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The Gospel and Postmodern Minds: How Do We Reach Out to a Changing Culture Without Selling Out?

Acts 17:16-34

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism from Acts 17:16-34.


“I’d like to invite you, this morning to turn in your Bibles to Acts 17. I shall begin reading at verse 16 and read to the end of the chapter. Silas and Timothy have stayed at Berea while Paul has moved down south on the Greek peninsula to the city of Athens. This, then, is what Scripture says:

“While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.

And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.’ When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Two or three years ago, I was asked at the last moment to fill in on a television program. I think that one was Larry King Live. They have to have an evangelical talking head every once in a while. On this particular program, pulled together at the last moment, he was in his studio and there was somebody in a Los Angeles studio and I was in Chicago. When they get you there, you’re in a little booth and the camera is right on you, but you don’t see anything except the camera.

There’s a split screen with all the talking heads, but you’re just there to do your little bit. Because it was arranged at the last minute they sent a limo for me. Now that’s not normally the way I travel, but that’s what they did. I’m in the far north suburbs of Chicago, and on the way down I was sitting in the back seat, scrambling through papers, trying to be prepared enough so as not to look like an absolute twit on national television.

Then at the end of the program, I got back in the limo, and the chap started driving me home. But at that point, you see, I didn’t have to read my papers anymore so I started engaging him in conversation. It turned out he was a 58-year-old Jew. We started talking about this and that. I asked him if he had any family. It turns out he was married to his second wife. She was 29. He had divorced the first one.

He also said that he had a daughter, and then he choked up a bit. She was 34, but she was brain-dead. She had had an accident in Kansas on snow-covered roads just a few weeks earlier, and they were just waiting now to pull the plug. The vehicle had flipped, and she wasn’t going to make it. I asked him how he was coping with all of that. He said, “I’ve decided stuff happens. You know? What can you say? Stuff happens. You just can’t get too emotionally tied up with it. It just happens.”

So I said to him, “You mean, just like the Holocaust? Stuff happens?” He exploded, which I expected him to. He said, “I lost both my parents in the Holocaust. That was evil. That was vile from beginning to end.” So I said, “You do have a moral category for outrage, then, do you?” He said, “Of course.” I said, “Why aren’t you outraged at your daughter’s death?” He said, “Are you saying it was evil?”

I said, “Of course it was evil. I’m not saying she died because she was more evil than anybody else. We’re all under sentence of death. But according to the Bible, death isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. It’s all the result of our rebellion before God and the sentence that hangs upon all of us. You ought to be outraged. The apostle Paul actually calls it the ‘last enemy.’ ” Then I said to him, “Tell me. Would you view things differently if you really did believe with all your heart there is life after death?”

“Oh,” he said. “I know just what you mean. My daughter, she has a wonderful garden in Kansas. Lovely butterflies. I think she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Zoom! Passing each other, not even on the same planet. Have you had any experiences like that in your witness? Where suddenly you realize you’re not even in the same conversation? You see, many of us, not least in the South, have been brought up in such a churchified culture that virtually all the witnessing we’ve done up until fairly recently has been with people who are already steeped in some sort of Judeo-Christian culture.

When I started doing university missions, if I were dealing 30 years ago with an atheist, he or she was, at least, a Christian atheist. That is, the God he or she denied was the Christian God, which is another way of saying all the categories were still on my turf! But as the culture becomes progressively more biblically illiterate, the categories change. Even in the South, on university campuses, there are substantial numbers of people nowadays who are completely biblically illiterate.

They don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never held a Bible in their hands. They don’t have a clue who Isaiah or Abraham is, and if they’ve heard of Moses they either confuse him with the recent cartoon character or, if they’re old enough or watch enough movies, with Charlton Heston. They have no idea what the storyline is, and they can’t put together enough sequence to know whether or not Moses and Jesus were contemporaries or what.

They don’t have a clue. And every single one of their God-talk categories, every single one of them, without exception, means something different from what I mean. God, spirit, faith, truth, repentance, sin. In every single case they mean something different from what I mean. So if you start evangelizing in those sorts of contexts, it’s very easy to get frustrated because it’s easy to start thinking you’re on different planets. “This one’s too hard for me. You know? I’ll leave that for somebody else. I don’t know how to get through to them. They’re clearly not understanding me, and I’m not sure I understand them.”

What I want to say to you is: that’s the way it was when Paul was evangelizing in the first century. As soon as he moved out of synagogue circles, that’s the way it was. They were biblically illiterate. Bone ignorant from a biblical point of view. So in one sense, you see, we’ve been spoiled by a few centuries of Judeo-Christian history that had many people in the culture already familiar with biblical categories.

I’m not saying they were all Christians, but so many of the categories were already known. They had to be tweaked, they had to be explained, and they had to be fleshed out. You still, by God’s grace, had to preach the importance of repentance and faith and all the rest, but those categories were not unknown. They were not strange, by and large. Now they are. Not only so, in many parts of the country there’s a real animus against Christianity.

If I’m in New York City, I don’t call myself an evangelical unless I have about half an hour to explain things, because for secularists on the streets of New York City that roughly means “hate-filled, Christian-equivalent of Taliban.” That’s what the word means, and if you don’t realize that, you’re not even in the discussion. Go somewhere else. The categories have changed. This means, worse, that when we try to explain what the Bible says, to explain the good news, it’s not as if we are writing new files on a blank hard drive.

They already have a lot of files on their hard drive, and most of the files on their hard drive will clash with the Christian ones, which means part of evangelism, besides explaining what the Bible says and what the gospel is, is helping them to delete some of their present files, because otherwise they clash irreconcilably with the truth of the Bible. Do you see? Which means that, inevitably, however courteously managed, there’s some confrontation. There’s some saying, “To be frank, I think that’s mistaken.” Some things have to be unlearned.

Now that’s the way it was for Christians evangelizing in the Greco-Roman world once you got outside of the synagogues with their Jews and Gentile converts and Gentile proselytes. That’s the way it was. The vast majority of people in the ancient Roman world had never heard of Moses and had never read what we call the Old Testament. Most of them were polytheists of one sort or another. They adopted different kinds of philosophies, different kinds of strategies.

In one sense, therefore, if you read the New Testament today, it speaks with much more immediacy and power to our culture, once you see this, than it did in our parents’ day, because in our parents’ day there was already an adopted Judeo-Christian heritage broadly in the culture, which there isn’t in most of the country today. So although the reasons may be bad as to why the country, as a whole, has moved in this direction, nevertheless, there is a result that’s wonderfully good.

That is, the New Testament speaks with a rare immediacy that comes back to us and is wonderfully helpful and supportive in terms of helping us understand how to talk to such people. You can see this by comparing, for example, Paul’s sermon here in Acts 17, spoken to intellectuals who are pagans and who know nothing of Christian background, with his sermon in Pisidian Antioch four chapters earlier in Acts 13.

There, he is speaking in a Jewish synagogue, and in the context of a Jewish synagogue he doesn’t have to demonstrate that there’s only one God or that there’s a difference between right and wrong, that this God demands repentance, that he has promised a messianic figure, and that history doesn’t just go in circles but is actually heading somewhere to a final judgment. All that’s presupposed.

So he spends the vast majority of his time asking, “What kind of Messiah does the Old Testament actually anticipate?” and insisting that if you read the Old Testament aright the Messiah must not only be King, he must be suffering servant, because he’s interested in demonstrating Jesus really is the promised Messiah they were waiting for.

But supposing you’re dealing with people who have no linear notion of history, who don’t have a category called Messiah, who don’t know what suffering servant means, and by “God” can mean almost anything under the face of God’s green earth. Let me outline a few things.

1. The situation that Paul faced

We’re told (verse 16) that he arrives in Athens. As far as we know, this was his first time here. Athens was still known to be the premier intellectual city of the day. It was going downhill, but it was still widely viewed as number one, likely followed by Alexandria in Egypt and then followed by one or two cities in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey.

This is like going to (what shall we say?) Harvard? From another tradition, Oxford or Cambridge. That’s where he’s going. Only this city was known, also, for its spectacular architecture. By the time Paul got there, the Parthenon, which you can still see, had already been up for 500 years. So by the time he got there, you’d think he would sort of walk up and down the streets and admire the wonderful beauty and comment on the spectacular design and the long intellectual heritage.… Nuh-uh. When he arrived, he was greatly distressed to see the city was full of idols.

In other words, he is already assessing things out of a biblical theological framework of faithfulness to God. He is looking at things as God looks at things. No matter how spectacular the culture and the literary history and the architecture, he still sees the place is steeped, top to bottom, with idolatry. Instead of lambasting it with self-righteous indignation, we’re told he was distressed. Here is a man like the Lord Jesus himself who, when he saw the crowds as sheep without a shepherd was moved with compassion.

So he did what he regularly did. Before we come to what he did, it’s important, too, to see something of what he faced. Ultimately, we’re told, he confronted Epicurean and Stoic philosophers (verse 18). Now when you and I, today, here the word philosophy, we’re inclined to think of an academic discipline taught to small numbers in big universities where they’re basically told how to think and be critical about every cotton-pickin’ thing under the sun, and that’s about it.

Now in fact, there are different philosophical schools, of course, but by and large, the Western analytic tradition has spent an awful lot of time trying to think rigorously and not much time teaching people how to live. But in the ancient world, that’s not what philosophy did. Philosophy was not a learned discipline for academics. They didn’t have universities in the ancient world. Philosophy meant something like what we mean, today, by worldview.

So there were various competing worldviews out there that were taught by people in public marketplaces and, then ultimately, they’d hire their own buildings and have their own little schools and so forth. They competed for students, clearly. The best of them charged a lot of money. But when we’re told, now, Paul confronted Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, we’re not to think this was a learned, technical, academic debate. No. It could get technical on occasion. It really was a worldview confrontation. That’s really what it was.

The Epicureans believed the gods were made up of atoms so fine.… These atoms lived in the interstices between the other atoms. Therefore, they were removed from this world order. They didn’t have much to do with us, at all. So many Epicureans functioned, lived, like practical atheists. I mean, “The gods don’t have much to do with us.” Think of Lucretius, for example, in the ancient world.

By contrast, the Stoics thought the entire universe was so structured on this principle of reason that they called logos, what we know as word, that everything is structured on this principle of reason and order; therefore, what you really had to do was tame the passions which lead you astray and work with reason. As a result, they developed a philosophy and outlook that was full of high moral tone and self-discipline and tried to avoid passionate commitment to anything, because passionate commitment to anything opens you up to being vulnerable and disappointed.

You know? Just be strong, reasonable people. The sort of equivalent of Richard Dawkins, today, in some ways. That is, everything turns on reason. Forget all the passion and the mysticism and the emotion and art and beauty. Reason controls everything. Now there were some differences, of course, between a Dawkins and Stoicism, but nevertheless, you must see there are whole worldviews that are operating here, and how people think about God, and so forth.

Moreover, in the ancient world, all the way until the beginning of the fourth century, the first 300 years of the church’s life, the biggest criticism the pagans raised against Christianity, by far, the biggest, most consistent, most heated criticism the pagans raised against Christianity is that Christianity was claiming to be exclusive. So Epicureans, do you see, they fought for their corner. And the Stoics fought for their corner, and there were a lot of other corners, as well.

Nevertheless, none of them said theirs was the only way. In fact, they all insisted there was not just one way. So for Christianity to come along and say, “There is only one way of knowing God, the true God, and there is only one God” just sounded horribly narrow, what we would call fundamentalist. Right-wing, bigoted, hate-filled, people-haters. Christians were sometimes charged with being people-haters in the ancient world. Doesn’t that sound vaguely familiar? That’s the situation Paul faced.

2. The standard practice Paul adopted was one he adopted in just about every city where there were synagogues.

Where there were no synagogues he would go down to the riverbank or someplace like that where Jews would sometimes meet if they didn’t have 10 heads of household. You had to have 10 heads of household to have a synagogue, in Jewish thought. If the Jewish population was so small, then they would meet down there on Saturday at a beach. Once or twice you find him in the New Testament doing that sort of thing.

But clearly, there was a synagogue here, so he followed his policy of going to Jews first and then also to Gentiles. He went to the synagogue. There he would have found not only Jews but also Greeks who were fascinated by Christian monotheism, as many people were in the ancient world. Some of them became Jewish proselytes and were circumcised and were proper Jews.

Others just came and attended the meetings, but they never actually got circumcised. They were God-fearers. He started off there. He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews, doubtless preaching the kinds of things you find he preached, for example, in the Pisidian Antioch synagogue, way back in Acts, chapter 13. But he also spoke in the marketplace “day by day with those who happened to be there.”

There’s nothing quite like that today in the Western world. A modern shopping center is not a marketplace. The marketplace was not only a place where you bought your food, and so forth, but it’s where you conversed. It’s where you put up soapboxes and spoke. It’s where people competed for the public eye. It’s where news was announced. There were no newspapers; there was no CNN. There was no Fox News. You did it in the marketplace.

You’d have town criers, in some cases, paid. Then you’d have teachers setting up there little stands and beginning to lecture. If they were sufficiently gifted to actually pull together a group of students, then, eventually, they’d hire a place, just as Paul eventually hired, in one instance, the school of Tyrannus. That’s what they did. There were no universities. That’s how education, at what we could call a tertiary level, proceeded.

So that’s what he did, too. Undoubtedly, he’d done it again and again and again. If you read his brief, self-constructed biography in 2 Corinthians 11, you learn how he had planted churches in Cilicia for a long time, for approximately 10 years, after his conversion before he surfaces again in Antioch helping Barnabas. He has a lot of experience, now, teaching and preaching and founding churches in the Gentile world.

In fact, in the Damascus road call, isn’t that what God had said? I will send you to the Gentiles, and I will show you what things you must suffer for my sake. That’s important. I’ll come back to it right at the very end. At this point, Paul was not some greenhorn right out of seminary just trying to figure out which end was up. By this time, he’d had 15 years of hard, hard, experience.

What he does as he disputes and teaches, and so on, to those who happen to be there and in the synagogue is preach the gospel. That’s what we’re told in verse 18. The charges they were making against him (“What’s this babbler trying to say?”) were generated because, we’re told, Paul was preaching the good news. He was preaching the evangel. He was preaching the gospel: Christ crucified, resurrected again. He was preaching about Jesus and the resurrection.

It’s important to see that. Tuck that at the back of your mind, because we’ll come back to that again. From their point of view, they couldn’t figure out what he was saying. “What’s this babbler trying to say?” I’m sure you’ve been told that the word is often used for a little bird that goes by the side of the road and picks up seeds. “What’s this seed-picker trying to say?” Because it sounded to them as if he wasn’t coherent. That is, as if he had picked up a bit here and a bit there and a bit somewhere else, and he hadn’t got it into a philosophy, into a worldview.

So he was spouting off without really knowing what he was saying. You know? Like teenagers sometimes at the age of 14 who sometimes pontificate on something they barely know anything about. In our family, when we did that growing up, my father, who often entered conversations by quoting Bible verses at us, inevitably, of course a generation ago, from the King James Version.… He would listen to us pontificate and simply say, “He wist not what to say, so he said …”

If you don’t know what that means, it’s because you’re not familiar enough anymore with King James English. “He wist not what to say …” It’s old English for “He did not know what to say, so he said …” That’s the King James Version of the Mount of Transfiguration. “Peter did not know what to say, so he said …” So Dad would listen to us, and “He did not know what to say, so he said …” Do you see?

That’s what they’re saying about Paul here. He doesn’t have it put together. He doesn’t really have a philosophy. He doesn’t have a worldview. He’s a seed-picker. He’s a babbler. “What’s he trying to say?” And the reason they’re charging him with this, Luke records, is he was preaching the gospel. They didn’t have a clue how to put it together. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a worldview. It wasn’t a frame of reference.

Doesn’t that sound like us, sometime when … Zoom!… we go by each other like ships in the night, and you wonder if we’re on the same planet. Paul faced exactly the same problem.

3. The message Paul preached

 I can read through his so-called Areopagus address in about two minutes, but you must understand when Paul preached this he was preaching in the tradition of Areopagus addresses that could go on for hours and hours. So what you must see is every sentence, every clause, here, is the equivalent of a heading. What you have is the outline of what he preached. You don’t have his address. You have an outline.

In most cases, you can figure out pretty closely how he would have developed each point because most of the points he makes, elsewhere he discusses, somewhere, in the corpus of 13 letters that has come down to us in the New Testament. Do you see? Now not in every case, but pretty often. Pretty often. I don’t have time to tease that out in detail, but let me fill in at least a few bits here.

He begins with a generalized comment. “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.” We wouldn’t begin that way today. But I might well begin, “Students here in Cambridge, I see many signs that you are a very spiritual people.” That’s what I would use today. It doesn’t mean a blessed thing, just as religious didn’t mean a blessed thing in Paul’s day.

It’s just a generalized indication they’re interested in something other than the material world. Do you see? It’s a courtesy statement going in. Nobody today, in a larger world, views it as a complement to be called religious, but everybody wants to be spiritual. It doesn’t mean a blessed thing. Or, more accurately, it means about 20,000 different things, depending on who is using the term.

But it’s a really generalized complement going in, but it’s a setup for what comes next. “As I walked around, carefully observing your objects of worship …” Which he, in his own mind, is already condemning according to verse 16 as idolatry. “… I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” The point is, you see, in the pagan world with many, many gods, each god operated in a certain domain.

If you wanted to make a sea voyage, then you offered a sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. If you wanted to give a speech somewhere, then you offered a sacrifice to Hermes, because that was the god of communication, and so forth. So there were many, many gods. The Greeks had thousands of gods; Hindus, today, have millions of them, but the Greeks had thousands of them. So you didn’t want to offer all of your allegiance to any one particular god.

You wanted to offer sacrifices and propitiate the particular god who was most bound up with the venture you’re about to tackle. But how could you possibly know all of them? There are probably some unknown ones there, too, and they could trip you up. So somebody had apparently made an altar to an unknown god and offered sacrifices there. They were living their lives in a certain kind of fear lest these nasty gods, these nasty spirits, would actually trip you up.

But Paul sees this as a mark of confession of ignorance about God-ness. He’s not promising to introduce to them a new god to add to their pantheon of gods. “The one that you think is unknown, I’m going to tell you about that one.” His language is more subtle. What he means is, “What you do in worshipping the unknown I’m going to unpack to you and make it known.”

It’s a sweeping claim, but can you imagine the breathlessness now of the congregation? Then he starts off. Amongst the things he establishes, but not just with a phrase or a sentence, unpacking it, line by line.… Amongst the things he establishes, then, are these:

A) God made everything.

“The God who made the world and everything in it …” Isn’t that remarkable? All of these Greek philosophies had their own myths of creation in some respects. They varied considerably, and sometimes there was sort of a general god-ness back there somewhere. But many Greeks, not all, but many, thought god-ness was so removed from the material order that this god-ness could not possibly create something material, because that was inclined to be bad.

So he made other gods who made other gods who made other gods, all the way down to junior gods, often called demiurges who finally made something here. But that’s not that what Paul says. Paul says, “Nuh-uh. There’s one God, and he made everything. Not only Genesis 1 and 2, but Romans 1. Not only so, he’s the ‘Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.’ ”

Paul is not denying the place of the tabernacle in the Old Testament or the Solomonic temple or the second temple built after the exile. But after all, when Solomon built the temple, at the dedication he himself prayed, “The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built?” The Jews, at their best moments, understood full well that neither the tabernacle nor the temple was a dwelling place that somehow domesticated God or gave him an address.

The moon was his footstool. The heavens can’t contain him! But so often, do you see, in the pagan world, the temples actually localized gods. The gods, in fact, were often regionalized. That’s why when the Romans took over new turf, they insisted the locals take on some of the gods in the Roman pantheon, and the Romans take on some of the local gods, because then if there were civil war, nobody could figure out which side the gods were on. They had god-swaps.

That was possible only because of regionalization of gods. That meant, too, the temples were places where, in some ways, the gods were domesticated. The gods were domesticated, and you had the right priest offering the right sacrifices to make this miserably bad-tempered god propitious, favorable, happy. Thus, the temple was a place for controlling the gods, who could be just a bit obnoxious and a bit whimsical and not always very predictable.

That’s why you had experts called priests who could tell you what to do with the gods. But Paul’s picture of God, instead, is vastly different: one God, sovereign over absolutely everything, heaven and earth, not reducible to any location, not manipulated by priests, not restricted to a local address, finally, not findable just in a building. That’s where he starts off.

B) He insists on the aseity of God.

The Puritans used to use this term. We’ve lost the word. We need to recover it. Aseity. The aseity of God. Do you hear what he says? “And he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything …” The Latin a se means from himself. That is, God is so much from himself he’s dependent on no one or anything else. So in eternity past, before there was a universe, God was entirely happy. He wasn’t lonely. He wasn’t miserable.

You are not to think of God, now, come Thursday, saying, “Oh boy, I can hardly wait ‘till Sunday, when all my people break out their guitars and praise me again. I’m needing a little reinforcement, you know.” In fact, some of our hymns and songs are dangerously close to hinting this.

Now don’t misunderstand. God does respond to worship for reasons we still have to see. He expects us to praise him for reasons we still have to see, but not because of any weakness in him. Not because he needs us in order to find his own self-identity. He is the God of aseity. He doesn’t need us. Isn’t that taught again and again in the Old Testament?

God says, “If I were hungry, why would I come to you? The cattle on a thousand hills are mine. Why do I have to go and pay my two bits at McDonald’s? I own the whole flipping shop anyway. Do you see? If I were hungry, would I come to you?” He’s the God of aseity. He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need our counsel. He doesn’t need our advice. He doesn’t need our praise. He doesn’t need our offerings. He doesn’t need our tithing. He doesn’t need anything! He’s God!

But what that means is, if you really believe that, you can’t enter into barter with him. What are you going to offer him? You see, so much of pagan religion (because the gods are finite and you’re finite) is a kind of tit-for-tat swap. You scratch my back; I scratch your back. I pay my money at the temple and offer you my worship and do my bit with the priest and all of that, and then you give me a nice fat baby. You have your needs; I have my needs. Religion becomes a god-swap.

Sometimes it has to be said, amongst Christians who should jolly-well know better.… They start thinking, “You know, if I just have my devotions, and I’m really, really good, then, you know, the Lord will spare me from cancer.” What kind of God is this? A god-swap God? You barter with God? He doesn’t need you. But that means anything good we receive from him we receive by grace.

It can’t be any other way because he doesn’t need us. We don’t have anything to offer him that he doesn’t already have. He doesn’t need us. We’re his, too, by creation! It changes everything. All the categories change. That’s what Paul makes clear. “He’s not served by human hands as if he needed anything. In fact, it’s just the opposite. He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. Every beat of your heart is by his sanction, and if he says, ‘Stop,’ it stops. And you’re dead.”

In other words, the first responsibility for created beings in God’s universe is to recognize their creatureliness. Failure to do so is the beginning of idolatry. It’s no longer recognizing, “God is God and I’m dependent upon him.” I’m his creature. Then he deals, moreover, with what we would call today the doctrine of anthropology, the doctrine of human beings. Most of these competing philosophies in the ancient world were tribally connected in some way.

There were certain gods who created Greeks. There were certain gods who created Romans. There were certain gods who created whatever tribe. Do you see? What does Paul say? “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth …” Not a whiff of racism there. Moreover, he’s not just the God of local Jews. “He determined the times set for them, and the exact places where they should live.”

That is, there is a sovereignty over them all, which is why you read (going through Jeremiah, let’s say) chapter after chapter after chapter where God not only addresses what he’s going to do to Jews, but what he’s going to do to the Babylonians and what he’s going to do to other groups. Do you see? Because in every case, whether they’re his covenant people or not, “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” God’s sovereign over the whole lot and will call them all to account.

So far there has not been direct mention of anything wrong. In other words, Paul spends quite a lot of time talking about who God is and what creation looks like and who human beings are before he actually gets to sin. Now for the first time you begin to see there’s something wrong, without him quite yet saying what it is. “God did this …” Arranged this ordering of things. “… so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”

In other words, Paul is acknowledging there is an alienation that’s gone on. He hasn’t quite described what it is yet. He’s about to, but God sovereignly disposes everything providentially with the purpose that these alienated human beings should seek him. And, moreover, by common grace, even some of the pagan poets have seen some of these truths. He quotes two of them.

He has not yet quoted the Bible, and he’s now going to quote two pagan poems, just as I, when I’m on university campuses, long before I start quoting endlessly from the Bible, might well begin with Michel Foucault. Then he starts dealing with the nature of sin. What is so interesting, here, when he deals with sin is he doesn’t introduce it in terms of the category of law. He introduces it in terms of the category of idolatry. Have you noticed that?

We’ve been brought up, in the Western world, to think of sin in terms of breach of God’s law, and, of course, in some sense, it is. It is. It’s not only breach of God’s law specifically given to the covenant community, but there is also a profound sense Paul works out in Romans 1, 2, and 3, in which the law is written on our hearts.

That is, we are made imago Dei, in the very image of God. We, too, know differences between right and wrong. We may not have them all as clearly laid out as the Jew who actually has Torah; nevertheless, there’s something stamped in our being that teaches us some differences between right and wrong. But whether we have all of this revelation or only this amount of revelation that’s stamped into our very being, the fact of the matter is we don’t live to whatever level it is we’ve been given.

We’re still sinners! So Paul can deal with evil as a category that is confuting law, but that’s not what he does here. Indeed, elsewhere in Romans, Paul points out that death reigns from Adam to Moses, before there’s any formal giving of the law, because before there’s any formal giving of the law there’s still idolatry. Isn’t that what’s going on in Genesis 3? In other words, the breaking of that specific commandment about not eating the fruit that comes from a certain tree.… It is breaching something God said, but it’s not just breaking an individual rule. It is de-Godding God. It’s insisting I’ll do things my way. It’s the beginning of all idolatry.

Idolatry is not just having idols in the first-century pagan sense or the twentieth-century BC sense. That’s why Paul can call covetousness idolatry. If you want something badly enough, that’s your god. Whatever you cherish the most is your god. The thing you cherish the most might even be a good thing, but if you cherish it so much it dethrones God, it’s idolatry. And, “God, if he, she, or it exists, must jolly well please me and what I think of paramount importance, or I’ll find other gods, thank you.”

That’s the very nature of idolatry. Instead of finding our fulfillment, our being, our joy, our completeness, and our holiness in him, God becomes merely a sort of magical dispenser of blessing so we can get on with our life and follow whatever particular path we cherish most, which is idolatry. That’s why he defines sin in the categories that these people understand: idolatry.

Those of us who do university missions in really secular settings have found what Paul found in the first century: this is often the best way to get at this business of sin. If you simply say, “You’re breaking God’s law,” they’ll say, “Who are you to tell us what’s right and wrong?” That’s not a godly way of thinking at all. Don’t misunderstand me. There is certainly a place, eventually, to get to God’s law. All I’m saying is there is something that’s more fundamental than that, and it is relational.

We are made in God’s image. We have defied him. We have wanted to go our own way. We love to sing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.” Do you see? That is the larger category that embraces breach of law. It is, first and foremost, profoundly a relational breach against God himself. And because postmoderns tend to spend a lot of time on relationships, actually that resonates with them more than actual breach of law, and it is the larger category.

Then he introduces history because world cultures have different kinds of views of history. For Hindus, for example, things are going around and around and around and around in cycles. That’s why you have reincarnation: they’re going around and around and around in cycles. So you come back and have another go at it. You try to move up a little higher, or maybe you fall down a little lower. Then you have another go and have another cycle.

It can take you thousands of cycles in Buddhism until you achieve ultimate oneness and unity with reality. But that’s not the biblical view of history. The biblical view of history is there’s beginning, then there’s fall, there’s a lot of history where God reveals a lot of stuff, there’s the climactic coming of Christ, and there’s ultimately a judgment at the very end.

He is introducing this teleological view of history. He has already talked about creation. He has hinted at the fall. Now he says, “In the past God overlooked such ignorance …” That is, he did not approach all the nations of the world with this demand for repentance when he was focusing his redemptive activity on his called-out people in Abraham’s line.

In mercy, sometimes he pulled in the Ninevites or others, but on the whole that’s not what he did. In the past, God did not confront such ignorance head-on. “… but now …” There’s something new that has happened. “… he commands all people everywhere to repent.” To repent in the light of a day still coming in the future! “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof to all of this by raising him from the dead.” And for the first time, he has introduced Jesus.

4. The non-negotiability of Paul’s gospel

Do you see? At this point, if he had said, “And he has given proof of all of this by bringing to life one who has died,” the crowd would have said, “Deep. Deep. Tell us more,” because they would have read such words as mere immortality. But Paul insists there’s more than immortality going on. There’s resurrection. Paul was not a stupid man. He knew that would offend people. There were an awful lot of first-century Greeks who had no category for resurrection, because resurrection is in the material realm.

To go on with immortality forever: that’s deep; that’s spiritual. But to come back to life in a resurrected body? What would God be doing bringing something back to the domain of what was already corrupt? Do you see? It doesn’t make any sense. You know what? He’s just a babbler. He’s a seed-picker. He can’t put it together. As a result, they bring it to an end. Some of them sneered, and his speech was cut off before he had gotten further. I have no doubt where he was going now.

Now that he’d introduced Jesus and the resurrection, he was going to describe the resurrection, and he was going to go back to the death and the significance and the atonement. That’s where he was heading. My point in all of this is that Paul understands full well that to make sense of Jesus, you’d have to have the biblical frame of reference into which Jesus fits. Otherwise, you can’t make sense of Jesus.

Supposing you say to a completely biblical illiterate person, “I want to tell you the good news about Jesus. I want to say that what he gives you is the abundant life.” How will they hear you? What are they picking up? Where does the expression the abundant life come from? Is it biblical? Uh-huh. It shows up once. John, chapter 10. Uh-huh. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it abundantly.” This, in the context of Jesus, the Good Shepherd. He knows his sheep, and he’s come that they might have life and have it abundantly.

Okay. We know that. They don’t know that. “I want to have the abundant life. What does that mean? More sex? Better job? Sense of fulfillment? I mean, that’s pretty cool. I mean, if something’s promising me abundant life, you know, I’ll try a bit of Buddhism, try a bit of Christianity. Jesus is going to give me abundant life. That sounds like a pretty good deal.” “Nuh-uh. That’s not what it means. He’s actually talking about sheep. It’s part of a metaphor. It means he’s going to lead them to a lot of grass.”

“Hey, we’re going to get a lot of grass! That’s really cool, you know.” If you talk about a lot of grass to university students, you get another set of categories going on. Do you see? Suddenly, you realize you have a framework in which to talk about these things. Now I’m not saying you can’t talk about Jesus right away. I’m not saying that.

I know all kinds of very effective evangelists who start working through Mark’s gospel or Luke’s gospel or John’s gospel, but somewhere along the line, you have to give enough content to make sense of who Jesus is and what he did and why he died, and so on. You must give enough of the storyline or what people are hearing is not what you think you’re saying.

So in this business of passing like ships in the night, and you wonder if you’re on the same planet, what this means is most of us who are involved in evangelizing people who are biblically illiterate.… We realize we have to start farther back. There’s more stuff that has to go on here. I know that God, by his blessed Holy Spirit can come along and convict people and convert people in 15 minutes of explanation. He doesn’t need me to rabbit on for six months of Bible instruction. But God is normally the God of means, and Paul himself understood that in the first century.

I want to answer one objection that is frequently raised at this juncture. Some people look at this passage and they say, “You know, Don. In fact, Paul goofed here. Do you know how we know he goofed? Because from here he goes on down to Corinth, a little farther south, and when he reflects on all of this a little later, he writes to the Corinthians in the letter we call 1 Corinthians.… He writes to them in chapter 2, and he says, ‘When I was with you I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ ”

Implied: “I blew it in Athens. Then when I got back to you, then, I decided no, no, no. I’m going to stick to the simple gospel.” After all, isn’t that the text says? Only a few people believed here? Whereas he actually planted a great church in Corinth. So what you learn from Acts 17 is not how to do it but what not to do. Forget all this philosophy stuff. Just preach Christ and him crucified. I have to tell you that is a ridiculous interpretation. Let me tell you why.

A) This is taking a reading (a false reading, we’ll see in a moment) from 1 Corinthians and then feeding it back into Acts to change the meaning of Acts.

But if a person were just reading the book of Acts right through, as most people did originally since they didn’t have a bound New Testament canon (that came a little later) then there is no flag in the book of Acts that says “Yeah, here Paul had it right. Yeah, here Paul had it right. Yeah, here Paul had it right. Whoops! In Athens he had it wrong.” There’s no flag in Acts that gives that impression. None.

B) Paul does not say, when he writes to the Corinthians, “I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified because I blew it in Athens so I changed my mind when I got down to Corinth.”

He doesn’t cast what he says over against what he did in Athens! There’s not a hint of that anywhere in 1 Corinthians 1 or 2. What he does instead is cast it over against the way the Corinthians themselves were much preferring rhetoric and high-flown praises and influence and power and visibility and manipulation.

Over against that, he says, “Not me. When I came, I came preaching the message of the cross.” In other words, 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 is designed to rebuke the Corinthians for their love of pomposity, not as a signal for what Paul was interpreting in his own failure in Athens. Moreover, already we’ve seen in Athens he was preaching, as we saw in verse 18, the good news about Christ and the cross and the resurrection. You see, he’d already been doing that. It’s not as if he was doing something different. Moreover, at this juncture, Paul has been in the ministry for about 15 years.

He has been beaten up time after time after time by Jews and Gentiles. He has already suffered several shipwrecks before the one we know about in Acts, chapter 27. He has planted churches throughout the pagan world. He has been left for dead. He has suffered a great deal. He is not some fledgling right out of seminary who is trying to figure out which end is theologically up. He has paid his dues. It’s not as if, at this point, he’s trying to figure out how to do things, and now, suddenly, he’s gobsmacked by Athens and doesn’t know how to handle it.

Moreover, when you get to verse 34, it’s important to read what the text says: “A few men became followers of Paul and believed.” There’s no reason to think of that as one step. It makes much more sense to read it as two. “A few men became followers of Paul.” That is, they became interested in what he said because of this. So they followed him and learned a lot more and in consequence, believed.

You see, a number of years ago, when I was doing university missions, 30 or 40 years ago, then, those who got converted tended to get converted at the mission. It’s not like that today. Nowadays, I have to tell you.… Maybe it’s my fruitlessness, but nowadays most people don’t get converted during the missions when I’m there. I’m filling in background. I’m preaching Christ. I try to explain what the gospel is.

But what usually happens is, toward the end of the few days that I’m there, I say, “Now for those of you who’ve become interested in these things, we’ve set up some further Bible studies.” Over the course of the next six weeks, eight weeks, those who are still on the ground e-mail me and say, “Do you remember that Chinese lass, from Mainland China? She has soundly become a Christian.” In other words, they become followers of Don and, in consequence, a little later have believed.

That’s what is going on here. In other words, Acts 17 becomes for us an astonishingly important paradigm. Now how we do that in hard practice, how we present more of a complex, complete gospel that explains the structure of biblical truth as part of our witness to Christ.… That would take us into some hard pragmatics I don’t have time for now, but perhaps I’ll take just a few minutes tonight before dealing with my subject tonight to fill in at least some of those basics.

A book that I’d strongly recommend to you, if you’re interested in these sorts of things at a practical level, is one that came out of a conference at Trinity in 1999 called Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns. There are quite a lot of essays in there you might find really quite helpful, indeed.

It’s under my name because I edited it, but the conference papers themselves are pretty helpful, pitched at different levels: some are popular, some are more theologically rigorous, but it’s designed to fill in some of the gaps, now, that really need to be filled out at the practical level. My point, however, is that, already, first-century Christians were facing these things, and the Word of God here, too, is our guide as to what to do. Let us pray.

So help us, Lord God, to become effective and faithful in our generation, too. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.