The Troubling Gospel
Acts 13:42-52
Coming to the 13th chapter of Acts, we have been studying, beginning in verse 14, the ministry of Paul and Barnabas in the City of Antioch. Antioch was in a region called Pisidia which was in a larger area called Galatia. This is the first missionary journey. Paul and Barnabas were two of the five pastors of the church in Antioch of Syria, a different Antioch, and they had been called of the Holy Spirit to go out and carry the gospel to the pagan world, to the Gentile world. Their first adventure was on the island of Cyprus, and that we saw in the first 13 verses of chapter 13. The gospel spreading to the Gentile territory began its conquest in Cyprus. They had a wonderful time there, ran into conflict with Satan face to face through a magician, a demon-possessed sorcerer. They saw victory in the life of Sergius Paulus who was converted. They went on from there to the second stop on the first great missionary journey and that is in the City of Antioch.
Arriving in the City of Antioch, Paul preached in the Jewish synagogue. We saw that he did this customarily because there was an open door there for him as a Jew and as a rabbi and as a leader. There was the fact also that they knew well the Old Testament so they were a ready audience to hear. The fact that they met regularly made them a ready audience just physically. Paul also knew that if some of the Jews were saved in the city, he would then have more people to reach the Gentiles with and so he endeavored first of all to go to the synagogues.
Well, when he arrived at the synagogue, he was invited to preach and Barnabas and he sitting in the congregation were noticed by the leaders. Paul was invited to preach and he did. His sermon blew the city wide open. It was the most devastating, shattering thing that perhaps had ever happened in the City of Antioch. The city had, like most cities, endeavored under its leadership to maintain some kind of a placid equilibrium and some kind of a balance and that was absolutely shattered by the preaching of Paul. But before we would be too surprised, we would call to mind the fact that the gospel, whenever it is purely proclaimed in the midst of sin and wherever there are unsaved people, is bound to have results that are going to be shattering.
The Book of Acts, for example, just charts those. You remember that the Book of Acts is a history of the church in its early years and it began in Jerusalem. The gospel was preached and Jerusalem exploded. There was havoc among the leaders. There was chaos among the people. There was persecution that came about, bitter opposition, hatred. The reaction went just like a grass fire through Jerusalem. Then the gospel moved to Judea and Samaria as our Lord Jesus had said that it would and as it spread into those areas, the same devastating results came to pass, revolutionizing cities and towns and turning things upside down and people committed to Christ and others hating them and fighting them and resisting them and the forces of God and good were set against the forces of Satan and evil. That's how it was with the gospel. That's how it is with the gospel.
And now as the good news of Jesus Christ reaches into the City of Antioch, a Gentile community, it has the same devastating effect. Paul and Barnabas arrive and the whole place blows up in a matter of a week and all of the finely-tuned equilibrium that somebody worked so hard to preserve and keep the various racial factions off each other's necks and try to find out some kind of a way to bring about a sort of...at least a superficial peace were absolutely thrown apart and chaos resulted.
There's an interesting thing as you look at the early church to find that in most cases the chaos and the persecution came directly from Israel and it's a sad thing because, you see, Christ was the Messiah of Israel and Israel were the people of the promises and the covenants and to them was the adoption and so forth and so on, Romans 9:4 and 5. Everything that God had designed, He had designed initially for Israel and yet all throughout the early church and all throughout the life of Christ, Israel played the devil's advocate. Israel, to whom it all was given, rejected it all and fought against it all and really played the part of Satan's advocate. You go to Jerusalem, for example, and the early church in Jerusalem, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 7, charts persecution and all of that persecution is directly from the Jews against Christ and Christians.
The gospel then moved to Samaria. In chapter 8, you come to Samaria and you find antagonism and the man who antagonizes is Simon. Simon is either a full Jew or a half Jew. You come a little further into the City of Damascus and the conversion of the Apostle Paul takes place and Paul is there in Damascus and immediately you find the Jews are filled with wrath and a persecution begins, again generated by Israel. You go a little further into chapter 12 and again in Jerusalem, Herod, the King of Israel, begins a persecution and Peter is thrown in prison. You come to chapter 13. At the very beginning...remember...we saw how that Paul and Barnabas arrived in the City of Paphos on the island of Cyprus and they met a conflict and the conflict was with a sorcerer and a magician by the name of Bar-jesus and it says very simply in verse 6, "They met a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Bar-jesus." All the way along, sadly reversing the plan of God initially, Israel was playing the devil's part against God and against His Messiah for whom they had waited, incidentally, for hundreds of years.
And, you know, as you go further in the Book of Acts, you find it continues to be the Jews. In chapter 14 verse 2, unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles. In verse 5, there was an assault made both of the Gentiles and the Jews with their rulers to use them despitefully and stone them and here again the Jews are in on the persecution. In chapter 14 verse 19, certain Jews chased them from Antioch all the way to Lystra, stoned Paul and threw him out of town expecting him to be dead. In chapter 17, you have the same thing again in verse 5. "Jews who believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain vile fellows of the baser sort...which is the King James way of saying hoods...and gathered a company and set the city in an uproar and assaulted the house of Jason," etc. etc. and persecuted and so it went. Verse 13 again, Jews of Thessalonica stirred up the people in persecution.
Over in chapter 20, and just thinking here of another occasion, Jews laid wait for Paul and so again repeatedly it is the Jews antagonizing the gospel and the things that they had prayed and dreamed and hoped for and waited for for years and years, they now reject and playing the part of the adversary and that's sad. We think a lot today about anti-Semitism and what a despicable and terrible and ungodly thing it is but it's a ramification of sinfulness. In a real sense, in the early church, it wasn't anti-Semitism; it was the very opposite. The Jews were characterized by an anti-Gentile feeling which was equally as evil, as is anti-Semitism.
Well, Paul had arrived in this town and this town, incidentally, was a tender box to begin with. As a city on a road, a very prominent highway, it had a cross of population that was mixed from a lot of places. There were many Jews in the area. There were Greeks. There were Romans and there were the native Phrygians of whom the historians say they were unstable and irritable people and all of this cross-pollination of nations meeting here created a rather volatile situation that only demanded a spark. The Romans had made it a colony in 6 B.C. and had brought some semblance of order but all it needed was the right spark and it would explode and Paul was the spark. Believe me, he was the spark about everywhere he went, but here just one sermon and the place blew up.
Now Paul preached and he preached about Jesus, obviously. He announced that Jesus was the culmination of history, the fulfillment of prophesy and the justifier of sinners and he wrapped it up with a warning and an invitation and today we're going to see the response. What did they do? How did they react to his sermon? I gave you a little chart and you might look at it just because it'll help you to visualize what I'm saying. The initial response...you notice in that first little box...the initial response was positive. I mean everything at the very beginning really looked good. The subsequent response split...very negative and very positive. The results on the one hand were negative and the results on the other hand, positive.
Now anytime the gospel is preached, you're bound sooner or later to have a split in reactions. You may have an initial positive response. There may be a tickling of the fancy. There may be a basic interest, but eventually the issue is going to come down to a commitment to Christ and the thing is going to split and that's exactly what happened in the City of Antioch as it always does. Now just to give you an idea of why Antioch exploded, let me just pick it out from one point. The gospel always creates trouble. We know this. I have found that. I always think back at the time when I was invited to speak at Valley College and the results are still going on. Somebody yesterday was talking to me about the fact that I had been banned from the campus and so forth. That's true. I have been and that's okay because we have our people there infiltrating. But anyway, we just aren't quite as public about it, I suppose, but nevertheless, I preached and it caused trouble. Believe me, it blew the thing wide open and it caused a lot of problems. This happens. We expect this to happen if the gospel is clear cut and defined. It has to fraction. Christ said, "I came not to bring peace but a sword," and what He meant was the preaching of Christ doesn't bring everybody together in a big, lovey-dovey toleration. It fractures things. It splits. It cuts things apart.
You know how it is in a family. A person gets saved and all of a sudden it severs something in that family. That's what the gospel does, particularly in a Jewish context. Now the gospel then is a shattering thing. It always creates trouble when it's clearly presented. Now all of the Ecumenists and the liberals who are getting everybody together are just proving for once and for all that they're not preaching the true gospel because the gospel splits. It doesn't get everybody together under the same umbrella, tolerant of everything. If you want to preach that kind of message, you get everybody together, it's not the gospel because the gospel never does that. The gospel automatically divides between the saved and the unsaved, the people who accept it, the people who reject it, and so it's a shattering thing.
Now part of the reason this happens is because of this. Men usually...and you and I have done this perhaps in our past before we knew Christ...we usually try to figure out a rather comfortable philosophy. Let's say we're not a Christian. We've got to figure out some kind of rational reason for living, right? We've got to come to a philosophy. Now if you don't wind up with one, you become a drug addict, an alcoholic or you kill yourself. That's the guy who never got comfortable, right? He never found a philosophy he could live with so he either drowns his sorrows or kills himself because he can't find something comfortable to live with, but most people, they get a rather comfortable philosophy. They block out certain things and they concentrate on other things and they sort of gather together, rather as an eclectic, pieces and bits of everything and I've got my thing and I'm okay and it's sort of placid and they're like a little pond that's rather still and they're sitting there resting in their little philosophy.
Well, have you ever seen a little tiny pond and seen some kid drop a boulder in it? That's what happens when the gospel hits somebody's placid philosophy. You see, you walk up to some nice, comfortable guy, who after 20 years of struggling, has found his philosophy and he's finally comfortable and you say, "Brother, you're on your way to hell." Whew, see. You're a sinner before God. You're unrighteous. You're doomed and unless something happens in your life, you're going to spend your eternity without God, without joy, without happiness, without peace. Now that is dropping a boulder in his placid pool, believe me, and that's exactly what the gospel does. Men struggle to find a comfortable philosophy and we invade their lives with the gospel and it disturbs them. We hope it does, don't we, because an undisturbed man is an uncommitted man.
I was thinking as I watched television and all those people in Argentina were waiting for Peron to come back and they were all...bands were playing and everybody was happy and flags and banners and all of a sudden somebody somewhere starting firing a machinegun. Did you see that on the news? The people starting dropping all over the place and all of a sudden the placid, happy-go-lucky, hooray, play the music thing was over and everybody was on the ground for their life and I thought, "Boy, if that isn't a good illustration of what the gospel ought to do to a crowd. Just wake everybody up from their happy-go-lucky attitude to life and make them hit the deck for survival." Well, that's what happened. The guns were blazing in Antioch and Paul was firing it all and the people were hitting the deck fast. The gospel shatters. It blasts people out of that placid pool that they've finally wound themselves into and that's a really rough thing for a guy to take. I mean 20 years I've been figuring this thing out and you come in, in one message wipe me out. Not too happy about that. It's understandable, but you'll always have varied reactions and it'll always be volatile.
But I want you to notice something. In this case initially it didn't appear to be and let's look at the initial response, first of all, in verses 42 to 44 and it was very positive. In fact, through verse 44, it could have been a revival. I mean it could have been a fantastic thing going on there because not until verse 45 do you really see the thing fall apart. Now in verse 42 to 44, we find the beginning and it looks so good. You know, I really think as I looked at this that if I were the evangelist, I would at this time have been thinking, "Man, this is fantastic. Have we ever knocked this town for a loop. They're all going to get saved. We're going to have the first saved city going." That would have been a very easy response for somebody who really didn't think it through because of the good features.
No. 1...and I'm going to give you four things that were tremendously positive. One, they were pleased. The people were really pleased. Look at verse 42. Paul has just finished his sermon. "And when"...now you notice, I'm going to make a couple of corrections in the verse. The term "the Jews and the Gentiles" is not in the manuscripts. That was just put in to clarify but it really is not accurate and what it should read is this. "And when they were gone out of the synagogue...and the "they" refers most likely to Paul and Barnabas...when Paul and Barnabas were gone out of the synagogue, they...the Greek word is just "they," referring most likely to the Jews who were in the synagogue...besought that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath." When Paul finished, Paul and Barnabas went out and as they went out, the Jews said, "Would you come back next week? We want to hear this again."
Now I'll tell you, friends, as a preacher, the greatest compliment that any audience can pay the preacher is to tell him to come back next time and tell them the same stuff over again, they liked it so well. "Can you tell us more about this?" That's why whenever you preach somewhere on a subject, you always want to make sure you quit before you've said everything you know because if you get invited back, you want to be sure you can pick it up from there. You always...you know that when a preacher says, "I could go on and on," that means he's at the end of his material. But anyway, they were pleased. They were very pleased. They said, "We want to hear more about this. Would you please come back next week?" Now I'll tell you any teacher desires above everything to create interest, doesn't he? I want you to be interested in what I'm telling you. I want you to be excited about what I'm telling you. I want you to say, "I like that but I want to know more." I want you to come to verse 52 this morning and say, "That's great but what happens in verse 1 of 14? What happened when they left town?" I want you to have interest in what I'm saying and want to hear more.
That's the desire of any teacher, of anybody who wants to move people to make a commitment or a decision in a certain way and these Jews had responded. Everything that Paul said was very Jewish. Why, he'd given the history of Israel in a nutshell. He had talked about the God of Israel. He had talked about David. He had talked about the Old Testament prophets. He even quoted the prophets. He'd exalted the Messiah. The only questionable issue was that all of it resolved in Jesus and whether or not Jesus was the Messiah was a question. Now they weren't so plugged into Jerusalem that they had the same hatred for Jesus and maybe it was worth hearing some more and so they said, "Come back."
You know, I really think that Paul is a great example of a great preacher because a great preacher can make people want more and a good teacher can do the same thing. You remember those classes in school that you wanted to go to and those ones that you couldn't stand. The difference was somebody made you interested; somebody didn't. Well, Paul had that ability to make people interested. In Act 17:10, verse 10, "The brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night until Berea: who coming there went to the synagogue of the Jews...they always went there first...and those were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the Word with readiness of mind." He preached to the Jews there and they really received it well. They were really open and then listen to this. "...and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so." You know something? That's the thing you want to do. You want to present something that drives people into the Scripture themselves to make sure that what you're telling them is true. The absolute compliment to the teacher is to go home and pursue what he told you on your own, right? Sure.
Paul had ability to make them do that. Those people went out of that place there and they fired right back and started digging in the Old Testament to figure out whether what he was saying was for real and verse 32 had similar effect, the same chapter there. "When they had heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: but others said, 'We will hear thee again on this subject.'" We want more of that. Now that's a great compliment and that's what every teacher wants. From a teacher's standpoint, it's good when people want more but from the people's standpoint, putting off the decision may not been good.
Remember in 24th chapter of Acts...you don't need to look it up; I'll just read it to you...Paul had just shared the gospel with a man named Felix. "And he reasoned of righteousness, self control and judgment to come and Felix trembled." Just...he was so scared that he just shook about judgment to come. And he said, "Go thy way for this time. I can't take anymore. Out of here." But he says, "When I have a convenient season, I'll call for you." Sounds good, doesn't it? I want to hear more. Did he ever call for him? Yes, he did. Verse 26, "He hoped also that money should have been given him of Paul, that he might loose him: wherefore he sent for him the oftener, and communed with him." Sure, he called for him. You know why he called for him? He hoped Paul would pay him money to let him go. He called for him but not for the right reason. He called Paul all the time out of prison to try to get Paul to buy his freedom...money-grubby. See, it's not always right to wait. Second Corinthians 6:2 says, "Now is the day of salvation." Hebrews 3:7 and 8 says the Spirit says this: "Today while you're still hearing, harden not your heart." And so from the preacher's standpoint, it's great when the people want more. From the people's standpoint, it's better to receive Christ now. But anyway, they were pleased. They wanted more.
Second point. They were persistent. They were not only pleased, they were persistent and I like this. Again, this is a supreme compliment to Paul. What a teacher he was because it says in verse 43, "When the congregation was broken up...they were dismissed...many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas." Now that's persistent. They said, "Come back next week." That's good, but it's even better that they just formed a little trail and followed them right out of the place. Here comes Paul and Barnabas like the Pied Piper with a whole trail of Jews, proselytes and God-fearers on their heels. They wanted to know more. They were so interested in this. What a terrific sign! I mean to complete your message, to walk out cold turkey. You've walked into a town you've never been in in your life. You've fired out the gospel. You walk out and a gob of people are following you saying, "Hey, hey, wait. We want more. We want more." And Paul and Barnabas were speaking to them. They were persistent. The term "religious proselytes" embodies both the full proselyte who had been circumcised and the one who was just a God-fearer who had attached himself to the synagogue but never gone fully for circumcision and Judaism.
So there were Jews and Gentiles and they followed him, but they were all those who had adapted themselves to Judaism, who had been there that day in the synagogue, and so they taught them. They spoke to them. That looks so good, but there's something even better. They were pleased. They were persistent. Are you ready for this? They were even professing. Apparently, they had even professed to believe the message they had heard, that Jesus was the Messiah. You say, "Where did he get that?" Look at verse 43 at the end, "Paul and Barnabas speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grade of God." To continue assumes that they got there, right? You can't continue to be where you aren't. In some way, they had professed to believe this and so Paul and Barnabas were saying, "Now you people, you continue in the grace of God." Boy, that looks terrific.
Now you say, "Does that mean they were saved?" Well, that's the question. That is the question. Let me say this. I don't know whether they were truly saved. From verse 43, I don't know. Later on, I'll tell you what I think. From verse 43, I don't know that they were saved. It doesn't say they were saved. Want to know something else? I don't think Paul and Barnabas knew whether they were saved or not either and I think that the reason that they didn't know was because nobody can know. I can lead somebody to Jesus