for, passing through and beholding your shrines, I found also an altar on which was inscribed, To the unknown God. Whom therefore ye reverence, not knowing [him], him I announce to you.
Paul walks through a city full of shrines and finds one altar that quietly admits defeat: its god has no name. That inscription becomes his text. On the Areopagus — the hill in Athens where the city council met — he announces the God they worship without knowing Him.
The inscription was not meant as a confession. It came from a fear of leaving some god out.
In the huge crowd of strange gods at Athens the apostle's sharp eye noticed an altar with an inscription on it. Without knowing it, that inscription admitted the ruined condition of the people of that city — and of the whole pagan world. They did not mean it as a humbling admission; yet the words told the fact to the one who knew the truth. Reliable witnesses show there were several altars inscribed this way. Paul certainly saw one, and spoke accordingly. In their zeal for many gods they dedicated shrines to every local and foreign god. They dedicated shrines to unknown gods too, so that not one would miss its due honour.
The altar showed what Greek philosophy had failed to produce. We can ask the same question of later ages.
"The world did not know God through wisdom." What did the philosophy of Greece do for its students? It made them ignorant worshippers of "AN UNKNOWN GOD." The inscription on their altar announced their ignorance and their shame to the whole universe. And may we not ask whether philosophy has done better for the Christian world than it did for Greece? Has it given the knowledge of the true God? Who would dare to say Yes?
Out of everything in the city, he took his text from the one object that was honest.
He comes down to the lowest point and form of truth in order to reach the Athenian conscience. He had done the same before with the people of Lycaonia. The Jews, through the law, had far worthier thoughts of God and of their own relationship to Him. Still, the address opens with his usual courtesy, while there is not a particle in it to flatter their pride. In that crowd of honours paid to demons that really were strange, the apostle laid hold of the one object which confessed the humbling fact about themselves and God. "An unknown God" told the true story. Everything else around was deception and the enemy's triumph.
This speech is not the same as the gospel Paul had already been preaching. He starts from ground his hearers had themselves admitted.
God, the unknown God, now reveals Himself. The apostle aptly lays hold of the inscription on the altar and announces the true God whom they did not know. This is not the gospel. He had already preached this God in the gospel of Jesus and of the resurrection, and he now identifies Him with the truth they themselves admitted. Defending that truth, he speaks to the conscience... By the power of the Spirit in Paul they stood accused and convicted. They had falsified the idea of God and denied His glory, the glory of the only Creator. They had recognised Him only by confessing that He was unknown.
So how does anyone move from an unknown God to a known one?
Christianity reveals God; it makes Him known to faith. Creation cannot, circumstances cannot, law cannot. But the Son of God became man, died under the judgment of sin, and is now alive in glory. He has made all the truth of God fully known. Thank God for Christianity! ... Paul declared to them the God who was unknown to them. Some mocked and some believed. The effects differed, but Paul declared God and made Him known.
Once Paul announces God, ignorance stops being an excuse.
Paul reaches the conscience of the Athenians through one point: their own confessed ignorance of God (verse 23)... But now Paul was declaring to them the God whom they did not know. The true God shines out in the death and resurrection of Christ... The full light of God now shines over the whole world like the sun. The sound of the gospel goes out to all the earth. So man is without excuse.
- Ignorance admitted. Athens raised the altar so no god would be missed. It stated a fact its builders never intended: the true God was unknown to them.
- Ignorance uncured. Greek philosophy reasoned its way to a nameless altar. That is the measure of what human wisdom reaches on its own.
- Ignorance addressed. Paul dropped to the lowest step of truth and took his text from their own altar. He was courteous, but he flattered no one.
- Ignorance answered. He announced the God they had only confessed as unknown. Creation, circumstances and law cannot make Him known. The Son of God, who died and now lives, does.
- Ignorance ended. This address is his defence, not his gospel preaching. Yet once Paul declares God, the hearer is no longer ignorant — and no longer excused.
The God who has made the world and all things which are in it, *he*, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands,
Paul stands in Athens, a city packed with shrines and even an altar to a god nobody could name. He starts not with Jesus but with the making of the world, and every word of his opening pulls the city's religion apart.
Paul's first claim is the one thing no teacher in Athens taught.
Every clause, you might say every word, undermined paganism. Yet not one word could rightly offend. This grand but simple truth left no room for the myths of priests and poets. It left no room either for the reasoning of thinkers in pitch darkness. Here is the remarkable fact: not one of the rival leaders of religion or philosophy claimed that their gods — home, foreign, or unknown — had made the world and everything in it.
The two schools listening to him each had their own account of the universe, and neither had room for a Creator.
Neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics owned creation. The one held the absurd idea that atoms came together by chance. The other imagined a fixed cycle of forming and breaking up, repeating for ever in the universe. That cycle was their god, if they can be said to have had one.
Paul does not stop at "Maker." The second title presses on the conscience.
The God who made all things is not only a Creator. He is Lord of heaven and earth. His authority is constant everywhere. Fallen man writhes under this truth, because it appeals at once to the conscience. As a man, I am His creature, and that tie makes me His servant. Am I doing His will? Am I pleasing Him as the motive of my life? But now I am a fallen man, departed from Him, and I like to do my own will, though I know it is opposed to His. But if He is Lord of heaven and earth, He must call me to account for my wrongdoing.
Scripture gives God this same title elsewhere, and those words shaped Paul's own thinking.
In Matthew 11 the Lord Jesus, speaking to His Father, addressed Him as "Lord of heaven and earth." In Acts 7:49 we have the words "Heaven is my throne." The light and power of this had entered Paul's mind, and it found a place in his testimony to the men of Athens.
One line from Paul sets every temple aside. He is not the first to say it.
God "does not live in temples made by man." Isaiah implied as much to those who rested on that gift standing among them — a temple soon to fall. Stephen said it in those very words. Paul heard him then with unbelieving ears. Now Paul proclaimed it in faith and love to the Athenians.
The mistake runs deeper than architecture. It starts when people turn from the Creator to things they can make.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools. They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the worship of nature, and then for the worship of humans made into gods. The sheer number of religions proved that men had lost the one true God. No splendid statue or temple could hide the fraud. Each one only advertised it. How can you fence in the everywhere-present Lord of heaven and earth inside man's work?
If not in buildings, then where? Some writers apply Paul's words to a habit many Christians keep — calling a building "God's house."
True believers make up the house of God. They are "living stones" — people who have tasted that the Lord is gracious and have come to Him. The Spirit of God lives in them. Don't tell me that cold, dead stones make up the house of God! "God does not live in temples made by man." True believers are the house of God.
So great a God might seem out of reach. He is not.
God made the universe. He is Lord of heaven and earth, and He does not live in temples made by man. Yet He stoops to look on a person who is poor, contrite in spirit, and trembling at His word. His goodness leads the sinner to repentance; and where did His goodness shine as it did in Jesus?
- Maker — Paul opens with creation. No Athenian god or philosophy ever claimed it. His words pull idolatry apart without insulting anyone.
- Lord — Maker means Ruler. If He rules heaven and earth, then my will is not my own and He must call me to account.
- Unhoused — No building of ours can hold the God who is everywhere. Isaiah and Stephen said this before Paul. Athens' crowd of shrines only proved that men had lost the true God.
- Indwelling — He refuses stone buildings and lives in believers instead. They are the house of God, not any structure.
- Stooping — The God too great for temples bends down to the person who trembles at His word. His goodness, seen in Jesus, leads that person to repentance.