They love these people in front of them who bear the image of the true God, and so they want them to turn from idols to the true God. Paul and Barnabas love the God who has made, saved, and kept them, and so they wants others to know, love and worship him too. And it isn’t simply that they recognise God as the source of all being; the God Paul declares to the people is the kind God, the source of all joy. 

In Acts 14:6, Paul and Barnabas arrive in Lystra, a city that must be one of the most pagan places we encounter in the Acts of the Apostles. This seems far, far away from the Jerusalem of Acts 2 where people are cut to the heart as they realise that Jesus truly is the Messiah they had been expecting for centuries. And yet, even here, the grace of God is at work – and not only through the preaching of the apostles.
Paul and Barnabas bring about the healing of a man who had been unable to walk and so, amazed at what they have seen, the people of the city begin to shout praise. Trouble is, they aren’t shouting praise for the God who has healed the man, they are worshipping Zeus and Hermes; ancient Greek deities. And, while Zeus is right at the top of the pantheon, both he and Hermes are no gods at all. As Psalm 115 says,
They have mouths, but cannot speak,eyes, but they cannot see;they have ears, but cannot hear,noses, but they cannot smell;they have hands, but cannot feel,feet, but they cannot walk;nor can they utter a sound with their throats.Those who make them will be like them,and so will all who trust in them.
In fact, because the people seeing the healing decide that Barnabas and Paul must themselves be Zeus and Hermes, they are the ones who receive the praise. How would you feel if the people of a city you’d just arrived in decided to bring sacrifices and worship you? Might there not be a temptation to enjoy the adulation?
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I know many people who have become Christians from non-Christian family backgrounds. They want to live a life honouring the true God but need to set up new family traditions and ways of living. What does it look like to be a Christian husband? What does it look like to live a single life that is faithful to God? These are questions their parents never asked or attempted to answer, yet they are trying to do these things day by day. And, by God’s grace, they are setting up ways of life that might well not only influence themselves but their families and those around them.

Every family falls into patterns of doing things. It can be something minor, like placing the cups in the cupboard upside down when you have washed and dried them. Or it might be something major, like a pattern of responding to disagreements with anger or resentment with little forgiveness or grace. Some families value sport above all other things, while others value reading with every member of the family engaged in a book of their choice.
There can be something very positive about family traditions. But there can also be something terribly destructive. Following other religions often continues for generations. Big issues like drunkenness and violence also have a tendency to be passed on from parents to children.
If you’ve grown up in a destructive family tradition, or a family who have followed another god than the true God, you might feel negative or despondent about it. All of us are a product, to a significant degree, of the way we have been brought up. Yet there is always hope; you can change the path set before you by your parents.
We see this in the latter chapters of 2 Kings. The family line of kings in Judah was almost entirely negative. Most kings tolerated the high places where people worshipped other gods. Some of the kings went far further than this, actively following other gods and persecuting the prophets of the true God. What hope was there that a child born into this kind of family would end up living a faithful life?
Well, we do see this on a couple of occasions. Hezekiah was the son of Ahaz, a man who built a major altar in the temple to another god.
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A book can almost have a personality. It was written by somebody, and it is about something. Neither of these things can be said of a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad. They are not written at all and are not about anything. After libraries have all closed down or become free computer centers, there will still be people like me, feeling like monks in monasteries preserving books in their own private libraries.

There was the Great Flood. There were the Ten Plagues of Egypt. There was the Fall of Rome. There was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the Fall of Constantinople. And then this: The Encyclopedia Britannica went out of print.
While the Simpsons just celebrated its 500th show, the world’s greatest learned publication couldn’t even make it to its 250th anniversary. Will the last person who even knows what Western civilization is please turn out the lights?
I submit that this is the most significant cultural event of the last fifty years. No. Make that a hundred. The New Dark Ages are upon us.
T. S. Eliot ended his poem, “The Hollow Men,” with the words:
This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang, but with a whimper.
The sing-song rhythm of the first three lines evokes a child’s careless playground chant, as if Eliot meant to say that the end of the world would be attended with a general lack of awareness that anything significant was really happening–and that, when it did happen, it might go unremarked or even unnoticed.
If you want proof that our own culture is experiencing this very kind of end, just look at the malaise with which we have greeted the Britannica announcement. Note the general cultural yawn directed toward the announcement that they will be suspending their print edition.
The best anyone could do was to give the glib assurance that there was nothing to worry about, since Britannica will continue in an electronic edition.
If someone important to you died, would you find comfort from being told that he or she would continue on in a digital form? No. Encyclopedia Britannica is dead. We now have only its electronic ghost.
Our cultural landscape is fast becoming welter and waste. Before the barbarian onslaught of the computer, one would go to a place and read a thing. There was a library, and it had books, and one went there to read them. Go into a library now, and look to the right, where there are rows of shelves of books, but no people. Then look to the left, where there are rows and rows of people–sitting at computers.
Soon the shelves will be gone, the books sold, leaving only the people, staring mesmerized at their screens. They won’t even notice that the books have been taken away.
Every technological revolution has its benefits—and its casualties. The invention of writing was itself a technological revolution. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato tells a story about the old god Theuth, the inventor of many arts, including arithmetic and geometry. But his greatest discovery, said Plato, “was the use of letters.” He came one day to Thamus, the Egyptian god-king, who dwelt in Thebes. Theuth presented his great invention, writing, to the king. “This,” said Theuth,”will make the Egyptians wiser. It will increase their memory and improve their wit.” But the Egyptian king was not impressed.
“Because these letters are like your own offspring,” he said, “you are blind to their faults. This discovery of yours will only create forgetfulness in the learner’s soul because he will no longer need to use his memory. He will trust to the written characters instead of his memory, and will not remember them himself. These letters of yours may help in reminiscence, but they are not an aid to memory. Your hearers will become, not disciples of the truth, but of a semblance of truth only. They will be hearers of many things, but they will learn nothing.”
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