by Kenneth Sheets
Many years ago, only about twenty years or less after the death of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul spoke to a group of philosophers on Areopagus in Athens, Greece, regarding their “worship” of the “gods” they claimed to recognize. He told them how he had already looked upon the things that represented the nature and content of their “worship,” and he summarized his observations by saying that “with respect to all things” they were “too (literally, “more”) superstitious,” that is, the Athenians were allowing their thinking to be ruled by their “recognition” of multiple “god-like” beings. Paul then called their attention to their acknowledgement of an “unknown god,” a “god” whom they perceived to exist, but about whom they knew nothing of substance. Like all humans, they could not escape the sense that a “god” existed outside of those whom the “religious” among them thought to exist.
Using their recognition of this “unknown god,” the Apostle proceeded to declare to them, unequivocally, not only his existence, but also aspects of his person and nature, and especially his relationship to those very Athenians, and any other humans, who did not know him. This “unknown god” was, indeed, the God who had brought into existence all that exists; He was the Creator, their Creator, and He had made them, and all humans, to “seek” Him, that is, He had designed and constructed all humans in every place and in every moment of time to seek to know and understand Him, and to interact with Him according to the reality that He was Creator and they were created. Humans, however, from the beginning, had misused the intellect and authority, which He Himself had built into them, to devise and concoct their own concept of their relationship to Him; they had chosen to seek their own concept of God and the “freedoms” they possessed in their existence. Certainly, they could not deny His existence, but they could re-define and re-interpret not only His revelation of Himself, but also their own relationship to the creation around them, including the powerful antiGod angelic beings now called demons.
These beings manifested great powers of influence and activities, demonstrating that mere humans would be very unwise in failing to acknowledge their greatness. Thus, fearing the retribution of these beings, humans devised systems of “religious” acknowledgement of these beings in order to appease their demands. The God Who Existed became, in the minds of humans who did not know Him, “just another god” among the powerful antiGod angelic beings who threatened their existence. Though the God was Himself the creator of all the antiGod angelic beings, humans did not perceive this accurately. To them, the God was just another “god” in competition with the other “gods” they had chosen to acknowledge. To them, He, too, was limited, localized, capricious, and inconsistent, unknowable personally, and certainly, not worthy of absolute trust, and thus, they “served” and “worshipped” Him with the same kind of heartless “externals” that comprised their “worship” of every other being they feared, and such “worship,” though completely erroneous, became the false standard for “worship” of the true God. Human ideas, their concept, of this God, the true God, the God Who Exists, was wrong, and essentially all that they did misrepresented Him and His perfect design for all that exists.
As time progressed, erroneous concepts of God and His design became even more widely “believed,” the great bulk of humanity pursued these errors. They could often perceive something “good” or “supernatural” in these “belief systems,” but the errors of the “leadership” in these systems either denied their validity or wove these truths into the fabric of their error in ways that few would ever recognize them as truth. Humans needed to know the truth of God and His design, and He Himself insured the availability of this knowledge by building it into His creation and then making its truths inescapaple by providing an enduring written record of that revelation. Humans would go to great lengths seeking to undermine this revelation, but Heserved it in a manner that manifested its validity to all who sought to know it as He actually gave it. He recorded and preserved it in languages perfectly chosen by Him, and He preserved those languages so that humans would never misunderstand, but yet again, humans, even those who claim to know Him and His design, have turned away from His actual expressions, His actual words and their definitions, to the expressions of “translations” and the “definitions” of other humans who themselves have never known Him and His revelation accurately . . . and the error continues, and humans are destroyed for a lack of a true knowledge of God.