And what will fix the ill of our church that ultimately penetrates the ill of our society?
It won't be a list of pietistical exercises, longer praying, longer fasting. The solution to the ill is a fresh understanding of the nature and character of God. That's why I'm thrilled to be at this particular juncture in our study through the book of Acts because we come to a rich passage of Scripture where Paul describes to his Athenian audience, this is who God is. When the Apostle Paul first arrived in Athens, that city was the philosophical center of the world.
It was the birthplace of the democratic system of government. The citizens of Athens considered themselves wise. They believed they had discovered many truths. The problem was they had not discovered the truth. They didn't know the ultimate source of truth, God himself.
The Apostle Paul changed that when he introduced them to the one true God. We're going to explore that account today here on Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen Davey has a message for you called More Than a Monument. I was reading recently in a new book called To Follow Him by Mark Bailey. He tells a rather humorous story of a woman who discovered how meaningless things are. You might enjoy this true story. A young man had a passion for Porsches and every day he would glance through the classified ads and look for Porsches offered for sale even though he knew he could never afford one. One day he was shocked to see an ad offering a brand new Porsche for only $500.
Quickly he came to his senses and realized it was just a typo. Brand new Porsches do not sell for $500 but the next day the same ad ran again. The man decided to call the number in the ad although he felt quite foolish because he knew the whole thing had to be a mistake.
The woman who answered the phone assured him that the ad was correct. The man just couldn't believe it but upon arriving at the house he saw a beautiful new Porsche sitting in the drive. He got out and examined it carefully thinking to himself it must not have an engine in it. The woman came out of her house and again assured him it was for sale, it was brand new and yes $500 was all that she was asking for. So he test drove it.
The car ran beautifully. He couldn't believe it. He paid her $500 and left as quickly as he could fearing she might have second thoughts. The car was in mint condition but it kept bothering him to think he had paid the woman only $500 so after driving the Porsche for a week he called her, identified himself and said, ma'am are you aware that the book listing on this car is thousands more? Yes, she responded. Well, he asked, why did you sell it to me for only $500?
Without pausing a moment she answered, I'll tell you why. Three weeks ago my husband ran off to Bermuda with his secretary and the last thing he said to me was, sell the Porsche and send me the money. So I did. I've been checking ads out ever since I read that story. I was struck by a message, we were in a store shopping with all the other hundreds of people and a woman, a middle aged woman walked past me and she was wearing a sweatshirt and she had written across her sweatshirt in big bold words, I want it all.
I could only hope that she discovers before it's too late that even if she had it all, it wouldn't be enough. I want to take you to a city this morning that had it all and had long since discovered that all of it wasn't enough. I want us to go to Athens, Greece and you would know if you're a student of history that Athens, Greece played a pivotal role in western civilization. Athens was the cradle of democracy, they're the ones that came up with the ideas of parliament and individual freedom. Athens had roaming its streets and teaching in its classrooms, teachers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. They had discovered so many truths but they had never discovered the truth. By the time the Apostle Paul visits the city of Athens, they are surrounded by opulence and affluence, they have had the greatest thinkers in the last thousand years, they have discovered everything from the rules of hydrostatics to biology.
They had it all and had discovered it wasn't enough as well, students say. I couldn't help as I realized the city that did not know who God was is so much like our city and our world. I shared a story with this congregation a couple of years ago that came back to my mind and I want to repeat it again. It's the story of the wedding between Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh which occurred in 1947. People came from all around the world, they converged on London to see this magnificent wedding and it had all of the tradition and pomp of a royal wedding and among the crowd of people who traveled to be part of this was a twelve year old king named King Faisal II. He was the monarch of Iraq and he arrived and he certainly wasn't interested in the wedding, he was more interested in the horses that were pulling the carriages down the boulevard toward the cathedral.
Viewed as any other twelve year old, he pushed his way through the crowd so that he could get a better look and he was roughly treated by the officers. It was only until after they discovered who he was that for the next set of days the London Times carried articles along with the headline King Faisal we're sorry, we didn't know who you were. And I think in our culture and especially during this season we would have to say that that message is echoing throughout not only from Athens but all the way to America, we don't know who God is. I'm afraid that the message of not knowing this God is not only a cultural message or misunderstanding or lack of understanding but it has seeped its way into the church. For the last thing you'd ever think of studying is doctrine or theology proper, the attributes and the nature and the character of God and what will fix the ill of our church that ultimately penetrates the ill of our society will not be a series of church meetings.
It won't be a list of pietistical exercises, longer praying, longer fasting. The solution to the ill is a fresh understanding of the nature and character of God. That's why I'm thrilled to be at this particular juncture in our study through the book of Acts because we come to a rich passage of Scripture where Paul describes to his Athenian audience this is who God is. So if you have your Bibles, I want you to take them and turn to the book of Acts, if you haven't already, in chapter 17. We've already seen the truth rejected at Thessalonica.
Now we're going to see the truth ridiculed at Athens. Let's return to Paul's second missionary adventure and pick it up at verse 16. Now, while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was beholding the city full of vitals. Now there are two interesting words in this chosen by the Spirit of God to tell us a little bit about the man who was about to introduce God to this city and I want to highlight them.
You could take your pencil or pen and circle. The first word is beholding. That word gives us our English word theater. He didn't just come into town and casually stroll around. We understand he's waiting now for Timothy and Silas to come. Paul has just recently escaped from Berea and now he's waiting for his companions to join him and while he's there, he has some idle time.
And you know what you do with your idle time shows you a lot about you, doesn't it? Well, he has this idle time and in the process of being idle or I should say waiting, he walks around the city and he takes it all in like you would take in a show. Every nuance, he saw the buildings, he took long walks, he watched people. Notice circle the word provoked.
It's earlier in the verse. His spirit was being provoked within him. That second word could be translated deeply moved. It could also be rendered angry or angered. There was a mixture of being moved by what he saw and being angry at what he saw. He was deeply troubled.
Imagine what so deeply troubled the apostle. One Grecian author who visited Athens 50 years after Paul had come would write that it was easier to walk down the street of Athens and be confronted with a god than it was to be confronted by a man. There were 30,000 plus statues to the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. They were cut into reliefs where the town council met. They had this huge statue of Apollo dedicated to him where they kept their town records. That building was dedicated to the mother of all gods. He was surrounded by idolatry and he was angry because they were following a lie and he was at the same time deeply moved because every idol, every statue was a declaration that they were searching and had not found the truth. I couldn't help but compare Athens to America.
The first word that came to my mind as I sort of sat back and thought as I studied and researched, some words came to mind that were similar. The word, the first one was pluralistic. Athens couldn't have enough gods.
It couldn't follow enough paths. We have moved from that pluralistic stage to now even our own culture where we're now syncretistic. We now take a little bit from this god and a little bit from that religion and we sort of mix it all together and come up with something that makes us feel good. A poll was released to indicate this among the rank and file of our American culture twenty-four months ago that was released and ninety-six percent believed in the existence of God.
That really sounds good, doesn't it? We must really be making an impact. And yet at that ninety-six percent, twenty-eight percent of them also believed in reincarnation. Forty-five percent of them thought that Jesus probably had sinned. And nearly two out of three did not believe in absolute truth. What's true for you is your truth. I have my truth. But I believe in God.
Which one? We have stamped on our currency in God we trust. The trouble is we collectively no longer know which one we're talking about and who that is. Secondly, the word that came to my mind was intolerant. Now I'm not talking about persecution because we certainly are not persecuted in America.
We might be irritated, but we're not persecuted. I found it interesting that Luke slips in this little commentary in verse twenty-one, look there, on the Athenians. He said, Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new. Now that sounds very tolerant, doesn't it? That sounds extremely open-minded.
We want to hear new things. But let somebody like Paul come along and declare the gospel of Jesus Christ and he is called an idle babbler, a seed picker. That word referred to a bird that would go along picking up scraps here and there and then disseminating those. He just picked up a few scraps. He is an idle babbler. What made the difference between wanting to hear something new and Paul, who had something dramatically new to tell them, now become an idle babbler? Well, you can present something new to our American society and it can be bizarre and it will be accepted. Just do not say it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the what?
Now you're babbling. I heard a few days ago that it took a great deal of pressure and wrangling just to have the principle of one of our town schools and the staff allow a nativity scene, a small nativity scene to be placed on a table that had already had placed upon it different symbols of other religions around the world and what they did during Christmas time. Only after a tremendous amount of pressure did the nativity scene get the chance to be placed with other symbols of what other religions did around the world.
What is Christmas? Anybody looking up in the Encyclopedia Britannica? I brought mine with me.
Where is it? Here we go. Let me tell you what it says. This is going to be a shock.
Christmas dash is the Christian holiday that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ. Just don't remind anybody. It is becoming more and more apparent that America is open-minded so long as you are closed mouth. A third word that came to my mind before we dig into this text is the word uncertain. There was a deep abiding uneasiness in that Athenian crowd. They had idol after idol after idol after idol. They had dedicated their lives as it were to honoring the gods and that they were uneasy.
Why? Because they felt they might have missed the true one. And so as we'll see in a moment, they erected a monument to the what? To the unknown God, just in case. You know, I've talked to so many people who seem so solid and so sure about their beliefs and eventually we get through the layers and I'm able to ask them the question, are you dead sure? Are you really sure that you've got this thing together that if you were to die today, you know for sure 100% you'd go to heaven. And more times than not the answer comes back, I'm not really that sure.
And Paul was moved as we'll see by the site of this monument because he knew he had the answer. One more word, it's the word empty. Empty. Athens had heard it all. They had it all. They were saturated with philosophies and speculations. They were surrounded by spiritualities and they'd come up bankrupt. They were empty.
They had it all and discovered that all of it wasn't enough. Would you have been moved by that, ladies and gentlemen, had you been Paul? Would that have so bothered you that you became moved over that city? Have you ever been moved by your city? Like Jesus Christ himself who wept over the city of Jerusalem, Moody wept over the city of Chicago, Spurgeon over the city of London. Paul is moved over the city of Athens. Who will cry for Carrie? Who will be moved for Raleigh?
You? Many Christians get moved but never get moving. Notice what Paul does next, verse 17. So, in other words, because of the way he had been moved, because of all he had seen and heard, so he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles.
This is the first of three categories of people that Paul will impact with the gospel of Jesus Christ. We could call them the worshippers. They knew about the Old Testament God. They were adherence to monotheism. They did not know of the Son of God.
The second crowd, we could call them the shoppers because it tells us, and in the marketplace, that is the outdoor mall every day with those who happen to be present. Verse 18, here's the third group, and also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him and some were saying, what would this idle babbler wish to say? Others, he seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. They had confused his reference of the resurrection to Jesus. They tended to deify everything, so they felt he believed in two deities, Jesus, and Anastasia, which is the Greek word for resurrection.
He was, and he ends up with these philosophers. I learned more from my research this week about Epicureanism and Stoicism than you'd ever wish to hear this morning, so let me just give you two words to write in the margin of your Bibles. By the word Epicurean, or in your notes, wherever, one word, write the word indulgent or indulgent. The Epicureans believed that the highest end and chief goal of man is to attain pleasure and avoid pain. It's a wonderful philosophy of life, isn't it? They believed that you should get all you can get and live it up and the familiar themes of our own culture just ring in my mind as I study this individual school of thought. They believed you ought to go after everything and get all you can.
They hadn't discovered that even if you had it all, it wouldn't be enough. They were indulgent. While the Epicureans were indulgent, the Stoics were indifferent. The pursuit of man to them was to feel neither pleasure nor pain, to be above emotions, to be above circumstances. We get the word stoic, a person who was unmoved. They believed that you had self-mastery and by having self-mastery over your world, you had attained.
So you were not moved by anything. And so you had these two extremes on the philosophical spectrum and they're totally different and yet they unite in that they both now don't like Paul. Notice verse 19. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus. This is a level court, an outdoor court. There were 30 raised seats where the 30 judges of Athens sat, the Supreme Court.
He is not on trial but they're there to listen to his explanation. May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming? Verse 20. For you are bringing some strange things to our ears and we want to know therefore what these things mean.
Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new. And Paul, verse 22, stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respect. Let's stop a second.
We can learn a lot from his tactful approach. Gentlemen, I see that you are very religious. He doesn't say gentlemen, I observe that you are really carried away with idols. You are one idolatrous bunch of men I cannot... You know, he doesn't say any of that. He says, I observe you're very religious. Now if you have a translation that says you are too superstitious, that unfortunately involves more interpretation than translation, the compound word could literally be rendered, I see that you have a high respect for the supernatural. What a wonderful way to start with this pluralistic crowd.
Gentlemen, I've been around your city and I see that you have a high respect for the supernatural. And I imagine after that opening statement, they probably thought, you know, this idol babbler is okay. We'll listen to him and we'll get to the rest of his sermon as we go through a couple of weeks of study. But at any rate, for now, understand this. And then he adds to that another very tactful kind thing, verse 23. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your foolishness, no, the objects of your what? I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God, what therefore you worship in ignorance, literally, what therefore you worship without knowing all the facts, I want to proclaim the facts to you. I want to introduce to you the unknown God.
Now let's stop a second and let me give you about two more minutes of history here as we set the stage for several weeks of study. Six hundred years before Paul stood in the Areopagus and gave this testimony, the city of Athens had been stricken with a terrible plague, an epidemic as a matter of fact, and hundreds of people had died and hundreds more were dying. The city of Athens didn't know what to do.
They couldn't find a cure and they were panic-stricken. Finally, a famous poet from Crete named Epimenides came up with a plan that the city liked. It fit with their worship of many gods. Under the assumption that they had violated the feelings or they had wronged some of their gods, he presented or proposed the plan that he would arrive at the Areopagus and from there he would release a flock of sheep. It was the belief that the angry gods would lure those sheep to their temple. And so he released them that day and all the citizens came out to watch as those sheep began to wander about. The order was given that wherever a sheep would lie down or lay down, they would be sacrificed there to the god of the nearest temple, hopefully satiating the anger of some god that they worship.
The only problem was many sheep lay down in places where there was no temple nearby. They were then confused until someone came up with the idea that they had somehow missed a god. And so they erected this monument and they inscribed upon it the words, to the unknown god, and they sacrificed those sheep there. The apostle Paul arrives on the scene and he says, I am here to tell you the name of that angry god, whose wrath must be vindicated. And he will end his sermon with the statement of the impending coming judgment. But he said, I'm here in effect to introduce to you the name of the unknown god. Verse 24, the god who made the world and all things in it since he is lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Paul is saying, my god is more than a monument.
He is alive. He is the one and only living sovereign and I want to tell you about him. I want to close by saying how ironic I thought it was, if not planned, and certainly it was in the mind of God, for those of us who study together as we've done this morning, facts of history and scripture.
Because something very interesting emerged from this. From the very place that Epimenides released those sacrificial lambs, the Areopagus, is now the very place where the apostle Paul stands and delivers the name of the lamb, who voluntarily wandered into the wrath of an angry god and paid the price so that we could be freed from the epidemic, the plague of sin and everlasting death. He introduces to them from that very spot, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. And he says, in effect, I want to tell you the name of that lamb who came back to life. He is the Lord of Heaven. He is the Lord of Earth. The culture that you and I live in need to hear the exact same message. And I hope this time in God's word has encouraged and challenged you to be the salt and light among the people with whom you rub shoulders today.
Thanks for joining us. You've tuned in to Wisdom for the Heart, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Stephen pastors a church in Cary, North Carolina. He first taught this series to that church back in the 1990s.
But we pulled it out of our archives to broadcast it now, because the truth is just as relevant today as it was then. If you'd like to learn more about the Ministry of Wisdom for the Heart, visit our website, which you'll find at wisdomonline.org. That website is filled with resources, including the complete archive of Stephen's teaching ministry. You'll also find our online store that contains all of Stephen's books, Bible study guides and other resources. In addition, you can interact with our ministry and even support us if the Lord leads you to do that. We are a listener supported ministry, and it's your gifts that make it possible for us to produce these lessons each day. You can call us right now at 866-48-BIBLE or 866-482-4253. We'll be back next Monday, so join us at this same time right here on Wisdom for the Heart. Thank you. We'll see you next time.
