Growing up around church it is rare and I mean rare for me to stumble across a main theme or lightbulb in the Bible and not have heard it mentioned at some point. Now, I don’t mean something that I’ve heard before that’s just now registering (slow learner sometimes). That happens as we go through life. The Words from these Pages in the Bible tend to come to life as we live it. Perhaps that’s part of how this Book is the Living Word because it continues to unfold and unravel just as we do.
But back to the point – a couple weeks ago a short part of a story jumped off the page and slapped me like I’d talked back to my mamma. It’s a historical account of Paul talking to a group of sophisticated, cultured, contemplative thinkers. Philosophers who weren’t just surviving on the land one day to the next, but a culture wrapped around the pursuit of life and its meaning. A culture that had hundreds of years of over-valuing the things in their lives to the point these things ruled their lives. These things or values becoming “gods” they worshipped and idolized.
So Paul rolls up to this sophisticated crowd of thinkers after noticing all of the shrines around town that they’d built to all the things they valued and worshipped in life; some to “to the unknown god”. It doesn’t take long for this group of thinkers who “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” to want to hear more from Paul. Paul uses the Truth and appeals to their culture and even quotes from some of their past poets and philosophers as he speaks. (Brilliant and genius – no telling if these were facts he knew from growing up extremely well educated or if it was the Holy Spirit giving him the words to say just as we’ve all been promised in the Bible – Luke 12:12)
He immediately blows the roof off of how small their self proclaimed grandiose buildings and thinking actually was. That they’d put so much value in gods that lived in these buildings or shrines. They’d sacrifice and devote their lives and resources and energies to gods that represented pleasure and security and riches and _______ (fill in the blank) while there was a true God that literally made the entire world they were standing on, gave the air they breathed and used to worship all of these futile things. That He (God) needed no temple built to live in, but instead that He was SO BIG and SO GRAND that created every thing, every one, and every time determining where and when we’d live and here’s the part… you ready?
Paul delivers this promise, this unraveling of the human condition MANY of us internally contemplate about ourselves or others in Acts 17:27 “that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” This is LITERALLY the entire human experience wrapped up in half a verse. That we’d wake up, realize how we were born specifically in the where and when we were supposed to by a God that loves us and stumble through our lives, up and over and under and through “perhaps feeling our way towards Him”. WHATT!???
Not only are we born on purpose where and when He plans, but the experiences we have in life are designed so that we would feel around and find Him. This is followed up by “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us”. Paul paints this picture of the entire human experience that these people as great and smart and sophisticated as they think they are were really just stumbling through these things they worship in life feeling around like a blind person in this human experience meant to lead them to one place – God. The real GOD. And no matter how far they’d stumbled away from Him and towards these other priorities and gods in their lives, He was actually not far from them at all.
Ever feel like it’s one thing after another? Or like just when you get yourself on your feet the rug comes out? Or maybe everything is right but you don’t “feel it”? Or maybe you’ve gotten to the goal or success and it’s fleeting and you hunger for more? No matter whether you are empty from so much success or broken from so much failure you are on the same road – feeling around and perhaps finding your way towards Him. Your soul will hunger well past everything you achieve – you can’t change that. Because it desires just Him.
Welcome to the journey of feeling your way towards Him. You are in great company. I pray you are able to see this in your life, that you’d have discernment in what is taking over as a god so that you can lift your eyes up and realign your sites on The God (daily).
Thank you Paul for such a brilliant speech to brilliant people – a culture much like us today. Educated, sophisticated thinkers that desire all the comforts and excesses (gods) of life. Good to realize we’re still a stumbling and feeling our way to God and 45 minutes in church on a Sunday isn’t the answer – He is.
Paul for the win – again. A great story – now let’s go tell it.
Jared