Okay, so we are in Acts chapter 17. We've come as far as verse 16. Last week, we talked about Paul after he left Philippi, and as we said, Paul made his way through Asia Minor up to to the Aegean Sea, took a ship across the Aegean Sea, went over to Philippi. When he got to Philippi, he realized that, or was made aware that they had run all the Jewish people out of town. And so the only people that were left were people that were able to worship in a non-synagogic manner. So that's a good word. Do you like that word? Synagogic. Yes, that's a word. And so they find themselves there. And Rick Castillo, good to see you, brother. Welcome. So we are really fortunate that we have this opportunity to kind of see what they had to say. And of course, he picked up Luke, who was the one who wrote all of this. And we see Luke's hand on a lot of the the verbiage because there's some words, and we're going to look at this as we get into it today, that as a doctor, he was able to put a perspective on some of the emotions and some of the other things that are going on here. So really a neat time and a neat section. So Paul ends up leaving Philippi after he starts a church there and goes off to Thessalonica. From Thessalonica, he works his way down to Berea, meets the so-called Bereans. And oh my goodness, look who just walked in the room. So everybody say hi to E. And so Paul goes and meets with the Bereans. And he is asked to leave the group there. We'll wait for everybody to get settled down. See that? Everybody makes room for you, right? That's exactly right. He would not be late. That's what it was. So Paul went down, met with the Bereans. It says that many believed in verse 12. But he was being chased by a whole bunch of people that didn't like him, wanted to basically kill him. And so the believers at that time said, you know what, Paul, we're going to put you on a ship. We're going to ship you out of here so that you can continue your ministry where these guys can't chase after you. So they put him on a ship and he went 200 miles south all the way down to Athens. Now, Paul was a man who was brought up in the Hellenistic world, in the Greek world. He grew up in Tarsus, and when he was a teenager, maybe even a preteen, his parents shipped him off to Jerusalem to study at the feet of Gamaliel, made his way there, but he was always at his heart a Hellenist. This was his nature, kind of like if you think about us as Americans, Even if we're not in America, we always consider ourselves Americans, right? I mean, that's just the way we are. I mean, the fact that we're believers is obvious, but we are American believers. Does that make any sense? And to differentiate from other people, from other cultures. We see this certainly with Paul. So Paul goes down to Athens. So this is a place that Paul was not unfamiliar with, but he had never been to, best that we can figure, bless you. He was not in this place on a regular basis. This would have been the first time that Paul had made his way that far east. He had never been to Macedonia before he went to Macedonia, so clearly he had never been to Athens. So when he gets to Athens, which is a pretty long bus ride, quote-unquote, he makes his way into the city. And so we pick it up at verse 16. and it says now while paul was waiting for them at athens his spirit was being in the word isn't it that's that's an interesting word uh... many bibles have it by different ways but the word in my bible numerical standard is provoked and side it's only used uh... uh... in this form as a verb twice it's used as a noun one other time on the book of acts but uh... The word provoked there is the same word that we see in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, where it says, love is not easily provoked. And so this idea of provoked is to be filled with rage, to be upset, to... you know, really feel anger, for lack of, I'm trying to think of words that really kind of, you know, express this kind of a thought. But clearly he was upset by what he saw. He was looking around Athens, a place that he had heard so much about, and as a young man growing up in Tarsus, and his spirit was enraged. And so it says, he was enraged or he was provoked within himself because he was beholding a city full of idols. So I did some research on this and it's fascinating. In Athens at that time, there were at minimum, okay, this is at minimum, we know that there were at least this many. At minimum, there were 30,000 pieces of idolatry. 30,000 pieces of idolatry. There were over 3,000 places of religious worship that they called temples. So they had 3,000 different places where they could worship. Now, I've not been to Athens, but I looked at a map of Athens and the geographic area and so forth. It's just not that big. I mean, I had the impression when I heard this, when I first read this, this must have been some gigantic metropolis, right? To put it in perspective, Athens is half the size of Manhattan. Okay, so anyone who's been to Manhattan knows, you can go from the very end of Manhattan to the top of Manhattan in a relatively short period of time. Walking, it would be a little shorter. It wouldn't be as short. But the fact is, it's not that big. And Athens is half the size of Manhattan. So imagine just for a minute, from about 70-some-odd street in Manhattan, or maybe 80th street, right in there, just north of the park, imagine from there all the way to downtown, they built 3,000 temples. Yeah. It says in Florida there are 15,611 congregations. In the entire state of Florida, which is a little bigger than Manhattan. Okay, so the point is that these guys were obsessed with religious worship. Does everybody kind of get the gist here? There were 3,000 temples. There were 30,000, minimum, 30,000 actual pieces of idolatry, for lack of a better term. These were statues. That meant there were statues on every corner, there were statues in people's houses, there were statues in front of people's houses, there were statues everywhere. If anyone's ever seen my Big Fat Greek Wedding, you'll remember that in the movie, in front of the house that these people lived in, they had like statues everywhere. okay so so just kind of think of that sort of on you know you know on drugs okay just you know just statues on drugs okay so that's kind of what we're you know what we're looking at here so so we we we see this we see this incredible experiment uh... that uh... that these folks were going through and it was an experiment because at that time uh... in uh... in greek culture And this was the head of all Greek culture. There were all sorts of philosophers that had come and had gone and so forth. Of course, Socrates spoke in Athens, Herodotus, Herpetes, Plato, Aristotle, Democrosis, who is the guy that basically came up with the concept of democracy as a governmental form, which is an interesting thing. We think that democracy is scriptural. It's not. It's Greek. interesting little twist there for a lot of people uh... democracy does not come from the bible democracy comes from the greeks comes from this guy uh... democracies a homer of course the great poet uh... pericles who's who was really the founder of all that we have is as far as literature today uh... uh... a packer is uh... which came up with the uh... uh... the uh... uh... The Pagarian theory of geometry, thank you. Of course, we remember Aristarchus, which is the guy that basically was the first guy to name all of the constellations in the heavens, astronomy and so forth. Of course, Archimedes, who discovered pi. These were pi, P-I, not P-I. 5, yeah, 5 is, yeah, 3.1416, yeah, that, OK. And so they had all of these incredible people that had actually taught in Athens. And where did these guys all teach? Well, there was a place that was there that the Atheans called the Oropicus. it's Aeropagus, A-E-R-O-P-A-G-U-S is how you spell it. The Aeropagus, and so the Aerocopus is actually how you actually say it in English. So, And that means Mars Hill. That's what it means. It was a hill in which everyone would get up and would share their theories from afar, which, by the way, is why the Aristarchus called the most obvious planet that he could pick out, which was the red planet, Mars. He called it Mars because it was the place that was far off. So this is where they came in. So we have all of these people that would come to Mars Hill, and it would be a place where everyone would share. So Socrates, for example, was said to have shared his philosophy at Mars Hill, and the The Epicureans, who were the people that were in charge in those days, there was like a council of people that would warrant whether or not what you had to say had merit. Well, they thought that Socrates was so bizarre that they asked him to commit suicide on Mars Hill, which Socrates said no. Because Socrates said, I don't need to commit suicide. This is ridiculous, OK? But that's kind of where these guys were. They were these incredibly high, mighty thinkers. But the truth is that just because you're a high, mighty thinker doesn't mean you know anything. It just means that you can get up and talk a lot. And so, you know, I look at myself when I say that, okay? So there were these two major groups, and the two major groups were what they called the Stoics and the Epicureans. So let's keep reading. It says in verse 17, so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jewish people there and the God-fearing Gentiles, and in the market, the agapis, or the agrapis. Of course, that's where we get this idea of agrapophobia, the fear of the marketplace. you know, again, the market, the agropolis, and a place every day with those who happen to be present. So that was what Paul did. Paul went and whenever he came into a town, first thing he would do is obviously go to the synagogue, reason with the Jewish leadership for the most part, and with anyone, whoever was there. And then he would also go out into the marketplace. And of course, we saw this in Philippi when he went down to the river and, you know, witnessed to the women down there. and so forth and so on. So this is what he did. So it's the same identical thing going on in Athens. So that's how he got an invite to Mars Hill, by the way. Had he not gone into the marketplace, He would have never gotten an invite to go to Mars Hill, which is a big deal. So to get an invite to Mars Hill is really a pretty prestigious event, frankly. This is not just something you can take lightly, which, by the way, is why Luke spends as much time on what was actually taking place at Mars Hill in this particular chapter. Because most people, you know, a casual reader would just go, oh, OK, yeah, yeah. But this is a big deal. This is a big deal event. to get invited. Imagine, just to put it in perspective in modern day, that you were invited to speak in the Capitol. in Washington, you know, the head of our country, you were invited to speak in the Capitol. That's a big deal. Would you agree? That's a big deal. Well, that's kind of the same thing that's going on here. This is where all of the great thinkers came to speak and they would come and they would speak there. And so that's what's going on. Okay, so here we go. Verse 18, and also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. And some were saying, what would this... And the word there, in most Bibles, you're going to see babbler. You're going to see, in my Bible, it says idle babbler. So, of course, I looked the word up. This is a very interesting word. The word is seed picker. I was like, seed picker? What in the world? Well, it was an expression. It was an expression at that time, which, by the way, makes babbler actually a pretty good definition. What the Greeks basically believed was that if you were a philosopher, you had your own philosophy. But if you were a person that went out and listened to a whole bunch of other philosophies and tried to always incorporate them around and so forth and so on, they called that a seed picker. or a person that would pick up a little bit from this guy, pick up a little from this guy, pick up a little from this guy, pick up a little from this guy. It was not a compliment, by the way. It meant you didn't have any real thoughts. of your own. It meant that you basically were picking up. So they were saying that this guy was just a seed picker. He was a babbler. He was a person that had all these crazy thoughts that were all over the place, but they really didn't have any real continuity to them and so forth. By the way, interesting, they also called Plato a seed picker, just FYI. I just thought I'd throw that out just because it's interesting. So these guys didn't necessarily have the greatest, you know, you couldn't really look at their judgment because if you understand Plato's theories, they were new. That was the whole idea. He came in with new thinking. He was the first guy excuse me, to come up with the idea of a dictionary. The word dictionary was actually brought up by the Greeks, another little piece of information. A dictionary originally was to give you the meanings of words, but Plato said you have to be able to have diction, you have to say it correctly. Because if you say a word incorrectly, you'll get a wrong meaning. So he said, we have to have a dictionary, and we have to have a book that basically says, this is how you say what you want to say. If you want to say that word, this is how it's pronounced. That's what a dictionary is all about, by the way. It also gives you the meaning of the word, but primarily it's there to give you how to say it. So if you ever notice in a dictionary, the first thing it does is it has a little parenthetical thing which shows you how to say it. That's what a dictionary is all about. That's Plato. Interesting. Little piece of information out there, the Greeks. Okay, so again, I go back to the Great Greek Wedding, which says that everything comes from Greek, and he was probably right. Okay, so why would this seed picker, why would this idle babbler wish to say, wished to say. So that's the question. They say, what do you want to say, Paul? What do you want to say? And others said he seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities because he was talking about the resurrection. They didn't understand the resurrection. They didn't understand the idea of somebody being raised. In fact, that was totally you know, contrary to everything that they had been believing for all time. Their idea was that life was finite. You lived within this finite time. Their belief was that although time was eternal, your time was not. You lived in that finite time and you should take advantage of that time. And if you have not taken proper advantage of your time, you're supposed to end your time. That's why suicide, by the way, was so prevalent amongst the Stoics. The Stoics basically would come to a point where I don't have any more meaning in my life. Boom. Knife in the throat. And by the way, that's how they did it. Knife in the throat. That ended it very quickly, by the way. Yeah, OK, so this was a very interesting community that they were. So the Stoics and the Epicurean philosophers call him this babbler. They say he has strange deities and so forth. The Stoics, by the way, were pantheists. The word pantheist means that Pan meaning within everything, and Theis, of course, meaning God, so their idea meaning that God is in everything. That's basically what they believed, hence the fact that they could be stoic. Of course, stoic means, in English, to be calm, to be relaxed, not to get too excited about anything. And that's because the Stoics believed that God was in everything, so even a bad event was a God event. A good event was a God event. A bad event was a God event. It didn't make any difference what it was. So you never get too high or too low because everything is a God event. Some God basically took care of that. And then they had thousands of different gods that could take care of it. So they were pretty much assured that that was going to be where it was. So they were pantheists, goddesses and everything. The Epicureans, however, were people that said, no, God is in pleasure. and that we find our relationship with God by things that are pleasant, and we don't want to do things which are not pleasant. Well, that actually took a really weird curve over time, and this is when Athens was out on its decline. The Epicureans were the ones that basically were the big sexual orgy people and all the crazy kind of things just to find the ultimate in pleasure and so forth. These two philosophies obviously don't coexist very well, but somehow they basically were able to figure out how to do that. But they always had some Stoics and some Epicureans on their so-called council. And there was a council that would sit at Mars Hill. There were times when it was 12 people, apparently. There were times when it was as many as 24, maybe even 36 different people that would judge whether or not the people that had stood on Mars Hill were worthy of a hearing and then were worthy of their statements being published. And that was a big thing at that time was to publish this. And you say, well, how did they publish it? Well, it was a very time-consuming thing to take out this kind of leaves and the papyrus and so forth. and make these scrolls of people's writings. And by the way, it's because of that that we have some of the history that we have from this time, because these guys were so antimated about that. So they brought them before the Orocopus and the, I'm gonna just say Mars Hill because it's easier. And so they brought them before Mars Hill where all the teachers spoke before the judges and he spoke, about what he believed. He gave them the gospel. So I think it's important that you understand that he's not... diverting anything that he believed into their philosophy. No, he took what they were doing and used it as an example to then come and to actually preach his word or to proclaim the word of God. And so it says, so they took him to Mars Hill saying, may we know what this new teaching is in which you are proclaiming. Now, the word proclaim is used a lot here. It's used, over and over. You see it in verse 18, you see it in verse 19, you see it in verse 23, you see it later on. So the point is that this is what this was all about. He was making a proclamation to them of what it was that he was a believer of. And so verse 20, it says, For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. We want to know, therefore, what these things mean. They had no idea what he was talking about when he talked about death and resurrection. They had an inkling of what he meant when he talked about repentance, by the way, because that was a Greek idea. They actually had a word for it. It was called metanoia. And metanoia means to change your thinking. That's what the word repentance actually is, or the word that we define as repentance in English. He talked about a judgment day coming. He talked about what he does as to integrating the message. And so it's extremely important that you understand that these guys that had brought him up there were not doing it because they were extremely interested or they believed what he had to say. It was just whenever a new guy came in town who had a different thought, they wanted that guy to get a hearing. And why? Because they were concerned that if he had the truth, and you didn't give him a hearing, that some god would come down and would pound them for not giving them the right hearing. And so this is an interesting culture. Really, it's truly an interesting culture. So verse 21 says, now all the Atheans and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new. So that, by the way, is a parenthetical thing. It's to explain what it is that he's saying. So, verse 22. It says, And Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all aspects. Now, different Bibles are going to have different words for that and so forth. But the actual word that's used there, the New American Standard has it tagged. It is the word religious. It can mean also reverence and so forth. But it is religious. And so the King James, I think, I forget what the King James says. It's a little bit different. I'm sorry? Religious. Religious, OK. So at any rate. you're very religious in all aspects. Now, he's not saying that in a derogatory way. He's saying that because he just walked through a city and he saw 3,000 temples and he saw 30,000 at least statues, multiple statues in everybody's courtyard. I mean, come on. So he's like sitting there. Right. Precisely where I was going. So here's what he says in verse 23. He says, For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, How could he not? They're everywhere. Okay? I also found an altar with this inscription. Now, I'm not going to say it in English. I'm going to say it in Greek and you'll understand exactly what it means. Okay? The Greek here is... I'm trying to remember exactly how to pronounce it, but it's agonosis theos. Agonosis theos. Agonosis theos. Agnosis meaning agostic or agnostic, right? So agnostic God. Think about that as a word. Just as a combination of words. Because agnostic means to not know. That's what it means. It means when you're agnostic about something, it's just, I don't know. So you hear people say, well, I'm agnostic. You know, well it's because I don't have an opinion, or I don't know. And so he's saying here, this is about the God that we don't know. The unknown God, is how it was originally translated in most Bibles. But it's really about the God they don't know about. So what they did is they actually put up an altar to the God they didn't know about, just in case. because they don't want to offend any gods, right? They don't want to miss, you know, and so forth. You know, they had a lot of different gods that were being worshipped. They didn't want to miss one. So they put up an altar to the one they might have missed. And so Paul says, I'm going to use that because I'm going to tell you about the God that you don't know about. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell you about that, because Paul never ever backed off of the fact that we have a specific... that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is in fact the God of the universe. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not Rama. He is not Allah. He is not Krishna. He is not Buddha. He is not... No, no, no. Those are all false gods. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is Jehovah. He is the true God. Exactly. And so he says this. He says, I am going to proclaim to you the God you don't know. The God of your agnosticism. And so here's what he says. He says, the God who made the world and all things in it. Since He is Jehovah of heaven. So he's using words they don't even understand. Why? Because he is the unknown God. He is the God they don't know about. And I'm going to give you his name. His name is Jehovah. The unknown God that you're talking about is in fact Jehovah. That's who He is. He's an unknown God to you. But He is the God who has created all things. And since He is the Lord of heaven and earth, He does not dwell in temples made with hands. So these 3,000 temples that you guys have, He ain't in any of those. Think about that for a second. He's saying, look, you've got temples on every corner. Guess what? He ain't in them. See? I mean, it's just incredible. He ain't in them. Okay, so keep on going. He says, neither is He served. I love that word. Neither is He served by human hands. You know, we have this philosophy that God needs us for some reason. God doesn't need us. Sorry, He doesn't. He chooses to use us in His love, but He don't need us. So listen to what he says. He says, neither is he served by human hands as though he needed anything. You know, there's a whole group of people out there that would have you believe that if you don't give like all the money you have to your church, that church is going to go bankrupt because God's going bankrupt. What? No. Sorry. That wouldn't work that way. God doesn't need anything. God doesn't need you. He doesn't need me. He doesn't need any of these temples. He doesn't need any of these other things. And so forth. I'm going to tell you about that God. I'm going to tell you about the God that doesn't need anything from you. That's a whole different philosophy. That's taking it to a whole different level. And so he says, he says, I'm going to tell you about this God. He says, this is the God that doesn't need anything, since he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. So, unlike your gods, where you have to have a god that has, you know, gives the power to the fish, and you have to have a god that gives power to the heavens, and you've got to have a god that gives power to this and that and the other. No, no, no, no. There is one God, His name is Jehovah, and He gives breath to everything. Now he's speaking to them in their language. He's talking to them in a way that they're going to understand what he's talking about because these folks did not believe that. There was no one God that took care of everything. No, we needed gods that did everything. No, that's not how it works. We have one God and that one God does it. And the amount of times he says one here is amazing. He says, and he made from one every... And this is a really interesting thing. The word there in my Bible says nation. but I looked it up and the word is blood. Isn't that great? One blood. One blood. He has made from one every blood, every blood of mankind or nation to live on all of the face of the earth. Now, let me explain to you how crazy that thought was for them. That would have definitely curdled their blood. That would have gotten them started. Why? Okay, here's why. The Greeks believed, with all their heart, that they were the superior race. They believed that everybody else was inferior to them, especially the Romans. But they believed everybody was inferior to them. They believed that they were a super race. That's actually a philosophy that was taught throughout that entire... And that's why they had all knowledge was found in the Greeks. They gave us all language. They gave us everything. And they believed that it came from their superior blood. That's what they believed. Now, this should not fall short on you how important this is. Because this was classic racism. It was classic racism. They basically believed that they had the answers and everybody else was less than them. Now that didn't mean that everybody necessarily had to get destroyed, but everyone who was not Greek was definitely not on their level. And they really believed that. They would not allow, for example, non-Greeks to enter their colleges. as an example. Why? Because they didn't have enough brains to know what it was. Now, the only reason that Paul kind of got a hall pass is because he was from Targus, which was part of Greece. So he sort of got a hall pass even though he was a Jew. He got a hall pass, but not much of one. Because they really didn't respect him at a high level. They called him a seed picker, which, by the way, a babbler not a compliment. They're not going to say that necessarily unless they really didn't like them, and so forth. So they had this problem, and the problem was that they believed they were better than everybody else. Now, what's interesting to me is that throughout history, we have had people that have come along and have claimed this same basic thing about, it's in our blood. Certainly the Aryan race, that was the whole idea of Hitlerism, was it was based upon the fact that they had a superior bloodline. But it was interesting to me because I started doing some study on this, and as soon as I got into this whole thing about bloodline, the Google threw me right at Charles Darwin. And I'm like, what? Why did it go there? Why did it go there? Well, so I started reading it. And Grace will tell you, I did this last week. I was in there, what, five or six hours probably reading all the crazy things that this rabbit hole I talked to... Talked to Orlando about it earlier. It's a rabbit hole because it can take you down. But I'm just going to give you a couple of little nipples or tidbits here, nips of this. So in 1881, Charles Darwin wrote a book. Actually, he had already written his book about the survival of the fittest and so forth. And he wrote another book called The Descent of Man. And he said in that book, I'm going to quote. This is a quote directly from the book. It says, the more civilized or so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow, the struggle for existence. What he was saying, the Turkish hollow, by the way, that's a whole other rabbit hole. I don't want to get down. But the Turkish hollow was this idea that Darwin came up with that most people were ignorant. That's basically what that meant. Okay, so again, just to say that. So it says that they beat the Turkish hollow. In other words, they beat the ignorance, the struggle for existence. Looking at the world from no very distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized. The word civilized there, by the way, that he used in his, because he wrote this in German, was the word Caucasian. It's fascinating. He was completely convinced that Caucasians, whites, Europeans in particular, were a chosen race and that everybody was inferior to them. whole interesting part of this whole thing. And he says, and the endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. Quote, the presentation of favored races is the struggle for life. Unquote. At some future period, not very distinct, measured by centuries, the civilized races or the Caucasians will most certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. The point is, this is not new. This has been going on since the Greeks. And it has continued. There was a fellow by the name of Thomas Huxley, who was a disciple of Darwin, who was an absolute racist. So much so that Hitler, in his proclamations, quoted Huxley ad nauseum. Ad nauseum. As to why the Aryan race was, in fact, the true bloodline of God. Which is fascinating. Darwin and his disciples, the Thomas Huxleys and so forth, had another disciple. His name was Karl Marx. So Karl Marx wrote, He said this, he said, the scientific and sociological support for an economic experience that eclipsed even the carnage of Hitler's, I'm sorry, Karl Marx saw, this is my writing, Karl Marx saw in Darwinism the scientific and sociological support for an economic experience that eclipsed even the carnage of Hitler's Germany. His hatred of all things religious, by the way, Karl Marx was born Jewish, hated Judaism, hated Catholicism in particular, but hated any form of religion of any kind. So you could fill in the blank. He thought that it was all crazy. And he said this, he said, his hatred of all things religious led to the mass murder of multiplied millions worldwide, not just within Russia. and in Germany and so forth, but throughout the world. Karl Marx so revered Darwin that it was his desire to dedicate a portion of the Descapolal, which is the place he made in St. Petersburg, to him. It should be noted that Darwinism evolution is not only racist, but is also sexist. In the difference in mental powers of the races, Darwin wrote this, the chief distinction of intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining a higher eminence of whatever he takes up than can women, and he goes on to say, he says, whether requiring deep thought, imagination, or even the use of senses or hands, the average of mental power in men is always above that of women." Now, if that doesn't irritate you as a woman, you should get irritated, okay? What's the point of all of this? The point of all of this is that whenever you get away from God, Whenever you walk down that path, when you get off the path of understanding who the true God is, who the one God is, who the one Lord Jehovah really is, when you get away from that, you are going to go down and you're going to have a proclivity to go down these areas which say that there has to be something better, there is always going to be this idea that we came from something other than God. And so you end up with these kinds of crazy thoughts. The reason why Darwin was so adamant about the fact that the survival of the fittest, and he believed that men were more fit than women, and so therefore men would ultimately survive more than women. What's crazy about his philosophy is that there was no real scientific basis for that. Just a thought, okay? It wasn't really a scientific, I mean, the truth is we all know the women outlive men. That's a fact, okay? If you don't think that's true, just look around at the people that are 90 years old and how many men do you see? Not a lot. A lot of women out there, not many men, okay? So the point is that men don't outlive women. Women outlive men. Men don't outthink women. When women are given the same opportunity, and we see this, by the way, in just the simplest thing as an SAT score, women outperform men, or I should say, young students, teenage girls, we'll just use the word girls, okay? Teenage girls, I don't mean it in a negative sense, teenage girls outperform teenage men, or boys, on SAT exams consistently. It's not even up for debate anymore. Okay? I mean, all you got to do is look at the numbers. Now, if you think that's not enough, okay, what about college, actually in college? You know, success within college. Women drop out at a much lower rate than men. Well, why is that? It's because women are inferior, right? That was a joke. No, it's absurd. I mean, the whole concept is crazy. I mean, it's actually backward from what the statistics tell us. I mean, why? Why was this so in 18—well, the reason why it was so in 18— mid-1800s, is most women were not allowed to be educated. Most women were not allowed to have any opportunity. Most people that were non-Caucasian didn't have any opportunity. So of course he would have come to the conclusion that, well, of course the Caucasians are going to take over the world because they're the smart ones, they're the ones that are in charge, just like the Greeks, right? They're the ones that have all the opportunity. And these other people down here, these savages... I mean, the Greeks are so interesting. The Greeks thought so much of people that didn't speak Greek that they called them barbarians. The word barbarian is taken, I want you to just think of the word. It's bar-bar-ian. Bar-bar-ian. It meant people that couldn't speak, bar means to, it's like ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. They didn't understand what they were saying. So it was like babblers, bar-bar-ians. So the barbarians were the people that didn't, that weren't Greek. They didn't have a knowledge of what was going on. Why is this a big deal? Why is this important? Why is this important? Because God is not racially motivated. God is not racist. I think I've shared this with you before, but I was fortunate enough to have actually gone in and seen an open-heart transplant. Actually, it was a valve replacement, I'm sorry, but an open heart surgery. And I saw an actual valve replacement. It was an amazing thing. And I remember the cardiologist who was doing this surgery, tremendous, tremendous surgeon. And he said, you know what's really cool about fixing people's insides is everybody's insides are the same. Everybody's insides are the same. So it doesn't matter what race they are, it doesn't matter how big they are, how small they are, how smart they are, everybody's insides are the same. And I've never forgotten that. And by the way, he just said it sort of like, it was just a throwaway comment. I mean, in fact, I even mentioned it to him afterwards and he said, I said that? Just like he didn't even really remember saying it. Oh yeah, you said it, man. But it impacted me. It really did. It impacted me. Why? Because the truth is you open up anybody's chest and they all have the same basic organs. They're all the same. Blood's the same color. Doesn't change. It's all the same. It's there. It's just an amazing, amazing thing. So these Greeks, because of their racial overtones and so forth, messed up. And I'm telling you, we see it in today's society as well. I find it fascinating, to me, that people that believe in Darwinism, people that believe in Socialism, people that believe in Communism, the teachings of these particular people, don't realize that they find their basis in the very thing they say they abhor. Think about that for a second. The very thing they say they abhor, which is racism, is the foundation of these guys' beliefs. and the foundation of what these guys teach or taught, I should say, because they're all dead now. But the fact is, is that we see this. So Paul is approaching that and he says, and he has made from one every blood of mankind to live on the face of the earth. What he's saying is, is that there's no difference between Greeks and Romans and blacks, whites, green or indifferent. We're all the same. We all live on the face of the earth. Having determined their appointed times and boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God. Everybody is seeking after God. This is Paul's teaching. Everyone is seeking after God. Everyone is trying to figure out who he is. The problem is we typically do it the wrong way. And we miss the point. If you don't see that in the Greeks, you're missing the whole entire point. By the way, there is evidence that people seek God in every culture. My foundation, Love Without Boundaries, does work in some of the remotest parts of Uganda and some of the remotest parts of India, definitely some of the remotest parts of Cambodia. And what's interesting to me is that no matter where we go, we see evidence of people seeking after God. When I went to India for the first time and I went into this culture, I was just fascinated by how much people sought after God. They sought after Him in different ways. but they were seeking after God. We see it within Uganda. When I went to Uganda, or excuse me, I personally haven't been to Uganda, but when our organization went to Uganda, the first thing that just blew our minds was we went to the most remotest village. We worked in this one really, really remote village in the middle of absolutely nowhere. They had to walk up with buckets on their heads to get the water out of a contaminated lake to bring it up to this village that was up on the top of the hill. And the reason it was on the top of the hill is because the flooding was so bad, that was the only place they could live. And they had set up temples to gods that they didn't even know what they were doing. Because that's what people do. People have always sought after God. And so he says, and they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each of us. For in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of our own poets have said. For we also are His offspring." So now he's going back and he's quoting the poets of Greek, these Grecian poets, that they could understand what he was saying. He's saying, look, these guys were seeking after God too. They just didn't understand the unknown God, the agnostic God. They didn't know the one that they didn't have the information about. I'm giving you the information about that one. And he says in verse 29, being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone or an image formed by art or the thought of man. What he's saying there is really powerful because that's what they believed. They believed that you could create the divinity of God in an image, in a temple, in a statue. And Paul's saying, no, it's not done that way. Therefore, having overlooked the times of agnostic, that's again that word ignorance, there's the word agnostic, He says, therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance or agnosticism, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should metanoia, repent. Now they were very familiar with the idea of metanoia because that's what they taught on Mars Hill. Mars Hill was all about getting people to change their mind. You put somebody up on Mars Hill and his whole purpose was to change, was to metanoia the people that were there, to change their minds. to get them to repent from their philosophy. And that's what he's saying you need to do. He says you need to change your mind because he has fixed a day. Here's why. See, because this is something the Greeks did not believe. What he's about to tell them. He says, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. So he's saying to them, look, this God came down and was a man. He lived and dwelled on this earth and then he was killed, but he was raised from the dead by the God who was in heaven. That one God, they were together and they formed themselves in that alliance. And there we see this incredible concept of the gospel being preached by Paul so eloquently. in their language, with their understanding, using their things that they understood. It is a tremendous pattern for us to be sharing the gospel. If you want to share the gospel with somebody, do it on their terms, not on your terms. And that's what Paul was doing. He always did that, by the way. And he says, Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, We must hear you again concerning this. So he tickled a few of their ears. So Paul went out of their midst. But some men joined him and believed, and among them were Dionysus, the Areopagite, which basically means that he was one of the judges. one of the 12 or 24, however many judges there were at that time. He was one of those judges and a woman named Damaris and others with them. So obviously this Damaris person was a pretty well-known person as well, or he wouldn't have mentioned them. Here's the point. Paul took the things that were there, this statue to an unknown God, the statue to the God of agnosticism, And he said, I'm going to take that agnosticism, that ignorance, and I'm going to show you the true God of heaven. Now, did everyone believe? Did everyone believe? No, of course not. You see, we're not responsible for results. Don't ever forget what I'm about to tell you. You are not responsible for results. You are responsible for process. You are responsible to share the word. It's not your job to save people. It's not your job to fix things. No, no, no. That's God's job. But it is your job to proclaim. That's your job. But that's what Paul did. And by the way, this chapter doesn't say it once, it doesn't say it twice, it doesn't say it three times. It says it about six times that he proclaimed, that he proclaimed, that he proclaimed. That's what it is. He actually says in another place, he says it is by the foolishness of the preaching of the gospel that people come. So there it is. But don't ever think that you are ever better than anyone else, that you are somehow superior to other people. You're not. We are all on that same level. We are all together in this thing together. That's why the Bible tells us that we need to have the unity of our faith. That's why the Bible tells us that we have to have reconciliation amongst Jew and Gentile, and amongst bond and free, and amongst men and women, and so forth. Because there is no difference, he says, between the Jew and the Greek. There is no difference between the bond and the freak. There is no difference between the person that is of wealth and the person who is poor. We all have the exact same internal organs, just like my cardiologist friend shared with me. The exact same internal organs. We are exactly the same on the inside. But you see, the problem is that we look on the outward appearance and God looks on the inward appearance. God only looks inside. He does not look outside. does not look outside, he looks inward. And that's what he wants us to do as well. So this sermon on Mars Hill, I believe is one of the most interesting and most prolific things that Paul ever did. He took something which no one would have even thought about and used it for the glory of God. used it so that he could share that great truth. So again, I think it's pretty powerful and we're going to end right there and go into next week when we get to Corinth and we'll look at that. So let's just end in a word of prayer and we'll get out of here. Father, we thank you so much for your just loving kindness. We thank you that you've given us these words that we can come and we can glean them. I thank you so much, God, that you have called each one of us to a place where you are above all these things that we could ask or think. Bless our time now. Bless our worship this morning as we thank you for Jesus, and we pray in His name. Amen.