Acts 17:22 ¶ Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. 24 God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; 25 Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; 26 And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; 27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: 28 For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. 29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. 30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: 31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.
In many locations in the ancient Roman world there were altars and
monuments to an unknown god or goddess. Christian writers like to say that Epimenides,
a pagan poet and philosopher that Paul will quote in his argument, told the
Athenians that the way to end a plague centuries before was to build an altar
to a god they had not offered sacrifices to although this is a legend which the
writer Pausanias said was a different person in a different city. What I can
verify, though, is that the Greeks worshipped a dozen main gods and many lesser
gods. The Unknown God was sometimes sworn to by the Greeks and even had a
temple dedicated to him. Just think of it, that there was a god and the Greeks
didn’t know what his name was. Paul tells them that this is the God who created
all things who they did not know.
Fundamentalist Christians insist that Allah is a devil and that
the Muslims offer worship to this devil. However, Muslims and Arab Christians
say Allah to mean the God who created everything and none of them imagine they
are worshipping a devil and we shut off all conversation when we say something
like that. Paul, if alive today, would not only argue with them that Allah was
the same God as the God of the Bible but he would go on to explain who Jesus is,
the visible image of that invisible God. I daresay that Paul would probably be
able be able to quote from the Koran in his arguments if it happened today
using their own words against their argument like a good lawyer. We are going
to see that Paul had no problem using a nonbeliever’s system of belief against that
nonbelievers own argument.
Paul declares that the true God does not reside in a temple like
the pagan gods. His glory filled the Hebrew temple but God’s abode is in Heaven
and yet He is omnipresent or everywhere. Paul explains who the real God is. He
explains that all men, and that would include everyone from the pygmy in
Central Africa to the Scottish Highlander are made of one blood and that their
dispersal around the world was by His will. The American racist who strangely
uses this verse about God setting the bounds of their habitations in
wanting to relocate American Blacks to Africa would not even consider that
first, most Black people’s ancestors were kidnapped and brought here by immoral
and violent means and secondly, that by that argument he should return to the
Europe his ancestors left.
The Greeks considered Zeus, their highest god, to be the creator
of heaven and earth. Apart from the myths about him and other gods mating with
human women, an obviously contrived cultural reference to actual history when
the sons of God came to earth to mate with human women in Genesis Zeus was
considered an ideal. According to one source; “Zeus is understood to be the
absolute good; he is ungenerated, everlasting, the father of himself, the
father and pre-eminent creator of all other things.”[1]
But Zeus has a problem in that he is confined by his all too human
passions. Still, Paul will use him as representing the true God in type, and we
all know that types fall apart at some point.
Paul quotes two pagan poets here. In verse 28 he quotes from a
poem by the Greek philosopher Epimenides, and his poem Cretica spoken to
Zeus, which Paul also quotes in Titus 1:12.
They fashioned a tomb
for you, holy and high one,
Cretans,
always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are
not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you
we live and move and have our being.[2]
For we are also his offspring is said to be a quote
of a line from the Greek poet, Aratus, in his poem, Phenomena. Remember
that they thought of Zeus as the greatest god.
From Zeus let us
begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed;
full of Zeus are all
the streets and all the market-places of men;
full is the sea and
the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus.
For we are also his
offspring; ...[3]
Please do not make the
mistake of some liberal Christians who say that because Paul quoted these pagan
poets that they were inspired by God. The text doesn’t say that and Paul is
merely using their own words in his argument, not imparting divine inspiration
to a pagan. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The heathen world on a
regular basis emerges accidentally with the truth.
Paul makes His point, a
very important point, that God has been relatively patient with mankind and his
fantasies until now but that it is time for mankind to repent or change their
minds, turn from their idolatry, and turn to the true God through Christ the
Messiah, that man whom he hath ordained.
1Timothy 2:5 For there is
one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
[1] Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of
a Medieval Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) Kindle
Edition. P.295.
[2] Harris, J. Rendel, (Oct 1906). "The Cretans always liars", The
Expositor, Seventh series. 2: 305–17 as referenced by www.wikipedia.com at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides (accessed on 12 July 2020).
[3] Aratus, Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams. Lycophron, Translated by
Mair, A. W. & G. R. Loeb Classical Library Volume 129 (London: William
Heinemann, 1921), https://www.theoi.com/Text/AratusPhaenomena.html. (accessed on 12 July 2020).
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