For as I walked around and looked carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
— Acts 17:23
As we near the end of the Easter Season, this part of Paul’s speech to the people of Athens really leaped out at me:
“To an unknown God.”
An altar built to a god who could perhaps be sensed or longed for — but not personally known. Or maybe it was just an altar that over the course of time had grown unrecognizable from its original form.
It struck me how modern that inscription feels.
I know many people for whom God remains exactly this: unknown.
Not necessarily rejected.
Not always denied.
But distant. Irrational. A fiction. Impossible.
We hear it in everyday conversations about God — this vague spirituality. People talk about “The Universe,” “Energy,” “Spirit guides,” “Divine Truth,” but not God. They allow themselves to be “spiritual, but not religious,” setting themselves apart from any Church body.
All of it so impersonal.
To set the stage, here we have Paul early in his missionary journey arriving in the Greek city of Athens, filled with people who knew little or nothing of Jesus Christ — Jesus Christ whose resurrection proved beyond a doubt He was the Son of God. A God who loved us so much He gave His only Son to save us from our sin.
And as Paul enters the city, this altar inscription lands hard.
I can relate. There are many times I’m just walking along, and something strikes me as an urgent statement about our culture and its relationship with God.
When Paul sees this altar built to a god who could perhaps be sensed or longed for — but not personally known — perhaps he is devastated by their ignorance.
And just as those words struck him then, they strike me now.
How timeless the core problem contained in the inscription:
that too many hearts remain ignorant of the Gospel, ignorant of Christ.
Going back to Paul’s entrance into Athens in the early days after Pentecost, it’s interesting to witness the guidance of the Holy Spirit becoming evident, even to Paul. He is still learning what it means to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
Surrounded by temples, idols, and competing visions of reality, he walks through the city observing.
Listening. Paying attention. And then the line,
“For as I walked around and looked carefully…”
Looked carefully.
In the Gospel reading paired with this first daily reading, Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit will come when He leaves to:
“guide you into all truth.”
Listening to these readings together, I realized something I never noticed before:
the Holy Spirit guides not only Paul’s speech, but his attention.
Before the Spirit speaks through Paul, the Spirit shapes what Paul notices.
This is how, among countless shrines and inscriptions, Paul’s gaze settles on this single altar and its heartbreaking inscription:
“To an unknown God.”
Another person might have seen only paganism or offense. But Paul perceives something deeper beneath the surface — the human desire to be known by God.
And suddenly a doorway for conversation with the people of Athens opens.
Paul hadn’t arrived with a perfectly prepared speech. It was provided to him by way of the Holy Spirit illuminating what mattered.
This changes the way I hear Jesus’ words:
“He will guide you into all truth.”
I think being guided into truth begins with the direction of our gaze. In what we learn to notice. Because these are the things that eventually govern our responses.
Later in the reading, Paul describes humanity as “groping” for God, but immediately impresses upon the Athenians:
“Though indeed he is not far from any one of us.”
This is the great reversal of Christianity.
While the pagan world’s search for meaning often produced gods who stood apart from humanity — distant, unpredictable, even at war with one another — the God of Israel creates out of love, for the purpose of intimate relationship with His creation.
And the Gospel reveals just how far this God of love is willing to go when His Word becomes flesh in Jesus Christ.
Paul proclaims a God who is not distant. Not unknown. But near to us. Present. A God who reveals Himself and continually reaches toward humanity.
Perhaps this is the first and most important truth the Holy Spirit reveals:
that we belong to a God who has chosen us as His own. A God whose love is eternal. A God who desires relationship with us.
And perhaps the Holy Spirit is still teaching us to see this way now.
Because we also stand before altars to unknown gods.
Not carved from stone, perhaps, but built around the worship of self: self-promotion, self-definition, self-betterment, self-created truth. Or consumed with mastering vast impersonal systems — technology, artificial intelligence, data, simulation — the promise that humanity might finally explain itself apart from God.
Signs everywhere of humanity still searching for something — or Someone — beyond itself.
And still the Holy Spirit directs our attention toward the deeper truth hidden beneath it all:
the human desire to be known and loved by God.
Perhaps this is why Paul’s journey leads him next to Corinth.
In Athens, Paul recognizes humanity’s longing to know God.
But in Corinth, his message sharpens into its fullest expression:
“Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
It’s as though the Spirit leads him from recognizing the human search for God to proclaiming the depth of God’s love for humanity.
The Cross becomes the final answer to the altar marked:
“To an unknown God.”
Not merely:
Here is His name.
But:
Here is His heart.
The Unknown God has made Himself known in love.
Perhaps this is what it means to be guided into all truth.
If we allow the Holy Spirit to shift our gaze toward the love of God, it changes everything.
It leads us away from the altar of the unknown and toward the truth of Christ, where we are lifted and set free.
