Preaching the Gospel in today’s society
by Russell M. Grigg, M.Sc. (Hons)
Today’s society seems to be becoming more and more impervious to the Gospel.
So how can we present the Gospel to maximum effect? The book of Acts provides an
answer.
It is reasonable for us to consider the book of Acts as having two main purposes
that benefit us today. These are:
-
For our edification as Christians, as we are given an account of
the formation of the early Church and related events.
-
For our example as preachers, Christian workers, and missionaries,
as we are shown the way in which the Apostles went about the task of obeying the
Great Commission.
If we examine Acts in this light—as our example of how we should go about
preaching the Gospel in a cross-cultural situation or in our own culture (which
is becoming more and more multi-cultural) —we see some surprising things.
The love of God
First, the love of God is not mentioned by any preacher in Acts in any sermon. In
fact, as a concordance will show, the word ‘love’ does not occur even
once in the book of Acts in any context. Instead, Paul and the other preachers reiterate
the themes of the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s judgment, and the
need for personal repentance and belief in Christ. Paul’s expositions on the
love of God, including the great theme in
Romans 5:8 that God loved us while we were still sinners, were all written
to Christians, and were not, it seems, preached to non-Christians.
This does not mean, however, that God’s love cannot be seen in action in Acts.1 Saul’s (Paul’s) conversion,
recounted three times for us in Acts (Acts
9:1–20,
22:1–16,
26:9–18), is attributed by Paul in his letter to Timothy as
being due to the grace, love, mercy, and longsuffering of God, and Paul says that
his conversion was ‘a pattern to them which should hereafter
believe on Him’(I
Timothy 1:12–16). In
Romans 2:4, Paul says that it is the goodness of God that leads
to repentance, and the term ‘goodness’
here encompasses not only God’s holiness, righteousness and truth, but also
His love, benevolence, mercy and grace.2
Two starting points
The second surprising thing about the way Paul preached the Gospel, as recorded
in Acts, is that he had two entirely different starting points, depending on his
audience.
-
When Paul preached to the Jews, he ‘reasoned with them
out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered,
and risen again from the dead’. The focal point of his message
was ‘this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ’
[i.e. the Messiah] (Acts
17:2–3).
-
When Paul preached to the Gentiles, for example the Lycaonians (Acts
14:6, l5) and the Greeks (Acts
17:22–31), he began with Creation and God's role as Creator, and
he appealed to what can be seen in nature as the evidence for this.
Why the difference between Paul’s approach to the Jews and his approach to
the non-Jews? The reason is the key to our understanding of why preaching about
the lost state of man, or even about the cross, often has little impact in society
today, whether in the West or in missionary situations.
Judaism had a creation basis—Genesis. From the Old Testament Scriptures the
Jews believed in the one true God and knew Him as Creator, Lawgiver, and Judge.
The Jews already knew and believed the scriptural record of Creation and the Fall:
they knew about sin and that the penalty for sin is death. They needed only to be
shown from the Scriptures and from the Resurrection that Jesus was the promised
Messiah.
Greeks … Evolutionists
On the other hand, the Gentiles, and the Greeks in particular, were evolutionary
in their thinking. Professor Fairfield Osborn, of Columbia University and the American
Museum of Natural History, has said that Empedocles, who lived in the fifth Century
BC, ‘may justly be called the father of the evolution idea’.3 Aristotle, 384-322 BC, in his Physics, ‘refers
to Empedocles as having first shown the possibility of the origin of the fittest
forms of life through chance rather than through Design’.4 And Aristotle himself ‘taught that there was a
continuous gradation of living forms from the lowest to the highest, culminating
in man, and that this evolutionary sequence came about through an internal perfecting
tendency.’5
When Paul was on Mars Hill, he was dealing with ‘certain
philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics’ (Acts
17:18). The Epicureans followed Epicurus (342–270 BC), who denied
that there was any purposive form in nature and taught that everything on the earth
had evolved directly from the earth material itself. It is not surprising then that
the Epicureans believed that pleasure, and particularly sensuous pleasure, was the
chief good of existence. The Stoics, on the other hand, stressed a simple life-style,
but were completely pantheistic. Thus Greek society was both evolutionary in its
thinking and idolatrous in its practice.
These Gentiles did not have the Jewish Scriptures. Paul therefore had to reach them
in terms of something they did have—the foundational knowledge of God as Creator,
almost obliterated by their philosophies and idolatries, but still there and witnessed
to by nature and their consciences (Romans
1:20,
2:15). And so, in his address to the men on Mars Hill (Acts
17:22–31), Paul began with the power of God in creation, and
moved onto the goodness of God in His providence. He then spoke against their idols,
and he urged them to repent in view of the fact that God was ruler and judge and
there was a coming day of judgment. It was only after this that he mentioned the
Resurrection. Presumably, if he had not been interrupted, he would have gone on
to say that this Resurrection occurred after Christ’s death on the cross,
and he would have expounded God’s grace in the provision of a risen Saviour.
But note the order in which Paul developed his argument.
Did Paul fail?
Some expositors say that Paul failed in his approach at Athens, because he did not
found a church there. But there were at least six converts from his sermon on Mars
Hill and maybe several more, as we read, ‘Howbeit certain
men clave unto him, and believed: among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite,
and a woman named Damaris, and others with them’ (Acts
17:34). In due course a church was begun at Athens, and the conversion
of Dionysius, who was a member of the Areopagus or Supreme Court, was so genuine
that he became the leader of it. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, refers to Dionysius
as ‘the first Bishop of the Church of Athens’.6 Hardly a failure on Paul’s part, or, for that matter,
on the part of the Holy Spirit!
The world today
Today the world is very much like that of the Greeks of Paul’s day. In the
West, evolution is the predominant belief system and, as a result of this denial
of the one true God and rejection of His rules for holy living, the epicurean ideal
of hedonism (pleasure seeking) has become the predominant lifestyle. At the same
time many people are turning to the Hindu philosophies of the New Age movement or
to the occult to fill the spiritual vacuum in their lives caused by their own atheism.
Similarly, most of the countries in which missionary societies work have religions
which deny the existence of one holy transcendent Creator and are evolutionary in
their beliefs about origins; for example they begin with a belief in pre-existing
matter or creatures of some kind.7
These religions usually involve the placating of evil spirits, or the earning of
merit by worship, as in Buddhism, Shintoism, Hinduism, animism, etc., as the Greeks
did.
The lesson for preachers and Christian missionaries is clear. God has given us in
the book of Acts a pattern of a way to effectively reach people today, which we
can follow in our own preaching. Demonstrated to us is the way in which the Apostle
Paul adapted his approach and adjusted his method of preaching to best suit the
culture of his hearers, both Jews and Gentiles—to begin where they were at.
We also see the way in which he used creation evangelism to best penetrate the thinking
of the Greeks. Creation evangelism is a tool which works. Our society today, in
its evolutionary thinking, ignorance of the one true living God, and preoccupation
with sex, is much more like that of the Greeks than that of the Jews. Preachers
today can therefore follow this pattern to their own advantage and the advantage
of their hearers.
Related articles
References and footnotes
- Note also that when Paul spoke to the Lycaoniaris, he invoked God’s
care for them in sending rain from heaven and fruitful seasons as a witness to the
existence of ‘the living God’
(Acts 14:15–17). Return to text
- Henry Thiessen, Lectures in Systematic Theology, Eerdmans,
Michigan, 1979, p.85. Return to text
- Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin,
second edition, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929, pp.52–54, as quoted by
Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith, Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing Co., New Jersey, 1986, p. 39–40. Return to text
- Ref. 3. Return to text
- Ref. 3. Return to text
- Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, iii.4; iv.23, as quoted
in New Bible Dictionary, inter-Varsity Press, London, 1974, p.312.
Return to text
- In India, the State-owned All-India Radio (AIR) has embarked on
a massive science popularization program, consisting of a 130-part serial on human
evolution, being broadcast every Sunday in 17 languages from 51 radio stations for
the next two-and-a-half years. Source: Nature 352:465,
8 August 1991. Return to text
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