Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: December 5

“Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? Other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection” ~ Acts 17:18

The Epicureans, who had abandoned the search for truth through the process of reason, had begun to live solely for the experience of pleasure.

The Stoics, whose entire philosophy centered in complete self-sufficiency, lived by the stearn rule of self-repression.

How mad these two schools of thinkers must have thought Paul! Their two philosophies divided the entire period of thought at that period, although they obviously held an intellectual respect for each other. But even though the Greeks were always open to new thought or the possibility of a lengthy discussion, they certainly quite understandably thought Paul a “babbler.”

After all, he preached “Christ and him crucified.” He “preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.”

It sounded so simple they thought him foolish. From the intellectual viewpoint, I [Eugenia Price, the author] quite understand their verdict. The ancient Greeks, like myself, up to the time of my conversion to Christ, and like every other modern-day “greek” who demands to grasp the Gospel intellectually, is insulted at the simplicity of “believing” that Jesus was God showing us His heart!

It is more than foolish for those of us who have received the truth, to condemn those who still demand to understand it. They are still in spiritual darkness and we only increase that darkness by not understanding them. God’s Word attempts to make this very clear to us:

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God … we preach Christ crucified … unto the Greeks foolishness.”