Chapter IX · The Upper Room — J. C. Ryle
— Acts 17:16-171
“Now, while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.” Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.” —Acts 17:16-17.
PERHAPS the reader of this paper lives in a town or city, and sees more of bricks and mortar than of green fields. Perhaps you have some relative or friend living in a town, about whom you naturally feel a deep interest. In either case, the verses of Scripture which head tiffs page demand your best attention. Give me that attention for a few short minutes while I try to show you the lessons which the passage contains.
You see face to face, in the verses before you, no common city and no common man.
The city is the famous city Athens,—Athens, renowned to this very day for its statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, painters, and architects,—Athens, the eye of ancient Greece, as ancient Greece was the eye of the heathen world.
The man is the great Apostle of the Gentiles, St. Paul, St. Paul, the most laborious and successful minister and missionary the world has ever seen,—St. Paul, who by pen and tongue has left a deeper mark on mankind than any born of woman, except his Divine Master.
Athens and St. Paul, the great servant of Christ, and the great stronghold of old heathenism— are brought before us face to face. The result is told us: the interview is carefully described. The subject, I venture to think, is eminently suited to the times in which we live, and to the circumstances of many a dweller in London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other great English towns in the present day.
Without further preface, I ask you to observe three things in this passage:—
I. What St. Paul saw at Athens.
II. What St. Paul FELT at Athens.
III. What St. Paul DID at Athens.
I. First, then, What did St. Paul SEE at Athens?
The answer of the text is clear and unmistakable. He saw a “city wholly given to idolatry.” Idols met his eyes in every street. The temples of idol gods and goddesses occupied every prominent position. The magnificent statue of Minerva, at least forty feet high, according to Pliny, towered above the Acropolis, and caught the eye from every point. A vast system of idol-worship overspread the whole place, and thrust itself everywhere on his notice. The ancient writer Pausanias expressly says, that “the Athenians surpassed all states in the attention which they paid to the worship of the gods.” In short, the city, as the marginal reading says, was “full of idols.”
And yet this city, I would have you remember, was probably the most favourable specimen of a heathen city which St. Paul could have seen. In proportion to its size, it very likely contained the most learned, civilized, philosophical, highly educated, artistic, intellectual population on the face of the globe. But what was it in a religious point of view? The city of wise men like Socrates and Plato,—the city of Solon, and Pericles, and Demosthenes,-the city of AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Thucydides,—the city of mind, and intellect, and art, and taste,—this city was “wholly given to idolatry.” If the true God was unknown at Athens, what must He have been in the darker places of the earth? If the eye of Greece was so spiritually dim, what must have been the condition of such places as Babylon, Ephesus, Tyre, Alexandria, Corinth, and even of Rome? If men were so far gone from the light in a green tree, what must they have been in the dry?
What shall we say to these things? What are the conclusions to which we are irresistibly drawn by them?
Ought we not to learn, for one thing, the absolute need of a Divine revelation, and of teaching from heaven? Leave man without a Bible, and he will have a religion of some kind, for human nature, corrupt as it is, must have a God. But it will be a religion without light, or peace, or hope.
“The world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Cor. 1:21). Old Athens is a standing lesson which we shall do well to observe. It is vain to suppose that nature, unaided by revelation, will ever lead fallen man to nature’s God. Without a Bible, the Athenian bowed down to stocks and stones, and worshipped the work of his own hands. Place a heathen philosopher, a Stoic or an Epicurean, —by the side of an open grave, and ask him about a world to come, and he could have told you nothing certain, satisfactory, or peace-giving.