens. It had had a glorious history, but was now a small part of the very big Roman Empire. But it was still the Oxford and Cambridge of the ancient world. It was still the centre for learning, philosophy and the world of intellectual ideas. It had been the city of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and Epicurus. You name it and you could find it in Athens. It says in Acts 17:16 that the city was FULL if idols. Every kind of religious philosophy was represented by a temple or a statue or both.
Down in the market place (the Agora) there were discussions about religion all the time. The people couldn’t get enough of the latest fashion in religious and philosophical ideas. See verse 21. Just take in the extent of this. The language is quite strong - they ALL took part in this, they did it ALL the time. This was the atmosphere of their culture; this was the air they breathed; nothing is absolutely true, everything has something good in it. You could believe what you wanted; you could pick and choose from the buffet bar of religion. A bit of this, a spoonful of that, a handful of the other. They were all there, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Jews. “Oh do come and tell us your ideas, we’d love to discuss them with you”.
If you look at verse 16 you’ll see that Paul wasn’t at all relaxed about this. His inward spirit went into a paroxysm. It’s a strong Greek word from which we get our word paroxysm. The NIV has "greatly distressed”. It’s the same word used in the Greek version of the old Testament to describe God’s reaction to the children of Israel when they fell into idolatry - they PROVOKED the Holy one of Israel to jealousy. It’s doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of temper or a fit of passion; it means the reaction of a godly heart to a state of affairs in which the glory of God is being diminished by that which isn’t true to His character and word. Paul was passionately stirred in heart and mind by all the untruth he could see represented in this culture. He was so stirred that he got himself down to the place of debate and vocalised his evangelicalism.
That’s what Christians are supposed to feel when they see the minds of men and women coming under the influence of ideas that aren’t true. You’re not supposed to think, well they have a right to their opinion, you’re supposed to feel pain and heartache and passion that people are being blinded by error; that the ideas they’re listening to and sharing are dishonouring to the true and living God. That’s what God wants you to do as far as your gifts allow; to look at your society, at what people are believing, to feel the impact of the folly and danger of it; and then seek to bring people under the power of the true truth.
2. the witness who wouldn’t budge
In verse 18 we find that it wasn’t long before some followers of the Epicurean beliefs, and others of the Stoics, picked up that there was something different about the way this stranger was speaking and what he was saying. Their initial reaction was unfavourable - they called him a seedpicker. The word was originally used of birds, but then was used to refer to men who collected scraps. When I was a boy we had a man come down our back lane once a week offering a dolly stone for colouring the front step in return for unwanted household stuff. He was called a rag and bone man. He called out from his cart and out would come the housewives with their stuff.
So, their first impression of Paul was that he was a bit of a scrapyard merchant when it came to philosophy. It was along the lines of Goodness me, where did you pick that lot up? They perhaps thought he was bringing news of two new gods, Jesus and Anastasis ( resurrection).
Anyway, they took him up to the meeting of the town council where these new ideas were discussed and either allowed to enter into the life of the city, or be censored and forbidden. They had the reputation of the University to safeguard, and they didn’t want any old rubbish being introduced by any old rag and bone merchant. So, the apostle stood before the Areopagus. And this is so helpful to us because it shows us a man of God facing up to a culture in which many different kinds of religious ideas were tolerated; there was truth in so many of them; no one could say that there was one supreme standard, one body of truth against which all others could be measured. Everything was relative. And here we have a Christian witness facing up to such a culture. It’s got to be relevant to us as we face life in our culture as Christian witnesses. How did the witness behave? And as we look at a few points from this famous sermon you have to bear in mind that it’s more of a sermon outline than the full text of the message.
i. he showed them his interest
In verses 22-23 he shows that he’s walked around the city and tried to understand their culture and way of life. There were more idols in Athens than in the whole of the rest of the nation put together. But Paul had looked at them and read the inscriptions. He was especially struck by these altars "to the unknown god". Listen to what William Barclay says about this - “There were many altars to unknown gods in Athens. Six hundred years before this a terrible pestilence had fallen on the city which nothing could halt. A Cretan poet, Epimenides, had come forward with a plan. A flock of black and white sheep were let loose throughout the city from the Areopagus. Wherever each lay down it was sacrificed to the nearest god; and if a sheep lay down near the shrine of no known god it was sacrificed to "The Unknown God." So, Paul shows that he’s looked at their culture and done his very best to understand it and reflect on it.
On top of that he quotes from two Greek poets. The first is probably a man called Epimenides who wrote for in thee we live and move and have our being. And the second is probably Aratus (Cilician) “It is with Zeus that every one of us in every way has to do, for we are also his offspring”. He wasn’t a blinkered fundamentalist refusing to have anything to do with Greek culture in case it contaminated him. He was committed to an evangelism in which he would become all things to all men in order to win them to faith in his Saviour. To the Jew he became as a Jew, to the Greek as a Greek. And in order to do that, to get alongside the Athenian pagan, he looked at his culture and listened to his culture so that he could reflect on his culture with a thoroughly biblical mind and through the filter of a pure heart.
That’s the kind of witness we should aim to be. Not that we have to watch every dirty film, or expose our minds to Internet pornography; but that we take the time and be at pains to understand what the people around us are believing in and living for. We don’t come in with our Gospel testimony before we’ve tried to understand what makes the heart of that man or woman tick. Then having understood their heart we can apply the Gospel to them with compassion.
ii. he showed them their ignorance
He shows them that for all their opinions they’re ignorant about the simple things. He takes them back to creation and indicates that the God who brought creation into being, and who is therefore infinitely greater than the whole cosmos can’t be contained in the tiny receptacle of their philosophy and can’t be shrunk down to fit into one or all of their temples. And if this creator is so all-powerful then it means that the whole universe is being sustained moment by moment by his power. The universe depends on him; and you are treating God as though you controlled him with your little bits of food offerings, and your little religious rituals. How can you be so ignorant. How can you think you have some kind of control over the living God, when you can’t take a step, a breath, a toilet break without his permission. In Him we live, and move, and have our being. "I’m sorry, your religious views aren’t fine because you hold them sincerely. Your views are ignorant". Bold stuff, indeed!
Not only that, but your whole approach to religious thinking is ignorant, he says. You’re all on this search for truth; you’re looking for God as though you could discover him by the exercise of your intellectual processes. That’s like a flee in the hair of your head setting out to see if you really do exist. You think you’re looking for truth when all the time truth is looking for you and you’re not seeing it because of your mental blindness. God’s revealed himself in creation and conscience but you’re too spiritually blind to see what’s staring you in the face.
That’s another thing we need to learn as witnesses for Jesus. We must learn to kindly and lovingly but firmly to expose the terrible ignorance of the way people think about God. Learn about their inconsistencies and contradictions. Read John Blanchard’s book (Does God Believe In Atheists) if you can and get the arguments under your belt. In a relativistic age we must be ready to say “No, your opinion isn’t valid it’s based on ignorance.”
iii. he showed them his inspired foundations
What Paul began to do here on the Areopagus was to demonstrate that Christianity is THE true standard against which all other opinions must be measured. Christianity alone has inspired foundations. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments aren’t helpful religious literature - they are the very breathed out words of God. And one of the most powerful things that the Bible does is to accurately describe what God has done in history. Christianity doesn’t rest on man’s opinions, man’s guesswork, but on the astounding and miraculous activity of God in history. He created the whole human race from one man, says Paul here. And then displayed himself in all his true truth in another man, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the world’s creator and owner, and is therefore qualified to be the world’s judge. He came into this world as a man, and he’s going to return to it in judgement. (verse 31).
Jesus Christ is in control of history past and history future. How do we know that this is true truth? Because the Christ who died on the Cross to make reconciliation between man and God, rose from the grave. It’s fact. It's history. All that Jesus said about God and about himself and about human beings and their need of salvation, is true truth; and the resurrection from the dead is the validation of all that.
In an age of relativism we need to be clear that we believe what we do not because of personal preference but because God has spoken, he’s spoken in a person. A person who came from outside history, into history, died at a time and in a place, and demonstrated that he is the way to God, the truth about God, and life from God, by rising from the grave.
Why would you prefer the opinions and guesswork of ignorant human beings when God has spoken.
So, where is your confidence as a Christian? As a Christian witness you need to be clear that you’re a Christian not because Jesus has done some lovely things in your life, or because your quality of life has been lifted to a higher plain. But because THE INSPIRED TRUTH has come into the world in a person. You may not understand that truth as well as you want; but truth it is. The Bible is the perfect standard by which all other opinions and systems of thought must be measured. And the day will come when you will stand before the judge of all the earth and answer as to what you did with that glorious body of truth that God brought into the world in the person of his lovely son.
It’s OK to have your doubts as long as you’re willing to allow your doubts to be answered by the truth. But it’s not OK to have your doubts if that’s an excuse to live in ignorance.