Acts 17:22-34
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
May 10, 2026
By the time I entered college, I had finally begun to believe that the possibility of there being a living, personal God who loves me might in fact be a reality, but I did not yet know Him or the reality of Him in my life.
I did, however, get to know Pat Curtis, Rick Myatt and Miles Phillips – and the reality of the joy, peace and loving kindness in them. Those qualities, ones I very much wanted in my own life, made them stand out for me from everyone else on the campus.
They said they got those qualities from knowing the otherwise unknown God in the Person of Jesus. That opened my eyes to a possibility I had not before considered and motivated me to pursue my own search for God. I groped for God and eventually found Him, the previously unknown God knowable in Jesus.
In response to Jesus’ parting command to go into all the world and to make disciples of every nation, the first church reached out into every corner of the earth to share the good news of Jesus. Though they got a variety of responses, they won many to the adventure of following Jesus and enlarged His family of disciples.
At one point in his second missionary journey, the Apostle Paul left some of his fellow evangelists behind in Beroea to build the booming baby church there while he waited for Silas and Timothy to catch up with him in Athens.
With time on his hands, Paul explored Athens, a city unlike any other. It was the center of what was then the world’s most intellectual, sophisticated and creative culture. It was also a hotbed of indiscriminate spirituality welcoming of every religion. Its curious people were ever intrigued by new ideas or subjects of study. Often novelty interested them more than truth.
As he walked around Athens, Paul – a staunch believer in one Supreme Being – was “deeply distressed” to encounter countless shrines and altars devoted to all types of gods.
In a city whose citizens delighted in vigorous give-and-take with those with new ideas, Paul soon was debating with the inquisitive from the various pagan temples and schools of philosophy. Their discussion eventually took them before an Athenian council that met on the Areopagus (also called Mars Hill). There Paul was given the floor to spell out his exotic religion.
Because Paul had dedicated himself to opening eyes to Jesus, because he hoped to persuade folks to give Jesus a good long look, and because he had the faith that the Holy Spirit worked ahead of him to prepare them to receive his message about Jesus, Paul made his case for checking Jesus out by appealing to the common ground he and those polytheistic idol-worshipers shared. Though they believed in many gods and he in only one Supreme God, both Paul and these Athenians believed we all owed our existence to a great divine force, one so high above us that the divinity, while knowable to an extent, must remain ultimately mysterious and beyond human comprehension.
Paul applauded the Athenians for their spiritual “groping”, even as they admitted their inability to fully grasp divinity. Paul saw that outlook manifested in the altar they had erected “to an unknown god”.
Paul never insulted these pagans. Rather he honored what was honorable in them: particularly their awareness of being the “offspring” of a divinity far above them. Yet, after giving them their props, Paul went on to propose that the divinity in whom, they themselves said, “we live and move and have our being”, that divinity had in self-revelation made His unknown more fully knowable than they imagined. Paul in fact dared to put forth, for their consideration, the name of that unknown God: Jesus Christ who rose from the dead.
Now, it made no sense for Paul to cite scripture to the Athenians, for it had no authority with them. So he cited instead their poets and philosophers to call into question their set-in-stone dogmatism and to raise doubts about their doubts about his message — most especially that of Jesus’ physical resurrection. To the Greeks, bodily resurrection was an absurd, unappealing idea unworthy of consideration. For, while they believed in the immortality of the soul, they saw immortality obtained only after liberation from the body in death. To them human flesh was not a gift to be renewed and retained, but an obstacle to be got rid of. Thus, they disdained Paul’s claim of Jesus’ resurrection. To them, what’s dead stays dead – and good riddance!
Yet, their conviction in this matter was not established beyond reasonable doubt and thus was subject to doubt – particularly in light of their own deep yearning for the kind of God that the Bible reveals and that Paul claimed to have experienced in the risen Jesus. Paul urged them to respect this holy restlessness within them, this disquietude of soul that is not settled down by any of their many gods or even all of their gods together. Paul encouraged them to entertain and explore the possibility that the hunger of their hearts could be satisfied, not by one more god among many, but rather by one God higher than any other, the Supreme Being who is the Father of the risen God-Man Jesus.
Paul’s invitation to a new path of spiritual exploration elicited a mixture of responses. Some “scoffed” at his idea of one Supreme Being and a resurrected One at that; some told Paul, “We will hear you again;” and some believed and joined Paul in the way of Jesus. Paul’s sharing the good news of Him only sometimes won acceptance.
So it will be when we share that good news. For, while today no physical idols compete for the hearts and souls of people, the false gods of novelty, endless entertainment, popularity, money, sex, drug-induced mood enhancement, artificial intelligence and politics do.
If there is a God greater than these gods, a God who’s risen from the dead and is alive here and now, how can we get people to question their own dogmatic dismissal of what we hang our every hope on?
Not by scolding or judging. Not by argumentation that can prove no more than a possibility. But by just making some wish there were a God like Jesus and thereby motivating them to investigate for themselves the possibility that He is there for them and knowable.
And how might we make some wish there were a God like Him? By manifesting the character and conduct that suggests that, even in people who show little potential for improvement, He makes wonderful changes!
And how do we obtain those changes? By following Jesus and allowing Him to bring such changes about.
We cannot make anyone seek to know the unknown God. But we can make the possibility of knowing that God intriguing enough to move some to look into it for themselves, and grope to find Him – that they might know Him and be wonderfully changed by Him!
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