Ideas

DEVOTION

THE BOOK OF ACTS

IDEAS

Acts 17:16-21

16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." 21(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

NIV

Be ready to explain Jesus in a way our listeners can grasp seems to be one of the lessons we can learn here. We are going to see how Paul uses their own idols to prove who Jesus is, but for now we should know that took notice of the social setting he was in and in fact was distressed by how many idols this society had. Although people today do not have statues and temples for various gods, there still is a large variety of gods available to worship. It almost seem like the god of self is the biggest one these days. Certainly the god of gold or money has a great many followers but my not over power the god of self in fact the god of gold might be one of the god of self’s offspring. Considering we were told that we cannot serve both God and the god of gold, or money, it is clear it is a god designed or fashioned by man for man. Yes we must live and we need some money to do that, but to serve it, to make it our goal to accumulate as much as we can, we become its follower. Those who lived in Athens had more gods then they knew what to do with in fact the one Paul used was the statue to the unknown god. We have to be careful not to be entrapped by the gods of this society, even ones that we may not know are gods. But the greatest danger we fact is that god of self. We should be ever vigilant not to allow that god to overtake our belief in Jesus. We should be greatly distressed over these gods, especially the god of self. There is only one God and we need to worship him and him alone. It is easy to fall prey want worship the god of self, always looking out for our own best interests. We can get ensnared into always thinking about our situation, what we should do, where should we go, how should be live, how can we get this or that, how we can achieve a certain goal. Our life can be completely overshadowed by the god of self that we have no time to worship God, or what is worse we try to squeeze him into the time we have dedicated to the god of self. We cannot be like those in Athens always ready to listen to some new idea, new thoughts about whatever. The world has many new ideas, as well as supposed scholars and theologians coming up with new theories and concept about creation and evolution and how they co-exist. Ideas that God took millions of years to bring about man in his image. If this were the case perhaps we are still not in his image, that we need to evolve millions more years into what the image of God is. It is so bizarre what people will come up with in order to worship their own form of a god instead of God. We need to remain focused on God. It is one thing to have ideas, but we cannot change the idea of God.