The Unknown God

THE UNKNOWN GOD 

Paul had been preaching in Thessalonica and Berea in Northern Greece with Silas and Timothy, as part of his apostolic ministry to the gentiles, and he had to escape on his own from there because of opposition to his preaching and plots against him and he found a safe haven at Athens in the south of Greece. While he waited for his companions Silas and Timothy to arrive Paul was distressed to see that Athens was full of mythologies and legends and idols so he began to visit the Jewish synagogues there and the open marketplace and preach the resurrection of Jesus. 

Meanwhile some of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of the city became intrigued and sceptical of these strange new things he had to say so they urged him to come to speak publicly about his views at the Areopagus, which was part courthouse and part philosophical debating forum. There he was met by ‘the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there who would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new’

Acts 17:22 So, Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man, of one blood, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their allotted spans of time and the boundaries of their dwelling places, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own philosophers have said, ‘ For we are indeed his offspring’. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard Paul speak of the resurrection of a person who had been dead, some laughed, but others said, "We want to hear more about this later." That ended Paul's discussion with them, but a few joined him and became believers, among whom were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

When Paul spoke to those religious Greek scholars in Athens who were seeking to understand the meaning of their concept of ‘The Unknown God’ he told them that Jesus was the ‘Unknown God’ that they were actually seeking after, and when he said to them; In Him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), he went on further to say an extraordinary thing; ‘Even one of your own philosopher/poets has said this same thing.’

Paul understood Greek philosophy and knew that it contained an all-embracing eternal and unchanging truth of universal reason that they called ‘logos’, a word which described an unknown something that arranged and sustained the universe. 
So somewhere there was a concept in their minds that all human beings really belonged within an unknown something far greater than themselves. We know that something as a Someone called Jesus.
It might seem amazing to us that these Greek philosophers even had a concept of an unknown god, but the Bible tells us that God has placed ‘eternity’ (olam – the vanishing point that remains unreachable – an horizon) in the human heart.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 he has put eternity into man's heart, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
That means that there is an unquenchable searching in the human heart for something that is far greater than humanity and contains humanity within a higher creative entity than itself. 
This concept exists deep within the heart of every person right up to this day but this concept can exist in peoples’ minds as simply being a concept and not being a person who is relational towards humanity with love and mercy and compassion and wisdom and order, and who is also that ultimate intelligence of creation. That person is Jesus Christ 

Paul offered those Greek scholars his revelation of Jesus as the Son of God who was that ‘Someone’ in whom all of humanity now existed. He told them that Jesus Christ as God had become a human being that was the Son of God and that had been killed for proclaiming that fact - and had then risen from the dead. Jesus had told his disciples that he and his Father would live in them and they would live in him and that the Holy Spirit would reveal all of this to them after he had left them to be with his Father. (John 14).

Some of the Greeks he was speaking to accepted the truth that Paul spoke but others said this was preposterous while others said they would give the matter some thought (Acts 17:32) 

So even though that profound cosmic truth of what Paul proclaimed to those people on that day about us as humanity being in Jesus and his being in us there is no way that that can be grasped with the natural mind. This requires a revelation of the Holy Spirit about the Father/Son relationship that we have been brought into through Jesus, otherwise it is not a personal reality for us to live in. Our discovery of this cosmic truth that has already been accomplished becomes our FAITH. It doesn’t become true when we believe it; it was always true but now our faith makes it a present reality for our lives as we discover it. Jesus is never separated or isolated from the Father and he has made us part of their life and we had no say in that decision – but we do have a say in how we respond to it just as those Greek religious scholars had. 
We need the light of this truth to penetrate our heart otherwise the darkness and confusion of the human mind keeps us ignorant of it and we remain forever searching and never finding the unknown something (Someone) that we need, that fulfils our lives.
What is generally believed in our Western culture is that wealth and success and being well thought of is just about the best thing that could ever happen to us, and God has every good reason to break this illusion of ours however he chooses. This is part of the perplexity and confusion of our age. Other cultures may have different values, but there is ultimately only one destiny to be realized and the natural mind cannot realize it without a revelation from God.

1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural mind does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned…16 For "who has known the mind of God. But we have the mind of Christ.”

Paul was not speaking to a Jewish culture in Athens, but to a sophisticated elite bunch of philosophers, so he did not speak to these scholars about Israel; he went back to the creation of mankind and the oneness of us as being all of one blood in origin from one male and one female. Paul is anticipating the reaction of people of the world of all kinds of cultures having to grapple with the one universal truth that ultimately includes all of us in history as being in Christ before the beginning of time. 
That is why the Bible is clear in its recording of its genealogies of Jesus as an historical person, and while placing him particularly in a Middle Eastern culture his wisdom and his supernatural acts of love and justice and mercy strike deep into the hearts and minds of all cultures.

These genealogies that are recorded in the Bible in the four Gospels go back to different points of commencement and origin of the ancestry of Jesus. The writers of each of these gospels were inspired to convey particular emphases concerning the narrative of the life of Jesus and his ministry. The writers were also targeting different audiences of that day. For instance, Matthew goes back to Abraham, and Mark starts with the birth of John the Baptist, while Luke goes back to Adam. 

John, however, goes back beyond them all and begins with ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (Logos) – which was a word the Greeks understood, as we saw previously with Paul in Athens. John was stating that Jesus was the Logos, the very same word that the Greeks used to describe an all-embracing truth of universal reason, an unknown something that created and arranged and sustained the universe. That statement would have challenged any Greeks anywhere listening to it regarding their understanding of the meaning of Logos, because they would not have conceived of that lofty universal concept of theirs as being a mere mortal called Jesus who somehow created the universe. Nonetheless the Holy Spirit confronted them with that truth and made grace available for that truth to be embraced in their hearts and believed in as the ultimate truth for their lives. In the same way that statement of John’s would have disrupted the Jew’s understanding of the word Logos, which to them was not Jesus but simply and categorically the Torah, the sacred written Word delivered to them from God, and again the Holy Spirit would have confronted them with that truth of Jesus as the Christ and made grace available for that truth to be embraced in their hearts and believed in as the ultimate truth for their lives.

So across the board, Jews and gentiles (the rest of us as humanity) were being confronted by the reality that one man, Jesus, is, as God, the totality of meaning from the beginning of creation through the times of its fall and its redemption and then its fulfillment in eternity - the Alpha and Omega.

When John writes in his Gospel further on in the first chapter (vs.11) he states emphatically to all of us concerning Jesus, that he came unto his own and we knew him not and received him not. And we killed him. But Jesus came back from the dead, and he can never be killed again, so John tells us that the best thing we can decide for our lives is to be actively joined in Spirit to his life, because he will not cease his speaking and his supernatural doing of love and justice and mercy towards us - he will never go away. He will interrupt all of our religion and worship and philosophy and he desires to draw us into participation of the oneness of life that he shares with his Father. 

Among the Apostles it was Paul and John who were the ones most graced with the revelation of the vastness of the universal work of atonement accomplished for all of humanity by Jesus on the cross. When Paul said those words to the Greeks in Athens ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), he was stating a universal fact about all of humanity.
He was actually saying that each one of us has our ‘being’ in Christ. God is uncreated being and we are created being. In English grammar to have ‘being’ simply means ‘to be’, so to have your being within something means that that is what describes what you are part of and what you belong to - it defines who you are – it is your ‘I am’ – it is your identity. 

The world carves out its own identity – its own ‘I am’

For many people this identity can be a religion, a political party, an ideology, or a pathway to enlightenment, whether that is a pathway of reason or a pathway of mystical practice – there’s a thousand varieties and in all these things people live and move and have their being – and that’s understandable because they find some kind of meaning in those things. And the Church has also often adopted its own different styles of thinking and dogmas that may not altogether be of divine revelation but are strongly held opinions or persuasions that people belong to, in which they live and move and have their being.

The people in the book of acts knew they were in a world changing time – not just starting a new religion or even trying to get people to come to church. They didn’t even know precisely what church was – they just regularly gathered together as God’s Family and their conversation was about Jesus and they believed in the witness of the Spirit - and his Church grew. They became a community of love and faith and took that love and faith wherever they went. Jesus did the rest as the Holy Spirit gifted them with power from on high.
They also had to learn right from the beginning through many challenges how to avoid false teaching. Paul wrote to the Ephesian church not to be like children, believing in one opinion and then another because of persuasive teachers who had cleverly used deceptive techniques that sounded like truth but weren’t, and they took advantage of the people to gather disciples to themselves. So Paul warned them strongly about this and urged them to grow in truth and love and discernment, that they might become more and more like Christ (Ephesians 4:14-16)

And each one of us is designed to live and move and have our being, our true being and our true identity in the person of Jesus. So as a church and as individuals our purpose is to believe in that witness and empowerment of the Spirit and in the simplicity of Christ as in the book of Acts and to participate in the life of Jesus and the Father. 
Participating in the life of Jesus and the Father is what we have been given to share in as humanity. This was all planned before sin came into the equation and that’s why Jesus had to come to live and die and live again to reconcile us to the Father. He wanted to get us in on the beautiful relationship that he had with the Father and Holy Spirit. And whether Adam had sinned or not, Jesus still had to come to make us one with the Father because HE IS THE ETERNAL SON – NOT ADAM. 
In him we live and move and have our being – we are not trying to get there - we are there - so let’s embrace it, celebrate it and proclaim it.

Ephesians 3:18 That you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness (pleroma – completeness) of God. Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.