For our message this morning,
we'll be in the book of Acts again, a little further down
the road than where Mike was, in chapter 17. Chapter 17. You know, our pastor's
there. He may have left Athens by now. He was there, and so that's where
we're going today, is eventually we start in Thessalonians and
work our way south to Athens in the Book of Acts there. Did
I get to the right deal here? So we'll begin in verse 1 there
of Acts chapter 17. Now, and this has to do with
Paul and Silas and Timotheus there as they journeyed in Acts
17. When they had passed through
Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica where was
a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul, as his manner was,
he went in unto them. And three Sabbath days reasoned
with them out of the Scriptures. I could just imagine he was like
Philip. He went in there, and the custom
of those synagogues was that they would gather there in the
synagogue, and they would appoint someone to read a Scripture,
and they would open the roll, They would read that scripture,
and I can just imagine Paul, like Phillips, began at the same
place and preached unto them Jesus. And I imagine that's probably how
it went. Because it says, opening and alleging, in verse 3, that
Christ's must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead,
and that this Jesus, whom I preach to you, is Christ." That's often
translated, the Messiah. That's what the Jews often referenced. They called Him the Messiah,
the Anointed One, the One that would be sent. And some of them
believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas, and of the devout
Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few."
Now, if we remember this, this province of Greece was a
Roman province at the time, and so there were these Jews. that
lived there, and they were Greeks. And the Greek and the Roman religions
and idolatry were very similar, and they kind of adopted each
other's pagan idols and worship. They had pretty much the same
gods, they just called them by different names. And so that's
what the situation was. But the Jews, in verse 5, which
believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows
of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city
on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to
bring them out to the people. And when they found them not,
they drew Jason and certain brethren into the rulers of the city,
crying, These have turned the world upside down, and are come
hither also, whom Jason hath received. And these all do contrary
to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one
Jesus. So you know what they were preaching,
the kingdom of God. And they troubled the people
and the rulers of the city when they heard these things. And
when they had taken security of Jason and the others, they
let them go. And the brethren immediately
sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea. who coming thither
went into the synagogue of the Jews. And these were more noble
than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with
all readiness of mind and searched the scripture daily, whether
those things were so. And boy, what a treat. We will look
that up and see if it's true. We're not just going to take
your word for it, which happens so often in religion. And it says, and therefore, Many
of them believed also of honorable women, which were Greeks, and
of men not a few. But when the Jews of Thessalonica
had knowledge that the word of God was preached to Paul at Berea,
they came there also and stirred up the people. And immediately
the brethren sent away Paul to go, as it were, to sea. But Silas
and Timotheus abode there still. And they that conducted Paul
brought him unto Athens. And receiving a commandment unto
Silas and Timotheus for them to come to him, with all speed
they departed. Now while Paul waited for them
at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly
given to idolatry. And therefore he disputed he
in the synagogue with the Jews and with devout persons and in
the marketplace daily with them that met with him. And then certain
philosophers of the Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him. And some said, what will this
babbler say? Kind of reminds you what Mike
was teaching. These guys are drunk. But you
know, this word babbler, it's an interesting word. We always
like to look at the etymology of words here. And this babbler,
you know, we kind of think of one that babbles, just kind of
rambles on and doesn't really say anything. But it's an interesting
word, and it has to do with It's a derogatory slang term kind
of against both Paul and the people that were listening to
him that believed. And it has to do with seed and
a remnant. And when you look that word up,
it says it's like a crow that picks the seeds up. Seed picker is what that word
means. Seed picker. And when they plant a field and
they go in to harvest it, they don't grind all of the seed into
grain. They take a remnant of that seed
and save it for planting. And the crow goes in there and
kind of just robs stuff. And so it's kind of a derogatory
term in that Paul was a guy that kind of picked the low-hanging
fruit of there. You know, they looked at the vast seed of grain
out there and said, we control all of that. Us, the Greek religion,
we control all those people. And the Jews said, we control
all the Jews. And Paul comes in here and picks
the weaker, the remnant, the low-hanging stuff, the mindless
folks that are ignorant and foolish. And that was their view of it. And so they call him this babbler,
this guy that comes in and kind of takes away some of their people
that they have control over and converts them to his foolishness. So what will this babbler say?
I lost my place here. In verse 18, he seems to be a
setter forth of strange gods because he preached unto them
Jesus and the resurrection. You always notice in Paul's sermons,
he always brings all the elements of the gospel, and that's kind
of the title of our message today, Elements of the Gospel, It's
not that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
He was buried and was raised again the third day. So all three
things there. And he always was bringing up
this resurrection, which the Greeks didn't really believe
in. They thought that And when you died, you just sort of became
one with the universe and the planet and all that kind of thing. And some believed in kind of
a reincarnation thing. And so they took him and they
brought him unto Areopagus. And Areopagus was this I don't know if we're going to
make it all the way through this message today, but when you leave Thessalonica,
it's kind of at the tip of a sound on the A, G, and C, and there's
a little peninsula that sticks out there, and then the sound
goes up. Inland a ways and then Thessalonica
is kind of up in the northeast corner of that and then Berea
is about 50 miles west of that inland to the west and Then there's
kind of a mountain low mountain range kind of like we have our
coast range here in Oregon It kind of goes down the coast all
the way down the peninsula of Greece where we're toward Athens
kind of rugged terrain But it was about a three-day walk from
Thessalonica over to Berea. And then when they snuck him
out of town there, they said they were kind of afraid that
those rabble-rousers were going to take him and kill him. they
snuck him out of Berea and they said like and they kind of let
it be known that he was going to go over to the coast and take
a ship and and meanwhile they snuck him down the trail down
the rugged coast there to Athens and you go down through this
mountain range I've never been there but I look on my google
earth in three dimension which is very interesting and so you
go down it's about 200 miles from Berea down to Athens. It's
a pretty good jog. So when Paul gets down there
by himself and he says, I want Timothy and Silas to come down
here with me. Somebody's got to walk 200 miles
north and say, he wants you down there. And then they got to walk
200 more miles back down to Athens. And so there's a little bit of
a time delay here. And it says that he was there,
and he reasoned, I think he said he reasoned with them in the
synagogue three Sabbaths. So it's like three weeks there
that this kind of goes over. And when you go down that mountain
range and you kind of go through the pass and you drop down into
the Athens, and you look on Google Earth, it's like a big plane
out there. And the city's really spread
out in this big open. And then kind of out in the middle
of it is this areopagus. And it's kind of like a big table
rock that sticks up. It's kind of oval shaped. And
the edge of it kind of looks like up here by the Eagle Caves,
where it's that cliff that comes out of the ground. And if you
just imagine that, that just went around all the way around
this big oval. And on top of it, you had the
Acropolis and the Parthenon. The Acropolis in the Greek meant
the highest place. So when you dropped down and
you looked out over this vast plain and you saw the city of
Athens, you saw that Acropolis sticking up there. And you saw
the Parthenon, this temple that was to a Greek in the Greek they
called her Diana, in the Roman called her Artemis, I think,
that they worshipped there, the Greeks did. And the Romans, or
the Jews, they had their synagogue there where they did their religious
business. And so as Paul would go down
in there, he would see this high place, this high rock with all
these religious temples on top of it. And then over to the west
of that a little ways was a little rocky, another little rocky roundish
hill, and that was called the Rock of Ares, or Mars Hill in
the Roman. It translated into English, so
it's kind of a three-way translation conundrum there. But anyway,
he would see that. You could see that when you come
down from the hills there. You could see the Acropolis,
and you could see the Rock of Ares. Well known. been there
in a religious setting for eons. I just think that kind of thing
came into Paul's mind when he said, they call that the Acropolis. They call that the highest place.
I'm going to tell them about the true highest place. They
call that the Rock of Aries. I'm going to tell them about
the Rock of Ages. It just struck me as I looked at that that I
was sure that that's what was going to happen. So Paul, he's
there in Athens waiting in verse 16 of chapter 17, and he saw
the whole city was wholly given to idolatry, and therefore disputed
he in the synagogues with the Jews and with the devout persons
in the marketplace daily, with them that met with him, and he
disputed with them." You know, that word doesn't mean just argue. It means to say clearly. and kind of loudly, but clearly,
just say without hesitation, without doubt that Christ is
King and preach to them the gospel. And they said, well, He seems
to be setting forth these strange gods because He preached unto
them Jesus and the resurrection. And then they took Him and brought
Him unto Areopagus, Saying may we know what this new doctrine
whereof thou speakest is for thou bringest certain Strange things to our ears this
areopagus. That's the greek name for for
mars hill or the hill of aries areopagus Areopagus or whatever
they however they pronounce it on the side of that areopagus
That's where they held trials and stuff And that was a place
of trial, a place of judgment. And we find that he kind of brings
that up in the message here, too. So they brought him into
Areopagus and said, may we know what this new doctrine is, whereof
thou speak, for thou bringest strange things to our ears. And
we would know, therefore, what these things mean. for all the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing else but to tell
or to hear some new thing." Boy, isn't that what, all these things
that we find here, we could apply to our, right here in the Dalles
in Oregon, that people are engaged in this kind of thing. Then Paul
stood in the middle of Mars Hill, this Areopagus, And he said,
you men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too
superstitious, too religious. For as I passed by, I beheld
your devotions, and I found an altar with this inscription,
To the unknown God, whom therefore you ignorantly worship him, declare
I unto you." There is a tale that at some point there was
all these altars to all these gods, and the Greek people, they
didn't do anything. without sacrificing to make sure
that they had good luck and whatever it was they were going to do.
The gods would bless their endeavor, whatever it was. There was one
for business, one for marriage, one for war, one for anything
you could think of. And then they had the one to
the unknown God, because maybe there was one they didn't know
about, but they didn't want to offend that one and be cursed.
And this tale said that someone herded a, they sent a herd of
goats or sheep up there, and they were having a plague or
some disaster, and they, what do we do, what do we do? So they
sent a flock up there and wherever a sheep would lay down next to
an altar, they would say, okay, the gods say that sheep is to
be sacrificed on that altar. And this one laid down by that
altar, it would be sacrificed to that altar. And if it just
lay down out in the middle of one, that means it was to go
to the unknown God. And they would take that over
there and sacrifice it to the unknown God. Boy, what a way
to live. But we do a lot of those same
things ourselves. You'll put your lucky socks on. People are the same now as ever. That's just what Mike was saying. So as he's there on the midst
of Mars hills and talking to them about the unknown God, he
says, I'm going to tell you who the unknown God is. He's unknown
to you, but not unknown to the believers. God that made
the world. And he's looking at this high
place. This is the highest place, you know. And we're in charge,
and we control everything. And we look down from the Acropolis,
and we see all our vast holdings, and all of our religion, and
all of our wealth. And he said, God that made the
world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven
and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands like this Parthenon. And neither is he worshipped
with men's hands as though he needed anything, seeing that
he giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made
of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the
earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the
bounds of their habitation. and that they should seek the
Lord, if happily they might feel after Him and find Him, though
He be not far from every one of us." Boy, what a thing to
think about there. You know, Jesus said, where two
or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.
Is that just some religious talk on His part? Or by the Spirit
of God, is He actually here? not visible to us. It kind of
reminds you of that servant of Elisha. He says, oh man, we're
doomed. And he prayed and said, open
his eyes that he may see. And when his eyes were spiritually
opened, he saw the hills were full of chariots and soldiers.
And they were there. They didn't just pop in. They
didn't just beam down at the time his eyes opened. They were
there the whole time He just couldn't see them. So it's things for us to think
about. He's not, though he be not far
from every one of us. For in him we live and move and
have our being as certain also of your own poets have said for
we all are also his offspring. For as much then as we are the
offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is
like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device.
In the times of this ignorant, God winked at but now commandeth
all men everywhere to repent to turn from all this idle worship
and in their own self-righteousness because he has appointed a day
in which He will judge. And remember, He's at that place
of the trial. He's at Mars Hill at the Areopagus, which was the
place of trial and judgment. He will appoint a day in the
which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man
whom He hath ordained, the Messiah is what that means. And he hath
given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from
the dead. And when they heard of the resurrection
of the dead, some mocked, just as Mike brought up in Acts chapter
2 this morning, they mocked. And others said, we will hear
thee again of this matter. And so Paul departed. from them, and however, certain
men claimed unto him and believed, among which was Dionysus the
Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with him."
So again, we have that, as Mike mentioned, and we often mention
in the Bible class, we have this division that the gospel always
brings. And there's always a dividing
line of those where the Spirit has prepared the ground for the
seed of the Word of God, and others that it's not prepared. It's the thorny ground. It's
the stony ground. It's the place where they hear that Word, but
it never takes root. It's just foolishness to them, and they disregard it. And so
as he's preaching there in these three places, you know it's interesting
that it doesn't seem like he was in Thessalonica very long.
He was there, and he went to the synagogue and preached, and
there was an uproar. And so they snuck him over to
Berea in the middle of the night to keep him from being killed.
But you know, we read in the Bible class this morning in 1
Thessalonians 1, verse 5, He wrote a letter to those and
says, the church that was there, the Gospel had taken effect there.
He says, knowing, brethren, beloved, your election of God, because
our Gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power
and in the Holy Spirit. And then he says, and then you
got busy and preached the Gospel in Achaia and Macedonia and all
over that area. And it was well known. So see
how it blossomed there and how that went out. And then in Berea,
it doesn't say much about Berea, but it says they were more noble
than the Thessalonians at that time because they said we're
going to look this up and see if he's telling us the truth.
And so they could look up those Scriptures and see if what he
said was so. So this gospel message of Christ
who died for our sins, this Messiah that died for our sins, was raised
again for our justification, and how God commanded all men
everywhere to repent, to turn. But you know, the Bible says
they won't. Unaided. dead in sins and trespasses
they won't. And you know they're pretty comfortable
in the position that they're in. As we look at the view of
the Greeks that were in charge of the priests, that were in
charge of all the sacrifices and the rituals that went with
the Greek religion, And they had all their control over all
the folks, and everybody was pretty satisfied with the status
quo. They didn't want to be messed
with. And people made their living off it. Remember when Paul was
in Ephesus and the silversmiths that made statues of Diana, I
think it was, they took offense kind of at him coming in and
telling them that was all bogus. Killing off the economy here,
Paul, stop it. Other than that, they really
didn't care, I don't think, but they were making a pretty good
living selling icons and whatnot. But no different there in Athens. The Jews, they looked out and
they had their flock that they looked after, that they were
supposed to be declaring the Word of God and reading it to
the people and causing them to understand it, and yet they failed
at that. So, we have this situation where
the Gospel is preached, and sometimes it has immediate effect, and
sometimes it's a ways down the road before the Spirit takes
that and makes it effectual. I wanted to look at a couple
of scriptures that Paul might have used, because
we always find those two results, some good ground prepared by
the Spirit of God, and those who opposed and rejected, those
that were satisfied with the world, those who were satisfied
with their own righteousness, and seeing no need for a Savior,
and seeing no sin in themselves, and no need of the almighty work
of the Holy Spirit. They're just okay. I'm fine. And you know, nothing happens
until the Spirit of God creates in them a new heart and gives
them eyes to see. You know, they're always talking
about their uncircumcised ears. They have that fleshly covering
over their ears that blocks out the pure sound of the Gospel. And all they hear is just words,
like when the Lord spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus. He heard
the Word of God, but to others it just, they said, I just, it
sounded like thunder to me. So, you have to have the uncircumcised
ear circumcised and the uncircumcised eye circumcised to take that
fleshly dependence away and turn from where you were to the living
God. And so as he was preaching to
them about the Messiah and Him coming
to suffer and die in the place of His people, he might have
read to them from Daniel, how many weeks till Messiah shall
be cut off? Messiah the Prince shall be cut
off? You might have read to them from
Isaiah Chapter 8, where he said, I and the children whom thou
has given me shall be for signs and wonders. You might have read
to them from Isaiah Chapter 53, where God said, he shall see
the seed, the travail of his soul and be satisfied. What a
clear picture that he saw Him take on the sins of His people,
pay for them with His very life, His very blood. Christ died for
sinners. And he was satisfied with that
offering. This is my beloved son in whom
I'm well pleased. And so we see all these gospel
messages from the Old Testament that our pastors always bring
from Numbers and Malachi and Ezra and every place in the Old
Testament that he's been. That's all they had to preach
from. And clearly, with spiritual eyes,
you can see Jesus in all of those. You can see the Messiah, that
woman at the well says, one Messiah cometh. And he says, I'm here. And that's
what the Jews should have been in that synagogue. They should
have been saying all along, someone's coming and someone was here. And then we killed him. Now someone's
coming back. But they failed that task. That gospel that always turns
out to be a saver of life unto life for those who are alive
in Christ, and a saver of death unto death for those who just
desire not the knowledge of that. The scriptures replete with instances
where they stopped up their ears and shouted, we don't want to
hear that. go away, or which of the prophets
have you not killed and stoned?" And everyone that he sent to
bring the message, it was only received by that remnant of that
seed that was pictured by that babbler Paul as he was preaching
the Gospel in Athens. And some believed, and some did
not. And as Mike mentioned in the
Bible class there, we don't have the control over that. We're
tasked with declaring that Christ died for sinners of what Paul
said I am, of whom I am chief. I'm the worst one. I killed my
brothers, persecuted the church, and did a lot of other heinous
things. But we could all say something like that. You know,
I'm the worst one because of blah, blah, blah, or X, Y, Z. We all have a view of ourselves
that's the unprofitable servant, I think we call ourselves. And
when did we do anything good? We didn't do anything worthy
that Christ would look at us. It was because of eternal electing
love that He gave a people to Christ to redeem, and He did
that. And so, as Paul went into Athens,
that humongous big city, the capital city there, and saw that
big rock sticking up with a big temple on it, the little rocky
hill right next to it that had all these altars to all these
different gods all over it. What an opportunity to say, here's
the real deal. Here's the Rock of Ages, not
the Rock of Aries. Here's the High King. that made
this high place that you have covered up with religious idolatry. And so, we'll stop there. Be
our message for today, that gospel that was preached from Thessalonians
all the way down to Athens. As always, from John Chapter
8, my friends, be free. We'll have a closing hymn.