Transcription
All right, let's get to insist chapter 17. Now, this is the worst time in Paul's ministry, in my view. The second missionary journey is the worst time in Paul's ministry. Why? Because at the beginning of that ministry, let's just follow what happens. At the beginning of the ministry, he picks up Timothy, and then he promptly runs out of knowing what to do. So Timothy's on board, Timothy's circumcised, he's ready to be with the crew, and then they don't know where they're going. And Tim is gone. Guys, you know, do you usually have this go on? Like, you don't know where you're going next, or is this all the time this happens? And Paul's finding himself in a tough spot.
Then God is not letting him go forward where he thinks he should go forward. And rather, he's now, he's, he's sent in a direction by a dream. He gets there with the expectation of the Macedonian man and gets the Thyatira n-- woman. In other words, he's getting it wrong most of the time in terms of what his expectation is. Then when he finally gets on the road, he gets up to Philippi, and they get beaten, and he is physically attacked. He is unlawfully physically attacked. Then he's thrown in jail. God sets him free. You go, great. But he's still hurting over being physically beaten. So he walked into M Phyllis and apollon eeeh and finally makes his way to the Salonika. And he's there for a couple weeks, and he starts to feel better. And his family gets arrested. And now he's got to leave because if he doesn't get out of town, Jason's gonna sit and rot in jail. So now he leaves, but he's worried about the young church at Thessalonica because he has to leave them without really getting to get underneath of it more than a month with them. And that doesn't seem long enough to make mature Christians out of pagans.
By the time you get to 17:10, very quickly, look what happens. Paul and Silas went away by night to Berea. When they get there, look what happens. These people in verse 11 are more noble-minded than Thessalonica. They are with great eagerness examining the scripture daily to see whether these things were so. This is a teacher's dream. Paul has finally found his room. Come on, bring me your questions. We will dig into the scripture. You can fire questions at me, I'll throw verses at you, we can go back and forth, and we will come up with the answers from God. This is great.
Then verse 12, a lot of them believed, a lot of prominent Greeks and women and men. And when the Jews at Thessalonica found out that the Word of God had been proclaimed by Paul and Berea also, they came there as well, agitated and stirring up the crowds. Oh, great. I finally get a Sunday school class, an adult Bible fellowship where we're getting something started, people are really into it. Now we get the rabble coming. Whoo-whoo-whoo. It's a bunch of guys with pitchforks trying to burn down Frankenstein's castle. And everything, every place I go, you guys won't leave me alone.
Then it says in verse 14, "Then immediately the brethren sent Paul." Circled that in verse 14. Paul out to go as far as the sea, and Silas and Timothy remained there. Now Paul has been beat up, his family's been arrested, he's been chased out of town. And I want you to put in the margin next to verse 15, "Paul is alone. He's lost his team." And at verse 15, "Now those who escorted Paul brought him as far as Athens and and receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they left."
Now Paul gets to Athens. And when he gets to Athens, you would be at some point, you should go to Athens. It is a marvelous city, but it's a profound and deep and reach rich city philosophically, and it has a huge educated community there that sits around and thinks lofty thoughts and says philosophical things since the 5th century BC. This is the capital of philosophy of the Western world. And now it's 500 years deep in the richness. But if you were a Roman and you hired a butler or a doctor, you him to have that that Greek sound because it was a posh. It was kind of like hiring a British butler today with somebody with a great sound. And here's the thing. He gets there and look at verse 16. What moved Paul to preach? The Spirit of God. His spirit was provoked within him. This is not a statement that God told him to do something. This is a statement of he had been beat up, he'd been kicked out, he's alone, and he got stirred up. This is exactly when you don't answer someone on Facebook when they write something and you're so angry you just want to fire back, or they send you an email and you were just, I'm gonna rip that guy. He's stirred up and he's agitated. So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and god-fearing Gentiles, and in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be present. He's for the first time gonna walk right out into the Gentile world and stand face-to-face, bare-knuckled, with Gentile philosophers. And some of them were Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and their computer conversing with each other.
Now, what's interesting is look at what they say about him. Some were saying, verse 18, "What would this idle babble or wish to say?" The idle babbler is actually the word *sperma logos*. Sperm, you know what that is? Logos is the word. Word. It's a word for the seed picker. What kind of? He's probably one of those guys who goes around and takes a little bit of this philosophy, a little bit of that philosophy, a little bit of that philosophy, and writes a book. So let's see what he has to say. And that's how they're looking at it. And it says, "He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities." Hmm. And there they are, as they're watching him. And it says, "So they took him, brought him to the Mars Hill, the Areopagus, saying, 'May we know what this teaching is which you are proclaiming? For you are bringing strange things to our ears and we want to know what these things mean.'" They have curiosity, but it's not a real spiritual curiosity. He has an agitation, but it's not really a spirit leading. This is the perfect failure about to happen right here.
And so Paul stood up in the midst of them, and he starts preaching. He says, "Men of Athens, verse 22, I observed that you're very religious. And I see that you have this altar to an unknown God, verse 33. And then I want to tell you about who he is. The God who made the the world and all things in it. He is the Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn't dwell on a temple made with hands, nor Zi serve and served by human hands, as though he needed anything. Verse 26, he made made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth." And he goes through and he tells them this whole story.
Now, what's interesting to me is he gets down to verse 34. He's preached all the way through the resurrection of the dead, and he's, he's given him the whole overview. And it says, verse 33, that Paul went out of their midst. And verse 34, "Some men joined him and believed, among who were Dionysius the Areopagite and the and the woman named Damaris and some others." So this is a pretty discouraging thing because he goes through this, he stands out there, he gets a few converts, but really, his Athens ministry is not that great. He doesn't have a lot of Bible to get into, and he's standing there, and he's trying his best.
Now I want you to go back to verse 28 for a minute because I want you to see the heart of his message. He does not quote the Hebrew Scriptures, but in verse 28, he says, "For in him we live and move and exist. And even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are all his children,' or 'We also are his children.'" Now, one of the on part of their own poets was a Cretan poet by the name of Epimenides, who in 600 BC wrote that. And he quotes one of their poets. In other words, in the Mars Hill ministry, he goes on the front end of relevance. He uses popular poetry, but he doesn't use the scripture. Does it work? No. So when you find whole groups of people making their basis of ministry off of what Paul did in Athens, it didn't work. It's a terror idea to get agitated and go out there and preach something that isn't the Bible, but is very relevant and edgy, and hope that that's what's going to get people to Christ. Did some people come to Christ? Yes. But my teacher that had somebody come that came to Christ because because a drunk priest read from John 3, doesn't make that a way to do it. So what I'm saying to you is, don't get caught up in some movement that we need to all do it this way. This didn't work. And in fact, later on in his life, Paul will say to Timothy, "Preach the word. Don't get caught up in the other discussions. Preach the word. Don't worry about sounding like you know all the latest poets. Preach the word. Don't try to get out there and look more relevant than everybody else. Preach the word." That's what's gonna change people's hearts. He didn't do it, it didn't work.
So by the time in chapter 18, he's going from Athens to Corinth. He comes to Corinth despairing of his own life. He's walking along with his head down. Now, having said that, let's go to chapter 18 and watch him walk from Athens to Corinth, which by the way, is a very short bus ride. It's been an hour and fifteen minutes or something by bus. So let's make it a day's walk or a better part of the day's walk. "And after these things, he left Athens and he went to Corinth." It's a there was a large stress of the work, there was very little success from the work, and it was lonely service. And he's walking on the road by himself.
So what does God do when he's at the bottom? Because I want you to see 18:1 is the bottom. "When he got to Corinth, he was beat up and he was beat down. He had been smacked up and down and he was almost out." So what did he do? He boldly went out and proclaimed. No, no, no, no. He didn't boldly do anything. He got the Corinth and then look what God added to him. This is a great passage, guys. "He found a Jew named Aquila from the native upon Pontius, having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla because Claudius had commanded all Jews to leave Rome." What's the first thing he does? He found some new friends. So I'd write next to verse 2, "New friends." He was beat to the floor, and God sent him some reinforcements.
"Because they were of the same trade," it says in verse 3, "he stayed with them and they were working for by trade they were tent makers." And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks. That is, God gave him new opportunities. So he had new friends, and now he had new opportunities. He's in a new synagogue where nobody's heard of him before, and he starts again. But wait a minute, wait. Verse 5, "When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia." Now we got new reinforcements. Now his team comes back, and he's starting to build. Can you hear the theme music building in the background here? And then it's all, it says, "Paul began devoting himself completely to the word." Now he got new fresh study time, and and he starts to build a little strength, "solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah." Now he's, he's got a new wind of a message as he's bringing it to them. But when they resisted him, blaspheme, he shook out his garments and said to them, "Your blood be on your own heads. I am clean. For from now on, I will go to the Gentiles." He gets a new resolve that when the next thing hits him, he's not ready to quit. He goes, "All right, you don't want me, I'm gone. I'ma gonna cross the street and I'm gonna go talk to them." And then he left there and he went to the house of a man named Piteous Justice, a worshipper of God. So he was a proselyte whose house was next to the synagogue. He walks next door. Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, believed. That's a new victory. He's got the synagogue leader who's coming with him out of the synagogue, walking to the pagan place next door because those people have come to Jesus. And now they're gonna move this the whole show next door. While the synagogue's is fine, you don't want it, fine, I got your leader, we're gone. And now in the middle of the new victories, it says, "Many Corinthians heard and were believing and were baptized." And you say, great, he's fully healed. Not, not wait, wait.
Look at verse 9. "And the Lord said to Paul in the night in a vision, 'Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent.'" You know what was still scared? Why? Because he got beat up. Every time it started things started to go right, they fell apart. So he was getting gun-shy. So what he said was this, he said, "Don't be afraid any longer. I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in the city." Paul, here's what I promise you. I'm here, and I'm watching, and nobody's gonna hurt you. I want you to see Paul as a person. He got beat up, and then he got gun-shy. People went like this, he went because he started to think he's gonna get hit again, and he doesn't want to get beat up anymore. Can everybody understand him? He wasn't walking around boldly. Look, and it bounces off, you know, fired up me. He was going because he got tired of getting beat up. He counted his hopes up time and time again, and they fell apart. The second missionary journey, in my opinion, is the low point of Paul's life. And later on, when he writes to the Corinthians, he said, "You know how when I came to you, I despaired of my own life. I wanted to say, I'm done, I can't do this anymore." I need you to see Paul as a real person.
Now, what's interesting to me is that it goes on and says, "He settled there a year and six months teaching the Word of God among them." But while Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews with one accord rose up against Paul. Now, Jesus had promised him that he was not going to let him get hurt. What's important to me is Gallio. He's brought before Gallio, and Gallio turns to in verse 14, and this as if it were a matter of wrong or of a vicious crime, "O Jews, it would be reasonable for me to put up with you. But there are questions about words, names of your own law. Look after it yourselves. I'm unwilling to be a judge of these matters." And then he drove them away from the judgment seat. They took hold of Sosthenes, the leader of the synagogue, began beating him in front of the judgment seat, and Baal Gallio had no concern about any of these things. So these guys turned on Paul, but instead of this time Paul getting beat, the guys who turned on Paul got beat. And Jesus kept his promise that I will not let anyone hurt you. And Paul stayed there a year and a half. Guys, the longest time he ever stayed anywhere was three years at Ephesus. The second longest was a year and a half at Corinth. And why did he leave after the year and a half? Because Gallio was finished being the proconsul. He had Gallio's protection. And when Gallio left, he left.
So by the end of this, it says at the end of it, "Having remained many days longer, took lead of leave of the brethren and verse 18, put out to sea for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila in Katcreo or Cenchrea. He had his hair cut, for he was keeping a vow." Paul was Paul made a vow. He had kept his hair growing. You get the haircut at the end of the vow. What was the vow based on the story? He stayed there a year and a half, then he got his hair cut. What was the vow? He didn't get his hair cut during the whole time he stayed at Corinth because he promised Jesus he'd stay there until he was done. And the thing is, he was hurt so bad before this, but now he stopped. He met Jesus in a vision, and then he didn't get his hair cut. He stayed there for a year and a half, and he let his hair grow the whole time he was there because he was under a veil of Jesus that Jesus said, "I'll defend you. You stay here, you've got a job to do." When he was finished the job, which happens to coincide with when the proconsul left and a new proconsul came, he took that as the signal that he was done. He went down and got his haircut and sailed for Syria.
And it says that he goes off into back to given account. And what's interesting is he goes back towards Syria. Then he came to Ephesus. He left them there. Now he entered into the synagogue, reasoned with the Jews. When they asked him to stay for a longer time, he did not consent. That taking leave of them, he said, "I will return to you if God wills." He set sail for Ephesus. He landed in Caesarea. He went up and he greeted the church, and he went down to Antioch. In other words, he went back to Jerusalem and he gave an account of what he had done. Then he went back to his church in Antioch, and he went right back to what he was doing. And hat Luke leaves you with the knowledge that another missionary journey might be coming because he's promised that it'll go back to Ephesus if there's any way that he can. I don't have.