The God Close at Hand

Paul’s address to the Athenian thinkers at the Areopagus begins with basic teaching on the nature of God. This makes sense, for one can hardly understand the gospel unless one first understands something of the nature of the One to whom the gospel reconciles us. As we saw in our last study, the first truth about God that the Apostle emphasized was divine transcendence—God is the Creator of all, distinct from His creation, and the sovereign King over the universe (Acts 17:26–27a). In today’s passage, we see that the second key truth about God that Paul proclaimed was divine immanence.

Although false religions often deny divine transcendence, others take a nonbiblical view of it and push God’s distinction from the world so far as to make the Creator utterly unknowable. Many forms of Islam, for example, say that God is so far above us that we cannot know Him at all and that He cannot really love us. Biblically speaking, however, the Lord is not only transcendent but also immanent—that is, close at hand. God is closer to us even than our own souls. He is never absorbed into His creation, remaining ever distinct from it, but He is not so different as to make true knowledge of Him or a true relationship with Him impossible.

In Acts 17:27b–28, we see Paul stressing God’s immanence. Quoting ideas current in Greek philosophy at the time, the Apostle notes that even the philosophers could see that we live, move, and have our being in God and that we are His offspring in the sense that He is our Creator. We are not self-existent, for our existence relies at every moment on God, who created and sustains us. His immanence does not deny His transcendence, for we still depend on Him, but He is so close that Paul can speak of all of us as being “in God.” This is not panentheism, which says that we occupy the same divine space as the Lord or are metaphysically present in Him in such a way that we are no longer fully distinct from Him. Paul is simply emphasizing our dependence on God and His closeness to us.

We are not self-existent but derive our existence from God, who has the very power of existence in Himself. Dr. R.C. Sproul comments on Acts 17:28: “Our being is creaturely being. It is very much involved with life and change, but our existence is nothing we could have brought about on our own. Apart from a being that is not derived, dependent, or contingent but has the power within Himself eternally to be—without that none of us would exist.”