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By Pastor Glenn Pease
Arthur Constance and a friend were watching squirrels and chipmunks gathering nuts in Queens Park in Toronto and then looking for a place to bury them.
He made comment to his friends that the Indians use to watch squirrels and chipmunks to gage the severity of the winter.
If they were very busy it meant a hard winter coming.
It is remarkable he said that God gave these little creatures such a built in wisdom.
But his friend, with a note of skepticism responded, "I suppose you know that they forget where they hide half of them?
It is a pity God did not give them better memories."
He was a bit shaken, for it did seem like a defeat to be so forgetful, and it seemed like a flaw in God's plan.
A few months later Constance read and extract from Forestry Digest, which was titled "Chipmunks plant 17 thousand trees per acre."
Researchers had found that squirrels and chipmunks are responsible for planting all these trees because they do forget where they hide their nuts.
That which seemed to be a defect in God's plan all of a sudden became a part of a plan of superior wisdom.
By forgetting half of their hidings they guaranteed there would be food for future generations of squirrels and chipmunks, plus a forest where many other creatures in their environment.
The lesson he learned, and that which all of us have to learn, is that no matter how much you know about anything, you do not know enough until you see how it glorifies God.
It may have a negative slant until you discover a positive purpose it has in God's plan.
The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, and this is the chief purpose of all that God has created.
This means that the Christian is to pursue every subject until it in some way leads him to praise God who is the truth.
In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
The intellectual goal of all Christian studies is to relate every subject to Christ, and see in them that which exalts His wisdom as creator and redeemer.
We want to look at the only man we know of in the New Testament who rivaled Paul for the title of the greatest intellect of the New Testament.
Apollos is his name, and everything about this man is a challenge to the intellect.
Just look at the vocabulary connected with him in these few verses of Acts 18 where he is first brought on the stage of Christian history.
In verse 24 he is called a learned man.
He is the only man in the Bible called by this word.
He is said to have a thorough knowledge of Scripture.
In verse 25 it says he had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he taught himself about Jesus accurately.
In verse 26 we read that he had the way of God explained to him more adequately.
In verse 28 we see him refuting the Jews in public debate and proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
Here was a brilliant and bold orator who was able to debate with great effectiveness.
It is no wonder that he is considered one of the three most educated and trained men of the New Testament.
The other two are Paul and Dr. Luke, who was responsible for telling us about these other two.
Had Dr. Luke not revealed the existence of Apollos, we would never had known the role he played in the early church.
Paul refers to him as his friend and rival in Corinth, but we would not have known how he ever merited such a status had Dr. Luke told us.
Luke puts Paul on the back burner for awhile an devotes more space to Apollos than he does to any of his close companions except Timothy and Titus.
Dr. Luke tells us enough about Apollos so that we have in him a fascinating study of one of the giant intellects of the early church.
To study this man is not only of value for the graduates we are recognizing today, but for all of us, for the knowledge of how God works in history through people leads us all to glorify God and enjoy Him all the more.
We want to look at this learned man from 3 points of view.
First-
I. HIS PREPARATION IN LEARNING.
The amazing thing about the education background of Apollos is that the more you study it the more you see the hand of God in history.
Verse 25 says Apollos was a native of Alexandria.
That has little significance to us until we realize that Alexandria was not just the capital of Egypt, but it was the intellectual of the ancient world.
It had the world's largest and most famous library with anywhere from 600 thousand to a million volumes.
Max Muller says the founding of the University of Alexandria was the beginning of the third great epoch in the history of civilization.
It was a university where man was on the cutting edge of intellectual progress.
They did original research, and schools of science and literature were formed for the first time.
Scholars from Alexandria were in demand all over the world.
1.
This is where Euclid wrote his famous Elements Of Geometry.
2. This is where Ptolemy spent 40 years, and published his studies of the universe that held sway for many centuries.
His math is still the basis for trigonometry today.
3.
This is where the works of Homer and great classics were preserved.
4. It was the center of the philosophic world for centuries.
This was the home town of Apollos, and he was a learned man.
It was no accident that he came out of Alexandria.
Everything about this city reeks of learnedness, but also of the providence of God in history.
Alexandria the Great built a road out to the island city of Tyre and destroyed it, and thereby fulfilled the prophecy of Ezekiel.
Then he marched on Egypt and conquered it.
In 331 B.C. Alexandria the Great saw the strategic possibilities of an island in the Delta of Egypt, and he ordered that a city be erected there in his name.
It was to be the best and most beautiful city of the ancient world.
Deinocrates, the greatest living architect, famous for building the temple of Diana was given the job.
We don't have time to describe its many palaces and parks.
But when Alexander died he ruled the whole world of his day, but he was buried in a golden casket in Alexandria.
Mark, the Gospel author, was also buried here for many centuries before his body was moved.
The largest merchant ships in the world were built here, and battleships that held a thousand men.
Its 400-foot tower of white stone became one of the ancient wonders of the world.
It was at its peak a city of 800 thousand people.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "So what!"
What do we care about some fancy pagan city built by Alexander the Great?
We should care because God cared, and he use Alexander the Great and this great city of his to prepare the world for the Gospel.
Alexander came on the scene just when Greek culture was at its intellectual peak, and Aristotle was his teacher.
Alexander was a great lover of learning, and he wanted the whole world to benefit from the wisdom of the Greeks.
The result was that he brought Greek culture to every land he conquered.
He made the Greek language the universal language.
He gave slaves and education so that they in turn could teach their masters.
In the New Testament world there was an estimated 6 millions slaves, and many of them were teaching Greek to the children of the Roman masters.
The point is, Alexander was the key man in God's plan to bring his son into a Greek thinking world and spread the Gospel by means of a Greek book, which is the New Testament.
But God did not forget the Old Testament.
It was vital that the whole Bible be in Greek.
How could God bring about such massive intellectual challenge as that?
The Hebrew Bible had never been translated into another language.
The answer was Alexandria.
The Jews were good scholars, and they were accepted in this intellectual center, just as they are today in the great places of learning.
Ptolomy I of Alexandria had 30 thousand Jews in his army, and when Cleopatra ruled Alexandria two of her Generals were Jews.
Many of the most influential Jewish writing came out of Alexandria.
It became the center of Jewish and Greek interaction.
The two were setting the stage for Christianity.
These Jews were close to the Gentiles and were accepting the Greek culture.
They wanted their Hebrew Bible in Greek, and so here in Alexandria the Hebrew Bible was for the first time translated into another language in 280 B.C.
This Greek Old Testament was called the Septuagint, which is often referred to as LXX, because of the 70 who translated it.
It was a pioneering work that changed the course of history and made Alexandria a center of Bible study for many centuries.
What does all this have to do with Apollos?
Note that verse 24 says he had a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures.
It was the Septuagint that he had this knowledge of.
He was an authority in the Greek Bible, which became the Bible of the early Christians.
When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament it was usually this Bible from Alexandria.
Apollos was a Jew, but was one with the Greek mind, and as a Christian that was a perfect combination for accomplishing the goal of making the Jews and Gentiles one in Christ.
This was all happening because of God's preparing the world for the Gospel through Alexander the Great and this great city of learning.
Apollos was not the only great Christian scholar to come out of Alexandria.
The first theological school in Christianity was founded in Alexandria.
Men whose works are still read today headed that school, such as Clement and Origen.
By the fourth century Alexandria was the theological center of Christendom, and ten councils were held there.
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