“Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
As is true with any portion of scripture, whether Old Testament or New, the student cannot get the fullness of any part of this sermon of Paul’s unless the historical context is known and then the sermon is read in its entirety.
There is a specific point I want to make today and I have chosen these two verses from Acts 17 from which to draw. It is not on the surface of the text; indeed, I do not think it was on Paul’s mind as something that his audience should have inferred from his immediate discourse.
Nevertheless, under the surface of it, and profitable for us to fathom and meditate on today I believe, is a study of the patience of God and some dimensions we as Christians should strive to understand.
ATHENS AND US
First thing we need to have fresh in our thinking then, is where Paul was physically. He was in Athens, Greece.
I think that if we take a look at what we know of 1st century Athens we will be able to discern with some clarity, parallels between that culture and what we witness all around us in the 21st century.
The Greek culture, even hundreds of years before Christ, had led in art and philosophy. Athens was at one time the greatest city in the world and the center of that culture.
By Paul’s day Athens was in decline. Corinth had surpassed Athens in importance when it came to politics and finance, but Athens had lost none of its rich cultural significance.
As well as being a hub of philosophy it was also a center of religion, which is attested to in Acts 17 when in verse 16 Luke writes that while Paul awaited the arrival of his companions his spirit was provoked within him by the idols that filled the city and every part of life. One historian said there was not a building in the city that was not dedicated to a god.
Pagan writer, Petronius joked with some sarcasm that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man. (R.C.H. Lenski, The Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles [Minneapolis, Augsburg, 1961]
Then in verses 22 and 23 of Acts 17, as Paul stands up to address the Philosophers of the Areopagus, he mentions viewing their many idols and uses one with the inscription, “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD” as a launching point to tell them about the God who made the world and all things in it.
So here we have a culture of people who take an inordinate amount of pride in themselves for their beauty and their talent and their intelligence. Verse 18 tells of those representing two very popular philosophical positions, the Epicureans and the Stoics, talking with Paul because they want to know what ‘this idle babbler’ would wish to say to them.
You can almost detect the curl of their upper lip and their half closed eyes as they tilt their head back and literally look down the plane of their nose at this unremarkable, beat up little Jew before them, and calling him an idle babbler, which in the original language means literally, ‘seed picker’, as though he’s a little bird who goes about collecting little seeds of wisdom and philosophy and trying to expound it to others in a way that will impress them and give them the impression that he is very clever and knowledgeable.
Then there is this very interesting parenthesis that makes up verse 21…
(Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.)
So can you get the picture? Here they gather, every morning before going off to whatever secondary obligations might demand some small part of their day, and they order their specialty coffee and gather in little groups to wow one another with the most recent bit of philosophy or mysticism, or religious twaddle that has come from passers-through.
And while the primary influence of the crowd is the Epicureans and the Stoics as mentioned, even they themselves are ready and willing to be entertained and enlightened by whatever sounds good and tickles their ears.
By the way, in case you don’t know who these two main groups are and what line of thought they represent; the Epicureans taught that pleasure and comfort was man’s primary aim in life. They were materialistic and took sort of an agnostic stance concerning whether gods existed. They didn’t outwardly deny them, but did not believe they interfered with the lives of men.
The Stoics went to the opposite extreme. They saw self-mastery as the highest virtue of man. The most admirable of men were the ones who took pain and suffering quietly and accepted them as part of life. They also were pantheists, which means they believed in many gods, and those gods would be pleased with a man’s determination to accept the hand dealt him in life and make the best of it.
Now there was a third, less prominent group; the Cynics. I won’t go into describing them here, but if you know what it means to be cynical, then you have an idea what the approach of the Cynics was.
Some people confuse the Stoics with the Cynics, but there is a very clear difference. The Cynic is da place where me mudder does da dishes…and the Stoic is da boid what brings da babies. (and my spell check put red lines under a lot of that)
So if you would ever be interested in experiencing the atmosphere and attitudes that confronted Paul that day, you might just go to one of our coffee shops or sandwich shops in town, or any other place where people might gather just to gather and chat and exchange ideas. You don’t need to go to any of the small mountain towns that dot our state and that draw the skiers and the celebrities and the people who want to be around people who are the people. You don’t have to go to Boulder or Denver, or even Los Angeles or New York City. You’ll find them right here in our small community, and I think once you find them, you could easily become part of the same sort of vague, non-confrontational sharing of independent thought and baseless philosophies that Paul was faced with there. I would go further and suppose that if you ventured to introduce Paul’s message into the mix, you would get very much the same response he did, as is recorded for us in verses 32 and 33. Some would sneer, others, doubtful, would say, “Well, maybe we’ll hear more another time”, and maybe just a few would believe.
PAUL’S SERMON IN BRIEF
Ok so you have a picture of the setting, I hope. Here are these very ‘with it’ people, full of self-importance and a warm sense of self-worth, comfortably ensconced in their proud city on their proud hill and members of their proud club, proudly demanding an accounting from the newest stranger, of the strange religion he seems to be expounding, and proudly passing judgment on his words as though they were just naturally endowed with the wisdom and knowledge required to make such an assessment.
If that doesn’t sound like the response of people in our own culture and around you every day, then perhaps you might consider getting out more.
So let’s read down through the things Paul had to say to them just to get the broad idea of his approach, then take this to the main point for today.
“So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. 23 “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. 24 “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; 25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; 26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, 27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ 29 “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. 30 “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, 31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
Now what do we see that Paul has done here?
Well first, remember what we have said about his hearers. They are of varying philosophies; some in diametric opposition to others, which must have made for some very lively debate on any given day of meeting.
Secondly, they are, as Paul noted, very religious. That is not a compliment.
I searched in vain for a bit of commentary on this passage that I read years ago so I might include it in this sermon. I don’t know now where I saw it but it doesn’t seem to be in any of the books I presently have on my shelf. It gave a name of this group that was almost unpronounceable to me, claiming that this gathering of philosophers called themselves by a single name, and it said there were certain rules that had to be obeyed when coming to them to speak.
I wish I could have found the reference because I wanted to impress you by pronouncing the name. I only remember it began with a ‘P’. No matter.
One of those rules was that the speaker was not allowed to compliment or otherwise ingratiate himself to any portion of his listening audience in order to garner the approval and sympathy of any particular segment.
Well, I don’t know if Paul would have been aware of the rules of this little philosophy club, but he certainly wasn’t there to ingratiate himself to them. He was there to tell them the truth about the one true God, maker of heaven and earth, infinitely too grand to live in any of their temples or idol shrines, and hardly in need of anything from them, since it is He who instead supplies their every need, down to the fundamental basics. Life, breath to sustain that life and all things needed along the path of that life.
And he starts out with this phrase, ‘you are very religious in all respects’, then points out that one of their idols along the way is dedicated ‘to an unknown god’.
In other words, ‘you people are clueless’!
And they were clueless. With all their art and their education and their verbosity and their trapping of every philosophical or religious line of thought that passed through the town and then chewing it and swallowing it and regurgitating it and sharing it around once more… all of that had not brought them one step closer to God than the lowest, basest, most uneducated and unrefined of back alley brawlers.
They set up idols along the main drag in an attempt to keep all the gods appeased so their comfort and supply would not be removed from them by some insulted deity, and then someone had the clever idea of putting one up to a nameless, unknown god, just in case they might have missed one and they wanted to cover all the bases.
Paul said they were ignorant. With all their accumulated knowledge and supposed wisdom, they were ignorant. And he was absolutely right. It was their ignorance of the one and only true God that made all the rest of it worthless, and worse than worthless; demonic!
Not long ago I was in a conversation with a couple of men in a local store. I am only briefly acquainted with either of them and I only know that they are professed believers in Christ. In light conversation I shared an example with them of how unchurched people around us are so completely devoid of Bible knowledge, and that even what they think they know is usually way off base. I wasn’t saying this in a spirit of criticism, and I wasn’t saying it as one who is puffed up that he knows more than some others about the Bible, but to illustrate that when we talk to them we have to be aware that often they are beginning from below bottom, so to speak, and we have to watch our vernacular and communicate on a clear and simple level with them in order to tell them the gospel.
Well, these men had no immediate response but only stared at me, and as I glanced from one to the other it was almost comical in that their expressions were exactly alike, and both seemed to be saying, ‘you’re too critical’. Finally one broke the silence and confirmed my suspicions, by saying, “Well, we have to remember that God loves them too”.
Now I don’t know these gentlemen well enough that I would allow myself to be drawn into a debate, but what good in all the world does it do people that God loves them, if we’re afraid to expose their ignorance so they might be led to truth?
Paul said, you’re ignorant, but I’m here to clue you in. There is a God, there is only one true God, He doesn’t fit in your little stone shelters, He is the one who made you and sustains you and gives you all that you have, and by the way, He is waiting for you to turn from your sin and believe with an obedient faith in the One He has appointed as Savior and future Judge of the world.
Christians, the church of Jesus Christ in our day has absorbed the pagan ideals of a culture that says that at all cost we must avoid offending, that no one’s ‘truth’ is more valuable than the next guy’s so we mustn’t be pushy with our version of the truth, and that the gospel is just one more thing to market with soft soap and strategies and mission statements and vision statements and church growth plans.
There needs to be a massive turning back to a clear and bold proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, that begins with a confrontation of sin, and the exposing of ignorance, so that people will know that we know there is something they need that they do not have and cannot have apart from God’s own grace and provision. People are not going to come to the Kingdom of God by way of free food and gentle pats on the back. They might be brought into the assembly; but the only way they are going to be brought to the Kingdom is if they are made to see that the God who gives to all life and breath and all things, having been patient through their time of ignorance, “…is now declaring…”
Did you hear the present tense of that? He is declaring. His voice goes out to all the earth and His declaration is perpetual… “…to men that all everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
GOD’S PATIENCE
Now as believers in Christ and students of the Bible we have some working knowledge and understanding of the patience of God. We certainly know and are grateful for the patience He shows us as His children, and there are many passages of scripture that either openly declare or imply by the nature of what is being said, that God is a patient God.
One of the most familiar is 2 Peter 3:9 which tells us that God is not willing that any person should perish, but that all should come to repentance, and this is given as the reason for His seeming delay in coming in judgment.
Tertullian of Carthage was a prolific author of the second century church. In a lengthy essay on God’s patience he included this:
“He [God] endures ungrateful peoples who worship the trifles fashioned by their skill and the works of their hands, who persecute His name and His children, and who, in their lewdness, their greed, their godlessness and depravity, grow worse from day to day; by His patience He hopes to draw them to Himself. There are many, you see, who do not believe in the Lord because for so long a time they have no experience of His wrath against the world.”
This would have been an apt description of the eminent philosophers of ancient Greece, and it is certainly an apt description of people in 21st century Anytown, USA, or anywhere in the world for that matter. For ever since sin was introduced into the world and death through sin, as A.W. Pink said, ‘the best of men are only men at best’, and until there is repentance and turning to God, there is only the digressive downward plunge of the soul and character of men, and all their works are worthless and fit for burning.
Yet the theologian knows, and the Bible clearly says, that God is patient so that they might repent. Why? There is only one reason.
Because God loves to save sinners.
THE END OF PATIENCE
I come now to the thing I wanted to say to you today. It is what we need to get very clearly and it is what people need to know, just as they need to know of their sin and their ignorance of God.
That thing is that there is an end to God’s patience.
But it is not enough just to say that, because to leave it at that would, I think, put a very inaccurate picture in the head of most people about God’s nature.
When a man comes to the end of his patience, the result is usually not very good, unless he is a very wise and self-controlled man who has thought it through, and determined in advance what action he would take when his patience waned.
I do not think this happens very often. In any case, even if a man is of a gentle nature and not inclined to outbursts or angry actions, still, when we lose our patience, as we often say it, or come to the end of our patience, we usually only confirm what the Bible says about the sin nature, in one way or another.
Now I hear preachers and teachers of God’s Word, - some of whom I have a great deal of respect for and do not fault them in this because they have a point and make their point in poignant ways that I often wish I was capable of - I hear them say that when God’s patience ends with a person or a group of people that is when His wrath is poured out. They sometimes say “Even God has a limit to His patience!”
Well, that is true, but not in the sense that we would mean if we were to say, for example, “Young lady, you’re trying my patience and you’re about to be punished if you don’t stop what you’re doing”.
Because while there is an end of God’s patience, God does not lose His patience. God is not sitting up in heaven doing a slow burn, waiting for men to repent, waiting for them to stop sinning, waiting for them to put away their idols and worship Him, waiting for them to start treating one another with kindness, and if it doesn’t happen soon He’s going to jump up, and shout, “That’s all I can stands; I can’t stands no more!” and pour out His wrath.
The end of God’s patience is actually on God’s calendar. What do I mean by that? Well, I think the best way to explain can be found in our text verses, in the word ‘fixed’.
In times past God has been patient with men in their ignorance of Him, even though they were guilty of suppressing within themselves the general knowledge of Himself that He put in every man, and continued to sin.
In these last days however, after having revealed Himself through a Man, there no longer remains any excuse for their ignorance. He has come to man, He has revealed Himself in terms they can clearly understand, He has paid the penalty for sin so that they might be given eternal life, and now He is ‘declaring’ to them that they should turn from sin to Him, because while He has chosen to continue His patience so that they might have a chance to hear and believe, there is a day fixed.
There is a day when God will be known, not for His patience, but for His wrath. He has sent a Man, He has raised that Man from the dead, and His righteous judgment will come on this world of sin through that Man.
Jesus spoke of it in John 5:22-27
“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, 23 so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. 24 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. 25 “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 26 “For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself; 27 and He gave Him authority to execute judgment, because He is the Son of Man.”
Who are the dead that He spoke of there, who would hear His voice and live? They are the spiritually dead. Those dead in trespasses and sins; without hope and without God in the world. He said those dead who heard His voice would live. That is His desire.
Then He went on to speak of judgment. That hasn’t happened yet in the sense of the ‘day’ Paul spoke of to the Athenians.
But he wanted them to understand this, and I want you to understand this, and it is the duty of the true church of Jesus Christ to tell people this…
…that for each of them a day is ‘fixed’. God’s patience ends with each one who leaves this world not having repented and come to Him in the obedience of faith.
God has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through His crucified and risen Son; but until that day, get this clear, there is a day fixed for each one when the time for turning will be ended, the time for enjoying God’s patience will be over, scoffing will end with a rude abruptness, and there will be nothing left to look forward to but judgment.
That is the ultimate truth being conveyed by Paul to these men in Acts 17. He told them they were ignorant though religious, then he introduced them to the true and living God so that they would no longer be ignorant, and now that they had heard the truth he told them that the time for winking at their ignorance was over. God has sent a Man, God has raised that Man from the dead, God’s voice is now declaring and calling, and now is the day of repentance, for the day of judgment is coming.
Ignorance, revelation, knowledge, declaration, repentance, judgment. That is the order of things, and the way to avoid the judgment is to acknowledge that order and repent in due time, because that order is not going to be reversed…there won’t be repentance after judgment. Only the wrath to come.
The wiseman said there is ‘…a time to be born and a time to die” Eccl 3:2
Men do not have control over either. Their days are numbered, literally, and only God knows that number. It’s fixed.
So how do men react to this knowledge? Well, I think as a whole the percentages are probably pretty well represented in that relatively small number on Mars Hill, that day so long ago.
Many scoff, some think they’ll wait and maybe they’ll hear more later, and few, very few, believe.
The scoffers will certainly get their comeuppance. There is scriptural evidence for that claim which I referred to earlier; you can find it in 2 Peter 3.
Those who choose to wait do so at their peril for the very reason I’ve already given, that God knows when their fixed day is and they do not.
Those are the ones we have to warn. If you belong to the third group, the ones who have believed, then there is a day fixed for you as well. The difference is that when that day comes for you it will not be to experience the end of patience but the beginning of bliss in the face of that appointed One.
That’s why we have to get the message out to that second group. Encourage them not to wait. Tell them that God’s kindness and tolerance and patience are not a sign of weakness or condoning of sin, but to give them time to repent (Rom 2:4). Because as the pages of His calendar turn, for each one there is day fixed for the end of patience and the beginning of eternity.
“And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain— 2 for He says, “At the acceptable time I listened to you, And on the day of salvation I helped you.” Behold, now is “the acceptable time,” behold, now is “the day of salvation”— 2 Cor 6:1-2
There is an end of God’s patience, hearer. What will follow for you on your fixed day? Are you scoffing, or are you doubting, or are you believing? Your answer to that question has eternal implications that are as real and as imminent as your next breath.
He has fixed a day. Only He has the calendar.
Choose.
