Paul's Second Missionary Journey: Athens. Acts 17:16-34
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Introduction
good morning church and welcome to the week of Thanksgiving which seemed to come out of nowhere if I’m open. I say that, Amanda has been counting the minutes until she can evict Levi on Black Friday but I seem to have lost all of November somewhere. I came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly.
But this brings me to my favorite time of the year, Thanksgiving. I will preach on thanksgiving’s glory forever because it is in my summation, the perfect holiday. It centers around family, way too much food, being thankful, and then sitting around and watching TV. How many of you watch football? How many watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade? How many of you have some other tradition that you do?
I had a friend whose family would go out after the meal and play tackle football. All I could think about is how the last thing I want to do after eating a turkey dinner is move at all. I want a nap and to focus on breathing.
but as your friends, family, or group gathers this year, I hope you will take time to take stock of all the ways God has blessed you and make sure to offer those things up to Him in praise.
Thankfulness and gratitude have a unique propensity in our lives to help us recalibrate ourselves towards God and His preferred orientation for our lives. Thankfulness and gratitude are one of the best antidotes for one of our greatest ills as a society: selfness. Our whole culture worships self and self-centeredness. We brag about ourselves and there are books, podcasts, channels, and influencers whose entire brand is centered around building the life you deserve. and, btw, it happens in all of us to a lesser extent.
We all think we deserve better outcomes than we usually get. We’ve all felt passed over for that promotion and that they guy who got it was the wrong choice. We all want more and better stuff and feel that we deserve it. That is why it is so important that we keep coming back to the divine physician of our souls to keep getting our medicine prescribed. Worship and gratitude help reset our souls away from us and towards God. Contentment comes when we count our blessing and stop focusing on what we don’t have.
Tension
Today, as we continue on with Paul’s second missionary journey, we encounter the city of Athens and a particular problem they had with their own version of idols. Where we as a nation struggle with popularity, fame, self-importance, and selfishness, their idolatry took on a more “on the nose” approach. Paul, freshly kicked out of now Thessalonica and Berea now seeks to share the gospel with a new city, one that prided itself on philosophy, religiosity, inclusiveness, and openness to most ideas. And while that might have sounded like a page from a recent newspaper, I assure you it was in the Bible. Going further to show us that their seems to be nothing new under the sun. So let’s get going this morning as we Start in chapter 17, starting in verse 16.
Prayer
Exposition
16 Now while Paul was waiting for them (Remember that Silas and Timothy were still in Berea closing up shop as they were not as of yet run out of town.) at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.
17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.
18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.
19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?
20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.”
Athens and the barriers of idolatry and philosophy. vs 16-20.
Athens, and in point of fact, Greece herself was in a point of upheaval culturally. It’s glory days were fading and the once proud capitals of Hellenism, or Greek thought and practice, were on their way out as the entire world was becoming more Romanly influenced. Athens was the former stronghold of thought and practice still boasting its vital world-famous university. The city was beautiful in terms of art and architecture but its history in paganism and mythology permeated everything. For this real, Paul, walking through the city streets seeing idols adorning everything was greatly distressed. It’s idols were a reflection of what they worshiped, namely intellectualism and humanities. They were a culture steeped in worship of itself and it’s glory and gave little attention to the holy.
Moved by this Paul took his fight to two battlegrounds: the synagogue and the marketplace. We’ve discussed that the synagogue was Paul’s bread and butter and usually his first stop in a new city. Nothing here would surprise us then. Paul enters Athens's synagogue and reasons with the Jews there and all the devout gentiles who will listen, explaining Christ and his messiahship and how the OT backs up all of this, pointing out it’s necessity. So this approach would be to go after those that were actively seeking information about the Holy. But the marketplace was a unique feature of Greek society. The marketplace, also known as the “Agora” was the center of Greek life and philosophers would often be found there debating and presenting veiwpoints and scholarship. So, when in Rome, Paul goes there and uses this opportunity to reason with the intellectuals on their home turf.
Verse 18 gives us two sets of opponents who stood there against Paul: Epicureans and Stoic philosophers.
Epicurean Philosophers followed Epicurus whose central teaching was that the cheif end of all mankind was the pursue pleasure and happiness. Now this shouldn’t be explicitly tied to hedonism because of the way in which people would told to get there. It wasn’t simply through carnal delights and bodily pleasures but in avoiding excesses and the fear of death. You should spend your life seeking tranquility and freedom from pain, and a great deal of this could and should be exprienced by celebrating and loving fellow mankind. They also had a sort of diest tint to them as they believed that “if gods exist, that they don’t interfere with the ordeals of mortals.”
The S
you can see in vs 18 that they kind of mocked him, declaring his words to be babble. The word for babble actually means “seed-picker” here is used to speak of the way a bird picks through seeds on the ground and passes up less favorable ones.
And to be sure, normally they would welcome anyone to the market to share their wishdom, but for whatever reason, their viewpoint of Paul advocating for foreign gods was seen as strange. Mostly because they had never heard someone preach about the name of this Jesus or about his resurrection before.
So they bring Paul up to the thunderdome of Philosophy the Areopagus, literally meaning “The Hilly of Ares” which was the meeting place of the Council of the Areopagus who functioned in Athens like congress and the supreme court glued together.
but in recent years their oversight had been cut back to overlooking only education and religious affairs. They very non-chelantly ask him,
May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?
20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.”
Now, I don’t know if they were genuine or not. If they wanted this information, if they were seeking to harass him, if they wanted to hear him out because they wanted to jail him or not. We don’t fully know their motive but only that they were the overseers who managed what was taught and who could speak about any and all religions and mere days after walking into town, again Paul is before a group of people who have sway over his life and his ministry yet again.
21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.
23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
Paul’s approach to the Athenian hearers. vs 21-23.
Being a philosophical society and priding themselves on debate and public discourse had developed an entire class of citizen who worked almost exclusively as scholars. They would, as the scripture explains here, “spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” It was like a special group of teachers who had their degrees in whatever was new and flashy. They debated the newest ideas and due to this openness, Paul is given access to preach to them this day.
and given this platform, this timing, and this audience, he makes a masterful observation from which to ground his entire argument. this city has statues and idols everywhere for all of these gods that the peoples worshiped. Hundreds of them litter all the city and there are so many in fact, that there is even one that is entitled “to the unknown god.” As if to say, in case we missed one out there, this one is for that one. Paul opens up by saying, “ I want to talk to you about that one.”
This is masterful for a couple reasons.
There is a potential chance that if Paul comes in preaching and teaching about this Jesus, they can claim that Jesus is an invention of Paul and that he has no power or authority and outlaw teaching about Him entirely.
They could also declare that Jesus was, as many thought at the time, an offshoot of Judiasm and therefore needed to be regulated or overseen by Jewish rules and customs, therefore shutting him down again.
Lastly, and perhaps the most clever, is that by Paul citing their own pantheon of accepted gods and subjects of study and authority, he was just talking to them about a subject they themselves have already declared open for academic discussion and debate. He’s playing a game they already said was appropriate.
As the old adage goes, “When your opponent is making a mistake, don’t interrupt him.”
So Paul takes the bait and he catches them instead. And now he has a vested audience who must listen to what he says.
So, Paul takes them to task theologically using their own rules but he also addresses them in ways they could understand.
So we are going to crawl through his response line by line.
Evangelism and theological corrections. vs 24-31.
24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man,
Paul is calling them out to a new ways of understanding. In contrast to their Greek gods which were taught to live within human constructed temples, The God with a capital “T” made the world and everything in it. Contrast that with the reality that these Greeks invented these gods and then constructed their temples. Paul’s “The” God came before humanity and before creation. He predates it and lives standing apart from what these Greeks teach. In terms of power, in terms of authority, and in terms of causation.
25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
This “The” God is completely self-sufficient and not needing of any human interference. He doesn’t need your worship, your harvests, your offerings, your money, your sacrifices. He is God. this would have particularly appealed to the Epicureans who believed what god or gods existed were above human events.
His last line explaining that even the life humanity has inside of them was provided by God on purpose. This would speak to the Stoics who taught that our entire lives needed to be aligned with our divine cosmological purpose.
So Paul is getting them reading, with ears perked up to hear of the inadequacies of their concepts of truth.
26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
Paul, here, refers to the shared ancestor all of mankind drew from in Adam. This would have been seen as a shot across the bow to an Athenian people who believed themselves unique and better than the swath of history. To bring them back to an origin story that found themselves in the same boat as everyone they knew they were superior too would have felt falsely ostentatious.
To add to it, Paul explains that God’s soveriegnty even allows or disallows creations’ boundaries, humanities authorities, kingdom lines and maps. He is actively and intimately aware of the affairs of man and He himself allows them to thrive as He sees fit.
27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,
Why would He do this or allow it to move in this fashion? Because His goal has always been that people would seek His face. Romans 1:19-20 explain clearly.
19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
28 for “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “ ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Here Paul references two notable works these men would be intimately aware of. the first is Epimenides, the Cretan poet. His famous line, “For in Him we live and move, and have our being” would have been well known. Secondly the poet Aratus from Paul’s homeland of Cilicia. In his work Phainomena- all people, including the Athenian people, are said to be God’s “offspring”. Now he meant it not in terms of redemption or in terms of them having divinity, but that they owe their breath to Him.
Walvoord, John F., and Roy B. Zuck, Dallas Theological Seminary. The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985.
29 Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.
And here Paul goes into full meddling. The reality is that God was before us and created us. Therefor, we could never hope to even try to create Him. This was a mic-drop for a city that was full near founded on the foundations of idols, idol worship, crafting and maintaining idols, even economically making these statues and altars and temples were most of what kept the bills paid. Paul makes it clear that in the face of such a God with such power what are gold, silver, or stone? What possible idol could we make that would be worthy? The answer is obvious— none.
30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent,
31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Paul now explains that God allows them as people to go on in their own ignorance but the days of judgment is coming. This urgency requires them now to put away these old sins and come to repentance. All humanity is under the wrath of God and because of God’s obvious nature written into creation we are all without excuse due to His natural revelation. Yet, God, in His patience left sins unpunished in the immediate in hopes that they would ultimately see their error and repent. His manner is how he deals with us as well. Oftentimes your stupid, your dumb, your evil won’t immediately blow up in your face. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t. We can even get lulled into believing that it never will. But this grace is given so that we might have time to repent.
Notice also in 31 how Paul drops the very Christian idea of Jesus as “a man whom he has appointed” as righteousness. Christ would judge the world and the was all displayed by this victory over death.
Here again the resurrection of Jesus was preached. The idea of resurrection (cf.
32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.”
33 So Paul went out from their midst.
34 But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.
The fruit among the Athenians. vs 32-34.
We can see clearly from verse 32 that the response was a mixed one. For the Greeks the idea that a man could ever be raised from the dead let alone live forever was absurdity and nonsense.
You start to understand Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 1:21-25
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom,
23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
Some of the Greek council scoffed at the mere mention of this by Paul. They wouldn’t even entertain such opinions. But others were at the very least intrigued. They wanted to know more about such things and invited him back to speak some more. Yet, as has been the case for this trip, while opponents kept trying to stifle the work, the Gospel kept showing up and showing off.
Of note, Luke records Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. Dionysius was one of the members of the Areopagus, the council that controlled speech on education and religion, and again we see a lady named Damaris named as a follower. If you are keeping track, She is added to Lydia, the prominent women in Thessalonica, and the “number of prominent Greek women” in Berea.
It would appear that while God is doing things in these towns in interesting and impactful ways, He is also doing something of note through the women of these cities. The gospel is finding a way into homes through mothers, grand mothers, daughters, and even among those who are considered nobles in those cities.
Landing
As we close today we can see Paul use philosophy and poetry and the culture of Athens to point them towards Christ. I for one love the game of philosophy and apologetics. Mostly, it is a game of logic and making sure that what you say about one thing is logically carried out to all the places it touches and that it all makes sense. It can be fun, it can be confusing, and it can also be a giant waste of time, energy, and purpose.
In his seminal work, Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig posits that apologetics and philosophy only appeal to a small amount of the population but that there are 3 primary reasons whey these pursuits shouldn’t be ignored.
It helps us shape culture
It strengthens believers
It helps evangelize unbelievers.
Paul again shows us that you take what is offered to you and try to speak the people’s language as best as you can. The message doesn’t change because the gospel is all that is needed. But the delivery can depending on how we need to engage the culture. Scoffers happen, interest peaks, people are intrigued, and the gospel penetrates hardened hearts. Don’t allow yourself to wave a white flag before God has done His work. Step in and be faithful and let the Holy Spirit change the equation.
