Writings: Is Our God Unknown?

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

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God’s amazing creative genius in fashioning this universe is quite overwhelming. When I look up into a brilliant night’s sky, I cannot help but know that God is ... that God exists ... and that this God, this creator, this Lord and Savior wants to be known, wants to be in a relationship with us.

That’s what Paul was saying to the Athenians there in ancient Greece. Athens was a great metropolitan center, a crossroads of the ancient world between the West and the East. It was the seat of many ancient religions, the home of many powerful mythical systems, the birth place of ancient philosophies and many of the ancient Philosophers who still influence our western ways of thinking:

Zeno
Pythagoras
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle

It was in this environment, one fed by a multitude of ancient religions and powerful philosophies, that Paul was speaking about this “altar to an unknown God.” The Athenians had such receptive minds that they left room for a deity that they didn’t yet know. And Paul, brilliantly, drew the connection and proposed to them that this unknown God is God … the one whose very nature, whose very name, means “I AM.”

Yahweh means “I Am”
“I exist”
“I am and will be known”
Or, as I like to say, "The One who IS, and who cannot not be."

Paul declared that GOD - Yahweh Elohim - the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, was the unknown God to whom the Athenians had built an altar.

“I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” (Acts 17:23)

I like to believe that Paul would have said:

“What you see through the telescope or the binoculars, that which you peer at through a microscope, the wonder of all creation that your science reveals to you, points to the God who made it all.”

I believe that.
I believe that we can know about God by looking at that which God has made:
The macroverse, written large in the heavens above us;
The microverse, in the cells of our bodies;
The subatomic realm of the very small indeed:
Protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, neutrinos, muons, Higgs bosons, pions, photons … they all point toward God.

No matter where you look ... in Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Physics, Astrophysics, Astronomy ... you see the fingerprints of God. What we know about this creator, from that which God has made, makes it clear to us that God desires to be known. God made the universe in such a way that it can be known and understood by those who are within it. That’s not an accident, and it reflects the very nature of God as the "One who will be known."

Moreover, this God has made Godself known to us directly, not just through the stuff which God has made, but also through the revelation of God's mind, the Divine Logos, Jesus himself. That’s what Paul was saying to the Athenians.

Our God is NOT unknown. Our God IS knowable:
Knowable through that which God has made,
Knowable through what God has done,
Knowable through what God has said,
Knowable for who God is …
Our Lord
Our Savior
Our Redeemer and friend.

This gives me great comfort. The one who fashioned all that I see in the night sky, the One who fashioned the hugeness of the Macroverse, the same One who created the infinitely small realms and intricacies of the Microverse, cares for you and for me. Ponder that for just a moment. We are truly insignificant, as far as beings go. We are tiny, we are weak, we don’t exist for very long. And yet, as tiny as we are, this same God who created absolutely everything, cares about us. That's pretty amazing, don't you think? It's amazing, and it's comforting … that in the enormity of the universe, God loves us all.

© 2020, Dr. Gregory S. Neal
All Rights Reserved