Acts 17
Read: Acts 17
In this chapter, Paul meets two kinds of people; the Bereans and the Areopagites. These two groups illustrate some important things about the way people receive information. The Bereans were a people that were not naive. They did not just believe something because they were told to. The passage says that they “received the word with eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” As a result, many of them believed. It is vitally important to know what the Scriptures say because without them, we don’t know truth from falsehood. The Areopagites on the other hand were a curious people, who “spent their time on nothing else but telling or hearing something new.” Like the Bereans, these people had a great desire to learn. However, unlike the Bereans, they were not seeking to find out whether or not the things they were learning were actually true.
We can apply these two different responses to our lives today because I think we have very similar tendencies. While I was in seminary, I saw these two types of people regularly. There were those who were there just to get a degree. They wanted to get a job in ministry, but they didn’t seem to care if they actually learned the material or really wrestled with the scriptures to prepare themselves. Others were always seeking to find out what was true and wrestled with what they were learning. Just because someone has a PhD in theology, Biblical languages, or New Testament studies does not mean that they are teaching truth. In fact that is how many in non-orthodox seminaries lead people astray. These well educated professors teach things that aren’t true and no one is willing to check their Bibles to see if it lines up with what God says.
My encouragement for you today is simple: don’t believe everything you hear. Test it, search the scriptures, and pray about it. Don’t believe what I say or what anyone else says unless it lines up with scripture. Historically before the Protestant Reformation, the Bible was only printed in Latin in the Catholic Church. The priests would tell people what the Bible said, but the people could not read Latin so they just trusted in what the priests told them. Long story short, the priests did not teach them the truth about a lot of things, but the people didn’t know any better. Because of this the Church amassed great power, and they didn’t want to give it up. They could tell the people anything and they would believe it. Then a few individuals came along and started protesting against them and decided to translate the Bible into languages that the common people could understand. Many of these individuals died for that cause. Today many of us have multiple Bibles in our homes or on our phones. We have no excuse for believing false teaching other than laziness.
