The Lord of heaven and earth does not live in temples built by hands

Act 17:22-33 (TNIV) -

22 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.

23 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.
24 “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 hands.25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.26 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.27 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.

28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
29 “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.30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

31 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.”
32 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.”33 At that, Paul left the Council.

My thoughts -

My children have these ideas about God that I, in my understanding of God, find to be quite nonsensical. They really do believe that God is like a man (not a woman, either - this is an indictment against us and our lack of inclusive language) who is really, really big. This really, really big man/God lives in a physical world separate from ours called heaven. When we die we get to go there.

Now I try to educate them but they're children, there's only so much they understand. And then I wonder just how nonsensical my ideas about God are, or anyone's. How do you conceive of the inconceivable? How do you comprehend the incomprehensible? What kind of a being is being itself?

I can sympathize with the Athenian idea of an "unknown god", in a way. Do we, can we, really know God? And, does Paul's message to the Athenians really not still have meaning to us? We go to our churches to encounter God, but do we understand that God doesn't live in these buildings that we've built; that God is life itself? There is no life outside of God. There is no death in God. It's hard to understand, impossible maybe. But God is not limited to the scope of our imaginations or our limited understanding of the universe.

We like to be comfortable. We like to feel secure. We have created idols for ourselves to make God something we can wrap our heads around. And yet God cannot be understood, only experienced. [Note: This is not meant to let us off the hook in learning more about God and God's will for our lives. That we can not know all does not mean that we should not seek to know all that we can.] Our worship is not really that different from that of the Athenians. I may spend my time and energy mocking their "primitive" beliefs about gods, and yet my own are no more refined, really. God is not, and can not be limited by what we believe about God.

"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 hands."

We can not define God. We can not contain God. We can not fully understand God. But we can bow down and worship God in everything that we do. God is life. God is in all life. Our experience of God and worship of God is not limited to Sunday morning at church, but everything that we do, our entire lives, are an act of praise to our Creator.

[Note: This post has been updated to correct a typo in the title. Also, I'm an idiot. FYI]