Acts 17

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. ‭‭Acts‬ ‭17‬:‭11‬-‭12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

God wants us to use our intelligence to investigate and understand the truth.  We are not expected to have blind faith regarding who He is and what He can do for us.  Blind faith means believing something without trying to fully understand it or differentiate whether or not it is actually true.  God encourages us to seek wisdom through studying and truly knowing Him and His Word.  Let us look at the example of Abraham, when he was asked to sacrifice his only son, Isaac (See Genesis 22).  On the surface it appears that Abraham was blindly doing what God told him to do.  However, we discover in Hebrews 11:19 that “Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.”  Abraham did not act blindly.  Instead, he used his powers of reason to guide his actions, based on what he knew about God.  He knew God’s nature and trusted that He would be faithful.  In this passage, Paul commends the Berean Jews, who actively researched the Word of God to establish a good understanding of what he said so that they could truly believe him.  God created humans with the ability to think and reason, and God expects us to use the gifts He has given us.  Remember that at its core, the goal of reason and logic is to find truth, and Jesus made the bold claim that He is truth (see John 14:6).  So seeking the truth will lead us to Jesus every time!  “Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding” (Proverbs 3:13).  There will be times in our walk with God that we will act purely on faith because we do not know the whole picture.  However, this faith is not blind.  It is based on knowledge of God’s nature and character, His promises from Scripture, and our personal experiences from walking with Him every day.

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 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. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything. Rather, He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent. For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.” When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others. ‭‭Acts‬ ‭17‬:‭22‬-‭34‬ ‭NIV‬‬

The discovery of the altar “To An Unknown God” in Athens showed that these highly educated Greek philosophers could not explain everything with science and their gods.  These men were in search of the truth, which Paul boldly explained to them.  In fact, searching for the truth in the scientific realm actually leads to God.  Contrary to what many believe, science and the Bible do not conflict.  Jeremiah 33:25 tells us “This is what the Lord says: ‘If I have not made My covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth…”  Scientific laws and discovering how things in nature work are all a reflection of God’s creativity and perfection.  The more one studies science, the more one will see that there is a deliberate, intelligent design to the universe, one that is absolutely impossible to have occurred by random chance.