26 And he made from
one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having
determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that
they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and
find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for
“‘In him we live and move and have our being’; [3]
as even some of your own poets have said,
“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ [4] (Acts 17:26-28 (ESV)
Paul continues his speech moving from the creation of the
world to the creation of man. We are his creation. He quotes a few of the Greek
poets themselves to this effect.
This is an important thing to note. One of the things that
made Christianity popular in antiquity was that the society was already losing
its religion. The Philosophers and Poets who were oftentimes interchangeable
and leaders of the culture, had long ago come to new notions of god and the
nature of the world that could not sustain the old religion of gods who were more
or less the equal of man. And now as people contemplated this notion of one god
who was a creator of the world and man, they came to understand this was
something Judaism had been teaching for a long time, and now in the fullness of
time along came Jesus who has opened this faith to all men in ways that it had
not been open to them before.
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