The Gospel Strategy
The Acts of Jesus Through the Holy Spirit • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 35:57
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Acts 17
Acts 17
Something that stands out to me in this chapter is Paul’s strategy. I am not saying that his strategy in this chapter was either right or wrong, but the fact that he was apparently being strategic with the Gospel really stands out. I think that it is a lesson that we, as Christians today, should take seriously when we approach non-believers. Hopefully that will make more sense by the time we make it to the end of this chapter, but right away in verse one we are going to see one of Paul’s strategic decisions. Not wasting any time, let’s pray and then dive right in!
Pray
1 When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue.
Notice that Paul “passed through” these other cities on the way to Thessalonica? We don’t know why he did that. Maybe they were still healing up from being beat up in Philippi? Maybe they didn’t come across a synagogue in the other cities? Maybe they were being strategic and trying to reach Thessalonica, which would be a great place to preach the Gospel and allow it to propagate? We can’t know for sure, but here is how Thessalonica is described...
Thessalonica (modern Salonika) was strategically located on the Thermaic Gulf. It too straddled the Via Egnatia. It linked the rich agricultural plains of the Macedonian interior with the land and sea routes to the east. Cicero (Planc. 41) in 54 BC described it as “situated in the bosom of our domain.”
Whether or not this was his intention, this action does imply some sort of intelligent decision making. At the very least, not being chased out of the area before reaching Thessalonica gave them the opportunity to start the Thessalonian church and without it we would not have Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians.
Paul spent three Sabbath days here sharing the Good News. Then in verse 4…
4 Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few prominent women. 5 But other Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd.
So what does Paul do? He changes up the strategy…
10 As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. 11 Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. 12 As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men.
Luke says that these Jews were more “noble in character” than the ones in Thessalonica. Commentary describes it this way…
Luke gave the Jews at Berea undying fame by characterizing them as being “more noble” (eugenesteroi, GK 2302) than the Thessalonian Jews because they tested the truth of Paul’s message by the touchstone of Scripture rather than judging it by political and cultural considerations. So they examined the Scriptures daily (kath’ hēmeran) to see whether what Paul proclaimed was really true. And many believed (v. 12).
However, the jealous Jews in Thessalonica heard what was going on, so they showed up in Berea to stir up crowds of people there. So, in another change of strategy, the believers put Paul on a boat and sent him to Athens, where he waited for Timothy and Silas.
Before we continue, I want to talk about the “Jealous Jews” for a second. This is a topic that could lead down some crazy deep rabbit trails, but I think it is very interesting so we are just going to dip our toes into the water today.
The Greek word translated to “were jealous” is “zēloō” (Zee-Low): be jealous; be envious. It is a verb. The noun is “zelotes,” which is where we get our English word “zealot.” The Hebrew word for "zeloo” is “qa-na” (kah-nah): be jealous, be envious.
It means to have a feeling of ill will ranging even to anger, based on a perceived advantage or a desire for exclusivity in relationship. The adjective of this word means the same thing, with the addition of being a title of God. You may remember this from Exodus 34:14 “14 Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”
To bring this back to our passage in Acts… What did Luke call the people who studied scripture to see if Paul was speaking truth? “Noble.” Important. Open-minded. What did he call the closed-minded people? Jealous! Instead of researching to find what God had to say about the subject, they decided for themselves what was right! They made themselves the jealous god! They let their desire enrage them and turn them against the God they claimed to love.
So Paul runs from them because they were not able to be reasoned with and he runs to the pagans. The ones who should have known the One True God chased Paul away and he went to the ones who didn’t know God at all. In fact, they even had a monument to “the unknown god!” While we read about Paul in Athens we are going to see some of his strategic decisions in action. Pay close attention to this as we get to his speech. Just to give you a mental image of Athens, here is how my commentary describes the city…
When Paul came to Athens, it had long since lost its political importance and wealth. Its population probably numbered no more than ten thousand. Yet it had a glorious past on which it continued to live. Its temples and statuary were related to the worship of the Greek pantheon, and its culture was pagan. So Paul, with his Jewish abhorrence of idolatry, could not but find the culture of Athens spiritually repulsive.
Paul arrives at this city and waits for Timothy and Silas. Verse 16…
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 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. 18 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.
Who are these philosophers?
18 Athens was the home of the rival Epicurean and Stoic schools of philosophy. Epicurus (342–270 BC) held that pleasure was the chief goal of life, with the pleasure most worth enjoying being a life of tranquillity free from pain, disturbing passions, superstitious fears, and anxiety about death. He did not deny the existence of the gods but argued in deistic fashion that they took no interest in the lives of people. Zeno (340–263 BC) was the founder of Stoicism, which took its name from the “painted Stoa” (i.e., the colonnade or portico) where he habitually taught in the Athenian agora. His teaching focused on living harmoniously with nature and emphasized humanity’s rational abilities and individual self-sufficiency. Theologically, he was essentially pantheistic and thought of God as “the World-soul.”
These philosophers began arguing with Paul and some even called him a babbler. This is pretty funny because the term had significant meaning and it was very ironic for these people to call him that…
Some declared him to be a “babbler” (spermologos, GK 5066)—a word originally used of birds picking up grain, then of scrap collectors searching for junk, then extended to those who snapped up ideas of others and peddled them as their own without any understanding of them, and finally of any ne’er-do-well. Others thought he was advocating foreign gods, probably misunderstanding anastasis (“resurrection,” GK 414) as the name of the goddess consort of some god named Jesus.
In v. 18 the philosophers call Paul a “babbler” but the word in Greek is spermalogos, which refers to somebody who picks up scraps of established information — like a scavenger bird picks up seeds — and rearranges it to make up something new. In other words, they were calling Paul an ignorant, religious plagiarist. This suggestion of ignorance will be thrown back in their faces by Paul in v. 30.
It’s ironic that they call him a babbler, or an ignorant, religious plagiarist. For one thing, Paul will ironically call them ignorant in verse 30. More importantly, these people feed on information. They are known for constantly seeking new ideas. They are like the birds and they flock to any new philosophy or idea. In fact, in the very next verse they take Paul to their version of the local congress so they can “know” this new teaching that he is presenting.
20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
In modern terms, you could think of Athens as a college town. All the nerds are here and eager to learn something new. In another stroke of irony, Paul stands up to teach them what they want to hear. The irony is that he doesn’t teach them about some new god, but the One True God. The crazy thing is that for the first time, Paul doesn’t directly quote scripture to teach. Instead, he teaches from scriptural principals but connects them to the broken philosophies of Greek poets. My commentary describes his method better…
Quoting these Greek poets in support of his teaching sharpened his message for his particular audience. But despite its form, Paul’s address was thoroughly biblical and Christian in its content.
Let’s read Paul’s speach...
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 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. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. 24 “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 human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 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 human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 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 everyone by raising him from the dead.”
I like the way Nate Sala describes what Paul is doing…
In v. 28 Paul quotes from two secular authors: Epimenedes and Aratus. Both quotations are taken from addresses to the god Zeus.
Paul is pointing out what C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien affirmed, that pagan myths are simply broken reflections of the true story of reality.
In “Myth Became Fact” Lewis wrote this: “We should expect that in the fullness of time God would draw the circle closed and bring together in Himself all the hints, all the aspirations, all the fragments of the truth scattered among the pagans. In that sense only the Christian story is true: a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.”
In the same vein Tolkien wrote this in a letter to Milton Waldman: “We have come from God… and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error,will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.”
Paul is showing the Athenians the truth that is already evident in their own stories — but has been obscured by the corruption of sin and their own warped imaginations. And, if they can recognize that the Gospel is not a new story, they will see how it transcends all their stories and fulfills their deepest longings.
In v. 30 Paul tells the Athenians they need to repent. The question is: From what sin? The sin of idolatry. That means, as David G. Peterson writes, “Repentance for the Athenians would have meant turning to God from idols ‘to serve the living and true God’ (1 Thes. 1:9).”
Even though Paul knocks it out of the park with his speech, the Council didn’t react well. Some of them sneered, some of them wanted to hear more, and some of them became followers of Paul and believed. According to my commentary…
But because no action had been taken to approve Paul’s right to continue teaching in the city, his hands were legally tied. All he could do was either (1) wait in Athens until the council gave him the right to teach there or (2) move on to some other place where his message would be more favorably received. With a vast territory yet to be entered and a great number of people yet to be reached, Paul chose the latter. We hear of no church at Athens in the apostolic age. And when Paul speaks of “the first converts [aparchē, lit., “the firstfruits,” GK 569] in Achaia,” it is to “the household of Stephanas” in the city of Corinth that he refers (
On the surface, it seems as though Paul kept hitting brick walls of failure after failure in this chapter. First, he get’s chased out of two cities by “jealous” Jews. Then he struggles to convince pagan Greeks in Athens. Even though we will never know how things could have been different or what he could have done differently, one of the lessons of this chapter is the importance of strategy. Even though Paul only appears to have a small impact on Athens, the way he approaches the people in this pagan city is masterful. In most of Paul’s encounters he speaks to people who, for the most part, have some knowledge of scripture or at the very least the God of the Jews.
In his speech to the Athenians, Paul addresses people who don’t know or don’t care about an ancient religion. They only care to learn new things, and he connects with them in a very intelligent way while keeping his arguments biblical and focused on Christ.
Today, it is all to easy for Christians to approach non-believers and just start beating them over the head with the bible. When someone doesn’t even believe in the bible to begin with, it rarely does much good to start from a firm foundation they don’t even have faith in. The way Paul connected truth in scripture with the foundational principles of the Athenians gives us an opportunity to step back and think about the way we approach people today.
There is not one-size-fits-all solution to this, but Paul utilized a kind of “Gospel Grid” to appeal to his listeners. When he speaks to non-believers, Nate Sala says that he utilizes the same four categories that Paul did in his speech to non-believers. The categories are:
Identity: The men of Athens were very religious (Acts 17:22)
Purpose: They spent much time and effort building statues in order to properly worship the gods (Acts 17:23)
Suffering: This led to religious ignorance. They didn’t know the one, true God which means they were not fulfilling their purpose (Acts 17:23)
Redemption: This problem could be solved if they repent before God judges the world through the resurrected Messiah (Acts 17:30-31)
This is a very interesting method that I am trying to put into practice myself. It’s a method that involves asking questions that drill down to someone’s core beliefs. Think about it in terms of foundational beliefs. Just like you stack bricks to build a wall, everything we believe is stacked on faith in foundational beliefs. This is what Jesus said about the foundation of our beliefs…
24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
So when Paul dug down to the bricks at the bottom of their wall, he could point to it’s weaknesses. We can do the same thing by asking questions that are rooted in these four categories…
Identity
Purpose
Suffering
Redemption
This makes me think of a child that keeps asking “why?” “Why is the sky blue?” Well, because of the earth’s atmosphere. “Why?” Because light from the sun scatters when it hits molecules in the atmosphere. “Why?” Because the color blue has a shorter wavelength in the visible spectrum, so it is scattered more easily. “Why?” Go ask your mom.
Evolution evaporates if you ask “why” enough. Humans, apes, amoebas, big bang, then what? At some point there has to be a creator! The problem isn’t that we need to make the Gospel fit in other people’s stories. Everyone’s story already fits into the Gospel. The Athenians wanted to hear a new story to introduce into their established myth’s. Instead, Paul was teaching them the One, True, Ancient Story that both corrects and transcends their flawed worldview.
A simple two-part question that Nate asks is, “What do you think is wrong with the world and how can what’s wrong be made right?” These are questions about suffering and redemption. He says that when he challenged his young adults class to ask their friends these questions they were shocked at what they found. Not only did they discover how easy it was to start this kind of conversation, but everyone had an opinion about it!
In the end, most non-believers’ answers are insufficient in thinking through these categories because they don’t go far enough to explain the true source of all of the issues, which rests in the human condition — sin.
So what does this mean? Do I have to memorize these categories and try to come up with questions to fit each category? No. If you are like me, it wouldn’t matter if you tried anyway. The categories are just a way to structure and strategize your conversations with people. There is really only one thing you need to remember to do. For this final point, I am going to glaze Morgan for a second. If you don’t know, that is a term all the kids use today to say they are going to brag on someone or build them up. They glaze them, like a donut!
The other day I told Morgan, “Man, I am really proud of you. Everywhere you go people love you. You take the time to talk to them and you ask them about specific things in their lives. What’s up with that?” He said, and I am paraphrasing, “I ask them questions and really listen. I just really care.” Wow, what a guy, am I right? Same thing for Paul. He really cared. He quoted from secular sources they were familiar with to help them see the one, true God!
Even in the midst of his infuriation at their behavior, Paul cared so much that he learned about them and tried to show them how close they were to the one true God. We are all sinners who have missed God’s mark of perfection. The Truth is that there is only one way to redemption to God, and that this through Jesus.
29 Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
Pray
