No! Athens was to be comparatively barren for the gospel: so different are the thoughts of God from those of men. Mere love of novelty, not value for truth, characterized that city once the most renowned seat of the arts, of letters, of philosophy. It was covered with idols: God was not really in their thoughts. Indeed He cannot be known or loved apart from Jesus. But now a herald was come to set the testimony of Jesus before them, yet alas how little heeded!
“Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked in him as he observed the city to be full of idols. He reasoned therefore, in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout, and in the market-place every day with those that turned up. And certain also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers attacked him. And some said, What would this babbler say? and others, He seemeth to be an announcer of strange deities, because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And having taken hold of him, they brought [him] up to the Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new teaching [is], that is spoken by thee? For thou bringest certain strange things unto our ease: we wish to know therefore, what these things mean. Now all Athenians and the strangers sojourning there spent their time in nothing else than either to tell some thing, or to hear some thing newer” (ver.16-21), i.e. than the last.
It was an indignant and painful feeling which stirred the apostle s spirit as he beheld idols everywhere. Companionship he loved and valued, and tidings of Thessalonica he longed for; but at once he goes to the synagogue, for the Jews and proselytes, as well as to the market-place every day for those that came by. The Epicureans and the Stoics soon encountered him; the former being really Atheists, under the plea of chance, and looking for the dissolution of soul and body; the latter, of a sterner school, which cried up necessity, or fate, and an intolerant and intolerable egotism, being really Pantheists: Some had recourse to banter. “What would this babbler say?” Others took Paul up more gravely, “He seemeth to be an announcer of strange divinities [or demons], because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” So Ignorant were these sages as to count the resurrection a goddess, the counterpart of Jesus, a god. The true God was unknown. But they were no longer disposed to persecute. Intellectual levity survived the loss of their national independence and political power. Mocking or curiosity alone remained. Still they were sufficiently struck by the apostle's preaching to lay hold of him and bring him up to the Areopagus, not to try him for his life, as they once did with Socrates, but that they might know what this new doctrine was. Even they could not but avow how strange the sound was to their ears. “We wish to know therefore, what these things mean.” The truth, however, enters not through the ear merely, but the conscience; and what conscience was there in spending their time for nothing else than either to tell or to hear the last news? We shall see that the apostle brought God as a personal and living reality, before themselves as morally related to Him. Till conscience is awakened, what groundwork can there be? Otherwise the gospel is degraded into another new thing, and Jesus and the resurrection become the latest additions to the Pantheon of heathen vanities.
“And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, Men of Athens, in all things I observe that ye are very [i.e. more than others] reverent to deities [or demons]; for passing through and closely observing the objects of your worship, I found also an altar on which was the inscription, To an unknown God. What [or whom], therefore, ye without knowing worship, this I announce to you. The God that made the world and all things therein, He, being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands as needing something more, Himself giving to all life and breath, and all things. And He made of one [blood] every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and are; as also some of your own poets have said, For His offspring also are we. Being therefore God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divinity is like gold or silver, or stone, graven by art and device of man. God, therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, now commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as He appointed a day in which He is about to judge the world [inhabited earth] in righteousness, by a man whom He marked out, having given assurance to all in that He raised him from [the] dead” (ver. 22-31).
Though we have only a sketch of the apostle's discourse, we can readily see its striking difference from that which he was wont to preach to the Jews. He comes down to the lowest point and form of truth, in order, as he had done before (Acts 14) with the Lycaonian barbarians, to reach the Athenian conscience, the Jews having through the law incomparably more worthy thoughts of God and of their own relationship to Him. Nevertheless the address opens with habitual courtesy whilst there was not a particle to flatter their pride. The apostle laid hold of the only object, in that crowd, of honors paid to truly strange demons, which confessed the humbling fact about themselves and God. “An unknown God” told the true tale; all else around was but deception and the triumph of the enemy. “What, therefore, ye worship in ignorance, this I announce to you.”
“The God that made the world and all things therein” is the Judge of all the world by the same risen Man who is Savior of such as repent and believe the gospel, be they who or what they may. Creation was owned by neither Epicureans nor Stoics: the one holding the absurdity of a fortuitous concourse of atoms; the other conceiving a fixed ever recurring cycle of generation and dissolution in the universe, which was their god if they can be allowed to have had any. But the Creator of all things is also Lord of heaven and earth; He neither rests in apathy, nor is He the mere active soul of the passive world, but supreme Ruler, not of heaven only, but of the earth. He is not therefore to be limited to human sanctuaries, nor to be served by human hands as though He needed anything, seeing that He Himself gives to all life and breath and the whole of what they enjoy. Some elements of these truths might be accepted here and there, for man has a conscience.; but seen fully and simply they swept away the dark clouds of philosophic dreamers, maintaining for God His own place of sovereign goodness towards man, let him be ever so proud, dark, and miserable.
The apostle adds more. He struck next at a well-known theme of Athenian vanity, by no means, however, peculiar to that race, or land, or time: “And he made of one [bleed] every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined appointed seasons and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek God, if indeed they might feel after him, and though he is not far from each one of us.” The one origin of man goes with the unity of God, as the pretension to distinct races with their respective patrons of polytheism. The Jews as they fell away helped on the falsehood in their self-exalting vanity, though to them only was committed the revelation of the two-fold truth, which Christianity alone applied thoroughly and carried out according to God. It was not only the mere passing testimony to His goodness in the gift from heaven of rains, and fruitful seasons, to which the apostle here pointed, but to appointed seasons, and the boundaries of the dwelling of the various nations, all under God's hand with peculiar favors distributed to each, and at least a whisper to seek after (not “the Lord,” which is true neither in the Jewish sense of Jehovah, nor still less in the only just revealed exaltation of the rejected Messiah, but) “God,” if haply they might grope after and find Him, though not far from each of us.
It is not however without interest to compare Job's treatment of the same truth generally (chap. 12:23-25): only he dwells rather on the side of the divine sovereignty of Him to whom the nations, haughtily indifferent about Him though they might be, are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance. But the glowing heat of the inspired preacher does not fail to urge the moral aim of His beneficent arrangements on the grandest scale, that they might seek after Himself, if perhaps they might feel after and find Him: teaching quite in keeping with his own Epistle to the Rom. 1:2020For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: (Romans 1:20). Even, in the darkness of heathenism more than one had owned, if not Paul's fine statement of man's absolute dependence on God for continued life, activity, and existence, yet God the source of the race: a truth already given most distinctly in Luke 3:3838Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God. (Luke 3:38), supposed parabolically in Luke 15:1111And he said, A certain man had two sons: (Luke 15:11), and taught formally in the first clause ck; mph. iv. 6. The poets among them (the heathen Greeks) had expressed it; not the Cilician Aratus only (whom he cites verbally), but Cleanthes also in nearly similar words, as others substantially.
With this acknowledgment of their poetical seers the apostle states the confutation of the folly of idolatry. If man alone of creatures on earth is God's offspring, how maintain that the divinity is like a work of man's craft and imagination in gold, or silver, or stone? “We ought not” so to think, he says graciously, not forgetting that Israel too had to bear the sterner irony of Isaiah (chap. 44:9-20). A lifeless stock that man forms cannot be, or duly represent, the God that made him aid all things.
Yet the God, who was time shamefully misrepresented in the times of the ignorance that was past, would no longer overlook as heretofore such delinquency; He is now charging them that they everywhere repent (ver. 30.). This was a death blow, not only for the self-indulgence of the Epicurean as well as for the self-righteous Stoic, but for the careless and the proud all mankind and not least in that city. And the apostle followed it up with the solemn reason for heed and urgency, “because he had appointed a day in which he is about to judge the habitable [earth] in righteousness by a man whom he had marked out, having afforded assurance [or, ground of belief] to all, in that he raised him out of [the] dead.”
Here the prevalent thought of Christendom errs greatly. The Jews used to, and perhaps in some measure do, look for a judgment of living men; the mass of Christians, notwithstanding the Creeds, only look (all but exclusively in fact) for a judgment of the dead before eternity. The apostle here and elsewhere pressed the judgment of this habitable scene at our Lord's appearing to introduce His kingdom in displayed power and glory, as He did Himself in Matt. 24, and 25; Mark 13; Luke 17, 19, 21, and other scriptures. The pledge of His thus coming to judge and to reign is His own resurrection, as ours who believe will be at His coming preparatorily to our appearing and reigning with Him.
This shows how vital and fundamental a truth is His resurrection, which so blessedly involves our own, besides being the witness to His victory over death and Satan, to the Father's glory in vindicating His Son, to the efficacy of His sacrifice for the believer, and to the displayed condition of man for heaven according to divine counsels. Granted that in the nature of the case it is a fact attested by His own, though with the most abundant and weighty evidence, above all by God's word long before the fact, as well as by fresh revelation immediately after. Could any other fact be shown possessed of grounds to be compared with these? All that on which the soul stands forever before God, rests on the self-same ground of divinely given testimony; and consequently, as being addressed to faith; purifies the heart through the operation of the Holy Ghost, as nothing else can do.
What was the effect on the Athenians? “Now when they heard of resurrection of dead [men], some mocked, but others said, We will hear thee concerning this yet again. Then Paul went out from their midst. But some men slave to him and believed; among whom also was Dionysius, the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them” (ver. 32-34).
Nor should we wonder at these heathen philosophers, and news-mongers, staggered by a call resting on a basis so irrefragable on God's part, so crushing to human will and unbelief, as resurrection. For human science never rises above sensible causes and effects, or phenomena arrayed according to natural laws. This is all true and interesting in its own sphere. The folly is in denying what is wholly different in kind, as grace necessarily is from nature; and rejecting facts attested by the fullest and surest testimony, the most unreasonable course to be conceived in things which must, and ought, as facts, to depend on testimony: a course only intelligible in this exceptional case through the desperate antagonism of fallen humanity to God, even when waiting on and speaking to man in the richest mercy. But man, and not least philosophic, man, rebels against resurrection. He might endure a whole night's Socratic discussion of the soul's immortality; for this gratifies the nobler sort, if it be offensive to the more degraded. But a dead man raised brings in God; and God intervening in the midst of a busy world to mark out the Man Whom they crucified, Who is going to judge this habitable world one day, as also in due time the dead raised later, ere all things are made new for eternity. To science, as science, I repeat, it is repulsive, because impossible for their idol; for what can be the cause of resurrection? Certainly not death, but God in the person of the Son.
Bow, proud man, bow to Him, who in love sent His Son that we might live through Him, true God as He is, and that He might die for us—for our sins, without which the gift of eternal life had been the merest anomaly, but with it the deep blessing of a full and everlasting salvation of His grace, yet righteous, to the glory of God forever. There were mockers and triflers then as now. Oh! may you like the others of old, cleave to the apostle, and find your place with the true Dionysius of Luke, not with the Neo-Platonist impostor who borrowed his eminent name for his fables and rhapsodies of the 6th century manufacture. Doubtless that blessed place must be shared with a Damaris and others, whose names are written in heaven if unknown on earth. May Christ satisfy your soul, as well He may Who is all, and in all.