Acts 17:23-27
The Unknown God: Paul at the Areopagus - Acts 17:23-27
Acts 17:23-27 (NIVUK)
23 'For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.'
Commentary
Revd. Mark Fletcher: And perhaps genuine intellectual inquiry is actually rare because it requires humility. It requires a willingness to accept when you don’t know or that you’re wrong. And perhaps we don’t find God because we don’t want to face the consequences of finding God. If we say that we seek the truth, we need to be willing to live with the consequences of the truth. And God is not a tame God. He requires our lives and our hearts. But that phrase, he is not far from each one of us, is wonderful and really important. It’s, I think, one of the defining things about Christian theology. We talk about transcendence and immanence. So transcendence is the God who is above the heavens, but immanence is a God who is nevertheless not far from each of us. He is sort of just out of reach. And if we ask and seek in humility and faith, he will allow himself to be found by us.