Acts 17:22-31 - The Truth About... - May 14, 2023

Imagine that you were traveling and you found yourself in a culture that seems to be completely backwards from what you have always thought and known. A culture that claims to be very spiritual and yet in practice is very materialistic and obsessed with the here and now; a culture that accepts many gods but rejects the idea that there is only one true God; a culture that has no real concept of sin or guilt and is so morally bankrupt that it not only tolerates but celebrates such obviously evil actions as abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and pedophilia. In a society like that, how do you separate fact from fiction; truth from lies? If you were going to share the Gospel, where would you even begin? The society just described is not imaginary; it was very real. It is the culture the Apostle Paul entered when he stepped into the city of Athens around 50 AD. At the time, Athens was the intellectual center of the world. It boasted of its philosophical pedigree inherited from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; it pointed to its literature, art, and architecture – as proof of its greatness; and it bragged of its contributions to the advancement of the human race – including things like individual freedom, equal rights, and a form of government called democracy. I probably don’t have to tell you that Athenian culture sounds an awful lot like American culture today. Our culture seems to have lost its moral compass. Our own culture worships all sorts of idols and ideologies but, for the most part, does not know or even care about the one, true God. So how can we know what’s true in a world where nothing seems certain or absolute? Today Paul clears up the confusion by preaching the truth.

Paul ended up in Athens after being run out of Thessalonica and Berea on his second missionary journey. While waiting for Timothy and Silas to catch up with him (Acts 17:15), he explored Athens and discovered that they had a very religious culture. For starters, a huge temple dedicated to Athena (the goddess of wisdom and war – among other things) crowned the highest hill in the city, known as the Parthenon. Below that, the streets and markets of Athens were littered with countless shrines and altars dedicated to various gods and goddesses. Paul was so distressed to see that the city was full of idols (Acts 17:16) that he not only spent time preaching in the Jewish synagogue but also in the marketplace to anyone who would listen. Some philosophers who heard Paul preaching this new and novel message about some guy named Jesus who supposedly rose from the dead invited him to explain his ideas at a meeting of Athens’ leading philosophers (read: religious fact-checkers) – called the Areopagus.

Paul stood up in front of the council of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. For as I was walking around and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar on which had been inscribed, ‘To an unknown god.’” There is no question that the people of Athens were very religious. (The Roman historian Petronius commented that there were more gods than people in Athens.[1]) They were energetic in their search for the meaning and purpose of life, but the very fact that they had constructed an altar to an unknown god revealed the futility of their idolatry – that in spite of their countless idols, they knew that they were missing something.

The first thing we learn from Athens is that everyone worships something. Everyone has a god (or gods). (Luther defined a god as whatever a person looks to for every good and for help in time of need.[2]) Today, if you walk the streets of Madison you will not necessarily find an altar on every corner dedicated to a different deity, but you will find idols. Where? Jesus said where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). Where have the people of Madison put their treasure and their hearts? There’s the university, where parents spend a fortune for their children to bow before the altar of human wisdom – and shrines dedicated to athletics tower above the city; hospitals where the masses go searching for eternal life; the office buildings and banks that house the high priests of the god of money; the Capitol building where people seek every good thing and go for help in time of need. People attend these temples and present their offerings there because everyone is searching for identity, meaning, and purpose in life. The problem is that they are searching in all the wrong places. And, even if they don’t admit it, the truth is that none of these idols can truly satisfy the longing they feel in their souls. No amount of money or pleasure or knowledge can provide the forgiveness or peace that the Fall into sin (Genesis 3) has left in every human heart. Sadly, for many of our own neighbors, God is still the unknown god.

That ignorance is what Paul was determined to change: Now what you worship as unknown – this is what I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made with hands. Neither is he served by human hands, as if he needed anything, since he himself gives all people life and breath and everything they have. Whether you are exploring Athens or Madison, manmade gods end up looking an awful lot like…man. They have human flaws and human weaknesses; they need us more than we need them. That makes sense. Creations always end up looking a lot like their creator. But Paul proves from Scripture, starting with Genesis, that they have it all backwards. God is not a creation but the Creator (Genesis 1). There are not many gods; the LORD alone is God (Isaiah 45:5). He can do anything he wants because he is all powerful and answers to no one (Isaiah 42:5). The sun rises, the rain falls, our hearts keep beating simply because God causes it to happen (Psalm 147:8-9). We can’t confine him to a temple because God is spirit (1 Kings 8:27; John 4:24). He doesn’t need us or our offerings or our service because he is absolutely self-sufficient and independent (Psalm 50:8-13). And, even though he doesn’t need us and is not compelled to do anything for us – in his boundless love he has chosen to create us, sustain us, and reveal himself to us in Scripture. That’s the truth about God. What does that make us?

Paul tells the truth about that, too: From one man, he made every nation of mankind to live over the entire face of the earth. He determined the appointed times and the boundaries where they would live. He did this so they would seek God and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘Indeed, we are also his offspring.’ We are not the results of a random chemical reaction or a Big Bang. We are not the outcome of billions of years of Darwinian evolution. We are all – regardless of race or gender – descendants of Adam. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we, too, are created in God’s image, with immortal souls and bodies crafted by his own hand. The bad news is that we also have inherited Adam’s sin and his death sentence.

That’s who we are. Why are we here? Perhaps no question has proved so difficult for humanity to answer than this one. For Paul it was very simple. God put us here in a specific time and place, with specific talents and abilities, surrounded by specific friends and family for one very important, very simple reason: to search for and find God. God has given you everything from your talents to your job to your family in order that you may search for him and find him. Like a fisherman throwing bait into the water, God has littered creation with evidence of his presence and love. From the heartbeat of a baby in the womb to the reliable rotation of the planets in their orbits, God wants us to look for him, he wants to be found – but while the creation around us can tell us that – only the Bible can tell us why: [He]…wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:3-4). The truth that God is the holy, just, all-powerful Creator and man is his fallen, sinful, mortal creature leads naturally to the final important question: how can the relationship be restored? How can we be saved? That’s where Paul takes us next:

“Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and planning. Although God overlooked the times of ignorance, he is now commanding all people everywhere to repent, because he has set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he appointed. He provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

The truth about salvation is very personal and very relevant whether you’re living in the 1st or 21st century. In the past, God was patient with unbelief and idolatry, but now that God has revealed himself – and the salvation he promised to bring – fully in the person and work of his only-begotten Son, Jesus – the time for unbelief and idolatry is over. Now is the time to repent. If there are any idols lurking in your heart, now is the time to get rid of them. Now is the time to turn our time and attention and love away from the idols of materialism or career or family or wealth or pleasure and turn back to our Creator and plead for his mercy. Why the urgency? Why is it so dangerous and foolish to skate through life without ever taking the time to ponder the deep truths of who we are, why we are here and where we’re going? Because the day is coming when every last one of us will have to give an account for how we used God’s gift of life. Paul didn’t tell the people in Athens who their judge would be, he wanted them to think about it. But we know. Jesus, the one who lived for us, died for us, and rose again will be our judge (Matthew 24). The empty tomb still preaches that truth even 2000 years later. You may wonder why we still say “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed” over a month after Easter. This is one reason why. Not only is Jesus’ resurrection the cornerstone of Christian faith, it is the key that will seal the eternal fate of every man, woman and child who ever lived. Everyone who believes that Jesus died and rose for their salvation will rise to live with him; everyone who rejects him will endure a miserable existence apart from him forever in hell (Mark 16:16). That’s the truth about salvation.

Imagine living in a world that has countless idols but doesn’t know the one, true God, and even worse, doesn’t even care enough to look into it. How can you separate the truth from the lies? First, recognize that this is the world we are living in and then open your Bible, the one place where the unknown god makes himself known – most clearly in the person of his Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Here, and only here will you find the truth about God, the truth about yourself, and the truth about salvation. God is not far from you, he created you to find him (even though, in truth, he’s the one who found us! (John 15:16)), and he sent his Son to die for you so that you could be with him forever. In a world filled with false idols of every shape and size, that’s the truth – truth which is grounded in the fact that Christ is risen! Alleluia! Amen.

[1] http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/petro/satyr/sat04.htm

[2] LC 1st Commandment 1