Nathan E. Lewis

“Common Grace and Paganism”
Acts 14:8-20

In this series on Common Grace I have preached three sermons presenting the common ground shared by humanity: We are all created in the image of God; All of us have been born into original sin; We are totally depraved in our human nature. I have preached two sermons outlining the two purposes of God’s common grace: The restraining of evil and the promoting of good. These have been followed by two sermons presenting the “us and them” distinction made in the Covenant of God, seeking to understand the prolific use of “us and them” language in the Bible. The final three sermons concern Christian civility, the premiere application of the doctrine of common grace. Early in August I preached the sermon, “Grace is Everywhere,” and this morning the second sermon is this final section is titled, “Common Grace and Paganism.” This coming Sunday I will preach a final sermon titled, “Common Grace and Christian Civility.”
While I am among those who recognize and speak openly about the injustices, problems, and inconsistencies maintained and promoted in the church, I am nonetheless encouraged to see throughout my lifetime and in historical records of the church, the doctrine of common grace informing a Christian civility expressed in acts of kindness, mercy, and love toward humanity in general. Christians have not largely separated themselves from the world, but instead have forged relationships, campaigns, and movements of extraordinary love toward their persecutors, toward the lost, and toward the destitute. Indeed it is evident to many throughout history that the church has instigated self-sacrificial love toward her enemies. One of the beautiful attributes of our cluster of congregations here in Oregon, is that we go the extra mile to express love and care to our neighbors regardless of their union to Christ. Many of us enjoy growing relationships with neighbors, coworkers and family members who have not put their trust in Jesus. We are not known as a separatist church, an angry mob of Christian soldiers. We have not moved to an extreme, treating every pagan we encounter as an instrument of the devil. We assume that God has his lost sheep scattered throughout the world and that in any conversation we may be speaking to a sister or brother in Christ, who has yet to put his faith in God. This is the path divinely charted for us in this great Day of Divine Patience.
I have titled this sermon promoting Christian civility, “Common Grace and Paganism,” knowing full well that “paganism” is for the most part a pejorative term describing any religion that is “pre-Christian,” and not monotheist. Jesus uses the term “pagan,” as he teaches his disciples to love their enemies. He says that if we love those who love us we do no more than the pagans do. Apart from the gospel of Jesus, human beings have the capacity to love according to affinity, personal satisfaction and endearment. But the gospel directs us to love our enemies, the unlovely, and those who do not return our love.
We no longer live in a Christian age but have slipped into a post-Christian era in which of plethora of religions flourish, many of these, ironically self-described as “pagan.” The term “pagan” in our day has become a badge of honor for anyone or any group that is not distinctively Christian, returning to pre-Christian roots found in the Druid worship of trees, the coven’s tapping of the powers of earth, wind, and fire, and in the replacement of theism with polytheism and monism. Dr. Peter Jones of the Truth XChange says, “We are in the presence of a powerful pagan/Gnostic theological agenda, claiming to be spanking new, objective and scientific, but as old as the hills. It is my belief that this trend in biblical studies is part of the setting in place of a pagan reconstruction of human culture for the planetary era.” I like to think of this post-Christian age as a pre-Christian age and so, I find our present day to be nearly identical to the day in which the Apostle Paul planted the church in Asia-minor, North Africa through Europe.
In Acts 14 we read of the Apostle Paul healing a cripple in the pagan community of Lystra, located in the central plateau of Turkey. Lystra was devoted to a Hellenistic paganism, worshipping the Greek pantheon of gods. The people of Lystra proclaimed Barnabas to be Zeus and Paul to be Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Paul had been preaching and so they took him to be the messenger of the silent partner, Barnabas, mistaking his silence to be a sign of his ultimate power controlling Hermes as his mouthpiece. So devoted was Lystra to Zeus that his temple was incorporated into the main gates of the city. No one could enter Lystra without entering into the temple of Zeus. The priests of Zeus began to prepare a sacrifice to Barnabas and Paul, disturbing these two mere men and instruments of God’s grace that they tore their clothes and rushed into the crowd appealing to it to stop the sacrifice.
Both Barnabas and Paul now speak to the people of Lystra and their words in (15) introduce our first lesson for the day concerning the doctrine of common grace. As we interface with paganism our first appeal is to our commonality as members of the human race. It would be tempting from an apologetic perspective for Barnabas and Paul to speak first of the incarnation of the Son of God, as the people of Lystra had a pagan notion of incarnation, believing the Greek gods to descend to the lower regions in the form of human beings. But this would be a confusing point of contact. Christian doctrine views the incarnation of Christ to be a unique act of the one, true God, not a regular activity of a pantheon of gods. Barnabas and Paul say, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you….” Their first point of contact is to appeal to the commonality of mere human beings. A Christian prophet, priest or a king clearly communicates and operates as a mere instrument of Christ, the only wise God to whom honor and glory and dominion belongs. Any church or Christian system that presents its priests as a category above the masses and closer to God is a system of syncretism amalgamating Christianity and paganism in a confusing and compromising presentation. The priests of the Old Covenant from Aaron to Eli to Zacharias were mere sinful men ordained to their office to point us to the one and only Great High Priest, the perfect Son of God, Jesus Christ. The doctrine of common grace assures us that we remember and practice under the sole priesthood of Christ, reminding us of our commonality as mere, sinful human beings.
Barnabas and Paul begin to preach the gospel allowing the doctrine of special grace to flow from the doctrine of common grace. Firstly, they present the living God as Creator of everything and everyone. They begin with the inescapable and foundational Creator/creature distinction consistently blurred in every form of paganism. J. Gresham Machen wrote, “The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.”
Secondly, in (16) Barnabas and Paul proclaim God’s patience with all humanity. “In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways.” This statement provides us with an important component of the doctrine of common grace. God does not immediately or consistently destroy or shut down all forms of ungodliness and evil in this world. Rather, he exercises a patience we often mistake for a lack of justice or moral inconsistency in the divine Person. God allows individuals and nations to walk for a time in wickedness all the while revealing himself and his holy gospel rendering everyone without excuse. In Romans 2 Paul makes the point that the Gentiles, who do not have the law in written form informing their personal behavior and societies, nevertheless have the law of God written upon their hearts, a divine revelation unto them rendering them responsible for their vile lifestyles.
Thirdly, Barnabas and Paul reference the central tenet of the doctrine of common grace as God’s sincere and universal witness of his goodness toward humanity. They repeat the words of the Lord Jesus: “for God did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” When we deny this doctrine of common grace, we remove most of the space and opportunity we have to be instruments of God’s special grace. You may think: “Well, the results fell short in Lystra of the crowd embracing special grace, and so tell why should I model my evangelism after the message of Barnabas and Paul?” The short answer, of course, is that Barnabas and Paul were Christ’s apostles entrusted with the gospel and so the only gospel we have to proclaim is the gospel they proclaimed. We not only have this presentation to the people of Lystra, but we have a variety of gospel proclamations so that we might aptly proclaim the gospel to every people group and human situation we encounter. It would be tempting for Barnabas and Paul to start with the central doctrine of the atonement as the apostles often preached to the Jewish community. After all, Lystra had a sacrificial practice of worship – the people were on the verge of sacrificing oxen to the glory of mere men they thought to be gods. Why not say, “You’ve got the right worship practices but you have the wrong object of worship”? Once again, this would be a confusing apologetic in light of Christian atonement rooted in a doctrine of substitutionary sacrifice to satisfy divine justice as opposed to the pagan notion of sacrifice as celebration. The apostles in Lystra chose the more foundational gospel presentation beginning with Genesis where God is proclaimed as Creator of all things, providing for all his creatures and thus unlike, most unlike any mere man who may appear to us as divine.
This gospel has existed from the beginning of time and there is no one who can stamp it out. The pagans of Lystra tried to stamp it out by stoning Paul. Stone the bearer of good news and he will rise again to proclaim that God is good and that he has come to redeem us from all our pagan notions. The preachers may not proclaim the gospel to us again as the Holy Spirit directs them to new communities open to embrace the grace of Jesus. But now, while we have been given the privilege to hear the good news, let us embrace it, adding to God’s common grace, his special grace in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.