“For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” (Acts 17:23)

“… for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’” (Acts 17:28)

For they themselves report about us what kind of a reception we had with you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God (1 Thessalonians 1:9)

Athens was the intellectual and philosophical center of the ancient world during the first century, when the NT was written. Rome was the political center, but the Greek way of thought and life carried over from the preceding empire of Alexander the Great. Paul found himself on his second missionary tour traveling through what we would call modern-day Greece. First he entered in the north and travelled through towns like Philippi, Berea and Thessalonica, and then down to Athens (and eventually to Corinth). If there was a church established in the preeminent Greek city, it is not mentioned in the NT. But its significance lay in being the thought center that would have a far-reaching influence, not the least of which is for the example this story in Acts 17 provides for today’s apologists in defending the Christian faith.

Paul fearlessly takes on the intellectual elite of the day, and essentially calls them ignorant. In fact, any worship of any so-called god, apart from the “living and true God,” is uninformed. The Athenians portrayed a surprisingly superficial sophistication, similar to atheistic or agnostic religionists and philosophers today. Paul breaks all norms of the day and proposes an informed view to stem their ignorance. Imagine those learned scholars upon hearing Paul’s comments. They were looking for something on which to pounce, and they found it when he brought up the resurrection (Acts 17:32). But Paul didn’t hold back; he proclaimed it anyway.

Why? Because the true God is the One in whom “we live and move and exist.” The Athenian poets wrote about this, and their country cousins to the north, in Thessalonica, heard and believed, rejecting their idols and turning “to serve a living and true God.” God is not something a person carves out of wood. There is a true and living God. He was (and is) alive, not just an object of our imagination, or philosophical reasoning. And He is tangibly active in this world—and in our lives. Our very lives have meaning because of Him.

Lord, I have turned my back on everything because I believe You are the one and only true and living God.