As we return to Paul's day . . .

The ancient Greeks were interested in what makes the ‘summum bonum’ (the supreme good) in life and they considered that to be happiness, spending a lot of time trying to think and focus on how to accomplish it.

In Acts 17:16, when Paul was in Athens, the center of the Greek world and the intellectual center of the world of his day, it’s reported that “his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.”

Verse 18 reads, “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, 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.”

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In the Scofield Reference Bible, Scofield has notes about both the Epicureans and Stoics. He writes of the Epicureans, “Disciples of Epicurus, B.C. 342-271, who abandoned as hopeless the search by reason for pure truth (cf John 18:38) seeking instead true pleasure by experience.”

Of the Stoics he wrote, “Disciples of Zeno, B.C. 280, and Chrysippus, B.C. 240. This philosophy was founded on human self-sufficiency, inculcated stern self-repression, the solidarity of the race, and the unity of Deity. Epicureans and Stoics divided the apostolic world.”

Jordan explains, “They were the two dominant thinkers and culture drivers of their day and the reason was there were two extremes on how to solve the contentment issue.

“For the Epicureans it was getting, acquiring, having, conquering, owning, achieving. ‘You get enough stuff and you’ll be satisfied.’ That was a big thing in the Roman Empire: ‘Go out and conquer, conquer, conquer and we’ll be satisfied.’ That’s the dominant thinking of the Western world. Certainly, it’s the way the West and America operates. The more we can get, the bigger the better.

“Now you know it doesn’t work. The premise is what you’re looking for keeps moving. It’s elusive.

“The Stoics were the other way. They said, ‘If you desire less and less you can desire less and less until nothing matters. Just get disconnected from things.’ Now, that’s the Eastern thinking; the Buddhist mentality. ‘The way to get peace is to get less and less and be detached until it just doesn’t matter.’

“For the Stoics, the big illustration of that is they would take a valuable vase and break it and say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ A child would die and they’d say, ‘It doesn’t really matter. Doesn’t hurt.’ And you were to just grin-and-bear-it kind of a thing. That way it can’t impact you.

“But that doesn’t work either, does it? Somebody once said, ‘Stoics have made their heart a desert and called it peace.’ You can’t do that because things DO matter! God put a conscience inside of you and things do matter. Right and wrong does matter.

"In Chicago, a 12-year-old gang member shoots an 11-year-old kid and the commentary about it is, ‘How can you have children care nothing about life that they’re just willing to murder each other?!’

"That is the Stoic mentality. You’re just more and more detached from anything that matters until nothing matters and so there’s no value in anything. But that just makes for more discontentment.”