Daily Devotional · Acts 17:22–23
Unknown God, Now Known
Reflection
"Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: 'People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 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.'" Athens was the intellectual capital of the ancient world. Its Areopagus (Mars Hill) was the council that deliberated on matters of religion and philosophy. When Paul arrived and began preaching in the marketplace, the philosophers brought him there to explain this "strange doctrine." Paul's approach is one of the most studied pieces of contextual evangelism in the New Testament. He did not begin with a Jewish framework, Torah quotations, or the history of Israel. He began with what his audience already had. "I see that in every way you are very religious." Not a critique — an observation of genuine religiosity. He had been troubled by the idols (v. 16), but he opened with what he could affirm. The Unknown God altar was the doorway. Whatever the Greeks had been reaching toward in their religious searching, whatever unnamed reality they sensed was there but could not name — Paul said: this is what I am going to tell you about. He then moved from the unknown to the known: the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by human hands. He gives life and breath to all people. From one man He made all nations. He determined their times and their places "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." And then: Jesus and the resurrection.
Background
The Areopagus speech is considered one of the most sophisticated pieces of contextual apologetics in the New Testament. Paul quoted Greek poets (Epimenides: "in him we live and move and have our being"; Aratus: "we are his offspring") to build common ground before the gospel announcement. The response was mixed: some sneered at the resurrection, some said "we want to hear more," and some believed — including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris.
Truth
God has not left Himself without witness in any culture (Acts 14:17). Every human culture contains an altar to an Unknown God — a reaching toward the divine that cannot be fully explained by natural means. The gospel does not tear down this reaching; it names what was being sought. Paul found the Unknown God altar and said: this is Him.
Application
Who in your life has an altar to an Unknown God — a genuine spiritual longing, an unnamed awareness of something more, a searching that has not yet found its destination? Don't tear down their search. Find the altar. Learn what they are reaching for. Then, like Paul, name what they have been reaching toward: this is what I am going to tell you about.