Psalm 4

Confident Plea for Deliverance from Enemies

To the leader: with stringed instruments. A Psalm of David.

Psalm 5

Trust in God for Deliverance from Enemies

To the leader: for the flutes. A Psalm of David.

Psalm 6

Prayer for Recovery from Grave Illness

To the leader: with stringed instruments; according to The Sheminith. A Psalm of David.

Paul in Athens

¹⁶ While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.^{(A) 17} So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and also in the marketplace^[a] every day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸ Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this pretentious babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) ¹⁹ So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰ It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” ²¹ Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

²² Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. ²³ For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands,^{(B) 25} nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.^{(C) 26} From one ancestor^[b] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,^{(D) 27} so that they would search for God^[c] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.^{(E) 28} For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

²⁹ “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.^{(G) 30} While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,^{(H) 31} because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”^(I)

³² When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” ³³ At that point Paul left them. ³⁴ But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.