Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJames Nisbet Commentary - Acts 17:20 - 17:20
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘
‘Thou bringest certain strange things to our ears.’
Act_17:20
I. The message of the Apostle has guided countless lives, comforted countless sorrows, and crowned countless death-beds with a sure and certain hope. The philosophies have faded long ago like the dead leaves of autumn, and the roots of self-pleasing and pride of heart which they spring from have had to reproduce fresh theories in fresh forms, but the Gospel still advances with the same message in the same words, a growing power over the width of the world. Yet see how lightly, in the day of small things, it was taken up, looked at, and thrown aside as ‘babble.’ What a lesson for the listener now! God has allowed us our day in which we weigh and judge His Word, but He has kept for Himself His own day, in which His Word will judge us.
II. The Athenians gave this word a hearing—set it aside as absurd, and not worthy of consideration; some set it aside to be considered by-and-by—‘We will hear thee again of this matter.’ Corinth, the luxurious town; Thessalonica, the flourishing seaport; Philippi, the political centre of a province—all these had their Churches, and to all Epistles were written: but what Luke can record of the success at learned Athens only amounts to, so St. Paul departed from among them. Howbeit certain men clave unto him, among them which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.’ This was the result; and yet Athens was so feverishly interested in all sorts of religious novelties, that the saying ran, ‘It was more easy to find a god there than a man.’ It seems, then, that fussiness about religious controversies is not the frame of mind which most helps us to a real personal receiving of the Gospel.
III. The holy truth of God wants a quiet, modest soil to grow in.—It was the character of the Saviour, not to strive or cry, or seek publicity; the waters of Siloam run softly, and the home of the Holy Spirit is a meek and contrite heart. If the temptation of fractious questionings assail us—and few can hope to be quite exempt from it—let us humble human pride before the greatness of God; let us be content to be as our Divine Master was, and to be patient learners of our patient Teacher. ‘Take my yoke upon you,’ He said, ‘and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and I will give you rest’: rest from man, rest from self, rest from pride, rest from doubt, rest from the heavy burden of religious uncertainty and worldly care; rest from sorrows which have not found their true consolation, and anxieties which have not been set at rest by their true assurance; rest from the heavy, heavy yoke of self alone; rest for our souls in the docile service of Christ, Whose yoke alone is easy, and His burden light.
—
Rev. Canon F. T. Crosse.
Illustration‘Athens was a great and celebrated city, full of clever, learned people interested in all questions of religion, tolerant of all forms of it—full of altars, full of idols; intellectual, artistic, dilettanti, controversial; ready and craving for any novelty, “for all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” Athens was, in fact, the mental metropolis of the world. All that mind could achieve had been achieved there; but this one thing they had not done, they had not achieved the discovery of religious truth. That door does not open to experiment or to logic: “from the beginning of the world,” to that time, and to this, the heart of man, unaided by grace, has failed to fathom the beginning, middle, or end of what “God has prepared for them that love Him” ’ (Isa_64:4).