Pastor Jeremy M. Thomas
Fredericksburg Bible Church
107 East Austin
Fredericksburg, Texas 78624
830-997-8834      jthomas@fbgbible.org
A0922 – May 31, 2009 – Acts 17:24-25 – Jerusalem Meets Athens - Part 2

Alright, we’re in Acts 17 and how Paul witnessed to the Athenians. I want to start with a couple of clarifications as we study. One, when we say Paul didn’t use Greek rationalism we’re not saying Christianity isn’t rational. Rationalism and rational are two different things. If something’s rational it just means it's coherent, reasonable, and Christianity is a coherent system because our God is coherent. In fact only Christianity is rational. It is reasonable to believe. To believe anything else is unreasonable. Rationalism means man’s reason is sufficient to arrive at true knowledge. And Paul said, no, it’s not; if man is going to arrive at true knowledge then he has to have divine revelation. So we’re not saying at all to throw out your intellect and just believe. Paul is going to engage their intellects, it’s going to be a perfectly rational presentation, but it’s going to start with God’s word, not man’s mind. Paul is not saying, and you should never say, just believe. That would be an unbiblical concept of faith. Man is to believe only after he has thought, understood and been persuaded something is true. Second clarification, when we say we’re going to use the Scripture like Paul, and we’re not going to leave the Scripture at any point, all we’re saying is the battle belongs to the Lord. It’s His word that has power, not my word. The moment we leave the word we’re saying our word is powerful enough to save people. In all my intellectual strength I will construct arguments that are superior to God’s arguments. . So that’s all we’re saying when we say we don’t leave the Scripture, the Lord has given us certain weapons listed in Eph 6 and these weapons are sufficient to win the battle, the battle against forces of darkness that must be taken captive with His weapons, not ours. The battle must be fought His way, with His weapons if we’re going to be pleasing to Him and victorious in the battle that we’re all plugged into through the Lord Jesus Christ. 

So let’s return to Acts 17, Paul’s defense to the Areopagus in Athens. Athens was the great philosophical center in the ancient world. So Paul is facing Gentile paganism in its refined form. Centuries of Greek philosophy had trickled down from men like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus. Zeno and Epicurus are the founders of the two philosophies mentioned in v 18. Epicurus founded Epicureanism and Zeno founded Stoicism. Paul’s audience was not your average audience, average people were in attendance but the core of the audience were the intellectual giants. 

Now I’ve made a great deal about this address and I’ll continue to make a great deal of it. Some of you are wondering why in the world we have to understand Paul’s approach in Athens. You say, I’m not witnessing to philosophy students so why spend so much time on Paul’s witnessing to philosophers? The answer to that is basically three-fold. First, you may not be witnessing to philosophy students but some people are. And the pulpit approach is basically a shotgun approach. And so everything isn’t going to be targeted at you, it’s more of the scatter approach. And that’s one of the difficulties of speaking to 200 people rather than 2 people. 2 people is a very different forum and you can have Q & A, give and take and target your problem area, but when you have a large audience you have to use the scatter approach so that’s why I teach the way I teach. You may not care about point x but for somebody else point x is exactly what they need. 

Second, you may not be witnessing to formally trained philosophers but the people you’re witnessing to think the same way. Greek thought permeates our society. We’re descendants of the Greeks and we inherited their thought patterns. So your friend may not be using high and lofty philosophical terms but he expresses the same ideas in every day street language. For example, moderns speak about evolution.  The ancient Greeks such as Empedocles talked about the scale of nature. They are basically the same thing. Even in my biology classes at Tech we were taught that ancient Greeks thought the same basic way Darwin thought. So we’ve inherited all that, there are some differences but the big ideas are the same and they have come down to our day to the average everyday man you meet on the streets.

Third reason, and very important, is if you master Acts 17 then you’ll be ready for any witnessing opportunity. Obviously if you can witness to the greatest intellects and break down their position then every other witnessing opportunity is a piece of cake. So we train at the highest level to be ready for any person the Lord brings our direction. And since our witness is primarily to pagan Gentiles we’re training hard on Acts 17 in Athens because this is the fullest record of how Paul witnessed to pagan Gentiles. For a less full treatment that follows the same approach we could go back to Lystra in Acts 14. It’s a shorter account with pagan Gentiles but Paul follows the exact same procedure. So Acts 14 is key, Acts 17 is key and Romans 1:18-32 is key, these all link together in a chain for how to evangelize a pagan audience that has little to no OT background. 

Now, having said why we must engage Acts 17 with such tenacity we must also say there have been different views as to what Paul is doing. And this enters us into a discussion of apologetic methodology. Apologetics is just the word for making a defense. We get our word apology from this word but it doesn’t mean saying your sorry for your faith. I’m not sorry for my faith, my faith is the truth. You should be sorry for not believing the truth. What apologia meant in the ancient world was to defend your position. Socrates in his work Apologia defends himself before the courts in Athens after being accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. And that’s what Paul is doing in Athens. He’s defending the faith. So we want to take notes on how he did it; which is precisely where we run into disagreement among great men of Church History. What exactly is Paul’s approach? What’s his method?
 
This apologia given by Paul has been given more attention in the commentaries than any other ten verses in the whole Book of Acts. More than Acts 2, more than tongues, more than water baptism. And how you handle Acts 17 basically tells me whether you’re more Socratic or Mosaic, more Greek or more Jewish, more Roman Catholic or more Protestant.  It tells me how you think about God and how you think about man and how you think about sin and about the word of God. Acts 17 is a watershed.

Now, the commentary literature reflects these two understandings of Paul’s method that I just contrasted by a series of categories. On one hand, some say Paul used a method called Classical Apologetics. The classical approach says Paul started with human reason and then moved to divine revelation (e.g. Unger, Geisler). The other approach is called Presuppositional Apologetics. The Presuppositional approach says Oh no, Paul started with divine revelation and stuck with it throughout (e.g. Van Til, Oliphint, Bruce). Of course, there are hybrids of these positions but those are the two basic approaches and I want to try to show you the difference. If you do some reading in this area it’s been my experience that most people can’t tell the difference between what Rome is saying and what Protestantism is saying.  Even most Protestants are Roman Catholic at heart here, and that’s a pretty big difference. It shows a very different understanding in a number of areas.

So I want to describe what I mean by Presuppositional because there is a lot of confusion about this term and there’s also a discussion going on in evangelical circles over which apologetic strategy is best. The word presupposition does not mean “an assumption.” Everybody does assume things, they may be legitimate or not, but that’s not what we mean by presupposition. What we mean to say is a person's “ultimate commitment.” What are they ultimately committed to? Are they committed to man and his reason as sufficient or are they committed to God and His word as sufficient. Now, most Christians are going to say, “Well, God and His word are sufficient.” Obviously that’s what they’re going to say. But in practice when they go to witness to a person that’s not how they do it. Inevitably they almost always start out trying to prove the existence of God from human reason. And they’ll build the cosmological argument or the design argument or the moral argument or the being argument.  There’s a whole series of about 15 arguments that most atheists shred to pieces in about 5 seconds. Now, there is an argument for the existence of God that is very different from all of these and we’re not going into it except to say it’s an argument from the impossibility of the contrary. In other words, it’s just a biblical position that states that for an unbeliever just to articulate his non-biblical position requires him to depend upon the biblical position being true. And that means it’s impossible for Christianity not to be true. More on that another time. Today I just want to try to show you the difference between classical apologetics and presupppositional and how your loyalty to God hinges on this. Let’s use an example from real life history that had economic implications, it had family implications; it had very practical fallout in people’s lives. 

In the early 1900’s the fundamentalists at Princeton lost to the liberals. These fundamentalists resigned and left Princeton. They had no seminary, they lost libraries, they lost their jobs, everything, and so they went to Philadelphia and built Westminster Theological Seminary. Those fundamentalist scholars began to ask themselves, “How did we lose to the Princeton liberals? What went wrong? Why did the non-Christians ace us? How did they win?” And several of the men on that faculty came to the conclusion that we fundamentalists were not Scriptural enough in the way we were defending the faith. 

They had thought, before this, that, for example, if you have DVP on one railroad track above and the HVP on the other railroad track, that HVP was neutral and thereby, following a series of arguments using logic and/or experience that you could divert the HVP person from his railroad track onto the DVP track. In other words, what’s their ultimate commitment? Logic and/or experience. That’s the ultimate presupposition in classical apologetics and they are committed to it as absolute and sufficient to bring a non-believer to Jesus Christ. What the fundamentalists scholars found out was that these arguments didn’t work very well against the liberals because what they had done was start with logic and experience as ultimate just like the liberals and when they tried to argue on that basis and defend the faith from that rather than from the word of God they lost every time (1 Cor 1:21; Col 2:8). 

Let me give an example that’s easy to see. Take Adam and Eve. After Satan talked to Eve, what had he talked that woman into doing? Here’s Eve, over here she has one claim, that if she eats of the tree she’s going to die. Over here Eve has another claim, that if she eats of the tree she won’t die. Satan has very cleverly gotten her to buy the question, because what has the woman done? She’s immediately gotten herself in a position of neutrality, at least she thinks, so now Eve is going to have to do an experiment; I’ve got these two competing claims and how do I tell which one is true? How did Eve try to tell which one was true? She ate of the tree. Did she find which one was true? Yes. Did she disobey when she did it? Yes. What was wrong with Eve’s approach? What was wrong with her methodology? What was wrong was that she presumed that she was the final authority; she had elevated herself to the position that SHE would decide whether or not God was correct. Once a person moves into that position their logic and experience becomes the ultimate presupposition.  In other words, the ultimate presupposition is that “I will decide.” 

So, some of these fundamentalist scholars said, “Okay, we made a mistake and we should never make this mistake again. We have to be more biblical in our approach.” So they went back and they started studying God and how he approached men.  They started studying Moses, they started studying Elijah, they started studying Jesus and they started studying Paul and asking, “How did these guys approach unbelief. These are the greats, maybe we can learn something.” And of course they found what we’re talking about. They found things like Paul at Athens getting whipped in the marketplace just like they’d been whipped on Princeton campus. And they said, alright, but then Paul was successful, so let’s really think about what Paul did differently. And out of this came Presuppositional apologetics, which says if there are two railroad tracks, here’s the non-Christian going down his railroad track of HVP and here’s the DVP railroad track, and guess what, there’s no connecting track between the two. 

To get a train that is on that track over to the other track, we have to derail the train and move it over car by car. Reason and logic still exist, yes, but the flesh uses those to suppress the truth. Unbelievers aren’t neutral. They’re at enmity with God. So what are they going to use logic and experience to do? Rebel against God. That’s what they do best. In fact, they’re even going to use logic and experience to construct arguments to the effect that God could not possibly exist. And so if the Christian jumps over to the HVP track and tries to work with logic and reason the unbeliever is going to constantly build argument after argument to the counter position. There’s no way to move him from his track to ours by that method. There’s no connecting track. What this diagram is all about is repentance. Paul is going to call for repentance at the end of his defense. Repentance. To Paul is when a person suddenly realizes the catastrophic difference between his track and the biblical track and he puts his faith in Christ then his train is, so to speak, derailed, picked up and moved to the other set of rails. That’s Presuppositional-ism. There has to be a ground shift of ultimate commitments from one side to the other, which says, you know, I’m not sufficient to know all things and so I’m in no position to decide whether or not what God says is true. He is in a position to decide so I must submit to His authority; He says what is true and what is false. So the ultimate presupposition as a Christian is the fact that God’s word is the standard. The ultimate presupposition of a pagan is that man’s reason is the ultimate standard. Friends, there isn’t any continuity between those two positions. Try as you might you can’t get these two together and that’s what’s been wrong, many believe, with the way we defend our faith.  It doesn’t see clearly enough that you can’t borrow pagan ideas and then abandon them at the last minute, they will eat you up from the inside. So, we begin up front with the authority of Scripture. We’re not pretending to come from some neutral zone and then trying to reason our way from that neutral zone to God. There is no neutrality; the flesh is at enmity with God. And so we confess up front, our authority lies in the word of God (2 Cor 10:3-5).
	
Now, let’s take what we’ve just said and come to v 23 to make the application. Knowing what you know now what has Paul done in v 23? What did Paul call them at the end of that verse? Religious ignoramus’. Why did Paul do that? That’s not a very loving approach. Paul gets a lot of flack here by commentators. Paul, you really fumbled the ball here, don’t you know you should never push people away from Jesus?  You should bring people close to Jesus. And Paul, if he could answer his critics, would say, yeah, that’s what I want to ultimately do. Nobody loved Jesus more than Paul, nobody wanted people to come to Christ more than Paul, but to get people to Christ Paul says, I have to first push them away so they see, “Hey, you know, we’re coming from two totally opposite positions. Paul’s on his railroad tracks over there and I’m on my railroad tracks over here and you know there really is a difference between what I believe and what Paul’s saying.” That’s the very first thing a person has to see and that is that the Christian position is different. What are you seeing when you hear people say, “Oh yes, you have the Bible, there are many religious books, there’s the Koran, there’s the Bagavad Ghita, the Book of Mormon. How do I choose?” You’re seeing a person who doesn’t see the difference at all. To them religion is just a smorgasbord. How far can you get with a person that thinks that way? Not very far. And if you buy into what he’s saying you’ve bought his agenda and he’s enveloped you. That’s why Paul’s pushing them away. And then when he’s got them all ears he’s going to paint the difference between his railroad track, DVP and their railroad track, HVP. Here’s what the word of God says, here’s what you say. 

So let’s start again with the inscription Paul found in v 23, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. What is the very first thing you know about the Athenians from this inscription? Is it not a frank admission that they know GOD is there? Yes, it’s a claim of knowledge that we know GOD is there. In fact, what did we say last week was one of Paul’s assumptions about all unbelievers? That they know God exists because God has made Himself evident to all men. If He didn’t then they couldn’t be held accountable. And so Paul already knew that they knew GOD existed, so when he sees them admitting it he says, “Aha, I’m going to use that as my point of contact.” The word of God says they know God exists and here I find an inscription where they admit they know God exists. Perfect situation. But what’s a second thing we can know about the Athenians from this inscription? They say He’s UNKNOWN, we don’t know what the nature of this GOD is like. We have an admission of finite knowledge. We know GOD is there but we don’t know what His nature is like. 

Now, Paul has this and he was a man who trusted the word of God over the word of man. They say Paul, we don’t know the nature of this God.  Fine, says Paul, I know they do know it, that’s Rom 1, and Rom 1 tells me that the real issue with these people is they’ve suppressed that knowledge. They’ve held it down to the point that they may have even convinced themselves that they don’t really know. So my job is to break through the suppression. Francis Schaeffer said the suppression can be like ten feet of concrete reinforced with steel, so this is a thick barrier Paul has to break through. But actually Paul knows he can’t break through it, only the word of God can break through it. So he’s not going to use Greek rationalism to break through. Greek rationalism is what was used to build the barrier and you can’t use the same tools used to build the barrier to knock it down. Gotta use something else. So Paul is going to use the only something else that can break through the suppression and that is the word of God. We say the word of God is inspired, we say it’s sufficient, we say it’s authoritative; the problem is we don’t often act like it. So Paul says, you know, I’m going to act like it. Let’s see if the word of God is actually as strong as it says it is. Is it really sufficient in every area of life or is it just in faith and morals. So Paul is going to start with the word of God. And he very brilliantly says, “Alright, I’ve got people who admit there’s this GOD out there, but they’re suppressing His nature. So what I will do is proclaim to them His nature. That’s what vv 24-29 are all about; it’s all about Who and What God is. You’re not going to find anything in those verses about Jesus Christ, you’re not even going to find anything about sin, except by implication. It’s all about who and what God is. God has to be defined before you can get to sin and salvation. So watch how Paul does it. Verse 24…

“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; 25nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; 26and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, 27that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ 29“Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
 
What did I tell you? It’s all about who God is. Six verses almost exclusively about the nature of God. What God has done, who He is, who He is not. Some people say, Jeremy, just tell us the positive truth, never tell us the other side because if you show us the positive truth, we’ll automatically detect when something’s wrong. I’m sorry, but that’s not how Paul did it. You can argue with me till the kingdom comes but Paul said this is who God is and this is who God is not. You know why he’s doing that? To contrast with their position. When the waters muddy what do you do? You clear the water. So he’s saying, this is what I’m saying, this is what you’re saying.  Now, see the difference. You’re on one railroad track, I’m on another. Let’s make that crystal clear. 

So now let’s see how Paul starts in v 24. The God who made the world and all things in it. Did Paul start out to prove the existence of God? I don’t get it how people can come to this text and say that Paul started with creation and argued for the existence of God. Paul didn’t do that. If Paul had been arguing from creation to a God of creation he would have said something like, “You know Athenians, the world and all things in it attest to a maker of the world, don’t you think, and his name is God.” But Paul didn’t say that. Paul simply said, God…made the world. A statement about what topic? Origins. Gosh Paul, don’t you know you shouldn’t start with such a hot topic. You should have started with Jesus. But Paul already tried starting with Jesus in the marketplace and what happened? By v 18 nobody had believed and they had effectively neutralized Paul. All Paul had done was raise enough confusion that this Areopagus defense was set up. Paul moves back all the way to origins to begin the discussion. Sounds strikingly like what verse in the Bible? Gen 1:1, “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” Brilliant idea. Start where the Bible starts. So novel of Paul. Now, with that said, what has Paul just done? He’s done two things. First, if God made the world and all things in it then is God a part of the world? Obviously not. So the first thing we learn from Paul is the Creator-creature distinction. That is the most profound and basic thing you can say about God; that He is not to be identified with the universe; God made the universe. God is not the universe. 

Now, what’s a second thing Paul did with this statement? What did Paul do to his audience? He enveloped them in God’s universe. God made the world and all things in it and guess what Athenians, that includes you. God made you and you live in His world. Now if you want to think, by way of divine attributes, what kind of a God Paul has just defined by this sweeping statement we can say at least three things; He’s a God of infinite power, He’s a God of infinite genius and He’s a God of eternality. There’s no way around it.

Let’s go on and see what else Paul says, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, that’s the way they referred to the universe. He is Lord of the universe we’d say in modern parlance, and since He is Lord of the universe He does not dwell in temples made with hands. What’s on Paul’s mind here when he mentions man-made temples? What do you find in Athens today up on the acropolis about 200 yards away? The Parthenon, the Great Athenian Temple. I can see Paul pointing at the Parthenon and saying the Creator of the universe doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. Obviously if He created the universe and He created you, you can’t come along and box Him into a temple. Your Greek architects, for all their skill can’t contain God. For crying out loud, He made the materials your architects and construction men used to build the thing, and now you’re going to put Him in there. What attribute(s) of God does Paul proclaim? God is omnipresent, He’s immense. 

And notice verse 25. Verse 25 follows logically. It’s not wrong to use logic. We’re not saying logic is wrong, we’re just saying logic when used in rebellion against God according to the dictates of the flesh is wrong. We can’t agree to it as an ultimate commitment. Paul reasoned from the Scriptures which meant the Scriptures were ultimate and reason was just a tool to expound the Scriptures. So, verse 25 logically follows, that if God made all things and is Lord of heaven in earth then He is not served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things.  The Greeks thought that the gods and goddesses were served by man’s worship and sacrifices and that they needed man’s worship. The Greeks for example had their fertility gods and goddesses and if you wanted your crops to grow the way to get the gods to comply with this was you’d go out in the field and copulate and dig your little holes in the ground for the seed and drip some sperm in the ground and the gods and goddesses would watch this and say, “Oh, Bill wants us to make the seeds come up.” And so the gods and goddesses needed man to copulate out in the fields sort of as a stimulant to respond in history. History’s a joint product in pagan thought, the gods and goddesses plus man brings about history. And Paul says, the God I’m proclaiming to isn’t like that. He isn’t served by human hands. He doesn’t need you out copulating in the field. He doesn’t need anything at all. He doesn’t even need you. He doesn’t even need me. What kind of a god would he be if he did need you and me? A dependent god. And that’s not the God we worship. What attribute of God is this expressing? Rarely heard of but for some, one of the most fundamental. Aseity. Aseity means God is self-contained. He needs nothing outside of Himself. He’s self-sufficient. He is totally independent. He is self-sustaining. And thereby He doesn’t need you, He doesn’t need me, He doesn’t need oxygen, He doesn’t need the world. He didn’t have to create. He is totally complete in and of Himself. 

And look at the end of the verse.  Why doesn’t He need anything? Because He Himself gives to all people and forget people, people are not in the original, he’s talking about all living organisms including people. He gave them life and breath and all things; every thing necessary to sustain life. Now, if that doesn’t strike you nothing will. He’s given you everything you have, everything. Now I ask you, has there ever been a human being who has not come into contact with God? Is it really true that God’s existence is not clear? From this verse every breath you take is contact with God. Every O2/CO2 exchange in your lungs is attesting to God. No evidence for God?  Every fact is evidence of God. God is unavoidable. You can’t escape Him, I can’t escape Him, and no one can escape Him. Every fact attests to Him, every moment of every day in history at every point in the universe. Now think of the implications of this. If God gives you everything you have from your life to the oxygen you breathe to all things then what do you think it’s going to be like when you have to stand before Him and you’ve spent your whole existence and all your energy suppressing Him, suppressing Him, suppressing Him at every point and not giving thanks, not giving thanks, not giving thanks? Now, maybe for the first time in your life as a Christian you can see why eternal hell is not an overly harsh penalty. A person who has never received Jesus Christ has been in constant rebellion against God. Constant! It’s never let up for even a single moment; every moment was a moment of rebellion, every breath was given by God and every breath was used to reject Him. As Cornelius Van Til used to say, “Even to negate Christ, those who hate Him must be borne up by Him.” God gives men the tools they require even to rebel against Him. He used the analogy of a three year old child and his father. He says, “A three year old child may slap its father in his face only because the father holds it up on his knee.” Do you see how terrible this is for the unbeliever? It would be impossible for an unbeliever to reject God were it not for God giving him the tools to do it. He uses that which God meant to be used to glorify Him to reject Him. Now, is it really not clear that God is there? Only if every single moment you re-interpreted every moment of your life, my life, everyone’s life and the history of the entire universe. And that’s rebellion to the core. The only natural thing I can liken it to is when a baby is conceived in a mother and that baby grows inside the mother and is born into this world and the mother and father feed and take care of and give everything to that child in those early years of life and if the child could talk he’d be saying, you didn’t carry me in the womb, your body didn’t nourish me, your didn’t birth me, you didn’t feed me, you didn’t hold me, you didn’t change me, you didn’t teach me to walk, you didn’t pay for everything, you didn’t give me an education, you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t. That’s rebellion! 

Now, we haven’t even gotten to verse 26. All that is rammed, crammed and jammed into vv 24-25. Paul isn’t going to force people to believe or anything. But what he’s doing is he’s using the word of God just like a sword and he’s cutting deep. He’s using the word of God to cut through all the flack and all the suppression actively going on in these people’s hearts so he can penetrate to the heart of the issue which is the nature of God as Creator. He is the Creator and you are His creature and Paul says I’m going to bring you eyeball to eyeball with your Creator so you can get a small glimpse of the rebellion you’re in. Every moment of your existence is a rebellious one. 

Alright, to close let’s try to make this practical. What we have seen is Paul begins in Acts 17:22-23 to attack the Athenians so they’ll listen, so they’ll see; you know there really is a difference. If you do not do this, I don’t care who the person is, they’re not in a listening mood for you to beat your gums about Christ. Now how can you do what Paul did in verse 22-23?  Here’s a simple thing. Ask a person if they know everything, just ask them: do you know everything? If they say yes you’re done, don’t mess with them, but if you ask them if they know everything and they say no, then okay, so you don’t know everything. Now let me ask you another question; how then can you say that Bible Christianity is wrong? If you don’t know everything you don’t know enough to make that statement, do you? No. Well, then listen, would you? Stop saying the Scriptures are wrong when you don’t know everything and just shut up and sit down and listen for a minute, okay.  

And then start with the Creator-creature distinction. The God who made the world and all things in it;  just do like Paul in vv 24-25 because you’ve got to get God’s character across in some way using words you’re used to communicating with.  But do it because there are people out there who have heard about Jesus and their sin and oh yes, some of them even say I’m a Christian and yet if you ask them does God exist they say no. There have actually been people say Oh yes I believe in Jesus and the resurrection but I don’t believe God exists. Now, how in the world can you be a Christian if you don’t even admit God exists? If you don’t believe that I don’t see any possible way you could be a Christian. So you have to get the Creator-creature distinction across and then after you’ve explained all this for five or ten minutes then do this to check yourself. Stop the conversation and just ask the person, now I don’t always communicate what I intend to communicate; would you mind telling me back what you believe I have just told you about God’s character. And just listen as to whether it got through and you will be startled and depressed at the number of times that you thought you were so clear and then five minutes later you turn around and ask the person, what did I just tell you, And they come back with some gobbledygook. And you will think, my goodness, what just happened. Are we in the same room? Do we speak the same language? And you’ll have to start all over again. Don’t try to zip on over to sin and the cross and faith, just stop, go through it again, ask them what you said until they get it, then go on, but don’t rush through. You don’t have to get them understanding every attribute of God, just the basic biblical idea of God. I guarantee you when it’s all said and done you’ll spend 90% of your time where Paul spent 90% of his time, getting across the biblical view of God. But that’s the kind of people we have to witness to.