Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. When Paul reaches Athens, which for centuries was the center for ideas and philosophies for the ancient world, where and how would Paul try to share the good news in such an environment? He got the opportunity to address the city’s deepest thinkers, and in this episode, we’ll see just how he approached an intellectual audience. Acts chapter 17: The Battle of Ideas. In his introduction to the Old Testament wisdom book called Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote, What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun.

He wasn’t thinking of technology or the latest fads in music and clothing. He was referring to ideas there, ideas that many people think are new in our generation usually aren’t new. They’re just retreads of ideas that have been around a very long time. They become passé for a while, they disappear, only to be rediscovered and popularized again at another time in another place. People no longer remember what bad ideas they really were. In fact, some of the most popular philosophical ideas in Western societies now are ones the Apostle Paul encountered long ago, as we’ll see in today’s chapter.

At the end of chapter 16, Luke wrote, The next morning, the city officials sent to the police to tell the jailer, ‘Let those men go.’ So the jailer told Paul, ‘The city officials have said you and Silas are free to leave. Go in peace.’ But Paul said, ‘They’ve publicly beaten us without a trial and put us in prison, and we’re Roman citizens. Now they want us to leave secretly? I don’t think so.’

Let them come themselves and release us. When the police reported that, the city officials were alarmed to learn that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, so they came to the jail and apologized to them, and then they brought them out and begged them to leave their city. When Paul and Silas left the prison that day, they returned to the home of Lydia. There they met with the believers in Philippi and encouraged them once more, and then they moved on. Paul and Silas were treated unjustly by the magistrates in Philippi. Because they were Roman citizens, being beaten like they were without even a chance to defend themselves, that was highly illegal.

They probably could have made trouble for those town officials, but they chose not to. They did, however, get a personal apology, for whatever that’s worth. Then the team left the city, but on their own terms. But they left behind a group of believers, the nucleus of the church at Philippi, to which one of Paul’s New Testament letters was later written. We’ll get to that one eventually. They moved on from there to a major city called Thessalonica, the capital of the Roman province called Macedonia.

It’s called simply Salonica today. This was about a hundred miles west on the Ignatian Way, a major Roman road, the ruins of which you can still walk today. Reaching Thessalonica, a city of about 200,000 people, as Paul liked to do wherever there was a Jewish community, they attended the next local synagogue service. Being a highly trained rabbi in the Pharisaic traditions, Paul knew he would probably be invited to speak, and he was. Given that opportunity in Thessalonica, he engaged his audience in discussions about messianic prophecies in the Old Testament and told them why he believed Jesus was their fulfillment. The exact word Luke uses in this text is the Greek term dialexato.

It’s the root of a term that we translate into English as dialectic, a form of argument where you advance your thesis through repeated questioning, trying to show the weaknesses in your opponent’s positions. Paul wasn’t preaching a sermon in Thessalonica or just sharing his testimony, although he may have done both of those things too. But on this occasion at least, he engaged these Jewish worshipers in rigorous dialogue. He set forth his propositions about Jesus and how he fit the messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, and when the Jews raised objections, he showed the weakness in their arguments. Luke says he was explaining and proving from Scripture that the Messiah had to suffer and die and then be raised from the dead. Paul knew Christianity was rooted in facts, in history, in evidence.

What Paul was doing is very much the same thing that Christians need to be able to do today, that is, lay out the evidence for what we believe and why we believe it is true, and engage people in dialogue. Try to lead them to think through the truths about sin, about death, about God’s answer to this dilemma, that is, why we need a Savior and the forgiveness that God offers through Jesus, the Savior that he sent. Are you prepared to do that? Paul and his team stayed in Thessalonica for three weeks doing this kind of ministry, and they won some Jews to faith in Christ and even more God-fearing Greeks, by which Luke meant non-Jews who were drawn to the Jewish faith and its form of monotheism. He also mentioned some prominent women of that city became Christians, but then, as often happened, that led to trouble.

I’m guessing that some of those prominent women that Luke mentions’ husbands were not so happy they’d become Christians because, Luke says, it was jealousy then that led to some serious opposition and problems arose. Those who hated what Paul and Silas were accomplishing hired some lowlifes in that city to start a riot, and they actually attacked the home of the man who was hosting the mission team. Paul and Silas weren’t there at the time, fortunately. Maybe they’d been tipped off, but the mob dragged the host before the city leaders anyway. What a memorable line in verse 6. Luke says, The complaint the city fathers heard was, ‘Those men who are turning the world upside down have now come to our city.’

An exaggeration for sure, but also unwittingly prophetic. Christianity did turn the Roman world upside down in time. And some of those there, including the men who had hosted Paul and Silas in their home, on this occasion were arrested and had to put up a peace bond. Fortunately, though, Paul and Silas had escaped the town by this time without being arrested, and they moved on to nearby Berea. Once again, they’ve left behind a strong nucleus of new believers in Thessalonica, which became in time an outstanding Christian church. As has happened before, those who opposed the apostles in Thessalonica were so angry with them, they pursued them.

Paul was the focal point of their anger, and he was clearly the leader of the team. He was like a lightning rod, so he decided to move on quickly from Berea, leaving behind Silas, Luke, and Timothy. They would continue teaching and organizing believers in Macedonia while he got out of town and headed south. Let’s think about this for a second. What did people find so threatening about the apostle Paul? He wasn’t a political revolutionary.

That was a false accusation. He was not purposely causing trouble in these places. It was just his ideas. Ideas. And how persuasively he communicated them. His opponents understood correctly that ideas have consequences, as someone has said.

Ideas are powerful things, and Christianity was upsetting the status quo in ways they didn’t like. Much in the same way, Jesus upset his world back in Israel and also faced violent opposition because of it. Ultimately, if we could see behind the screen, it’s what we call spiritual warfare going on. By that I mean the enemy, and I’m talking about Satan now, stirs up opposition and hatred. Early Christian missionaries kept running into it time and time again. It seemed better to Paul, I think, to let the tensions die down in Macedonia rather than risk his friends’ safety there.

So he got out of town, as I said, and he went alone out of Macedonia southward into Achaia, the southern province of Greece. He was escorted all the way to Athens for his safety. There he would wait until Timothy and Silas completed their work up north and could catch up to him. Now, even if you haven’t heard of Thessalonica or Philippi or Berea, the places in Greece we followed Paul thus far on his second missionary journey, I’ll bet you have heard of Athens. What has Athens been noted for, even to this day? Literature, science, architecture, being the birthplace of democracy, but above all, philosophy.

When Paul reached there, Athens had for more than 500 years been the intellectual hub of Western civilization. This is where the wealthiest people in the Greco-Roman world sent their sons to be educated: Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, Aristotle. They had all lived and worked in Athens. That’s the right word. I love Luke’s characterization of this place because he says in verse 21, he sums up the city’s ethos just like this: All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Hey, have you heard any cool new ideas lately?

One might have overheard Spiros asked Alexander over some gyros. Remember, Paul was a very learned man himself, having grown up and been educated in the university town of Tarsus, as well as later schooled in Jerusalem under the esteemed Rabbi Gamaliel. To big part of why he was, as God called him, the chosen instrument, remember? When it came to taking the gospel to the Gentile world, he was perfectly suited to spearhead this effort. I’m pretty sure Athens was somewhere Paul wanted to see and to experience. It still makes a great vacation destination today.

You know, amazingly, if you book a trip to Athens today, you can still see pretty much the same architecture and sculpture of the Greek civilization that existed there when Paul was there in 52 A.D. Magnificent structures like the Parthenon, impressive temples, fabulous sculptures. But when Paul arrived there, he couldn’t fully appreciate all of this. For him, these were not tourist attractions from the ancient past. As he walked down the colonnaded streets of Athens lined with busy temples filled with images to pagan deities, this whole scene, Luke says, distressed him. Being in that great city, home to so many dead philosophers, home to so many pagan temples filled with false idols, this whole scene made Paul profoundly sad.

He realized Athens, the highest center of intellectualism in the Greco-Roman world, was every bit as spiritually lost as any barbarian village he had passed through in the remotest part of the empire. The citizens of Athens were just as devoid of any real knowledge of the one true God and as yet unaware His Son Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, had come. Paul may have intended, after all the problems he’d experienced in Macedonia, to take some time in Athens kind of recuperating and being refreshed. But he couldn’t. He felt compelled, once he was there, to share the gospel with the people in that great city. And that is what he began to do, both in the synagogue of the Jews there, as was his custom, as well as in the city center, the agora, the marketplace.

He dialogued with people, whoever he could engage. That wasn’t hard to do in Athens. Remember, where everybody liked nothing more than the spirited exchange of ideas. So while doing though, he caught the attention of some of the local Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, Luke says, and at first they disparaged him. The term Luke uses in verse 18, translated babbler, as in, What is this babbler talking about? was what the sophisticates there called someone they wanted to belittle.

It meant somebody who picks up secondhand ideas from here and there like a bird picks up scraps and then tries to retail them as their own, like someone desperately trying to sound smart. But Paul was not deterred by their insults. He kept at it until apparently he was attracting enough following in that city that he was invited to appear before the prestigious Areopagus. The Areopagus, referred to in verse 19, was both a place and a body of men. It met in the very shadow of the Acropolis and had for hundreds of years been the setting for public hearings and debates. Socrates himself had been tried and condemned by the Areopagus 450 years earlier for propagating new and dangerous ideas in Athens.

Luke doesn’t indicate that Paul was actually on trial there. He was invited to the Areopagus to explain the new and unusual ideas he was preaching. By this point in its history, although Athens was filled with temples and idols from the past, most of the citizens there saw themselves as pretty sophisticated and didn’t take religion very seriously. They may have participated in a limited way out of deference to traditions, but their lives were really influenced far more by whatever school of philosophy they subscribed to. Let me tell you briefly what I understand about the two most dominant schools of philosophy in Athens at that time. They were the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The Stoics believed that the universe was eternal. God, if you want to call him that, was in everything, and everything was part of God. God was not a personal being to them, but God was an impersonal soul of the world. God was nature. So, to them, the best thing men could do was to understand how nature worked and try to live in harmony with their natural environment, to live rationally and self-sufficiently in tune with the natural world. We all came from it, and we’ll all return to it.

Does any of that sound familiar? If these Stoics were around today, they would probably be members of some New Age environmentalist group. The Epicureans, on the other hand, were materialists. They believed that the universe came about through an accidental collision of matter, and that anything religious was merely superstition. If there were gods out there, they were uninvolved in our world anyway. They understood us humans as just material beings.

According to the Epicureans, the only way you could know anything for sure is based on what you personally felt. What you felt was right for you. Believable to you. Epicurus taught that the best thing one could do in life, then, was to live for self-fulfillment and free from superstitious fears, because when you die, that’s it. So, while you’re here, pursue personal satisfaction above all. Does that sound familiar?

The Epicureans would fit well with much of the current Western culture and its thinking, wouldn’t they? Solomon was right. There really is nothing new under the sun. So Paul is given the invitation to speak before these philosophers, the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers at Athens. I’m sure many others came out of curiosity to hear what he would say. They were curious to hear him explain his new ideas that he’d been propagating in their city streets.

You’re bringing some pretty strange ideas to our ears, they said, and we would like to understand what they mean. As he stood in the shadow of the Parthenon, where centuries before Socrates and others explained their ideas, Paul was not the least bit intimidated. I wish we had everything this great ambassador for Christ said that day, but as usual, Luke gives us only a synopsis. Paul began engagingly by saying, Men of Athens, I can’t help but notice, since I’ve been in your city, that there are very many religious things. As I have observed all your objects of worship and devotion, I have seen one that especially caught my attention. It was an altar inscribed, To an unknown god.

This God, who has heretofore been unknown to you, I am here to proclaim. Notice Paul did not strike an antagonistic pose. He tried to find a point of contact with his audience. He did have some new ideas to bring, and he understood, as someone has said well, ideas are best used like seeds rather than bullets. So Paul starts seeking to connect with his audience, mentioning this altar he noticed in the city to an unknown God, and used that as a jumping-off point to address what he really wanted to address. I think Paul saw in that altar’s description the implicit admission that for all their pagan deities of the past and for all their collective philosophical wisdom, these people were not confident they really had hold of the truth.

That’s why they were eager to listen that day to any new idea that came along, and that presented an opportunity for Paul to share the Christian faith. During his message, and again we have only a synopsis, it is clear that Paul is trying hard to find areas where he can agree with some of their views, which wasn’t easy because he didn’t agree with much. But he tried. He even quoted from some of their own poets. He tried to talk in terms they would understand and relate to. He, however, did not change up the essence of his message.

His message was that there is a personal God who has made us and everything there is. He’s not something we create or imagine. He created us, and we are answerable to Him. But He’s a God who made us to have a relationship with us. This world we’re living in is not eternal, and in fact a day is coming, Paul said, when all men will stand in judgment before this divine Creator. The last thing Paul told them was about Jesus and about His resurrection.

He didn’t try and tell them everything here at once, but he told them enough to create curiosity. Some of his listeners that day, after he spoke of the resurrection and of a man rising from the dead, openly ridiculed him. That was just too far-fetched to consider seriously. But for Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was the singular, most important piece of evidence that Christianity should be taken seriously. It is absolutely essential to what he believed, since he himself had been confronted with the risen Christ. Luke says that some of these intellectual types sneered at that idea of physical resurrection, and some other people said, You know, we’d like to hear some more about this at a different time.

And a few people responded positively to Paul’s words that day at the Areopagus. Some of them followed up with him, learned more, and became believers, Luke says. All in all, Paul made a good showing with a difficult crowd because, listen, there’s no more difficult crowd than those who consider themselves intellectuals. You know, much of the culture in my part of the world in America is becoming more and more like the culture Paul was trying to reach with the gospel in the Roman Empire’s big cities. Western societies are increasingly pluralistic, where pretty much any point of view is deemed equally valid, except biblical Christianity. Most think they are too sophisticated to take that seriously any longer.

Many younger people look very skeptically, if not with absolute disdain, at what they call organized religion, and they lump all things religious together. They are much more affected by secular ideas that they have bought into, although they would not necessarily identify themselves with any philosophical school like Stoicism or Epicureanism, or even by their more modern counterparts like nihilism, existentialism, postmodernism. Most people I know who are not committed to Jesus Christ and his view of truth have bought into many of the tenets of these philosophies. The insult pointed at Paul by the Athenian philosophers is really true of many people today. They pick up bits and scraps of ideas from here and there, piecemeal them together into their own personal philosophy of life.

When it comes right down to it, are they any more certain than these people in Athens were that they have the actual truth, that they have a grip on reality? The gospel is a powerful idea, the most powerful idea ever unleashed in our world, actually. Christianity is a consistent worldview that provides an answer to all of life’s really big questions, the questions philosophers have always wrestled with, like who are we and how did we get here? What’s wrong in our world and is there any solution to it? And most importantly, what happens after all of this is over? Christianity has real answers to these big questions, and Christianity is not merely a speculative theory.

It’s very firmly rooted in historical facts. We need to be able to, as Paul was, demonstrate that to people through respectful dialogue. The philosophies men have thought up ultimately provide no satisfying sure answers and worse, no hope beyond this life. Socrates drank the hemlock when the people of Athens turned against him. Seneca, the most famous of the Stoic philosophers, slit his knees and wrists and climbed into a pool to bleed to death in a state of depression. Those men and others like them spent their lives sitting around Athens trying to figure things out, trying to arrive at an ultimately satisfying version of truth.

But Paul knew the truth. He met him on the road to Damascus. And although no one realized it that day at the Areopagus as they listened to his passionate presentation of the ideas undergirding Christianity, they were actually listening to someone whose life and writings would have a far greater impact on the world than all their philosophers put together. Not because he was smarter than them all, but because the ideas he espoused were in fact the right ideas. They were the truth. Thanks, Paul.

Well, history certainly seems to keep repeating itself. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode right here at Share the Word Podcast. Each episode brings out the big ideas of the chapter and furthers our focus to bring people to Christ and to share the good news of the gospel. Help us with this Great Commission project and share with others what you’ve experienced and heard right here. Visit our archives at sharetheword.org and listen to all the podcasts. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.