Clough Acts Lesson 35
HVP vs. DVP – Acts 14:1-18
…Paul’s first missionary journey as it goes
out into the ancient world and we can watch from looking at details of the
journey the tactics that the apostles followed.
Some of these tactics have long since been forgotten and ought to be
resurrected in Christian groups. This
morning we’ll see one that has long since fallen into disrepute and yet we must
recover this particular way Paul worked.
Several of the things that we have seen so far in the book of Acts
concerns the financing of the missionary enterprise. Remember that in the early days the apostles
were not supported by the local churches.
The apostles supported themselves on the field. Now we’re not saying that that particular
practice should be resurrected, but there are others. For example the apostles followed their
natural contacts. There wasn’t any
esoteric leading of the Holy Spirit that led Paul and Barnabas to
Here we’ve seen that Paul and Barnabas, when they were on the missionary road, they moved along the lines of the Roman colonies. The Roman colonies were places where there would be protection, there would be transportation, there would be a wide dissemination of Koine Greek, at least, so that they could be understood, and in most cases of the Roman colonies there would be a Jewish sub colony inside the big colony. That is, there’d be a Jewish ghetto or Jewish neighborhood, and it was that Jewish neighborhood that they used to act as the cultural bridge between themselves and that particular area.
Now in Acts 13 when Paul spoke to the synagogue he spoke to the Jewish people in primarily a Jewish context; we’ve studied how he approached that. We want to go back and just mention one thing about that approach that Paul used because he is going to modify it quite extensively at Lystra so let’s review how Paul taught the Word of God and announced the Christian message to people who had never heard it before.
First, in Acts 13 we studied how he
announced it to people who had some background in the Bible. In Acts 14 we’re going to see how he
announces it to people who have no background in the Bible, and he announces it
two distinctly different ways. To the
Jewish people he begins with the call of Abraham. This is a sequence of great Biblical events;
the creation, the fall, the flood, the covenant of Noah and the call of
Abraham. With the Jewish people he
doesn’t have to begin with those first four events; they already know those;
they know about creation, they know that God isn’t part of the creation, they
know that God isn’t nature force, that God isn’t something else. God is wholly distinct from His creation,
He’s not part of society, He’s not like the glorious so-called Christians of
the Third Reich in
Now what does that mean? Well, it means that they were straight on at least the first four events in the divine viewpoint framework. It means that they were straight also on the various doctrines that are built upon those events. It means in particular they were straight on the doctrine of God; they were straight on the doctrine of man, they were straight on the doctrine of nature because they knew of creation. It means that because they knew the fall they were straight on the area of suffering. They knew whence comes evil; they knew why the universe was evil. They knew that the world could be evil without making God, the Lord over history, evil Himself. And then the flood, because they knew of the great worldwide judgment of the flood they also knew the doctrine of judgment/salvation. They knew that God interferes in history and he can interfere in a global way and in a catastrophic way into history. Then the Noahic Covenant, when God promised that He would rule over all nature in such a way that the earth would never be globally inundated again, they had confidence that it was not natural law that reigned in the environment, it was the Word of God over natural law that reigned in the environment.
These things the Jewish people, whether
Christian or not, these things they understood, and Paul could take advantage
of that, and thus it was in Acts 13 that he begins with the doctrine of
election and the call of Abraham. The
background had already been laid. Now we
come to a different situation. First,
however, in the first part of the text you’ll see the events at Iconium. Iconium was just southeast of the area of
Paul followed that and in verse 1 he comes
to Iconium. At Iconium he follows
precisely the same strategy he did at
As you saw when you read the text, which of the two events most upset the apostles? The one where they went in and communicated and the thing blew up in their face of the one where they went in and didn’t communicate properly and they got just a complete screwed up response? It was the second one, where they did not communicate, and it shows you that the apostles would rather any day communicate and communicate clearly and have someone throw rocks at them than to go into an area and be misunderstood. That really infuriated them, to go into some place and have people not understand the message. That was a lot harder. At least you know when people throw rocks at you, you know they got the point. And that’s good because you get a grade of 100 in communication. I don’t know of any Bible teacher or any evangelist worth anything that wouldn’t love to have a little opposition at time that’s nothing to confirm somebody heard. What gets you is when there’s no response either way and you can’t tell what happened.
The first incident, Acts 14:1-7, is the incident where they went in to a Jewish area and they got a response all right, and they communicated all right, and what happened? In verse 1, they spoke to the synagogue, they went through the same thing evidently, same kind of message as in Acts 13, didn’t change their approach, if they did Luke would have noted it, and they got a lot of people to respond. It says at the end of verse 1 the Jews and the Greeks that happened to attend the synagogue responded by believing. [“And it came to pass in Iconium, that they went both together into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spoke, that a great multitude both of the Jews and also of the Greeks believed.”]
And that’s
why we have the white segregationists in
Dr. Schaeffer, in his book, How Should We Then Live, has an excellent section on the Reformation, it shows what a problem it was and how why, what we call the Anglo-Saxon culture is superior, but it’s not superior because the Anglo-Saxons are white men; it’s only superior because the Anglo-Saxons responded to the gospel for four or five hundred years and the Anglo-Saxon culture has sucked up and slurped up gobs and gobs and gobs of Bible doctrine along the way. But you compare that with other races. For example, you compare that to the Latin Americans. The Latin American culture hasn’t had the Word of God for three or four hundred years like the Anglo-Saxon, hasn’t been able to absorb the categories. This is why they’re always playing musical chairs down there with their dictators. They haven’t absorbed the concept of Reformation law, it’s a foreign thing to them; it has nothing to do with their race; it has to do with their reception or lack of reception to the Word of God. And so these Jewish people in verse 2 are reacting along racial lines instead of reacting along spiritual lines.
In Acts 14:3, you’d think, after they start stirring up trouble, and by the way, small men always like to stir up people against big men. This is why you have so many people on college faculties who love to malign and criticize great men of history. They love to run down George Washington; they love to run down someone else, John Calvin or Martin Luther or someone else great. The reason that these people do this is because they can’t make a living outside of the academic campus and they run down anybody else that they know is better than they are. These guys would starve to death if they had to earn their bread in the street; it’s only tenure on a college faculty that puts food on their table and they know it, and that’s why they want the grand socialist system to keep on putting food on their table and that’s why they’re usually against free enterprise. And free enterprise, if free enterprise involved the field of education parents would hire good teachers for their children which means they wouldn’t get hired. So they obviously have a professional vested interest in knocking greatness in history.
Well, it was the same kind of thing then; you’ll see this over and over again in history and as you read Scripture learn something about the common sense of history; people repeat themselves and this is people repeating themselves. So in verse 3 you would expect maybe Paul to say oh-oh, things are getting hot, I’d better leave. Oh no, it takes more than just a little bad-mouthing to get rid of Paul. In fact one of the great words of verse 3 in the Greek is the word oun, the word translated “therefore.” Therefore because of the opposition Paul decided to stay, have a little fun, people are stirring people up, people are agitated about the Word, great, good environment to minister the Word of God. People upset and mad at you, fine, stay around and make them upset and mad more. So Paul stayed, some scholars think as long as six months; if so, following his usual schedule of teaching at the city of Ephesus, that would mean about 500 hours of instruction was given to these new believers at Iconium. 500 hours of instruction; do you know how long it would take for us to get 500 hours of instruction, in even the best Bible teaching churches, at say three hours a week? It’d take about two and a half to three years! And that’s just introductory basic doctrine as far as Paul is concerned. So now do you see why those early churches were strong?
Can you imagine having the apostle Paul for your lecturer two hours or three hours every afternoon? Can you imagine what you would learn in the course of just two or three months with a genius, a theological genius like this going through the Hebrew text and showing how Messiah did this and Messiah did that and analyzing all these verses. Wouldn’t it be an amazing education; relating it to all the other areas because Paul knew all the Greek philosophers, was able to quote from them just by rote memory, as he shows in Acts 17, be able to ask well Paul, how does Moses relate to Plato? You got a few hours, I’ll tell you. And he’ll sit down for two to three hours and give a lecture on Moses and Plato and show why they’re two opposing different systems, and they cannot meet at any point. That was the kind of training the early Christians had and that is why the early church turned the world upside down; it was training, training, training, training, in the Word of God, not five minutes, not a few weeks, not one Bible conference, but training day in, day out, week after week, month after month and year after year. Well, Paul followed that policy in at least here he did as long as six months. [3] “A long time therefore abode they speaking boldly in the Lord, which gave testimony unto the word of his grace, and granted signs and wonders [to be done by their hands]” to confirm the message, and notice again this is around the area of primarily Jewish people.
So verse 5, a plot is arranged.
The plot never gets pulled
off but the plot is arranged and planned.
“And when there was an assault” now that’s too strong a word, it was a
planned assault, “made both of the Gentiles, and also of the Jews with their
rulers, to use them despitefully, and to stone them,” it was a lethal plot. By the way, notice what a beautiful set of
encouraging circumstances Paul had on this first missionary journey. He goes to
Now the early critics of the book of Acts said verse 6 was a clear
mistake; they said verse 6 has got a historical error in it. Ah, they pounced on this like this was the
way we could shoot down the Christian position, just show that Luke, the
historian, or whoever it was, was just writing in error. There were various states in the ancient
world; two of them were
There’s a man who did research, wrote a famous, monumental study in the book of Acts in 1915 by the name of Sir William Ramsey. Sir William Ramsey was unlike many people who are critics; Sir William Ramsey at least had the honesty to go to the field and look at the data. In particular he did not look for literary evidence but what we call epigraphic evidence; that is, evidence written on monuments; evidence written on tombstones; evidence of coins at the site; epigraphic means something written on, evidences that could be found and pinpointed, we could locate these things, pin them down in space and time, and so lo and behold, Sir William Ramsey writes in his book, that Acts 14:6 was the first verse he found that vindicated Luke, that after all, when he found the markers and he found various tombstones, he was able to show that Iconium lay in the state of Phrygia just exactly as the book of Acts says it was. And indeed Cicero, who most people think was at least a fairly accurate oratorist, Cicero was wrong. Now whether he was deliberately wrong or not is another question, he may have just been flippantly referring to it as the general area; we don’t know. But the notices in Cicero and other Roman speakers were inaccurate when you get down to the field data and actually see the epigraphic material. Verse 6 gives us one great historical note: it’s accurate, proved now, no critic raises the question any more, it’s dead.
Acts 14:6 and this whole Iconium incident gives us another
historical note, not so much for the accuracy of Scripture but for just our own
personal Christian curiosity. Haven’t
you often wondered what the apostle Paul looked like; haven’t you often
wondered as you read these artist’s reconstructions of the apostle Paul, I
wonder if the artist really knows what he’s doing when he draws those
pictures? Well, we have a description of
the apostle Paul as he appeared to one person who lived in the city of
There was a man by the name of Onesiphorus, he lived in Iconium and he’d apparently become a Christian and one day he was walking down the road, he had become a Christian after this testimony but before the testimony he wasn’t. He was walking down the road and he first saw the apostle Paul and here’s what he says I saw. “I saw this man, Paul, approaching, a man small in size, with meeting eyebrows, with rather a large nose, bald-headed, bowl legged, but strongly built, full of grace, for at times he looked like a man but at other times his face appeared with the sternness of an angel.” Now he’s not talking about some fairy when it talks about… in those days the face of an angel meant a severity of judgment, a spiritual fierceness about him. So this is the first and only portrait that we have surviving in the historical annals of what the apostle Paul looked like. Now if you were God would you pick out that kind of a physically appearing spokesman for the Christian faith? Wouldn’t you pick out some big smiling orator that would be created in the Athenian model? Well, we would because we tend to think like our forefathers, the Greeks. But Paul isn’t a Greek; God isn’t a Greek either. And when God organizes history He organizes it looking at man’s soul and so therefore He picks out this kind of an individual to represent His Word to the non-believing world.
So much for the incident at Iconium. Acts 14:8, the second incident. This one, down the road a little bit further at Lystra. Paul follows the military road across the boundary from one region to the next and comes across the Roman colony at Lystra. Now here something changes; here for the first time in the book of Acts we have Paul going into a highly Gentile non-Jewish culture with no bridge. Very few Jews, if any, live in this particular colony. It wasn’t like the previous colonies. Now he deals with an almost completely Gentile audience. Now he deals with people who, as we said earlier when we showed you the Framework, now when he preaches the Word of God he can’t really be sure that they know those first four events; creation, fall, flood and covenant. Now when Paul introduces Christ he can’t start there, he’s got to start earlier. Well, apparently all the signals don’t get going the right way and verse 8 he begins with this man.
As he’s teaching he notices this man crippled from birth. You’ll notice how frequently God’s Word makes these little notices to us, signals I call them that the Holy Spirit is trying to get our attention by saying look, when I work a miracle I always pull off the hardest case, congenital defects. This man wasn’t crippled because he’d gotten a nerve cut with a sword, something like that, he wasn’t crippled because of an accident; this man had been crippled all of his life, and I think God deliberately picks out men like this for miracles for several reasons. It shows, number one, He’s omnipotent, but it shows something else. All the citizens of the town had grown up with the man and so therefore any change in the man would be very clearly perceived by the people he grew up with. [8, “And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked.”]
So while Paul is teaching in verse 9, the man is listening. Paul is teaching, probably this same message that he taught in Acts 13, the man is a believer, he sees that he has faith to be healed, in trust; in this case the healing is a result of faith but be careful, not in all places is that so. He responds to God’s Word. [“The same heard Paul speak: who steadfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed.”] Paul talks to him in verse 10 and commands him to be healed, [“Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked.”] and we have an instantaneous healing, not a gradual process, it’s an overnight miracle. But now the fun begins because listening along with this crippled man are probably hundreds and hundreds of Gentiles, never heard anything like this before in their life. And they draw the wrong conclusion, just like some walk in here 11:00 o’clock service, they can hear the Word of God but because mentally they are worlds apart from the Biblical position, what is taught, what they read, what they sing, means nothing, it just is totally readjusted in their minds because they have their own inner grid of human viewpoint and by the time the stuff gets filtered through the grid it comes out in some sort bologna that isn’t even recognizable. Well, that’s what happened here. Hundreds of people have listened to the apostle Paul and after they have listened to the greatest theologian of the Christian church they have no more idea what he said than the man in the moon. Tragically this isn’t confined just to Lystra.
It’s my contention, it’s the contention of many Christian pastors and some of the great leaders of our time, that the days of mass evangelism are rapidly drawing to a conclusion. The days when you can go out and preach the gospel and really be understood have just about ended. I think they’ve already ended. I and many of the people at LBC have been counselors at some of these meetings and some of the people that come down the aisle and respond to the invitation have no more idea of what they’re responding to than these people at Lystra. They are totally confused people. Why? Was the message confusing? No, at least not always it wasn’t. The message was reasonably good. Well, then where did the confusion enter in? Because they had this framework that prevented them from listening, prevented them from understanding what was really said. The man mentioned God, the word “God” comes into the ear drum, registers in the brain, but then since the brain is filled with human viewpoint, and “God” is a process or “God” is an it, or “God” is an old man in a rocking chair patting people on the head, there’s some false Biblical image there, God gets retranslated somehow and before it slips into their mind G-o-d means totally completely different things than what the guy meant that taught it. The guy mentioned something about “sin.” “Sin” comes in the eardrum, registers, the audio nerve comes up to the brain, registers “sin” but then because there’s no morality, there’s no framework of absolutes, “sin” just gets filtered around so it comes out some sort of a psychological sickness. And that’s the way the perceive it; they literally perceive it, you can give them a lie detector test and they’d pass; that’s what I heard him say, because he heard him say it through the wrong set of presuppositions.
Now this passage we’re coming onto and particularly the next few
verses is a very somber, somber warning to us who live in a very tiny minority
in
Acts 14:11-13 depict the process of a false reception of the gospel. Let’s look at that false reception. The people of Lycaonia interpret Paul and Barnabas inside their categories, they say, “[And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia,] The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. [12] And they called Barnabas, [Jupiter],” it should be “Zeus,” the King James had a silly thing here, they translated all the Greek gods by Latin names. It’s Zeus, not Jupiter, same god but that’s the Greek name, and it’s not Mercury, it’s Hermes [“and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker.”] All of you have seen a picture of Mercury in the florist, where you have whatever it is for telegraphing flowers and you see the guy holding flowers and he’s got wings on his feet. Well, that’s Mercury because Mercury was the messenger of the gods. That’s what that picture means, it’s left over from pagan mythology and don’t call your florist a pagan, but that’s what the sign is, it’s left over from days of myth. And Mercury or Hermes was the messenger. By the way, Hermes, you should recognize the stem, that from which we get hermeneutics, interpretation. He became the messenger of the gods.
Now these people had some justification, you might say, for saying
this. We know in history two things at
least, show activity on the part of Zeus and Hermes in the city of
But there’s more solid evidence. When Sir William Ramsey did his work and other people in following him up did their work, they found out there was some inscriptions in this city that clearly proved the existence of a temple devoted both to Zeus and Hermes together, outside the city. This is exactly what it says in verse 13, “Then the priest of Zeus, which was before their city,” notice it’s not a statue of Zeus before the city, they say it’s Zeus “before their city” because to them there was no difference. We say that’s a statue that represents Zeus, not to them in the popular way; in the popular rural peasant understanding that was Zeus out there, parked at the gate. Well, the people begin to cluster around this temple outside the gate and begin to get oxen, and they start coating them with garlands, just as we see in the pictures of the ancient world, “[brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people.”] And they gathered the men together, Paul and Barnabas still going on teaching, they don’t know all this is going on until somebody says hey, I know Greek and I know Lycaonian and know that these people aren’t responding the way you want them. It’s like somebody comes down the aisle and they’re not coming down to receive Christ, they’re coming down the aisle because somebody said all people that are patriotic come down the aisle. Or they’re coming down the aisle because they have heartburn or something and they need an Alka Seltzer or they have some other excuse for coming down the aisle but it’s always some other reason. Well, this is the problem here, these people are responding but they’re responding for the wrong reason. The reaction, verse 14, tells you very clearly that Paul didn’t like this one bit, and he takes almost a violent reaction to a false reception of the gospel. He doesn’t want people responding this way; he’d rather have them throw rocks than respond this way.
Now how are they responding and what is the problem? It goes back to their human viewpoint. What is the essence of human viewpoint? It’s autonomy. Man is going to make his own way, I will decide where I am going to go when I want to go there. That is the heart from which comes all autonomy. Now what is the result of human viewpoint autonomy? What is always the result of this? Let’s look at God’s character. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable, and eternal. Those are God’s attributes. What happens in human viewpoint? Let’s visualize those attributes as sort of a board that we stuck up on the wall and the attributes I’ve just put up, the letters are just kind of those peel-on things you can get in the stationary store. Human viewpoint comes along and peels off these letters one by one; for example, it takes God is eternal, rips it off and brings it down here and makes the creation eternal. It takes immutability, rips it off, brings it down and makes the creation immutable. It takes omnipotence and omnipresence off, rips them off and brings them down here. So the creation acquires the attributes of God.
Now surely from a Christian point of view this is a strange marvel
to behold. You know, the man out there,
the unbeliever who thinks that God isn’t there, he is loud in his proclamation
that well, I don’t know whether God is there or not, maybe someday I will
see. Someday God might pass my
test. Now isn’t it a marvelous thing
that if God isn’t there, why is he so concerned to preserve God’s attributes? Why is he so concerned to make something into
God if God isn’t there in fact? Why is
he so concerned to form a counterfeit?
But he always does. I can take
you to any classroom in the city of
That’s the theory of human viewpoint but let’s get down to a little
more practical level where the farmers of Lystra were concerned. What were they doing with this? In essence they were doing exactly what we
just showed in the diagram but it showed up in a practical way. Evil never is obvious. When Satan walked up to Eve he didn’t say
hey, you wanna sin baby? When he did it
was always presented in some sort of a religious guise of good. And so it is when God’s attributes are torn
off, the evil system isn’t going to wave red flags and ring bells and say we
are now ripping off God’s attributes. It
will not be this obvious. You have to stand back and think, pray about it
and look and perceive. If we had
Christians in the school system, as an example, and I hate to keep picking on
this but it’s the one closest to home; we have Christians by the carload and
yet they let this stuff slide through by the ton. How can we resolve this? Are they in league with Satan? Not at all, it’s just they’re ignorant; it’s
just the fact they don’t want to take the time to apply the Scriptures to their
understanding; they don’t want to take the time to apply the Scripture to the
text and parents don’t want the teachers to bother; it’s not just the teachers
in the school system, the parents too.
They’re not concerned with it. How
many Christian parents in the city of
These attributes were ripped of by the peasants in the area of this farming. Obviously farming was the key industry of Lystra, and in the practical every day life, where would a man and a woman for that matter, spend 90% of their time? It wouldn’t be contemplating the statute of Zeus out in front of the gate? It would be out there plowing the field, sowing the seed, weeding the field, fertilizing it with whatever fertilizers they had at the time, doing what they could to harvest the crops, that’s where the time was spent and the effort and the attention so that’s precisely the place to look for their idolatry. And when we look at their fields and idolatry we discover something. They observe the process of fertility in the field. They observe that you put the seed in the soil and up from that comes the plant and they say that’s interesting, that’s just like copulation and sex. And so like often times in the ancient world, we don’t know for exactly whether this happened at Lystra or not, but in many places there was a spring orgy in the fields and everybody would go out in the field and copulate with everybody else. You say what kind of stuff was that? Well, it wasn’t just a sex orgy; it was that they thought by having sex on top of the rows that were being plowed on which to plant the seed that they would stimulate nature forces to do the same thing, because they observed the parallelness in the process.
Now we can laugh and say ha-ha, isn’t that a stupid thing to do
because after all, we know that there’s a slight problem of kinds here; men
aren’t rocks and there is a difference between animals and plants but because
they don’t have the doctrine of creation, that is not intuitively obvious to
them. And so all over the ancient world
you have this blurring up; fertility becomes a magic power, it becomes something
we can manipulate and we tee-hee and haw-haw but don’t we do the same thing in
the area of, say, government manipulation of wealth? Don’t we have it, don’t you read it on your front page paper this week, how the
federal reserve system is now going to arbitrarily change the size of the
dollar by dumping more money into the system so we can inflate further? Don’t we have the moving of levers to
generate wealth. Somebody said after the
service last Sunday we at last found a new way to solve the space problem at
Lubbock Bible Church; we’ve got so much square footage, now to generate more
square footage all we have to do is shorten the ruler and we generate square
footage overnight by simply manipulating the ruler. That is exactly what the modern big boys are
doing in the area of finances. Geniuses,
except they shorten the rule and it takes a PhD to shorten their ruler, but
they basically are doing it. Why is the
food in the supermarket cost more than it did three weeks ago? Because your dollars are worth less, that’s
why. Why? Did you do anything to them, did you mark
them up, cut them, destroy them? No, a
dollar bill is the same, it lies in your wallet this week as it was three weeks
ago. What happened to it? Somebody was
pumping more dollars into the system, so they’re worthless. Who’s changing the value standards? Who has the right to change value standards;
only God has rights to change value standards and the changing of value is a
modern worship of the divine state. Remember,
God is always the lawmaker in any system.
In
Acts 14:15-17 Paul’s attack. Now please notice how he attacks, we can learn much material from the way Paul counterattacks. After all that we have said from this pulpit there still arises from time to time people involved in certain Christian organizations in the city of Lubbock that insist that we are going to evangelize beginning with Jesus, and we’re going to start off the practice discussing Jesus stories, and we invite the little children in, we’re going to tell them all about Jesus. We don’t have to listen to all that garbage about God and His attributes, we just tell them Jesus stories, that’ll be fine. Now how can you talk about Jesus, without talking about God, may I ask. Isn’t Jesus God-man? How, then, can anyone understand who Jesus is unless you first understand who God is. It seems to me that’s elementary but maybe this is too much to ask, people who are so wrapped up and bound up in these anti-Biblical processes that dominate Christian, so-called, organizations, always start with Jesus. No! Don’t start with Jesus.
In fact, if you read verses 15, 16 and 17 very carefully you will find Paul never got to Jesus. These people weren’t ready to hear about Jesus, they were so screwed up they had to be straightened out about who and what God was first, and only after that would we discuss Jesus. Do you know why? They had to statues out in front of their gate; one was to Mercury, one was to Jupiter. If Paul had come up and said now let me tell about Jesus, I don’t want to ruffle your feathers, people, after all Dale Carnegie taught me to come in here with a smile, that’s how I win friends and influence people. And so therefore I won’t interrupt at a basic level, I don’t want to precipitate disagreement, after all, there are two things that are impolite to discuss in company, are religion and politics and since I really want to talk about religion, I don’t want to be impolite and discourteous so I’ll just kind of smooth it on like olive oil, just roll on over here, and you have Zeus and you have Mercury, why not have a third statue to Jesus in the front and then you can have three gods instead of two, a sign of prosperity.
Now that would be the result of Paul preaching a Jesus story to
these people. You see, he wouldn’t
challenge them in the least. You could
talk Jesus from morning until evening to these people and they still wouldn’t
understand what you’re talking about.
The only possible interpretation he could have if he told them a Jesus
story was we need a third statue. Do you
know the sad thing about it was, for 200 years in
Acts
Now isn’t that interesting?
Where does Paul begin? Does Paul
begin the way some of the elder Christian statesmen in the evangelical
community say we should begin today? Oh
but we can’t get involved inside issues, we have to stay with the simple gospel
of Jesus. The problem is, who’s Jesus.
So Paul does not follow the enlightened latter day statesman of the Christian
faith; he follows instead the framework of the Christian faith and goes back to
creation. He begins at the beginning and
that’s the only possible place you can ever begin. If somebody is fouled up on how the universe
came into existence they can’t help but be fouled up in the area of who and
what God is. I see this again and again
and again. I have tested this hypothesis
out with different people, different levels at different parts of the country
and I have seen it again and again, that everywhere people have a weak concept
of God they are always weak on creation; it follows as night follows day. I have never, conversely, I have never seen a
strong Biblical Christian sloppy and hesitant in the area of creation. Never.
Maybe some exist but I have never met one; never. They’re always shaky, they’re always fudging,
they’re usually uptight because they don’t want to get into that area because
sure that area is going to hold. So we’d
better keep it over here, we’ve got a blockhouse mentality, we dare not go out
the door, the unbelieving world might just tear us apart.
Start with creation; God made all things, and immediately at the end
of verse 15 Paul has separated the concept of God away from nature; it’s no
longer Zeus in nature, Zeus was a planet; that’s kind of odd, how you can go
out here at night and you look around the sky for the planet Jupiter; if you
know something about star mapping and the time of the season and so on, where
to look in the sky, you’ll find it but it takes a little looking and it takes a
heck of a lot more looking to go out here in the sky at night and find Mercury.
Verse 17, you could say ah, then if God let all men sin, then all men who sin are not responsible; is that right Paul? And Paul replies, no, “He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” General revelation. The testimony of general revelation together with special revelation left over from the fourth event. What was the fourth event of Biblical history which every Jew would have known and it would have been unnecessary to cover? The Noahic Covenant, the great rainbow, the promise that God would never inundate nature again.
Why is that rainbow so important. All right, all that’s necessary for us to have an inundation is again is for a large astronomical body, say the size of Mercury, passing within so many million miles of the earth. The gravitational fields of that small bypass would set off tides something like thirty to forty thousand feet tall. Now a tide circles the globe once every 24 hours. And that means that all the earth would have to do is have a nearby bypass, flyby of a large extraterrestrial gravitational body and we have had it; it wouldn’t even have to hit the earth, all it would have to do is just glance by the earth; in fact, glance by at some distance from the earth and it would trigger a global inundation. So to keep the rainbow promise God has to control not just terrestrial forces but He has to control the extraterrestrial forces to keep planet earth safe, and therefore, the Noahic Covenant guarantees that God’s Word personally rules the laws of physics. You can go to Kepler’s laws of motion, you can go to the conservation of energy momentum theories worked out since Newton’s day in classical physics, you can go to your modern physics where these laws are somewhat amplified and modified, and I don’t care where you go, those equations you draw on your paper are subject to this book and the phrases contained therein. This Word controls physics and chemistry. That’s the kind of confidence you have to have in nature and that’s what Paul says, you people, before I tell you anything about Jesus, I want you to understand the universe and its nature from creation, I want you to understand the moral problem of history; I want you to understand what is it that controls nature. And in verse 17 he enumerates particularly the features of Zeus and Hermes in that culture. For it was Zeus that gave the fruitful season; it was Zeus that gave the rain at the right season; and he says no, NO, NO! Zeus did not do this, God did it.
And verse 18 is the end where he summarizes. [“And with these sayings scarce restrained they the people, that they had not done sacrifice unto them.”]
Now let’s think about some things we can learn from this passage. One of the things that we learn out of this passage is that Paul never, never tried to prove the Bible from the basis of human viewpoint. Paul was faced with a human viewpoint system; Paul presented divine viewpoint, Paul never presented a bridge to drive your car from one to the other. He never used the inductive for the Medieval thinkers, the ontological proof for the existence of God and so on. He never tried to say look, you guys, I know you’ve got a little thing here, and you’ve got some truth here, now let’s just take Jesus and the Bible and we’ll pile some more truth on top of that and then we’ll have one nice complete system of truth. Is that the way Paul glued on the gospel to a heathen foundation. No! Paul brought a bulldozer in and he plowed the heathen foundation to the ground, start all over again. Paul preached, in other words, the tremendous difference between the two.
Notice this, Paul doesn’t preach compatibility in this passage. If you can say anything about verses 15 and 17 surely these verses are shouting from the rooftop, there is no contact between your paganism and the Word of God. These are two completely different answers to two completely different areas. These are two completely different views of the world. Paul says there are certain common things, certain factual things like rain, like fertility of your fields, things you’re interested in, goodness, human happiness, all those things. They can be interpreted through human viewpoint or they can be interpreted by divine viewpoint but the two systems never touch at any point and don’t think they are going to and don’t expect me, Paul says, to prove it to you. I preach that you must turn from one to the other. It’s a complete repentance, a 180 degree reversal.
And then there’s the other thing that we learn from this, that we’ve harped on again and again and that is apparently, from Luke’s notice here Paul never got to Jesus Christ, and there’s a lesson in that too for it shows you that there will come many times when a person is not ready to hear about Jesus Christ because they are so badly confused over who God is that it is a waste of time and you do yourself disservice and them by introducing Jesus too quickly into the discussion. Save Jesus for later. He’ll fit in if you’ve laid the framework; until the person has made a conscious decision to come to the God of Scripture, Jesus Christ can never be correctly perceived.