A City Wholly Given to Idolatry – Acts 17:16

Paul’s visit to Athens can be compared to the visits of two other Biblical saints to two other cities.

I thought about developing this message along those lines, but it became just a bit too complicated.

Nevertheless it would be profitable for you to meditate on Lot’s visit to Sodom and Jonah’s visit to Nineveh.

All three men were ambassadors of Jehovah.

All three cities were wicked, idolatrous and foreign to their guests.

But one man had a successful ministry, despite of himself.

One man was corrupted by the sin of his city, and became one of their fellow-citizens.

And the other walked away spiritually unscathed – but without much in the way of success.

Paul was not in Athens of his own accord.

He had been hustled out of Berea and brought to Athens by some of the new converts there.

They were in fear for Paul’s life, and so the itinerary and schedule of the missionaries was quickly changed.

Thus, for the first time since becoming a missionary, Paul was completely alone in a foreign community.

Silas & Timothy were temporarily left in Berea, probably in order to make Paul’s escape that much easier.

And it appears that it never was Paul’s intention to minister in Athens on this particular missionary journey.

When he disembarked from the ship, he sent word back to Berea for his co-workers to join him.

“Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.”

This morning let’s think a little more about the subject that we introduced last Wednesday: IDOLATRY.

In my study, I have read over and over again, that there may have never been a more idolatrous city in the western world than Athens.

The phrase “wholly given to idolatry” is one word in Greek, & it is found only one time in our Bibles.

There were no other towns or cities mentioned in the Bible which were “WHOLLY given to idolatry.”

Over & over again Roman, Greek and Jewish writers agree about the Athenian idolatry.

Someone named PAUSANIAS said: “The Athenians GREATLY surpassed others in their zeal for religion.”

He said that there were more idols in Athens than in all the rest of Greece combined.

He said that they had an altar for Mercy, another for Shame, another for Fame, and another even for Desire (or lust).

They had altars dedicated to twelve gods at once, to unknown gods and to unmet gods.

LUCIAN said: “On every side there are altars, victims, temples, and festivals.”

LIVY testified: “Athens is full of the images of gods and men, adorned with every variety of material, and with all the skill of art.”

It was PETRONIUS who said that “it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man.”

PLINY states that in the time of Nero, Athens had over 30,000 public statues besides countless private ones in the homes.

Every gateway or porch had its protecting god.

They lined the five-mile road from Piraeus up to Athens, and caught the eye at every place of prominence whether on walls or in the agora – the market place

XENOPHON wrote that the Athenians had twice as many religious feasts as any other people.

It is impossible to over-state the idolatry of Athens.

It may not have plummeted as deep as the idolatries of the eastern world.

These idolaters may not have murdered their children in the worship of their false gods;

They may not have stooped to self-mutilation, incest, or genocide in their idolatry;

But for sheer size and volume, no place in the western world was as idolatrous as Athens.

And when Paul beheld it all his spirit was stirred in him.

The Greek word is “paroxysm” – a sudden outburst of uncontrollable emotion.

This morning, I’d like you to consider the cause, the effect, the conclusion and deliverance from idolatry.

And it’s not just because we have run into the subject in the course of our study of the Book of Acts.

We need to consider this idolatry because it is AS ALIVE TODAY, as it has ever been in the past.

It’s shapes and form may have evolved over the centuries, but there are as many idolaters today in any American city of equal size, as there was in Athens in the day of Paul.

First, consider the CAUSE or the SOURCE of idolatry.

It isn’t necessary to check out a dozen library books on the subject of Anthropology, religion or psychology to learn about the roots of idolatry.

As is true with 9 out of 10 of the really important subjects,

There is enough information in God’s inspired Word to provide us with all that we really need to know.

For example, it is vanity, sin and idolatry to scour the universe to find the source of life, when the Bible clearly and simply tells us that it originally came from God.

And it’s vanity, sin and idolatry to try to seek for the evil heart of man, when the Bible explains it to us.

Romans chapter one provides us with all the text that we need to study IDOLATRY 101.

Please turn to Romans 1:18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God shewed it unto them.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are w/o excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.“

Idolatry began when man chose to elevate himself and his will over Jehovah and His will.

During the week of creation “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image.”

And shortly after that time the Lord gave His first command to that man.

That is as it should be:

The Creator is greater than His creation and has the right to give His creatures His commands.

But Adam chose his way over God’s way and to disobey the command of the Lord.

Even before his first bite of that forbidden fruit, Adam’s opinion of God fell below the proper level.

And at about the time of Adam’s transgression, he became an idolater.

He elevated himself over the Lord.

In Romans Paul explained idolatry in very broad strokes:

Because of man’s innate sin, those sinners refuse to recognize what they ought to see about God.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”

When man rejects what is knowable about Jehovah, and glorifies Him not as God,

It is natural for man to sinfully elevate various parts of God’s creation, and to worship them as deity.

They “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.“

They “changed the truth of God into a lie, & worshipped & served the creature more than Creator.”

And what is ironic is that all the while they are doing this, they are calling themselves “intellectuals.”

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

The smarter man THINKS himself to be the more he rejects his Creator and the more foolish he proves himself to be.

And, oh how the self-proclaimed intellectuals and scholars loved ancient Athens.

As is very often said, there is something within man which demands the recognition of deity.

There is a corner of every heart which can be filled with nothing else but some sort of god.

And so there is nothing more unnatural than a true atheist;

Basic human nature denies the denial of God.

But when sinful men refuse to recognize or worship JEHOVAH – the one true and living God – those men’s sinful human nature must look for a substitute.

And thus we have idolatry.

That idolatry can take ten thousand different forms, from the worship of stumps and stones, to the worship of cats and alligators, to the worship of sports heros or demons and devils.

BUT man’s absolute favorite form of idolatry is the worship of himself.

The source of idolatry is sin – man’s depraved and rebellious heart.

The EFFECT of this idolatry takes two basic forms.

For the idolater himself, the only way to go is down.

There was Eve, who thought of herself more highly than she thought of the Lord and his commandment.

She wanted to be able to see and know things as God knows them.

At least that was the form of her temptation.

She ate of the fruit, slipped on the ice & started plummeting down hill as fast as gravity could take her.

And then there was Adam, who knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to disobey the Lord.

We aren’t really sure what was in his heart as he put the fruit in his mouth.

He may have been thinking in exactly the same way as his wife, yearning to be smarter or more important than the Lord.

Or he may have somehow elevated Eve and made her more dear to his heart than God.

We don’t know if his idol was himself or his wife, or both, but in whichever, he was an idolater.

And when he disobeyed the Lord, he spiritually died, was expelled from Eden, and had to struggle with the rest of creation just to stay alive.

Together the sin and idolatry of Adam and Eve infected their children, their grand-children and their great-grand-children.

Their son Cain thought of himself over the Lord, over his brother, and probably over his parents as well.

His particular idolatry ended in the murder of his brother.

Over and over again throughout the Bible, throughout history, and perhaps even in our own lives,

we can see the effects of elevating ourselves and thinking little of the Lord.

We can see the effects of idolatry

For Adam and Eve there was, in one sense, a one sentence Bible:

“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:

for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

In effect, they rejected the only scriptures they possessed, and in the process threw themselves into chaos.

And as it was with those two, Idolatry produces spiritual pandemonium.

Idolatry leaves man without a standard for theology, morality, or intellectual honesty.

Idolatry rips the rudder off the ship of humanity, and leaves it without divine guidance.

Or perhaps more accurately, it gives that ship so many rudders that it’s incapable of progress,

and so it heads nowhere but into disaster.

There were 30,000 idols in Athens, the city “wholly given to idolatry.”

I guess that we have to assume that some of those idols were duplicates of other idols.

So how many divinities were there actually supposed to be? 10,000 – 5,000 – 1,000?

Verse 21 says that “all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.”

If all these new things were really new,

then it means that they had to be different from what preceded them.

And if they were different, could they all be right? or could they all agree?

It is amazing that all these non-agreeing philosophies could amicably walk together in one city.

Ah, but these Athenians, like most idolaters considered themselves to be exceptionally smart.

Athens was the university city of the Roman Empire; it was the cultural capital of the world.

Was it their foolish wisdom which made them seek out foolish idols,

or was it their foolish idolatry which made them bold enough to call themselves wise?

Remember what Paul wrote to the Romans:

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

In I Corinthians he wrote:

“Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God.”

Idolatry produces pride-filled foolishness.

And it is the pinnacle of foolishness to try to tell Jehovah what is right and what is wrong.

It is foolishness to disregard and to break God’s first commandments, thinking that there will be no penalty to pay.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.”

Idolatry is at the heart of the most hideous sin.

And as is true with most sin, idolatry leads to more and more idolatry and more and more sin.

While Jehovah was rejected or replaced with Athena, Poseidon, Zeus and a thousand other false gods,

the Word of God was being replaced as well.

In fact, many modern idolaters turn to false gods for the specific purpose of avoiding the Word of God.

And in the absence of the Bible, the doorway to every kind of sin and debauchery is thrown wide open.

If any of you walk away from this church some day, turning your back on the Lord and on the Bible,

I will be greatly saddened, but not surprised, to hear some day that you have become a homosexual,

a transsexual, a murderer, a Mormon or a Muslim.

Without the Lord and His word, anything goes – from immorality to incest, from extortion to abortion.

History proves that idolatry doesn’t produce a great and permanent society; it can’t by its very nature.

In fact one of the effects of idolatry is to throw that foolish person into the lap of Satan himself.

It was the Devil who convinced Eve to experiment with idolatry.

It was his desire to bring these people into HIS camp in the war against Jehovah.

There is a sense in which Satan helps to design every idol ever worshiped, from the idols of marble and gold to the idol of flesh and bones which we love more than the Lord.

Satan is at the heart of every icon and religious artifact raised up and honored in the name of the Lord and fallen Christianity.

Satan is using idolatry to lead foolish people right into the same eternity as himself.

And that takes me to my third point: the RESULT of idolatry.

God will not tolerate idolatry in any form.

As far as individuals are concerned the idolater was to physically die as an illustration of his spiritual death.

“He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.”

That man’s nearest relatives were not only bound to denounce him and deliver him up to punishment,

but their hands were to strike the first blow when,

On the evidence of at least two witnesses, he was stoned.

To attempt to seduce others to false worship, or to idol worship, was a crime huge enormity.

“If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;

Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.

And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;

Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;

Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:

But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you.”

No facts are more strongly declared in the Old Testament than that the extermination of the Canaanites was for the punishment of their idolatry.

And on taking possession of the land, the Jews were commanded to destroy every trace of every kind of the existing idolatry of the Canaanites

Then later, the calamities and judgments that fell on the Israelites were due to THEIR idolatry, because they failed to obey the Lord in exterminating idolatry from their land.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, the neighbors of Athens: “Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.”

He wrote to the Galatians: “The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

He wrote to the Colossians: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience.”

God hates idolatry because it attacks the very heart of the Lord Himself.

Idolaters, like all other unforgiven sinners, will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire; in fire and brimstone.

And I fear that there are far more idolaters even in the churches of God, than anyone has ever imagined.

But there is DELIVERANCE.

Paul declared to the idolaters of Athens:

“Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.”

The solution to idolatry is the same as it is for any other form of sin.

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”

Why do we preach Christ?

Because in Him, God has provided an escape and forgiveness of sin.

“In (Christ Jesus) we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.”

“Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.”

The Creator has chosen to deliver members of His Creation from their native idolatry.

So the Son of God came into the world to suffer the punishment that their idolatry deserves.

Then after His death, He conquered and routed death through His resurrection.

Today, when sinners like us, turn from their idolatrous sins and cast themselves upon the mercy of the Lord, He saves them; He delivers them.

It is essential that everyone of us bow before the cross of Christ, repenting of our sins and trusting the Lord Jesus Christ.

That was the message of the Apostle Paul to the Athenians,

And that must still be the message of every gospel preacher to the sinners and idolaters of the United States of America.

“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”