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The people of Athens, especially the ones who frequented the Areopagus, were professional scholars. Paul, a former Jewish zealot and recent convert to following Jesus, preached to them in language that engaged their minds and hearts. The learned men surrounded by statues of every god imaginable, listened critically to this foreigner, suspecting Paul to be a "babbler" (verse 17), so Paul addressed a challenging audience.
Mars Hill, the site of this gathering, honored the god of war. Each inanimate monument commanded worship for a god with power over a particular part of life. Paul appeals (perhaps ironically) to their thoroughness in covering all their theological bases by even including a monument to the "Unknown God" in the Athenian pantheon.
With razor-sharp rhetorical skill, Paul appeals to their intellect and seeks to touch their hearts with knowledge of the one God who cannot and will not be contained in an inanimate monument, but who was and is the "ground of being," and made himself known in the flesh in Jesus, who proved God's love by his life and teachings and death, and proved God's power over everything, including death, by his resurrection. He gives a name to the "Unknown God" that they were seeking, who has become known in Jesus, the Christ.
"In him we live and move and have our being." Paul's witness compels us to question our own pantheon of lesser gods that fail to measure up to the God made known in Jesus, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. God is closer that we think...as close and as life giving as the air that we breathe!
See you in Church!
LeeAnn |
