Acts 17:16-34
Many Religious Beliefs
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” 33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
Genesis 3:1-24
Our Fall from Grace
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Romans 1:18-32
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Exodus 20:1-17
God Gives Us the Ten Commandments
1 And God spoke all these words:
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
13 “You shall not murder.
14 “You shall not commit adultery.
15 “You shall not steal.
16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
John 14:5-7
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
Matthew 9:9-13
The Good Doctor Came for Sinners
9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Acts 4:12
Salvation is Found in Only Jesus
12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.
Back two thousand years ago, when Paul's gave his Sermon in Athens there were many different religious beliefs and ideas...As Paul walked around Athens he saw that the city was full of idols....Thus many idols represented many things the people could believe in...So Paul reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there about their beliefs and their idols...A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him...Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?”...Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.”...They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection...Jesus was completely new to them...He would be foreign to their ideas and beliefs...The people Paul was debating and discussing Jesus with, took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?...You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.”...(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)...Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious...Paul said he had seen their altar with this inscription: to an unknown god...The people of Athens and in the country of Greece, believed in many different religions...And the country of Greece believed in many of these idols...The people of Athens and Greece thought the things about what they believed in were true...
Today there is still many people believing in different religions...And each of us believe in our own personal religion for really one basic reason...The basic reason is because each of us see our religion as the truth...When we think about this, we believe that our religion holds exclusive truth...And so each religion sees there belief to be true -and theirs is the only one exclusively true religion...And really the belief that we have about the other different world religion's and different people believing in them is not something new or enlightening...Paul saw this two thousand years ago as he walked around and visited and traveled around the different cities of the world...
And though each of us believe his or her religion is exclusively true, and there are many religions -that does not mean there is truth and something not profound in all religions...I would venture to say that most believe that their religion holds some sacredness...I believe that there is some reality backing each of the major religions, or people would not be believing in them for long periods of time...There is something true about each of the religions...There are some facts surrounding each of the religions...There is some sincere, some honesty, and some truthfulness in the major religions...Looking for Truth in the differing religions carries with it an exclusivity, and a uniqueness...This is because everyone of them cannot be true...This is because the different religions differ...But is there one religion that is truer than all the others?...Is there one religion based on Truth?...
Different people have different ideas on the subject of different world religions...G. K. Chesterton said according to most "scholars" when comparing the religions, Christianity and Buddhism are much alike...Peter Kreeft says this about the different religions...By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach...Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority...Then comes Protestantism and any "separated brethren" who keep the Christian essentials as found in Scripture...Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ...Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies...Fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism; Sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos; Seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics; Eighth, idolatry; and Ninth, Satanism...To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat...
C. S. Lewis on the subject of different world religions, narrowed his view down to two religions...He said, “I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism...(Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies...Real Paganism is dead...All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.)...There isn't really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider...We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’...By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions...By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions...Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly...And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity...But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly...The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side...The Brahmin hermit doesn't bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics...But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition...It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord...The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick...That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”...
In summing up Lewis he stated that if you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong through and through...But if you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake...If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hints of truth...Lewis said when he was an atheist he had to try to persuade himself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when he became a Christian he was able to take a more liberal view...But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong...As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer to being right than others...In the end, there can only be one true and exclusive religion...
If all religions could be lumped together this might help us to see God a little better...Creation shows us He exists, and all people and their religions can see creation and nature...I think in Paul's letter to the Romans on God and seeing creation gave rise to some of the old religions...God can be seen in nature and the universe and the skies...But there is something apart from creation...And is completely different than looking external and around ourselves...It is when we start looking at the completely opposite -looking within ourselves...We can start believing somehow in moral laws...These moral laws seem to exist and come from somewhere, and people around the world know they ought to be good and that human rights and treating others is the right thing to do, so justice and being just is right...Where does this belief of treating others properly and justice come from?...God gave us the Ten Commandments thousands of years ago, as His people were exiting Egypt during the Exodus ...And in the Ten Commandments, we read that He is a moral God...
So if all the great world religions hold some great truths, then maybe God has put some of Himself in each of the other religions...But if God is in none of any of the other religions, then it might be harder to believe that He is quite near to us, and is this Unique and Absolute Truth...However, even if God has somehow peppered Himself in each of the other religions, they are still different...And some quite different...So in religion as in arithmetic there can only be one right answer to the sum...
I believe that the world is broken...As I read the news each day, I see there are many problems in and around the world...There seems to be this pull, this battle between good and evil...It seems to me, we must have fallen from grace many years ago, and sinned...I believe I am a sinner...We do need a Good Doctor to help us who have sinned...We do need a Savior...One who can fix, heal, and cure the sins of this world...There is something unique about Jesus in this respect...Christianity is centered around Jesus...He stood up and said He is the only way to God...He stood up and said He can forgive people of their sins...He convinced His closest followers that only He can bring us salvation from our sins and we can only be saved Him...He stood up and said He is a Way of Life, and the Way to Life...He said when we know Him (Jesus), then we will know God and have seen God...And He said He is the Truth to all these things...I find Truth in His Words...
In Christianity it has a Man who came to earth and is like no other...He is the difference in all the other religions...There is a difference between Christianity and all the other religions, and that distance is an eternity because of Him...There is some truth in many religions, but one religion has a Man who calls Himself Truth, and is Truth...