Remembering

Life doesn’t always go the way we plan.

No.

Life nearly never goes the way we plan.

Acts 17. As Paul was waiting on Timothy and Silas to join him he wandered the agora and stoa of Athens. His heart was in turmoil over the idolatry of the place. Up and down the streets and avenues he saw one god and another god and yet another goddess in spectacular detailed marble. Hundreds of statues represented the hundreds of ways the Athenians were trying to manipulate and plan their lives by propitiating just the right god. As he wandered, Paul stumbled across the altar to An Unknown God. (Google the story behind this altar, it’s pretty great. Libby gave us an adLib to explain it to us today.)

As Providence would have it Paul’s preaching on Jesus in the agora (the civic/social center) is noticed and he is taken to the Areopagus (Mars Hill) to present his case to the philosophers and the curious. Raised in Tarsus, a university town, yet a Hebrew of Hebrews and a Roman citizen, Paul was prepared to speak eloquently to the elite people gathered. With respect he begins by acknowledging their religiosity and that he had looked closely (probably tearfully) at their objects of worship. Then drawing on the legend of the Unknown God as his touchstone, a story so familiar to them, he begins to teach them about the God of creation. He corrects their understanding of God, He doesn’t need a temple and He doesn’t need our offerings. But He is the God who gives life to us all. All men come from the man He made and He is the one who plans and plants history. In short, this God cannot be manipulated. “‘For in him we live and move and have our being,’” Paul quotes Epmenides, one of their philosophers. And again he reminds them of the true statement of the Stoic, Aratus, “‘We are his offspring.’”

From here Paul moves to the nature of God and the rights of God and the provision of God. Gold and silver, formed with ever so much skill, cannot represent this God. This God is judge and will judge and has the right to judge. How so? By raising from the dead the man he has appointed.

Kim and Dan and I walked around the side of the hill to commemorate the life of our dear friend and her dear husband, Tom. The resurrection was on our hearts and minds in this place, the perfect place. It seemed that many of the things Tom loved were represented in this one place. He loved Greek history, philosophy and thought but most of all he would have loved the fact that all of this intersected with the Gospel of Jesus on this hill.

We wanted Tom here with us. That was the plan. That was his plan. But we don’t serve God for what He can give us, nor try to manipulate Him with our sacrifices. It is His plans that succeed. This plan broke our hearts and changed us. But His plan will also restore our beloved friend on the last day. “Now brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand…Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash…For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality..then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory: Where, O death is your sting?’…He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you,” 1 Corinthians 15.

Life did not go the way we had planned. But on this sunny and very hot day in Athens, beneath the Acropolis, standing on Areopagus, we remembered that things will one day go very, very right, just as God has planned.