The two passages before us today [Acts 17:22-31 and John 14:15-21] could not be more different from one another. And yet, in some ways, they could not be more similar.
In the first one, the one from Acts, we have the Apostle Paul speaking to a group of Gentile skeptics who know nothing of the God revealed to us in Bible, and the incident takes place in Athens, the Greek city named after the pagan goddess Athena. In the second passage, the one from John, we find ourselves in the holy city, Jerusalem itself. And we have Jesus speaking to his own disciples, Jews, who had known the Scriptures since they were children. So, these two passages are very different.
But they are also very much alike. Both of them help us to understand the true nature of God. Both of them exalt Jesus Christ. And both of them reveal to us something of the work of the Holy Spirit. What I want us to do today is to look at each of these affirmations in turn.
First, we see, both in the Acts passage and in the account in John, something of the truth about God. In other words, we see God as he is, not as we imagine him to be, nor even as we may want him to be.
Acts 17 tells us that the Athenians “would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new” (v. 21). So they compelled Paul to go with them to the Areopagus, a huge rock formation in the shadow of the Acropolis. It was here that people would gather almost every day to debate philosophy and religion and metaphysics. You’ve heard the slogan, “Inquiring minds want to know.” And these people wanted to know. They wanted to hear what Paul had to say.
So, Paul used their request as an opportunity to tell them the truth about God. He started by saying, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way” (v. 22). And, apparently, they were. There were innumerable shrines and statues and monuments to gods and goddesses, and they were all over the place. Among them was an altar dedicated to “an unknown god.” Apparently, the Athenians didn’t want to overlook or risk offending any divine being that might possibly exist, for fear, perhaps, of inciting him or her to wrath.
So, Paul used their superstition as a starting place for introducing to them the one true God, “the Maker of heaven and earth.” He told them that “God made the world and everything in it,” that he is the “Lord of heaven and earth,” and that he “does not live in shrines made by human hands.” What we see Paul doing here is appealing to what the Reformed tradition calls “the book of nature” and what theologians have called general revelation. There are certain things that can be known about God simply by looking at the created order. Elsewhere, Paul says that God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Rom. 1:20).
While general revelation can tell us that there is a God and can even tell us something of his power and majesty, it cannot tell us how to come into a saving knowledge of him. That is reserved for what we call special revelation. Our Reformed forebears saw alongside “the book of nature” another book, the Book, the Bible. And it is in the Bible that we learn what God has done to save us.
So, if we turn to John 14, where Jesus is instructing his disciples, we see that salvation is the work of the triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is special revelation at work. Notice that all three Persons of the Trinity are mentioned in John 14:16. Jesus says there, “I” – and we recognize in this first person personal pronoun that the Second Person of the Trinity is speaking. “I will ask the Father” – there is the mention of the First Person of the Trinity. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,” and this Advocate, we learn in the next verse, is the Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. Nature cannot tell you this about God. It can tell you many other things, but it cannot tell you this.
Nor can it tell you why this is important to know. And just why is it important to know? It is because in knowing this that we learn how God saves us. It is through “the Spirit of truth,” as he is called in verse 17. That is, salvation is accomplished by the Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, as he applies to us the Word of truth, the testimony to what God has done in Jesus Christ to rescue us from sin.
But notice that, when Jesus speaks of the Spirit, he says that “the world cannot receive [him], because it neither sees him nor knows him.” We cannot apprehend the truth about God apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (ESV). The Athenians, for example, were not ignorant people. On the contrary, they were quite intelligent, intellectuals even! In Paul’s audience on the day he spoke at the Areopagus were philosophers and debaters. And yet, not many of them grasped what he was talking about.
These two passages – one from Acts and the other from John – are different in some ways. But they are also alike. We’ve seen how they help us to understand the true nature of God. Now let’s look at how they are alike in exalting Jesus Christ.
The truth is: All Scripture exalts Jesus Christ. In the Acts passage, Paul announces God’s command to “all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged…by a man whom he has appointed.” This man, of course, is Jesus, and Paul says of Jesus that God has “raised him from the dead.”
This command to “all people everywhere to repent” and to put their faith in Jesus is what our Presbyterian tradition calls “the free offer of the gospel.” We don’t believe that all people will be saved, but we do believe that God commands “all people everywhere to repent” and believe. If you read the Bible with an eye to it, you will see that Scripture never merely invites people to put their faith in Jesus; it commands people to put their faith in Jesus. That is why the refusal to believe in Jesus is referred to as disobedience. First Peter 2:8 says that unbelievers “stumble because they disobey the word.” At the same time, those who do respond to the gospel by receiving Christ are said to “obey.” In fact, two occurrences of the phrase, “obedience of faith,” serve as bookends to the book of Romans. In Romans 1:15, Paul says that he has “received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among” the nations. And in the last chapter of Romans, Paul speaks of the gospel, “the proclamation of Jesus Christ,” and says that it “is made known to the [nations], according to the command of…God, to bring about the obedience of faith” (Rom. 16:26).
To obey the command to believe is to exalt Jesus. Jesus himself makes this point in our passage from John 14. Twice in the span of seven verses, he talks about obedience. In verse 15, he says, “If you love me you will keep my commandments,” and, in verse 21, he says, “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”
And what are his commandments? The whole of Scripture, of course, contains the commandments of Jesus. Those who would separate the words of Jesus from the words of the prophets and apostles, by which I mean the whole of the Old and New Testaments, misunderstand the authority of all the Bible. It isn’t just the “red letters” that express Jesus’ commandments but all the imperatives of the Bible. Jesus himself said about the Old Testament Scriptures that “it is they that testify on my behalf” (John 5:39). So, the whole Bible is filled with Jesus’ commandments.
But, more specifically, the commandment that Jesus gives in the context of our passage is found in John 14:11, where Jesus says, “Believe [in] me.” Believe in me! Here again is the command to believe, and Jesus says that it is those who keep his commands that love and exalt him.
There is one more way our two passages today are similar. Both of them tell us something about the work of the Holy Spirit. You won’t find a specific reference to the Spirit in our text from Acts, but what you will find is the effect of his work. It is the Spirit who makes the proclamation of the gospel effective. As Paul was giving his discourse “in front of the Areopagus,” the Spirit was applying his testimony to the hearts of those who were to believe. Our Presbyterian heritage refers to this as the doctrine of “effectual calling.” And what we mean by this doctrine is this: that there is, as we have seen, a general calling to “all people everywhere to repent,” but there is also an effectual calling. We recognize that some people – actually many, perhaps even most – will not accept the terms of the gospel. But there are some who will, and, according to the Shorter Catechism, this is “the work of God’s Spirit, whereby convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, He persuades and enables us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the gospel.” The Spirit was at work just this way at the Areopagus, for we are told that some of the people there “became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them” (Acts 17:34).
Not only, though, does the Spirit draw us to Christ; he also matures us in Christ. When we come to Christ, the Spirit comes to us. In fact, he comes to live within us. Jesus says in John 14:17: “You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” This is one of the great benefits that Christ purchased for us on the cross, that the Spirit would abide in us and help us to keep Christ’s commands. In fact, the word rendered “Advocate” in our text is often translated “Helper,” and that is fitting. Because that’s what the Spirit does for the people of Jesus. He helps us to become more and more like Jesus.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – one God in three Persons. And this one God is far superior to all the idols of the human imagination. Let us then determine to know God and to worship him, not as some idol devised by our own natural preferences, not as many people configure him to be, but as “the book of nature” and the Holy Book together reveal him to be. Let us exalt Jesus, God’s only Son, and let us be obedient to the gospel by putting our trust in him alone. And, finally, let us pray that God would use this church and this pulpit effectually to call those who are to believe in Jesus for eternal life.
