²³ for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about.

²² You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship, while we Jews know all about him, for salvation comes through the Jews.

Paul’s Concern for the Galatians

⁸ Before you Gentiles knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods that do not even exist. ⁹ So now that you know God (or should I say, now that God knows you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual principles of this world?

³ And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth.

²⁵ “O righteous Father, the world doesn’t know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me.

²¹ Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe.

³⁰ “God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him.

²⁰ And we know that the Son of God has come, and he has given us understanding so that we can know the true God.^[a] And now we live in fellowship with the true God because we live in fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the only true God, and he is eternal life.

⁴ He will exalt himself and defy everything that people call god and every object of worship. He will even sit in the temple of God, claiming that he himself is God.

⁵ There may be so-called gods both in heaven and on earth, and some people actually worship many gods and many lords.