If you would take your Bibles and turn to Acts 17, page 926 in the pew Bibles, and we’re in the middle of Paul’s second missionary journey. We’ll be coming to the conclusion of that second missionary journey next week in the first part of chapter 18 and then take a break from our series in Acts for a little while. And so we’re looking tonight at the whole chapter of chapter 17. And now that May is here, we have officially entered graduation season and there are, I’m sure, a few of us here who will attend a ceremony or two or maybe three or four over the next few weeks and you’ll hear a speech or two over those same weeks as well. Someone a few years ago took a bunch of graduation speeches from the year before and they compiled all of the most frequent cliches that were heard in those speeches and they created a Bingo card to take with you next time to a graduation or a ceremony. So if you hear, “Trust your heart,” “This is only the beginning,” “Never stop learning,” and “Do good,” then congratulations, you’ve got a Bingo according to this card!
Which got me thinking – I wonder what Acts 17 would say to a soon to be or recent graduate because after all, in Acts 17, Paul is in some sense he’s going to college because he’s going to Athens and Athens has been called the city of learning. It is the birthplace of philosophy. Some have said that when Plato created his academy there in the fourth century BC that it was the world’s first university. And so what happened when Paul went to Athens, Greece? What happened when the Gospel went to Athens? Well it’s the same thing that we find over and over again whenever Paul went to the different cities with the Gospel, and it’s what we find in the beginning of this chapter, what the crowds say about Paul and Silas – “These men have turned the world upside down.” These men have turned the world upside down.
And so sometimes you will hear, “The world is your oyster. Take the world by the tail. Experience the world for all that it has to offer.” But what about this – “What does it mean to turn the world upside down?” And Acts 17 has the answer to that question. And we’ll take a look at this chapter along in two parts. Number one – sights, sounds and the sands of time. And then number two – one simple message. So with that in mind, let’s pray and ask for God’s help and blessing on the reading and study of His Word. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the simplicity of its message. So we pray that it would ring out loud and clear from this pulpit tonight, that You would open our hearts, that You would protect us from all of the distractions that may be swirling around in our heads, in our lives, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We pray that You would help us to focus and to hear, that Your Spirit would give us ears to hear, that You would help us to apply this Word to our hearts and to our lives that we would serve You with joy. Speak Lord, for Your servants listen. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Acts 17, verse 1:
“Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.’ And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.’ And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.
The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. But when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the word of God was proclaimed by Paul at Berea also, they came there too, agitating and stirring up the crowds. Then the brothers immediately sent Paul off on his way to the sea, but Silas and Timothy remained there. Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and after receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they departed.
Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, ‘What does this babbler wish to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities’—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.’ Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for
‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’
Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, the sights, sounds and the sands of time. There is a lot happening in Acts 17, and of course our attention, I think naturally, gravitates towards Athens. John Stott writes in his commentary that there is something enthralling about Paul and Athens as we have here this great Christian apostle amid all the glories of ancient Greece. And Athens is what peaks our attention, our interest, because Athens had been the foremost Greek city state since the fifth century BC. Stott says that even after its incorporation into the Roman Empire, it retained its proud, intellectual independence. It boasted of a rich, philosophical tradition that went all the way back to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. And even though at this time that Paul went there, the city was only about 30,000 in number. It still had a reputation as the cultural and intellectual fountainhead of the entire Roman Empire.
And so, when we read about Paul in Athens, we read about him visiting all the sights. He went to all those places we’ve heard about – the marketplace it says he went to in verse 17, the marketplace or the Agora. The Agora was the place of civic gathering. It was the commercial and political heart of the city, you see. And so it wasn’t just the marketplace where you went to buy food and supplies, no, it was a marketplace for ideas. And it’s in that marketplace, it’s in the Agora where Paul interacted with the philosophers of the day. We’re told that he interacted with the epicurean and the stoic philosophers. Those were the two main schools of thought in this time. And they, yes, they had different views about the gods and what it meant to live the good life, but in both cases what they said about the good life had to do with what they believed about the Greek gods. And the gods were everywhere on display all throughout Athens. Verse 16 says that when Paul arrived in Athens his spirit was provoked. “His spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.”
And so there were idols in the marketplace but there were also idols at the Acropolis. The Acropolis was the high part of the city. It was the place that had the most famous monument in the city – the Parthenon. The Parthenon was the temple to Athena, and yet all lining the Acropolis there were all sorts of temples to other gods and figures. There was a temple to Nike and Pandeon and Zeus and Roma and Augustus and many others as well. And what had once served as perhaps the palace, maybe the seat of government, had become overwhelmingly religious over time. It had a religious flavor to it. And then there was the Areopagus. We read about Paul going to the Areopagus in verse 19. Stott says again, he says “There is no precise equivalent to the Areopagus in our own time and culture, but perhaps the nearest equivalent is the university because it was at the Areopagus that the country’s intellectuals were found.” And this Areopagus was just to the west of the Acropolis. It was the place where the city’s council gathered together to make decisions and to discuss matters and events that were happening there in the city. But again, think about it – what was woven into the very name, “Areopagus”? It was a city that was devoted to the Greek god of war, Ares. Literally, it is “the hill of Ares.”
Now did you get all that? For some of you, school may be a long way in the rearview mirror, but that’s enough information about ancient Greece that can give some of us test anxiety or examophobia! And it’s like to understand ancient Athens, to understand where Paul is, we have to delve into subjects like history, philosophy, political science, the classics. And I haven’t even mentioned anything about Thessalonica because it was an important city as well. It was the capital of the province of Macedonia. It was located in a very strategic location along the important Roman road, the Via Egnatia. And it was the first city, as we read through Paul’s second missionary journey, it was the first city as Paul crossed over into the Balkan Peninsula that we find what? A synagogue. There was a synagogue there. Verse 1 says that they came to Thessalonica “where there was a synagogue of the Jews.”
Now if we had our map in our bulletin which we don’t this week, but maybe next week, you can see that Thessalonica was a long way from Jerusalem. It was a long way from Judea. Google Maps says that Thessalonica is 1500 miles from Jerusalem. And one chart that I came across said that it most likely would have taken around 103 days of travel to go from Jerusalem to Thessalonica. And yet, and yet this city had a large enough Jewish population that there was a synagogue there. Now what does that tell you? That gives you a sense of how far the Jewish people have spread throughout the Roman Empire. And in fact, there may have been more Jews living outside of Judea than there were living inside of the region. That’s because of the Diaspora, the Jewish Diaspora. And they had spread to the far corners of the Roman Empire, this dispersion of the Jewish people.
And you can tell just how much influence the Greek language and the Greek culture or Hellenism had had on the Jewish people. Because what are we reading about here? We’re reading about Paul going to a synagogue. The word “synagogue” is a Greek word, not a Hebrew word. And so what they called this place where the Jewish people gathered together to worship and study in Thessalonica was a synagogue. And we find the same thing in Berea and Athens as well.
I heard someone recently say what I thought was pretty good relationship advice. He said that if you’re in a time of conflict, if you’re discussing a problem, he said, “Don’t open up a new tab!” And you know what that means. When we’re on the internet, we’re on a browser and we’re looking at some topic, maybe there’s a link, maybe there’s something that comes into our mind and we want to find out more about it so we open up a new tab, and maybe that leads to another new tab. I looked on my phone, I have 61 open tabs right now! I don’t know if that’s normal or if that’s a bad thing, but that’s not good when we’re dealing with conflict. And if we’re trying to deal with one issue, if we open up a new tab and bring another problem into it and bring another problem into it then all of a sudden we’re dealing with 61 open problems and we’ve lost sight of that original issue that we’re trying to deal with.
I say all of that because when we come to Acts chapter 17 we’re tempted to open up a bunch of new tabs and we’re tempted to chase a rabbit trail to a bunch of different topics that peak our interest as Paul goes to this part of the country. We want to know about things like synagogues and Agora and Areopagus and the Acropolis. We want to know about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and democracy and Greek mythology. And we could talk about all those things or we could even just stick to Acts 17 and we could talk about all of the things that we see here in this chapter, the lessons that we could learn from the apostle Paul as he engaged this culture, as he went to these cities. We could learn about how important it is to study and to know the Scriptures, to be serious students of God’s Word as we saw in the city of Berea. We could think about how important it is to be aware in our own lives, to be aware of the ideologies and the idols that are all around us all the time and to guard our lives from being distracted by those things, to succumbing to those temptations. We could talk about how when Paul expressed his faith in Jesus, he did it in such a way that the people that heard him knew, they could tell that he served a different King and worshiped a different God. It was obvious to them. It was obvious even to those who thought differently from him.
We could talk about the way he engaged those beliefs. And you notice that as Paul is in the synagogue and he’s in the marketplace, he didn’t treat them with scorn. He didn’t treat them with malice or derision. No, he was actually curious, wasn’t he? He was observant. He studied. He took it all in. He sought to find common ground with the people to whom he ministered, even though they were very different from him. And then when it was all over, what did Paul do? He kept going. He moved on along. And we could learn something about that, couldn’t we, as well. He wasn’t enamored with all the glories of the culture of Athens. He didn’t care about his sense of popularity. He didn’t care about demanding his right to be heard or to be respected. He didn’t grasp to the glories of that culture, but when it was time for him to go along, to move on, he moved on and he continued to be faithful to what God had called him to do and to press on in service to God. We could talk about all of those things, all of those things that we see from Acts 17. Some of it would be informative, some might be entertaining, some might actually be helpful to us as we seek to be faithful in living the Christian life.
But you know what? We could talk about all of those things and yet miss the central message of this passage. We could miss the main point of this whole chapter. And that main point is really very simple. And it’s Jesus and the resurrection. Verse 18 says, “He was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” It’s one simple message. And we notice that when Paul went to the synagogue of the Jews, he preached the resurrection as the fulfillment of the Scriptures. Look back at verse 2. “And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead.”
I taught a Bible class at Belhaven this spring, and on the last day of class I was having a bit of a low moment. The students were distracted, spring fever and all of that, it didn’t seem like they were listening at all, and yet after class was over, one student came up to me, he had his Bible open in his hand, and he and his roommate had been reading their Bibles together and they had their Bibles open to Psalm 16:10 – “You will not allow your holy one to see corruption.” And he asked me a question, “Is that talking about Jesus?” He got it. He got it. He got what Psalm 16 is all about. He got what Paul was doing in the synagogues and Thessalonica and in Berea and in Athens when he opened up to them the Scriptures. He opened up to them the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and he showed them Jesus and the resurrection. He showed them that Jesus and the resurrection was there the whole time.
And we’ve already seen something of this back in Acts 13, haven’t we? You remember when Paul was in Pisidian Antioch and he went to Psalm 16:10, “You will not allow your holy one to see corruption,” and he talked about Jesus and the resurrection. But he could have gone to other places as well, couldn’t he? And he could have gone to Psalm 22 or to Isaiah 53, verses that talk about the kingship of the Lord and the servant of the Lord and this figure who was afflicted, who was pierced for our transgressions, and yet through it all he was prosperous and victorious. It was teaching the resurrection, Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul was saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection was written about beforehand in the Old Testament scriptures and that Jesus’ resurrection demonstrated that Jesus is the Christ, that Jesus is the Messiah, and that His resurrection was the fulfillment of all they believed and hoped for. Verse 3, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.”
And then he went to Athens and he did something different. When he arrived in Athens, he was taken to the Areopagus and he approached it differently but he did the same thing, didn’t he? It says that he went to the Areopagus, he was taken there because, verse 18, “he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” And as he addressed the men of Athens, he spoke not of the Hebrew Scriptures, he didn’t go to a Psalm, no, he talked about the Greek gods and he specifically pointed out that there was an altar there that was dedicated to an unknown god. And so what Paul did was, beginning at creation, he proclaimed the God who made the world and everything in it. And he talked about the God who gives life, who gives mankind life and breath and everything, who had made Himself known. God has made Himself known in the things that He has made. And Paul talked about how even their own poets had acknowledged that in a sense because they said, in verse 28, one of them said, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Another one said, “For we are indeed His offspring.” And the reason they could say those things and acknowledge those things is what Paul says in verse 27 – that “God is actually not far from each of us.”
The journalist, Charles Duhigg, journalist and writer, he recently wrote a book called Super Communicators. And I was listening to an interview recently. He was talking about body language in communication. And he said that something incredible happens between two people when we’re having a genuine conversation. He says that actually our pupils start to dilate at the same rate and the electrical impulses along our skin start to match each other. And when we’re having genuine conversations, studies have shown that actually our brains start to match each other. And the interviewer responded to him, he said something about the miracle of communication. And Duhigg said this. He said, “It’s amazing. We communicate for hours and hours a day without even thinking about it. Both people are making literally hundreds of small choices as we’re communicating with each other and we’re almost completely unaware of those choices.” And then he said this. He said, “Humans’ superpower is communication and that’s what sets us apart from every other species in a way that’s allowed us to thrive and it’s,” he said, “it’s amazing.”
Now what Duhigg says is that the reason that it’s amazing is because we evolved that way. But could it not be that we were created that way and that’s why it’s amazing. That we were created in the image of God, the image of the God who spoke and brought all things into existence. And the God who made us in His image in order to enjoy relationships with one another, who made us humans in His image as the climax of creation. It’s hard, even in talking about something like communication, it’s hard to deny the miraculous work of the Creator God. That’s what Paul’s saying in Acts 17.
And he’s saying to the men of Athens that this same God who has made us, that we are also accountable to that God. We are accountable to the God who made us. Look again at verse 29. “We ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” And then in verse 30, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” Remember, Paul had seen the risen Lord Jesus on the way to Damascus, and here he is, he has traveled thousands of miles away from his home and he is literally putting his life at risk and from place to place he’s being dragged around, thrown into prison, beaten up. He will give his life for the sake of this message that he preaches at the Areopagus in Athens and that is that Jesus has been raised from the dead. And Jesus’ resurrection demonstrates that He is the Christ, He is the Messiah, He is the Judge and the Savior. In fact, He is God in the flesh. And though they said that Paul is preaching foreign divinities, Paul says that he is preaching the one, true and living God.
Don’t miss it. Don’t miss Paul’s simple message. It’s Jesus and the resurrection. That’s the Gospel. That is the Gospel. In fact, the word “gospel” is found in verse 18 in this passage in the Greek. The ESV doesn’t pick it up, but the NIV is actually one of the only translations that picks up the word “gospel” in this passage where it says this for verse 18 – “Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.” And Jesus and the resurrection is good news because it’s good news about God’s grace. It’s grace because it’s about what God has done to save sinners. It’s about what God has done in history in sending Jesus to live and to die and to be raised again. Not what sinners can do for ourselves to save ourselves, but what God has done. And it’s grace because it’s what God has done to keep His promises. God keeps His Word. He keeps His promises. And we are called merely to believe, to have faith in His promises, to have faith in the fulfillment of those promises. And it’s by faith that we are justified. It’s by faith. “The righteous shall live by faith” in the promises of God and the fulfillment of those promises, and by faith we are justified, free, forgiven, made righteous before God. That’s grace.
And it’s also grace because God pursues His people.He pursues His people to the far country. And this message goes to the Jewish people of the Diaspora. And Isaiah wrote about it in Isaiah 11. He says, “He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” That’s what’s happening in Acts 17. God is pursuing His people in the Dispersion and, and He is pursuing even idolaters. And Paul goes to a city that was full of idolaters, he goes to a city that loved to do nothing else but to discuss some new idea, he goes to them because the Gospel, because of God’s grace. The message of Jesus and the resurrection is for idolaters and pagans. Idolaters, mind you, whose idols were sensual and drunken and violent because they were made in the image of those who made them. That’s what these people were like and the Gospel goes there. The message goes to these people because Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel. He’s not ashamed of the Gospel of grace. He’s not ashamed of the message of Jesus and the resurrection because “it’s the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes – to the Jew first and also for the Greek.” That’s grace. That’s grace.
And this Gospel, this message of grace, it turns the world upside down. And of course that was true with all of the mobs and the uproar, with the cities and the crowds that were agitated and stirred up that we see in this chapter, but how else does the Gospel turn the world upside down? How should the Gospel turn our worlds upside down? Three things, very briefly. Loyalty, worship, and humility.
First, there’s loyalty, and we see that when the crowds heard Paul proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, what did they say? They said, “He’s acting against the decrees of Caesar and he’s saying that there is another King, Jesus.” Now of course that was only halfway true, but what they were saying is that Jesus is the King. And so how do we turn the world upside down? It’s by living and honoring Jesus as our King. Not bowing the knee to a politician, not bowing the knee to our job or our school or a club or a team or any other thing but only bowing the knee to Jesus as our King. And that makes a difference, doesn’t it, in how we live. And others should see that, even if it makes them mad. That Jesus is our King. Take that with you to school. Take that with you to the workplace tomorrow morning. That others would say that Jesus is the King of his life.
Then there’s worship. Second is worship. Did you notice how Paul, he went to the synagogue, there’s this sort of surprising juxtaposition. He goes to the synagogue, this place of worship, and they accuse him of treason, of honoring a different king. Then he goes to the Areopagus, the place of the city council, the place of government if you will, and they accuse him of heresy. They accuse him of worshiping a different god. That’s because the Gospel turns the world upside down in that it is incompatible with the pantheon of idols. And I’m not talking about the idols of Zeus or Ares or Athena of Aphrodite. I’m talking about the idols of the love of money and the love of power and the love of popularity and pleasure and beauty and school honors and the praise of man. Jesus is not a foreign divinity, but He is distinct from all those things because He is the Lamb who is worthy. “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever,” because He alone is to be worshiped.
This past summer, in Cajamarca, we were about to leave, we were eating in Esther and Alanzo’s house, and Esther, we were saying our goodbyes and Esther Ramirez was asking especially the young people, asking them for how she could pray for them. And before we prayed, she paused and she said, “I want to leave you with a couple of things from Ecclesiastes and from Proverbs. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Fear God and keep His commandments. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.” Remember the Creator. Worship your God.
And then there’s humility. And it’s one of the refrains in this chapter. It’s about those who believe. Verse 4, “A great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.” Verse 12, “Many of them believed with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.” And then verse 34, “One of those who believed was Dionysius the Areopagite.” Why were those names recorded here? Was it because they were important people? They were prestigious? They were significant? No. Why are they recorded here? It’s because they believed. That’s it. It’s because they trusted in Jesus. That’s all they had to do. Their prominence, their prestige, their importance, it had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t matter for anything. It was only their faith. It was their faith because the ground is level at the foot of the cross.
And we may think that we should take the world by the tail. We may think that we should experience the world for all it has to offer, but the way to turn the world upside down is to be humble and to say, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give the glory.” Let’s pray.
Father, we pray and we ask, we beg that You would allow us to live lives that are marked by the Gospel in such a way that they turn our priorities, our trajectories, our desires, everything, that You would turn them upside down. That we would seek not ourselves, that we would elevate not ourselves as king, or worship our own desires, but that we would serve Jesus as King and worship Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, that You would humble us and help us to turn the world upside down. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.