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And seeing our talk this morning is on the topic of what God is like. Without his grace and his Holy Spirit, we cannot know him. Let us briefly pray. Our Father, now as we come to do serious business with thee and with thy word. And by thy grace to understand thee that little bit better and more. That we may communicate the knowledge of thee to our contemporaries. Be with us now, we pray, and by thy spirit illumine our minds. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. When the great apostle Paul came first to Athens, he began by taking a stroll around the city. I suppose that's not a bad missionary strategy. A lot of us enjoy taking walks around strange cities on holiday. I've often admired the courage of missionaries who come to sophisticated modern cities where Christ is not known and have the courage to begin witness to him in that kind of Our situation. situation. As he walked around the city of Athens, he found growing indignation in his heart to see the blatant idolatry and superstition. All the more grievous because Athens was a university city. Where should he begin? He went first, we're told, to the Jewish synagogue, and there he reasoned with them, says his historian Luke. The verb is interesting. It's not said he preached. He reasoned. Now, there is a certain school that would tell us you don't have to reason when you're talking to unconverted people. You simply have to preach. God bless the preachers. God bless the evangelists. I've often wished I were one of them, but I'm not. But there is a part for reasoning the gospel, and Paul would have done it in the synagogue by re- leading them through reasoned exposition of many Old Testament passages. For even the Old Testament is a very good tool for evangelism. It made Timothy, so Paul says, wise to salvation. The Old Testament is an evangelistic tool. But Paul wasn't content just to reason and preach the gospel to those that already had a Bible. He went out to the marketplace, where you could come across all kinds of pagans, so many varieties you'd never get bored, where you might come face to face with a few philosophers and university dons. And there he reasoned every day. And in fact, he did draw the attention of a few Greek philosophers, who eventually accosted him and invited him to come to the court of the Areopagus in Athens and explain a little bit more what these strange ideas were that he constantly preached. Let us begin our study by reading Luke's summary of what Paul said to the Athenian philosophers. Comes in the book of the Acts, chapter seventeen. Acts seventeen and verse twenty two. And since I'm very old, I read a very old English translation, and all the generation will have mercy on me, the younger generation will have mercy on me. We begin, therefore, at verse, uh, uh twenty two. and Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, you men of Athens, in all things I perceive that you are sizably religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, to an unknown god. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this set I forth 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, neither is he served by men's hands as though he needed anything, seeing he himself giveth to all life and breath and all things. And he made of one every nation of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being. As certain of your, of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring. Seeing then the offspring, being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that God, the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and device of man. The times of this ignorance, therefore, God overlooked. But now he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as he hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. So far then, Luke's summary of what Paul told the Athenian philosophers. And you will know that this Paul's address to the philosophers has been criticized very severely, both on the one hand by modernist liberal theologians, and on the other hand by well-meaning evangelicals and conservatives. The modernist liberals will say that this summary given by Luke of what Paul is supposed to have said is so vastly different from what Paul has written elsewhere in the New Testament. That they conclude, these liberal theologians, that Paul never said anything of the sort, and Luke has simply made it up to fill the odd space in his record. And of course, conservative evangelicals would hold up their hands in horror at such a suggestion, for they do believe that Luke's record is God's inspired word. Nonetheless, many evangelicals have felt free to criticize Paul very severely. They said, what a pity. And Paul had such a fine grasp of the gospel, and normally he preached and made the cross of Christ central, ha. But this time he was asked to address the learned academic philosophers, huh? And tried to argue with them philosophically. Useless it was, utter failure. They just laughed him out of court, and he learned the bitter lesson. He should not try to argue intellectually with anybody when you're preaching the gospel. And so the, the, the criticism adds, when he got to Corinth, very much with his tail between his legs, uh, he had made a mess of Athens, and he resolved to know nothing amongst the Corinthians except Christ and him crucified. And he had reaped a tremendous harvest. On this showing, therefore, Paul's address to the Areopagus is not an example of how to commend the gospel to the thoughtful. It is an example of how not to do it. Marvelous, that, isn't it? They say it was a failure, what he said to the Areopagus. Oh well. There were on- there were four at least converted, and there might have been more. Paul names two and says others cleaved to him and believed. I would count it an amazing success if after any sermon I preached, four people got converted. I don't know about you. And if this was the wrong way to do it, I do feel comforted myself. I say, well, Gooding, you have a chance because you often make a mess of it, but if God would convert these four through Paul's failure, he could even use me. And then the criticism assumes various unprovable things. They say he should have preached the cross. Is not that central to the gospel? It is indeed. But he had been for a week in the marketplace. And the philosophers who had come by occasionally to listen to him were struck by his repeated emphasis on Jesus and the resurrection. But true to form, this lay at the center of his gospel, Jesus and the resurrection. And if he had preached the resurrection in the marketplace at Athens, reason would have it he must have preached the death and burial of Christ, must he not? It's very difficult to preach the resurrection of somebody who hasn't died and been buried. Very difficult. Oh, so he had preached the death of Christ then, and his burial and his resurrection. I think it is fair to assume that if he preached the death of Christ in the marketplace at Athens, he had told the crowd why Christ died. He had solidly preached and argued the gospel in that sophisticated but pagan society. Let us soften our criticism and turn to ad- and turn to admire a valorous person, Paul the Apostle. I was in Corinth years ago and took a tour. And the Greek lady who was the guide of the tour, she took us into the marketplace at Corinth, and she pointed out a, a heap of rubble and said that that was where the speaker's rostrum was in Corinth, you see. If you were in the marketplace and wanted to preach or speak or argue, you got up on the rostrum. She said, Paul came here, you know, and he would have stood there and preached his gospel. She said, turning around, pointing to Acrocorinth, the mountain behind old Corinth, she said, up there was a temple devoted to Aphrodite, and there were there a thousand priestesses, so-called, open to any customers that came. In the worship of the god of sex. Said the guide, I think Paul had a difficult time here. I crept behind an old monument and took out my testament and read it. To admire the courage of a man that dare go out into the marketplaces of sophisticated cities like that. But the philosophers at Athens asked him to come and explain things. For to some of them, he seemed a babbler. The Greek means a picker up of seeds, like some old cocker- cockerel strutting around the farmyard and picking up here a grain of wheat and there a worm or something, and growing fat on it and parading his prowess before all the chickens, much to their amazement and worship. They thought Paul was an old charlatan, picking up a bit of philosophy here and a bit of religion there and making a good trade of it, a peddler of the supposed gospel. And philosophers would, of course, despise anybody like that. It's a good job, don't you think, that Paul got a chance to explain that he was nothing of the sort, yeah? And could talk to them in their own language if he chose. And some of them thought he was a setter forth of foreign gods, and that wouldn't have pleased them. When the gospel first came to the city of Philippi, the citizens there, who were largely Roman citizens and spoke Latin and despised all else, complained that these people were Jews that came here. And the very notion that a Jew should come and talk to Romans and try to impose the God of the Jews on the Romans was thought to be an insult. Funny that, isn't it? They resented the gospel because it came from the East. Hm. Nowadays, if you go East, they'll resent the gospel because they think it comes from the West. You can't win, can you? Paul took the opportunity to go and talk to the philosophers, and to show them that though the gospel at heart is an exceedingly simple message, it's not a lot of incoherent claptrap. This is the gospel of the blessed God, and is coherent and profound. Is able to look in the face of any philosophy ever created and argue its case. So let me talk to you a little while about these, um, uh, philosophers, if you can bear it. You're going to get a good lunch afterwards to compensate you if I first, uh, tax your powers of endurance by talking a little thing about Epicureans and Stoics. These are men, along with the rest of the Greek philosophers, who tried to think, and that's no sin, is it? We Christians are reminded that we are to love the Lord our God, not merely with all our hearts, but with all our minds. Not to use our minds as best we can to think about God and his word is in fact a breaking of the biggest commandment of all. The Greek philosophers tried to use their minds to think. They were, of course, interested, very strongly interested, most of them, in what nowadays we call ethics, how man ought to behave. And therefore they quickly saw that if you're going to found ethics on a solid basis, you must ask questions about the whole universe around you. Where do we come from? What lies, if anything, behind this universe? Did anybody make it? You say, what's that got to do with ethics and the way we behave? Well, you can, you can find that out by going teaching the first form in school. Uh, do you have a notice, do you, on the playing field? Please keep off the grass. The teenager will want to know why and who said so. Mm-hmm. And if you tell me I must love my neighbor as myself, I shall ask you why and who said so? The fact is that if you deny the existence of God, our creator, your ethical system will lack any sufficient basis and authority. We had in the university where I worked for some years a very gracious gentleman. He was a commando in the war, was blinded. Very, very gracious, but an atheist. He came along to a little society that some of us ran to talk to us. We were Christians, and we had anybody come and talk, so long as we were allowed to ask questions afterwards, you see. He came and advocated the view that you have morality, serious morality, without believing in God. Yeah, a theory. To put it simply, though he was a very learned philosopher, he said, you see, it's like this. If you poke your finger in my eye, I shall poke my finger in your eye. And then you'll very soon come to the conclusion that putting fingers in people's eyes isn't a central thing to do, and you'll come to some agreement with your neighbor no longer to put your finger in his eye. And that's how morality is built up. You don't need God. When it came to question time, I said to the dear man, Sir, my name is Adolf Hitler, and I'm going to put my finger in your eye in a very big way. Don't you say you'll put your finger back in my eye because I've got the most tanks and the biggest army? And when eventually you overcome, uh, think you're going to overcome me, I shall simply shoot my brains out. And I shall have got away with it, can't I? I said to the lecturer, what would you say to me? His reply sticks in my memory. He said, I'd tell you to go and get lost. Which I thought was not altogether a philosophical answer to the problem. You'll see... these philosophers, wishing to develop an ethic, did also try to understand the universe around them. What makes it tick? How does it go? The Epicureans, they followed the theory of the early atomic scientists. For the Greeks, you know, invented the atomic theory. This is not a new invention, it's a very ancient invention. Leucippus and Democritus came to the conclusion that everything you can see around you is made of tiny, tiny particles, so tiny they cannot be split. They are atom. They can't be split, atoms. And though in our modern world we have a far more developed view of atoms than they ever possibly could have had, yet their basic concept was true, wasn't it? No good laughing at them. This is the beginning of modern science and eventually technology. Everything was made of atoms, they said, and the other thing was infinite void space. And these atoms, according to them, were falling down through space. And these atoms, according to them, were falling down through space. It was a very curious notion, but you see there's no up and down in space, so you can't fall anywhere, unless there's something near to attract you by gravity. But they held, they were falling through space, and then came a swerve, no one knew from where, and all these, uh, atoms started barging into each other like a pile up on the M m one. And because they were different shapes, eventually some of them linked together and then rebounded, and then others linked better together, and the force of all the atoms around them packed them tight, and eventually all sorts of creatures emerged. Funny looking creatures that weren't very stable, dinosaurs and things, and they came to bits again, but eventually there evolved stable animals and mankind. They were evolutionists. Evolution didn't g- begin with Charles Darwin, you know. It's a very ancient philosophy. The Epicureans laid hold on that physics. They didn't believe in God. They believed there were some gods out in intersp- interstellar space, but they didn't interfere with us and weren't interested in us anyway, so virtually they were atheists. And they taught as follows, that when you die, what is happening is the atoms that formed you disintegrate. The physical atoms of a- atoms of your body, the atoms of your mind, and nothing survives death. That's just the end. And the atoms go off and go in the grass and get in the cows and whatnot, and all, you know, the normal story, and go up to make all sorts of funny things. There was a Roman poet called Lucretius, who eventually read Epicurean philosophy and was delighted with it. And he tells us in his book, The Perms, why he was attracted to the philosophy of the Epicureans. He said, you know, isn't it marvelous? When we die, that's the end of us. And what a liberation that is. We no longer need to fear some judge that will haul us before him and examine our sins and consign us to hell. We now know that nothing survives. What a marvelous message that is. Not everybody who, uh, is an atheist is an atheist for objective scientific reasons. Like one main famous atheist has told us publicly, publicly and in his writings, he not only doesn't believe in God, he doesn't want there to be a God. And men and women have their reasons, don't they? For the very thought of God, by God's own creatorial arrangement, begins to awaken the conscience and makes us feel the weight of moral questions. And if there's a God who ca- who cares for morality, then life will not be the end. Uh, God will call us to account one day. And the Pope, Pope Lucretius was delighted that the atomic theory and evolution had seemed to prove that man does not survive death, and therefore there will be no judgment. Many still are attracted to that kind of theory today. What should we say to them? What I would say, among other things, is this. That if man does not survive death, and there's no judgment, then you've made a mockery of justice itself. Because for now, on that understanding, for millions upon millions of people, the notion of justice is a sheer mockery. We used to say sometimes to the Russians and to the sophisticated academics, no God? Righto, come with us to a Buchenwald or Auschwitz, and we'll go and talk to the prisoners, shall we, in our imagination, our little thought model. I said, I'll go first as a Christian, and I'll talk to them, and here they are, uh, their feeble arms. We want justice. What are you going to do about it? And I shall say, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do about it. You're not going to get justice in this life. But there is a God. And there will come a final judgment when God will put right the wrongs of this world. And you're sinners like the rest of us. But God loves you with the creator's love and sent his very son to die for you, that you might know here on earth the forgiveness of your sins and the certainty of eternal life with God in his heaven. That's what I shall say. I say, come on now, let the atheists come and talk. And they're saying to you, we want justice. What are you doing about it? What will you say? Well, you're not going to get justice in this life to come, so you'll not get justice there either. And all your hope throughout life of getting justice was nothing better than a rope of sand. There's ultimately not such a thing as justice. Which goes against that deep-seated, God-invented idea in our hearts, that morality counts. Our creator is concerned with morality and concerned with justice. So concerned that, as that lovely hymn we just sang reminded us, he didn't just brush our sins under the carpet. If ever he were to forgive them, it must be done in full accord with justice, that he might be just and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus. Epicureans and their modern equivalents are without hope, without ultimate hope. That ought to move our compassion, did it not? They are without God, without the Messiah, and in consequence, without hope in this world. And there are multitudes around us like it. And what of the Stoics? They were much more sensible people, in some sense. Whereas the great aim in life of the Epicureans was pleasure, the Stoics were a harder kind, and they said, no, no, no, no, pleasure cannot be the supreme good in life. The supreme good and virtue in life is to live according to reason. For they held that the universe is everywhere permeated by reason. Matter is permeated by reason. They looked upon reason as a kind of a fire that brought the universe into being and will recreate it when necessary. And there's a bit of that reason in everybody. And they, of course, were pantheists or panentheists, to be more correct. And therefore, they said we ought to try and live according to reason, because that's how the universe works. Then we all should try and act rationally. Wouldn't you agree with the Stoics we ought to act rationally? I think you would. Yes, but then because they thought that this, uh, this reason was part of the matter of the universe, it was material. Wasn't in that sense a God. It was just part of the stuff of the universe. They then believed that this universe as it is, is the best of all possible worlds. Must be if reason is at the heart of it, mustn't it? And that presented you with kind of problems. If you had found sixty million Jews about to be gassed, six million Jews about to be gassed, though they didn't know of such atrocities, they would have told you it was a reasonable thing to do to try and save them. Very reasonable. But if you found you couldn't save them and they got gassed anyway, then they would tell you that the only reasonable reaction is not to grieve about it. For if the reason that's at the heart of the universe allowed it, it must be for the best. And what were they but a few lives that were expendable? What they called matters of indifference. The main thing being reason. You say that sounds a little bit like Romans eight, All things work together for good. It's as far distant from Romans eight as we are from the edge of the universe. We don't believe that this world and all its details is the best world that ever could be. It's a fallen world, invaded by sin, ruled over by the god and prince of this world, his satanic majesty. It's a heartbreakingly fallen world. I thank God for the knowledge of the Savior, who's allowed this, but sent his son to seek and to save us. And because we have trusted him, can assure us that he does indeed work all things together for good to those that love him. Not to make life more comfortable, but to turn even the pains and sorrows of life to positive good, helping to conform us to God's eventual goal, that we shall be conformed to the image of his dear son. The Stoics, like the Epicureans, had no ultimate hope. One day the whole universe would collapse, and then it would be reinstituted by this aforesaid reason, but because reason was behind the first lot, the next lot would be exactly the same and repeat everything again all over again the second time round. And as for the individual, there's no ultimate hope for him at all. No hope. And multitudes live like it, don't they? Does it not move our compassions that we might, if need be, equip ourselves, yes, to bring them the gospel of the cross, but to pull out from their pathway some of the stumbling blocks that stop them coming to faith, and among which is to point out to them the serious deficiencies, logical deficiencies, and spiritual deficiencies of their false systems of thought. You say, I, we didn't come here to be taught Greek philosophy, we came here to hear the Bible expounded and how to preach the gospel. Oh, half on, I'm going to preach the gospel, uh, in my last few moments anyway, because I'm going to maintain that Paul preached the gospel even to the Areopagites. He seems to be a setter forth of strange, that is, foreign gods, they said. And if you read the summary that Luke has given us of Paul's speech, you will find everywhere, almost at every sentence, if not at every phrase, he talks to them about God. That's the first thing you had to get straight with pagans like that, to tell them what God was like, for their ideas of God were sadly deficient. He pointed out that God is not a foreign God. He is the God, he says, that made heaven and earth. He preached God the Creator. He's not a foreign God. He's made of one, that is Adam, all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. He's the creator of all. He's not far from any one of us, says Paul. And what is more, he commands all everywhere to repent. Because he's appointed a day in which he will judge the whole world in righteousness. Paul is preaching the gospel of God. You say he ought to preach the cross, but how for ninny it? You like the book of Romans, epistle to Romans? I think you do. You say, yes, that is a marvelous statement of the gospel, particularly chapter three. Yes, but before chapter three comes chapter two, and before chapter two becomes chapter one. And how does Paul begin his great exposition of the gospel? By talking about God and tracing man's kind- mankind's problem to the fact that knowing God, they did not retain the knowledge of God. Therefore, men are culpable before God. He preached the one true God. Nowadays, we have a considerable opposition, don't we? You mustn't say anything to the world, uh, that where you suggest that your God is the only God there is. And that sounds marvelous in our modern society, doesn't it? Very democratic. It's nonsense. By definition, philosophically, there can't be more than one God. But anyway. What about the laws of arithmetic? Do they just apply to, um, English or the West? Or are the laws of arithmetic, one and one make two, universal? And what about the sun in the sky? Is there one for everybody, Indian or Chinese or even Irish? Yeah, even in Ireland we have just one sun, the same as everybody. It's no good objecting. Gravity. I think it applies everywhere. Got the impression it did. It's no good objecting. I'm an Australian. Don't you start talking to me about gravity. Well, all right, old chap, you go and jump off a skyscraper and see whether gravity applies in Australia. It's a philosophical nonsense that you must allow everybody to have their own ideas, uh, and gods galore. But what is God like? Now that's the rub, isn't it? What is God's like? Can you be sure? How would you decide? Paul is talking to pagans. He says, you know, God who made everything doesn't dwell in temples made with hands. How could you? He's infinite. Do you know that the Stoics and the Epicureans would have clapped at that? They said, yes, because many of the philosophers thought their pagan religion in their temples was a lot of old nonsense. It was very important when Paul was talking to them that he dissociated Christianity from that pa- pagan religion with its temples and its incense and all its paraphernalia of, um, very questionable ceremonies. Yes, of course, the God, if he exists, is infinite. He cannot dwell in temples made with hands. Neither is he served by men's hands as though he needed anything. How'd you come to that? Because he has to make everything. You can't, uh, buy anything from God. He's not in business, you know. Doesn't sell anything. Oh, what a marvelous gospel message that is. The almighty infinite God. You don't even have to pay him for salvation, you know. All that it should be proclaimed the world through, and not least in Christendom. The multitudes imagine they have a Christianity, when they've fallen back into the old pagan idea that you have to pay God by your good deeds or something or other for salvation. What a tragedy it is. You can't buy forgiveness. You can't buy eternal. These things are a gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Yes. He's appointed the bands of our habit- habitation that we might seek him, says Paul. It is our duty to seek God. If you came home every day from your office, your factory and found a beautiful bunch of flowers on the table, all nicely packed, delightful. You said, that's odd, I don't know who put them there, but never mind, I put them in the vase and that's that. But you found it every day. Would you not begin to ask who put them there? Or would you attribute that to a freak of evolution or something? And if you found out and had an idea of somebody put them there, would you not attempt to thank them? Or to evolution, because where would if there be no God creator? We are to seek him. And what's he like? Well, says Paul, God that made everything is not to be likened to stone or wood or metal, is he now? How do you come at that? Well, because we humans are persons. And we instinctively know in our heart of hearts that persons are more important, more significant than mere matter. I trust you'll not think me, uh, uh, bordering on the insanity of pride when I say that I'm far more significant, my brain is tiny as it is, my brain is more significant than the sun up in the sky, you know. Because the old sun is only so much gas, you'll see. I know the sun is there. The sun doesn't know I'm here. If it did, it might shine a bit more. We will see. Ha. Thanks to the scientists, I know a bit about how the sun works. The sun doesn't know anything about how I work. The sun doesn't go courting the moon with a nice romantic, uh, trill in its voice, anything like that. Mere matter. Yes, we instinctively feel we're more important, more significant than mere matter, and the God who made us is certainly more than personal, is not less personal than we are, is he? What a nonsense that would be. I must soon stop, as I shall be a nonsense. But I must say this. I sometimes get a certain amount of, I don't know, false, false kick, I suppose, in it, just to remind my atheist friends of what they're doing to themselves. You'll see they don't believe there's a personal God. Well, where did we all come from then? From impersonal matter. Well, interesting. And impersonal matter, without knowing what it's done, has produced us humans with our brains and our rationality. Marvelous accident, that. And one of these days, I say, a little virus will get into your body, and it hope won't have more than tuppence hate me worth of sense. Certainly not got any reason or rationality, and it will begin to tear your body apart, and eventually your brain, and with it your rationality. And when it's done it, you won't even know it's done it. Which means that if there's no God, you and I are in a prison house of mere matter. Without any thinking produced us, and without any thinking one day will destroy us. And there's nothing we can do about it. That's a marvelous, uh, uh, uh, uh, conclusion for reason to come to, isn't it? With all their rationality and powers and their theories, they come to the conclusion that their reason is a prisoner of mindless forces, which will eventually destroy their reason. Marvelous logic, that is, isn't it? I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, my dear brothers and sisters. Not ashamed of it. For the God who gave his son for us is the God of reason. His gospel transcends reason, but it's not irrational. And we who believe it know Christ as the wisdom of God, the philosophy of God, if you like, and the power of God. So may God encourage us to follow Paul's example. Not that we all of us meet philosophers every day of the week, but whatever and wherever we find men and women, to seek God's grace. First of all, to understand their difficulties. And the big difficulties some of them have in coming to Christ. God help us to be compassionate. And to seek ways of talking with them, if need be, arguing with them, so that we might induce them at least to come and read God's word and to discover the Savior for themselves.