Neither is worshipped with—ministered unto, served by
men's hands, as though he needed anything—No less familiar as this thought also is to us, even from the earliest times of the Old Testament (Job 35:6, Job 35:8; Psalms 16:2-3; Psalms 50:12-14; Isaiah 40:14-18), it would pour a flood of light upon any candid heathen mind that heard it.
seeing he—He Himself.
giveth to all life, and breath, and all things—The Giver of all cannot surely be dependent for aught upon the receivers of all (I Chronicles 29:14). This is the culminating point of a pure Theism.
God that made the world and all . . . therein—The most profound philosophers of Greece were unable to conceive any real distinction between God and the universe. Thick darkness, therefore, behooved to rest on all their religious conceptions. To dissipate this, the apostle sets out with a sharp statement of the fact of creation as the central principle of all true religion—not less needed now, against the transcendental idealism of our day.
seeing he is Lord—or Sovereign.
of heaven and earth—holding in free and absolute subjection all the works of His hands; presiding in august royalty over them, as well as pervading them all as the principle of their being. How different this from the blind Force or Fate to which all creatures were regarded as in bondage!
dwelleth not in temples made with hands—This thought, so familiar to Jewish ears (I Kings 8:27; Isaiah 66:1-2; Acts 7:48), and so elementary to Christians, would serve only more sharply to define to his heathen audience the spirituality of that living, personal God, whom he "announced" to them.
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