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At the end of this blog post the whole 31 Days Challenge will be over. Some days the blog post has taken a little over an hour to work on but mostly it has taken up to three hours or more so for any blogger who can keep up daily blogging for longer than a month -
Good for you!
Yesterday we left chapter 17 at the end of verse 15 so today we will finish off the chapter.
verses 16 - 21
Paul had gone on to Athens ahead of Silas, Timothy and Luke because of the anger incited up against him at the end of
Day 30 The Power & Destruction of Envy
Now we see him getting upset about the idol worship of the people in this city. He feels so strongly about it that he goes to the synagogue and tries to get the Jews and the Gentile worshippers to see how wrong this is. We are told he even went into the marketplace each day to talk to people there.
The people who seemed to take the most notice are the philosophers who just want to always talk and hear about new things and they think that Paul is talking about a new god because he is preaching about the resurrection of Jesus which is unfamiliar to them.
The first thing that stood out to me here was the mention, yet again, of the resurrection being preached about and we have seen this several times before by Peter and others so it appears that the Apostles and other early Christians thought it important that they spoke of the resurrection and indeed could not preach about Salvation without including it.
We would not have any hope of resurrection ourselves if Jesus had not been resurrected and yes part of our eternal life will involve resurrection for us so it is a main part of our understanding about Salvation.
So the philosophers take Paul to Mars Hill ( Areopagus ) because they want to know what this talk of his is all about.
verses 22 - 34
He starts with something that is familiar to them all which is the altar with the inscription to the
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
An altar indicated that they would worship this god, one whom they did not know anything about but Paul directs them straight to God the creator of the world from this.
He explains who the god they don't know is, He's the creator, He is Lord of heaven and earth and everything else but does not dwell in temples that the people have made.
He isn't worshipped by our hard work instead He has formed us all as we are and placed on on this earth so that all men would seek Him and find Him. He does not need us to do things for Him as we saw in
Day 29 What Does God Need?
Why?
Because everything we do is made possible by Him
28 for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
So the true God is not an idol, not made or formed by man but is alive and is to be worshipped by all when we understand who He is
30 Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, 31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”
and He brings us to the knowledge of Him and the understanding that we need to repent of our sins and accept the fact that one day we will face Jesus and we will have no righteousness of our own to be able to stand before Him as He judges the world. We will have no right to say we have worked for Him if we have not accepted Him as the true and living God because he has not looked for work.
Then back to the testimony of the resurrection again.
Some people mocked Paul for telling them about the true God the one they felt existed but did not know who He was and perhaps were just happy not knowing so that they could believe whatever they wanted but Paul because He was a believer and was called of God to preach had the responsibility to speak the truth to them.
This should be a challenge to us that no matter what others decide to believe about God, if it is not what the Word of God tells us then we as believers have also the responsibility to tell them the truth.
Remember all of us will stand before Christ one day and we can only depend on one thing
- not how we lived our lives
but who we truly worshipped as our Lord.
Christianity is not based on works but on the death and resurrection of Jesus in our place for the life we are not able to live by ourselves.
Thank you for joining in so much with me over this past month and for those who have asked if I'm going to continue in Acts the answer is yes, but not on a daily basis. I will post a few times a week but not feel an obligation to keep to a very rigid schedule.
For anyone who has been reading and realises that they have not known who the true God is or has in the past kept putting off actually becoming a true believer then please click on the short 3 2 1 video at the side of my blog to hear more about the Gospel or contact me for further info.
Also if you have missed any of the days in this series on Acts please click on the link below and you will find a list & link to all of the 31 Days.
Interested to know more about the Book of Acts?
Then Try these commentaries
Or this Bible Study
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