Engaging Our Culture

So we've been looking these last couple of weeks at engaging our culture and we've been
seeing together that the challenge for the Apostle Paul in the city of Athens, as is
our challenge increasingly in the world today, is how do we engage a culture whose belief
systems are increasingly at odds with those of God's people.
Tim Keller makes the observation that 20 or 30 years ago if you wanted to do evangelism
in a city, you could call in an evangelist, you could hire a large room, even a stadium
depending on the popularity of the evangelist, and he could preach an old-fashioned gospel
message of sin, salvation, and service.
You'd fill the auditorium, you'd fill the stadium, and many people would come to faith.
He says today, that's the exception.
You can hardly ever do that in this modern day and age.
The reason, he says, is because society's belief system has shifted from what was essentially
a biblical world and life view, even if they didn't practice it, to a world and life view
that is increasingly non-biblical.
And so the further society moves away from a biblical world and life view, the harder
a time you and I have to even talk to them about who God is, about what the Bible says,
what sin is, because a lot of those terms have been redefined.
And in modern society, sin is no longer what the Ten Commandments teach.
Sin is primarily reduced to you not tolerating what I want to tolerate.
So how do you make that connection?
Well, as we've been seeing, that's where Paul finds himself here in the city of Athens.
As long as he was in the synagogue, he was on very familiar territory, but once he moved
out into the marketplace, he ran into very different world and life views.
And so far, in the messages that we have previously conducted to so far, we have looked at three
aspects of his strategy in how to engage his culture.
Very quick review.
Number one, he goes to where the people are.
Number 17 of this particular passage, we read, let me find it here.
So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in
the marketplace, day by day with those who happened to be there.
The synagogue, of course, was familiar territory for him.
The marketplace was not.
Just to give you an overview of the geography of the city of Athens, watch this.
Here is the city plan or the outline of Athens back in those days.
Here is the Acropolis, which was another very high mountain.
That's what Acropolis means, the highest place in the city.
You will recall the Parthenon remains a major tourist attraction in the city of Athens even
today.
Here you have the Areopagus or Mars Hill, the picture of which we have seen before.
But here is the marketplace, Agora.
And if you look at the scale here, this is in meters, so these are just stone throws
from each other.
So Paul goes to the Areopagus after being in the marketplace, and he engages them.
That's the second thing that we have looked at together.
He engages them in conversation.
Verse 18, a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute or to debate with him.
The third strategy that we have followed is that he gets himself a hearing, and that is
verse 19, "They took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said
to him, 'May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting.'"
And here is a view of the Areopagus, if we can have that back up, in the modern city
of Athens.
So here's all the modern day buildings, but here is the Areopagus, and as I mentioned
last time, it continues to be a major, major tourist attraction in the city of Athens even
to this day.
So that brings us then this morning to his fourth, the fourth aspect of his strategy,
and that is in order to engage the culture, he builds on their existing belief system.
As verses 22 and 23, Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, "Men
of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious, for as I walked around and
looked carefully at your object of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription
to an unknown god.
Now would you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you."
You see what he's doing, he's tying in to their belief system, and their belief system
says in addition to all these hundreds of gods that we worship in the city of Athens,
we know there is a god whose name we don't know, but we have served him for many hundreds
of years.
Now Don Richardson, some of you may remember him as the author of Peace Child.
How many of you here have ever read the book Peace Child?
Certainly those of you that have gone through Christian high years ago will have read it.
It's an amazing story that reflects, that deals with reconciliation among the natives
of New Guinea whose value system is so turned upside down that the hero in biblical stories
is not Jesus, but Judas.
The more you can trick your enemy, the greater is the appreciation of you and your culture
if you can imagine that.
And the book Peace Child ties into a cultural practice among those tribes where actually
peace could be restored by the exchange of a child.
It's a whole story in itself if you've never read the book, it's fascinating, but this
is a subsequent book that he wrote called Eternity in Their Hearts.
In this book he cites a number of ancient authorities to give us the background to this
unknown god altar at Athens.
Apparently what had happened some 600 years earlier in the city of Athens is that it was
struck by a plague.
It was a very severe plague, try as they might, it would not lift.
They made sacrifices to all kinds of gods, but no god heard them.
So what to do, well they went to consult the Pythian oracle, located not that far you may
remember from Athens, and the oracle said you need to send a messenger to the island
of Crete.
And there you need to solicit the services of a prophet by the name of Epimenides.
Bring him back to Athens.
They did.
He surveyed the situation and he said here's what you need to do.
There is some god that you have not placated on account of this plague, and you need to
take a flock of black and white sheep.
You need to set them free on the grassy field next to the Areopagus early in the morning
and you need to let them graze.
And you need to pray that whatever god is in charge of this plague will give you a sign,
and this will be the sign that you need to look for, the sheep that lies down instead
of feeding when they're still hungry, that sheep you need to take, you need to sacrifice
it on an altar and that will turn away the wrath of God.
So that's what they did.
They put those sheep out in the field and lo and behold here and there were sheep that
lay down not because they were satisfied but clearly as a fleece or a sign of some spiritual
thing that was happening.
So some of those sheep were sacrificed in the proximity of temples that already existed,
but there was at least this one particular sheep not close to any existing temple.
So they built an altar there and they sacrificed that sheep and that became known as the altar
to the unknown god.
Very interesting story.
It's recorded for us by a Greek historian by the name of Diogenes Alertius and it has
been attested to in a variety of different ways by other ancient authorities.
Did it happen exactly the way that I'm describing it?
I don't know, but we do know that in Athens there was this altar to an unknown god because
they wanted to make sure that all the gods were covered.
Because remember back in those days as today there were two overriding concerns that people
had.
How do you make sense out of life that you cannot control and what happens when you die?
Placating the gods who were responsible or thought to be responsible for things that
happened was a very important part of everybody's everyday life.
And so Paul says so very clearly this god that you don't know, I am going to proclaim
to you.
And of course there's a power for Lessa there for us, isn't there?
Because if you're going to communicate Jesus, whether to your sons or daughters or grandchildren,
friends, neighbors or Lord knows who, you've got to begin where they are spiritually.
Now here's the very interesting thing, atheism and unbelief has been significantly on the
rise in the Western world in the last 10, 20 or 30 years and still the percentage of
people who profess faith in God continues to remain very high.
In the states it's somewhere between 85 and 90% of people claim to believe in God.
In Canada the number is somewhat less but probably still around 70 to 75%.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean the biblical God and it certainly doesn't mean the biblical
Jesus in all instances because God has been reduced to sort of a paternal grandfather
who loves everybody and he wouldn't look askance at anybody's sin.
And of course Jesus is the inclusive Jesus, everybody gets along with Jesus.
He's not the Jesus of scripture.
But there is still that knowledge of God and there is still some knowledge of biblical
truth and so you and I in conversing with people and engaging with people we can certainly
talk with them about who God is, what they believe about God and we can challenge them
on that level.
And even people who claim not to believe in God, everybody at heart is religious because
if your God is whatever or whoever you look to, to give purpose meaning in life and who
therefore you serve, then you see where idolatry continues to be as rampant today as it ever
was.
Because even the people who don't want to serve the true and living God of scripture
will serve their relationships, they will serve their spouse, they will serve the boss,
they will sacrifice time, talent and treasure for the object of their worship.
And part of our job is to help people identify what those places of idolatry, what those
are and drive home to people that just because they don't think they're religious, they
are indeed very religious.
They just don't know the God that they're serving.
So the place to start in engaging culture when you're in conversation is where do people
find themselves.
And you and I, we need to do a lot of listening so that we correctly understand people's world
and life views before we begin to judge, comment or critique because that's how we get a hearing.
I could say a lot more about that, I won't.
The next thing then that Paul does here is he begins to explain what this unknown God
is like and that's what the rest of his speech is.
And so we won't get through it all this morning but let's make a start of it and see what
he does.
Remember he's speaking to very smart people.
He's speaking to people who have spent their whole lifetime asking questions, having brilliant
conversations about the meaning and the purpose of life.
So how does he go about explaining who God is?
Well he starts off by explaining that God exists, listen carefully, independently from
and outside of creation.
Verse 24, the Lord God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven
and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.
Three things in that little verse I want to touch on just really quickly.
And the first is this, that God is outside of the universe and is its creator.
The God who made the world and everything in it has been created by God.
Now think back to what the Epicureans stood for and what the Stoics stood for and you
will see that this is a direct critique of what they believed about the origin of the
universe.
The Epicureans were materialists.
They believed the universe was not the product of the gods.
They thought the universe was the product of atoms coming together.
They were materialists, naturalists, like a lot of people are today who say God didn't
make the universe, it just came out of nowhere all by itself.
You see, new teachings are always old teachings because there's only so many thoughts to go
around and a lot of these ideas have been around forever.
Now the Stoics, they were what's known as a pantheist and a pantheist is like a new
ager today who believes that God is in everything and everything is God.
And so people talk about the spark of divinity.
It's very common today to say well, God lives in you and so all you have to do is to realize
your God potential, not realizing that everything that is in you because of sin is corrupt and
needs Jesus to get it straightened out.
So this was an attack, a subtle one on the understanding of both the Epicureans and the
Stoics as to how the world came about.
Then he goes on to say the very next thing is this God who made the world and everything
in it is the Lord of heaven and earth.
Now it's easy to read over that and miss the whole implication of it because this means
that God who created the whole world is actually sovereign and as Lord over heaven and earth
he controls the whole universe.
He is the God who is in charge of everything.
This is a direct criticism of their belief that the universe was controlled by fate.
It just happened.
They are impersonal forces and you better just make the best of it and as I said before
each of these schools of thought have their own way of coping with the universe that was
out of control.
Now he says the universe came from this unknown God that you don't know.
He created it.
He is totally and completely in charge of it and he said this God does not live in temples
built by hands.
He does not live in temples built by hands.
That means of course that's a criticism of idol worship.
As I said a moment ago the ancients like today had two overriding fears.
How do I live life when there are so many things that I cannot control and what happens
when I die is there life beyond death?
Do I go to heaven?
Do I go to hell?
And one of the ways in which the ancient world coped with those overriding issues and remember
death and destruction were everywhere in those days even as they are today though we can
anesthetize whatever the word is, dull them away with modern medicine and so these were
major issues and to control those issues they created idols and we'll talk more about those
later on but idols are a representation of spiritual powers behind the scene and they
had idols for everything.
They had idols for love.
They had idols for war.
They had idols for business.
They had idols for relationships.
And anytime you ran into trouble in any one of these areas what you did is you worship
the idol and you asked the idol to help you.
And while on the one hand idols were just dumb images they nevertheless had power because
there was spiritual power behind those images.
It was a way of controlling the gods so that life would go well for you.
And Paul says listen the God who made the heavens and the earth, this God who controls
the whole universe, this unknown God that you worship, this God does not fit in a temple.
He is too big all together.
Solomon many years earlier when he built the temple in the Old Testament echoed those same
words when he said but will God really dwell on earth with men?
The heavens even the highest heavens cannot contain you.
How much less this temple that I have built.
No building can contain God or reflect him.
Interestingly enough from a New Testament point of view the temple of the living God
is first and foremost Jesus and secondarily the church.
And so Jesus said to Philip in John chapter 14 anyone who has seen me has seen the father.
How can you say show us the father?
And to you and me he says be imitators of me as I am of Christ.
So you want to see God today?
You want to go where God is?
You look at an individual believer not only but when the church gathers together like
this and Jesus is in our midst and the reflection of Jesus in your life and in my life becomes
a reflection of who God is.
The reason idolatry was such serious business in the Old Testament is that no idol can fully
capture the characteristics of God and that's why the first commandment is you shall have
no other gods before me and the second commandment is one don't make any graven images because
you will always get the wrong impression.
So Paul starts with where they're at then he says I'm going to explain to you who God
is and the first thing he says about God is that he exists independently from and outside
of the universe and why is that important?
Because a lot of people will tell you prove to me that God exists and I will believe in
him isn't that true?
Isn't it even true in our own lives that we say well if only I could have a sign that
God exists then I would believe?
What's the problem with that?
The problem is God is outside of space and time and the scientific methods that we develop
in order to study the universe cannot study God.
You cannot put God under a microscope, you can't aim a telescope at him and that's why
when your scientific colleagues and the people that have bought into science try to tell
you science hasn't proven God to me, that's absolutely true but the reality is science
cannot prove God to you because God is outside of the scope of science, does that make sense?
You only know God indirectly through his reflection in nature but more especially by the revelation
of his word in his spirit.
Think of it as a sphere that we live inside of, God is outside of that, we cannot get
out there but God has to penetrate in to reveal himself.
That's where Paul is going in all of this because we'll see later on that he chooses
to reveal himself, he will gladly reveal himself to anybody who goes looking for him.
But you have to go looking for him, you cannot find him on your own and for that reason historically
all the arguments that have been created to try to prove that God exists always end up
falling short because a broken and an unbelieving world cannot connect with God short of God
revealing himself and breaking through.
So the God that we serve, this unknown God exists independently and outside but then
he goes on to say another thing that's really intriguing I think and that is that this God
is a giving God.
This God is a giving God, verse 25, and he is not served by human hands as if he needed
anything because he himself gives men life and breath and everything else.
He is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.
Notice the contrast here between this unknown God who is the God of scripture, the God of
creation and the idol gods that they served.
How do they keep the idol gods happy?
If you have an idol in your life, whether it's work, your boss, your spouse, your boyfriend,
your girlfriend, how do you keep them happy?
You got to keep paying, don't you?
You got to keep paying, you got to put out because the idol gods always consume, they
always take and if you stop giving and stop delivering they smack you over the head and
everything breaks down.
But Paul says the true and the living God is not like that.
The true and the living God is a giver because that is who God is.
He is a giver for two reasons.
Number one, he is totally self-sufficient, do you know that?
He has everything that he needs in himself.
He doesn't need you, doesn't need me, doesn't need his angels, doesn't need his creation.
For all eternity past, God has been perfectly happy as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
That's why the Trinity by the way is so important because in the Trinity there is the mutual
love, affection and relationship that fully satisfies every person of the Godhead and
Godhead no reason to create you or me or ask anything of us because he needs a very important
understand because sometimes, you know, somebody will have a child that dies, for example,
do you ever hear this?
And somebody will try to comfort the grieving parents, right?
And what will they say?
Well, sometimes they will say God must have needed him more than you needed him.
Do you ever hear anybody argue that?
Surely not very wise but also very unbiblical because the reality is God doesn't need anybody.
So you say then why does God want us to worship him?
Why does God make demands on us?
Why does God want us to gather like this on Sunday mornings and why does he want us to
give her time, talent and treasure?
Because God is a giver.
He is not only self-sufficient, he chooses to share himself and the reason he invites
you and me into relationship with him is not to get from us but rather so that he can share
the riches of his abundance with you and with me.
I love Ephesians 1.5 because it spells it out so clearly.
It says he destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose
of his will.
Think about that.
He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that for all eternity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit
were sitting together having a grand old time full of love and then one said to the other,
you know, we've got so much love to give around, let's spread it around a little bit.
And then they said to each other, how shall we do that?
And then one said, I know what we'll do, we'll create this great big huge universe and believe
you me, it's big, like really big, and then we'll create this planet called earth.
And then we'll make a wonderful creation on this new planet with birds and bees and trees
and seas and whatever.
And then he said, you know, then we're going to crown it all out and we're going to make
ourselves people who look like us, with whom we can have love, relationship, people that
we can bless, people that can share in our creativity, people that can exercise dominion
over this whole creation and have the time of their lives to fill the earth with a kingdom
that is a reflection of heaven's values so that heaven's will will be done on earth even
as it is in heaven.
And I think the father and the son of the Holy Spirit sat around and they patted each
other on the back and they said, what an incredibly brilliant idea.
And that's what they did.
And if you look at the first two chapters of Genesis, that's the story of creation.
And I sometimes compare it to this.
Think of yourself as a man or a woman or a couple and you have infinite wealth and you
have servants galore and you have property galore and you live in this huge house and
you have servants and you have a reputation that is sterling.
And you say to yourself, we've got all of this and it's not right that we just keep
it to ourselves.
What will we do?
And then you say to each other, what we will do is we will be get sons and daughters and
they will be a little reflection of who we are and we will shower them with our blessings
and with our love.
And then when they come of age and when they come to maturity, we'll hand over the keys
of the kingdom to them and we will watch them run this whole empire and share in our joy.
That's the heart of God.
How different from an idol God who says, give me, give me, give me.
Now why do I belabor that?
Because apart from revelation in scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart
and in my heart, our tendency is to think God is a taker rather than a giver.
And how many of us do not hold back our deepest hearts of hearts from God because we don't
really believe that he's good and that he has our best interests in mind.
And I'll tell you something, you will never, ever surrender fully to God as long as there
is that hesitation in the back of your minds.
What was the first lie the devil managed to perpetrate upon our forebears in the Garden
of Eden?
It was the implication God is not good, he is holding out on you.
This tree that he has forbidden you to eat that looks so good is him holding out on you,
you're better off on your own.
You and I from that day to this, we share that nature and unless God shows us his mercy
and gives us an understanding of his heart, we will always hesitate to surrender ourselves
to him fully.
And so the antidote to that is a revelation that God is the God who gives life, not only
in terms of our breath, our physical life, but he also gives us spiritual life in Christ
Jesus, the ultimate demonstration of his heart towards you and me is the sacrifice of Jesus
on the cross.
And because Jesus died on the cross for that reason, we know that he's not interested in
taking from you, he's not interested in taking from me.
He wants to give his abundant life in our relationship with him.
So that's how Paul unfolds the picture.
This unknown God exists outside of time and space, this unknown God is the creator of
the whole universe, and this unknown God wants to give you more abundantly than you can even
begin to imagine.
you