January 26, 2004
"Knowing an Unknown God"
Picture this. The year is around 40 A.D., and you are standing in the heart of one of the greatest cities of your time. Huge buildings of stone are everywhere, and statues of your gods line the walkways. You are an Athenian, and you are among the most intelligent and philosophical men of your time. Every day you go to the Agora, the center of commerce and religion, and at the foot of the Acropolis, you and your fellow philosophers meet at the top of a stone hill to listen to the newest theories and teachings that come to your city.
Now imagine you're Paul. You've just left your friends in Berea, on the other side of the country, and you're a Hebrew - in a Greek city. And yet, you're still preaching the good news of Jesus. And when the most intelligent men of the age say they want you to tell them what you're teaching, you jump at the chance.
"Men 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. Now, what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and doesn not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' And as some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring'.
"Therefore, since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone - an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."
And they rejected him. The Athenians could not understand this God of Paul's, because he was too different from their own gods.
What I want to ask is this. Are we worshipping an unknown God? What makes our God so different from the Gods of ancient Greece and Rome? That is my focus for this semester. I want to take several of the personality traits (if you will) of God that we don't really think about that often, and compare those to the Greco-Roman gods, and see what makes our God so special.
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