Acts 17:26-31

Acts 17:26

St. Paul at Athens.

I. The Jewish nation had existed to be a witness for this universal fellowship among the nations. It had existed as a witness against that which tended to divide them and set them at war. It existed to say, "The living and true God has created you all to be one." No one thought has been awakened in your minds without His teaching and guidance. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to make that claim on behalf of the God whom I worship. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to declare that you, the men of Athens, have had a Divine vocation, that the God of all has appointed you to play a distinct and a very remarkable part in His great drama."

II. But why has God chosen out the particular nations? Why has He ordered the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation? Here is St. Paul's answer: "That they may seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him." According to this explanation of an inspired apostle, it was God Himself who stirred up the thoughts and inquiries of men about His Being and nature. Without His first word they could not have been; without His continual presence and inspiration they must have ceased altogether.

III. Bold as this statement is, it is less startling than the words which follow. We are so familiar with them, they have so leavened the dialect of Christendom, that we do not consider how awful they are in themselves, how much more remarkable they are for the place in which they were uttered, how they contradict some of our most approved religious and philosophical maxims. "Though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." St. Paul regarded this statement as the one great protest against Pantheism, and all other evil tendencies, to which the Athenian was liable; He shows the Athenians that God was their Father. It was because He was the Father of their spirits because they were spiritual beings created in His spiritual likeness, created to feel after Him and find Him it was therefore that the conceiving Him under any of these notions of theirs, the casting Him in any material shape, was so degrading and abominable. The whole burning indignation of the Jew against the gods of the hills and groves comes forth in this assertion, which is nevertheless so full of tenderness for every heathen, and which could only have been uttered by one who believed that God had loved the whole world, and had sent His Son to take upon Him the nature of the dweller in Athens as much as of the dweller in Jerusalem.

F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. v., p. 111.