You have to know God to work in His vineyard

Sermon for Midweek of Septuagesima

Acts 17:22-34

On Sunday we considered the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where those who were hired last, toward the end of the day, had spent the whole day—their whole lives—outside of God’s kingdom, but were invited in, nonetheless, and given the same reward as those who had started working early in the morning. This evening’s lesson from Acts 17 gives us a glimpse of the recruitment process for the late-in-the-day hired workers.

The Apostle Paul goes out to “hire” workers for God’s vineyard, that is, to preach the Word of God to them and to call them to repentance and faith in Christ. And what he sees at first, as he walks around the famous city of Athens disgusts him. In the verses before our text begins, Paul’s spirit is provoked—he’s appalled by all the idols he sees throughout the city. Athens had beautiful sculptures and ornate statues and temples for all their many gods, based on a mythology that went back hundreds, maybe thousands of years: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Athena, and an endless list of minor deities and demigods. They had put such time and effort and human ingenuity into the sculptures and statues that represented these gods. They had created an elaborate system of worship. They had invented dozens of belief systems and religious philosophies. They were so proud of their piety, of how religious they were.

They were proud, but Paul was appalled and disgusted, as every Christian should be. Because none of the Greek gods were real, none of their beliefs were true, just as all the gods and beliefs of all the nations, from the Saxons and Vikings in the North to the Africans in the South to the early settlers of the American continents in the West, were all unreal and untrue. It was all manmade. It was all wrong. It was all worthless, and, worse, an abomination to the true God.

But Paul doesn’t address the Athenians with disgust or with any sort of pride. He addresses them with respect, you might say, with sincerity, and with hope—hope that, once they were told the truth, they would abandon their longstanding false religion. He addressed them with trust that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was powerful to break through centuries worth of devotion and zeal and a mountain of pride, to bring these Greek idolaters to repentance and faith in the one true God, who can only be worshiped if He is known, who can only be worshiped in one way, through the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The Athenians invited Paul to speak after hearing bits and pieces of his message in the marketplace. So he addressed them: Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you. It’s not okay to worship God as an unknown, without truly knowing Him. It isn’t God-pleasing. It isn’t helpful. Paul would not have been better off leaving the Greeks in ignorance, any more than the early settlers of the Americas would have been better off left in ignorance to worship their own gods. Those who don’t know the true God will perish in their ignorance, outside of the Lord’s vineyard, unless their ignorance is corrected.

The reality is that, even after almost 2,000 years of the Christian Gospel going out into the world, most people, even here in our own country, still don’t know the true God. Many have given up on the concept of “God” entirely, becoming fools, because, as the Psalm says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Many reject Christianity and worship idols. But perhaps the biggest problem in the world today is just how many people think they’re worshiping the God of Christianity when, in fact, He remains an unknown God to them.

I’ve talked with many people who think they’re believers, who think they worship the God of the Bible, but in their own way, according to their own personal beliefs, disengaged from His Church. We were just watching a TV show last night where a “Christian” minister joyfully proclaimed to a troubled soul that, “No, God won’t punish you for living together outside of marriage! You have nothing to worry about there!” What a relief that was for the troubled soul! But what a soul-destroying lie it was! No, many people who use the name of God, and of Jesus Christ Himself, don’t actually know Him at all.

So Paul began to reveal the true God to the Athenians. I’ll summarize his points: God is the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t need anything from man, not our sacrifices, not our devotion, not our rituals. He gives life and breath to all. From one blood, from one man and one woman, Adam and Eve, He made all the people and all the nations on earth. He determined where and when they should live. He wants to be sought and found. He isn’t far from us. “We are His offspring,” that is, we came from Him in the first place, and we owe Him everything. He cannot be or be contained in man’s artwork. God “overlooked” these times of ignorance, that is, He didn’t wipe out all the idolatrous nations of the earth, but allowed them to live out their lives on earth and even still provided sunshine and harvest for them.

But now, Paul says, God commands all men everywhere to repent. He has set a Judgment Day for all men, and Jesus Christ, appointed by God, risen from the dead, will be the Judge.

It’s really important to see how Paul preached to these people who didn’t know God. Not, “It’s okay that you were worshiping false gods!” Not, “You’re all good people, and God accepts you just as you are!” But, “God commands all men everywhere to repent.” It’s vital that people hear the truth in today’s world, too. If they were living separated from God’s holy Christian Church, not paying attention to God’s commandments, not hearing His Word, not sorry for their sins, not trusting in the Lord Jesus for forgiveness, not determined to live as saints, according to God’s commandments, then they must hear that, no matter what notions they had about “believing in God,” they weren’t believing in the true God. And God commands them to repent, which includes acknowledging their sins, looking to Christ for forgiveness, being baptized if they weren’t already, becoming engaged with His Church, hearing His Word, and determining to lead holy lives from now on.

Many of the Athenians stopped listening when Paul mentioned a man being raised from the dead. That was just too much for them. But against all odds, contrary to all human reason and possibility, some believed. They believed because the Gospel is a message filled with power, the power of God’s own Almighty Holy Spirit. So don’t worry that the message of repentance, the message of the cross, or the message of the empty tomb, is hard to accept in today’s world. It was always hard to accept, impossible to accept. But the Holy Spirit worked through it then, and will keep working through it until the end of the world, bringing late-comers into the Lord’s vineyard, a few here, a few there, until the end of the day—the Day of Judgment—when we will see the Lord Jesus in whom we have believed coming to judge the world and to give out the promised reward to all who worked for Him in His vineyard. May we be among them! Amen.