Acts 17:26

Acts 17:26. And hath made of one blood all nations of men. Here Paul definitely asserts that God created the whole human race from one common stock. His reasons for this deliberate assertion of the common brotherhood of men no doubt are to be found in his desire to do away, once and for all, with the prevailing idea that different peoples owed their origin to varied ancestors, either themselves deities or immediately under the protection of some deity. The Athenians, for instance , believed they were sprung from the soil of Attica. The belief that all peoples sprang from one common ancestor Paul knew would do much to eradicate the notion that there were ‘many Gods,' would assist much in the reception of the great truth of the ‘Fatherhood of God.' Besides this, Paul probably had in his mind the prejudice with which these haughty Greeks viewed him as a Barbarian Hebrew, a member of a despised oriental race. The beautiful and true conception of the ‘common brotherhood of men' has in no little degree contributed to the reception of the gospel amid so many different peoples:

‘Then, having met, they speak and they remember

All are one family, their Sire is One,

Cheers them with June and slays them with December,

Portions to each the shadow and the sun.'

F. W. H. Myers.

And hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation. The one true God, different from the impassive selfish deity of the Epicurean schools, was not only the Architect and the Preserver of the universe, but was also the watchful governor of each people. The burning eloquent words of he eastern stranger they were listening to, telling of appointed times to a nation's prosperity, must have rung strangely and awfully in the ears of these proud Athenians, who lived only on the memories of a past greatness and superiority; while the assertion that Paul's God determined the bounds of the habitation of peoples, would painfully remind these Greeks that they had long ago reached the boundaries of their habitation and of their influence, which once seemed to promise to be limitless both in the east and west, and that these boundaries every year were being narrowed.

Thus claiming such powers for that God whose messenger he asserted himself to be, Paul warned them indirectly of the danger and folly of rejecting the message of a Being at once so mighty and beneficent.