Clough Acts Lesson 45

Philosophical Effects of the Gospel: Introduction – Acts 17:10-18

This passage continues our study of Paul’s second missionary journey; we’ve watched how as Paul has invaded Europe he has shown very clearly that Christian is not conservative, it is radical. We’re not interested in perpetuating the pagan status quo, we’re interested in uprooting it and changing it in every area. We have studied so far how real Christianity upsets pagan society economically. It does so because when people become Christians and study the Scriptures and allow the Scriptures to infiltrate their souls they change their system of values, therefore they change the products they buy and therefore it’s undeniable that real Christianity will influence the market place. It will influence the production and lack thereof of certain goods, practices and services. And so you’ll have a general sensitizing of conscience.

Today we can see a very good illustration of this on the home front. This week school officials asked all students whether or not they thought that the Lubbock independent schools ought to participate in a federal breakfast program for students who come from poor homes who supposedly can’t afford breakfast. Now there may be, there genuinely may be students who can’t afford nutritious breakfast, and that is essential for learning, that’s undeniable. But I find it interesting that the parents of these poor people who can’t afford breakfast seem to have enough money for booze and cigarettes all week. Now isn’t it strange that they have enough money for cigarettes but not enough to pay for their own children’s breakfast. You see, it’s not a question of wealth, it’s a question of the use of wealth. It’s a question of priority and Christianity affects that, and it affects it without federal guaranteed lunch and breakfast programs.

The other area that we studied in Paul’s invasion of Europe, where Christianity has influenced society, is a challenge to existing psychology. When the Philippian jailer has what today would be called a mental breakdown, Paul does not retreat to Freudian [sounds like: re jeer ian] methods of counseling; he goes directly with an authoritative Scripture and tells them that the man has sinned, that his whole response and lifestyle against the crisis is sinful. He acknowledges human responsibility, stops blame shifting and cover-up. We saw how Paul challenged the world legally; he gave us an exposition of what it means to turn the other cheek by standing up for his rights when those rights were being violated, not just because of his own safety but because of the thousands of other Christians who would be crushed if bad judicial precedence were allowed to continue. We found Paul socially upsetting people in Thessalonica last time; how when he came to the city preaching Christ he was deeply upsetting to certain minority groups in that city and they got together a mob to see if they could do something about it.

And the social upheaval, the legal upheaval, the economic upheaval, and the psychological upheaval are all the results of the fact that Christianity is not neutral, it’s either one way or the other, either the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever or the chief end of man is to glorify man and enjoy himself forever; there can’t be any in between, and so there must be these collision points as the gospel invades pagan Europe.

Now in Acts 17:10 we find Paul continuing his journey and this time he continues his journey over to a place called Berea. He’s been following the Egnation way, an east-west major route that connected the Aegean with the Adriatic. Paul was on his way westward along this highway when at Thessalonica he encountered such severe social opposition, that something had to be done and so he tried to take the low profile approach by going to Berea. Berea was off the Egnation way, it was up in the highlands, it was hard to get to. Cicero says that this area was very hard to get to. You’ll notice in verse 10 that they sent them to this place by night, [10, “And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.]” So Paul is now diverted by circumstances from what appeared to be a well thought out strategy. We don’t know the “what if’s” of history but it may very well be that had this not happened in Thessalonica, this riot, had that not happened Paul would have continued west on the Egnation way until he got to the Adriatic, possibly continuing, taking the ferry across to the boot of Italy and on up to the city of Rome on the second missionary journey.

But Paul’s been diverted but Paul’s been diverted by adversity and circumstances, and now, although it looks like on the surface man has the last word, God will have the last word because Paul is going to be diverted to some very interesting territory and we’re going to watch the development of how the Holy Spirit leads Paul because that is one of, at least the sub themes, of the book of Acts. It says when he went to Berea he continually went to the synagogue of the Jews, it’s an imperfect tense, it’s a habit. This would become his custom, his practice, as always, to go to the Jew first. Why? Because again the principle, if you are educated enough in the Scriptures to evangelize the Jew you are educated enough to evangelize anyone else. And so it’s a good control to upgrade the quality of evangelism, to always strive to at least be able to witness intelligently to an intelligent Jewish person, grounded in Judaism, and then you’ll automatically be prepared for anyone else.

And so he would go into the synagogue of the Jews, as was his custom. It says in Acts 17:11 about the reception, “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind,” the word “more noble” is the word which means well-born, well-born! This is a comment that goes back to the comment of Jacob’s character; well-born has reference to the Jewish character. We might say that Luke is describing the people in Berea as real Jews, not pseudo Jews like those in Thessalonica. Here the real Jews showed real Israelite character. What Israelite character? Well, the character that we saw in the manhood series on Jacob, Yacob as he wrestled with the preincarnate Jesus Christ, demanding that he have blessing from God. He put a half-nelson on Christ to make sure that Christ blessed him, that attitude. You see, the aggressive spiritual attitude of Jacob. And these people were aggressive spiritually. These people in Berea insisted if there was a truth that God had revealed they were going to find it. Maybe, maybe there’s an outside chance that Paul might be right, we’re going to find out and we’re going to search the Scriptures every day until we do find out. We will not be passive unthinking people.

And so it goes on and describes that they were well bred, meaning they were really good Jews, “[more noble ] than those in Thessalonica because they welcomed the word,” dechomai, it’s the word to welcome, “they welcomed the Word with a readiness of mind,” and then although it’s translated in the King James as a compound sentence, “they received and they searched,” literally in the Greek it is not a compound sentence, it is a participle that modifies the verb to receive, “they were searching the Scriptures daily,” that describes how it is possible that Luke can say why, I know these people in Berea, that they have good character. Well Dr. Luke, how can you tell they have good character? And Luke’s reply is just watch what they did when Paul came to town. What did they do? They kept searching the Scriptures every single day, not just once a week, they searched the Scriptures daily, and that’s the attitude of aggressive people, people that are really serious about their faith will always search the Scriptures daily. And it describes at the end, “whether those things were so,” it’s an odd situation in the Greek because this is a fourth class, it’s an optative mood, if possibly there’s an outside chance Paul might be right, we’ll search the Scriptures each day. Verse 11 gives you the model of a hungry thirsty believer.

There’s a historical illustration of verse 11 in our history of America. During the 1910, 1920, 1930 period there was what historians called the fundamentalist/modernist debate. Now a large product of those debates came from what we’ll call the simple laymen sitting in the pew hearing liberal clergymen spout off a new theology. These people knew there was something wrong; they couldn’t put their hands on it but they knew something sounded differently. Yes, the old words were still used, Jesus, sin, redemption, cross and so on, all the old familiar words. But there just seemed to be a hollow ring about those words, there’s something lacking in them. And so the people would sit back with their Scriptures and by and large it was the Scofield Bible, the editions of the Scofield that was used; this is why that edition is so hated; it’s not because it’s got notes in it, it’s because it put a tool in the hands of the laymen. And those people used that and they went back and they said you are wrong, you are not teaching the doctrine that was historically taught in our denomination. You have departed from the faith. But the liberals, though they won the day, lost many, many people, and many people came out to found conservative denominations of independent churches. Some of course, some of the disloyal people, stayed in the big denominations because their great aunt had laid the cornerstone 85 years ago and they were so infatuated with the stone architecture of the particular buildings and the colored glass rather than the content of the Scriptures, that’s their loyalties were misplaced. That’s why you still have Christian friends in liberal apostate organizations, because they have not yet found the courage to make the break for the truth. You don’t hold up a sinking ship, you get off of it so you can be saved.

And so it is that people have come out, and they came out because these are the people that searched the Scriptures daily, like the people in Berea, and they found out what Paul in fact said was true. You see the result of the Word of God is always faith, because faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word, and thus we aren’t surprised to read in the next verse, Acts 17:12, “Therefore many of them believed;” not some, many believed. Why? Because they searched the Scriptures daily, that’s why. They were exposed to the Word of God, the very exposure caused the faith in their hearts, “Therefore many of them believed, also of honorable women which were Greeks, and of men, not a few.”

You’ll notice this point that Luke has made in verse 12 is something that we’ve noticed him making before and that is almost his marveling over the response of women to the gospel of Christ. Now we said, we warned you that when we came to Acts 16 and Paul begins to invade European soil, that things would change. And Luke is sensitive to what’s changing and he notices a statistical shift in the response to the gospel. And one of the statistical shifts that he notices is that women are responding, and not just women in general but the notices always are they’re “honorable women.” What’s he mean by this? He means women were upper class, the women of Lydia’s status in society. Now why do these upper class women flock to the gospel? Obviously it’s something worth noting or Luke and the Holy Spirit wouldn’t mention it. It’s sort of an adumbration of what would happen down in the pagan history that women would be very sensitive to the Scriptures and to the message of salvation, sometimes so sensitive relative to the males that it causes a leadership crisis in the churches. But nevertheless, it’s there and it’s there from the very start of the book of Acts.

Now we suggest there’s a very good reason why women are interested in spiritual things. And the reason is that women intuitively know that if they are not protected by the laws of God they will never be protected by the laws of men. Women inherently know, or did before ERA, that in a pagan environment their rights are never protected, that in paganism women are always the greater losers. Now it’s sad that in our own very short-sighted generation where people talk glibly of women’s rights but know nothing of the basis for rights, and know nothing of history, they glibly speak of lifting women’s rights off and away from Christianity, freeing you from that supposed oppression of the Word of God.

Well, if you want to see where women’s rights wind up on a human viewpoint pagan base, the writer to refer to is the Marquis de Sade, because more than any other man in western history, the father of pornography and sexual perversity, is the man who saw very clearly where women rightfully belonged in paganism. He wrote to one woman: “Be smart, Eugene, act the whore with this young man; consider that every provocation incensed by a boy and originating from a girl is a natural offertory and that your sex never serves nature better than when it prostitutes itself to our sex. And that in a word is to be…” and you can fill in the four lettered word, “that you were to be born, that she who refuses her obedience to this intention nature has for her does not deserve to see the light any longer.” There is the woman’s rights on a pagan basis. And women inherently know that, or at least they used to, that in paganism there is no protection. Marquis de Sade is right; if Christianity is wrong the male is physically stronger than the woman and therefore he can do what he wants to with her. That’s de Sade’s simple gospel and no woman can fight it simply because the men are physically stronger.

Now in that situation since the women have no physical power where is their power? Their power must be in a framework of law, given to them by God. And thus it is when the gospel meets European soil it is the women who intuitively sense here is where our life is, here is where our protection is, and they flock gladly to the gospel.

But all is not well at Berea either, Paul no sooner preaches his gospel there than he has opposition. He has collided at every point; he has collided economically, he has collided psychologically, he has collided legally and socially. In a nutshell the collision has been here over women’s rights, for the fact that he says woman ought to be defined in terms of God while de Sade says she ought to be defined in terms of her genitals. That’s the simple alternative.

Paul has made the point and now the Jews come after him, we can’t stand that difference. We can’t stand to have our position undercut by the Christian gospel, and so they do in verse 13 what they did before at Thessalonica, start a riot. [“But when the Jews of Thessalonica had knowledge that the word of God was preached of Paul at Berea, they came thither also, and stirred up the people.”] If you can’t have your way and you have a minority, and you want to push your will on everyone else, start a riot and in the discord and chaos you can get your way. So that’s why at the end of verse 13 they “stirred up the people.” That’s mob action; you couldn’t defeat Christianity intellectually, couldn’t defeat it rationally in dialogue, so just smear it, just physically crush it. And so immediately they sent Paul away, by the sea, “to go as it were by the sea,” apparently he went by land, it was just kind of a fake out, [14, “And then immediately the brethren sent away Paul to go as it were to the sea: but Silas and Timothy abode there still.”] And he went down to Athens, [15, “And they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens: and receiving a commandment unto Silas and Timothy for to come to him with all speed, they departed.”] And when he came to Athens we have a further extension of this marvelous leading of the Lord of Paul and how Paul, when he is led of the Lord, follows a situation where the gospel has unexpected benefits.

Here’s Berea, he makes as though he’s going to come down by the sea to Athens, but actually he goes down by land and winds up in the university center of the ancient world. Now beginning in Acts 16:16 and following we have the last of these confrontations, not the last absolutely but the last in this description. And in these confrontations we have the philosophic collision. We’ve had every kind of other collision, but now Paul comes to the university center of the kingdom of man. This university center is then, to that generation, like for example Boston was at one time in America, where Harvard is, where it became the intellectual center for the eastern seaboard. Or in London and in some of the other cities, Manchester, of England, and some of the other places where universities like Oxford and Cambridge are. These were the intellectual centers, the fountainhead that controlled the kingdom of man.

Let’s go back and remember something; something we always ought to remember when we think of paganism and external to the church, it’s pagan. There are four layers in the kingdom of man. These four layers were all spoken of by Daniel. And although they represent sequences, they represent a continuing pavement, so the first layer of pavement that was laid down was the Babylonian contribution. That is the economic structure of the apostate satanic kingdom; deficit financing, inflation, fractional reserve banking, they’re all aspects of Babylonianism, so strong and so persistent in history that in the book of Revelation the kingdom of Satan is described as Babylon, the great whore that has committed fornication with the kings of the earth.

The second layer of pavement that was laid down was Persia; Persia, reaching from India to Greece, was the first attempt in the ancient world was the first attempt to bridge the Orient and Occident; east and west united in one world culture. And so the second layer of the kingdom of man has been the perpetual desire to unite East and West into one grand apostate tower of Babel culture.

And then the third layer that was laid down from Athens through the rise of Alexander and his tutor, Aristotle, was Hellenism, the empire of Greece, with its emphasis on autonomous man. And this is the fountainhead. Now Paul hadn’t intended to do this. See, Paul had apparently had intended to go directly west and direct to Rome. But there’s something deeply significant about how the Holy Spirit led Paul; Paul, you must proceed through all the layers of the kingdom. Before you come to Rome you must come to Athens; Athens must be encountered, it must be met and it must be defeated. True, everyone in Athens isn’t going to become a Christian but the answer to Athens will be given, and that’s why Acts 17, from this point on is more important to your witnessing today than any other chapter in the book of Acts because today our fights aren’t mainly in Jewish synagogues; our fights are with the Athenian spirit, the same Greek spirit that permeates everything around us. So Paul’s analysis of the Athenians and his gospel preaching to the Athenians is going to become a model for us to learn how to do it in our day.

All right, what happened? He went to Athens and it says in verse 16 that “while he was waiting for them,” apparently he wasn’t interested in starting anything, it’s quite accidental how it all started, he was simply waiting there for Timothy and Silas to come get him, but “his spirit was stirred [in him],” the verb “stir” is imperfect, it was continually stirred, day after day he’d walk down the streets and it would be stirred. Stirred what? Because “he saw the city wholly given to idolatry,” …wholly given to idolatry? Paul, isn’t that an exaggeration? No, Paul said, Athens was “wholly given to idolatry.” Well, what do you mean “wholly given to idolatry?” How? When? Where? What are the facts.

Well at this time, estimating from voting records in Roman literature, the population of Athens had sunk to about 5,000 people, it was nothing more than a large town, population wise. But the great buildings of a previous era still stood and on the sides of those buildings, and on the frescoes of those buildings were many, many, what we would call works of art. But Paul didn’t call them art for art’s sake; Paul called them idols. Paul saw theological significance to statues and art work, far more sensitive to it than we are. We forget that the product of an artist’s hands and his brush is a product of his heart; where a man’s heart is, that’s how he thinks, and how he thinks determines how he creates. Those of you who’ve read Frances Schaeffer’s book, How Shall We Then Live? know, or ought to know by now, that artwork is just simply the physical pouring out of a theological religious position. Paul knew that, and that’s why he said Athens was overrun with idolatry. We wouldn’t call it that, we would just take the tourist bus to Athens and see the great stone statues, ah, beautiful classical art, we would say. Paul’s “spirit was stirred within him.” There were 30,000 statues of art in Athens at the time, according to Pliny; one Roman writer, Petronius said it’s easier to find a god than a man in Athens. Obviously where there’s six statues for every one person that still lived there, surrounded by classical art.

Now isn’t Paul being a little rough with the Greeks? Isn’t he being a little hypercritical? Running down their culture, after all, he was just an obnoxious Jew, wasn’t he? Jews didn’t have art so he was just jealous of the Greeks because they had art? Isn’t that the case? Not at all. What was classical Greek art. Take the statues of the gods; they were always men in perfect physique. Now if you took a random example of a thousand men I challenge you to find one who would have the physique of one of those Greek statues. You don’t find men build that way. So what is that art from but an ideal, is it not? It is an ideal that doesn’t exist in real life. Real men’s bodies aren’t built that perfectly and so what you have in your art is an unreal abstraction, held up as the ideal, the ideal now becomes a physically perfect thing. But in God’s sight what would be the ideal? Jesus Christ did not have a perfect physique; He wasn’t the statue of Hercules. Well, then, doesn’t that refute the position? Of course it does, God’s ideal is what is morally perfect, not what is physically perfect. And so the Greek ideal was an apostate ideal, it was an idolatrous ideal. Every statue, of the women too, the statues of Venus and Aphrodite, what woman has that kind of a figure. Take a thousand, you won’t find any of them with that figure. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. It’s a false ideal and it warps men to think that that which counts most is the physically perfect ideal when God says that which counts most is the morally perfect ideal.

So Paul had a collision with human viewpoint. Let’s look a little more deeply at it because today in getting down to verse 21 we want to prepare for what’s coming up. When Paul gets in a fix of presenting Christ to these people we will not have time to devote to all the background material so today what we’re doing is researching our unbelieving target. We must know what the unbeliever thinks, rather than going up, buttonholing him and saying, “are you saved?” Ridiculous question to an unbeliever who doesn’t even know what sin is, leave alone salvation. Saved from what, do I save stamps, green stamps, gold stamps, what stamps. It’s not a facetious question for the unbeliever, it just doesn’t communicate to him. And so we have to understand the unbeliever first and that’s what we’re going to try to do this morning, get background on this thing.

First let’s look at human viewpoint, review a little bit about its features. You always find these features, whether it’s in your unbelieving friends, whether it’s in your own heart, we all have hunks and gobs of it because we’re not yet totally sanctified and it’s in the world spirit around us. Human viewpoint always starts with negative volition, rebellion against God. It’s not negativism; be careful, we don’t believe like John Locke and modern educators that a human baby is born with a blank slate and all that education is a process of writing propositions on a blank blackboard. God says in Romans 1 that’s not the case; ALL children are born into the world with God-consciousness, they all have propositions already written on the blackboard and that’s why it’s not neutral volition but negative volition, it is an active act over against what they know to be correct.

That’s human viewpoint and that’s the spirit of the age. You see this all over the place. You see it in the fact that educators want neutrality in the public classroom, when there can’t be. If I say I want to teach my physics neutrally, we don’t want religion, this is science and religion has no place in my physics class—it doesn’t? You are therefore implying that there is not a God of the Scriptures who created the entities you are studying and has never spoken with regard to those entities. You are saying that the God of the Scriptures cannot exist and if He does exist then He never has and can never speak a proposition that would affect your study of physics. You are saying that theoretical constructions can be made without reference to Scripture. You’re serious about arguing the principles like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in 20^th century physics can be decided without reference to theological norms and standards? Is that what you’re asserting? If you are you’re making religious assertions and you’re not neutral. You’ve said that all is possible except what the Scriptures say is possible or exist.

So we meet this autonomous spirit behind very respectable people. And this respectable spirit manifests itself in two central propositions that mutually collide. All human viewpoint is self-contradictory. Every unbeliever is trying to ride his horse in two directions at the same time. On the one hand he as a finite individual with limited assets reaching out from himself is saying I know what the nature of the universe is and is not, I am 100% a rationalist in that I say the universe is this way and not some other way. I say this, and we all say this if we subscribe to any doctrine of neutrality. This is the idea that finite man legislates what is and is not possible in the entire universe. Hume did this, miracles are not possible, by definition. Nice, he defined things out of existence, win all the arguments that way, until a miracle happens in your life.

Then the second proposition is the opposite of the first one and that is everything is 100% irrational because I have absolute freedom; I determine the next 60 seconds of time, I can either stand up or I can sit down, I am the ultimate author. That’s the freedom of man but look what happens. If I am free, my neighbor is free; if my neighbor is free his neighbor is free, and so millions and millions of people are absolutely free to decree the next 60 seconds and if that’s the case we’ve got an innumerable set of causes which is chaos.

Now you can’t have the first proposition and the second together. Either one is true and the other is false but they both can’t be true. And yet all human viewpoint breaks down into these contradictory propositions. We see this inevitably and it winds up in the case of the final result is idolatry. How does idolatry show up today. Why, you say, I haven’t seen an idol recently, even on the new civic center they haven’t put any idols yet. So therefore there are no such things as idols. Ridiculous! We people sophisticated here in Lubbock in 1977, we have no idols, it’s foolish to talk about idolatry. Oh really, let’s look for a moment. Every man knows that God is there. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is loving, God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternal. These are attributes of God; every man knows that God is this way. Even the atheist knows these attributes are there. Do you know how I know? Because he keeps saying they’re there; you say atheists don’t say omniscience is there. Oh yes they do. Atheists don’t say immutability is there. Oh yes they do. Watch.

Here we have a scientific law, let’s say we go back to F=MA, Force equals Mass times Acceleration, a very simple law of basic physics. Okay, says the atheist, this is a basic law, I will use this law to interpret how the universe came into existence. How can I do that? Because the law always was there. What did I hear? The law always was there; ah, I’ve heard the words of eternality, have I not? I have heard the words of immutability, have I not? That F always equals MA; if, for example, I were chemically analyzing the water in the water pots when Jesus turned them into wine I would still insist that F=MA even though obviously electrons, protons and atoms were being created instantly at that point. And so I as the non-Christian, I argue that well F=MA is true always so I subscribe to these two things. And you would say but you can’t, you’re making them god, and I would respond but I have to, I can’t have science unless I have standards. Exactly! And since you reject the God of the Scriptures and you throw Him out of the picture, lo and behold out of the magic Pandora’s Box you bring a new god to replace Him, because you as one made in God’s image cannot stand to be without God a second; you can’t stand to build anything without God being there.

And so we rip off His attributes off His face and we paste them on some false god, some piece hunk of the creation and we begin to serve the creature more than the Creator. And this is always the result of autonomy. Modern science has made scientific laws immutable, it has made the universe eternal. Modern education has made educators omniscient. And so we always have [can’t understand word] idolatry, don’t be fooled because you don’t see statues like in Athens. We live with far more than 30,000 statues; there were 6 statues for every man in Athens; I suspect in Lubbock there are 10 idols for every single person in our city of 190,000.

So Paul comes in and he’s stirred, verse 16, [“while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.”] so he does what every good Bible belt person ought not to do and that is therefore he began to dispute. Why Paul, you mean you’re not going to be the “good old boy;” Paul, you’re upsetting the boat. Why Paul, you’re butting into people and how they believe. Now it’s the Christian thing to do to just let them have their opinion and you have yours, don’t be a bigot about this. Don’t raise issues, I don’t care how nice and polite you are, Paul, there are two things you don’t talk in decent company: politics and religion. You talk about everything else that’s irrelevant but don’t talk about the significant things, it’s not polite to do that. So in nice company a “good old boy” never raises issues, vote for me because I’m a “good old boy.” That’s the way our elections are run, no issues, just vote for so and so.

Now Paul did not subscribe to that and I’m afraid he would not be too welcomed in certain circles because Paul insisted on continually, it’s an imperfect tense, “he continually disputed,” and not just with the Jews, notice the list of disputations in verse 17, “Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews,” that was an irritant, you can imagine how that must have gone over every Sabbath; Paul, why do you upset people, can’t you just let them have their own way without going down there. If you want to believe your way stay away from the synagogue, you’re irritating people. No, Paul says, I love them enough to change their mind, that’s an act of love, and people that pussyfoot around do not love other people. Frankly, they don’t care whatsoever about anyone because what they’re saying is if so and so wants to walk out in front of a truck and get his head squashed under a ten ton truck, well just let him go out and get run over because let him do his own thing. Is that an act of love? You know intuitively it can’t be and Paul takes the same thing in spiritual things. Why is it that people have common sense about physical things have no common sense about spiritual things. There’s no difference.

But here it is, he is “disputing daily in the synagogue with the Jews,” notice “and with the devout persons,” the second group of people he works with. These are the Greeks who have some divine viewpoint because of their association with the Jewish people, and then the third group, “and in the market daily with them that met with him.” Now this is a whole new tactic. Many of you have seen pictures of the famous Acropolis in the city of Athens and southwest of this at Paul’s time there was a long alley, sort of like a central mall stretched out, with stores on both sides of it, and it was called the Agora; this is the place where business was conducted and they’d have their goods all displayed along in tiny shops. But also along this there’d be places like you find in Central Park and Hyde Park in London, the classical soapbox where people would get up and harangue about something and Paul took advantage of the opportunity to speak in the Agora. He would get up and form his soapbox and that’s what he’s doing here in verse 17 in the market place. Whoever would come up he’d have a discussion. In between the carrots, pears and potatoes he’d be discussing the creation of the universe. And this would go on daily, it says, notice in verse 17, Paul never gave up. Imagine how Firs [sp?] would like it to have an evangelistic meeting in the third aisle.

And in Acts 17:18, [“Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seems to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.”] finally after he goes on for a while, then along comes some students, and finally these students bring their professor friends; the students come from two schools; one, the Epicureans, and the other the Stoics. The verb to “encounter” also is in the imperfect tense, they continually encountered him, day after day after day after day after day this went on, and gradually Paul’s message spread out until it began to touch these people in their school and they’d led them up to a place where he is going to explain to them. We read in the text, they begin to respond in verse 18 with two kinds of questions.

Now we want to go very slowly today to prepare for Paul’s gospel presentation. When Paul goes to answer these people he is going to preach the gospel in such a way that he totals both of their positions at the same time. He is not saying oh, you people are so sincere, you’ve got a lot of truth, now let’s just take Jesus and glue it on top of your system and we’ll have a complete thing. That’s not the way Paul approaches the Christian position. He says no, I have the contract with a man with strong earthmoving equipment and we’re going to take your whole building, foundation and all, and just shovel it over into the alley in the debris, we’ll let the garbage man collect it, and then we’ll start all over from the foundation and build a whole new edifice. That’s [can’t understand word] problem, that’s why Paul was not too popular in how he approached people with the Christian faith.

Let’s look at what the building was that was built on the property that Paul’s bulldozer is now going to demolish. First we’ve got to get some background about the Greeks. The Greeks in their contribution spiritually to civilization, each group of people have a positive; today we’re concentrating on the negative contribution of the Greeks, their positive one was language. They gave the world one of the greatest languages, Koine Greek and God picked it to write the New Testament in, so we’re not knocking Greece. We’re just saying that part of their contribution was apostate and the part that was apostate was their philosophy. Now their philosophic era lasted down through the year about 300 BC. By that time things were starting to phase out and we have from there on down to 529, when finally the Roman emperor couldn’t take it any longer and he closed the schools down, we have what is called the Hellenistic period.

During the Hellenistic period certain things happened. You had the rise of the Stoics and the Epicureans; both represented opposite polls to where paganism… and your friends, your neighbors, you, me, we are all subject to this thing, we are infiltrated today with an element out of Stoicism and Epicureanism. It’s all around us and the moment I describe these to you, many of you will be oh, yeah, I know what you’re talking about, I know, so and so thinks that way, I thought that way. You’ll recognize the elements are still with us.

So let’s look at some of the background of this. Plato died in 347; Plato was the father of western philosophy. That’s why some of the professors in the 20^th century, Dr. Whitehead, has said that all western thought is but a footnote to the writings of Plato. Plato was the father of it all but he died in 347. Aristotle, his student, died in 323. Aristotle is known, obviously because of his writings in science, his influence in the Middle Ages, but also never forget that Aristotle was hired by Philip of Macedonia to teach personally one little boy called Alexander and wherever Alexander went in the ancient world he brought the teaching of Aristotle. Aristotle then, himself, though he didn’t conquer the world, did so through his famous student, Alexander.

But all this had gone by by this time and in Paul’s day instead of debating the big issues of origins of the universe and so on, men had kind of got tired of that and they’d gone through this system and that system and so the things had kind of calmed down to levels like what ought we do to be happy? So it was primarily ethical questions that were being discussed by the Stoics and the Epicureans.

Let’s look first at the Epicureans. In verse 18 the Epicureans are the first group to hit Paul. What did the Epicureans believe? Paul knew very well what they believed; do you know how we know that? Because he quotes their writings in 1 Corinthians 15. So Paul was a student of Epicurus. Epicurus lived from 341 to 270 BC, notice the dates, 341 to 270, he followed Aristotle. Epicurus began his philosophy on a borrowed foundation, the foundation which many share today. His origins, obviously he did not accept creation, he was an atomist, he believed not in modern atoms but he believed that all of matter came from just three particles. There’s no such thing as everything connected but there’s just pieces. In modern physics this shows up in the particle theories of nuclear physics. And the idea is still with us; we have particles, and this was whence cometh all things. He also believed along with atoms in a thing called spontaneous generation, something modern evolutionists believe, that just by sheer Chance life came into existence. So when someone tells you I am an evolutionist, I’ve discarded all of those old-fashioned ideas you can very bluntly remind him that his ideas go back to the time of the Greeks, even back further. The idea the everything has come by Chance did not begin with Darwin; it began back here.

So the Epicureans believed in spontaneous generations by Chance; the result of this was exactly the result in our own day. If that’s really the case and Chance is the ultimate thing, remember, 100% irrationalism, and we stress that heavily, what are we going to do to man’s reason, do you suppose? What are we going to do to the process of thinking? We’re going to destroy it, aren’t we? If everything’s come from Chance then what counts is my experience, because after all, why say that the sun is going to rise at that point on the eastern horizon today when if everything is by Chance it might rise over there tomorrow. Why bother to structure knowledge if it might change in the next several hours. So in a universe of Chance we have a decline in reason and an emphasis on experience. This is what’s happening today in the west; the emphasis is on existentialism, emphasis is on having this experience, having that experience, tired of life, go to India and find your favorite guru. Tired of life, go out and try new drugs, there’s many on the street, all marked up 400% but that’s all right, go try it, see if you can get another experience because experience is the source of truth.

Professor Gordon Clark has several of the translations of fragments of the Epicureans. Listen to what he says: “I know not,” said Epicurus, “how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures of taste, sex, sound and form; the pleasure of the belly is the beginning and the root of all good; sexual intercourse has never done a man any good and he is lucky if it has not harmed him; nor will the wise man marry and rear a family.” Notice that last one, very sinister. “Nor will the wise man marry and rear a family,” well of course not, if all is chaos why should I tie myself down with one woman? Why should I tie myself down with the responsibility of raising children over ten to fifteen years; it’s not worth it if everything’s got a background of Chance to it. Don’t blame the man for his ethical conclusions; if he starts in the right place that’s where he’s got to wind up. So this was the belief of the Epicureans.

A modern Epicurean, Corliss Lamont, writes in his book, Humanism is a Philosophy, an interesting chapter entitled This Life is All and Enough. Now they didn’t believe in an after life. He says, “Even I, disbeliever that I am, would frankly be more than glad to awaken some day to a worthwhile eternal life.” You see, the Epicureans, in their doctrine believed in one supreme thing and that was the pleasure principle. That’s why today a person who emphasizes pleasure is called the “eat, drink and be merry” philosophy of Epicureanism. But we have to be honest and say that the Epicureans didn’t take it that far. To paraphrase Professor Clark again, the Epicureans did know that to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall have cirrhosis of the liver and delirium tremors. They did know that there were some prices to be paid for outright licentiousness, so they were conditioned somewhat against carrying things to conclusions. But the momentum was there in their position. They emphasized the present pleasure of the moment.

Now, one little final note on the Epicureans and this is going to key you to what Paul’s going to say later on in the gospel presentation. The one thing that the Epicurean writers feared most was divine judgment in the future. And because of this hatred toward a future divine judgment, they said when you died your body dissolved and there is no after life. That was their answer to the fear; they said this idea about eternal existence is bologna, because it threatens us morally; if we exist forever someday we might be judged. We can’t have that! The thought of a future judgment hanging over my head disturbs me, I don’t want to be disturbed, I want to live in the present. So you see, I think you all have noticed a little Epicureanism in modern America of 1977.

Now let’s take the other side, the Stoics. Who were the Stoics? That was the second group that Paul encountered. The Stoics were founded by a man by the name of Zeno, he’s a mathematician, some of you studied math know Zeno’s Paradox. Zeno lived from 340 to 265, again notice the dates, he lived after Aristotle. He followed on with the next stage. Zeno had his universe begin differently than Epicurus, he took the only other position, that the universe is a continuum, that is that everything blends into everything else, it’s one big gob, it’s sort of like a sea, that persists in modern physics in the wave theory. And so both these ideas are prevalent and come down to us in the latest scientific models. The ideas are not original, the ideas go way, way back to the Greeks.

Zeno believed that the universe was a continuum and Zeno said everything is by fate, so he’s exactly opposite to Epicurus; Zeno emphasized the plan of God, [can’t understand word] called, but he called it fate. So everything was tied together in one situation, it was not chaos. And what was the ideal of the Stoics? You kind of can guess it? You’ve used the word yourself, stoical; you’ve said that so and so was very severe, he’s a stoical in his personality. What did you mean by that? You meant that he was stern, he was disciplined, he was orderly, stoical, victory over the adversities by just kind of a sheer gut-level determination. All right, that’s your stoicism, and the world is full of also of stoics. Says Professor Clark: “The ideal of virtue differs in many particulars from the Epicurean ideal of pleasure. Whereas the school of pleasure found family life too much of a nuisance, the Stoics defended monogamy and the family with its reciprocal duties. They advocated education for women, even courses in philosophy, whereas the Epicureans too withdrew from politics, the Stoics stressed patriotism, civic responsibility.”

So now what do we have when these two groups of students come down the Agora to discuss with Paul? How fatuitous, that we’ve got represented in this 18^th verse the two poles of paganism, don’t we? Hasn’t paganism ever since this time either tended to licentiousness or to legalism, one or the other. How remarkable; this isn’t happening by chance. How remarkable that Paul is going to have to face down the two extremes of paganism, the licentious people, articulate licentious people, and articulate legalists. And so they come to Paul with two questions. One says “What will this babbler say,” and the other one says well, “He seems to be a setter forth of strange gods; because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.”

Now the word “babbler” is missed in the translation; here’s what it looks like literally, seed-picker. Now that was a slang term for a very interesting idea, a very dangerous idea. It came from the fact that as people would stroll down the Agora and they’d be selling grain here and flour here and meat over here, that parts of the food would roll down in the gutter to stay there, and of course the birds would come down and pick it up. Well, the birds could come down and they’d pick up a little of this seed, a little of that seed, a little of some other seed, and the food of the birds was made up of diverse sources. And so the word “seed-picker” came, even before Paul’s use here, came to mean an eclectic person, a person who builds their position up a little here, borrow a little from here, borrow a little from here, borrow a little from here, and they’d put it all together in a new position.

So this little question, “What will this babbler say?” is unfortunately a very dangerous question, it goes back to what I examined last Sunday, we’ll talk about it next Sunday, we’ll talk about it the Sunday after that, we’ll talk about it the Sunday after that, and that is the problem of the enclosing frame. In divine viewpoint and human viewpoint approach you always have the problem of what do you do with the opposite. If I’m a human viewpoint person and you come to me and you say Jesus Christ died for your sins, I’d say to you, well now, that’s interesting, sin, I guess what you mean by sin is psychological disturbance, don’t you? And so I begin to absorb like an amoeba your Christian message, slurping it up inside my framework. So my framework has eaten up yours. And that’s what we mean, I have drawn my line around our line and I have totally encased you. So everything you say I reinterpret in terms of my framework; my framework wins.

Now Paul, when he structures his approach, beginning in verse 22, is going to have to avoid this problem and he gives us a great way of doing it, because we’re going to have to come to the unbeliever and he says why, you know, you Christians are really naïve, you mean to tell me you believe all this garbage about the deity of Christ? You believe the virgin birth, look friend, I don’t even buy Genesis, I don’t buy the idea of creation. And immediately at that point we have to say well of course you don’t, you’ve turned off the revelation of God, you can’t believe in creation, you’re not able to believe this, you’ve turned against it. So we begin to interpret his position in terms of ours and now our framework eats his up. And that’s what you have to do and that’s what you’re always doing, whether it’s in a counseling situation, whether it’s in a witnessing situation or what, with the result of that conversation one or the other framework is going to eat the other one up. It goes back to presuppositions again.

And so what they’re doing with this little innocent question is this: Paul, you’ve got an eclectic religion, Christianity is made up like a jigsaw puzzle of pieces and Paul, you’ve borrowed this piece from Plato, you got this one from Aristotle, you got this one from the Jews, the late Jews, you got this one from Moses, you might have read a few of the poets, the Greek poets, the tragedians, you might have read some of Cicero, over here maybe a little of Caesar Augustus’ ideas and so on, and out of that you’ve fashioned this new religion, you’re a seed-picker, you’re a collector, you’ve got a cafeteria Paul and you’re serving us plates. That’s what they say, and they added sarcasm, “What will this babbler say, if he can say anything?” It’s a fourth class condition. If this little squeaky guy, remember, Paul did not have the oratorical voice; he had failed his homiletics courses, and he was not able to preach clearly, and so they said if the guy can say anything, I wonder what he would say.

So the second question is well, say some others that listen to this guy in the market place or the Agora, well, it looks to me like “he must be setting forth strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.” Now in the Greek, if I can phoneticize this, Jesus name is like this, Iesous, and the word for resurrection is anastasis, now that’s the way it was coming out, you know, he wasn’t preaching in King James English, he’s preaching in Greek. And so when this was heard in his hearers they thought oh, he’s talking about a god and his wife. He’s talking about Jesus and Anastasis, Jesus is the God and Anastasis is the goddess. And furthermore the reason they thought this was the Greek word to heal is iasis, and so this is would mean the healer and this would mean the restorer, so the [can’t understand word] must be a doctor of some sort, some new medical set of gods, healer and restoration. And so they thought to absorb Paul into their pantheon. After all, if you have 30,000 gods why not have 30,002; we can add to our collection. And so it is that Paul has to avoid the problem of having his framework eaten up by theirs.

Listen to the words of one of the great apologetic thinkers as he summarizes what the problem is here, Dr. Cornelius Van Til. He tries to paraphrase what the mind is of these philosophers. “They’re a bit suspicious, shall we say, because of what they heard Paul say about Jesus and the resurrection in the market place. But he is no common revivalist so let’s go hear him out, let us take him away from the rabble and ask him to make clear to us what he means by Jesus and the resurrection. Maybe there are such things as resurrection; after all, Aristotle told us about monstrosities, has he not. We already seem to have a measure of the chance and the accidental in it; if anywhere history is the realm of where the accidental appears, so maybe he has something strange to tell us. After all, we have an auditorium in which there are some vacant spaces.”

So they thought, then, to absorb Paul’s gospel, take the potency out of it and the result would be that the gospel would be destroyed. You see, Paul is faced with the situation that you are faced with, that I am faced with. How do we articulate what we believe so that it cuts sharply across the faith of what the non-Christian neighbor believes, so he’ll even be aware there’s a choice. Too often we just talk about Jesus in terms that don’t make him choose and we wonder why we don’t get any response. We haven’t asked for one, we’ve just asked them to add Jesus to their auditorium; they had Zeus there, Buddha, Confucius, why not talk about Jesus a little bit for now, after all, we get equal time. In that situation we’ve not asked for a response and that’s why we don’t get a response. We’ve got to totally bulldoze the edifice down, not patch Jesus onto it.

So at this point Paul, on the one hand, the Epicureans and the Stoics on the other; there’s no common ground between them, there’s no common authority, there’s no common truth, there’s no common good. We’re left with what the Apostle John says: “We know that we are of God, the whole world lies in wickedness. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true. We are in Him that is true, and His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life,” and then John adds this last sentence, “Little children,” addressed to us, “Keep yourselves from idols.” Keep yourself from idols. Athens was full of them, Lubbock is full of them. The tragedy of today, we don’t even know an idol when we see one. We would take the tour through Athens and say Paul, you’re wrong, there are no idols here, all I see are works of art. You just saw art, you didn’t know it when you looked at them.

Let’s stand and sing…