Standing in the Areopagus, Paul made an unsettling claim. Only it’s still unsettling when we hear it today. For Paul insists that no one’s location (place) or era (time) is ever an accident.
No one’s location or era is ever an accident.
Listen to his words. “God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27).
From those verses we see that God determined two things: territorial boundaries and appointed times. It is a striking argument with many implications. But in this article I want to consider its direct bearing on how African believers ought to understand their birth on this continent, in this century, as a summons from God.
No one’s location is a divine oversight. Neither is their era. Being born here is ordained. Likewise being born now is ordained. But much of Africans’ discontent comes from one or both of those. We ask ourselves, why do I find myself on this continent, in this country? Why was I born at such an hour as this? Acts 17:26 offers the same answer to both questions. God determined it. And that changes everything.
God Determined Your Dwelling Place
However, God doesn’t merely determine our time and place. He does so with purpose, which Paul gives in Acts 17:17. “That they,” ourselves too, “should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.”
A people’s history and geography are neither divorced from nor obstacles to the search for God.
A people’s history and geography are neither divorced from nor obstacles to the search for God. They are its terrain, the field appointed by God. The circumstances of life point us to God, giving glimpses of his beauty and majesty, preparing the heart for God’s fullest self-revelation in Christ. We can trace this in Paul’s argument in Romans. “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:19). Yet “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). Acts 17 simply applies this geographically and historically.
Your particular place, this time, are the very circumstances God has prepared for you, to seek him. Here. Now. In other words, we aren’t more likely to find God when our situation improves, in a better Africa of the future or even another more affluent continent. The soil isn’t softer elsewhere for faith.
This isn’t a shield against honestly engaging with hardship. Like no other continent on earth we have almost ubiquitous scarcity, rampant corruption and collapsing infrastructures. I’m not baptising any of these things. They aren’t good. However, as Abraham Kuyper would argue, they are the field of God’s redemptive purposes. Coming back to them: scarcity strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency; and when institutions fail we fall to our knees in prayer.
These verses in Acts 17 close off two common, though opposite errors. The first is resignation, which treats ubiquitous hardship as an excuse not to seek God now. The second is one worth exploring in a little more detail.
Relocation Isn’t Redemption
Many Africans assume that escaping their present location would resolve their deeper restlessness and provide an environment for properly seeking God, living more fully for his glory. Migration isn’t the concern here. No, the concern is our unspoken belief that comfort and convenience are themselves ultimate progress. Athens had no shortage of wealth or comforts, yet its boundaries and seasons were ordained for the same purpose as everyone else’s: to seek God. Surrounded by idols (Acts 17:23), distractions and decadence, Athens preferred its comfortable civilisation over actually pursuing the God who made it.
The test isn’t geography or circumstances but disposition.
Should the believer leave Africa? Or should they stay? None of this makes departure itself suspect. For the same sovereignty that fixes a people’s boundaries at other times widens them. After Stephen’s martyrdom, the Jerusalem believers “were scattered” by persecution and “went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:1, 4). When God scattered them they didn’t escape God’s ordained field, for he was merely enlarging that field.
This matters immensely now, because Africa is fast becoming the centre of global Christianity, even as many believers aspire to emigrate to places marked by shrinking, secularising churches. Leaving need not mean leaving the field of gospel seeking. Instead it should mean carrying that field into places that have largely stopped searching—in a word, mission, not escape. Ultimately, then, the test isn’t geography or circumstances but disposition.
Seek God, Wherever He’s Placed You
If you’re holding an acceptance letter, checking the date of your visa interview, getting ready to accept that invitation from a relative abroad, I’m not telling you to stay. But I am urging you not to leave without reflection. There is a harder question than whether or not to leave. And it’s this: am I seeking God here? Am I seeking God in this place, at this hour? Or have I quietly decided that seeking him properly begins once I go elsewhere?
We must test our desire to leave and the desire to stay by the same standard. If a visa means you’ll carry this gospel into a place that has long grown cold to it, go as one sent. If staying means facing scarcity and learning to depend on God rather than comforts, then stay as one seeking him. Either way, the field travels with you. For it was never only a place. It is the desire God placed in our hearts to seek him, ordained to be worked out somewhere, in some hour.
You don’t need to relocate to draw near to God.
You don’t need to relocate to draw near to God. Improved circumstance won’t necessarily lead to more earnestly seeking him. Paul’s sermon doesn’t close with: ‘wait for better boundaries.’ It closes on a specific ground. God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The search that Africa’s boundaries and seasons were meant to provoke doesn’t terminate in a vague sense of the divine. It terminates in a person, crucified, risen, and appointed as judge of the world.
God is “actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). He is near. And in the risen Christ he’s found.
