Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Acts 17:22-34, NASB
- Series: Individual Messages (2025), no. 3
- Date: Sunday, April 20, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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The Resurrection Changes Everything
Normally, when we come to this time of year, my natural instinct is for us to talk about the evidence for the resurrection. I have done that several times over the last few years. Instead of getting into the evidence today—though I hope, if you have been here any length of time, you know by now that there is evidence, and plenty of evidence, for the resurrection—I want to talk about the effects of the resurrection.
I want to talk about how the resurrection of Jesus split history in two. It split people’s lives in two. 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 there was after knowing about the resurrection.
We experience things like this in our own lives. It was a sad week, as a lot of people I know, either from my family or 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. I remember that as a child. There was life before that, and there was life after that event, and they were not the same.
Charla and I talk that way about 9/11. There was what life was like before 9/11, and there was what life was like after 9/11. So much of life is different. They are not the same. We will watch shows with our kids that were made in the 1980s and 1990s and think, “Wow, I forgot you could just run and catch somebody as they were about to walk onto a plane.” They do not make movies about that anymore. There is not quite as much dramatic tension in running and catching somebody in the security line at the airport, where they are waiting for three hours. They used to run up to the gate, but life is completely different now.
It happens on a smaller scale in our lives when an event happens and everything that comes afterward is different from what came before. Sometimes it is the death of a close loved one. Sometimes it is a diagnosis. Sometimes it is the loss of a job. For some reason, a lot of the things that change our lives in that way are negative.
But every once in a while, there is good news that becomes a dividing line in our lives. There is good news where we can say there was everything before and then everything after, and they are not the same. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those moments. For those who believe, it is one of those moments in our lives where there was before him and there was after him, and they are not the same. For those who experienced it, for those who were eyewitnesses, there was before the resurrection and after the resurrection, and the two were not the same.
This morning, we are going to be in Acts 17. We are going to look at a moment where Paul steps in and talks to a group of people who were not eyewitnesses to the resurrection. They really did not initially understand what the resurrection was about. They really did not understand God that much at all. Paul could have done a lot of things. He could have corrected a lot of errors in their thinking and 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.
That is the message he brought to this group of people. That is the message that got them stirred up. That is the message that, for some of them, changed everything in their lives. It is the message that turned entire cities and eventually the Roman Empire upside down: Jesus died, and then, as my son put it when he was very little, he stopped being dead.
That is what is so incredible about it, because that does not happen. That is not something we see every day. That is not something we should believe without compelling evidence, which fortunately we have. But I want to look at Paul’s message this morning in Acts 17, beginning in verse 22. Paul brought this message about the resurrection to a group of pagan people in Athens. He does not mention the resurrection until the end, but once we see it, we can tell that he has tied everything else he is talking about to the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.
Paul and the Unknown God
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. What they had in the back of their minds was this vague notion that they might have missed one. They had all these temples and all these shrines, but they thought, “We might have missed somebody. And just in case we missed a god, we really do not want to irritate that god. So we are going to make a little shrine to him, to the unknown god, and we will worship that as well.”
Paul says, in effect, “That is the God you do not know. But there is a way for you to know this unknown God, if you are willing.” So he begins to talk to them about how they can know this unknown God, and he ties all of this to the resurrection of Jesus.
As he talks about how God created them, who God is, and how we can know him, he ends the message abruptly. It may be that he was not finished, but it also may be that he was interrupted as he got to the point. We see this several times throughout the book of Acts. As the apostles preach 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.
By the time we get to the end of what Paul does say, he has been building a case point by point, as Paul does. Then he says in verse 31 that God has “furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.” In other words, how do we know all of these things are true? It is because God proved them by raising this man from the dead. He is talking about Jesus.
Paul is preaching about Jesus who was crucified and raised from the dead. It is important to point out, if you are not familiar with Paul, that Paul was not a believer in Jesus during Jesus’ time on earth. What changed Paul’s mind was a vision of Jesus after he had been raised from the dead. Others had seen Jesus in physical form, and Paul later talked with them. Paul saw him later in a vision. But it took something compelling to change Paul’s mind, because Paul began as a persecutor of Christians.
Now Paul has become convinced not only that Jesus was worth listening to, but that Jesus actually rose from the dead. At this point, he is so convinced by that fact that Jesus is God that he has gone out all over the known world, at great risk to himself, preaching to other people that Jesus was crucified for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day, as the Scriptures foretold that he would.
So Paul brings that message to the people of Athens. As had happened so many times, they seemed to be listening intently. The Athenians especially longed to hear new and novel ideas. They listened intently until Paul got to the point about the resurrection. Then verse 32 tells us that some of them began to sneer.
The Resurrection Challenges Our Ideas About Jesus
The resurrection was a problem for the Athenians. The resurrection challenges our ideas about Jesus. It challenged theirs, and it challenges ours today.
The Athenians had a reputation for being religious. There was a Roman writer who claimed that Athens had more gods than men. That is a little bit of an exaggeration to make a point, but the fact was that you could walk into ancient Athens and find 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 Paul says in verse 22 about them being “very religious in all respects,” he also says there was still a lot they did not understand about God. They thought they understood what they needed to understand about God, but they were wrong. He tells them about this God who was unknown to them, a God they worshiped in ignorance. And there is nothing about the God he is telling them about that fits their expectations.
There are several times where Paul writes that the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ, is foolishness to the Greeks. That wording might make us a little uncomfortable. He takes this message about Jesus and says it is foolishness. But he is not saying it is foolish. He is saying it is foolish to them.
Why would it be foolish to them? Because they had all these gods and 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 is only one God and all the rest of them are made up was completely foreign to the Greeks. “You are telling me Zeus is not real?” “You are telling me…” My son is really into the stories of Greek mythology and likes to quiz me, and I do not know the stories of Greek mythology, so I try to put a stop to it.
At lunch on Friday, he asked, “Who is the mother of monsters?” I said, “Charla.” I do not know. That was supposed to be a joke, but I did tell him that. Then he asked, “Who was the most powerful god in ancient Greece?” I said, “Jesus.” He said, “No, I mean for the ancient Greeks, who was the most powerful god?” I said, “Jesus. They just did not realize it.” I do not know all these other gods, but they are all made up. He knows that, so do not worry that he is going to start teaching wrong things. If he starts talking about Zeus, I will clamp down on that.
But they had all these gods that were made up. So if Paul said to them, “The most powerful God in ancient Greece is Jesus. As a matter of fact, he is the only real one,” that would have been completely foreign to them. Then there is the idea of him being perfect. The understanding we have from the Bible is that God is perfect, omniscient, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. The Greeks could not wrap their heads around that because their gods were more messed up than we are.
You look at the stories they told, and Zeus is a mess. Zeus messed up his whole family because he could not get his act together. The idea that there is a perfect God was foreign to them. The idea that there is 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, was foreign to them. They had stories where a god might want to play a trick on somebody or deceive somebody, so he would take on a human appearance. But in those stories, they were pretending. They did not actually become people.
They also had this strange dynamic where somebody could be half god and half man. But the idea that God would become a man, and that someone 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 Greek religion, you had to do everything just right to keep the gods happy. You had to sacrifice to them so that they would be happy with you, and maybe then they would 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 to them.
They did not even have a category for the resurrection. They believed that when you died, you became something like a shadow in the next world. The idea that anybody would come back from the dead did not fit anything they understood about the world. That is why Paul says they would consider it foolishness. For him to come and say there is this story about Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, God in human flesh, that the God who created the universe became a man, dwelt among us, lived a perfect, sinless life like Zeus never could, 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 challenged their ideas about who God is. In our world, it is the same way. Some of the details may be different, but people are comfortable with certain ideas about God. They are comfortable with certain ideas about Jesus, and the resurrection comes and blows holes in them.
Some people want Jesus to be a passive, good-natured teacher who affirmed people, affirmed everything they 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 is so much more than that. The resurrection shows that he is more than that, because there have been a lot of good teachers who have come and told us to be kind to each other, and they did not predict and accomplish their own resurrection from the dead.
There is something unique about Jesus. If all the world wants Jesus to be is a good moral teacher, a passive guy who says everything is wonderful, the resurrection stands at odds with that idea of Jesus. Because if he rose again from the dead, then he is all the things Paul outlines him as being here.
Jesus Holds Power Over Life and Death
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 the Athenians needed to understand if they were going to worship that unknown God. Paul was saying, “Here is who he is.”
Each of these attributes is tied to the resurrection. In verses 24 through 26, Paul outlines how Jesus holds power over life and death and everything in between. In verse 24, he 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 is Lord of heaven and earth. He created everything.
That would be uncomfortable for the Greeks in particular, because as long as you did your sacrifices, the gods did not really demand much of you. They did not really care what you did. But here is someone who claimed to be Lord of heaven and earth, and who predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead to prove it. If he is everything he claimed to be, then he is in charge and we are accountable to him.
That was uncomfortable for the Greeks. It is uncomfortable for us today, this idea that there is somebody beyond ourselves to whom we are accountable. And unlike the Greek gods, Jesus is not dependent on us. It is the other way around. Since he is 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.
We talked about this Wednesday night in the study on Zephaniah. In a lot of pagan contexts, you had your statues of the gods, and you brought them offerings and sacrifices. You brought them food. You brought them water. You washed them. You clothed them. You moved them from one spot to the next so they could be worshiped. These gods were utterly dependent on human beings to care for them.
It was the same way in ancient Greece. But Paul said Jesus is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. Verse 25 says that 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. It depends on him to have made it and to have given it to us. We are dependent on him.
Then when we get to verse 26, we see that it is not just that we are dependent on him. Nations and empires throughout history have been dependent on him as well. Paul says that he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth. He created all people. He created all the nations, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.
To these Greeks, who were the descendants of massive and powerful empires—actually multiple empires—and who now lived in the Roman Empire, the greatest, most powerful empire known to man at that point, Paul was saying something staggering. They could look back in history and see the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Carthaginians, and all these massive, powerful imperial nations that had come and gone. Paul said Jesus determined when they would be and where they would be for his own purposes.
That was a real difference from their gods, who had authority over one or two little things. Here is Jesus, who controls life and death and everything in between. And you would expect a God like that to be too busy to mess with us. He has too much going on. But when we get to verse 27, Paul starts to make the point that this God has made himself available to us.
The God Who Makes Himself Known
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. They might not help their worshipers because they did not want to, or because it benefited them to be selfish. Even then, they were not all-powerful. But Jesus, despite all that he has to do, 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 is not far from each one of us. That is tied to verse 26. Jesus is moving the nations of the world around like pieces on a chessboard. Why is he doing this? What is his purpose? To orchestrate things in such a way that he can be found.
What does moving the empires of the world around have to do with making Jesus known? Jesus came at just the right time in history so that all these Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled. It also just so happened that the Romans had made it possible, really for the first time in history, to travel from one end of the known world to the other in relative safety, on roads that might not look like much to us today but were state-of-the-art for people, goods, and news to travel long distances. Most of the known world also spoke one language.
Why did that happen? Because of prophecies 700 years earlier in the book of Daniel that talked about the Greeks, who laid the foundation with their language and commerce, and the Romans, who came and then kicked the Greeks out according to that prophecy and brought in their rule of law. God was orchestrating all these things so that when Jesus came, it would be possible for as many people as possible to know him. Verse 27 says he is not far from each one of us.
A God like that might be expected to be distant, but he has moved everything he needs to move for us to find him. He is not up there hiding from us. He wants to be known. Verse 28 says, “for in Him we live and move and exist,” as even some of your own poets have said, “For we also are His children.”
Do not ask me why he loves us. Do not ask me why he loves me. I know me. I know me better than you do, and I am not that lovable. Yet the Bible tells us that God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He looked at us, saw everything about us that was unlovable, and loved us anyway. He loved us enough that he came to the cross for our forgiveness and our salvation. He cares enough to want to have a relationship with us.
In verse 29, Paul says that God is greater than all other gods: “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 skill and thought of man.” I have said this before, but I will never stop being puzzled by the idea of worshiping something you made, because that thing is dependent on you. Paul is saying that this God cannot be encompassed with gold and silver and stone. He is not some dead, lifeless image. He is greater than all the gods they were worshiping, greater than all those gods combined.
Then in the next couple of verses, Paul tells us that this God is different because he warns of judgment but offers mercy. God had let them go on for a time worshiping their idols. But Paul says, “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent.” Why? “Because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed.”
There is a day when Jesus Christ is coming back in judgment to judge sin and idolatry. How do we know he is coming back? Again, Paul ties it at the end of this verse to the proof of the resurrection. How do we know he is coming back? Because he has come back before. When somebody dies, promises that he will come back, and then rises from the dead, when that same person leaves and says, “I will come back,” you have reason to believe he is coming back.
The verse says he is coming back in judgment. But notice the phrase that all people everywhere should repent. Why the call for repentance? Because there is mercy if we will turn to him. Our sin deserves to be judged. Our sin deserves to be punished. But there is a call for us to turn to him. It is a call to repent, because Jesus, unlike their gods, will judge the world. But Jesus, unlike their gods, is also merciful.
The Resurrection Remains Controversial
Paul proclaims to them this message of a God who came to earth and became a man. That was crazy to them. This God sacrificed himself for them, for our forgiveness. That was crazy to them. This same God proved all of that by rising again from the dead. Again, that was crazy to them.
Now we look at it and we have evidence. We can take the accounts of the gospel writers. We can take the accounts of unbelieving Roman, Jewish, and Greek historians. We can talk about the things history records and the changes that cannot be explained 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 the Athenians, they were hearing this for the first time, and it did not 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, and people get a little more uncomfortable. You profess to believe that Jesus rose again from the dead, and you are mocked or told that you have gone too far. People do not want to hear about that.
If we proclaim the resurrection, it will bring opposition. That is what happened in the days of the apostles. I do not pretend that anything we will 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 4, where Peter and John were arrested and beaten for preaching the resurrection, and they would not stop. They would not stop even after they were arrested and beaten, because it was a message they believed in with such firm conviction that they could not keep from telling people about it.
That is 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 exclusively true about Jesus Christ that is not true of any other religious leader in history. But it is the most important message we could proclaim. It is the most important truth we could stand on.
It is not just important on Easter. It is important every day of our lives, because there are times when it is the only thing we have to stand on. There will be times when 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 is 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 that our faith is not dependent on how we feel moment to moment. The beautiful thing about the Christian faith is that it is rooted in a historical truth claim that is either true or it is not. Two thousand years ago, Jesus either walked out of the grave or he did not. If he did, then I am inclined to believe the man who said, “I am going to be crucified and rise from the dead,” and then he did. I am going to listen to what that man says.
If it is not true, then no amount of feeling about anything makes any of this worthwhile. And I can tell you, there have been difficult days when I have wondered, “Is God paying attention? Why would I think God actually loves me or cares about any of this?” Feelings lie to you. So I go back to that conviction that history tells us that 2,000 years ago he walked out of that grave.
If that is true, then everything he claimed about himself is true. Every bit of authority he asserted is true. Every promise he made is true. Some of those claims he made about himself are controversial. Sometimes, in our human nature and our flesh, we do not want those things to be true because of the accountability. The resurrection, as the ultimate proof of who he is, will always be controversial. But there is nothing more important for us to stand on.
The Resurrection Changes Lives
The resurrection changes lives. It changed lives in Jesus’ day, and it changes lives in our day. We see at the end of this chapter that there were scoffers. Paul went out, but verse 34 says, “some men joined him and believed.” Paul could have looked at it and said, “I am a failure because I preached the resurrection, and they did not believe. They made fun of me.” But no, there were people who believed. After he left, it looks like there were people who believed.
That message, even when it is rejected, harassed, or heckled, continues to work. It continues to have power. It continues to change lives. It continues to work on people: Jesus Christ died for our sins because there was no other way we could be forgiven. And he did not 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 us from 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, because Jesus rose from the dead, you can trust his promises. You can trust his offer of forgiveness and salvation. When he said he paid for your sins in full at the cross, when he died and said, “It is finished,” and when he sent out his apostles to preach that the only thing we had to do was trust in him for our salvation, you can take him at his word, because it is the word of a man who predicted and accomplished his own resurrection.
If you have never trusted Christ as your Savior before today, I want to invite you to do it before you leave here today. We would love to answer your questions about what Jesus did for you and help you understand how you can have a relationship with him. Right where you are this morning, if you understand what I have told you, you can trust Christ and ask for that forgiveness, and you will have it.
If you are already a believer, maybe you are going through a point in time, or about to go through a point in time, when you wonder, “How do I know? With everything going on in my life, with everything I am feeling, how do I know he really loves me? How do I know that he cares? How do I know that he is paying attention?”
This message split history in half. Jesus walked out of the grave, proving everything he claimed about himself. We do not have to feel it every day, but we go back to the certainty of what Jesus Christ did, and we trust in him because of that.