Why Isn't God More Obvious and Proveable (Acts 17:16-34) • Geoff Bradford

Glad to see you all here with us in this new year. We are going to turn our attention to God's word and, as is our custom in this church, we read God's word aloud together. We're gonna be in Acts chapter 17, a little longer passage, so put on your speaking voice, and we're gonna read together verses 16 through 34.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed when he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with those who worshiped God, as well as in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Some of the Epicurean and stoic philosophers also debated with him. Some said, "What is this ignorant show off trying to say?" Others replied, "He seems to be a preacher of foreign deities," because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. They took him and brought him to the Areopagus and said, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? Because what you say sounds strange to us, and we want to know what these things mean." Now all the Athenians and the foreigners residing there spent their time on nothing else but telling or hearing something new. Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said, "People of Athens, I see that you are extremely religious in every aspect. For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was inscribed, 'To an unknown god.' Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it—He is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in shrines made by hands, neither is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man He has made every nationality and determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. He did this so they may seek God 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 even some of your own poets have said. For then we shouldn't think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, like an image fashioned by human art and imagination. Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has set a day when He is going to judge the world in righteousness by the Man He has appointed. He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead." When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him. But others said, "We'd like to hear from you again about this." So Paul left their presence. However, some people joined him and believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with him. This is the word of the Lord.

Introduction to the "No Bad Questions" Series

We started a new preaching series last Sunday called "No Bad Questions," which is actually not true. We all know that there are plenty of bad questions. If you've ever taken a marketing class or a PR class, you know that test makers, people who write surveys, they have bad questions they write all the time.

There are bad questions, such as things that use double negatives that you can't really answer. For example: "Does it seem impossible to you that the moon landing never happened?" Nobody knows how to answer that. I've asked those kinds of double negative questions in my sermons, and I can tell you all give me the pug face—don't know what you're asking.

Another kind of bad question is called a double barrel question, where you're really asking two questions at the same time. "Are you hungry or thirsty?" The person's like, "Yeah, one of those. Do I say yes? I don't know what to say to that." Or a leading question, like on surveys: "How satisfied are you with our easy and simple product?" That's a leading question that expects something.

Of course, there are lots of bad questions. But the impetus for this series is hopefully that there are no bad questions in church—that you should be able to come into a community of faith and ask all your questions. Questions around the nature of God, what it means to believe, what it means to know God, belong to God—those are welcomed and provided for.

So we're doing this series. We're talking about questions like: Is God fair? What's God's big deal with sex? Is the cross really divine child abuse? Is Christianity a hindrance to justice? We're asking all these questions. In addition, I've created a way—if you go over to another slide—we have an email address that you can email during this series, and you can ask other questions.

I'm trying to answer those on Instagram and Facebook during the week with short little videos, trying to give some kind of response. Now, I'm not the Bible answer man. I don't have all the right answers. I'm not trying to set myself up as some kind of authority. But I do want to communicate that it's okay to ask your questions, and I do want to provide a way for you to be able to do so.

We're doing this series. Some of you do not like topical series, and sorry not sorry about that. We're actually interspersing those with another series called James on James. You'll hear about that in two weeks. But my hope is for a couple things. One is that you pass these on. If there's somebody that you know who's asking questions, you give them an opportunity to engage. Second, that if you're a Christian, you learn how to engage and you're not afraid. You learn how to answer what you can and engage with people, and you don't have to have all the answers either. But you take some steps in knowing how to engage other people.

Three Points: Debatable, Depends, Deeper

So today, this is the question: Why is God not more obvious and provable? I have three points to this that I'm going to work my way through. First is it's debatable. Second is it depends. And third is it's deeper. Three D's: debatable, depends, deeper.

It's Debatable

You know, there have been lots of attempts, and if you've ever taken a philosophy class in high school or college, you may have heard these. There are lots of attempts to try to prove the existence of God. Let me give you three classic ones.

The Ontological Argument. First vocalized by a man named Anselm in the fifth century AD. Anselm said this: God is that of which there's nothing greater that can be conceived. Then he argued, our minds could conceive of an idea that's greater than which nothing greater can be conceived, and God is greater than that. Therefore, the existence of God. God is being itself.

The Cosmological Argument. It points to the existence of the cosmos as the evidence for God's existence. This has been articulated in Greek, Jewish, Arab, and Christian communities. Most famously, Thomas Aquinas articulated this. It goes like this: something outside the universe is required to explain its existence. Our universe is based on cause and effect principles. There had to be something before—an ultimate, a prime first cause—that caused everything that is.

The Moral Argument. Humans have a universal sense throughout cultures of right, wrong, good, bad, fair, not fair, that applies across all times, places, and cultures. Where did that come from? It has to come from some source. C. S. Lewis, the Oxford professor, most notably said this in his book Mere Christianity. He said two points: human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they should behave in a certain way, and second, they don't do it. Those two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. Hence, God is real.

Now, there are others I could mention, but what's fascinating to me over time is that none of these proofs is universally accepted. They're interesting, but it's not like germ theory. Over time, germ theory has become pretty widely accepted. Gravity, another one—we're pretty sure about. We all feel pretty good about this. But over time and throughout human history, what's fascinating is there hasn't been some consensus point where we're all convinced that these arguments persuade us. Have you noticed this? There's not a consensus.

And many people would say, yeah, God is not provable, not obvious. But I want to point this out—this is just an observation. That very question is debatable. Because there are lots of people, maybe some of you in this room, for whom it's like there's evidence everywhere. It is obvious as the nose on your face to you that God is real, provable, observable.

The Bible even takes this posture:

God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, his divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, having been understood through what he has made. — Romans 1

The Bible would say in every sunset, every breaking wave on the beach, in your DNA, in the way the human hand or the eyeball works, in cell structure looked at under an electron microscope, in those images we're now getting from the James Webb telescope—we get evidence all the time that God is real, that God is obvious, that God is provable.

And so again, there's this debate. For some, this is no big deal, obvious. Of course, God exists. For other people, it's like, I can't believe it. There's no proof. Now, how is that?

That's my question for us. How is it that this is debatable? Why is that the case? Why is this obvious for some of you, and there's no way you're scratching your head for others? Let's think about that. That's where our passage picks up.

The passage we just read is from the history of early Christianity, after the resurrection of Jesus, in the early days of the church in the book of Acts. The apostle Paul visits what is the cultural center of the Roman Empire: Athens, Greece.

Now, it may sound weird for me to say Athens was the center culturally of the Roman Empire. Rome is in Italy, so we might think Rome was the center. Rome was the center of power, but Athens was the center of culture. The Roman Empire was thoroughly Greek in just about every way. They spoke Greek. Greek was the language of common trade. Greek theater was the predominant type of theater that everybody enjoyed. Greek philosophy was at the center of how people thought. Greece had the heart even though Rome had the power.

Paul goes to this place in chapter 17 and enters the Agora, the marketplace. You can go there today and see the ruins of this on Mars Hill in Athens. The marketplace is the place where there's the trade of goods and services as well as ideas. They bring him to talk to the Areopagus, which is a ruling council and also a group of people who are philosophers and people who like to debate ideas. They begin to debate with him and hear what he has to say about the God that he's proclaiming and Jesus Christ, the resurrection from the dead.

Now, when Paul speaks, what's fascinating to me is that even though we read in the beginning of this passage that he was disturbed by what he saw in the city, he was not offended. He doesn't write them off as dirty pagans. Instead, he begins to reason with them and engage them around this idea of the existence of God, the provability and knowability of God.

He appeals to them using points of connection. In this passage, he quotes from a sixth century BC Greek poet, Epimenides of Crete, who wrote:

In him, we live and move and have our being.

Now, Epimenides wasn't talking about the God of the Bible. He wasn't talking about Jesus Christ, but Paul refers to him because this is a point of connection. He said, "Even your own writers are referencing this." Later on in the passage, he quotes from a Stoic philosopher from the third century named Aratus, who says:

We are his offspring.

Again, Aratus had nothing to do with the Christian faith or biblical Christianity in any way whatsoever. Paul is saying, "Look, your own philosophers are interpreting the world, and when they look at the world, they can say that there is a God out there and that we in some way belong to Him." It's a point of contact, a point of connection.

Why Is God's Existence Debatable for Some and Obvious for Others?

I want to point this out really simply. What Paul is showing us, and this is the first part of the answer to the question—why is this debatable for some and obvious for others? Why is this not obvious for everybody?—is that every person is an interpreter of what they see. Human beings, by definition, are meaning makers. We look at the world and we form narratives. We form interpretations. We look at reality and we say, "Therefore, this." We interpret the world around us.

None of us are C-3PO from Star Wars. None of us are Doctor Spock or Data from Star Trek. We all are meaning makers. This is why this drives police officers crazy. If there's an accident and there are five witnesses to this complex accident, they can get five very different accounts and stories of what happened—including what was the make of the car, what was the color of the car, what was the model, and the order in which the events happened in the wreck. Humans are not great cameras. Police try to gather all that together and piece together what happened. What they would prefer is not just one camera, but a whole bunch so they could see what's going on.

But humans, we are not cameras. We are not raw repeaters of what we observe. We are meaning makers. So even all those witnesses to the accident are making meaning subconsciously of what's happening.

So the first answer to my question is this: Why can two people, even close friends, look at the world and one says, "Of course there's a God," and one says, "You're kidding me"? Because we're meaning makers. We're interpreting. We're looking at the world around us. And therefore, I just want to push on this a little bit.

Your ability to see or not see evidence for the provability, observability, and existence of God may say a lot more about you than it says even about God himself.

Many people in conversations miss this, and they assume that in some ways everybody else is subjective about these questions and they are objective. They are able to make a decision. Where I want to take this is this warning: Don't turn pluralism into relativism.

Now, Greece, just like modern America, was a pluralistic society. Lots of people with lots of different ideas about how the world worked lived together in close proximity. You know, the bumper sticker that's all around Raleigh, "coexist." That's pluralism. We should all be able to have our own beliefs and feelings about things, and probably you have lots of friends who think differently on lots of things than you do. That's healthy because we live in a pluralistic society.

And yet, there is a temptation sometimes. There's a temptation if you are a person who's skeptical about God to assume that if there's no consensus that we've built up over years and years about God, about the knowability, the provability of God, there's this tendency, therefore, to assume that all religions are basically doing the same thing. All religions are basically the same.

Let me illustrate. You ever heard this parable of the mountain? And it goes like this: God, whatever whoever God is, is at the top of the mountain. And all these different people and all these different religions and life philosophies are trying to make their way up the mountain, and they've got these different paths to get there. And one goes one way, and one goes the other way, and one goes around the other side of the mountain, but they're all basically getting to the same pinnacle. They're all trying to get to God as however he, she, it exists at the top of the mountain. And they're all basically well meaning. None of them is really right. None of them is wrong. They're all just paths to the same thing. We're all on different journeys.

Now, that parable is really common in freshman philosophy classes. And it sounds so humble, doesn't it? It sounds so gracious, but there's a problem. You recognize the problem with the parable? It goes like this: No one sees the whole picture except for me. Right? Everybody else, they're kind of blind to the fact that they're all doing the same thing, but I alone, of all people, have Google Maps downloaded into my brain, and I can see that all the paths are actually going to the same place.

It sounds so humble, but it's an incredibly reductionistic, arrogant statement. It's saying, "All you guys are kind of blind. You all think everybody else is wrong, but you're all just doing the same thing, and I know that." That's relativism in a nutshell. Reductionistic and arrogant.

Instead, this is what Paul does, and it's not reductionistic, and it's not arrogant, but it may sound so to you. Let me explain. Paul walks into the Agora, the marketplace of the Greeks, the place where they exchange ideas, and he says, "There is a true God, and you're not far off from him. Come and believe."

Now, that sounds arrogant to modern ears, but it's really honest and it's really humble because he walks into the marketplace and offers Jesus. He doesn't offer subjective truth. This isn't "live your truth, I'll live my truth." This isn't "my truth even is better than your truth." But this is: There's a Jesus who is raised from the dead, an objective reality that has crashed into his subjective experience.

Relativism says, "I see it all. I see the whole landscape, which nobody can say, really." Paul says, "I've seen Jesus. I've seen a risen savior, and he's the true God, and he's not far off from you."

You know, nobody calls math teachers arrogant for insisting on math tests there is a right answer and there's a wrong answer. Nobody calls doctors arrogant when they diagnose and prescribe medicine. "How can you say there's only one way to get better?" No, we don't say that. Yet people call Christians arrogant for saying, "Hey, there is one way, one truth, one real God."

But Paul's sermon here is really humble. It's not airtight, but it's not arrogant. He's not claiming that he sees and knows everything. But he's seeing and saying, "I know Jesus, and this is real."

So, again, summary. Why? Why is it this up for debate? Why isn't God more obvious and provable? Well, one, it's a debate. Some people it's obvious, other people it's not. But second, it depends. It really depends on you more than God. It has a lot more to tell you about who you are than even something about God.

And then finally, number three, it's deeper. It's deeper. As in, there is a deeper reason why many individuals are convinced that the reality or the possibility of God, the obviousness of God, and it's really bound up in two words in this passage.

So the two words that Paul uses right at the beginning of the passage reveal something crucial. He comes to Athens and in verse 16, this verb—he sees under. That's where we get our word "theorize." He sees under what's going on in the city, and there's something underneath it. The second word, what's underneath it, is the word idol. The city was full of idols.

Of course, Paul is engaging people on Mars Hill in Athens. The Parthenon's right there. You can see all the Greek deities—Athena, Ares, Hera, Zeus, Hermes, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus, Hades, Demeter, Hestia, Hephaestus, Apollo. These gods represented different aspects of life: wisdom, love, war, the hunt, the hearth, good crops—all the things. These idols of worship are all over Athens. There's even an altar with the inscription: "To an unknown god." You're so much about gods here that you have one that's generic to cover all the rest of them. This is what Paul observes: underneath your whole city is this worship of deities.

We can look back at ancient Greece and say how primitive and foolish they were with all their gods and altars and shrines. But isn't it kind of obvious that we also live in a time and place where people idolize? They make their lives centered around some good thing, and that becomes their whole life.

The Problem Isn't What's Bad—It's What's Good

Christianity teaches something many people get wrong about God's problem with us. God's problem is not primarily the bad things we're doing. It's that we take good things and make them ultimate things. We make them ultimate, things that have become the best things—good things that we worship, that we put our whole lives centered around.

There's a category on surveys now about religious preference called "none." The fastest-growing religious group in the country are the nones. But Paul would say there are no nones. Everybody gets up out of bed in the morning with some sense of purpose, or drive, or need, or want, or something to center their life around. Maybe it's success or art or health or having a great body or being a great gamer or someone you love or great vacations or a perfect family or power and control or security or money—any of those things.

The reality is we live in a culture where people are just as fixated on something their life has to be about as the Athenians were. Art is a wonderful thing. Art gives beauty and can help us reflect on the meaning and purpose of life, who we are. It has a tendency to bring us into transcendence. But your life centered around art? Dangerous. Business is a great thing. Some of you are very successful at it. But life about business? Dangerous. Nothing wrong with a party, but there are so many people in our culture for whom the next good time is the ultimate that you might as well be saying "Bacchus"—the Greek god. The same thing.

We don't see the reality of this in ourselves, but idols have a tendency always to rule us and control us and reign in us. People have, almost universally, this sense that I have something my life has to be about, and if I lose it, my life loses meaning and purpose.

How Idols Distort Us

You ever seen a caricature drawing? They do them at theme parks and boardwalks. Someone draws pictures of people and exaggerates a part of their features. Think Mick Jagger's lips, Will Smith's ears, Donald Trump's hair. This is what idols do with us. They make us into a caricature of part of who we are, of something we want to center our life around.

Think about the man at the stadium on a Saturday, shirt off, body paint, yelling at the top of his lungs. He's become a caricature of his favorite team. Or the woman decked out in all the designer labels becomes a caricature. Or the person centered around Apple products, always needing the next one, their whole life about the company Apple. They become a caricature of something that's part of what they've centered their life around.

Idols make us behave in ways that embellish the significance of the things we worship. They reduce us to those caricature qualities that our lives have become about. This is what it means to be a Christian.

To be a Christian is to say, I am going to make my life with God in the center. It doesn't mean that sports or art or designer clothes or Apple products are bad, but to be a Christian is to put God in the center of your solar system. And when you do that, this is what we find over and over again offered to us in scripture, that it puts all the other loves, all the other things that are good things we've made ultimate things, into their proper place, and they can go around the solar system without crashing into you or one another. Now, of course, Christians can worship idols as well. But this again is the answer, the third answer to like, why is this? Why is it so hard for some people to see that God's real? Why is this obvious to some of you and completely unprovable and not obvious to others? Idols. What's under your life? What are you worshiping? You have to let go of something in order to lay hold of God.

This is Paul's appeal to them:

The God who made the world and everything in it. He is the Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn't live in shrines made by hands, neither is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man, he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our beings, even as some of your poets have said, for we are also his offspring. — Acts 17:24-28

The God of the universe wants you to know him. We'll talk more about the knowability of God next week. But part of that means prying our fingers off the things that are good things that we make ultimate things, that ultimately blind us from seeing there is a God. I live in God's world that he made with a body that he designed. I breathe his air, and he has a right to call me to himself. And in fact, God in calling us to worship him, make our lives for him to be in the center of the unit of their solar system, is not being arrogant, or mean, or unkind. God wants our freedom. God wants us to have in the right orbit all the things. When God is in the center, everything else finds its right spot.

A Call to Repentance and Reconsideration

In conclusion, would you make a decision about God? Many of you have made a decision about God, but I don't presume that by any stretch in a group this size. Listen to Paul in verse 30:

God commands all people everywhere to repent. — Acts 17:30

That word repent, we think of that sometimes as fire and brimstone language about God, or we think of that as moral language about turning away from bad things. It can have both of those connotations. But simply the word, repent, in Greek, means to change your mind. To change. Paul is inviting the Athenians to change their minds about God. And I'm inviting you to do the same thing today. I'm inviting you to change your mind, to reconsider, to ponder, to consider what it would be like to look for God. And it will require you to do four things.

Number one, to admit that you don't know all of reality. You don't have Google Earth downloaded into your brain. You can't see all things. You don't know it all. You can't see that there's not a God or that all the paths go the same place. You can't dismiss that idea as foolish or ignorant.

Second, to admit that you have a subjective view of reality. Maybe you haven't wanted God to exist, therefore, it's been very convenient that he doesn't.

Third, to admit that you have other things under the surface of your life that are ultimate things for you. And to admit that letting those go in order to lay hold of God is really hard, and may feel like a death to you in some ways. It may be a real obstacle.

Last thing, to ask God to show you if he's real. And that's a very simple challenge to you this morning. If you have not believed in God, if this is hard for you, if you feel like, I don't know, just ask. If you're real, would you show yourself?

As I said at the beginning, there are bad questions in the world. There are double negatives like, does it seem impossible to you that the moon landing never happened? Leading questions. How satisfied are you with how simple and easy it is to use our product? Double barrel questions. Are you hungry or thirsty? But one question that's never a bad question: Have I been wrong? Could I have been wrong about the God question?

Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for your word. There is nothing like your word. Thank you for this story of Paul's engagement with philosophers of his day who are asking, in many ways, the same questions we're asking today. And thank you, Lord, that you are not afraid of our questions.

We pray for boldness and honesty with ourselves to be able to truly be clear with you and with ourselves about our lack of objectivity, the fact that we think many times, we know.

Lord, help us, as Paul says here, to seek you and find that you are not far off from any of us.

We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.