“Bible places: Berea”
Acts 17:10-15
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Hendrik Hanegraaff is the president of the Creation Research Institute and the host of a radio show called, “Bible Answer Man.” He’s written twenty-five books like, The Complete Bible Answer Book, Afterlife: What You Need to Know about Heaven, and Has God Spoken? Proof of the Bible’s Divine Inspiration. His latest book, Muslim: What You Need to Know about the World’s Fastest Growing Religion, was published in October of this past year.
But his faith wasn’t always what it is today.
He grew up in a Christian home. His father read the Bible at mealtimes and he attended church and Sunday School every Sunday.
But there was a catch. You see, he knew that if he wanted to find true peace and fulfillment, he had to repent and turn from his life of sin, and then be willing to receive Jesus as his Lord and Savior. And that, he said, he just could not do. So instead of repentance, he chose rebellion.
At first, he said it wasn’t hard to make that transition. While he read the Bible at home and in church, his school textbooks told him something else. There he read that man had arisen from primordial slime, that atoms evolved into amoebas, that invertebrates became vertebrates, and that a monkey eventually became a man. And he was told that “true men of science and learning” had “proven” that the Bible was little more than myth and superstition, and that a God-figure was a figment of his own imagination.
But for years, in spite of his success, he struggled with a sense of emptiness and loneliness. He couldn’t help but think that something was desperately wrong.
Until, one wet, windy, January night, three people from a local Ft. Lauderdale church knocked on his door. And as they sat to visit, they talked about Jesus, and they told him that God had a plan for his life. And they said that, the very next week, their church was sponsoring a seminar on origins, where they would examine both evolution and creation on the basis of science. And with that, they left.
And as he attended that seminar the following Saturday morning, he learned that he wasn’t rejecting God because of evidence for evolution. Instead, he was refusing to yield his life to God’s sovereign control.
His real problem wasn’t science. It was rebellion.
Three months later, after examining the evidence, he humbly knelt beside his bed and asked the Creator and Redeemer of the world to be his Savior and Lord. And Jesus, he said, God incarnate, became as real to him as the very flesh on his bones.
So it was for the people of a town called Berea. Please turn in your Bible to page 1178 as I read the words of our text. Acts chapter 17, beginning at verse 10: “The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue.”
We’ll stop there for just a moment.
If you know anything about the apostle Paul, you know it’s something he would often do. Glance back for a moment to chapter 17, verse 1. There it says: “Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.’”
So why would Paul visit the synagogue first? Why not the coliseum or the marketplace?
For one thing, he was a Jew. He knew their language, their beliefs, and their customs. He knew them better, and could speak to them better, than he could to anyone else.
But for another, it was really part of God’s plan. As Paul himself would later write in his letter to the Romans: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
But in Thessalonica, things didn’t go as well as he had planned. Look at chapter 17, verse 5: “But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.’”
So what to do? Verse 10: “The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea.”
So what do we know about Berea? Not a lot. It was about fifty miles from Thessalonica, some three days on foot. It was an out-of-the-way place (good thing when men from Thessalonica wanted him dead!), and it lay just north of Mt. Olympus. It was the home of as many as 60,000 people.
But the people of Berea were very different than the people of Thessalonica. In Thessalonica, when Paul preached, the people started a riot and wanted him dead. But not Berea.
Look at verse 11: “Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”
“More noble,” it says. “Now these Jews were more noble…”
Allow me to digress for just a moment, for those words bear a closer look.
In the original language, the word for “more noble” comes from the word “eugenes.” (It’s actually how we get the name “Eugene”!) It’s a word that means “well-born,” “open-minded,” “not prejudiced or hostile, but is willing to give a fair hearing.”
There in verse 11, the Greek paints a word-picture of a ravenously hungry man who devours the food set before him, or an extremely thirsty man who’s finally given something to drink.
There in Berea, the people were full of enthusiasm, readiness, and a zeal to hear the Word of God.
Pretend for a moment, that you’re a first-century Berean Jew. And suppose that, one Saturday morning, a stranger came to your synagogue and asked to address the congregation. He said his name was Paul, and he’s brought exciting news that the long-awaited Messiah has finally come! He didn’t restore the kingdom to Israel like you expected. In fact, the Romans nailed Him to a cross. But, he said, that’s exactly what was supposed to happen, and he even proved it from Scripture.
Even more, who was preaching? None other than the apostle Paul--certainly the most famous apostle and theologian of the early church, the human author of thirteen New Testament books. He cast out a demon from a slave girl, and one night, when he sang in prison, the earth shook, chains fell off, and the doors broke open.
Still what did they do? Verse 11: “They examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”
Now let me ask you a question--what do you have to do before you can examine the Scriptures daily? You have to know the Scriptures! You can’t examine them if you don’t even know them in the first place!
But how many people really know the Scriptures?
Researchers George Gallup and Jim Castelli once put the problem like this--they said: “Americans revere the Bible--but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.”
For example, they say that fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many Christians can’t identify more than two or three of the disciples. And they say that some sixty percent of Americans can’t name even five of the Ten Commandments.
No wonder people break them all the time--they don’t even know what they are!
And there’s more! The Barna research group found that twelve percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, fifty percent think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, that Joshua was the son of a nun, (actually, that’s Joshua, son of Nun), and that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham.
We are in big trouble.
And if that’s not bad enough, a lack of Biblical literacy leads to a lack of Biblical doctrine, for while most Americans believe there is a heaven, almost half believe there are many ways to get there. And there’s no telling what they think about Jesus, sin, hell, and salvation.
Ever heard of Stacey Irvine? Probably not. She’s a British seventeen-year-old who, for the last fifteen years, has eaten nothing but Chicken McNuggets.
She has a loving mother and two siblings who all eat perfectly fine. But for some strange reason, ever since she was two, she has refused to eat anything except Chicken McNuggets. She said, “I love them so much, they were all I would eat...Mum gave up giving me anything else years ago.”
So it was really no wonder that, one day, she collapsed, couldn’t breathe, was taken to a hospital where she was diagnosed with anemia, and nearly died.
And I can’t say that we’re that much better! For while we live in a “land of plenty,” where every one of us has at least one Bible, some even three, where a Bible app is available on any computer, smartphone or tablet, for free, we settle for little more than a box of Chicken McNuggets.
How desperately we need to hear the words of Psalm 1: “Blessed is the man whose delight is in the Word of the Lord, on which he meditates day and night,” and the words of Jeremiah 15: “Your words are what sustain me; they are food to my hungry soul.”
But what do we find when we read the Word of God? We find a God who judges justly, who promises, if we fail to follow Him, to give us exactly what we deserve--an eternity without Him. Yet in that Word we find that, by His indescribable, incomprehensible, unfathomable mercy, through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus, there is grace and strength and blessing.
No one could love us more than that!
So before we leave this text, I can’t but ask the question--how can be more like the people of Berea, and less like the people of Thessalonica?
Let the Word of God be part of who you are, what you do, and where you live. Let it be the first thing on your mind in the morning, and the very last thing at night. Read it, mark it, learn it, and inwardly digest it. And when you do, you’ll have the hope of everlasting life.
Back in the late 1800s, pastor and hymnwriter William How put it like this: “O Word of God Incarnate, O Wisdom from on high, O Truth unchanged, unchanging, O Light of our dark sky; we praise Thee for the radiance that from the hallowed page, a lantern to our footsteps, shines on from age to age.”
We thank You, dear Father, for the people of Berea, and their love for Your rich and powerful Word. May it also be our hope and joy, our strength, and our place of refuge, for Jesus’ sake. Amen