Setting Aside Superstitions

And what Paul will do is he will begin to introduce his God at the same point, by the way, that anyone has to start at with a pre-Christian world like Athens or America. You begin with Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. And so Paul begins his declaration of who God is by telling these Athenians the next shocking declaration, and that is this, the unknown God, whom I know, created everything that is.

Respect, humility, consideration of others' feelings and convictions. These characteristics defined Paul's evangelism to Athenian philosophers, and they should define our evangelism as well. When the apostle Paul was introducing unbelievers to the true and living God, he approached them thoughtfully and carefully. That's not to say Paul didn't confront their false belief systems because he did.

We'll see both of these things today. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Stephen's in a series called Introducing God, and he's calling this lesson Setting Aside Superstition. A few years ago, the Pew Research Center surveyed 4,000 U.S. adults to identify the spiritual experiences that they claim to have had in life. Of those surveyed, 29% said they had been in touch with someone who had died. 18% said they had seen or been with a ghost. That's 47% who had contact with a deceased person or a ghost. A Gallup poll found that three out of four Americans believed in something paranormal. In other words, the majority of people believe there is something out there, there's something otherworldly, some kind of otherworldly creature or creatures out there.

I came across this recently. One Sunday school teacher in British Columbia thought that she would set the record straight with her students in second grade. Some of her kids raised the subject of fairies being real, and she assured the young class that fairies were not real, only make believe.

One little boy wasn't too happy about it, and he argued back. She stood firm and repeated, fairies are not real. And finally, he blurted out, fairies are too real.

My daddy rides a ferry to Port McNeil every single day. Okay, those fairies are real, all right? In a New York Times article I came across not too long ago, it is ironically entitled Conjuring Up Our Own Gods. A journalist wrote that more than 90% of those who do not belong to any church, do not belong to any religious system, all say that they pray to some divine being.

39% of them pray often, if not weekly. But note this, they are prone to believe in ghosts and Bigfoot. The article ended by declaring, and I quote, Americans are obsessed with the supernatural. It's not really a new phenomenon, and it really isn't just American, is it?

It's around the world. I did a little research on it and found in the Middle Ages, the flickering lights in the marsh bog was considered to be ghosts of departed people, or even goblins. The popular view in the Middle Ages about fireflies was that they were the souls of deceased, unbaptized infants. Many thought ghosts manipulated human life. On ancient maps, back before the world had been fully discovered, cartographers or map makers would put down what they knew, and then at the edges of their map, beyond anything they had knowledge of or understanding, they would often write into the margin the words, quote, beyond here, there be dragons. Frankly, superstition is the bad side of a good thing.

It really is. It's the world's attempt to explain the supernatural, to try to come up with an explanation about the truth that is stamped on every human heart and conscience about a creator and about immortality. This isn't all there is, Romans chapters one and two. And it's really up to the believer to contradict or confront the notions and speculations of the darkness with the light of the gospel. In fact, Paul, writing to Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 10, said that he was effectively preaching and teaching the truth about Jesus Christ who was bringing to life or bringing to light life and immortality through the gospel. This is the mission of the apostle Paul as he enters a very superstitious city by the name of Athens. Now in our last study I pointed out two observations from what Luke tells us in Acts chapter 17.

Let me return you there. First, we learned that Athens was intuitively religious. And secondly, that Athens was intellectually curious.

In fact, today you can see the remains of Athens' obsession with speculations and curiosities of the unseen world. One author living in the days of Paul said that there were more than 70,000 statues of the gods in Athens. They lined the streets.

They filled the parks. They adorned the temples and public buildings, all dedicated to their glory. There were temples literally everywhere. A temple to Nike, the god of victory, a temple to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to Ares, the god of war, to Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen and sculpture, to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, to Eros, the god of sexual desire. In fact, the Romans would pick it up and they had their counterpart to Eros.

They named him Cupid. And like Eros, they both just sort of flew around with a bow and arrow, shooting people they were bringing under their spell. By the way, in Paul's day, all the working classes and tradesmen belonged to guilds.

We would call them unions. And they paid dues to their patron god. They would have annual feasts. They would offer libations to their patron god or goddess that had made them prosperous. So you can imagine if you could travel back to Athens during the days of Paul, the difficulty of a believer in Athens to decide whether or not to offend his business partners by not attending the feast where they would give libations to their patron god, perhaps even losing that career path. I have little doubt that many a believer would be kicked out of the guild and deprived of employment because of their lack of political correctness.

The pressure has always been on the believer to contrast their life to the speculations of the world. So as Paul is touring this city, he would have been struck, of course, by the Acropolis. The Acropolis was this ancient citadel, this platform built on rock upon which buildings were seen from every direction. The most famous building on the Acropolis would have been the Parthenon. It was a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, the namesake of the city of Athens. The Parthenon is considered the enduring symbol to this day of ancient Greece. It is a massive building. It's nearly the length of a football field.

It is five stories high. Paul would have also seen the Odeon of Herod. This was a famous theater that was in full swing when Paul arrived. The theater was wildly popular.

It would also be the place for musical concerts and poetry festivals as well as plays. Paul, no doubt, would have stared at one particular temple built with incredible beauty and with its sculptured columns that formed the porch of a temple dedicated to Athena and Poseidon. And then for our primary consideration today, there was the Areopagus. The Areopagus was a natural stone outcropping that jutted up 500 feet in the air, and it served as the outdoor court for the Supreme Court of Athens.

Today all the names of the Supreme Court justices before whom Paul stood have long been forgotten except for one who will show up a little later on in this text. But I want you to just imagine this scene as Paul has taken up these stone stairways, and they have been restored. He's going to walk up these stairs to the top of the Areopagus where the council has convened. It's going to be up these stairs and on top of this windswept open chamber where Paul is going to have this panoramic view of Athens as he introduces to them the living God. He's about to introduce God and several of his attributes to a city that is intuitively religious, that is intellectually curious. Let me give you a third observation, then we'll look at the text. Athens was inwardly anxious. With all that it believed, with all of its buildings, with all of its gods and goddesses, with all of its temples, with all of its statues, with all of its religious investments and rituals, Athens was still at its core inwardly anxious.

Let me show you where. Let's pick the narrative back up where we left off at verse 22. And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus.

These men would have been forming a semicircle around him, these 50 council members. And he said, men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. By the way, don't overlook this gracious, tactful introduction. I observe that you are very religious. Paul does not say, I observe that you are very ridiculous.

Okay? I observe that you are very superstitious. Now I observe that you are very religious in all respects. And the council, by the way, would have taken that as a compliment.

That would have been a kind approach to them. Very religious. You could literally rather woodenly translate that Greek phrase. He's effectively saying, I can see that you are fearing the gods. It isn't his attempt right now to say, what in the world is going on around here with all this stuff you're making up? No, I can see that, you could translate it this way, I can see how religiously devoted you are. And I think those men would have sat there probably nodding their heads thinking, you know, this guy understands us.

He gets us. It's a wonderful introduction and a good model for us. Notice further, for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown god. Athens had discovered so many things. They were the birthplace of democracy.

They were the home of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle with all their sage advice. But the most important truth, they had not discovered. They were troubled by it. They fit the description of what Paul wrote to Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 7 where Paul says that unbelievers are always learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. They can learn a lot of things but never come to know the most important thing. And so because of this they're living in a world of inward anxiety and confusion and they've erected these pedestals and even temples. Tertullian tells us dedicated to the unknown god we're probably missing one and we don't want to do that.

So here you go. Beloved, you travel the world and you see the same uncertainty played out in every culture. In fact, I was reading in one journal not too long ago and I pulled it out, The Hindu Practice of Kumari.

I hope I translated that correctly. The belief that the supreme goddess of the cosmos who gave birth to everything through her womb, that she inhabits a young girl's body for a brief time. The Hindu belief, in fact this is shared from what I could research and discover by many Buddhists as well, it holds that the supreme goddess, Telaju, who birthed the cosmos from her womb, indwells a carefully selected young girl for a period of time and that young girl then becomes the incarnation as it were of the goddess and she can be worshiped as deity.

You can see the kernels of the gospel, can't you, even though twisted in the end. She's worshiped. I went online and I watched about 15 minutes of an annual festival where she is dressed up in an amazing costume and people are nearly fainting around her. The goddess a few years ago that had been selected, though caused quite a stir, evidently the rules are that under no circumstance can the goddess ever leave Nepal.

She's carefully watched and cared for, typically living in a central palace, but a few years ago, Nepalese authorities were outraged when they discovered that she had been taken at her approval with adult supervisors to the United States to take part in a video documentary of the Kumari tradition. And when she returned home, the article said she received notification that she was now terminated as a goddess. I mean, God was fired, basically, is what they're saying. She was no longer worthy of being worshiped as a deity. However, after pressure from the public, and her own show of remorse, the government backed down and agreed that she could stay a goddess if, and I quote, she goes through an intense cleansing process that washes her of the sins of the countries she visited while traveling abroad.

Now, just think about that for a moment. What insecurity? If even your goddess has to be cleansed from sin and can lose her deity, how can any Hindu ever hope to be cleansed of their sin and even be secure that they're following a deity that's going to last? Well, here in Athens, with all of their ceremony and all of their curiosity and all of their religious piety, Paul effectively finds them in the same state of spiritual anxiety. Notice the end of verse 23. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. He's coming to the end of his introduction. In other words, the God whose name you do not know, he's not calling them ignorant, by the way, he simply say what you don't know, the one whom you worship without knowledge of who he is, I'm going to proclaim him to you.

I'm going to tell you who he is. Now, with that statement, what Paul does is absolutely brilliant. He sets the legal stage for his introduction of God. You know, one of the things we miss when we speed read or speed preach is the fact that Paul is engaged here in a legal trial.

He's not standing before the Supreme Court because he thought this would be a great place to do a little evangelism. No Athenian law required that any new religious system and the following of any new God receive the approval of this council. And so, in fact, Josephus in my study, I encountered one thing, he said he was the first century Jewish historian who wrote that it was forbidden by Athenian law, let me quote him, and the penalty decreed for anyone who introduced a foreign God was death. The most famous example, and by the way, I'm going to take you back to college or high school days when you may have read this, but the most famous example in Athens was 500 years before Paul arrived. Socrates had been roaming the streets of the city of Athens teaching this growing band of followers, most of them young people, that the gods of Greece were not who they thought they were. He denied the omnipotence of the pantheon. He denied that gods were all powerful. And he rejected the polytheism of the culture, that is the worship of many gods. Now while he didn't follow the truth of one God, the true and living creator, he didn't follow the superstitions of his culture either. So he's effectively teaching a new religion. In fact, he was charged with atheism because he didn't buy into the polytheism of his day.

He's brought up on charges. He literally is brought to trial on the very hill where Paul now stands 500 years later and the Senate or this council, I should say, claims that he is corrupting the youth of Athens and they sentence him to die by drinking poisonous hemlock, which he did. Now here we are 500 years later at this text and Paul is referencing the nearby pedestals. He's referencing the nearby temple dedicated to the unknown God. And what he's really doing is informing them, I'm not telling you about a new God. I'm not introducing a foreign deity to you, somebody new. I'm really just going to talk to you about the name and the nature of the God you've always wondered about. You have temples dedicated to him.

Brilliant strategy of Paul. He's claiming to provide this stunning answer to centuries of uncertainty. Now where do these pedestals and altars and temples originate to this unknown God? 600 years before Paul arrives in Acts chapter 17, Athens had been besieged by a terrible plague. People were dying every day and they were terrified of what was happening. They were desperate for an answer from their gods.

No answer came and with that then no cure. A famous poet from the island of Crete, his name was Epimenides, he came up with a solution. He said, I know what's going on. There are some gods that are angry because they have been overlooked in the worship of Athens.

The citizens have been overlooking them. Now he didn't know which gods, but whoever they were or whoever it was, they were the cause behind the plague. And the council thought, that's brilliant, that's it. And then they convened and said, what do we do about it?

And Epimenides said, I have a solution. He took a flock of sheep to the top of the hill where Paul is now standing, on top of the Areopagus, Mars Hill, and he set those sheep loose. And he instructed the Athenians that whenever any sheep laid down, they were to be sacrificed in the name of the God whose temple was nearest the sheep. It was believed that the sheep would be pulled by the God to the temple to reveal that he was the one effectively pouting because he wasn't getting attention, but that's how I interpret it.

So when the sheep were let loose, many of them roamed and they just came off the Areopagus and went around and settled and grazed and lay down eventually to take a nap. The problem is, some of them lay far from any nearby temple. And so that created new confusion. And so what Epimenides said to do was build an altar to the unknown God and sacrifice the sheep upon it. The Athenians would later build temples, scatter numerous altars around Athens dedicated to this unknown God. And now if you can imagine it, Paul arrives on the scene and stands on this same hill and he says, I know who this unknown God is.

And I want to introduce him to you. And what Paul will do is he will begin to introduce his God at the same point, by the way, the same key point that anyone has to start at with a pre-Christian world like Athens or America. You begin with introducing God as the creator of all that is. You begin with Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. And so Paul begins his declaration of who God is by telling these Athenians the next rather shocking declaration. And that is this, the unknown God whom I know created everything that is. Introducing God as creator is the next truth that the apostle Paul will reveal to the unbelievers he was talking to that day. We'll come to that in our next Bible lesson here on Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey.

Here's a note we received recently from Kevin here in North Carolina. I'm so thankful to add more godly truth to my journey as I listen to Wisdom for the Heart. I feel as if my pilgrimage is better equipped for having found your ministry.

I work in the medical field and specifically with COVID-19. God has used this time to draw me deeper into a walk with Jesus. Podcasts, listening to BBN, along with Wisdom for the Heart keeps me in God's word daily. Last night after a 14-hour shift, I opened my first copy of your Heart to Heart magazine. I picked it up thinking that sleep would arrive soon.

That's pretty funny, Kevin. Well, I was delighted to read the article where you mentioned reaching Mandarin speakers in Flushing, Queens. I got to visit China in 2007 on an adventurous missions trip. It was worth my 19-year wait invested in prayer over China.

I was raised in Flushing and God gave me a burden for the Chinese people after my conversion in 1984. Thank you for the Wisdom International app to share with others. God is using your Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese resources and I'm glad to be equipped with another tool. Wow, Kevin, thanks so much for taking the time to share with us. Friends, if you'd like to send us a note, you can address your email to info at wisdomonline.org. You can also write to us at Wisdom International PO Box 37297 Raleigh, North Carolina 27627. And by the way, the magazine Kevin was referring to Heart to Heart is a resource we send to all of our Wisdom partners. If you're not one of our Wisdom partners, we'd be happy to send you the next three issues of the magazine as our gift to you. There's a sign up form on our website or you can call us. Our number is 866-48-BIBLE. Our website is wisdomonline.org. As I mentioned a moment ago, we'll be looking at what Paul said about God being the creator of the universe in our next lesson. Join us for that right here on Wisdom for the Heart.