Greece and the Bible (and You)

It works today.

I want to discuss a subject that has been very much on my mind for a number of months now. That is the subject of Greece and the Bible and you. As many of you probably know about a dozen of us from along the Front Range churches, we're able to go to Greece for the feast this year.

It's a very wonderful experience and educational experience. I'm sorry to see that Beth isn't here today. She was one of those who were able to go. The Malieres, Anthony and Michelle Scott, Connie and myself, and a few others. It's just a really wonderful educational experience. I've been blessed to go to most of the lands of the Bible in previous years, but Greece is one of the places I had not been to, other than a trip about ten years ago by ferry out to the island of Patmos to experience that.

There is something, as I mentioned before, something about actually being there in the lands of the Bible that gives some perspectives and insights that you just wouldn't quite understand quite the same unless you were actually there. Unless you actually walked on the streets there, unless you saw the lay of the land, the geography, smelled the same smells, felt the breezes, this sort of thing, heard the sounds, that sort of thing. In some cases, literally walking on the same roads where Jesus Christ, where the apostles, where other biblical figures walked.

All of that really adds a depth of understanding that really isn't there otherwise. I have tried to convey this to you on some of my previous messages after going overseas for the feast to Israel, to Jordan, to Egypt, to Turkey, and places like that. What I'd like to do today in the sermon is to help convey that with Greece, the city or, excuse me, the nation of Greece. I'll first mention that Greece is not mentioned in the Bible nearly as often as some of the other empires, for instance Egypt, Syria, Babylon, Rome, places like that.

Why is that? The answer is really very simple. That is that the Greek Empire reached its peak during the period of the roughly 400 years between the last of the books of the Old Testament being written and the first of the New Testament books being written, or actually the history beginning with the birth of Jesus Christ. There's a little over 400-year gap in there, and it is during that gap that the Grecian Empire rose and fell and was replaced by the Roman Empire. In contrast, Egypt and Syria and Babylon interacted with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah over a period of many centuries, and we have quite a bit, many mentions of them.

Just to give us a quick overview of the Bible, Israel is invaded and, well, actually going earlier than that, Israel is taken into slavery in Egypt. They escape from that. They establish a kingdom. They are invaded and taken away into captivity in the hands of the Assyrians. And then the same thing happens with Judah. About a little over a century later, they are taken into captivity by the Babylonian Empire, which rose and replaced the Assyrians. And then Judah is taken into captivity. Babylon is replaced by the Middle Persian Empire. They allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, and then they are living there under Persian rule. And that is basically the time period in which the last of our books of the Old Testament are written.

And there is a four-century gap in history before the curtain rises on the Gospels and that period of history. So there is this large gap in there of over four centuries, more than 400 years, of history of which nothing is written about in the Bible. Now, for a matter of perspective, that is roughly twice as long as the United States has existed as a country. So there is a gap about that long in the history of the Bible there.

So think about that. There is a lot that happens during that time period that is not recorded in the Scripture. And two huge developments happen during that time period that impact the Holy Land. One is, again, the rise and fall of the Greek Empire. And the other is the rise of the Roman Empire, which absorbed the Greek Empire into itself and adopted and copied a lot of the Greek culture, a lot of the Greek beliefs.

If you remember from grade school, copied the Greek gods and goddesses and renamed them with Roman names. So that is what is in place when the curtain rises on the period of the New Testament. So again, this period isn't directly talked about in the Bible, but it does have a huge impact on the world that we read about in the New Testament period. So let's go back and talk about the Greek Empire, what was happening, get some of the high points of their history.

But to start, I want to go back before the Greek Empire was even thought of. And that is a period back to around 2000 to 1600 BC, starting about 4000 years ago. And this is where we'll begin our journey today. This is during the time of the patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the others.

So this is roughly Abraham lived around 2000 BC, about 4000 years ago. And 1600 is roughly the time the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt. So we're talking about that period. There's not a kingdom of Israel yet. There's not a kingdom of Judah. There isn't really even a people of Israel yet. All we have is Abraham, his children, and their wives, and his grandchildren, and their wives.

And they're just an extended family at this time. There's not a nation of Israel that won't exist for several more centuries. And actually, there's not a Greece yet either. There's the land. The land is there, the area that we know is Greece today. But it is occupied by a number of city-states who are, frankly, fighting with each other. It's kind of like the Hatfields and the Pooys there, the Greek version. And they're fighting each other there for a number of centuries. They have not come together.

That will not happen until far, far into the future from this period. However, there is a fairly major civilization that is emerging at this time, and that is called the Minoan civilization. The Minoan civilization. M-I-N-O-A-N. Minoan civilization. And it is not emerging in Greece. It is actually emerging in these island areas. Hmm. This is odd. Can any of you see the red dot up there? Okay. Yeah, I guess that's it. Huh. It is odd. Yeah, it'll show elsewhere, but not up there. Well, anyway, you see all of the islands there. I assume you all know Greece over there on the right-hand side of the screen. Asia Minor, or Turkey over on the, excuse me, Greece on the left side. Sorry, I'm backwards here.

Turkey, Asia Minor over on the other side, and all the islands down there. So it's in these islands that the Minoan civilization develops in relative isolation from what is going on in Greece itself. So this is, it wasn't necessarily planned this way, but this is where we started off our feast for Greece. And it's actually good that it happened this way because we're able to see things chronologically. And we started off at an island called Santorini, which is circled in red down here.

Santorini is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's a hot vacation spot for much of Europe, very beautiful island, distinctive Greek architecture there, the white buildings, the colored roofs, and looking out over the Mediterranean Sea there. Just a gorgeous, gorgeous place with a house that's built up on these on these cliffs, overlooking that. But what most people don't realize is that these cliffs are actually the edge of a volcanic crater because the island of Santorini was an ancient volcano. It was a big mountain there, the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, that blew up about 1600 BC. There's an aerial photo of it, or satellite photo of it. You can see the ring. It used to be a mountain, a cone. The top blew out, collapsed, and filled with water. It's literally hundreds of feet deep in that area today.

So in that eruption, in the destruction, the tsunamis that took place around there, it wiped out the ports and towns, not just on the island of Santorini, but for literally hundreds of miles around. The tsunamis wiped out, essentially destroyed civilization in that area.

This eruption was enormously powerful. Some of you probably remember Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State. This was many, many times the power and the magnitude of that spread ash all over hundreds of miles around there. So that's good and bad. Makes a beautiful spot to visit today. It was definitely not good for the people who lived there.

There is actually what I would call a Greek version of Pompeii there on the island of Santorini.

You're probably familiar with Pompeii, the Roman city that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. There's a Greek version of this because there's a Greek city, Acroteri, that was buried in this eruption by many feet of volcanic ash that settled there. This is what it looks like today. You can actually walk around. They've excavated a number of acres, about five or six acres, as I recall. You can walk around and look down into the houses and the streets of this city that was flourishing there. It was a port city that flourished on the island of Santorini about 1600 BC, about 3600 years ago. It's like a time capsule of what life was like for people at that time. We're able to see, for instance, what the people themselves looked like by some of the paintings on the walls of their buildings and houses. You see here two things, two reconstructed paintings. Part of the painting is original. Part of it has been reconstructed. On the left side, you see two boys there who are boxing. Maybe this is the way they solve disputes between brothers at that time. Just give them a pair of boxing gloves and let them duke it out. I don't know. This is obviously something that was done for entertainment or whatever. You can see their hairstyles, clothing styles, color of their skin, that sort of thing. Now the odd-looking painting beside that, the other one, if you look closely, the two blue figures are actually monkeys. They had pet monkeys on the island. There's a particular species of monkey that's imported from Africa to be household pets there. Interestingly, they actually found the skeleton of a monkey in one of these houses that they excavated there. The monkey was smothered in the eruption. We know that they kept these monkeys as pets there. There are also some things we can tell from the remains there. This is a large wall painting showing the town itself. It was a port town. You can see it here. You can see the architecture of the building. You can see the ship down at the bottom that's so detailed. We can tell how they built their ships, how many ores they had, what the sailors looked like, what they dressed like. You can see a few gazelles up in one of the corners there showing that the gazelles lived wild on the island at that time. We can tell quite a bit about the people there from these paintings that they left, from their pottery, from their tools, their artifacts, things like that. Even though this is not directly related to the Bible, it does show us what culture was like, what civilization was like among the peoples that lived in these islands several hundred miles away from the Holy Land during the period of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were a veteran who were living in the dry areas of the Holy Land, who were traveling, living in tents with their sheep, their camels, their goats, this sort of thing. So there was a really highly developed civilization in the area surrounding the Holy Land at that time. Now, from Santorini we flew to the island of Crete, the largest island in the Mediterranean there, and it was actually the hub of the Minoan civilization. Crete is a rather large island. I think it's roughly 150 miles east to west, about 20 to 30 miles north to south, and it has a number of ancient Minoan cities there that have been explored, partially excavated. Here is part of what the most famous city there, Knossos, looks like. This is based on excavations that were done roughly 100 years ago, and partial reconstructions of the palace at Knossos, which is huge, covers several acres, and has a very distinctive architectural style, which you can see here.

We know the colors that were used because of remains of the plaster, the painted plaster, from the walls, and that sort of thing. So it was really, really quite a magnificent palace with with running water, things like that, that was actually fairly common in the ancient world to have running water. We know again what the people looked like. Here's a restored painting of a fisherman bringing his daily catch, the fish. We can actually, they're so detailed, you can tell exactly what kind of fish it was, the species. Again, see what the men dressed like. We can see what the women dressed like. Here's two ladies, I think, enjoying a goblet of iced tea or something like that. They're in a hot summer day in the Mediterranean, but you can see their dress style, their hairstyles, things like that. So because of paintings like this, we have a lot of insight into how the people lived. It's like looking through a picture book from 3600 years ago.

Here's one of the more famous paintings from that period depicting athletes leaping over the back of a bull who's charging at them. Now, we don't know, we think maybe some of our sports are a little bit stupid these days, but leaping over the back of a charging bull isn't exactly my idea of a good time, but they had appealed to them for whatever reason. Maybe that's what they watched on Sunday afternoons instead of football or something. But we know this was quite common. Whether it had religious connotations, we don't know because bull worship was quite common at this period in Canaan, down in Egypt. We just don't know what's going on there. And one reason we don't know is they left no written records that we can understand, that we can decipher. There have been very few inscriptions found from the Minoan civilization anywhere in these islands. One object that was in a museum in Crete that I read about is this clay disc. It's about this big around. And if you look carefully at it, you'll notice that the writing is in a spiral on this disc, on both sides of the disc.

But the characters don't look like anything we've seen anywhere else. We don't know if you begin at the middle of the spiral and read outward, or whether you start at the outside and read inward. We just don't know. So their writing system is a complete mystery to us. There's nothing else like it in the ancient world, both in terms of the characters in this spiral writing. So because of that, we have their artifacts, we have their pottery, for instance. We have the paintings, we have their architecture, some of the tools and that sort of thing, but no written records. So we don't even know what they called themselves. Nothing about their history, nothing about their rulers, anything like that. So it's a big mystery, one of the biggest mysteries of archaeology.

What is significant about this, though, is that we do know they traded a lot. They traded with the peoples of the Holy Land, the Canaanites, who were there before the Israelites come in.

We know they traded with Egypt. For instance, we find their pottery, very distinctive pottery, in the Holy Land today and in Egypt. And that's helpful for dating archaeological sites, in the Holy Land, for instance. If you find this distinctive Minoan pottery, I know they found it at Jericho, for instance, what do you know when you find Minoan pottery? Well, you know that that level is older than 1600 BC, because that's when the Minoan civilization collapsed, partly due to the eruption, partly due to other factors, warfare, invasion, things like that. So it is helpful for a benchmark for dating particular sites in the Holy Land and in Egypt there. But unfortunately, we just do not know a whole lot more about the people themselves, because of lack of any written records to tell us about it. Now let's fast forward with the history of Greece. This is what is going on in the islands. And for about the next thousand years, the people of mainland Greece, as we know it today, are just going to continue fighting each other. Again, it's city-states, they're competing with one another, they're trying to steal each other's stuff, so they're fighting back and forth for roughly another thousand years. And during this period, what is going on in the Holy Land or Israel? Well, during this time, the Israelites escaped from slavery, they're delivered by God out of slavery, they come into the Holy Land, they inherit the land, there's the period of the Judges. David and Solomon become kings, the kingdom of Israel is established, exists for several hundred years, the kingdom of Judah exists for several hundred years. Israel is invaded and taken away into captivity by the Assyrians. Then a little over a century later, the same thing happens to Judah at the hands of the Babylonians. And the Babylonians dominate the Middle East for some time.

And then, next in our story about Greece, a particular individual shows up on the scene in Babylon. And I appreciated the introductory sermonette here about prophecy, because there's a very significant prophecy that we'll read about and its fulfillment. Now, the man is Daniel. He's a fairly elderly man by the time we read about this prophecy here. And God reveals to him the coming of the most famous Greek who has ever lived. Who would that be? Alexander, Alexander the Great. So, let's read about the prophecy now in Daniel 8, beginning in verse 1. It's one of the most amazing prophecies in the Bible, because it is so specific. And it is so specific that, based on this, a lot of critics of Daniel say Daniel could never have known this. So, Daniel wasn't really written about 500 B.C. when it says it was. It was actually written about 100 B.C., after these events, because they are so accurate nobody could have foretold that.

But we know that it is just a fantasy, a fairy tale, to get around the truth of what is going on here.

So, let's read the prophecy now. In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar, Belshazzar is the last of the Babylonian kings. His empire is about to fall to the Medes and the Persians. A vision appeared to me, to me Daniel, after the one that appeared to me the first time.

I saw in the vision, and it so happened while I was looking, that I was in Shushan, the citadel, which is in the province of Elam, and I saw in the vision that I was by the river Uli.

So, again, this is in the reign of Belshazzar. He is the king who sees the handwriting on the wall, from which we get that saying. So, the Medo-Persian Empire is about to take over and capture Babylon. 1.3 Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and there, standing beside the river, was a ram which had two horns. And the two horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. So, what Daniel is seeing here is the Medo-Persian Empire represented by a ram.

The ram has two horns, Medes and the Persians. One of them is bigger, more powerful than the other, and it came up last. Well, that's what happened with the Medes and the Persians.

The Medes were the original people of that empire. The Persians were ethnically somewhat different. This is modern-day Iran that we're talking about. And they came later and came to dominate the empire, but they were bigger. They were more powerful. The empire was stronger under them, so that's represented by the second horn, which was bigger, stronger, and came along second.

So, this ram symbolizes the Medo-Persian Empire. Continuing back in verse 4, I saw the ram pushing westward, northward, and southward, so that no animal could withstand him, nor was there any that could deliver from his hand. But he did, according to his will, and became great. And the Medo-Persian Empire would indeed be very great, more powerful even than Babylon was, and would spread out over there, conquering and defeating everything that was in their path, including mighty Babylon. But the empire would not last, as Daniel saw in this vision.

Continuing in verse 5, And as I was considering, suddenly a male goat came from the west. Now, what's to the west of this area? Well, the Mediterranean Sea and Greece. So, this male goat comes from the west, across the surface of the whole earth, a very large area. It's not literally talking about the world, but that area, without touching the ground. And the goat had a notable horn between his eyes.

Then it came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing beside the river, and ran at him with furious power. And I saw him confronting the ram. He was moved with rage against him, and attacked the ram, and broke his two horns. Now, I might interject. Let's catch up on a few things here. First of all, this goat is traveling so fast, maybe you've seen animals run so fast that it looks like their feet don't touch the ground.

This is emphasizing great speed. Alexander the Great won his first battle as a military commander at the tender age of 18. 18, and he never lost a battle. And in 10 years, he had conquered the known world, and built the greatest, largest territory-wise that the world has ever seen. So, when Daniel sees this goat moving very fast, and striking the Medo-Persian Empire, represented by the ram, and knocking him down and trampling him, that is exactly what happened.

It does mention here that he was moved with rage against him. Part of Alexander's motivation is the Medo-Persian Empire had invaded Greece several times over the centuries, had even sacked Athens, burned the city, took its people away into slavery, stole everything good that they could carry with them. And Alexander decides, you're not going to kick us around anymore.

So, he's going to put an end to the problem of the Medo-Persians invading Greece. So, he does. This is why he is enraged, and he attacks and destroys the greatest empire of the time.

Continuing in verse 7, there was no power in the ram to withstand him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled him, and there was no one that could deliver the ram from his hand.

Here's an artist's depiction of this, this goat that is enraged and attacks the ram, and hits him, and he's going at great speed, as Alexander did. Again, in 10 years, Alexander conquered the entirety of the known world at that period. So, this is, of course, talking about Alexander the Great, the notable horn. And he built, here's a graphic showing his empire. Over here to the left side, you have Greece. I wish I could depict this with the pointer, but what he did, he crossed over to Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, defeated the Persian Empire there, moved down to the Holy Land, invaded that, moved all the way down into Egypt. He didn't really meet resistance in the Holy Land or Egypt. As a matter of fact, in Egypt, the Egyptians were tired of getting pushed around by the Persians as well, so he was actually welcomed as a god. There are actually statues of Alexander in Egypt, where he's depicted as one of the Egyptian gods. And he moved back north then, swept across what is modern-day Iraq. Iran kept going as far as India and China, which are over near the far right edge of the screen over there. So this was his empire, covered an enormous amount of territory. Continuing in verse 8, therefore the male goat grew very great. I'll try saying that ten times in a row very quickly. Tim, you want to try that?

The male goat grew very great! But when he became strong, the large horn was broken. The horn is representing Alexander. And in place of it, four notable ones came up toward the four wings of heaven. What's that talking about? Alexander died at a young age, age 33, in Babylon. He returned back, not to Greece, but to Babylon, which is still a great city at that time. It's said that Alexander grieved because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. He'd done it all. He captured everything that was worth capturing. We don't know exactly how he died. There are several possibilities that have been suggested. One is that he drank himself to death in depression. Another is that he was poisoned by somebody else who wanted to take over, which was fairly common at that time.

Another that he died of a wound he'd sustained in battle that might have become infected.

Another that he might have died of venereal disease because of the lifestyle that he engaged in. We just don't know. But when he died, as it says here in prophecy, the large horn was broken and four other horns spring up. What happened to Alexander's empire after he died?

He had a young son who wasn't old enough to reign, so his empire, after about 15 years of infighting of people grabbing for the pieces, his empire was divided up among four of his generals.

That's what the four other notable horns are referencing there. The prophecy continues. We'll skip over that because it doesn't directly concern Greece. It actually skips down to the end times, but we don't have time to cover that. Actually, to save time, the next few verses, verses 15 through 22, go through and summarize what I've just told you. It specifically identifies there the Medes, Persians, Greece, and so on. Go ahead and skip through that part for lack of time. I'll add here that when Alexander's empire is divided up among four of his generals, it never had the same power, never had the same energy, the dynamism that Alexander had brought to it. So it settled into a slow decline that would last for quite some time. I'll note also, if you want to look this up, or you can write it in your notes, Daniel 11 verses 1 through 4, contain another almost identical prophecy of Alexander the Great, which states essentially the same thing, that the king would arise here. It's depicted as a man, not a goat. But he would arise, and after he passes from the scene, his empire would be divided up among four others. So for lack of time, we won't go through that. Now, I want to interject at this point. I'm going to talk about this a little bit more at the end of the sermon today, but Alexander had an enormous influence. He was definitely one of the most, maybe the most influential person of the ancient world before the times of Jesus Christ. He wasn't just a great general, a brilliant strategist there, but he was also an evangelist. An evangelist, I see all of you wondering about that.

What do I mean by that? He was an evangelist, not in a religious sense, but in the sense that he was an evangelist of Greek culture. He thought Greek culture was the epitome of human achievement, of human thinking, of human goals and ideals. And part of his mission was to spread Greek culture.

And that was actually part of his motivation in conquering the known world of his day, was to spread Greek culture. Because that was how mankind, how people could reach their ultimate human potential, you might say. And so that was part of his mission, was to spread Greek culture to these barbarians, these uncivilized people as he viewed them there.

And this is what we actually see this affecting the Holy Land as well. Because when we come to the New Testament period and the Holy Land, that Paul and the other apostles are interacting with this Greco-Roman culture, started by Alexander, and carried on by his successors, and later picked up and copied by the Romans. And the Greek's culture was so powerful that the Romans absorbed it. They didn't actually go out and militarily defeat the Greeks. They had rotted out from within.

But they kind of took over the Greek culture and absorbed it. But in doing so, Greece actually absorbed Rome. And what I mean by that is that's why they continued with the Greek gods, the Greek goddesses, the Greek philosophy, the Greek historians, Greek entertainment, Greek culture, and all of this. The Romans copied virtually everything from the Greeks. And Alexander, as I mentioned, came through the Holy Land and took it over without a fight, and began to impose Greek culture on that area. Now, he was friendly toward the Jews, so he did not force them to adopt Greek religion and so on. But he did found a number of Greek cities in the area. He actually founded more than a dozen cities called Alexandria. The most famous was Alexandria, but there were others throughout the areas that he conquered there. So in the Gospels, for instance, we read of the Decapolis, or cities of the Decapolis. And you can see them on the map up here. They're the ones in black. And what these were is he established, well, what does Decapolis mean? Deca, as in decimal, is 10. Paulus is city. It's the 10 cities. These are 10 Greek cities that Alexandria founded on the other side of the Jordan River. So when Jesus is traveling in this area, well, for instance, the prodigal son, where does he go when he leaves Hall? He goes to the cities of the Decapolis. That's why he's feeding pigs. He ends up slopping the hogs there. He wouldn't be doing that in Judea, where pigs are forgiven, forbidden. But he's slopping the hogs over here in the Gentile, the pagan area on the other side of the Jordan River. So you can actually go and visit some of these cities today. They were not Jewish. The Jews avoided them because they were pagan and unclean. But you can go there and you can see the remains of the Greco-Roman temples, like this one from the Jewish in modern-day Jordan. Or you can walk down the streets of another of the cities that happens to be in Israel today. That's Shawn, it's called. It's called Cethopolis in that day. And you can walk down the main street and you can see the temples and the Roman bathhouses and things like that there in that day. So here, very close to Jesus and the area that he's teaching in in Galilee, just on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, are these utterly pagan degenerate cities of the Decapolis there. So again, no self-respecting Jew would go there because they would be defiled by all this pagan culture.

So that brings us up to and through the period of the Gospels. And now let's, well, actually from Alexander, let's fast forward on up through the Gospels. And what happens during this intervening time is again the Greek Empire starts in this slow decline from infighting and surrounding nations fighting against him. So the Greeks grow weaker and weaker while Rome grows stronger and stronger and eventually steps in and takes over the Greek Empire. So now the Romans occupy the Holy Land when we pick up the story with the beginning of the Gospels and the life of Jesus Christ. I might mention also at this point that one lasting impact from Alexander imposing Greek culture is the Greek language. And that's why we have all the books of the New Testament recorded and written for us in Greek because Alexander made Greek, the Greek language, the universal language of the time. Pretty much like English today, you can go just about anywhere in the world and you'll encounter people who speak English or are signs that are named English.

Things like that. So that was a parallel to what's going on at that time. Greek was the language of the Greek Empire and then later the Roman Empire. The Romans couldn't change it. It's so deeply ingrained. You might think, well, it's the Roman Empire. Surely they're speaking Latin. Well, not really. They didn't speak Latin in Italy and in Rome, but everywhere else they spoke Greek.

Actually, most people were bilingual. They would speak their own native language, like Jesus and the apostles are speaking Hebrew or Aramaic, but they would also, most people would have a working knowledge of speaking Greek as well. And that's why we have the books of the New Testament recorded for us in Greek. So now let's fast forward a bit more past the Gospels and halfway through the book of Acts. We'll jump up now to Acts 16.

What is about to happen now is the Apostle Paul is doing his work. He's a number of years into his ministry. He has already traveled around Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, on his first journey and returned. Now he's on his second journey. He goes through Asia Minor again.

And then he gets to a city called Troas.

Troas. Anybody want to take a guess what that city was known as anciently?

Troas. Troy. Troy. Ancient Troy. Which, of course, remember from the the Greek wars against the Trojans. The Trojan wars and the Trojan horse and all of that. A lot of history in this area. So he goes to Troas and he has a vision. And we read about that here.

Acts 16 and verse 8. Passing by in Myziah, they came to Troas. And a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia, which is the area of northern Greece or above Greece today, come over to Macedonia and help us. Now, after Paul had seen the vision, immediately we, so Luke is joining him at this point, we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the Gospel to them. So this is new. Nobody's taken the Gospel across the Mediterranean to Europe, which Greece is a part of. So let's take a look at that on the map. Here's what it looks like. The big area in the middle is Asia Minor. And you can see up toward the upper left, where you can see Troas there on the coast, Troy. So they sail across to Philippi, or Philippi, as we would be used to calling it. Where does it get its name?

Well, after King Philip II, who was the father of Alexander the Great, he founded this city. And it was, as we read, a foremost city in that region. So Paul will go here, and then he'll travel down along the coast, along the eastern coast of Greece to Athens and Corinth. But we'll get there in a few minutes. So everybody see what we're talking about here. So then, continuing the story, verse 11, Therefore sailing from Troas we ran a straight course to Semothrace, and the next day came to Neopolis, and from there to Philippi, which is the foremost city of that part of Macedonia, a colony. And we were staying in that city for some days. And on the Sabbath day we went out of the city to the riverside where prayer was customarily made, and we sat down and spoke to the women who met there. Now, question, why doesn't Paul go to the synagogue?

Because he's not one! Because he's not one. The Jews, at that time, and they still do, had a rule that unless you had, you could not have a synagogue without 10 adult males.

Adult, meaning age 18 and older. So here's a Greek city, Greco-Roman city, and there's not enough Jewish men in it. However, the Jewish women are meeting by the river in lieu of a synagogue.

So that's where Paul goes. Somehow Paul, of course, is a Jew of the Jews, a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He's very familiar with customs, so if there's not a synagogue in town, he knows where to look for a group of God-fearing people or Jewish people, which is near the river.

Continuing, verse 14, now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple, which is a very expensive dye in that time, so she's actually quite a wealthy woman from the city of Thyatira. Thyatira is actually over in Asia Minor, so she's a businesswoman. She's traveled from Thyatira over here to Philippi, who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she begged us, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. So she persuaded us.

So they stayed there for some time. Now it happened, as we went to prayer, that a certain slave girl, possessed with a spirit of divination, met us, who brought her masters much profit by fortune-teller. Here we see some of the influence of Greco-Roman culture as opposed to Jewish culture. In Jewish culture, you're not supposed to deal with spirits and demons and things like that. You're supposed to eliminate that from the land. But here, her Greek masters has brought them much profit by fortune-telling. Now, in the mindset of the Greeks and the Romans, somebody who could tell fortunes, who could tell the future, that person would have been viewed as somebody that the gods or the goddesses are speaking through. Because that's what they believed. They don't recognize there's a demonic spirit at work there, which we know, which we recognize. So the spirit who is speaking through her is actually a demon. Paul knows this. Silas and Timothy know this. Verse 18, continuing the story, and this she did for many days.

Oh, wait a minute. Let me back up. Read verse 17. This girl followed Paul and us and cried out, saying, These men are the servants of the Most High God who proclaim to us the way of salvation.

So somehow this demon is being forced to really proclaim the truth about her. Verse 18, and this she did for many days. But Paul, greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And the spirit came out that very hour.

But when her masters saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. And they brought them to the magistrates and said, These men being Jews exceedingly trouble our city, and they teach customs which are not lawful for us being Romans to receive or observe. And of course, what they're really upset, they don't admit, they're really upset because they've lost their source of income.

From people paying to have this spirit tell them fortunes, thinking it's actually coming from one of the gods of the goddesses. I'll just fast forward now and summarize the story for lack of time, what happens there in Philippi. Paul and Silas are beaten and jailed. They're thrown in the jail. And that night there's an earthquake, and it loosens their chains. And the jailer realizes what has happened, and he's about to kill himself. Because the punishment for a jailer allowing his prisoners to escape was public execution. So he's going to kill himself, get it done over with. But then he realizes the prisoners haven't left. Paul and Silas are still there. And the jailer asks him, What must I do to be saved? And they tell him, Accept the Lord Jesus Christ and be baptized. So he is converted and baptized with his family there. And the next day, Paul and Silas, because Paul is a Roman citizen, get an apology from the city magistrates, and they quietly ease them out of town. And they move on and continue along the coast to Thessalonica, which is the next large city. So continuing the story, Acts 17, verse 1, Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, a couple of other towns along the way, they come to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. Now the city is big enough. There is enough Jewish presence to support a synagogue there. Then Paul, as his custom was, went into them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and demonstrating that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and seeing this Jesus whom I preached to you is the Christ. So now we'll take another look at the map here, and you can see where they've traveled on from Philippi over to Thessalonica.

And from here they'll go on to Berea, and continuing the story in verse 4. And some of them were persuaded, and we know there is a church to Thessalonica, which is why we have the two letters preserved, 1 and 2 Thessalonians. And some of them were persuaded in a great multitude of the devout Greeks, and not a few of the leading women joined Paul and Silas.

But the Jews who were not persuaded, becoming envious, so here is their motive, they're jealous, took some of the evil men from the marketplace, and gathering a mob, set all the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people, where they can have a riot and take it out on Paul and Silas.

Verse 6, But when they did not find them, Paul and Silas, they dragged Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out, These who have turned the world upside down, have come here, too. Jason has harbored them, and these are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another King Jesus. And I'll summarize a bit of the story at this point, what isn't spelled out here. What will they accuse them of? Of saying there's another King Jesus.

And this shows one of the great conflicts between the early church in the Roman Empire and the apostles, those who are spreading the gospel there. This was a world of hundreds of gods and goddesses from the Greeks and the Romans. And as if they didn't have enough gods and goddesses, the Roman Emperor started emperor worship, having people worship them. Sometimes their wives and family members as gods, as divine as well. So they had gods and goddesses for everything, for childbearing, for weather, for crops, for war, for you name it, they had a god or a goddess who had that covered. Again, literally hundreds of them. So when they say that the apostles, the ministers there are advocating another King Jesus Christ, what are they really charging them with? They are charging them with treason against the Roman government. Because in the Roman government there is only one King, and it's not Jesus, it's the Roman Emperor. And if you claim to be advocating another King, you're committing treason for which there is capital punishment.

What happened to Jesus Christ when they brought him to Pontagus Pilate? They changed the charges.

They changed the charges from blasphemy to seeing that he's a King.

If Jesus is the King, he's in direct conflict with the real King of the Roman Empire, and that's the Emperor. And so this is what's going on, and the consequences are very severe, because if you've committed treason, they're going to crucify you. They're going to kill you.

So that is part of the background of what's going on. So things get really heated.

At this point, Paul and Silas, looking at our map again, do what? They slip away at night, and they go to Berea, a nearby city. And there they find, as we're familiar with the Scripture, they find a fair-minded audience that searches the Scriptures to see if what they're seeing is really true. So this is a better audience, and some do believe there as well.

To summarize some of the story, again, Silas and Timothy stay there in Berea, because it's bearing fruit. And Paul decides to go further south, down along the coast to Athens, which is the heart and core of Greek culture and civilization.

So now we'll pick up the story in Acts 17 and verse 16.

Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over two idols. Therefore he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshipers and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there.

I might mention the marketplace. Each city had the... Romans called it the Forum. You've heard of Roman Forum. Well, it was actually a big open area surrounded by shops and stalls where you could buy anything. Think of an open-air Walmart today. You could buy anything there. The people did not have refrigeration, so virtually every family had to go to the marketplace every day to buy their foods, their perishable items. They didn't have refrigeration. So you'd buy your meat, you'd buy your veggies, you'd buy your fruit. They're your daily bread, everything you would need to eat from the marketplace. So Paul, when he comes to a new town, goes to two places. He goes to the marketplace because there's always people there every day, or he goes to the synagogue, or both, there because he knows he can find an audience there. So here's an artist's depiction of ancient Athens, and you recognize the Parthenon, the large tallest hill there, a famous landmark in Athens. With the parent Parthenon on top, you see the large statue beside it, a statue of Diana, excuse me, excuse me, Athena. Rather, the Greek goddess of wisdom. It's from Athena that Athens gets its name. The goddess of wisdom. The statue was about 60-65 feet tall, so tall you could see it for miles at its sea as you approach the city because it's on the highest hill within the city.

So she is the patron goddess of the city of Athens. So one of the Greek historians said of Athens, and she had some light on what Paul says here, he was provoked because he saw the city was given over to idols. One of the Greek historians said there were more statues of gods and goddesses in Athens, and there were actual men in the city. I think it was exaggerating a little bit, but you kind of get the point that this city is just covered with idols of the gods and goddesses. And again, if you visit the museums there, you'll see that. Statues of every god and goddess imaginable.

So continuing with the story, then, verse 18, then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered Paul, and some said, what does this babbler want to say? Other said he seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus. Areopagus is Mars Hill, more commonly known. Aries was the god of war.

Aries to the Greeks, Mars to the Romans. So it's called Mars Hill. They brought him to the Areopagus, saying, may we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak, for you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore, we want to know what these things mean.

And here is what that looks like. You still go to this very place today, Mars Hill. You see the Parthenon in the background. It's just a short distance from the entrance to the Parthenon.

It's just a large bare rock outcropping that overlooked the Forum several hundred feet below and not that far away. So this is, other than the Parthenon, one of the most prominent landmarks there in ancient Athens. So this is where all these philosophers gather to hear about new and strange things, as we read about. Verse 21, for all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in little and nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.

Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, 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, all these idols and gods and goddesses and altars and all of this, I even found an altar with this inscription, To the Unknown God.

So the Greeks wanted to have their bases covered. They'd got, you know, God for everything.

And then they got the Unknown God in case they missed one in there somewhere.

And it's interesting. I've actually, in an archaeological museum in Turkey, saw three little altars with a Greek inscription, To the Unknown God. This is very, very real.

Therefore, the one whom you worship without knowing him, I proclaim to you.

I'm going to tell you about the Unknown God that you don't know about. So here's what he's like. Verse 24, God, who made the world and everything in it since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he worshipped with men's hands as though he needed anything since he gives to all life, breath, and all things.

And he is made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, and the hope that they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring.

Paul is actually familiar with the Greek poets and quotes one of them here. That would tell his audience he is a cultured man. He is not just some ignorant Jew. He is somebody who knows the Greek poets and classics. Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising.

Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.

Because he has appointed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man Jesus Christ, whom he has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising him from the dead. And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, We'll hear you again on this matter.

So Paul departed from among them. However, some men joined him and believed among them Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them. So there are a handful of people who do believe they are in Athens. There is no record there was ever a church there in Athens.

We don't see that mentioned. We've got two epistles to Corinth, which is about 30 miles away, but none to Athens. So apparently the city is just so thoroughly pagan that there are some individual church members there, but not enough for a congregation.

We'll continue the story now. Next chapter, Acts 18, Paul leaves Athens, goes to Corinth, again about 30 miles away. After these things, Paul departed from Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently come to Italy, from Italy, with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius, the Roman emperor, had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome. He has exiled the Jews from Rome. Because, again, this conflict between worshipping all the gods of Rome versus the true God. That was a conflict for the Jews, and the Christians, of course. And Paul came to them. So because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked for by occupation they worked tentmakers. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and persuaded both Jews and Greeks. So here in Corinth, there is a Jewish presence and a synagogue that Paul goes and persuades both Jews and Greeks. There were Gentiles who saw the value of living a more righteous lifestyle than the typical Gentile lifestyle. So some of them did regularly attend the synagogues there. I'll skip down a few verses to verse 11. Paul continued there in Corinth a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them. When Galio was proconsul of Achaia, this is essentially a governor. Achaia is basically the area of Greece, so he's kind of the equivalent Epotius Pilate we were familiar with who's governor of Judea. And here Galio is kind of the equivalent of Greece here under the authority of the Romans. So when Galio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews with one accord rose up against Paul and brought him to the judgment seat. They're jealous of him because of the inroads he's making is convincing some of the Jews there to become Christian.

Seeing, this fellow persuades men to worship God contrary to the law.

Verse 14, and when Paul was about to open his mouth, Galio said to the Jews, if it were a matter of wrongdoing or wicked crimes, O Jews, there would be reason why I should bear with you. But if it is a question of words and names and your own law, look to it yourselves. Do not want to be a judge of such matters. And he drove them from the judgment seat. This is actually a legal precedent. The governor says, Paul's not doing anything wrong as far as I'm concerned. It's a Jewish religious matter. Take care of it yourself. But I'm not going to step in and stop this guy, no matter how much you dislike it. So actually, Galio establishes a legal precedent that will allow Paul to continue preaching the gospel there in the city of Corinth.

So he drove them from the judgment seat. Then all the Greeks took Sosnaes, the ruler of the synagogue, who's apparently a ringleader behind this, and beat him before the judgment seat. But Galio took no notice of these things. In other words, he didn't intervene to stop it. I want to note here that three times in these few verses we've seen this term judgment seat. And in Greek the word is bima, B-E-M-A, which means a raised platform, and from which public statements would be made, or judicial rulings would be issued, or proclamations would be read. You might think of a judge banging a gavel on his desk, and, here he is, here he is, and stay tuned for the verdict. And in Corinth we were able to see this exact structure that is mentioned here, this bima, this judgment seat, this raised platform.

It's probably about roughly half the size of this room, and about eight, nine feet high, as we're viewing it from this angle. And where this photo is taken from is a large open plaza.

In front of it, where the crowds would have gathered to hear these legal judgments or ruling passed down by the governor. So this is the very structure there that we find mentioned here in Corinth. So here we see evidence from archaeology of a very specific structure that is mentioned two thousand years ago that has been found, and anybody can go and see and step up on today. So part of the good archaeological evidence we saw on this trip. Continuing, so Paul still remained at Good Wile in Corinth. Then he took leave of the brethren and sailed for Syria. So he's going to go back home and then go down to Jerusalem. And Aquila and Priscilla were with him. They're going to be his traveling companions. He had his hair cut off at Kencray, for he had taken a vow.

Kencray is a port that's about six, eight miles from Corinth, fairly close there. And he came to Ephesus. So Paul sails across the Mediterranean via GNC over to Ephesus. So this ends his time on this journey there in Corinth. And today you can walk through the ruins of Corinth, where we were able to spend several hours today and see this giant temple there in the foreground. You can see the ancient hilltop, the Acro-Corinth, beyond that. We're in ancient times and Greek times. There was a temple to Diana up there on top of that with temple prostitution and things like that. You can walk through. You can see the remains of some of the shops around the forum there. When Paul is working as a tent maker with Aquiline Priscilla, they probably have a rented shop, kind of like what you see here, where their business is operating. They're in Corinth. You can even see things like the public latrine there, which had running water. So they had their public works there. And it's really quite an advanced modern city at that time. Paul did later, skipping forward, we'll leave off Paul's journey there. He does visit Greece on a later trip, which you can read about in Acts 20 verses 1-4. It doesn't say much, only that Paul went through Macedonia, down to Greece for three months, and then returned through Macedonia and back.

I do want us to take note of something here in the Epistle to the Romans, which is written from Corinth. Romans 16 verse 1. Paul says this is the last chapter. He's kind of wrapping things up, and he's sending greetings to the church in Rome from the church members in Corinth.

And he says, I come into Eufebi, our sister, who is a servant of the church in Kencray, this town, this other port town, about six miles, eight miles from Corinth, that you may receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever business she has need of you. For indeed she has been a helper of many, and of myself also. So Phoebe here is a servant, and the word here is Diaconos, from which we get the word deacon. So she is apparently a deaconess of the church there. And in Kencray there's a congregation in Corinth, there's also a church there just about six or eight miles away in this other city as well. And we were able to visit the old port of this town. This is what it looks like. This is where Paul sits sail from at the end of his second journey to return back to the Holy Land. Not a whole lot to see, just ruins there going out into the water. I want to point out something else a bit later toward the end of this chapter. Paul, again, is writing this letter from Corinth, and he sends greetings from some of the church members there in Corinth. And he says, Gaius, my host and the host of the whole church that's apparently in his house that the church meets there in Corinth, greets you. Arastus, the treasurer of the city, greets you and court us a brother.

So notice here's a church member, Arastus, who is the treasurer of the city, as it's worded here.

Now in the ruins of Corinth, when it was excavated, here's an area, a large public plaza near the theater in Corinth. And you see this horizontal stone, this flat slab here in the foreground, and it has some writing on it. And I'll show you a close-up of it. And here's, you can actually read the letters very clearly. They're about five or six inches high. And this is Arastus pro Adelit espistravit, translated from Latin. That means, Arastus, in return for his Adel ship, laid the pavement, this plaza, at his own expense.

Now the office of an Adel, as it's called here, a Latin term, is essentially that of a director of public works. He's the official responsible for maintaining the streets, keeping everything running properly in the city. And that is why the new international version translates this this way. Arastus, who is the city's director of public works, and our brother, Cordus, send you their greetings. So here we have this inscription, dating to the middle of the first century, right during the time of Paul's staying there in Corinth, his year and a half. And he mentions a church member, Arastus, who is the city's director of public works. And then, two thousand years later, archaeologists are excavating, and they find an inscription dating from the middle of the first century, right there in Corinth, mentioning Arastus, the city's director of public works. So apparently this is proof of a specific individual just mentioned in passing in one of Paul's letters that, yes, this is a real person who lived there at that time with this same job title.

There. So that's quite, again, a situation where archaeology confirms, just in passing, one of the individuals that we see mentioned in Scripture.

In our remaining few minutes, I want to talk about some of the things, how some of the things that the Greeks did strongly affect our culture today, because the title of this is Greece, the Bible, and you, because the things we've talked about still affect our world today in a very powerful way. I mentioned earlier that Alexander the Great was an evangelist. He had a mission. He wanted the whole world to be under the influence of Greek culture, in religion, in language, in philosophy, in political structure, in values. He died at a young age before he could make his dream a reality, but his successors accomplished his goal to a large degree.

Much of the world of that day, including the Holy Land, the lands of the Bible, adopted Greek ways and Greek thinking to some extent. This is called Hellenism. There are a few places in the Bible where you'll read of a group of people called the Hellenists. These are people who adopted Greek culture, Greek thinking, a Greek outlook and perspective on life. As I mentioned, Alexander and his successors established Greek culture. That was part of his mission. So they started establishing Greek culture. Alexander founded a number of cities in the other cities that he captured. He would instill this Greek culture in them. They did this through four tools. You may want to write these down. Stadiums, schools, temples, and theaters.

I've been in probably a dozen or more Greco-Roman cities. In every city, I shouldn't say necessarily everyone, there are a number of things that you haven't found.

It's kind of hard to identify a school. It's very easy to identify a temple or a stadium or a theater. Some of these existed, but they haven't been found. In virtually every city you go to, you'll find these four things. Stadiums, schools, temples, and theaters.

These were tools for instilling Greek culture and Greek thinking on the population.

Why were they so important? They built these in virtually every city of any decent size.

They had stadiums for the public display of athletic contests. Sports were huge in the Greek and Roman cultures. This is a stadium from the city of Delphi. We're used to calling it Delphi. It's Delphi and Greek. This is a track stadium set up against the base of the mountain. This was used for foot racing.

Most Greek cities had larger versions of this, where they would include chariot racing. Chariot racing is very popular. That was kind of the original NASCAR, you might say. People just adored the best charioteers. They even had team colors in their cars.

In the Roman world, it was typical to have red, blue, green, and white. Those were the four teams.

So, the best charioteers, the best gladiators, were the sports stars of that day, just as they are today. Today, who are society's heroes? Sports stars. Sports stars. They're LeBron James, Tom Brady, you name it. These are the people that our children look up to. That's who they want to be like. But it was no different back then. Their heroes were the athletes, the gladiators.

Gladiators. Let's talk about them a little bit here. These are people who fought other gladiators for sport. Sometimes animals, but most often human beings. Often they would fight to the death for the entertainment of the crowds. And it generated to the point that the most common entertainment in the Roman Empire was watching men fight each other to the death to entertain the crowds. And some of those places, like the Roman Colosseum, would seat, I want to say, about 70,000 people, if I remember correctly. Many other theaters I've seen would seat 10,000, 20,000 people, and they would come for the gladiatorial contest to see men fight each other to the death. Just something utterly evil, utterly ungodly. And we're not that different today.

We see athletes go out and risk gruesome injuries, broken bones, permanent injury, brain damage for the entertainment of the crowds. Hasn't changed a lot. You might even look at the design of our stadiums. They're patterned after the design of the Greek and Roman stadiums. No difference. The second type of structure that was very common, we had the stadiums. We also have gymnasiums, or schools, gymnasiums as they were called in. And they appeared in many, again, in any city of any decent size. This happens to be a particularly large one from the city of Sardis, which is in Asia Minor today. And in the gymnasium, or the school, the Greek ideal of training people's bodies and minds was put into practice. Students would train their bodies to be physically strong and healthy because the Greeks essentially worshiped the human body as the epitome of beauty. But they would also study the philosophy of ancient Greece. They would study the Greek writers, the philosophers, Plato, Socrates, others like that, Homer, the great historian. They would have athletic training. They would have athletic contests. Incidentally, how many of you know what the Greek word gymnos, from which we get gymnasium, means?

I mentioned it a number of years ago. I'll give you a clue. It means naked. It means naked.

So the gymnasium came to get its name for that because the students competed in their sports nude. The Olympic Games, the athletes participated in the nude. I'm surprised they haven't thought of that to increase the TV ratings on today's Olympics by having the athletes compete in the nude. But again, that's because the Greeks loved the human body, and they didn't mind showing it off. So again, schools, hundreds of Greek teenagers in the nude. What can possibly go wrong?

So again, just a degenerate system there. And their system, however, was remarkably effective at instilling Greek ideals into entire generations. Generation after generation of generation of young Greek and Roman young men and women. And the statues of the Greek gods and goddesses celebrated the human form. And this is also why we see so many of the artworks from the ancient world from the Greeks, and later the Romans, they're depicted in the nude. Because they idolized the human body. So this was part of their training.

This was part of their training. Part of their brainwashing, you might say, instilling Greek culture, Greek values, Greek ideals, and the people, the students.

Third item that was in every city were temples to honor the various gods and goddesses. And they would have festivals to worship the gods and goddesses on specific days and weeks and so on.

This is the Parthenon Temple, a temple dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens.

They're a very famous landmark you can go and visit today.

I want to show you another one. Connie and I slipped off just before the feast started to this temple of Poseidon. Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea, the equivalent of the Roman Neptune.

This is on a huge cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, not far from the port of Athens.

As the Greek ships sailed away from Athens, the last thing they would see is this temple of Poseidon, a big white temple up there on the cliff top. That was the last thing they would see as they left Athens to go out to sea. It was the first thing they would see as they returned to Athens on the way back. They built a temple to the god of the sea up here on the cliff.

These were everywhere. Paul is encountering this continually as he's traveling through the Greek and Roman world. A final type of structure that I've mentioned here, the fourth one after stadiums, schools, and temples, is theaters. Theaters. Here's the largest one I've ever seen. This is from the city of Pergamum in Asia Minor, one of the seven churches. This one, to the best of my memory, would seat about 20,000 to 30,000 people built in a mountainside overlooking the city of Pergamum down on the valley floor below that. These were very common, very immediately recognizable when you go to any ancient Greco-Roman city. There they would perform dramas, plays by the Greek and Roman poets, playwrights, and so on. Many of these would be myths, legends about the gods and goddesses, the labors of Hercules and the great heroes.

Many of them would be very sexually explicit. There, I won't go into details about that, but that was very, very common in their entertainment. Here's a much smaller theater we saw at the city of Delphi. There, this one would seat maybe 2,000 people. It wasn't that huge of a city. Again, some would hold 20,000 people or more at once. And they considered the theaters, we would think of a theater just as entertainment. That's why we go to a movie or watch TV to be entertained. For the Greeks, it was entertainment, but it was more than that. It was a way of instilling the ideals of Greek culture into people's minds. It was a way of communicating to the people, this is who we are and this is who we should become.

It would promote those ideals to tell people, this is who you should be like.

That was the message of the theaters. It wasn't just entertainment. It had this added dimension to it as well. And what was the foundational philosophy behind that? It was expressed in a Greek philosopher, Protagora, of 400s BC, man is the measure of all things of what is and what is not.

So, man is what you measure everything by, in other words. So, that was the prevailing worldview.

When Paul goes and interacts with the Greeks and the Romans and that culture, he didn't have to face just the rampant idolatry, but this philosophy, this worldview, the belief that human beings are the ultimate source of truth and authority in the universe.

Human beings are. And since the human being was considered to be the measure of all things, as we saw in the quote earlier, human wisdom was deemed to be the greatest wisdom.

That's why you have all the Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, these people.

And Paul contends with this, with the philosophers there in Athens who are always seeking to hear some new and different things, some other great idea. So, skipping over a little bit here, why did the Greek society collapse? Well, it collapsed because at its heart and core, they really had nothing more than themselves to look to. They didn't have a higher authority. Their gods and goddesses are just like a bunch of drunk, degenerate human beings on a bad Saturday night. They're fighting with each other. They're having adulterous affairs. They're getting drunk, all this kind of stuff, all the time. That was their ideals. And when you build a society and a culture on that, it has nowhere to go but down. And that's what happened to them.

So, what does it have to do with us today? Well, no society can exist for very long when it creates its own version of truth that is unrelated to real truth. Today, secular Hellenism has another name. It's called secular humanism.

Secular meaning non-religious, humanism meaning the human mind. Human beings are the epitome.

They're the ultimate. So, according to secular humanism, truth becomes whatever we want it to be.

Secular humanism is dominant in our educational systems. I think back to the 60s. I was in the 60s when they banned school prayer and reading the Bible. I was in grade school then. I grew up in Alabama. The schools there totally ignored those. We still had prayer every day on the intercom at school. On up today, I graduated. We still had Bible readings read over the intercom at school.

People there thumbed their nose at it, but you can't do that today without being sued out of existence. So, why were prayer and Bibles removed from schools? Secular humanism. Because you can't have God and secular humanism both fighting for which it's going to be on top. So, the courts rule that it's got to be secular humanism. God's got to go. Truth is no longer what God says is right, but whatever the majority decides is right. That's why now we have homosexual, the homosexual agenda being promoted in culture. It's not an abomination, as God calls it, to be eliminated from society. But it's something to be... it's just an alternate lifestyle that is to be celebrated because everybody is different. And everybody can make their own choices. It's the same thing with a transgender movement there, following the exact same pattern that was used so successfully by the gay rights movement. An abortion is no longer the shameful murder of an unborn baby, but just a lump of tissue that's removed for the mother's convenience. Or the boyfriend thinks it's inconvenient or something like that. Substance abuse. Marijuana usage isn't drunkenness and lack of loss of control of your faculties that God condemns, but it's just another lifestyle choice.

Because nobody has a right to tell me what to do in my personal life.

It's a kind of philosophy and thinking that goes right back to the Greeks and is dominating our society and culture today. Which means that man is the ultimate authority. Man is the ultimate authority. Does it sound familiar? Think back to Eden. What did the serpent tell Eve? Genesis 3, verse 5. For God knows that in the day that you eat of it, that you take of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing or determining for yourself good and evil, and right and wrong. That's the philosophy behind Greek culture, Hellenism, secular humanism. There's such a stain on our society today, and it's being advocated through the things we talked about. The schools, the stadiums, the sports, the temples, the theaters. They're all tools for instilling not God's values, but Satan's values in society. I mentioned earlier that Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans from Corinth. When did he go to Corinth? He went to Corinth right after Athens, and seeing all the rampant idolatry. What did he tell the Romans? I'll read Romans 1, 18 through 25 from the New Living Translation. But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who push the truth away from themselves. For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts. From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, so they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God. Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think of foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused.

Claiming to be wise, they became utter fools instead. And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshipped idols made to look like mere people, or birds and animals and snakes. So God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other's bodies. Instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies. So they worshipped the things God made, but not the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever. Amen.

It's a pretty strong indictment of Greek thinking and where it leads, and the thinking that we see predominant in society around us today. So these are the kind of thought patterns and ideas that Paul and Barnabas and Silas and Timothy and others had to contend with, but it's really not that different today. Just like in Paul's day, Hellenism or Humanism or Paganism, you might say, is making a huge comeback. And this is a struggle we fight in trying to reach the world with the Gospel. We're dealing with a secular system, a secular mindset, where everybody makes up their own rules. And Satan uses these methods, the idea that man is the ultimate authority, he uses it because it works. Because it worked for the Greeks, all those centuries ago, and he used it then, and he does it now.

So think about that culture of stadiums, schools, temples, and theaters around which their culture was built and promoted and which permeated people's minds and thinking. That was how Satan instilled his values in people's minds in that day. And it worked then, and it's worked ever since.

Satan uses those exact same tools today. He uses sports to do what? To distract us from what's really important. He uses schools to, frankly, brainwash our kids, remove prayer, remove the Bible from the schools. You can't talk about those. So he removed that to teach them alternate ideas, that often are hostile to God and God's existence, like evolution, which is taught everywhere today.

He uses temples to promote false religion, religious lies, and he uses theaters or popular entertainment to fill our minds with all kinds of ungodly ideas. I was just reading the Denver Post this morning online, and the TV series Roseanne that came and went years ago. They're rebooting it. And one of the leading characters is going to be a nine-year-old boy who likes to dress in girls' clothing. So this is what they want to promote to our kids. And it's just disgusting. So in conclusion, to wrap this up, we really need to think about these things to be on guard.

Against these methods, because, again, Satan used it thousands of years ago because it worked.

And he still uses it today to brainwash us, just as he used it to brainwash millions of people back in the Greek and Roman empires.