The God who made the world and all that is in it is neither served by human hands nor do we owe him anything. The human person is a notoriously religious being. Paul himself comes to this realization when his preaching mission takes him into the land of the Athenians where he stumbles upon an intriguing phenomenon. The Athenians were, as was the norm among the Gentile people at the time, worshipers of several gods. The reasoning behind this was the thought that no one god/deity was capable of taking care of all the affairs of the world. The more gods a people worshipped, the better it was for them. It was for this reason that the Athenian shrines were littered with a plethora of altars which were used for the offering of sacrifices to their many gods. But as Paul made his way through the shrines, something caught his attention. In addition to the many altars dedicated to the various gods, there was an altar that was dedicated to an unknown god. It might be that the Athenians realized that their list of gods was not exhaustive of all the gods that were out there, and so to be on the safe side, they needed to include these unknown, unnamed gods in their calendar of worship. It was something that impressed Paul who “commended” them for their “religiousness.” And as he was doing that, it also occurred to him that this was an apt opportunity to proclaim to them the one God who made heaven and earth and to whom worship truly and properly belongs. But he was careful to make it clear to them that the worship due to the one creator God differs from the kind of worship they were used to: “The God who made the world and all that is in it does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, not is he served by human hands because he needs anything.”
As Paul proclaimed the ONE, TRUE, God who had revealed the self to Israel, he made sure to dispel the wrong notion of worship that was prevalent among the Athenians and the other pagan communities (and which is still prevalent today). The worship of many gods was kind of an “insurance” policy: in case one of the gods was not pleased with a sacrifice made to him/her, the other gods could step in and save the situation. However, this was not how it is with the one, true God, the creator of heaven and earth. Yes, we duly owe God our worship. As religious beings, we recognize that we live in a relationship with a superior being, a being in whose power we “live and move and have our being.” But our worship of God should not be seen as a “service” rendered (in the sense of us doing something for God). Our worship of God is both a praise and thanksgiving, and is something that we do, not for God, but for ourselves: “Our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation” (Common Preface IV). We raise our voices in thanksgiving to God for our salvation which has already been won for us in Jesus Christ. It is this realization that moves one to offer worship to God. This was precisely the content of Paul’s proclamation to the Athenians: “God has overlooked the times of ignorance but now demands that all people everywhere repent because he has made this possible in the one whom he raised from the dead.”
We are moved to worship God because of what God has already done in the person of Jesus Christ. It is this knowledge (of God always acting salvifically on our behalf) that fills us with confidence that the God who has acted in the past will also act in the present and in the future. Consequently, we worship God, not for something that God is yet to do, but for something that God has already done: our salvation.