This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Problems with this lesson:
- The author presents Paul as an evangelistic innovator and culturally sensitive contextualized as he preached to the Athenians.
- The author suggests that Paul expected that God would use his native gifts to preach, but it was his on the street experience that God was able to use even more.
- The lesson uses Paul in Athens to present a modern idea of evangelism—but, in fact, this story isn’t about methods or strategies.
In this lesson the agenda of Adventist evangelism reveals itself even further. The artificial divisions of demographics and how to proselytize them simply is artificial. While cultural mores are real, the bottom line that people are either dead in sins or alive in Christ is consistent everywhere. Paul was’t strategizing and trying to get people to make decisions for God.
Paul, on the contrary, knew that God is sovereign and that belief is a miracle that God does; it is not a consequence of personal decisions.
Of course, a personal decision to believe is necessary, but even this decision is given by God. He is the One who gives faith to believe.
For by grace, you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, [it is] the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8, 9).
Paul wasn’t selling the gospel. Furthermore, the Adventists who write this Sabbath School Quarterly do not know what the simple gospel is. Adventism is always looking for new methods and programs to more effectively reach people and retain members. Like much of today’s evangelicalism, they glean ideas from conferences and current ideological educational theories, but these ideas and practices do not yield believers. They may entertain or interest people at first, but true belief comes only from facing the reality of who they are and who Jesus is.
Paul wasn’t being clever or attempting to share admiration for some of the Athenian’s beliefs and practices. Rather, he was aware that their altar to the unknown god reflected a real emptiness, an intuitive understanding that they had “missed” something and didn’t want to be guilty of ignoring a God they couldn’t identify. He wasn’t appreciating their thoroughness but was responding to their unnamed but intuitive need.
Moreover, he turned to telling the Athenians about God the Creator because this is the biblical place to begin revealing truth to unbelievers. The Bible itself begins with creation and reveals the nature of fallen man before it reveals God’s promise of a Redeemer who would crush the serpent.
The passage the lesson mentions, Romans 1:18–25, reveals that God makes Himself known to “all” through what has been made so that all are without excuse.
The reality of Jesus’ salvation accomplished by His human death for human sin and His breaking the curse of death because His sacrifice was sufficient to pay for ALL our sin—this fact is almost irrelevant apart from the founding truth that God created.
The reality of Jesus’ salvation accomplished by His human death for human sin and His breaking the curse of death because His sacrifice was sufficient to pay for ALL our sin—this fact is almost irrelevant apart from the founding truth that God created.
If God had not created us, His redemption of us in the person of His Son would not have meaning. He created all things, including us—including the angels and the rulers and authorities and the angels-turned-demons. His creation of us is what gives Him the authority to redeem us. It is what gives Him the relationship that validates His redemption of us.
The Bible itself begins with the story of creation. Paul’s teaching about the Creator was not a culturally relevant move; it was the biblical mandate following the biblical model set forth from Genesis to Revelation. Even the famous first angel’s message that Adventists say is a call to keep Sabbath is actually a reminder that the God who created us is sovereign, and He is the only One to whom valid worship can be given.
The lesson says this about Paul:
In Athens, Paul had expected that the Holy Spirit could use his knowledge and oratorical skills, which he had gained in his education under Gamaliel. But in reality it was Paul’s education on the streets of Athens that the Holy Spirit was able to use even more. “The wisest of his hearers were astonished as they listened to his reasoning. He showed himself familiar with their works of art, their literature, and their religion.”—Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 237.
This quotation reveals how significantly the author (and EGW) missed the point of Acts 17. To be sure, Paul emphasized his points by quoting the Athenians’ own poet, but the purpose was not to impress them with his knowledge and appreciate of their culture; rather, Paul’s purpose was to emphasize the “knowable-ness” of the one true God who is the creator of all things. Paul was preaching about the Creator who had the purpose and the right to judge the earth because He was sovereign over it, and he emphasized that even their own poets admitted their own impression of a sovereign god—a significant reference because their own poets admitted that they were dependent on God for existence:
“for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His offspring.’ “Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to suppose that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the craft and thought of man” (Act 17:28-29).
Even the Athenian poets understood, as Romans 1:18–25 says, that God is the Source and Creator of all things, including human life.
Once again the lesson has an inside-out view of reality. Paul was not accommodating Athenian culture or attempting not to irritate them, as the lesson said. Rather, he was using the biblical model for telling them the truth about their own origins and condition. He saw that they were very religious and eager not to offend any god, and he used that opportunity to tell them about the God they sensed was there (and whom their own poets revealed was there) but whom they did not know or understand.
Paul simply told them the truth; he was not couching his gospel-call with cultural platitudes and only going as far as they would let him; he was telling them the truth. If anything were to stop his truth-telling, he would move on; he didn’t adjust his message to fit the cultural climate.
The bottom line is that the Bible does not tell us how to contextualize the gospel. Rather, it tells us the whole truth, and we are to place ourselves under the words of Scripture, not over them. All people need to hear the real gospel of the completed atonement of Jesus and of our spiritual death which must be reversed by belief in the Lord Jesus’ finished work.
There is only one way to salvation: belief and trust in the Lord Jesus and His finished work of atonement through His death for our sin, His burial, and His resurrection on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).
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