Acts, 22:1-30
Vern Peterman · Jul 24, 2005
Acts (2005), No. 29
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262329505708

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, we'll want to first take a look through the the questions for last week Acts 22 1 through 30 and You know here in this situation what had happened here Here's Paul. He's talking from the stairs and So he has this crowd of Jews he's addressing Alright? So, the question here is, did Paul make a mistake in what he said to the crowd of Jews gathered at the temple? Should he have said anything different than what he did? Should Paul have not gone to the Gentiles in the first place, or just, or not brought that up with them?

I mean, that was the point that, remember, got them really set off. Up until that point, they were pretty quiet. Then all of a sudden, top blew off. You know, they went ballistic. start doing their three Jewish signals of, you know, these are all the signals we're giving that means we want you stoned to death.

Alright? And so, would you have given Paul any advice about how to handle this situation? What not to say, how to say it, etc. What are your thoughts there? Here's Paul, he's trying to talk to these Jews, he's got an opportunity. At first they're quiet. What should he have done to keep him quiet? Or should he? So what do you think?

How should Paul have tweaked his behavior? Ah, okay. Paul could count upon the Lord Himself explicitly and specifically the Holy Spirit to give him the words to say. So how does that lead you to a conclusion about what the question is asking here? Should Paul have said anything different? You're shaking your head no. And why not? Is it exactly what the Lord had in mind? Paul said what the Lord had in mind.

It is frequently our thought process, that didn't go so good. I should have, have you ever been down that road? I should have or I shouldn't have, after the fact, done this or that. And typically, that's the way we think as human beings. Here, things just blew up. It was like, okay, you had this big rowdy Mayhem with the Jews initially the Romans snatch him away Paul asked for a chance to talk to them again the whole thing blows up again The human thing is boy.

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut Maybe I shouldn't talk about the Gentiles. Maybe I shouldn't go to the Gentiles all those Things would humanly come to our mind that you notice that one you don't have Paul expressing some reluctance or regret about what he has said and done. Do you have any revelations from the Lord that say, Paul, hey, you shouldn't have said that, you should have done this? No. Tom.

I guess the point that comes out is Paul is speaking through the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is most convict in the world. Ah, okay. we tend as human beings to look at a situation like that and say, you know, how do we keep the waters calm, or how do we keep things settled down, when the truth is, as Joanne pointed out, He was speaking as the Holy Spirit led Him. The responsibility for how they respond is between them and the Lord from then on out. It's not Paul's responsibility. How they respond isn't Paul's problem as long as what he is saying is what the Lord has him say. So he's already written that, he's already written the verse, 20 verses, explaining who he is and what he's done.

Okay Yeah, yeah Basically what has happened? We've asked a few times before just to kind of as a checkpoint You know what letters have been written. What do they know and and what we can summarize it this way Paul has not spent but brief moments in jail, in prison. And so his prison epistles, Ephesians and Colossians are a couple of them, okay? His prison epistles have not been written yet at this point in time, but in great part the other ones have been.

So we're talking about substantial New Testament truth being out there at this point in time. and possibly by this time at least one of the Gospels having gotten out there. So you've got the Gospels, you've got Paul's letters, James, you're starting to get some significant portion of the New Testament out there.

Obviously Dr. Luke is not letting time go by twiddling his thumbs here. He's starting to pull things together too. And he wrote over a quarter of the New Testament between Luke and Acts. He wrote over the quarter of the New Testament, and he's starting to use we. So we're starting to see some assembly, some pulling together of a lot of these New Testament books, right? And some of the others in process.

Dr. Luke, as we're seeing here, being a case in point, where he writes to Theophilus, a fellow that we have no other mention of outside of Luke's letter. But he writes to Theophilus and tells them that he's very carefully going over things. So Dr. Luke is pulling things together, looking at details, getting eyewitness accounts, his use of first person, we and us. It's funny, he doesn't say I, but he says we and us, several different times throughout the book of Acts.

He's writing either eyewitness accounts or a record of someone else's eyewitness account. that he is carefully verified and cross-correlated. It's one of the interesting things is Luke is known as one of the most careful authors of the ancient period. Because as you check at various points, things cross-connect amazingly well. Do they cross-connect? Okay, so there's one question. Let's take a look here.

Question two the commander did not want to simply let Paul go and having ordered that he be examined by flogging often resulted in death So it's Mary. Okay. We're going to give you an exam and How many of you taking a test where you died? Usually you don't walk into those right But I mean that's essentially there's they're gonna have an examination and you might not live through it Okay, that's basically what's going to go on here So here's this examination order here. Why would the commander not let Paul go and yet order an examination by flogging that resulted possibly in death?

Okay. Yeah, let's think about this here. What mix of languages have you probably got in this temple courtyard situation? What languages are you likely to see among the people that are gathered there? Hebrew, okay, and biblical Hebrew would be explicitly used most likely. for reading out the things that are in the scripture. But Hebrew would be one of the languages that the people would know.

Others? Aramaic, which is a related language, and the more common language for the Jews living in Israel. Alright, what else? Greek would be another one. A great many of the Jews were living in Greek lands. Remember, about this period of time, over half the Jews in the world were living outside of Israel. Many of them, but not all, many of them living in Greek-speaking lands. And the learning of Greek was so thoroughly implemented among the Jews that by this time they had already had a Greek Old Testament for over two centuries. Because they couldn't read the Hebrew anymore, okay, so we got Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and what else?

He was trying to get back by Pentecost and so about this time yes, ah Yeah, good point now think about that. What did happen in Acts chapter 2 at Pentecost? Remember, there you had a whole bunch of people gathered together, Jews particularly, coming together, and what? What's that?

They were speaking in tongues, and the reason that they were speaking in tongues is they would communicate in the dialects and languages from the various places that these people were from. So not only would you have the Hebrew and Aramaic and the Greek, and the Roman offices are probably Latin, and some of the other, you know, Romans there, so you have Latin, so there's four languages, but all the other dialects, typical of what you see, they're listed, about a dozen of them, in Acts chapter 2. Todd? Yes, you have some North African languages, people commonly came there from not only the area around Alexandria, and that commonly would have been Greek, but there are also other languages, you know, Coptic languages, and then other languages as you get over towards Cyrene, which is another North African city now in Libya. So lots of different languages.

So here's the Roman officer and, you know, he's trying to figure out what's going on. Can you imagine? Not only, I mean, if you had everybody cool-headed, it would be tough. Okay? Cool-headed is not what's happening. And also, when Paul begins talking to them, the Jews that are listening get real quiet, and apparently a lot of them could connect with the Aramaic enough that it's all clear. It's doubtful whether the Roman officer, or any of the Roman people that were there, were really fluent in Aramaic. So, they're not knowing what's going on.

All they see is, now we've got the second time of this mayhem all in one short period of time. Pandemonium they still haven't been able to figure out what's happening and you got this language mixture Okay, that that they're further not able to figure out what's happening Have you ever been to crowd where it's tough to tell what's going on and that's with one language Okay, this commander think of the challenge He's got it's tough to tell what's going on just like a situation that you call to mind and on top of that you got all this Plurality of languages and not everybody knows the other languages that are being used so really a crazy time So that the commander is getting desperate isn't he? So so why did you just go ahead and side hey, I'm gonna order Paul to be examined in this examinations one he might not live through Yes.

This period of time, and we're going to see this more as we look over the next several weeks, this period of time in Jewish history, the big issue, because the prior century had been, you know, let's get the Parthians out. Because the Parthians had come in and they pushed them back out. And then the Romans put in Herod the Great, who wasn't all that great, okay? And so the Parthian issue hadn't come up all that much, but what was coming up repeatedly was lots of little Jewish rebellions.

We have records, some in scripture, involving hundreds or even thousands of these, you know, some guy had come up and claimed to be the Messiah and would lead a bunch of people off into some rebellion and hundreds to thousands at a time. We have other records outside of scripture of other rebellions during the same period of time. We do know explicitly that both Jewish high priests and Roman governors in this area got yanked and arrested and replaced in varying degrees because they didn't keep things settled in quite the right way. And we're going to find out pretty quick one of those that gets yanked. Obviously Pilate didn't stick around, right? So he's already been yanked out of there.

Keeping things settled down in Israel was a real tough job. And then think of it, okay, I want to keep things settled, and now these Jews have these big feasts and festivals that they come together for. And all kinds of people are pouring into Jerusalem. Then keeping things settled down is an even tougher job.

So here's this commander trying to figure out, how do I keep this thing from going nuts? How do I keep this place from blowing the lid off? And so he's looking at, here's Paul, and I don't know what's going on. I don't know who Paul is. He's apparently not that Egyptian guy that we're still trying to catch. All I know is he's talked to these people twice and then pandemonium breaks loose.

So I'm either going to find something out or this problem isn't going to crop up again. Okay? So he's looking at it. I haven't got anything to lose at this point because the other solutions where Paul talks to them or we just let them deal with it haven't worked. So Paul's either going to give them an answer or he's not going to live through this thing anyway. So that's the commander's approach to this thing.

Okay, we're going to do a little time shift here and go back to an earlier chapter. Yeah, Josiah? Yeah, no matter what happens, this guy is going to die. You know, he's going to find out what's going on, hopefully get some insight. But even if he doesn't, at least Paul, the instigator of this specific problem, is off the plate, out of the picture, not on the table.

So he figures, after what I've tried so far, I can't lose. I'm going to either get some answers or this guy is going to drop off the scene because he's not going to survive the examination. I've had a few examinations. I've wondered if I would, but this is the kind of examination he's talking about here.

So they start stretching him out on the rack. Anyway, so we're going to shift here and hopefully got a handout here for this next week because we kind of handed out two. So if you're lacking one, anybody lacking one, anybody in need of one, we're going to be looking at one that is titled Acts Revisited Part One. Everybody got that? Okay. Okay. Anybody else? We're there? Yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay. Situation is this.

We're going to step back into the discourse that Paul has in Athens. And the reason is because there was so much going on in it, and there's a particular theme I'd like us to trace. And we're going to step back into the time when Paul is talking to the philosophers in a group called the Areopagus. We know from earlier Greek history that initially they were a ruling group. This doesn't appear to be a ruling group here. It's more like a kind of a philosophy club. It would seem more like that's their role here.

Or it may have been a more official group in an unofficial meeting. That can sometimes happen. In our days, we have various, you know, open meeting laws and you can't get an unofficial group together, you know, in a public body because you have to, you know, have everybody there and have it announced and all that kind of thing. But in those days, they could do that sort of thing and it may be an official group with an unofficial meeting or unofficial purpose, or maybe just a casual, you know, hey, let's get together and listen to what this guy says, because we're all curious.

We love anything new. That was one of the things that Dr. Luke caught onto there. Okay. What we've got here is a few slides. You want to step through? And somebody caught on to the idea that everything has to start with A. Yep, okay. Yes, that's the truth. I confess.

This is a good shot though, and the reason it's a good shot is you have the Agora, which is the marketplace down here. And they would have, for the Agora, it would be a place where they would have buying and selling. And they typically had an Agora office. In other words, you can't just go up and set up my stand. I'm selling whatever. You had to kind of deal with the local officials and they had a business office for running the Agora and you had to pay your fees and get authorized and all that. But they would have this Agora down here for selling things.

It would also be a place if there was any public punishments to do. So I don't know how you'd quite make an equivalent to that in our society. It would be kind of like having a whipping in front of Safeway. So it's a little different from anything we're quite used to, but that would be their normal. Yeah, Tom?

Yes, yeah, they had a similar kind of thing, and essentially it's really only been in recent centuries that putting the punishment off somewhere else has been the approach. The pattern throughout a number of older world cultures was to have the punishment be very public and be very quick. It's like before the sun goes down, this happens.

Nancy and I over in Germany visited in a small town that had been preserved pretty much like about the 14th century. We visited a criminal museum. It was a museum on how they dealt with criminals. Everything was very public and very quick. And this is kind of that same pattern here.

If they had something to deal with, there it was. You're going to do it in the Agora. And that's, for example, in Philippi. That's where Paul and Silas got beaten. is right in the Agora, right there. They would have some officials, different kind of names, lictors was one of the terms that was used, various officials who are supposed to be the ones kind of handing out these beatings or whatever other punishment was prescribed.

So that would be the place. You see up here buildings that are of historic character and a lot of these were various kinds of temples. And of course, you come into town and what do you see? You see these temples are prominent. Frequently, it was the pattern to put temples up on the high place, called a necropolis. This is actually, there are sometimes several high places, so you might have more than one area that's a necropolis. But that was a common pattern in those days, put the temples up high. And so you see that in a lot of places.

The Areopagus appears to be off kind of down in this area down here. This is the gathering of where the Areopagus would be. Here's a Parthenon. This was the one, if you watched the Summer Olympics that were in Athens, they kept showing this building here. And it's fairly well preserved for being an area where they've got lots of earthquakes. And in seismic design, they weren't real advanced on that. So the fact that it's together is pretty good.

So that would be one. Here is the area where the Areopagus would, you know, where they would meet. And now you've got this, you know, drive up to it and there's a parking lot and all that kind of thing. So it's, I'm sure, a little different. I'm sure the guys didn't pull up in their Chevys to hear Paul talk, right? So you'd have that. Here's a place looking from the parking lot. Here's sort of the gathering area.

And they've got even a little plaque there to kind of give you the story. But anyway, that's the spot. And Paul mentions an altar to an unknown God. Now, this is not the altar from Athens. As a matter of fact, we have not found an altar in Athens that says, altar to an unknown God. This was actually from Rome. There were altars to an unknown God in a number of different places, and we have two written records that, aside from Scripture, indicate that they had altars to an unknown God. So it was indeed a verified practice for the time. Okay? Okay. Now, with that, let's take a look through this passage here, because there's some things I think we would particularly want to make note of.

As we go through here, here's Paul and he's talking to these philosophers. Here he's on his second missionary journey. One of the things that we noted is that Paul is, as he goes out on these journeys, he is number one evangelistic, and as a church is established, he spends time supporting them. He doesn't do, as is sometimes the practice of some churches in our era, Okay, now you've become Christians, I'm going somewhere else. He would either stay himself to teach, or he would leave someone else to teach, or send someone to teach. But the church must be built up.

Even, let's take for instance, on the first missionary journey, it was a fairly small loop. His second half of that first journey was going back and revisiting the churches where he'd already been. His second missionary journey, the first thing he did was revisit those first churches again, and then do evangelism. His third missionary journey, he did relatively little evangelism, but he spent most of the time revisiting the churches he'd already established. So you notice the pattern there.

Does he evangelize? Yes, most certainly. Does he stop there? No, most certainly. He does not stop there. He continues on to build. So that's one pattern. Here on this journey, it's his first time into Athens. And so what does he do? It's evangelistic. And so he's talking initially down in the marketplace.

That's the Agora that we saw. Let's see if I can click back to it. He's down here talking with the philosophers And as he's talking to them there, they say, well, this is new. We have a place we go to talk about new stuff. So come up and talk to us up here up on the hill. And we'll get together at our philosophy club, I'll call it. And let's talk about what you got. You can present your new philosophy, since we are so tickled by things that are new. So that's what they're laying out here. Now, let's see what we've got here.

What's this Greek philosophy all about? Is it a good thing, bad thing, neutral? What do you think? Is philosophy a good thing? Or a bad thing? What? Depends on what it is. Hey, there's a good answer. And what does it depend upon? How can you tell if it's good or bad or useful? Tom? Here's the framework. Philosophy is indeed useful. insofar as it's extended based on scripture. What do I mean by that? There are things in the realm of, for example, law. What's good evidence? Does scripture explicitly lay out what's good evidence? No. But there are some guidance points in there.

Why do we say scripture? Because scripture reveals what God intended for us to know. Scripture is revelation from a God whose truth with a capital T and So we have some reference point from which to work Human beings make poor reference points Okay, none of this is a good definition of the truth.

We're here for a short period of time. We don't see and know everything Some people think they do but we don't see and know everything and And plus, the human perspective apart from the Lord is something flawed, ever since Adam didn't stand his ground and made a choice to sin. So we need the Lord's framework in scripture to give us some definition. Then we've got some realm within that to work. Human philosophy by itself does nothing but wander. Gets us nowhere. Okay, now, so here's Paul, he's addressing these people. Why do we want to take a look at how he talks to them?

Why is that important? Yeah, we have here one of the longer addresses that Paul makes for one thing. He says something at length versus having something that's just a little comment here and there. It is, for the second missionary journey, one of the more significant pieces of conversation that's recorded. And the other thing is it's evangelistic. It gives us then some indications how should we as believers approach talking with unbelievers. How are we going to approach talking to them?

What I've done here is to just initially quote what he says there, or at least how it starts out here. What got Paul's attention? What did he start to do first? He came into Athens and he said, boy, let's go over and get those apples. They're really good apples. Is that what he did? Because I can't wait to drink a half gallon of olive oil. Is that what he was doing? What was happening there? What did he notice? What do you see in the passage as he comes into Athens?

Yeah, he's looking around, you know, just like we saw at the top of the hill. Man, we've got temples all over the place. There's even one record where in an earlier century, what they did is they let a bunch of sheep go on a hillside and everywhere the sheep stopped, they put an altar.

It's like, oh, that must be a place to put an altar. So they let, you know, the sheep just says, hey, here's some good grass, you know. So, but what they did is, is they used that kind of almost superstitiously as a place to figure out, you know, put an altar. Put an altar here, another one there, another one there. Everywhere the sheep stop, you know, hopefully they stop. So here's, so here's, you know, Paul coming into this situation where they got temples up on the hill, they go into a gore, there must be additional altars, you know, hung and strung around there, and then he finds this altar to an unknown god.

He noticed the place was full of idols, all kinds. And so that's what we see in chapter 17, verse 16. And his spirit was provoked within him. He's observing the city full of idols, lots and lots of them. So he was reasoning with, in the synagogue, among the Jews in the marketplace, the Agora. That's what we see here every day.

And then there's these Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. Now, interestingly, a little bit of correction to make from our perceptions. When you hear Epicurean, what do you think of? Pardon? Frequently we think of food. Yes. Nancy was looking at something this last week. Epicureus. I looked at it and kind of chuckled, you know. We make that connection. Okay? And we tend to think, well, Epicurus, the philosopher, must be some guy who's really into food and pleasure and things of that sort.

Well, they did, as a part of their philosophy, have this concept of pleasure, but really what it was, was living in harmony with nature. It had nothing to do with food. It had nothing to do with, you know, going out and living, just trying to have pleasure all the time. So, it's interesting how it's gotten morphed in our culture. So, when you have Epicurean philosophers, it doesn't mean that they're going around trying to figure out how to have pleasure. Yes, only in the sense that they define pleasure as living in harmony with nature, is the way they defined it.

Now, when you think of stoic, what do you think? Unemotional. We think of somebody that's just stone-faced. And we put another term to it poker face from the card game, okay, but but you know It wasn't just a matter of don't have emotions the Stoics had a had a philosophy remember when we were going through Earlier on the history of Colossians we talked about your earth air wind and fire and things like that their philosophy was was centered around that that you had these elements that everything was made of and were all things that were brought together so that all the various things in the world, including us, were made of these elements. And that when you died, you went back into those elements. That was the thought. Neither philosophy had anything that was in the way of an afterlife.

Interesting. So it's like, you're here, Whatever you're doing here, that's it. Your personality and humanness and all that, when you get done here, you're through. So they had some variations, but basically nothing in the way we would think of in terms of you continuing on in soul and in spirit. So, let's take a look here. How does Paul handle this? Now notice that various people respond in different ways. One group there, I'm looking at the bottom of page one.

Some of the Epicureans and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him, some saying, what would this idle babbler wish to say? Now, the idle babbler, that's not a complimentary term. As a matter of fact, it's worse than what it sounds in the English. Here's what's behind it. They would in those days, because where are they when they're saying that? They're in this agora that we see right in front of us, right? And the word used for idle babbler, spermologos, okay?

It was a person who would go around picking up scraps of things or things that were spilled in the marketplace and turn around and try to sell it. You know, that guy was carrying over a box full of these little idols that he made and one of them fell out and I found it and so I'm running around trying to sell it to somebody. Have we got anything quite like that in our culture? A little hard to compare. What do you call these guys who go and pick up tickets and then try to sell them? Scalpers, right? Yeah. He's sort of like a scalper, only not that good.

So for them to call him that was quite derogatory. Others, he seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities. Now, when they say strange, they don't mean odd and peculiar and bizarre. They just mean foreign, ones that we haven't heard of. So the first comment about being an idle babbler was derogatory. This comment was more neutral. Just ones we haven't heard about.

As a matter of fact, what about that might be a little bit appealing? It's new. Remember? They like what's new. So the first comment of being an idle babbler, one who says, one who's a spermologos, would be derogatory. The next comment was actually neutral to positive. The positive part being, He's saying something new.

These are strange deities. We haven't heard about them yet, so we've got to hear it because we love that. Alright? Because he was preaching about Jesus and the resurrection. So they brought him with this Areopagus. May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming. For you are bringing some strange things to our ears so we want to know what these things mean.

And then Luke in verse 21 puts in this, what we have in parentheses here about, they just go around looking for something new all the time. They just, they love that. Alright, so now, so we've got some context here about the, what's the character of what Paul found there. Then, as we look through here, and I'm looking now at the bottom of page two, One of the things that we have here, this strain we notice is not bizarre and weird, but just new and different.

One of the things that you see happening here is Paul is getting some sizing up, isn't he? He is doing some sizing up. He's looking around the city and saying, what do I observe? Point one. What are they doing with Paul? They're sizing him up too. And so what's happening is if we get into an evangelistic opportunity, let's call it, there is going to be a mutual size-up. Figure it.

People are going to say, what's this guy about? And you will have people that are looking at you. At times you may not even recognize that they're observing, saying, what's going on? There was a gal at the place I used to work in Carson City. that she came up to me and said something I really couldn't imagine, but she said, you know this guy, and she was referring to another fellow in the office that had an office next to mine, she says, and she'd never really talked to me about this before, but she says, you know this guy that has an office next to you? I said, yeah. He needs what you've got. It's interesting, isn't it? She'd never mentioned it before, we'd never talked about it, but there was a size-up going on, and that is going to happen.

They're trying to figure out, you know, who are you, what are you about? At the same time, there is a place for looking and asking the question like Paul did, what's the spiritual standing here? What's the spiritual temperature? And to get an assessment of where things are at spiritually here. That's a good thing to do and that's exactly what we see Paul doing. Meanwhile, from whatever perspective those people are coming from, they're going to be looking at you asking, at least to themselves, The same question. What's this guy all about? Where's he coming from?

And the more inexplicable you are, the better. If it's something they look at and they say, oh, I can explain that based on my, you know, Sociology 101, it's not going to be something very interesting. If they look at you and they say, I don't understand that, but this is a good thing. I can't explain this person based on this world.

Yeah, that's a good thing. So anyway, let's take a look farther down here. One of the things we see is that Paul, when they said you've got to come talk to us, did he respond, no, I don't want to talk to you guys. Thanks a lot. See you later. Is that how he responded? No. Why not? One, he was open to opportunity. He observed. He was open to opportunity, and he was always willing to clarify. Because you notice that he had various comments and questions that Dr. Luke recorded for us here, and they're kind of all over the place.

None of them really makes a truthful assessment of Paul. Right? Some are a little more negative, some are a little more positive, but nobody really makes a truthful assessment of where Paul is at. They didn't come up and say, you know, he's talking about Jesus and the resurrection and saying if you believe that Jesus died for you and was buried and rose again, you'll be saved. That's not what they said. They still didn't comprehend. They needed clarification.

And that's the third thing is Paul is always willing to look at an opportunity and willing to clarify where things stand. Always willing to clarify. I recall a philosophy class I had where the final was an oral final. And they asked, okay, everybody in the class gets five minutes to answer a different question. And the professor says, Mr. Peterman, you have five minutes to tell us what difference God makes in your life.

That was the final. After that, then one of the guys comes up after the class, and the class is over, and I hadn't met him before, and he'd been sitting somewhere else. He introduced himself, says, hi, my name is Vince, and I'm an atheist. I said, that's great, let's talk some more about it. So what happened there, perfect opportunity, since I'd only gotten five minutes, this guy's asking for clarification. So when we're talking to people, It isn't just a matter of, hey, I've got this thing, I'm going to cram it down your throat, but it is a matter of clarifying things for them, because in fact, things are not clear.

So I had Vince over that evening. I said, you know, come over for dinner, let's talk. We talked for several hours and he went home. I didn't see him for a year. Until a year later, I looked over and there he was in church. Vince, what are you doing? He says, oh, I'm a former atheist.

And it's because, not because I crammed it down his throat, when he walked out the door, I didn't know where he stood. But he had heard, and as we mentioned earlier, his response was between him and the Lord. And the Lord worked it out. It isn't my place to convert him. Not my job. That's the Lord's job. If the Lord wishes to use you or I as a tool to share the gospel, great.

It's between them and the Lord as to how that works out. Alright, now let's look at page 3. Paul took advantage of the opportunity that was presented to him there. That's the first thing we see there. So he stands in front of the Areopagus and he's got this public speaking opportunity here. I observe that you're very religious and it's interesting, the word that he uses there is basically superstitious. This is going along with the idea that, you know, like you watch where the sheep stop and that's where you put an altar.

I mean, they're just trying to cover the bases on, you know, I got this spirit and that spirit and these different gods. And in truth, these philosophers, they believed in gods of different sorts. They frequently poo-pooed some of them that had, you know, some of the big temples too. But they believed that they were very spirit beings out there. They didn't believe that human beings however, lived beyond this lifetime in any sort of a spiritual, as a spiritual personal entity.

So, look at one of the things that Paul does, he doesn't just start presenting his case, he looks for a connecting point. A connecting point, he says, I notice you have an altar to the unknown God. That's the altar we looked at before, one like it. And so what his connecting point with them was, you have an altar to the unknown God. It is the God that you do not know. That is the one I wish to introduce you to. Not as they had any sort of a conception as to what that God would be. But he took the point that there is a God that you don't know.

And that's explicitly the one I want to introduce you to. So it begins going down the line. And one of the things that he does is real interesting. I just basically quote it in here. He begins by talking about, interestingly enough, creation. Verse 24, this is in the bottom, page 3.

The God who made the world and all the things in it, and by the way, that's the Greek way of saying what you see in Genesis 1 and 2. The Greeks would say, because they wouldn't do as the Jews would do, heaven and earth was the way you make everything. Remember, we covered this in our Bible backgrounds class. To the Jews in Old and New Testament, you'll see again and again and again, heaven and earth, or the heavens and the earth, and things like that.

They would use both halves to describe the whole. For the Greeks, you just say the world and everything in it. to say everything. God made not just this and not just that, but everything. So what did he do? He described it in Greek and Jewish terms. He made sure he communicated with both groups. He doesn't dwell on temples made with hands.

This is basically out of 1 Kings 8.27. He didn't quote it.

He gave the message in words that they would understand. I think that's the key thing. Everything that he says here is basically biblical. And as we go through this, you'll notice I put little biblical passages. He just basically gives them things that are out of scripture, putting them in words that the people will understand. That's the key. Putting them in words that the people will understand.

And then, as we look at it here, he also quotes a couple of poets and philosophers from out of their own culture. And so what does he do? He has made a connecting point, and you have an altar to the unknown God, and I see that you're very superstitious, but his other connecting point was even quoting things that their own people and their own culture would testify this is true. These are true statements.

So he continued to make contact with culture that they could relate to. And then, finally, he brings up having furnished proof, and this is the end of the first paragraph on page four, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. That is the point at which a lot of them are starting to get alarmed.

This is all new, but the raising from the dead thing, do the Stoics believe this? No. Do the Epicureans believe it? No. This was totally radical. Because their thought was that your spirit and soul just kind of dissipate into nothing. Or back into the pantheos. The universal spirit or something. Here that you be actually physically resurrected was a radical statement.

And that's what kind of got a lot of And to me, I think culturally, they said something on the order of, you know, we'll hear you about this again, which is a way of saying we've heard enough. We'll hear about this again. But some responded, and I think that's the key.

As we as Christians talk to those who are unbelievers, there is a place To look for the opportunity, there is a place to look for the cultural connection. What's going to connect with them? There is a place for us to present the truths of scripture, and we may need to do so in words that they will understand and will connect with them. There is a place to continue to draw, as he did here, upon those contact points and connecting points with their own culture. ultimately giving the gospel message, ultimately letting them know. There is Christ who died for you, was buried, and rose again. Do you believe it?

There were people who responded by saying, we'll hear you again, which is another way of saying, we're not going to hear you again. But there were also people, as we see in this passage, who responded. And they mentioned a guy They mention a gal and they sit and others. There will be those who respond. And that degree of response is, that's God's job. Okay? Our place is in dependence upon the Lord to lay the truth out there for them. And the Holy Spirit will do the rest of the work in their hearts and in their lives.

Just like I shared with you before, I can't manipulate, you know, situations with Vince. He goes on and he lives his life and I can't say, well, this has got to happen and this has got to happen. I can't go and over-manage and micro-manage Vince's life so that he becomes a believer. No, it's the Holy Spirit's work. So my job is not to convert Vince, but to allow the Lord to do that.

And there's a place for me to present. And what we have here in Paul is an example. Make that point of connection. Make that point of connection. What I did with Vince is to talk to him about, you are dependent upon something. Tell me an atheist, you don't believe there's a God, but you are dependent upon something.

What is it? And he had to acknowledge and recognize that he depended on certain things. I'm not asking you to change that characteristic. I'm just saying what and who you're depending on is what needs to change. Every human being is going to depend on something. So what was Paul doing here? He's saying you depend on these idols, these superstitions, these philosophies.

Here is what's true. Does it make sense to depend upon this instead? And that's really something you can, it's a point of contact with everybody you talk to. I don't care whether they're Buddhist, Atheist, or they just really like a line of cosmetics. Everybody is going to depend upon something.

And that's the way the Lord made us. We are not beings who can live independent. We are made as dependent beings, and that's on purpose. It is where that dependence is placed, where that faith, that confidence is placed. That's the issue. And that's our opportunity with them. No matter where they're coming from. Okay. We've run out of time. Comments? Questions? Thoughts? Jubilations? Exasperations? Perspirations? That's enough? Okay.

Let's pray. Lord, as we look at this passage here, We've indeed seen a neat sequence that Paul used with the people here, and it serves for us as a model of how we talk with unbelievers about what is true. And Lord, it's not our place to go driving around looking frantically for one place and the next, but as we show up in life, There will be opportunities before us, and so we ask for wisdom, we ask for insight, and we ask that you would take the truths that are brought forward in this passage and bring them home to us in our hearts and lives and minds. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.