Acts: Our Hearts' Unknown God (17:16-34)

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Our reading from the Book of Acts, chapter 17, beginning at the 16th verse.

Acts 17 · chapter mention

Now, while Paul was waiting for Silas and Timothy 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 Auropagus, 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 Auropagus, 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 of 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 Aeropagate, and a woman named Demaris, and others with them.

This is the word of the Lord.

And just remaining standing, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Heavenly Father, we now come before you to hear you speak directly to our hearts and our minds.

Father, sometimes uh it may feel like your word uh was just meant for those 2,000 years ago.

But Father, um help us to know and feel that your word is still very relevant for today in 2024.

Um Father, we just come before you.

Please draw us to yourself.

And I pray us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Now I don't know how many people are familiar with uh the movie series Trolls.

It's a kids' series.

Uh there's three of them.

And uh in the third one, the one that's called Band Together, um, the the whole premise of the movie, of all the movies, is that they're all these trolls are very musical little beings.

Uh they like to sing, there's lots of singing, lots of music, lots of cutscenes going on in all of them.

Um, but in this one, one of the main characters, brothers, gets taken by the two villains.

And this is the whole thing, the whole premise of this one is that there's a lot of spoil, I'm gonna say some spoilers, that they're gonna go and rescue this brother.

And these villains, because this is a musical movie, are obsessed with becoming these big singers, these big singers who are obsessed with fame and fortune.

And so how they do this is they steal the trolls, they take the one troll's brother, and then they end up taking the other ones too.

And the the way they do this is they take the trolls' powers to sing, because they can't actually sing on their own.

They become obsessed with it, and they want they nearly come to the point of killing the trolls.

And the this the main song that they keep singing all through it is this all my greatness, it doesn't come from doesn't come for free.

All my talent, it doesn't grow on trees.

Take a breather, then take it all away.

If the top is where you want to stay, you gotta work hard.

To make it look easy, you gotta live fast.

To keep making that money, if you want to be famous as me, you gotta work.

This morning, I get to talk about the very Canadian topic, idolatry.

It's very politically correct.

So, what's going on is we're picking up again the Acts series that we've been going through.

We took a break for a week for Easter.

And what the Acts is, is it's a book of eyewitness accounts of the first 30 years of the early church after Jesus rose and rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

And what's going on in this story that we're about to look at is that Paul just arrived in Athens, and he's waiting for Timothy and Silas to arrive because he had to leave Berea early because the Jews were raising up and starting to persecute him, starting to come right at him and causing riots.

So he had to leave, and he ends up in Athens, and now he's waiting for us.

This is where we are when we come back into the Acts series.

So we're gonna look at it.

Acts 17, verses 16 to 34.

Acts 17:16–34

Please uh turn in your bulletins.

If you have a Bible, turn to it now.

I might lose my voice in this one, just you're you've you've been warned.

So verse 16.

Now Paul, now, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked with him in them, as he saw the city was full of idols.

When I was thinking about this, um it reminded me of the first time I arrived in Oxford, UK.

The town that is called, is famously called the town of the dreaming spires.

I had just finished, I was in seminary when I went to it for the very first time, and I had just finished a Reformation history class.

And the thing with Oxford, Oxford is the place where the reformers learned and they fought for the faith.

I got to walk the halls that they walked in.

I got to go to the library that they studied in, where they ripped down the books that the Reformation was all about.

And then I got to walk the streets where they were burned at the stake for holding to the gospel for the true faith.

And it's also the place where Token and Lewis lived and taught and met together.

I got to go to the Eagle and Child.

It's a place of great learning.

And I was enthralled by the myth and the legend of the place.

And here we have Paul arriving in Athens.

It's his first time in Athens.

And Paul is no stranger to Athens.

He knows the reputation of the place.

He studied the writers.

Paul himself was a man of great learning.

And now he arrives to Athens, and Athens was the place to be, if you wanted to be a great intellect.

It's where all the great thinkers came out in that area and that during that time.

It used to have great political power before the Romans came in.

Athens was the place.

It was the place where it had great legend attached to it.

And Paul arrives to it.

He knew the reputation.

But Paul was not a um, he was not a great intellect of the Greeks' mythology.

He knew about it, but this is a man, he is a man that was brought up brought up and schooled as a Hebrew.

He was brought up under the law of God in Exodus 20.

And in his mind, it would have been this.

He would have been thinking about this when he started to walk the streets.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or save them.

See, when he walked the streets, this would have came right to his mind right away.

This is what he would have thought about when he was walking these streets.

Athens was famously nicknamed the place.

It was called one great altar, one great sacrifice.

Another person, another writer said it was easy, it's easier, it was easier to find a god than a man in Athens.

This place, this place was so saturated with idols and temples that it was impossible anywhere you looked, there was an idol or something.

Something to point to a god.

So that's why he that's why it says he was provoked.

And this provoked, what it means, it doesn't mean that he was all of a sudden he was just hit and he became super angry.

It was like a slow burn provoked.

It's normally, it's like when you, you know, there's always someone in your life that might grate on you over the years, over the weeks that you spend time with them.

That's what's going on here.

It's starting to grate on him.

And that's why he's provoked.

And the reason why he's provoked is because he saw men and women who are made in the image of the living God, enslaved by these idols.

Enslaved by trying to get themselves right with the gods, to appease them, to try and better their lives.

That's what's going on here.

That's the situation.

And look how he approaches it in the next verses, 17 to 20.

He says, or Luke says, So we 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 into the Arepagus, 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.

Notice how Paul approaches this situation.

He doesn't start flipping tables, he doesn't start yelling at people, and he doesn't start bullying them.

This is a great thing for us to think about.

We've been going on talking about to go and tell, to go into the community and tell people about Jesus.

It's not about cramming it down their throats.

It's not about trying to get the upper hand on them.

It's just about showing them Jesus, treating them as human beings, treating them as they're made in the image of God.

And that's what Paul's doing here.

And that's how we need to take this text and apply it to our lives as we share the gospel with people.

It is the command that Jesus left us to share the gospel, but he didn't command us to bully people, he commanded us to love people.

And Paul must have been doing something right because he gains the attention of the philosophers.

These are the people who would have been of high status in this town at that time.

These are the people that people would have turned to to look at, to get opinions, to get the right answers on questions that they had.

Now the Epicureans, who are they?

They're people who didn't care that they believed there was a God, but he didn't care about humans.

He just did his own thing.

He wasn't around.

And to them, the ultimate purpose in life was pleasure.

But it's not just the sexual pleasure that we instantly think about when we say pleasure.

It's talking about mostly about being like in tranquility, being in nature, being one with nature, being one with your surroundings, not being pulled down by human thought, but just being in complete tranquility, complete pleasure.

Then the Stoics, on the other hand, they believed that they had the same faculty, intelligence as God.

They believed that God was almost, in a sense, not even worth looking after, because we had the same thinking as him.

They believed the top priority for them was self-sufficiency.

And when that was compromised, you were useless.

You didn't matter anymore.

That's the Stoic philosophy.

So that when they look at Paul, they consider him a babbler.

One, and what it means, what babbler means is one who picks up the seed of other philosophies.

He just picks at it like a chicken.

That's what it means.

That babbler, that's what they're talking about here.

So they're looking at Paul, and he's just one that just has no idea what he's talking about, they think.

He's just one who picks at seeds of philosophy, of seeds of thought, and brings it in.

But he's talking about what Paul's doing here is he talking he's talking about Jesus and the resurrection.

So as we go and tell in the community of Port Perry or in Oshawa or Uxbridge, we are to tell people about Jesus and the resurrection.

That is our mandate as we go and tell.

And maybe you're here and you're interested, or maybe you're new to Christianity, but you don't want to be called a babbler.

No one wants to be called a babbler, one who picks at things.

But first we need to remember that if Jesus rose from the dead, that changes everything.

That change all world views crumble with that truth.

And if you're curious in that, next week we'll be doing the learner's exchange at 9 a.m.

And we'll be approaching some of the common issues with the resurrection.

And I would greatly encourage you to come to that.

Even if you hold to the resurrection, I would greatly encourage you to come to it, to deepen your faith and your understanding about it.

And second, you're not alone.

You have a church family, you have these people who are around you that can encourage you as you go and bring the gospel to the community, as you be a go-and-tell disciple.

And Jesus was persecuted and killed for his faith, for killed for what he taught, that the kingdom of heaven is here and that I am the Messiah.

So they invite him to go speak about it more, about Jesus and the resurrection more.

And they and what Arepagus, I know I'm saying it wrong, but Arepagus is what it is, is a theater.

It was the place where all thought, all decisions were made within the community.

It's where people came and debated ideas.

It's where if someone had a problem, people would sit and the person would bring the problem and they'd make decisions.

It was the heart of Athens, this place.

And they bring Paul there.

And you might be thinking, why are we talking about idolatry?

Isn't that an ancient thing that people did before technology and science?

That's a good question.

That is something that we need to approach.

Why are we talking about idolatry?

Well, idolatry is something that is very present in our lives, it just looks differently.

Look at verse 21.

Now, all the Athenians and the foreigners who live there would spend their time in nothing, in nothing except telling or hearing something new.

Doesn't this sound very familiar to us?

Our hearts have an appetite for anything that's new.

Anything that has is sparkling and shiny, we want that.

And you might be saying, Matt, I disagree.

I would encourage you to watch the late uh when the next Apple product comes out, watch the release.

Watch the release of that.

Or when we go to a mall, if you really think about it, we go to a mall and we walk down the main aisle in a mall.

We have all these shops on each side.

And what what we see is that these shops promise on their mannequins that if you dress like this mannequin, you will live the perfect life.

And the place is filled with all pictures of people smiling, living.

If you go to an outdoor store, you see people living these crazy lives on mountains.

But are you like when you buy the clothes, that really doesn't happen.

You don't get transformed.

But it's these I these are forms of idolatry in our lives that we think that if we can look like that, if we can be like that picture in this life, this will give us a good life.

Or when when we scroll Instagram, we see people with these great lot great lives that we believe that we believe on Instagram.

But what we see here is just these images that make us want that life.

We start going after it, we start envying it.

When people travel to Athens now, they're just going to see the history and architecture.

Maybe the idol worship has changed.

We're not in communities anymore full of idols, full of statues of things.

But it just looks differently.

And an idol is an object, a purpose, a thing that we commit our lives to that replaces God.

That we that separates us from God farther.

That turns our eyes from heaven to the earth to created things.

Any object, anything, anything that turns your eyes from God becomes an idol when you commit your life to it.

And I'm not saying that you can't have a focus in your life to do something, but when that focus takes you off God, the living God, off of Jesus, off of the cross, that is an idol.

And that is something you need to get rid of.

Jesus commands it.

Now you may be asking, well, what are what are idols?

Our hearts long for them.

It could be anything.

It could be jealousy for what somebody has.

It could be envy, fame, wealth, power, sex, fitness, food, church, liturgy, worship, spouses, friends, family, recreate recreation, and knowledge.

It could be anything.

Our hearts want to worship something.

Augustine said a great quote our hearts are restless until we rest in God.

That is when our hearts become the most full and satisfied.

When God is at the center of our hearts.

We are created to worship the living God, for our hearts are broken.

At the beginning of the Bible, it shows how our hearts become broken with Adam and Eve as they try to make themselves like God.

And they take the apple and they eat it and they become like God in the sense where they can make moral decisions.

And they go off because now they elevate their own decisions above God.

Then Paul knows this struggle.

He's surrounded by it.

He sees it when he's in Athens.

And he himself knows what the struggle is like because he was consumed by covetedness.

He talks about it.

He coveted things, and the law of God showed him his covetedness, but he can never change it.

He can never change his jealousy over people.

Now you might be thinking, well, if this is the case, or maybe this is ringed home to you in your mind.

Maybe you're thinking about there's something in my life that I just can't let go of.

I just need it so bad.

But you know it takes you from your eyes off of God, from worshiping God.

You may be asking, well, how do I break this?

Well, let's see what it says in the text next.

Verses 22 to 33.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Arabagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.

Because that's what happens when we start to idolize things in our lives, and things start to consume our hearts.

We become religious about them.

That is what happens.

We raise them up like gods.

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.

Known 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 the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and 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, and 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 his 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.

So Paul went out from their midst.

See, Paul speaks directly to their hearts.

They are obsessed with idols, they are obsessed with worshiping these gods that they have fastened with their own hands before them.

But nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed from then to now.

We all try to feel our way to God.

Did you notice that in the text?

In verse 27, when he says that God created man, and he let them, as when after the fall, he let them do their own thing.

But he kept trying to call them back to himself.

But all creation speaks of God.

And God allowed them in their ignorance to allow them to that maybe that they would feel their way back, that they would grope their way back to him.

But it never happened.

He kept bringing himself into the picture, and they kept pushing him away because they wanted to worship idols.

And that's what's going on in Athens here.

The place is full of worship, worshiping.

They want to fill this void in their hearts, and we do that today.

We try to fill these voids in our hearts.

And that void will always be a void until you let Jesus, the Holy Spirit, come into your heart and break you from it.

See, everything in life points to the living God.

We look around it, everything does.

We just celebrated Easter, the glorious truth that God sent his son into the world to die and rise from the dead, that all who repent and believe will have eternal life.

The living God did this, sent his son into the world.

Only through Jesus will your heart stop trying to worship things other than God.

Only through the risen Lord will your heart rest in him.

People will mock you and call you a bagler, but blessed are those who are persecuted for Jesus' sake.

We have a great insurance in Jesus, because he rose from the dead and he's the savior of the world.

See, only the gospel can speak directly to our hearts as we give up more of ourselves and rest in Jesus, and the Spirit enters into more and more of our lives.

See, as that happens, we experience a great release.

We experience this release that as we constantly try to hold on to things that be our gods, as the gospel becomes more real in our lives, we lay as we lay down ourselves, as Matt lays down himself and the gospel becomes more real in his life, that Jesus comes in more and more, and his heart can worship God.

That is what happens when Jesus is so real in your life.

That is we worship God.

And that is what Paul is trying to say to Athenians, to the people there, is that you worship these things made by man, but there is a God that this unknown God in your ignorance that you worship, you don't even know who it is, but that is Jesus.

It is God.

Our hearts are designed to worship, but without Jesus, they will never worship the living God.

They'll always replace them.

Let us pray.

Our hearts so easily go after other things in this world.

And it could be good things.

But Father, help us.

We can't do it on our own.

Father, we just pray that the Spirit would become more real in our lives, that the Spirit would work in our hearts, that our hearts would cry out to you to come.

Come, Lord Jesus.

And I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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God bless you and keep you today and every day.