NLT Illustrated Study Bible - Book of Acts - Flipbook - Page 54
2010
The Unknown God
Acts 17:16-32
Ps 50:7-15
Isa 42:5-7
Rom 1:18-32
Col 1:15-23; 2:6-12
1 Thes 1:9-10
Heb 1:1-4
When Paul spoke to the Areopagus, the “high
council of the city” of Athens (17:19), he
was speaking to people who did not share
his faith in the God of Abraham and Moses
who had revealed himself “many times and
in many ways to [their] ancestors through
the prophets” (Heb 1:1). The members of
his audience had a very different definition
of the divine. A host of divinities inhab
ited their world, and the common people
retained much of their belief in the ancient
gods. But many of the cultural elite of Ath
ens no longer believed in the gods in any
literal sense. Instead, they held to either a
form of materialism (the physical is every
thing) or pantheism (the divine inhabits
everything).
What they all shared in common was the
complete absence of the idea of a personal
God who would, or even could, reveal him
self to people specifically and verbally in
time and history. Their myths told of the
activities of the gods long ago, but they did
not have faith that the ultimate reality, God
himself, was known to them, or even could
be known. Instead, they reasoned and dis
cussed “the latest ideas,” hoping for a better
understanding of the nature of things.
When Paul spoke in that context, he used
their own poets to proclaim things that they
could barely comprehend: That the God who
made everything is both personal and know
able; that he revealed himself clearly, his
torically, and definitively in Jesus Christ; that
death is not followed by either the cessation
of existence or the migration of the soul, but
by judgment; and that the proof of all of this
is the resurrection of Christ from the dead.
What was foolishness to most of the
Greeks of Athens turns out to be the ultimate
truth: God is knowable, and can be known
through Jesus Christ.
Paul preaches in Athens, Ölauf Leinwant, 19th century
Greek Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise, Fyodor Bronnikov, 1869
