Atos 17

Atos 17

Piper explains "This has a special wallop when you ponder why he chose to say just this to these Athenians on the Areopagus. The Athenians were fond of boasting that they were autochthones, which means that they sprang from their native soil and were not immigrants from some other place or people group. (See Lenski and Bruce, ad. loc.) Paul chooses to confront this ethnic pride head on. God made all the ethnic groups—Athenians and Barbarians—and he made them out of one common stock. So you Athenians are cut from the same cloth as those despised Barbarians and Scythians." (Racial Reconciliation) And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth - Talk about a blow to the national pride of the pride filled Greeks who derisively referred to all other men as "barbarians!" This passage places all men on equal footing, because all were created by God. God made the human race one family, descending from one progenitor, Adam. Thus One man is an allusion to Adam, which his hearers would not have understood if he had used the specific name. So in a sense Paul continues with allusions to the book of beginnings, the book of Genesis, having alluded to creation of the kosmos and now creation of God's highest creation Adam. Jack Arnold - We know that this is a scientifically sound statement, for science admits today that there is only one race of man, one species, Homo sapians. Despite differences of pigment, stature and features in the human race, all men came from one source. This statement was a real blow to the Athenian’s racial pride. They thought themselves superior to all men because they were Greeks who spoke the Greek language, and all others were barbarians. The Athenians also felt themselves superior to all Greeks because they believed that they evolved from the soil of Athenian land. Paul said that these Athenians were not some special section of humanity, but were made of the same stuff as the rest of mankind. All kinds of racial prejudices are shot down in this one verse. Hitler thought the Germans were the super race. Some whites think they are superior to blacks. Racial prejudice is a horrible sin and one of the hardest attitudes to break. (Sermon) ESV Study Bible says that one man "in whom all people find their ancestral unity, (is) an idea that would appeal to the Stoics’ strong sense of human brotherhood." The concept of "race" has no basis in Scripture for all men are descended from Adam, through Noah, and thus all are members of only one race--the human race. The term "race," as ordinarily used, is strictly an evolutionary concept, with "race" understood as a sub-species in the process of evolving into a new species. There is no observational scientific evidence for such evolutionary transformations, among either men or animals.