Athens had a god for everything. Then Paul found one altar that admitted the whole system had a hole in it: “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”

In Acts 17:16–34, the Apostle Paul walks into Athens with no shared Bible, no Abraham, no Moses, no prophets—and somehow preaches Jesus anyway.

Standing before the Areopagus, surrounded by Stoics, Epicureans, temples, idols, philosophers, and centuries of Greek thought, Paul does something remarkable. He doesn’t begin by telling Athens that everything it knows is worthless. He begins with something they already know they don’t know.

An altar.

A confession carved into stone.

We may have missed something.

Paul takes that little crack in the marble and walks straight through it.

He quotes their poets. He speaks the ...