From Unknown to Undeniable

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Well, normally as we come to this time of year, my natural instinct is for us to talk about evidence for the resurrection. I’ve done that several times over the last few years. Instead of getting into the evidence today, which hopefully if you’ve been here any length of time, you know by now there is evidence, there’s plenty of evidence for the resurrection.

But instead of getting into that today, I want to talk about the effects of the resurrection. I want to talk about how the resurrection of Jesus split history in two. How it split people’s lives in two.

That there was before the resurrection and there was after the resurrection. For those who were not eyewitnesses to the event, there was before knowing about the resurrection and after the resurrection. We experience things like these in our own lives.

It was kind of a sad week as a lot of people I know that either from my family or that I know from growing up in Oklahoma City were sharing their remembrances about the Oklahoma City bombing that took place 30 years ago this week. My dad wrote a beautiful piece about a friend of his who had just started work at the credit union in the federal building and was killed in the bombing. And I remember that as a child.

There was life before that, and there was life after that event, and they were not the same. You know, we talk that way, Charla and I do, about 9-11. There was what life was like before 9-11.

There was what life is like after 9-11. And so much of life is different. They’re not the same.

We’ll watch shows with our kids that were made in the 80s and 90s and think, wow, I forgot, you know, you could just run and catch somebody as they’re about to walk onto a plane. You know, they don’t make movies about that anymore. It’s not quite as, there’s not quite as much dramatic tension running and catching somebody in the security line at the airport where they’re waiting for three hours.

Now, they used to run up to the gate, but life is completely different now. It happens on a smaller scale in our lives where an event happens that everything that comes afterwards is different from what there was before. Sometimes it’s a death of a close loved one.

Sometimes it’s a diagnosis. Sometimes it’s the loss of a job. For some reason, a lot of these things that change our lives in that way are negatives.

But every once in a while, there’s good news that is a dividing line in our lives. there’s good news that we can say there was everything before and then everything after and they’re not the same and the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those moments for those who believe it’s it’s one of those moments in our lives that there was before him and there was after him and they’re not the same for those who experienced it for those who are eyewitnesses there was before the resurrection and after the resurrection and the two were not the same This morning we’re going to be in Acts chapter 17 and we’re going to look at a moment where Paul steps in and talks to a group of people who were not eyewitnesses to the resurrection, really did not initially understand what the resurrection was about, really didn’t understand God that much. And Paul could have done a lot of things.

Paul could have corrected a lot of errors in their thinking, a lot of errors in their behavior. But the number one thing Paul wanted them to know was that Jesus was crucified for them and rose again from the dead three days later. And that’s the message that he brought to this group of people.

That’s the message that got them stirred up. That’s the message that for some of them changed everything in their lives. It’s the message that turned entire cities and eventually the Roman Empire upside down was this message that Jesus died.

And then as my son put, when he was very little, he died and then he stopped being dead. And that’s what’s so incredible about it because that doesn’t happen. That’s not something we see every day.

That’s not something that we should believe without compelling evidence, which fortunately we have. But I want to look at this message this morning. So if you have not already turned there with me to Acts 17, I’d invite you to do so now.

And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to start in verse 22 and read through verse 34. this message that Paul brought this group of pagan people in Athens about the resurrection. Now, he doesn’t mention the resurrection until the end here, but once we see it, we can tell that he’s tied everything else he’s talking about to the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

So it says, starting in verse 22, So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God. Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.

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, 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. 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, 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. For in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are also his children.

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. 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. Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, we shall hear you again concerning this.

So Paul went out of their midst, but some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. And you may be seated. So as we come into this story, Paul is talking to a group of people who thought they knew God.

They thought they understood God, but they were mistaken. What they knew were false gods. And what they had in the back of their minds was this vague notion that we might have missed one.

We have all these temples, we have all these shrines, but we might have missed somebody. And so just in case we missed a God, we really don’t want to irritate that God, so we’re going to make a temple, a little shrine to Him, to the unknown God, and we’ll worship that as well. And Paul says, that’s the God you don’t know, but there is a way for you to know this unknown God, if they were willing.

And so he begins to talk to them about how they can know this unknown God, and he ties all of this in to the resurrection of Jesus. Because as he’s talking about how God created them, who God is, how we can know him, he ends the message and he ends it abruptly. We tend to think that he was not finished there, but maybe he was interrupted as he got to the point.

Because typically it was, you’ll see this several times throughout the book of Acts, that as they’re preaching about Jesus, as the apostles are preaching about Jesus, people are basically fine with it until they get to the resurrection, and then everybody loses their minds. That seems to be what happened here. But when we get to the end of what he did say, he’s building a case, as Paul does, point by point.

And then he says in verse 31, he has appointed having furnished proof to all men by having raised him from the dead. So how do we know all of these things are true that I’ve said up to this point? It’s because God proved them by raising this man from the dead, and he’s talking about Jesus.

And we see he’s preaching about Jesus who has been crucified, who has been raised from the dead. Paul, it’s important to point out in case you’re not familiar with Paul, Paul was not a believer in Jesus during Jesus’s time on earth. What changed Paul’s mind was a vision of Jesus having been raised from the dead.

Now, there were others that saw Jesus in physical form that Paul later talked with. Paul saw him later in a vision. But it took something pretty compelling to change Paul’s mind because he was somebody who started out as a persecutor of Christians.

And now he has become so convinced that not only was Jesus worth listening to, but Jesus actually rose from the dead. He is at this point convinced by that fact that Jesus is God, that he has now gone out all over the known world and at great risk to himself, He is now preaching to other people that Jesus has been crucified for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day as the scriptures foretold that he would be. So he brings that message to the people of Athens, and it’s happened so many times they seem to be listening intently.

The Athenians especially, they long to hear new and novel ideas. So they’re listening intently until he gets to the point about the resurrection, and then verse 32 tells us they started to sneer. The resurrection was a problem for the Athenians.

The resurrection challenges our ideas about Jesus. It challenged theirs. It challenges ours today.

They had a reputation, as I said, for being really religious. There was a Roman writer who claimed that Athens had more gods than men. It’s a little bit of an exaggeration to make a point.

But the fact was you could walk into ancient Athens and there were temples and shrines on every street corner. They wanted to make sure they had all the gods covered. They were incredibly religious people.

But despite what he says in verse 22 about them being very religious in all respects, Paul says there was still a lot they didn’t understand about God. They thought they understood what they needed to about God, but they were wrong. He tells them about this God who’s unknown to them, a God that he says they worshiped in ignorance.

And there’s nothing about the God that he’s telling them about that fits their expectations. There’s a few times that Paul writes that the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ is foolishness to the Greeks. And that wording might make us a little uncomfortable.

He takes this message about Jesus and says that it’s foolish. Well, he’s not saying it’s foolish. He’s saying it’s foolish to them.

Why would it be foolish to them? Because they had all these gods. They had all these ideas about God.

And nothing about the God of the Bible fit with their ideas of what a God should be. The idea that there’s only one God and all the rest of them are made up. That was completely foreign to the Greeks.

But you’re telling me Zeus is not real? You’re telling me, and my son is really into the stories of Greek mythology and likes to quiz me. And I don’t know the stories of Greek mythology, so I try to put a stop to it.

Like Friday at lunch, who is the mother of monsters? Charla. I don’t know.

That’s supposed to be a joke, but I did tell him that. Who was the most powerful God in ancient Greece? Jesus.

No, I mean, for the ancient Greeks, who was the most powerful God? Jesus. They just didn’t realize it.

Okay. I don’t know all these other gods, but they’re all made up. He knows that.

Don’t worry that he’s going to start teaching wrong things. Like, should we have him up here leading children’s devotional? If he starts talking about Zeus, I’ll clamp down on that.

But they had all these gods that are just made up. And so this idea, if I said to them, the most powerful God in ancient Greece is Jesus. As a matter of fact, he’s the only real one.

That would have just been completely foreign to them. There’s the idea of him being perfect. The understanding that we have from the Bible that God is perfect and God is omniscient and he’s all-knowing, he’s all-powerful, he’s all-good, he’s all of these things.

They couldn’t wrap their heads around that because their gods were more messed up than we are. You look at their stories that they told, Zeus is a mess. Zeus messed up his whole family because he couldn’t get his act together.

The idea that there’s a perfect God was foreign to them, that there’s an all-powerful God was foreign to them. The idea of the incarnation that God would become a man in the person of Jesus Christ, that was foreign to them. Now, they had stories where a God might want to play a trick on somebody or deceive somebody so they’d take on a human appearance, but they were pretending.

They didn’t actually become people. You also had this weird dynamic where somebody could be half God and half man. But the idea that God would become a man, and that somebody could be fully God and fully man, did not make sense to them.

The idea that a God would sacrifice himself for us was absolute foolishness to them. In their Greek religion, you had to do everything just right to keep the gods happy, and you had to sacrifice to them so that they’d be happy with you, and maybe they’d take care of you. So the idea that a God had come down to become a man and had made the ultimate sacrifice for us was bizarre for them.

And then they didn’t even have a category for the resurrection. They believed that when you die, you became something like a shadow in the next world. The idea that anybody would come back from the dead, that just did not fit anything that they understood about the world.

So that’s why Paul says that they would consider it foolishness. For him to come and say, There’s this story about this Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, God in human flesh, that the God who created the universe became a man and dwelt among us and lived a perfect, sinless life like Zeus never could, and then sacrificed himself for us, and then rose again from the dead, they would have said, this is crazy. This is crazy talk.

It challenged their ideas about who God is. this whole story, challenge their ideas about who God is. And in our world, it’s the same way.

Some of the details may be a little bit different, but people are comfortable with certain ideas about God. They’re comfortable with certain ideas about Jesus that the resurrection just comes and blows holes in. Different ideas that people have about Jesus.

Oh, he’s just a passive, good-natured teacher who affirmed people, affirmed everything people wanted to do, and just taught us to be kind. He is some of those things. He was a good teacher.

He did teach us to be kind, but He’s so much more than that. The resurrection shows that He’s more than that. Because there have been a lot of good teachers who’ve come and told us how to be kind to each other, and they did not predict and accomplish their own resurrection from the dead.

There’s something unique about Jesus, and the resurrection, if that’s what the world wants Jesus to be, if that’s all they want him to be, is just a good moral teacher, passive guy, everything’s wonderful, the resurrection stands at odds with that idea of Jesus. Because if he rose again from the dead, he’s all the things that Paul outlines him being here. Which is where we get into my second point this morning.

The resurrection demonstrates who Jesus is and what he does. It gives us a clearer picture of who Jesus is and what he does. This is what they would need to understand if they’re going to worship that unknown God, here’s who He is.

Each of these attributes, too, is tied to the resurrection. In verses 24 through 26, He outlines how Jesus holds power over life and death and everything in between. In verse 24, it talks about Him being the creator of everything and the master of everything.

He made the world and all the things in it, and He’s Lord of heaven. He’s Lord of earth. He created everything.

That would be uncomfortable for the Greeks in particular, because as long as you did your sacrifices, the gods really didn’t demand much of you, really didn’t care what you did. But here’s somebody who claimed to be Lord of heaven and earth and predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead to prove it. If he is everything he claimed to be, then he’s in charge and we’re accountable to him.

That was uncomfortable for the Greeks. That was an uncomfortable change. That’s uncomfortable for us today, this idea that there’s somebody beyond ourselves that we’re accountable to.

And unlike the Greek gods, he’s not dependent on us. It’s the other way around. Since he’s Lord of heaven and earth, he does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything.

Talked about this Wednesday night for those of you who were here for the study on Zephaniah. In a lot of pagan contexts, you have your statues of the gods and you bring them offerings, sacrifices. You bring them offerings of food.

You bring them water. You’ll wash them. You’ll clothe them.

You’ll move them from this spot to the next so they can be worshiped. These gods are utterly dependent on humans to care for them. It was the same way in ancient Greece.

And Paul said, Jesus is not dependent on us. We’re dependent on him instead. Because he says in verse 25, he himself gives to all people life and breath and all things.

All that we have. Every good and perfect gift that comes from above, as James says, is dependent on Jesus, is dependent on him to have made it, to have given it to us. And so we’re dependent on him.

And then when we get into verse 26, we see that it’s not just that we are dependent on him. Nations and empires throughout history have been dependent on him, is the claim that Paul makes. He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth.

So he created all people. He created all the nations, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitations to these Greeks who were the descendants of a massive and powerful empire, actually multiple empires. They now live in the Roman Empire, which was the greatest, most powerful empire known to man at that point.

And they look back in history and they see the Assyrians, they see the Babylonians, they see the Carthaginians, they see all these massive, powerful imperial nations that have come and gone. And he said, Jesus determined when they would be and where they would be for his own purposes. This was a real difference from their gods who had authority over one or two little things.

Here’s Jesus who controls life and death and everything in between. And you would expect a God like that would be too busy to mess with us. He’s got too much going on.

But when we get to verse 27, he starts to make the point that this God has made himself available to us. This Jesus who controls all things has made himself available to us. The Greek gods were too much like us to be much use to us.

You know, they might not help their worshipers because they didn’t want to, or because it benefited them to be selfish. And even then, they weren’t all powerful. But Jesus, despite all that He has to do, Jesus cared enough to make Himself knowable to us and to take care of us.

He made Himself findable. Verse 27 says that they would seek God if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He’s not far from every one of us. And that’s tied to verse 26.

Jesus is moving the nations of the world around like pieces on a chessboard. And why is he doing this? What’s his purpose in doing this?

To orchestrate things in such a way that he can be found. What is moving the empires of the world around? What does that have to do with making Jesus found?

Well, Jesus came at just the right time in history that all these Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled and where it just so happened that the Romans had made it where really for the first time in history, you could travel from one end of the known world to the other in relative safety on roads that might not look much to us today, but were state-of-the-art as far as people and things and news to be able to travel long distances. And most of the known world spoke one language. Now, why did that happen?

Because of prophecies 700 years earlier in the book of Daniel that talked about the Greeks who laid the foundation for that with their language and with their commerce and the Romans who came and then kicked the Greeks out according to that prophecy and brought in their rule of law and God was just orchestrating all of these things so that when Jesus came it would be possible for as many people as possible to know him and it says he is not far from each one of us God like that we might expect to be distant but he’s moved everything he needs to for us to find him. And he’s not far from us. He’s not up there hiding from us.

He wants to be known. Verse 28 says, for in him we live and move and exist. As some of your prophets even said, we are also his children. Don’t ask me why he loves us.

Don’t ask me why he loves me. I know me. I know me better than you do, and I’m not that lovable.

And yet the Bible tells us that while we were, God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He looked at us. He saw everything about us that was unlovable, and He loved us anyway.

And He loved us enough that He came to the cross for our forgiveness, for our salvation. He cares enough to want to have a relationship with us. And we get to verse 29.

He’s greater than all other gods. Being 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. I’ve said this before, but I will never not be puzzled by the idea of worshiping something that you made, because that thing is dependent on you.

And so he’s saying this God cannot be encompassed with gold and silver and stone. He’s not some dead lifeless image. He’s greater than all the gods that they were worshiping, greater than all those gods combined.

And then in the next couple of verses, he tells us that this God is different because he warns of judgment, but he offers mercy. God has let them go on for a time worshiping their idols. But he says, having overlooked those 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 which he has appointed.

There is a day that Jesus Christ is coming back in judgment to judge sin, to judge idolatry. How do we know he’s coming back? Again, he ties it at the end of this verse to this proof of the resurrection.

How do we know He’s coming back? Because He’s come back before. So when somebody dies, promising that He’s going to come back and He rises from the dead, when that same person leaves and says, I’ll come back, you’ve got reason to believe He’s coming back.

And it says He’s coming back in judgment. But notice that one phrase in there that all people everywhere should repent. Why the call for repentance?

Because there’s mercy if we’ll turn to Him. Our sin deserves to be judged. Our sin deserves to be punished.

But there’s a call for us to turn, to turn to Him. It’s a call to repent. Because Jesus, unlike their gods, will judge the world.

But Jesus, unlike their gods, is merciful. And so He proclaims to them this message of a God who came to earth and became a man. Crazy to them.

This God sacrificed Himself for them, for our forgiveness. It’s crazy to them. This same God proved it, proved all of that by rising again from the dead.

Again, that’s crazy to them. And now we look at it and we have evidence. We can take the accounts of the gospel writers.

We can take the accounts of non-believing Roman and Jewish and Greek historians. We can talk about the things that history records, the changes that you can’t explain any other way. We can talk about how the details of the gospel accounts line up with what medical science tells us to expect.

We can get into all of that, and we have ample reason to believe it. For them, they’re hearing this for the first time, and it didn’t make sense to some of them. For them, the resurrection was controversial. For the skeptics in the crowd, it was the final straw.

They began to sneer. They apparently cut him off and interrupted him. The same thing is true today.

You can still talk about God in a lot of quarters and people are fine with it. You get a little more specific about Jesus, people get a little more uncomfortable. You profess to believe that Jesus rose again from the dead and you’re mocked or you’ve gone too far.

We don’t want to hear about that. If we proclaim the resurrection, it will bring opposition. That’s what happened in the days of the apostles.

And I don’t pretend that anything we’ll face today or in our lifetimes is going to be the same as what they faced. At one point this week, I thought I was going to preach on Acts chapter 4, where Peter and John were arrested and beaten for preaching the resurrection and wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop even after they were arrested and beaten, because it was a message that they believed in with such firm conviction that they couldn’t not tell people about it.

That’s just one example. Paul is another. If we proclaim the resurrection, it will cause opposition.

Because if we proclaim that Jesus died and rose again from the dead, we are claiming something to be exclusively true about Jesus Christ that is not true of any other religious leader in history. But it’s the most important message we could proclaim. It’s the most important truth we could stand on.

It’s not just important on Easter. It’s important every day of our lives. Because there are times that it’s the only thing we have to stand on.

There will be times. There will be times you face difficulty in life, and it does not make sense to you. There may be times when those difficulties rise to the level that you think, is God even paying attention to me?

Does God even care? You may even wonder, how do I know any of this is true? How do I know that he’s going to come back for me?

How do I know that he has prepared a place in heaven for me? The beautiful thing about this is our faith is not dependent on how we feel moment to moment. The beautiful thing about the Christian faith is it is rooted in a historical truth claim that is either true or not.

2,000 years ago, Jesus either walked out of the grave or he did not. If he did, then I’m inclined to believe the man who said, I’m going to be crucified and rise from the dead, and then he did. I’m going to listen to what that guy says.

If it’s not true, then no amount of feeling about anything makes any of this worthwhile. And I can tell you, there have been difficult days where I’ve wondered, is God paying attention? Why?

Because your feelings lie to you. Why would I think God actually loves me or cares about any of this? Amen.

And I go back to that conviction that history tells us 2,000 years ago, he walked out of that grain. And if that’s true, then everything he claimed about himself is true. Every bit of authority he asserted is true.

Every promise he made is true. And some of those claims he made about himself are controversial. Sometimes we in our human nature and our flesh, we don’t want those things to be true because of the accountability. And so the resurrection as the ultimate proof of who he is is always going to be controversial, but there’s nothing more important that we have to stand on because the resurrection changes lives.

It changed lives in Jesus’ day. It changes lives in our day. You see there are the people at the end of this chapter who were scoffers.

Paul went out, but verse 34 says, some men joined him and believed. Paul could look at it and say, well, I’m a failure because I preached the resurrection, they didn’t believe they made fun of me. No, there were people who believed.

After he left, it looks like there were people who believed. That message, even if it’s rejected, even if it’s harassed, even if it’s heckled, that message continues to work and continues to have power and continues to change lives and work on people that Jesus Christ died for our sins because there was no other way we could be forgiven. And he didn’t stop there.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead to prove it, to prove to us that he was God in the flesh, able to save our sins, to prove to us that he would return, to prove to us that we could trust him and the promises he made. If Jesus rose from the dead, then everything he said about himself is undeniably true. And this morning for you, because Jesus rose from the dead, you can trust his promises.

You can trust his offer of forgiveness and salvation. When he says he paid for your sins in full at the cross, when he died and said it is finished. When he sent out his apostles to preach that the only thing we had to do was trust in him for our salvation, and we’d have it, you can take him at his word, because it’s the word of a man who predicted and accomplished his own resurrection.

If you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior before today, I want to invite you to do it before you leave here today. In just a moment, we’ll stand and we’ll sing as we close out this service, and you’re more than welcome to come talk with me. Come talk with we have any number of other people here we can direct you to who’d be glad to talk with you.

And we’d love to answer your questions about what Jesus did for you and help you understand how you can have a relationship with Him. If you’re nervous about walking down in front of people, when we’re done here, I’ll be out in the Welcome Center just to your right. I’d love to talk with you there.

But also right where you are this morning, if you understand what I’ve told you, you can trust Christ and ask for that forgiveness and you’ll have it. This morning, if you’re already a believer, maybe you’re going through a