The Current Thing is the God-shaped hole in your soul

In Acts 17, Paul finds an Athens community that built an altar TO AN UNKNOWN GOD, and makes an introduction.

When Paul visited Athens, and saw they built an altar to "AN UNKNOWN GOD," he saw an opportunity to spread the good news.

The Current Thing is your way of filling the God-shaped hole in your soul. And I can prove it.

Acts 17 tells of one of Paul’s most important but least successful missions.

In chapter 17 Paul has quickly moved from Thessalonica, where Jewish leaders formed a mob to oppose him, to Berea, where the mob followed him. Finally he heads to Athens, while Silas and Timothy follow in his footsteps.

As he waits for backup to arrive, Paul takes in the sights and sounds of Athens and is disturbed.

“He was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols,” reads Acts 17:16.

Yet when Paul starts talking, it is he who is accused of “advocating foreign gods.”

Paul is confronted with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and talks God with him. The philosophers were intrigued but not impressed.

“What is this babbler trying to say?” they ask in Acts 17:18. “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.”

In the Christian tradition, Paul is a model for boldness, for clear and forthright talk. In the eyes of the Epicureans, he was a “babbler.”

But they wanted to hear more.

“You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean,” the philosophers said in Acts 17:20.

And with that, Paul had his opening. When the early Christians were confronted with Jews, they were confronted with an ancient tradition whose leaders questioned Jesus’s place within it.

When the early Christians met with the Gentile equivalent, they were thought to speak “strange ideas.”

Strange, but interesting. Rather than tell the Christians to stop preaching, the asked Paul to say more.

In Acts 17:21, we learn why. They were trying to fill the God-sized hole in their souls. The fully-parenthetical verse reads:

(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

When Paul spoke to a group called the Areopagus, he offered Jesus as a means to fill the void.

“I see in every way that you are very religious,” Paul said in 17:22.

He continued in the next verse: “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim for you.”

Paul’s interactions in Athens point to the path forward for Christianity: A mission to the Gentiles.

The mission to the Jews failed because it came with two big obstacles:

1. The Jewish history of idolatry, and the consequences of it, made them wary of claims of a messiah. If the Gentiles had a God-shaped hole in their souls, reaching the Jews meant displacing their current idea of God with a new one. This proved difficult.

2. The political powers that be saw Jesus-preaching as a threat.

Christians would take their lumps in the Gentile world too. Preaching the name of Jesus carried “many hardships,” as Paul said in Acts 14:22.

Pagans viewed Christians as atheists, or at best peddlers of “foreign gods.” Romans viewed insistent and unrepentant Christians as lion fodder.

But it was the very emptiness of the Gentile existence that left room for God. These were people obsessed with The Current Thing, who built altars To An Unknown God. They had a desire for more, but didn’t know what to do with it. Paul had an answer: follow Jesus.

“A few men became followers of Paul, and believed,” Acts 17:33 reports.

Most every other mission did bigger numbers. But Athens showed the path forward.

Who better to share the good news with, than empty people who need it so?