The Altar to the God Nobody Knew

Since the night the jail shook in Philippi, Paul had been hurried out of two more towns, and now he was in Athens by himself, waiting for Silas and Timothy to catch up.

Athens was the cleverest city in the world, or at least it thought so. It had teachers on every corner and statues on every street: gods of marble and gold, gods of the sea and the harvest and war.

Paul walked those streets, and his jaw got tighter with every statue. All those people, praying to gods that could not see them or hear them or love them back.

So every day he talked about Jesus, in the synagogue and in the marketplace. The city's famous thinkers came to argue.

"What is this seed-picker trying to say?" one of them sniffed. (That was their word for a bird pecking up seeds, and they meant Paul had picked up scraps of ideas.)

"He seems to be preaching foreign gods," said another, because Paul kept talking about Jesus and rising from the dead.

They led him up to the Areopagus, a rocky hill where the city's council met. "May we know what this new teaching is?" they asked. "You are bringing strange ideas to our ears."

(Luke, who wrote this down, says the people of Athens did nothing all day but tell or hear the latest new thing. A visitor with news was better than a festival.)

Paul stood up in front of them.

"People of Athens! I can see that you are very religious. As I walked around, I found an altar with these words carved on it: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. The God you worship without knowing him is the God I am here to tell you about.

"He made the world and everything in it, so he does not live in temples people build, and he needs nothing from our hands. He gives everyone life and breath and everything else. He made every nation so that people would feel their way toward him and find him. And he is not far from any one of us. As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his children.'"

(A man from out of town who could quote their own poems! The council sat up straighter.)

"We are his children, so God cannot be a statue carved from gold or silver or stone. Now he commands all people everywhere to repent, to turn from wrong and come back to him. He has set a day when he will judge the world fairly, by a man he has chosen. And he has proved it by raising that man from the dead."

At the words "from the dead," the hill got noisy.

"Ha! Dead men stay dead!" some of them scoffed.

"We will hear you again about this," said others.

Paul walked back down the hill. A few people followed him and believed. One was Dionysius, who sat on that very council, and one was a woman named Damaris.

For years that altar had stood in Athens asking its question, and the stone had never once answered it. Athens' own poets had guessed that people were God's children, and still they felt around for their Father with their eyes shut.

God answered from his side. He sent a man with dusty feet, who ate bread with fishermen and said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." Sculptors carved gods of silver and gold that never moved. This man's enemies nailed him to a wooden cross. Then God did the very thing the council on the hill had laughed at: he raised him from the dead.

Dionysius and Damaris had found the God the altar could only point to. They were the first in Athens to know him, and not the last. In Jesus, the unknown God has a face.