Sugar Land Bible Church

Dr. Andy Woods: Let's take our Bibles this evening and open them to the book of Acts, chapter 17 and verse 28. I need to make an announcement at the end concerning furniture moving around in here for the ladies' conference fellowship luncheon. If I forget, sometimes I forget to make announcements, can somebody remind me? By the way, there's going to be a really good speaker at this luncheon, but we need help afterward. I highly recommend the speaker because it's my wife, and she's a good Bible teacher.

So, Acts 17. We are in that section of the book, the third part of the book, where you'll be my witnesses to the remote parts of the earth, which is chapters 13 through 28. We're right in the middle of the second missionary journey. Lord willing, I'd love to finish chapter 17 tonight. We just have 22 verses or so to finish the second journey in subsequent studies, but that's what the second journey looked like. These are all the places that Paul has been, and he is now in the midst of his Athens ministry.

His Athens ministry is first his witness in Athens. He's kind of made fun of; he's called a babbler. He was looked at as kind of an itinerant philosopher. So, they brought him before this place called the Areopagus, Mars Hill, which was kind of a venue for itinerant preachers. It wasn't really a pulpit; it wasn't a bunch of people saying amen. It was just a place where you could get a hearing. They brought him there because he was teaching some strange doctrines to their ears. These people, it's kind of like a local Starbucks; they were just sitting around all day, and their favorite thing was to hear something new. If you've ever been in coffee shops where people just talk and talk, the more novel your ideas are, the bigger an audience you can get.

That was kind of what the Areopagus was like, but it gave Paul a chance to present the gospel. So his speech, which is a classic speech, is given in verses 22 through 31. Then, in verses 32 through 34, we have the response of the Athenians. He's at the part of his speech where it's to an unknown God. There's been an introduction, and he starts off with the characteristics of God. He's talked about God as Creator in verse 24, God as sufficient in verse 25, the fact that we owe our origin to one man, we're all linked to Adam in verse 26, and how God has divided humanity into different boundaries or nations to prevent kind of Tower of Babel totalitarianism so that men might have the freedom to seek Him.

Then he gets to verse 28, where he talks about God as man's preserver. Notice what he says there in Acts 17:28. He says, "For in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your poets have said, 'For we are also his children.'" You'll notice, and we made a point of this last time, that Paul does not start his speech there on Mars Hill with the scriptures as he does in the synagogues. His habit is always to go to the synagogue first. He did that with Thessalonica in verse one, he did that in Berea in verse 10, and he did it in Athens in verse 17. When he's in the synagogue with the Jews, he always starts with the scriptures.

Acts 17:1 says, "Now when they traveled through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And according to Paul's custom, he visited them for three Sabbaths and reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead, saying, 'This is the Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ.'" He would seek to show from the scriptures that Jesus is, in fact, the long-awaited Messiah. He does that in the synagogues because he's with Jewish people, Hebrews that respect the Hebrew Bible that we call the Old Testament.

But when he's on Mars Hill, and he did this once before in Lystra amongst non-Jewish Gentile unbelievers, he does not start with the scriptures because that wouldn't do him any good because they don't accept the scriptures. So he starts with the revelation of God that they did know, which is general revelation. God has spoken in two books: general revelation and special revelation. General revelation is everything you can see all around you. You don't have to know anything about the Bible to see the handiwork of God in creation. Special revelation is what God has spoken in scripture.

If people won't accept the authority of the scripture, then he starts with the revelation that they did know, which was creation, conscience, and these kinds of things which also point to the existence of God. That's what Paul's doing here. He's appealing to general revelation because he's with a non-Jewish, unsaved people. He obviously knew their beliefs pretty well because he starts quoting from their own pagan poets. Arnold Fruchtenbaum has a comment here where he talks about all of the different pagan poets that Paul is referring to on the Areopagus on Mars Hill.

Fruchtenbaum says the fifth characteristic is that God is the preserver of man in verse 28. Paul pointed to the fact that in Him we live and move and have our being. This was the proof of God's nearness instead of stoic pantheism. There was real immanence, which means nearness with God. God is not way out there somewhere; He's near you. Paul provided an ascending scale reaching a climax. We live, therefore we have life. We move, therefore there is movement. We have our being, therefore there is existence.

Then Paul reminded his listeners that some of their own poets have said the same things. Among them are Aratus Soli, and you can see when the time of his life was, 315 to 240 BC, a few centuries earlier from Paul's perspective. And the already mentioned Cretan poet Epimenides, who had this to say to the god of Zeus. Here, Fruchtenbaum is quoting a longer version of the pagan poet that Paul is referencing: "They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one. The Cretans..." Paul quotes this in the book of Titus, by the way, this second line here: "The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, and idle bellies."

He quotes that to Titus, who's trying to be a pastor on the island of Crete. So how'd you like to pastor that group? A bunch of people that are liars, evil beasts, and idle bellies. He quotes Epimenides to prove the character of these people. "But thou art not dead, thou livest and abidest forever. For in thee we live and move and have our being." Well, that's exactly what Paul says right there in verse 28. "For in him we move, we live, we move, we exist, as some of your own poets have said." He's giving them truths about God that they themselves even could recognize in general revelation.

Fruchtenbaum says Paul quoted the same poet in Titus 1:12. Another poet would have been Cleanthes, the son of Phanias of Assos and head of the Stoic school in Athens from 263 to 232 BC. It is impressive that Paul had a total grasp of the Hebrew Bible, and it's also impressive that he had a grasp of pagan philosophy to the point where he knew which parts of it, without endorsing all of it, pointed to the truth. The Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary notes his hymn to Zeus, a surviving poem, contains the words quoted by Paul in his address before the Areopagus court, Acts 17:28. Regarding Zeus, Cleanthes wrote, "For we are your offspring."

That sounds familiar because that's exactly what Paul says here at the end of verse 28: "For we also are his offspring." So what is Paul doing here? Is he giving a blanket endorsement of pagan literature and saying it all has truth in it? No, he's quoting parts of it that even paganism recognizes as true. It's not an endorsement of everything that these pagan poets say, but he could recognize the parts of it that were worth retaining that were actually biblically accurate because God has spoken in two sources. He's spoken in special revelation, and he's also spoken in general revelation.

It's interesting when you talk about the flood in Noah's day. Noah's ark, eight saved on the ark. It's fascinating to learn that there are 300 flood legends floating around out there besides what you read about in the Bible. They talk about an ark. One of them talks about eight people being saved. But it's interesting their dimensions of the ark are different. Engineers have looked at the measurements of the ark and it wouldn't really float; it would kind of roll over like a bottle in water.

Whereas you look at the dimensions of the ark described in the Bible, and there have been engineers that look at that—if you're interested in that, I'd recommend the book by a guy named Woodmorappe. His book is *Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study*. He says unlike the pagan ark stories, the biblical account gives engineering dimensions that would float perfectly in the midst of a storm. The pagan renditions would not. And also the pagan renditions deny sin. The reason there was a flood is the gods were trying to take a nap and the earth dwellers were too noisy, so they sent a flood.

They're also not monotheistic. So the Bible says there's one God, and these pagan flood accounts give you this idea that the gods were many gods, and they were trying to take a nap and they got irritated with the earth dwellers and so they sent a flood. What does that show us? It basically shows us that the flood account really did happen because they all got this similar storyline from somewhere, and it was passed down through oral tradition.

Moses just comes along in the year 1446 roughly and gives you the right rendition of what happened, but these flood account stories existed on the books centuries before Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Where did they get this story from? They obviously took something that was true, and they kept the true parts, but then the parts of it that didn't fit their pagan belief system, they changed. They got rid of sin in their story, they got rid of monotheism in their story, and they tampered with the dimensions of the ark.

Even in those pagan flood accounts, there are some things that are accurate, although it's not some kind of carte blanche approval of everything that they wrote. That's kind of the idea that Paul is working with here. There are some things in paganism that are accurate, and Paul knows pagan philosophy well enough to go into the parts of the story that were correct and use them as a springboard to preach the gospel. But when Paul does that, he does it as an apostle, and he's not giving a carte blanche endorsement of everything in those pagan poets.

It's kind of like people quoting Thomas Jefferson. We all quote Thomas Jefferson. He wrote the Declaration of Independence: "We are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights," and things of that nature. You can quote that and say Thomas Jefferson was completely correct in what he said there. However, there are things about Thomas Jefferson that I don't think I would touch with a ten-foot pole. Depending on what phase of his life you're dealing with, he kind of had a skewed view of the Trinity.

He also was an actual slave owner, even though he said in the Declaration of Independence that we're endowed with unalienable rights. People have all these excuses for him, that in Virginia it was illegal to let your slaves go and all these kinds of things. But my point is when you quote the Declaration of Independence, you're not saying everything that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote is wonderful. But what he said in the Declaration of Independence is so important that we quote him selectively. That's what Paul's doing with these pagan poets. He's finding the parts of general revelation that are accurate and he's using that as a springboard to teach the gospel.

He does it this way because he can't use the Old Testament because they would just laugh at him, because the Old Testament there on Mars Hill had no validity. So that's what Paul's doing in verse 28 when he quotes these pagan poets. There's a lot in what's going on today in Christian education where people think that they're qualified now to go into their big mantra—all truth is God's truth. So they think they're qualified to go into Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud and try to find that needle in the haystack and integrate it with scripture. That's called the integrationist movement.

I'm not even sure we're qualified to be able to do that because Paul did it as an apostle. We're not apostles. He was directed by the Holy Spirit in a very unique and special way to record God's truth, and so he could obviously make discernment and make calls that the rest of us really aren't qualified to make. But he did it here. He found some things in paganism that they all had read and known that were true, and he's using that as kind of a springboard to preach the gospel.

So he's described God. He's given tremendous theology there in verses 23 through 28 based on things that they could see, things they were familiar with, things all around them. When you're sharing with people, you have to be sensitive as to what kind of person it is you're sharing with. If you're sharing with someone that respects the Old Testament, like a Jewish person, let's say, that's a great opportunity to use the Old Testament to point towards Jesus.

But that approach may not work so well with someone that has no Jewish background at all and doesn't believe that the Bible at all is inspired. If you're dealing with someone like that, you might appeal to general revelation. Where did everything come from? The teleological argument as it's called, the argument from design. If there's design, there must be a designer, right? Everybody knows that. That argument might work really well with someone that has no respect for scripture because you're appealing to the scripture that they do know, because God has revealed himself in two sources.

You might make an appeal to conscience. Conscience means "with knowledge." Conscience means "with knowledge," and so according to Romans 2, this is also part of general revelation. Everyone has an invisible barometer inside of them of right and wrong. Everybody knows the Ten Commandments, whether they've ever read them or not, because they're written on our hearts, meaning that when they steal something, they know it's wrong. Conscience alternatively excuses and accuses.

So backing up to our slide here just for a minute on general revelation, one of the aspects of general revelation is right here: conscience. Psychologists say the problem is everybody feels guilty. Well, the reason everybody feels guilty is because we're guilty. We violate conscience constantly. When you're dealing with someone that's unsaved, that doesn't have any respect or knowledge of the scripture, you might say something like, "Have you ever stolen anything?" I mean any little thing, like a paperclip taking it home from the office that's not yours. Well, if you've stolen something, that makes you a thief, right?

They say, "Well, I only did it once." Is that what they say in a court of law? "Gee, your honor, I only knocked off the liquor store one time." A crime is a crime, right? So everybody knows that they're criminals instinctively because of something in general revelation called conscience. That's a great opportunity to explain to someone that someone bigger than you put that there to show you you need a savior. So my point is you're using different approaches depending on the audience that you're talking to. That's exactly what Paul's doing here on Mars Hill.

So now that he's described God from general revelation, he gets to what he wants them to do with the information. What is their responsibility? They're supposed to do three things. The first thing he wants them to do is to reject idolatry, and that's in verse 29. He says, "Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that divine nature is like gold or silver or stone or an image formed by the art and the thought of man." So God is not a rock, God is not a tree, God is not a statue.

Remember, he looked throughout Athens and he saw these different statues and idols and he was grieved, he was provoked. You see that back in verse 16. While Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols. So you notice he's quoting their pagan literature, but he's not endorsing paganism. He's using it as a springboard to teach the truth, and he says stop being idolaters. God is not something that can be contained by gold, silver, or stone.

He's not a painting, he's not a picture, he's not a portrait. So he's telling them to reject God as they understand Him and embrace God as He really is. Once you do that, you stop being an idolater because an idolater is someone that worships something in the place of God. And that's how God wants to be approached; He wants to be approached through the vehicle of truth. Jesus said that in John 4:23 and 24 as he was speaking to the woman at the well. He says, "An hour is coming and now is, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers."

God is looking for worshipers. "God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth." So how do you become a worshiper of God? Is it a feeling, is it a musical instrument? What it is is you're worshiping God as He is, not how we prefer Him to be, but how He actually is. Once you move in that direction, then you're an authentic worshiper. And those are the types of people that God is actually looking for. A lot of people worship God because they think they're going to get something from Him, like he's going to make me rich or something like that, when that's not some kind of promise that God ever made.

In fact, what He tells you is that sometimes you lose everything if you follow Jesus as He is. So not coming to God with some kind of false idea, false expectation, but you come to God actually as He really is and that's true worship. So worship really has nothing to do with musical instruments, and it has really little to do with how it makes you feel at any given moment. You can worship God with contemporary music, you can worship God with liturgical music, you can worship God acappella.

But those kinds of things are just incidentals. Really what God is looking for is the truth element. As long as the lyrics and things like that are truthful, then that's what really matters to God. Are they biblically accurate and are we coming to God as He is, not based on our preferences? And so that's what Paul's saying here to these Athenians: reject idolatry.

These are three R's, by the way: reject idolatry. The second R is to repent. Look at verse 30. "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is declaring to all men that all people everywhere should repent." So what does that mean to repent? The Greek is *metanoeo*, which is a compound word: two words making up a single word. You recognize "meta" as in "change"—your cancer has metastasized, the doctor says, which is never good news, meaning it's changed from one part of your body to another. That's what meta means: metamorphosis. And then the second is "noeo," where we get the word notion or idea, which comes out of the mind. So *metanoeo* means to change your mind.

That's what he's telling these people to do. You've been worshiping all of these idols, now you know the truth, and I want you to change your mind about who God is. As a result of that change of mind, I want you to place your trust in that God for salvation. So in that sense, repentance is a synonym for believe. What's a synonym? Different word, same meaning. That's a synonym. So whenever you see this word repentance as held out to unsaved people, what they have to do to be made right with God, a synonym for that is to believe. To believe means to trust.

So when you got saved, did you believe or did you repent? And the answer is yes, you did both because the moment you placed your trust in Christ for salvation is the moment your mind changed about him. I heard the gospel when I was 16. I understood for the first time, for whatever reason I finally got it, that we're not saved on the basis of works. We're saved on the basis of His work, and I placed my trust in what He accomplished for me instead of trusting in my own work. I trusted in His work, and the moment I placed my trust in Him, my mind automatically changed.

You can't really believe without repenting. True faith is accompanied by repentance, a change of mind. So in that sense, when you see the word repent in the Bible used in the context of what unsaved people have to do, it's a synonym for faith. So Lewis Sperry Chafer says about this: "This vital newness of mind is part of believing, after all, and therefore it may be used as a synonym for believing at times. Repentance cannot be added to believing as a condition of salvation because upwards of 150 passages of scripture condition salvation upon believing only."

The way the gospel is wrongly taught today is they say if you want to be made right with God, there's two steps—we call this the Texas two-step. You have to repent and—every time you see a plus, you know there's a problem because there's only one condition of salvation—you have to repent and number two, believe. If you believe without repentance, then you're not a Christian. Unfortunately, they come along and they define repentance as penance. In fact, the Rheims English translation, instead of using repentance, will put in the word penance because that's the Roman Catholic English translation.

It sounds the same, right? Repent kind of sounds like penance. But if that's the way you think, you have a false gospel because penance is something you do on the outside. You've got to show contrition, you've got to cry a river, you've got to walk an aisle, you've got to sign a card, you've got to stand up in front of man, you've got to pick up your cross and follow Jesus. All of that goes under the category of penance, and then they say you've got to do that plus you've got to believe.

Well, if that's the gospel, then the gospel is based on what I do, not based on what He did. I'm not receiving what He did as a gift. Paul says very clearly by the works of the law, no man shall be justified. People think you've got to do something extra besides believing in order to be a true Christian, and it's a horrible burden to put people under because if you think that the gospel is you've got to repent of all of your sins plus believe, how do you know if you've really done penance for all of your sins?

How would you ever know that? What about sins that we committed years ago that we can't even remember? So you spend your whole life as a Christian wondering if I've done enough penance, and it's just a damnable heresy because they're defining penance by, I think this is repentance, by this Latin word. The Bible wasn't written in Latin; it was written in Koine Greek. What's the Greek definition of repentance? It's "change of mind." It's got nothing to do with renouncing your sins and trying harder and crying a river and feeling bad about yourself.

God is not interested in accepting any of us on that basis. What He wants us to do is to place our trust in what He did. Once you do that, your mind just changed. They're two sides of the same coin. So that's why Chafer said believe is actually a synonym for repentance. Now what about sins in the life of the Christian? Well, don't worry about that; God will take care of that after you get saved. After you get saved and the Holy Spirit is inside of you, God will start to deal with you about profanity and sarcasm and embezzlement or all those other things.

He's pretty good at pointing those things out. Can I get an amen on that? Okay, I only saw half the hands go up, and the other half you guys are in sin right now because you're lying, right? Self-deception. So what's happening is we're getting the cart before the horse. People think the gospel is "clean yourself up and come to Jesus." I've heard preachers say that; that is not the gospel. The gospel is "come to Jesus on Jesus' terms," and the cleaning up He will take care of. He deals with us all differently, but those are related to growth.

They're not related to initial justification before God where He declares you His child. So how do I know all this is true? Well, look down at verse 34. It says, "But some men joined him and believed." Well, I thought they repented in verse 30. Now it's saying they believed. So which is it? Well, it's both because repentance and belief, understood the way I'm explaining it, are two sides of the same coin. So whenever you're seeing repentance in the book of Acts, just keep reading and you're going to run into believe at some point because these terms are used interchangeably.

Let me show you one other place where this happens. It's in Acts 2:38. Peter said to them, "Repent"—this is his opening sermon on the day of Pentecost—"and each of you be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the Holy Spirit." There he's using *metanoeo*, change your mind about Christ. And then a few verses later, it says, "All those who believed," Acts 2:44, "were together and had all things in common."

Well, which is it? Did they repent or did they believe? They repented in verse 38; they believed in verse 44. Which is it? Well, it's both because repentance and belief are two sides of the same coin. This is what Chafer is talking about when he says repentance is just a synonym for believing. There's nothing in the Bible, if you guys can find the verse, I'll be happy to eat my words, but there's nothing in the Bible that says to be made right with God, I have to repent of my sins. Never says that.

It's not a repentance away from something as much as it is a repentance or a change of mind toward something. I'm turning towards God. I'm rejecting a false notion of who God is. I'm turning towards him in truth, knowing who he is as the Son of God and that he has the power to save me. I'm placing my trust in him, and when I do that, my mind changed. When I trusted, which was what believe means, when I did that, my mind changed. Two sides of the same coin. No Texas two-step here, no multiple steps on justification. Try to keep the gospel the gospel, and if you garble it, it's not God's gospel anymore; it's man's gospel.

So going back to verse 30, he says, "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to all people everywhere that they should repent." What does this mean here when it says therefore God has overlooked the times of ignorance? What it's saying is the day of idolatry is over. You know the truth. The day of worshiping these images and this temple to an unknown God, it's all done. You're now responsible for what truth has been communicated to you. As Paul has used general revelation as a springboard for truth, now that you know the truth, God is no longer going to put up with paganism and idolatry, worshiping God not as He is but how people want Him to be, because now they know the truth.

The same thing was said in Lystra to another pagan audience. Acts 14:16 says, "In the generations gone by, He permitted all the nations to go their way." That's very similar to what's being said here: "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is declaring to all men that all people everywhere should repent." When it comes to this issue of idolatry, God never let Israel get away with anything. That's why they went into the 70-year captivity.

They were told at Sinai: no gods before me. However, when it comes to non-Israelites, pagans, it's almost like God put up with it. He put up with it until His Son showed up in truth, and now the age of God putting up with paganism and idolatry is over because you know the truth. Paul's saying the exact same thing to Lystra, developing the attributes of God to a pagan audience from general revelation.

Number one, reject idolatry. Number two, repent. And number three, there's a reason—that's the third R—coming judgment. Look at what he says in verse 31: "Because"—he's giving a reason why they should repent—"he has fixed a day"—fixed means it's non-negotiable, right? It's like the train is coming. You can't change that; the only thing you can do is you can get out of its way is basically what he's saying here.

"Because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world"—that there is *oikoumene*, which I told you when we were back in verse nine that it could refer to the known world, but it can also refer to all the world depending on the context. Here it refers to all the world. "Because he has fixed a day in which he will judge in righteousness"—so it'll be a perfect judgment—"through a man whom he has appointed"—that'd be Jesus. And how do we know this judgment is coming? "Because he has furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead."

We know this judgment is coming because the tomb is empty and the resurrection of Jesus is now an objective, verifiable historical fact. The enemies of Christianity could have shut the whole thing down in a nanosecond. All they had to do is go into the tomb and get the body and put it on a cart or something and drag it through the city streets of Jerusalem and say, "You know what, this whole resurrected Christ thing that the apostles were aggressively preaching is a myth." And they could have stopped everything. There were plenty of people, believe me, at that time that would have loved to stop Christianity. But they never did that.

Isn't that weird? Very simple thing they could have just stopped it dead in its tracks; they never did that. You know why? Because there was no body anymore. He rose from the dead. And because he rose from the dead, that is proof that there's coming upon this world a judgment which will not be like the miscarriages of justice that we see today where judges do crazy things and juries turn a blind eye to evidence and all these kinds of things. You're not going to have that in this judgment; it's going to be done with righteousness and it's fixed. It's like a train that's coming; you can't stop it, just you can get on the right side is all you can do.

We know it's going to happen and Jesus is going to be the judge, and we know that's true because we have a precursor to it, the objective fact of the empty tomb. If God can raise Jesus from the dead, he can pull off this judgment, right? What he's referring to here is the Great White Throne Judgment, which is Revelation 20:11-15. It's a terrible judgment. I don't even know if we're as God's people going to be around to see it; I don't want to see it to be honest with you.

But it's a record of everyone whose name is not found in the Lamb's Book of Life as they're brought into actually resurrected bodies emptied out of Hades itself. As their names are not found written in the Lamb's Book of Life, they're thrown into the lake of fire where the beast and the false prophet already are, and where the devil was just thrown into back in verse 10, and that's their fate. Wow. So that judgment is coming; I can't stop it. I wish I could stop it, but it's not left up to me to stop it because it's fixed.

Only thing I can do is get on the right side of God so I'm not on the wrong side of God when this judgment happens. The only way to get on the right side of God is to do what Paul says here: repent, change your mind about Jesus, which is a synonym for believe or trust in him. So there's different judgments in the Bible: the Sheep and Goat judgment, the judgment of the Jews (that's for people that survive the tribulation period). Then there's our judgment, the Bema Seat, where we're rewarded or not based on how we allowed the Lord to express himself through us during this earthly sojourn. That's in the Father's house right after the rapture.

But the one I'm speaking of here is the Great White Throne. That's the one he's talking about right here, the one that's fixed, the one that's coming, the one that will be done with complete and total righteousness. The objective fact of the empty tomb tells us that this judgment is coming. If God can raise Jesus from the dead, He can pull off this judgment, right? So that's quite an evangelistic presentation without even a Bible. He's starting from what they knew and he's reasoning to truth. It's absolutely brilliant what he does here.

Is Jesus going to be the judge? Well, when you look at verse 31, it says He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world through a man. That's Jesus, whom He has appointed. That's Jesus, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. That's Jesus. Jesus is ultimately the one under the Father's delegated authority orchestrating the Great White Throne Judgment.

Jesus said this in John 5:22: "For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son." So what should you do? Three R's: reject idolatry in verse 29, repent in verse 30—the reason you should repent—the train's coming, you don't want to be caught in the middle. It's fixed.

How do they respond? Do they all stand up and say, "Praise the Lord"? No, the response is very, very mixed. You got two negative responses in verse 32, Paul leaves in verse 33, and then you get one positive response. What are the two negative responses? The first thing people did is they started to make fun of Paul. Verse 32: "Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer."

Why would they be sneering? Because gnosticism was dominant in this area, and the gnostics taught that the physical world is bad and the spiritual world is good. So what do you mean God became a man? That's ridiculous. Don't you know the physical world is evil? Why would God become a man? And keep in mind that Athens, which is right here, is not too far from Corinth, which is right there, just across the land bridge, the isthmus. So this philosophy existed in Corinth just like it did in Athens.

When you understand that, you understand why Paul has to include the resurrection chapter to the Corinthians because they were steeped also in gnosticism that the physical world is bad. A whole chapter in your Bible on resurrection: 1 Corinthians 15:14. One of the most famous verses: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and also your faith is in vain." So all of Christianity revolves around this resurrection, and the Corinthian church was throwing it overboard because they had been seduced by gnostic dualism.

Here's another map showing you how close Athens is to Corinth, practically next-door neighbors. So that's why they're sneering at Paul; this is ridiculous. Their second response is also negative: it's postponement. Verse 32: "Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, which he just mentioned in verse 31, some began to sneer, but others said, 'We shall hear you again concerning this.'" In other words, they took a decision and they just postponed it; they kicked the can down the road. "I'll make up my mind next month, next year, next time you're traveling through, not today."

So when you postpone a decision, you know what you just did? You made a decision. Postponements are tricky; we think we're postponing a decision, but actually you're making a decision not to make a decision, which is a decision. Very dangerous to gamble with your eternity that way. "I'll get on to this stuff next month." How do you know there's going to be a next month? Is there something guaranteed that we're going to live till next month?

How many people in this flock have passed away since I've been here in 2010? I can think of just off the top of my head 5, 10, 15, 20 God-fearing people that their time was up, and I've seen a lot of others that have come close to death. My own father passed away, a figure larger than life, an associate justice in the California judicial system, California Court of Appeals, a triathlete. My hero growing up, my dad. At 88, time to go. He was saved though, praise God. When he was dying, I said, "Dad, Jesus got this whole thing under control." He said, "I'm really glad to hear that." He knew the truth; we had talked about the truth, he had trusted in the truth, but he needed a little bit of affirmation, which was one of the great ministries that God gave me at my father's bedside.

So when is your number up? Who knows? So how dumb is it to say I'm going to postpone a decision? You postpone a decision, you just made one, and you're gambling with your future. What does the book of Proverbs say? "Don't boast in tomorrow. You don't know what a day will behold or become." I mean, you have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow.

So the first group mocked him, the second group made a postponement decision, Paul leaves in verse 33. So Paul went out of their midst. Now you notice that it doesn't say as in verse 10 "the brethren immediately sent Paul away." So we get the idea that this happened in such a way that there wasn't a church that started right away. There later became a church at Athens. We think one of the people mentioned in verse 34 was influential as a leader in the church, but the church probably didn't start this split second; it would take some time.

But then happily, there's a positive response. Two negative responses, Paul leaves, one positive response: verse 34. "But some," not all, "men joined him and believed." Well wait a minute, I thought they were supposed to repent in verse 30. God is now declaring that all men everywhere should repent. Well, these people didn't repent, they believed. Why use a different word? Because they're synonyms, right? Different word, same meaning. They trusted in the message and, more important than the message, the person of Jesus Christ.

And when they did that, their mind changed—*metanoeo*. Doesn't say they repented of their sins, it doesn't say penance. They just trusted in Christ. When you trust in Christ, you're not trusting in anything else for your eternity and the safekeeping of your soul, meaning your mind changed. When I trusted, which was what believe means, when I did that, my mind changed. Two sides of the same coin. So no Texas two-step here, no multiple steps on justification.

"But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius, Dionysius I think is how you say that, the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris and others." So who is this Dionysius the Areopagite? Arnold Fruchtenbaum writes, "While no church was planted at this time, some did believe. Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them. The fact that Dionysius was described as an Areopagite showed that he was a member of the council of Areopagus. He was one of the movers and shakers that brought Paul in for a hearing."

He was convinced and he became a believer. Now look at this: according to fourth-century historian Eusebius—so we don't have a church immediately, but Eusebius in the fourth century says a church started here—Dionysius became the bishop of the church at Athens and died as a martyr. Also mentioned is Damaris. She was probably an aristocrat as was Dionysius. There were others, so a group called others got saved, though unnamed, who also believed.

So you'll notice that a woman gets saved. Look at that. Luke even makes a point by saying a woman named Damaris. Why does he keep bringing up women? Because he's showing that the gospel is for everyone. Women were treated like subclass citizens when this was written, and Luke is trying to show that the gospel's for everybody. If they're on the outer edges of society, if they're rejected, the gospel's for them too. As you go through Luke's writings, particularly in Acts, he keeps saying "the women, the women, the women," over and over again he makes that point because the guy he's writing to is a guy named Theophilus who was a Roman and looked at by the Jews as kind of a conqueror, the enemy. He's saying Theophilus, the gospel's for you too.

Who was Paul's first convert in Europe? Lydia, a dealer of purple, it says in Acts 16:14. And others. So what you're seeing here is the outworking of 1 Corinthians 1:21. Remember Corinth is very near Athens. This is what Paul would say to the Corinthians later: "For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was pleased through the foolishness"—aren't they laughing at Paul?—"the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe." So God is not known through the great intellects of the world; he's known through the foolishness of preaching and the ones that know him are some, not everyone, because the whole thing looks so ridiculous. A lot of people just laughed at him.

What chapter of the Bible can you think of? Matthew 13, right? Parable of the sower. Didn't Jesus talk about a parable? He said the kingdom is going to be postponed, Matthew 12:24, the offer of the kingdom is taken off the table. No kingdom. By the way, when the kingdom comes, Isaiah 11:6-9, it says the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord. So obviously the earth is not filled with the knowledge of the Lord here because not everybody got saved; some got saved.

So that fits exactly with what Jesus said would happen while the kingdom's in postponement. It would be preached to different audiences. Depending on how the heart has been prepared, in most audiences it would be suffocated because the soil is not right. But the seed would fall on one batch of soil that would be very good, and it would bear a crop of, what did he say, thirty, sixty, a hundred-fold? So there's one group where people are going to hear it and they're going to receive it, but the other soils, for the most part, people will reject it. Jesus says that's going to be the norm in gospel proclamations throughout the church age that we're living in now with the kingdom in postponement.

So you guys are going out to evangelize Saturday; don't expect the whole town to "Yay, the evangelists are here!" and everybody in the town gets saved. Maybe it will happen that way, but likely it won't because God has given us a pattern. But it's going to fall on somebody's ears where the heart has been prepared and there's salvations. Praise God.

So that takes us to the end of his Athens ministry. Witness in Athens, his speech, the Athenians' response. So now he's going to move into Corinth. So read if you could for next time chapter 18, verses 1 through 18. And I'm going to try to finish the second missionary journey before we hit our summer break. So we just have half of chapter 18 to get through the next few weeks.

Let me pray and then I'll make our quick announcement. Father, grateful for your word, grateful for your truth, grateful for this man Paul, what you did with him at this time in history, in this part of the world. Help us to learn from these things and walk these things out by faith. We'll be careful to give you all the praise and the glory. We ask these things in Jesus' name. God's people said, amen.