MISGUIDED HOPE

MISGUIDED HOPE

“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.” Acts 17:24

Lord of heaven and earth--This message to the pagan intellectuals at Athens can be considered as typical of Paul’s method with people who did not already know and respect the Scriptures, just as his message in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch can be considered typical of his approach to those who did (Acts 13:16-41). In the one case, he began with God’s witness in creation, in the other with Scriptures; in both cases, he ended with Christ and the resurrection, urging his hearers to believe the good news accomplished in their behalf.

 temples made with hands--Athens was filled with beautiful temples, monuments and images, but to Paul they were merely depressing symbols of the city’s idolatry-misguided and misaligned hope.

God that made the world and all things . . . therein—The most profound philosophers of Greece were unable to conceive any real distinction between God and the universe. Thick darkness, therefore, behooved to rest on all their religious conceptions. To dissipate this, the apostle sets out with a sharp statement of the fact of creation as the central principle of all true religion—not less needed now, against the transcendental idealism of our day.

seeing he is Lord—or Sovereign of His creation.

of heaven and earth—holding in free and absolute subjection all the works of His hands; presiding in august royalty over them, as well as pervading them all as the principle of their being. How different this from the blind Force or Fate to which all creatures were regarded as in bondage!

dwelleth not in temples made with hands—This thought, so familiar to Jewish ears (1 Kings 8:27; Isaiah 66:1-2; Acts 7:48), and so elementary to Christians, would serve only more sharply to define to his heathen audience the spirituality of that living, personal God, whom he "announced" to them.