The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The Apostle Paul was walking a tightrope, ministering to the Gentiles while trying not to offend his own countrymen, willing to fall back into the rites and rituals of Judaism.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. God stayed Paul's hand from committing an act of purification and an animal sacrifice that would go against the very teaching Paul preached to the Gentiles.

Listen now as Dr. Boice shows us that despite Paul's good intentions toward the Jews, the Apostle's people rose up against him and threatened his very life for challenging the law of Moses.

Dr. James Boice: When we began our study of Acts 21, I raised the question: was Paul wrong in going to Jerusalem on this last trip? I tried to present my view of that in what I thought was a guarded and at least somewhat balanced way, but I probably did not adequately indicate that there are at least two sides to that picture.

Certainly, the Holy Spirit warned Paul on several occasions and in a variety of ways about going, and I referred to that and used that as evidence that he was wrong, persisting in his own way and will when God was indicating something different. I referred in trying to establish that to a verse in the 20th chapter when Paul said that the Holy Spirit warned him in every city that prison and hardships are facing him.

Someone pointed out afterward that the first part of that verse also says, "And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem." I admit that makes the sentence ambiguous. One might argue that the first reference, "compelled by the Spirit," lacking the word "Holy" before it, merely speaks of an inner compulsion, and that when Paul mentions the Holy Spirit explicitly, it is in the terms of a warning.

On the other hand, someone might very well say that a warning is not a command to desist. The Holy Spirit could very well be warning Paul that hardships and prison faced him and yet at the same time not be forbidding him to go. So, I acknowledge that what I was saying there is perhaps ambiguous.

What I do want to say, however, is that what Paul was prepared to do once he got to Jerusalem was certainly not ambiguous. He may have been right in going up to the city, but once he got there, and the Jerusalem church, in the form of its leaders, undoubtedly led by James, who's mentioned explicitly in verse 18, made a suggestion.

When these leaders and James said, "Now look, we have a group of men here who have prepared themselves to go through all of the Jewish rites of purification and at the end of that offer a sacrifice for their sins, have a priest offer a sacrifice for their sins in the temple area, why don't you just join them?"

They said, "By that means, demonstrate to this large Jewish population that you are not opposed to the laws and traditions of our fathers." When that suggestion was made and Paul agreed to do it, he was most certainly wrong. He was wrong for a number of reasons. In the first place, the idea of purification itself is wrong. You don't find anything in the New Testament about any rite of purification for a Christian.

Now, what you find in the New Testament, because we are sinners, is the command to confess our sin. That's quite a different thing. We confess our sin to God, and we plead the blood of Jesus Christ, which has been shed for us, and we ask for forgiveness. We have the promise in Scripture that if we do that, God is faithful and just to forgive, and he will restore us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

But you see, that is confession, and that's quite a different thing than a rite of purification. The reason why Christians are not given rites of purification is that in the absolute sense, we have that provided already through the work of Christ. So to go to a priest and go through some system of purification is in itself a repudiation of the completed work of the Savior.

But in addition, this particular rite of purification also involved the matter of a sacrifice. It's referred to in verse 26 as an offering. That's not what we mean by an offering. When we say, "Let's receive an offering," we mean give your money. It was not an offering like that. This is an animal that was brought by the worshiper, handed to the priest, one confessed sin over the head of the animal, and then the animal was killed as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sin of the worshiper.

Now, it is inconceivable that Paul, who taught the finality of the work of Jesus Christ, would do that, and yet it would seem that he was prepared to go to that length because of his concern for his people. We might plead, I'm sure we should plead, that he did it with good motives. He was very concerned for his people.

He didn't want a schism in the church between those who were Jewish and were Christians and those who were Gentiles and were Christians. And he saw that coming, and indeed it did come. He certainly did it with right motives. He wanted to hold the church together. He wanted to show his love for Israel. But right motives notwithstanding, it did not make it right.

And what Paul should have been doing is what he had told the Galatians to do when they were faced with a similar but much less serious problem. Legalizers from Jerusalem had come to the churches in Galatia, and they had said to the Christians in those churches, "You can't be saved unless you keep the law of Israel, and as a symbol of that, you must be circumcised."

Paul said in writing to the Galatians, "If you're circumcised with that in mind, that somehow that's contributing to your salvation, that you're saved by coming under the legal dispensation of the Old Testament, if you are circumcised with that in mind, Christ profits you nothing." Those are Paul's own words.

When he made his application, as he did in the fifth chapter of that letter, verse one, he said, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage." And yet here was Paul becoming entangled. And what I pointed out is that God, who is sovereign over the details of our lives, did not allow Paul to do it.

Sometimes you and I act that way. We, perhaps with good motives, quite often with bad motives, are on the verge of betraying the gospel by our actions. And God simply slams the door. He will not let us do it because the gospel matters to God, even if at that particular moment in our lives it doesn't matter a great deal to us.

Now we pick up the story at that point, and we find that Paul was arrested as a result of this attempt of the mob in Jerusalem to have him killed. Verse 27 says that this began because some Jews from the province of Asia saw Paul at the temple. Asia, of course, is the Roman province of Asia, what we call western Turkey, and its capital city was Ephesus.

If you think back over what we have already been told in the book of Acts, you'll recall that Paul spent a long time in Ephesus. He had a two-year ministry in Ephesus. He taught every day in Ephesus, a long, long time from 10:00 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, as one of the notes in one of the manuscript margins says, and there's no reason to think that that is wrong.

As a result of that two-year extensive teaching, the gospel spread throughout the entire province. Now, we're not told that these Jews are from Ephesus, it only says they were from the province of Asia, but we do notice that the problem that they mentioned in the context of this arrest involved a man named Trophimus, who was from Ephesus, an Ephesian.

So it's likely that they were from Ephesus and that because they were from Ephesus, they had been exposed to Paul's teaching and knew very well where this Apostle to the Gentiles stood. You see, Paul had come to Jerusalem and, beset by this particular attempt at compromise, was himself willing to assume again, contrary to his own teaching, the ceremonial law of Israel, even at the point of denying the finished work of Christ.

But listen, the Jews from Ephesus or the province of Asia knew better. They'd heard him teach. They knew what he believed, and they said quite rightly, "I don't care whether he's going through that kind of a ceremony or not, we know perfectly well that Paul is teaching the Gentiles can be saved apart from the law of Moses." And they were right.

Now, they were wrong about Trophimus. The idea got abroad that because Trophimus, a Gentile, was in the city and Paul had gone into the temple area where only Jews could go, that somehow he brought Trophimus along. Luke makes clear that that was not the case. Paul, who was very concerned at this point to demonstrate his adherence to the laws of Judaism, was certainly not going to violate the sacred temple precincts by bringing in a Gentile.

So he hadn't done that. But these Jews were certainly right in saying that Paul taught what he did teach. They gave it their own twist, of course. They said that he is stirring up everyone against our law and our people, and Paul was not doing that. He had great respect for the law of Israel, but he certainly was teaching that the Gentiles could be saved apart from it. And this is what upset them, as we're going to see.

Well, they stir up the crowd, and the crowd fell upon Paul while he was in the temple area. They dragged him out of this inner area where only Jews could go, and out in the court of the Gentiles, they fell upon him with force. They would certainly have killed him in a very short time if it weren't for the fact that the Roman garrison was stationed there in the Fortress of Antonia bordering on the temple precincts.

As soon as a riot started, someone simply said to the commander, "There is trouble down below." He took two groups of soldiers, each under a centurion, a minimum of 200 soldiers, and he had them pour out of the fortress down into the court of the Gentiles, making their way forcibly to Paul, and they rescued him from the mob.

The commander was a very wise man. He handled this very well. We're going to see in a moment what his name was because we know that also. When he got Paul into his custody and was keeping him from being murdered, he tried to find out from the crowd what it is that he had done.

They were all stirred up, and they were shouting one thing and another. He heard this, he heard that, sometimes he couldn't even understand what they were saying. So he wasn't making any sense of that. He said, "I'll have to take Paul inside and interrogate him." So he started to take Paul away with the soldiers.

The mob followed after. "Away with him, away with him," they were shouting, the same words they used of Jesus Christ at the time of the crucifixion. They didn't mean take him away; they mean away from him from the earth. They wanted him dead. The soldiers had to forcibly protect him as they began to lead him into the fortress for an interrogation.

Now, I said we're going to see what this man's name was in a moment, and I do that now because it has bearing upon the story. If you turn to the 23rd chapter to verse 26, you'll find a letter that he wrote, and it begins with his name. His name is Claudius Lysias. Now, that's important because although Claudius is a Latin name, Lysias is a Greek name.

What this indicates for us is that this Roman commander, this very able man, was actually of Greek background. Lysias was his family name, and he had adopted the name Claudius, no doubt because of the emperor Claudius using his name for his own. I say that as significant, at least as a detail, because as these soldiers were leading Paul up into the barracks, he asked the commander in very educated Greek, "May I say something to you?"

We know it was in Greek. In the New Testament, of course, it's written in Greek, but everything is in Greek. Even when they were speaking Aramaic, it's in Greek. We don't know it for that reason, but we know it was in Greek because the commander immediately said to Paul, "Do you speak Greek?" He didn't just mean you know my language. What he meant was, "Do you really speak good Greek? Are you really a Greek?"

Because Paul had been raised speaking Greek, you see, and he spoke it well, and he was an educated man. This man who was a Greek understood that, recognized that here he was dealing with a man of some education and some bearing. That surprised him because what had been going through his mind is that this must be that Egyptian who a number of years ago had come and had proclaimed himself the Messiah.

He had taken a bunch of people out into the wilderness, actually about as far as the Mount of Olives, and there had said that the God of the Jews whom he was serving was going to destroy the walls of Jerusalem, and then he was going to lead these 4,000 Jews in, they were going to drive out the Romans, and so on. Instead of that, the Romans attacked them, killed some, the Egyptian fled, and the followers scattered.

It is quite understandable that if this Egyptian came back, some of those that were involved or duped by him might have fallen upon him as they had in the case of Paul. That's what he was thinking, "That must be this Egyptian that came back." But Egyptians don't speak fluent Attic Greek. And here this man was speaking it. So he's very impressed, you see.

And when Paul then asked, as he did, "Would it be possible for me to speak to the crowd?" this Roman commander, who under other circumstances probably would have said no, said instead, "Well, all right. Must be a mistake here, and if you're speaking to them, we'll help to resolve this difficulty. Then go ahead." And so Paul stood up to speak, and he gave this magnificent defense.

He uses the word defense. In Greek, it's the word "apologia," from which we get our word apology, but it means a defense. He gives this magnificent speech or defense of his background and his actions that we find in the first part of chapter 22. It's interesting that this account of Paul's conversion is found as many times as it is in the Scripture.

We saw when we looked at the ninth chapter at the historic account of Paul's conversion that it's found three times in Acts. It's found in the ninth chapter where you have it presented historically, not in Paul's words but in Luke's words. You find it here in the 22nd chapter where Paul gives this address to the Jews of Jerusalem. It is a Hebrew version of it, spoken in Aramaic with Jewish overtones.

We're going to see why that was important. You find it a third time in Acts in chapter 26. There it's before Festus and Felix, the Roman kings, and Paul there gives it with a Roman slant, but it's the same story. Then you find it twice more in Paul's letters. You find it in Philippians, the third chapter. It's what I call there the theological version of his conversion.

Finally, though much briefer, you find it in the first chapter of First Timothy where it is hortatory or exemplary, where Paul says to Timothy what happened to him in order that Timothy might be encouraged to bear a similar witness in his life. So obviously, this is something of great importance. Now, as Paul gives it here, it has three parts, and it's very easy to see what they are.

Paul speaks first of all of his past. It's his past in Judaism, and he emphasizes that because what he's trying to do in this speech is calm the crowd. They're all upset because they think that he has done something wrong in opening the gospel to the Gentiles. He wants to stress with them how very Jewish he is and how everything that happened to him happened within terms well understood by a Jewish congregation.

Then there's the second part. It begins in verse 6, and that's the account of his conversion itself. So you have the past, and then you have his conversion, and then finally, beginning with verse 17, you have an account of his commission. Now, when Paul begins to speak of his past, we need to remember that when Paul spoke of his past in Judaism, apart from the single thing that he persecuted Christians, Paul always spoke of that past as something about which he had no need whatever to be ashamed.

On the contrary, he spoke of it favorably. He said, "You know, if anybody has something about which he could boast, certainly I do because I was born a Jew, and I was raised to know the law, and I tried to keep it, and I was a Pharisee, and moreover, I was zealous." Those are the things he talks about in Philippians. We find exactly the same things here.

It must be the way Paul was used to telling about his conversion. He was a pure-blooded Jew. Sometimes he spelled that out different ways: Hebrew of the Hebrews, tribe of Benjamin, and so forth. But it's the same thing: pure-blooded Jew and a Pharisee. And as a Pharisee, I was taught the law. He says here, "I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers."

He mentions here that he was trained under Gamaliel because everybody in Jerusalem knew who Gamaliel was. But it's the same thing. He's talking about his training, what his birth, now his training, but all of that was Jewish, you see. And furthermore, he says, "I was a zealous Jew," and he always proves his zeal by saying he persecuted the church. He mentions that in Philippians and he mentions it here in the 22nd chapter as well.

Aside from the fact that in his mistaken zeal he was killing people, Paul was not ashamed of his Jewish background. That's because God had been at work in the Jewish people. God had given the law. All the advantages that you find spiritually, advantages in history before the coming of Jesus Christ, were wrapped up in Judaism. And Paul was not afraid to acknowledge that.

There is a great story, you know, that involves the English Prime Minister and politician Disraeli. Disraeli was a Jew, and once in the Houses of Parliament, he was chided for his Jewishness. One of the English lords or politicians in the house said to Disraeli, "You, sir, are a Jew." And he meant it as a slander on Disraeli.

Disraeli rose to his feet and drew himself up to his full height, which was not very great. He was a rather short man. And he replied something like this, "Yes, sir, that is true. I am a Jew. And I remind you, sir, that half of Christendom worships a Jew and the other half worships a Jewess. Moreover," he said, "I remind you, sir, that when your ancestors were gathering acorns to eat in a German forest, my ancestors were giving law and religion to the world."

He was absolutely right in his rebuff. Now, Paul was party to that. That is the way he thought. And yet, in spite of the fact that he had this great heritage, in spite of the fact that Paul was trained in the law, the law which God had given for our benefit to restrain evil and to direct us to the Messiah, Paul was woefully off-base.

He was doing as a Jew the same thing that Gentiles do with their own kinds of non-Christian religion. He was trying to establish a righteousness of his own, which because he was a sinner was no true righteousness. And he was rejecting the salvation that God had provided. So he gives that background.

The second thing he talks about is his conversion when Jesus appeared to him on the way to Damascus. Paul had been all wrapped up in what he was doing. His zeal for the tradition of his fathers had blinded him to the truth. But when Jesus Christ appeared to him, he suddenly understood it. It was like God had stopped him absolutely short.

He had thought before this that he was doing the work of God, and suddenly Jesus appeared with the glory of God. He understood that in persecuting the Christians, he was actually persecuting Jesus of Nazareth and opposing what God was doing in the world. You know, it is remarkable if you think at it from a merely human point of view that the Apostle Paul was converted at all.

Lord Lyttelton, in his great study of the conversion of the Apostle Paul, approached it as a lawyer with all the various options. And he said, if I can reduce it just briefly to what his argument comes down to, Paul had nothing to gain by his conversion, and secondly, Paul had everything to lose by his conversion.

Nothing to gain. What point was there to become identified with this despised sect of the Nazarene? He was a man of some wealth. He was a man of education. He was a man of position. His future was ahead of him in Judaism as a Pharisee. What possible gain was there for him to be converted and begin to follow after Jesus, this rabbi from Nazareth?

Not only was there nothing to be gained by his conversion, he had everything to lose because if he made that switch, why, all of his friends would turn against him. He would be an outcast. More than that, his life would be in danger. He would be hounded from place to place. He would be persecuted, and we know that that is exactly what happened. Certainly, Paul understood it.

So why was he converted? He had nothing to gain by it, and he had everything to lose by it. What, humanly speaking, explains his conversion? The answer is nothing, humanly speaking. The only reason Paul was converted is because the Lord Jesus Christ, the real Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, who was not a myth, not a figment of the imagination of the early Christians, this real Jesus appeared to him on the road.

When he saw that, Paul the realist was stopped dead in his tracks and said to Jesus, "Lord, what will you have me do?" And that of course brings us to the third part of his testimony. When he asked that question, Jesus told him what he was to do, and the thing that he was to do was to take the gospel to the Gentiles.

That's where the speech stops, but not because Paul himself would have stopped it there. It stops at that point because when Paul mentioned the word "Gentiles," those who had been listening up to this point and who had been relatively quiet but were certainly growing in their ill ease as his speech unfolded now burst into the loudest possible objections to what Paul was saying.

"Why, if he's talking about Gentiles, he is not fit to live!" And all of the congregation with one voice rose up against him, the same way they rose up against Jesus Christ. There wasn't any opportunity of carrying on the address at that point. The commander simply ordered the soldiers to bring him inside, and they prepared for an interrogation.

I suppose the commander didn't understand what he was saying. He must have been standing there listening to Paul, very impressed with this man, this Jew born in a Greek city with Roman citizenship as he was to learn in a few moments. Paul's great presence in front of a hostile crowd, sufficient that when he began to speak in Aramaic, the crowd quieted down.

But you see, he must not have been able to understand it very well. And suddenly in the midst of this address, as Paul is going on and on, everything seems to be going quite well, suddenly everybody bursts out screaming. He don't know what's happened! What in the world has he said? What's he done? So he just hauled him inside. "Let's begin to interrogate him and find out what he had said."

But what he said was Gentiles. Gentiles. You say to yourself, "Why in the world? Why in the world would that upset them?" I mean look, he'd been doing everything he could to stress how Jewish he was. He had been born a Jew, he had been raised a Jew, he had been educated a Jew, studied under Gamaliel, a very distinguished rabbi.

He'd even gone about his job as a Pharisee trying to exterminate the Christians. And when he tells of his conversion, he even does that in Jewish terms. Points out that Ananias was a devout Jew living in Damascus. And when Ananias talks to him, even does it in Jewish terms: the God of our fathers has chosen you to see the righteous one.

Not the way the Gentiles talk; that's the way the Jews talked. Paul had done everything he could to bridge the gap. But when he mentioned the word Gentiles, they reacted violently and would have killed him if they could. Why is that? Well, it's not because the Jews did not believe that the Gentiles could be saved. They could.

And the Jews went about to try and save them. The Lord Jesus Christ said that on one occasion. He said, "You go about all over the world trying to secure a proselyte. You scour heaven and earth to try and save a Gentile." So they did that. Well then, why did they object to the word? The answer is that they were not objecting to Gentiles being saved.

What they were objecting to is Gentiles being saved without the law of Moses. Without circumcision, without the temple worship, without the sacrifices, without first of all becoming Jews. You say to yourself, "Oh well, what prejudice that is. How prejudiced they must have been." Well, yes, yes. But you see, that's not just a Jewish prejudice. That is the prejudice of the human heart.

Because all they were saying was in order to get to heaven, you first have to do something, and you have to do it our way. And what the gospel says is that you don't have to do anything because God saves people his way, and it's through Christ. And if you're a Gentile, you can come as a Gentile through Christ and Christ alone. If you're a Jew, you can come as a Jew, but it's through Christ and Christ alone.

If you're from England, you can come as an Englishman, but it's through Christ and Christ alone. If you're from Japan, you can come as a Japanese, but it's through Christ and Christ alone. Why? Why do we come this way? Because somehow it's a better way humanly speaking? Not at all. Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and God sent Jesus Christ to be the Savior. This is God's way.

That's why when we talk about the gospel today, we're not talking about a religious opinion, though the world wants to make it that. When you talk about the gospel, they say, "That's your opinion." I once talked to a woman on an airplane. I must have talked forty-five minutes, and the conversation went around and around. We said exactly the same thing. Everything I said, she said, "That's your opinion."

I replied, "It is true, it is my opinion, but that's not the point. The point is: is it true?" And then I explained what was true, and she said, "But that's your opinion." And I said, "The point is not whether it's my opinion, though that is my opinion, the point is: is it true?" You see, that is the issue. Did God send Jesus to be the Savior?

Paul thought he did. Paul met him on the road to Damascus, and that turned his life around. All down through the history of the church from those days, there have been countless thousands upon thousands of men and women who have been convinced by God himself that that is exactly what has happened: God sent Jesus Christ to be the Savior.

If your heart rebels against that, well, you're doing exactly what the Jews did. Oh, you have your own terms for it. You're not saying you have to become a Jew first, though you may say that if you are Jewish. But you're saying you have to do something first, you have to do it my way. You have to do good works, you have to do this, you have to do that.

No wonder, if that's what you're thinking, you hate a gospel that is as simple and as humbling to men and women as this one. It may be simple, it may be humbling, but that's the gospel. That is God's gospel. That is the way we're to be saved. May God give you the grace to see it and embrace it because there is one name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved, and that is the name of Jesus. Let us pray.

Our Father, do bless this study to our hearts. We come with different understanding. Certainly, we come with different backgrounds. But if we don't come on the basis of what Jesus has done for us, we all come in the same way in one sense: we come trusting what we can do.

Our Father, we ask that you would disabuse any who hold to that idea of that error and grant that instead of trusting to themselves, a most insecure and inadequate foundation, they might see that it is possible for them because of your grace to trust in Jesus. Help them to do that for his sake and your glory. Amen.

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