Sermon Text: Acts 17:22-31
Date: May 14, 2023
Event: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A
Acts 17:22-31 (EHV)
Then Paul stood up in front of the council of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. 23For as I was walking around and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar on which had been inscribed, ‘To an unknown god.’ Now what you worship as unknown—this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made with hands. 25Neither is he served by human hands, as if he needed anything, since he himself gives all people life and breath and everything they have. 26From one man, he made every nation of mankind to live over the entire face of the earth. He determined the appointed times and the boundaries where they would live. 27He did this so they would seek God and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘Indeed, we are also his offspring.’
29“Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and planning. 30Although God overlooked the times of ignorance, he is now commanding all people everywhere to repent, 31because he has set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he appointed. He provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
Repentance Conforms Us to God
As Paul walked through the city of Athens, he was coming from some really, really difficult times. He had been run out of both the Macedonian cities of Thessalonica and Berea by those who rejected the gospel and were jealous of his preaching about Jesus. Now, he walked through the capital city of Greece, alone, waiting for his companions to join him.
But he wasn’t exactly throwing a pity party for himself. Paul took the opportunity to share Jesus in this new place where his mission journeys had not yet taken him. As he did in most places, Paul began by seeking out the Jewish synagogue and sharing the good news with the believers there. But Paul didn’t just reach out to the Jewish people, he also spent time every day speaking in the marketplace, sharing the good news with the population at large. And as he had time, he explored the city. He was distraught to see all the idols, shrines, and temples devoted to the gods and goddesses of what we would today call the Greek mythology system—supposedly divine beings like Zeus, Hermes, Artemis, Dionysus, and Poseidon, just to name a few.
But Athens wasn’t just the political capital of Greece, it was also the thought capital. In the verse just prior to our First Reading for this morning, Luke describes the people in Athens this way: All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there enjoyed doing nothing more than telling or listening to something new (Acts 17:21). They loved to soak in new thoughts and philosophies and were eager to hear any new ways of thinking.
The Athenians’ addiction to new thought meant they just had to know more about what Paul was sharing. They asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are talking about? You seem to be bringing in some ideas that are strange to our ears, so we want to know what these things mean” (Acts 17:19-20). They brought Paul to the council of the Areopagus, a group that had oversight on “matters of morals and religion” in Athens—a highly respected group (cf. The New Bible Dictionary, 3rd Ed.). If someone was bringing new religious thought into Athens, this was the group to investigate.
Our First Reading for this morning is the message that Paul delivered that day to this council. Notice that Paul doesn’t bring in Scripture at all, to begin with. He meets them where they are with the things right around them in the city: “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way.” What a charitable way to say, “Boy, you sure worship a lot of fictional deities around here, don’t you?”
But something stuck out to Paul as he walked through the city: As I was walking around and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar on which had been inscribed, ‘To an unknown god.’ These people were so dedicated to religious thought that they figured they must have missed someone or something, so they created a catch-all altar to celebrate the god they did not know. This was Paul’s in: Now what you worship as unknown—this is what I am going to proclaim to you. He doesn’t chastise them for their idolatry, but he hooks into their obsession with new philosophical and religious thought: “You want to know a secret? I know this unknown God. Let me tell you about him!”
The problem that created all the different gods in the Greek system is the same problem the people have today. Mankind always wants to fashion a god they can understand or hold or even manipulate. People take the natural knowledge that they have—that a supreme being exists, that he is powerful, and that he is upset because they have not done what he said they should do—and then they try to make the best possible situation out of it. Either, creating gods that have plenty of human quirks and failings as the Greeks and Romans did so that they don’t feel bad about their own failings, or creating a system of work that will try to scratch the itch to pay off a debt to this deity, earn his love or respect or forgiveness or whatever the goal might be, and overall just try to soothe the screaming conscience.
But that’s not the way God works, that’s not the way religion or faith works. You can’t just create something and hope that it works out. Faith needs an object, and to be of any value that object must be trustworthy. You and I are not immune from this line of thinking. The delusions that you and I create in our minds are not trustworthy in any way. Any inclination that we are in control, that we can fix things, that we can make things right with the Creator of the universe is pure ego—to a damning degree.
No, we don’t bend and shape God to meet our thoughts and feelings; God bends and shapes us. How does he do that? Paul said to the Athenians, “Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and planning. Although God overlooked the times of ignorance, he is now commanding all people everywhere to repent.” Repentance is not making up your own rules, fashioning your own god, or trying to create your own balm for a burning conscience. No, repentance acknowledges sin and trusts that God—who promised to forgive us—has removed those sins. Repentance doesn’t find comfort or relief in the act or the process; repentance brings the true, lasting comfort that God promised and provides.
And in this way, God conforms us to his will. He makes the rules; he sets the standards. We, as the creation, are in service and at the will of the Creator.
That might not sound great. That might sound like our agency is removed. It actually has been, but not by God. Our sin removed that agency and made it impossible for us to do anything to please God or fix our relationship with him. Paul said that God wanted people to seek [him] and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. God’s will is that we would reach out and find him, not in some fiction that we create, but in the way he has provided for himself to be found.
Where has God revealed himself? In his Word. God’s Word clearly confirms our consciences’ feelings of failure by showing us God’s objective right and wrong in his law, and how we have failed to keep it. But he doesn’t leave us flailing, making up things in a vain attempt to fix it. He doesn’t direct us to build altars at random grasping about wildly for some comfort. No, in his Word God himself provides the comfort we desperately need and naturally long for—though his comfort is something we could never have imagined.
Paul confirms that the judgment the Athenians naturally feared was true—judgment was coming. But what they did not expect and could not have known is that the one who would do the judging is also the one who had saved them. “He has set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he appointed. He provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
Now, our reading ends here because Paul’s sermon gets cut off here. Once Paul brings in Jesus’ resurrection, many of the people recoil from his teaching. They liked new, wild ideas, but this was evidently a bridge too far for many of them. And that makes sense because now Paul is moving into areas that can only be grasped with God-given faith.
Jesus is our substitute and Savior. He is the one that lived a perfect life in our place. He is the one who suffered the death, the hell, that we deserved on the cross. He paid the full price for all of our sins. The “unknown god” is the Savior God. Our consciences can’t conceive of this; our minds could never even begin to imagine that the one we sinned against is the one who would pay our penalty and rescue us. But this is what has happened—and as we heard Jesus say last Sunday, it is the only way for us to find forgiveness of sins and eternal life. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus.
Repentance, then, is our path forward. Not just feeling bad about sin—though that is the start of it—but trusting that what God says is true. When he promises you and me that our sins are forgiven and gone, we can trust that with no hesitation, no matter how much we might naturally recoil from that message or find it to be bizarre or even wrong. The gospel message of sins forgiven in Jesus is never going to make sense to our natural selves, but in repentance, we express our faith that God has given to us—we bring our load of sins to Jesus and trust his promise that he has taken them away.
In this, God conforms us to himself. Rather than people forming statues and altars from stone and wood and precious metals in an attempt to find spiritual peace, God forms us into people who trust him, and who see Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as the certainty of our salvation. He forms us into people who live lives as he wants us to live to thank him for his free and full forgiveness.
My brothers and sisters, let God conform you. Let him shape you. He does that through his forgiveness; he does that through his certain promises. May we not seek our own way through this life, but his way. That way leads to eternal life only and always through Jesus. There is no doubt about the result of God’s conforming work through his Word that produces repentance, for Christ has risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
