I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I am on a business trip over the weekend and into next week, so my posts may be somewhat abbreviated.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Acts 17-18.

    When Paul and Silas were in Thessolanica, certain Jews stirred up crowds against them. Initially, they attempted to find Paul and Silas to have the crowd “deal” with them. When they could not find them, they took local believers before the authorities. In other words, they got the crowd ready to kill the outsiders but were unable to get a similar response to those who were known to the locals. In Berea, they were not able to get the crowd as worked up, and when they brought someone before the authorities it was not Paul and Silas (perhaps having learned of what happened in Philippi). I find it interesting that, in order to defuse tensions, the believers in Berea escorted Paul to Athens, while Silas and Timothy remained. This is not the first time his fellow believers escorted Paul out of town, and on each of those occasions Luke uses passive verbs to describe Paul’s actions in leaving the city. There are two things we learn from Luke’s descriptions of these incidents. One is that Paul was the focus of hostility. The other is that Paul never backed down from a confrontation, others had to convince him to move on.

    Being a firm believer in logic, I have always loved Luke’s account of Paul preaching in Athens. When Paul introduced the Gospel to the Athenians he started with their existing expressions of religious belief. We can learn a lot about the development of Paul’s religious beliefs by comparing Luke’s account here to Paul’s writings. I believe that it was in Athens where Paul learned the limits of using logic to convince others to believe. Luke’s story makes it sound like those listening to Paul in Athens were very receptive of what he had to say…until he started talking about resurrection of the dead. I know today many people who like much of the philosophy which underlies Christian morality, but are unwilling to accept the idea of resurrection. Ultimately, logic is limited by the assumptions one makes. If you start by assuming that the material world is all that exists, one can never use logic to discover that there is more. At some point, you need to have faith that there is more to this world than material things.