Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Acts 17:16
At the time the apostle Paul visited Athens, the beautiful old Greek capital was the pinnacle of the world’s culture and intellect. The city fairly reeked with the world’s greatest statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, painters, and architects. In proportion to its size, Athens may very well have contained the most learned, civilized, philosophical, highly educated, artistic, intellectual population on the face of the globe. It was known as the city of wise men including Socrates Plato, and Aristotle, the home of such great lawmakers as Solon and Pericles, and Demosthenes, the residence of renowned philosophers including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Thucydides. This was a city of mind, of intellect, of art, and of taste. Paul would never have seen such a highly favoured specimen of a heathen city. But he had also never seen such an overwhelming presence of idolatry. It moved his spirit, just as a different form of idolatry should move our spirits today.
The ancient narrator Pausanias described the city by saying, ‘the Athenians surpassed all states in the attention which they paid to the worship of the gods.’ Temples of idol gods and goddesses occupied every prominent location in Athens. The magnificent statue of Minerva, at least 15 meters high, according to Pliny, towered above the Acropolis, and caught the eye from almost anywhere in the city. This vast system of idol-worship that overspread the whole place would have been highly offensive to Paul, especially with his deep training in the Jewish traditions and Old Testament Scriptures that declare and reveal the one true God. Around us today, we see idolatry that may well rival that of Athens, although it is not the idolatry of stone or wooden or metal statues and altars. No, today’s idols go by different names, including self, and pleasure, and money, and education, and religion, and atheism, and evolution, and human rights, and global warming. Mankind’s preoccupation with all these things has become fanatical, to the elimination of all thoughts of God and His claim upon us. The world’s lack of response to a series of Gospel meetings should convince us of its devotion to its idols. Does the state of the world around us stir our spirits as Paul’s was in Athens? Does it drive us to our knees in frustration and weakness to cry to the Lord for light to penetrate the idolatrous darkness?
The idolatry of Athens should prove to us that mankind will immerse itself in whatever religion it can find, especially that of its own making. Despite its corruption, human nature must have a god. And if the true God is never presented to them, people will take whatever God who comes. Our responsibility then is to tell them of the God of love Who sent His Son to be their Saviour. Our prayer and motivation is that some will leave their old gods and be converted. -Jim MacIntosh