Man in God.
"In him we live, and move, and have our being." The greatness and humility of the apostle—an illustration of the nature and method of Christianity. Over all the glory of Athens the pall of spiritual death. An unknown God amongst them. The pride of the ancient world still clung to empty superstitions, only half, if at all, believed in. Boldness of the messenger. Polytheism is false. The human heart is claimed for God. From their own altar to the Christian announcement of coming judgment. An appeal to reason, conscience, experience, the universal spirit of humanity.
I. A GREAT PRIMARY TRUTH set forth in two aspects—natural and spiritual
1. All religion rests on a natural foundation. We are creatures of God. Threefold view of humanity—as life, as activity, as being or character. Unsatisfactory view of human nature which omits any of these. We live not alone for earth, but far eternity. Not alone to exist, but to unfold our possibilities, intellectual, moral, spiritual. God the God of providence. History. Social life. But natural religion insufficient. Has proved itself so—must be so.
2. Religion is the work in man of the spiritual. The great fact of a moral ruin cannot be overlooked. Ancient heathen admitted the irreconcilable Opposition of heaven and earth. Refuge in Promethean pride. Despondency They openly said "It is better to die than to live" Errand of the gospel was one of hope. Proclamation of the life of man in God. Spiritual power at hand. The message written out in the facts of the gospel. Paul led up his hearers to Christ. To us religion is Christ. The resurrection is the seal on the promise of life.
II. Consider THE APPLICATIONS OF SUCH A TRUTH.
1. The essential and supreme question of every man's existence is what he is to God, and what God is to him. Our life in him.
2. There is only one religion which meets man's wants, that which has come from God.
3. The religion of Christ is adapted to the humblest as well as the highest mind, to the lowest as well as the loftiest condition.—R.
Opportunity.
"Now when they heard," etc. The hearing of truth is the demand of man's position. Temptation "of such minds as the Athenians" to regard themselves as able to be their own teachers. Facts often stranger than fiction. Philosophy has been a great obstacle to Christianity. So still intellectual pride and prejudice. The two classes of hearers still represented—mockers and triflers.
I. RESPONSIBILITY IN HEARING.
1. Application of mind. Concentration on the subject. Openness to persuasion.
2. Surrender of the heart to truth. The message not addressed simply to reason. A speculative spirit may easily admit a cloud of objections and difficulties which obscure the Word. Procrastination means indifference. Enough is already understood and felt to justify practice.
II. SPECIAL CRISIS OF OPPORTUNITY. Whether in listening to the Word, or in receiving Divine invitation through providential circumstances, opportunity at times gathers to a point where resistance becomes guilt. So it was in the Jewish nation at the advent of Christ. So at Athens by the visit of Paul. The Word may be taken away:
1. By the work of sin within us, hardening the heart.
2. By changes in the outward life.
3. By summons into eternity. "Take heed how ye hear;" "Work while it is yet day;" "Now is the accepted time."—R.
HOMILIES BY P.C. BARKER
The work of three sabbath days.
It was a great idea, and much more than mere idea with Paul, to "redeem the time." He would not have stayed a continuous three weeks in one place doing nothing at all, much less doing what was good for nothing, or for very little. The time he gave, therefore, to a subject, and the stress he laid upon it, may fairly measure to a certain degree his persuasion of the value of it. There are subjects which depend upon their very mode of treatment, not in the merely ordinary sense for producing greater or less impression, but for apprising us of the estimate they purport to put on themselves. And this thought may certainly help to guide us, even in these days. It may help work conviction as to the reality of things long "believed among us," but perhaps never more attacked or less boldly grasped than at this present. For we here may notice that—
I. PAUL TAKES THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES AS HIS TEXT-BOOK.
1. It would have been particularly like Paul to have dealt with his subject or subjects through a period of upwards of three weeks, on their own merits, and not have laden them with any unimportant connection with things that had gone before. His method shows that the connection was not deemed unimportant by him.
2. If Paul does deal with great subjects, which might have been discussed on their own merits, in very close connection with their associations with the Old Testament, it were inevitable that those associations must cling to them. They will in a sense bring with them the atmosphere, or the flagrance of it, to which they have been accustomed.
3. There can be no doubt, no contradiction, as to the connection of the promised Messiah in the Old Testament with the sacrifices, which are really its most unique feature; nor can there be any doubt of the great sacrifices themselves, that they were in the main propitiatory.
II. THE DEATH OF CHRIST IS THE OLD TESTAMENT TOPIC SELECTED OUT OF ALL OTHERS BY PAUL. For what conceivable purpose should the apostles have taken all the trouble and encountered all the dangers they did in order to reconcile the minds of the Jews, to whom they preached, to the identity of the foretold Messiah of the Scriptures with the Jesus crucified of late at Jerusalem? There could be no satisfactory reason for this but one, that the suffering of Christ unto death was the central requirement of the whole position. While the Jew from first to last objected to the subject
III. THE INVARIABLE SEQUEL-SUBJECT OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST—THE RESURRECTION—IS PREACHED BY PAUL. AS much as all the deepest traceable significance of the death of Christ tends to humble those to whom it is preached, as "the way of salvation," so much avails the significance of his resurrection to comfort and to raise them! The glory of glories for Christ, it is, and it is ever scripturally exhibited as, the joy of joys for the believer in Christ. These, then, were the great topics upon which Paul and his companions and other apostles were constantly insisting. Let it be explained as it may, these purport to be the message of Heaven to earth; let it be objected to as it may, nothing else comes in their place. The forces that lie hidden, yet scarcely hidden, in both of these are now at least testified by an unsurpassed mass and variety of practical and irrefutable evidence. Men's hearts have been softened, humbled, and won to the exercise of profoundest trust and firmest faith by the fact of the sufferings and death of Christ. Their highest nature has answered to the quickening influence of the clearly revealed and clearly exhibited fact of the Resurrection, and so far forth its correlative, immortality. The pride of man rarely finds its gain or its object in rejecting the latter, yet is it abundantly doubtful whether any man come to it rightly, much less come to it to the purest and truest advantage, except through that approach which Paul found so often "to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness," but to "some" others even at Thessalonica (Acts 17:4) "the power of God and the wisdom of God."—B.
A comparison justly invidious.
In harmony with the directions of Jesus Christ himself, and with the dictates of wisdom as against presumptuousness. Paul and Silas, when endangered by their ministrations in one place, sped on in all fidelity and zeal to another. It may also be not without its significant interest that, as we are told, they were "sent away," or "sent on," by the brethren. Had they gone away at any time and ceased from their work, they and their motives and their love might well have been objects of suspicion. But the continuity of their devotion, and the renewal again and again of work after disappointment upon disappointment, protect them from suspicion, and even add to their praise. It is one of the greater practical difficulties of life to resist successfully the distressing and disintegrating natural operation of perpetual disappointments, and it is one of the severer tests of an uplifted faith and enduring purpose that "often foiled" is not accepted as failure, and that "cast down" does not mean "destroyed." On the other hand,
I. READINESS TO RECEIVE THE WORD.
1. There is, indeed, a "readiness to receive" which marks greed.
2. There is a readiness to receive which marks credulity.
3. There is a readiness to receive which marks the inertness of indifference.
4. There is a readiness to receive which marks a nature conscious of need, and responsive to the proper supply of that need, when proffered. The readiness to receive which now distinguished the Bereans marked thus a good and a healthy and a spiritual instinct. For their readiness was turned toward receiving a "word" that was true and pure and not flattering, but faithful to reprove and to teach, as well as to stimulate and uplift by promises. Such readiness as this is noble and ennobling. It saves souls pining. It saves wasted energies. It obviates vagrant pursuits. And for all such it substitutes a genuine education.
II. DETERMINATION TO BE COMPETENT TO "GIVE A REASON OF THE HOPE" WHICH THERE HAD BEEN "READINESS TO RECEIVE."
1. The very attitude of the inquirer has something of the noble in it, when compared with the custom of the decrier.
2. The mastery of prejudice is in itself a sign of nobility, while the reign of prejudice means an obstructiveness which infers to none greater loss than to the subject of it.
3. The searcher into truth does in the very act ingratiate himself with truth. "Happy is the man" who seeks for it as for silver, and searches for it as for hid treasure (Proverbs 2:2-5).
4. Openness to evidence comes inevitably of inquiring honestly, as surely as prejudice makes a shut heart and undiscerning mind. Many persons do not see because they never set themselves to look. They scarcely think it is given them to use their own natural powers.
5. Inquiringness has it in it to infer advantage
6. Inquiringness, when it is turned to things of higher and deeper significance, to things invisible and spiritual, to the great themes of the soul and its need of a Savior, to the grand themes of God and his pitying love to man—this inquiringness carries its own praise in it. It is bound to enrich him who practices it and extorts conviction from the unwilling, while the spontaneous tribute of commendation is laid at its feet by the just and good. That kind of moral certainty that lies in strong conviction is the price won by all those who will take the trouble, in matters of Divine import, to "search" whether and how they agree and hold together.—B.