Acts 17:27

Acts 17:27. That they should seek the Lord. The older MSS. here read ‘God' instead of ‘the Lord.' The design of God's overruling providence was that men should seek after a knowledge of the Divine Ruler of all things, and also after a living union with this gracious and all-powerful Being. The Greek words, however, which begin the next clause (εί ἂραγε), and the mood of the verbs in the sentence, indicate very plainly that the result is doubtful. The speaker on the whole implies in a delicate manner that mankind had missed the mark at which they aimed. This is still more clearly implied by the general exhortation to repentance contained in Acts 17:30 below.

They might feel after him. The Greek word translated ‘feel after' denotes the action of one blind who gropes after what he desires to find. Paul, says Schleiermacher, represents it ‘as the ultimate purpose of all the great arrangements of God in the world that man should seek Him, He regards man's noblest aim and perfection as consisting in such seeking after and finding. Let us consider,' he adds, ‘(1) the great object of our search; and (2) the path which conducts to that object.'

Though he be not far from every one of us. Acts 17:28. For in him we live and move and have our being. ‘ So near is He to all men, if they would but believe it. But the human race would prefer that He should be far distant; it continues to imitate our first parents, who hid themselves from the presence of God in Paradise' (Gossner quoted by Lange).

The words of Acts 17:28 explain the meaning of the assertion of' God's being not far from every one of us.' On God we must depend every moment for our life. We owe to Him our existence here, and every instant of our continuance in this world; and the apostle in the next sentence appeals to a then well-known saying of a famous writer in proof that this dependence upon and close connection with the Deity was a generally acknowledged fact.

As certain also of your poets have said, For we are also his offspring. The quotation is the beginning of an hexameter' line taken verbatim from Aratus, a Cilician poet who wrote about two hundred years before Paul's visit to Athens. The work from which the citation is made was the Phenomena, an astronomical poem. Cleanthes, in his Hymn to Zeus (Jupiter), uses almost the very same words: ‘For we thine offspring are.' Cleanthes was a Stoic, he lived about the same time as Aratus. There is no doubt that Paul was well read in Greek literature; elsewhere he quotes directly from Menander (1 Corinthians 15:33), from Epimenides (Titus 1:12), besides other expressions in his epistles which are probably ‘memories' of his studies in Greek poetry and philosophy.