Waverly Church of Christ

In the days of the apostle Paul such technology was not available. He and those with him had to travel from city to city. Our reading this morning was taken from the account of Paul’s time spent in the city of Athens, Greece. Paul had been forced to leave the city of Berea and sail to Athens where he was waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him. Athens was the cultural capital of the world — its buildings and monuments were unrivaled by any other city in the ancient world. However, as Luke tells us here in verse 16, “the city full of idols.”  The ancient Roman writer Petronius said that it was easier to find a god than a man in Athens. There were images of Apollo, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Baccus, Neptune and Diana — the whole Greek pantheon. All of this caused Paul’s spirit to be “provoked within him” — “His whole soul was revolted at the sight of a city given over to idolatry” (Jerusalem Bible).  As a result, Paul began “reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God fearing Gentiles, and in the market place every day with those who happened to be present.” (Acts 17:17, NASB95) Some of the philosophers began arguing with him while others accused him of being an idle babbler. Still others, because Paul was preaching Jesus and the resurrection, said he was a “proclaimer of strange deities” (v. 18).
Finally, the took him to the Areopagus, a hill adjacent to the Acropolis where the supreme court of ancient Athens used to meet. There he began to tell them about the “unknown God,” the one they worshiped in ignorance. In his sermon, I want us to see three truths which Paul communicated that day. The truth about God The truth about ourselves. The truth about our destiny.