Acts 5

Chapter 5. To the Regions BeyondSome time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” (Acts 15:36)Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” (Acts 16:6-9)An a previous chapter we have reviewed the plan of the Holy Spirit and the apostolic Church for the wider witnessing of the gospel from Jerusalem to the uttermost part of the earth, and we have seen how God’s supreme thought for the evangelization of the world was slowly impressed upon the early Church until the great work of foreign missions had been fairly started with the first missionary journey of Barnabas and Paul. All this was, indeed, a marked advance on Jewish conservatism, and forcibly recalls the slow awakening of the modern Church during the past century to a sense of its obligations to the heathen world. But it was merely a beginning. They were as yet but feeling their way to this new department of work and finding out its limitations and spiritual laws. At the end of their journey it was necessary that the Church should come together and have a more perfect understanding of God’s great plan for the evangelization of a world, so that they might go forth and work intelligently in cooperation with their divine Leader. The Council at Jerusalem For this purpose the first Council at Jerusalem was held, to which we referred in the close of the last chapter. The effect of this was to clearly determine in the minds of both Jewish and Gentile Christians the divine method for the present age, namely, the gathering out from the Gentiles a people for His name; second, the personal coming of the Lord Jesus immediately afterwards; third, the millennial age and the salvation of all the world. With all this settled and communicated in the form of a fraternal letter to the brethren in all the churches, they were now ready to enter fully upon the great business of the world’s evangelization, and the present section beginning with the second great missionary journey marks the next epoch in this mighty movement. Revisiting Their Stations It began with the revisitation of the stations already planted, and then followed the evangelization of the Celtic tribes of the highlands of Asia, known as the Galatians. But at this point God called a halt in all their home work in the continent of Asia, and marked a new epoch by sending them forth to the yet unoccupied continent of Europe, in connection with which the rest of their campaign was entirely occupied. Let us make a passing note of time at this point, that we may the more intelligently follow this great historical movement. It was now about 17 years since Pentecost. The events of the last section, from the sending out of the first missionaries to the Council at Jerusalem, had occupied about three or four years; and the present section, embracing their work in Galatia and Greece to the close of their second missionary journey, covered about three years more, from A.D. 51 to 54. While the narrative sweeps rapidly over these stirring events, let us not forget that what we are told is but a fragment of the whole story of apostolic missions, and that these are but sample pages from God’s book of remembrance intended to give a connected thread of the development of missions, especially in connection with the life and work of the great apostle of missions, Paul. Second Missionary Journey Let us mark some of the stages of this second missionary campaign (Acts 16-18):

1. Voluntary We note the absence of the special call of God to go forth as in their first missionary journey. It was voluntary, and came directly from the prompting of Paul himself. “Let us go back,” he said to Barnabas, “and visit the brothers” (Acts 15:36). And so we learn that when God has once called us to His work we are to be about our Father’s business and not wait for some special revelation for each new ministry, but “each man, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation God called him to” (1 Corinthians 7:24).
2. Timothy We note in the next place the solicitude of Paul about his fellow workers. He wanted the best material only for this great work, and he would have nothing to do with Mark, who had proved a failure in their former journey and gone back from Perga when the difficulties began to thicken. We can scarcely doubt that Paul was right in wanting the best missionaries, and we are quite safe in following his example. We cannot doubt that Barnabas was right, too, in standing by Mark as his nephew and helping to restore him to the Lord and the work, and so successful was he that the outcome justified him, and the day came when Paul was manly enough to acknowledge Mark’s merits and even to send for him in the hour of his need and add, “he is helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). Doubtless Paul’s firmness was as much used as Barnabas’ kindness in restoring the young and yet undisciplined lad. But the best lesson of all is the beautiful picture we have here of the way in which love can settle the differences of consecrated Christians. There are two ways of separating from our fellow workers: one, which leaves an unhealed scar, and weakens both of our lives for all the future; the other, like the separation of Abraham and Lot, or Barnabas and Paul, which sheds honor on the character of both and starts two centers instead of one of holy influence and service. If you cannot work together in perfect harmony as Christians, separate in perfect frankness and Christian love.
3. Silas We soon find God supplying Paul with new companions as he sets out on his missionary journey, leaving Barnabas to divide the field and go back to Cyprus, his native island, while Paul takes his own home province of Cilicia and moves on to Asia Minor. Paul chooses Silas as his fellow worker, and a little later God gives him Timothy who had been converted three years before during the apostle’s former visit to Derbe and Lystra. Timothy was the son of a godly mother, Eunice, a Jewess, and indeed had enjoyed the blessed teaching of a godly grandmother, Lois. There is, perhaps, a hereditary piety; at least there is an early influence in the first teaching and training of childhood that nothing can be a substitute for. God have mercy on the children of worldly, shallow, heartless mothers, and have mercy on mothers who bring into being neglected lives to a fate worse than orphanage. We little dream how soon the infant mind begins to receive religious impressions. I know a little child, little more than three years old, who can tell the whole story of the Acts of the Apostles, and often goes aside with her Christian nurse at her own request, with the tears streaming down her little face, to pray for the conversion of the manservant in the house to whom she is much attached, but who, she has lately found, is going to dancing school, and she greatly fears he will lose his soul. In Timothy’s case the soil was all prepared, and he needed only the seed of the gospel and the quickening of the Spirit to bring into birth the most beautiful Christian life of the apostolic story, except, perhaps, the Apostle Paul himself. From the first he became like a very child to his spiritual father. I have no one else like him, who takes a genuine interest in your welfare. For everyone looks out for his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. But you know that Timothy has proved himself, because as a son with his father he has served with me in the work of the gospel. (Philippians 2:20-22) Timothy was the son of a Gentile father and a Jewish mother, and in order to smooth down the prejudices of the Jews, Paul on this occasion consented to his being circumcised, and so Timothy became a sort of bridge between the two classes who were united among Paul’s hearers.
4. Former Fields Revisited The revisiting of the churches already planted was first carefully attended to. There seem to have been many of these, and it is added, “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers” (Acts 16:5). The nurturing of that little flock was quite as important a missionary work as the planting of the gospel in new fields. In our zeal for evangelization we must never lose sight of edification, the building up of the body of Christ. The Lord Jesus has covered both in the great commission, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). That is the work of planting the gospel. But we must never forget the other work which follows: “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20).
5. Galatia One new church, at least, was planted during this journey. Luke passes over it in the narrative with a single word, but the epistle to the Galatians tells the story of its planting. It was among the highlanders of Asia, the Celtic ancestors of the French, the Irish and the Gaelic people of the north of Scotland. Like their descendants still, they were a fiery, passionate race, full of enthusiasm for a new doctrine and as ready to follow some brilliant, false teacher into error. Therefore Paul tells us, “You welcomed me as if I were an angel of God” (Galatians 4:14), but a little later we find them going away after Judaizing teachers into ritualism. To them we owe one of the richest of the Pauline epistles. But with this new station their work in Asia came to a close.
6. A Halt The time had now come for a new departure even in foreign missions. The old world which for 4,000 years had been the cradle of the race, and the seat of all its religious movements, must now give place to the new continent of Europe and its children, which were to fill a larger place in the history of the future than even Asia had in the past. And so a strange incident occurs. They find their evangelistic work apparently arrested, “having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia” (Acts 16:6), whither they were pressing forward to the ancient city of Ephesus. “When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to” (Acts 16:7). It must have seemed strange at first and hard to understand. They had been so accustomed to the presence and blessing of the Spirit in all their meetings that they may have been tempted to think there was something wrong in them. And so, perhaps, for several weeks they persevered and tried to push forward into these new fields. But everywhere it was the same. God would not go with them. They were evidently out of His order and will. And so, like wise men, they stopped and waited. Have you never found at some point in your Christian work that God seemed to call a halt, and that the blessing that you had enjoyed appeared to desert you and the work to grow heavy and fruitless? And yet you could find nothing in your own heart to condemn. After a while, perhaps, it dawned upon you that God did not want you there, but had some other calling which He was trying to show you. Is this perhaps the reason why so much of our Christian work at home is dead, and worse than dead—corrupt? And why our theological seminaries and pulpits are teaching higher criticism, and our church members are dancing down in the great whirl of worldliness and sin to apostasy and ruin? God is not blessing His Church, because she is not where He wants her. She is wasting her energy, her money, her ministry, in religious selfishness, ecclesiastical extravagance and ritualistic forms in the name of religion, while her people are spending their God-given prosperity in every form of indulgence and selfishness. If she would only call a halt like Paul and Timothy and wait before the Lord as they did, the light would soon come, and she would find that her blessings are cursed because she is spending them on herself and neglecting the perishing world.
7. Europe While they wait at Troas the situation immediately becomes plain. God does not want them any longer in Asia because He needs them more in Europe. And so there appears to Paul a vision by night, a man of Macedonia beckoning and crying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9). And when the morning dawns the little company confer together and immediately conclude God is calling them to Macedonia. Taking passage at the earliest moment they sail for Philippi, the chief city of a miniature Roman state. Finding work, no doubt, as skilled laborers, they spend the week quietly, and on the Sabbath day they search in vain for the usual synagogue of Jewish worshipers. But they learn that there is a little company of pious Jews accustomed to meet outside the town by the riverside, and thither they find their way. And so the gospel in the great continent of Europe begins with a woman’s prayer meeting, and indeed with the opening of a woman’s heart, for “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message” (Acts 16:14). Why not? Hers has ever been the glory of undoing the shame of the fall. The conversion of Lydia opened the doors of her home, and the little church was immediately transferred to that loving household. It is not strange that henceforth the spirit of the Philippian church and Paul’s relation to it were marked by a tenderness not found in any other case.
8. Opposition at Philippi Soon, however, the dark shadow of the adversary falls upon the scene. Satan understands the situation and tries to meet it in its worst form. A priestess of Apollo, inflated with demoniac possession, and yet constrained somehow to bear testimony to the divine character of the missionaries, pursues them from day to day with her insane ravings, and at the same time with her witness to them and to their message, until they are constrained to meet the issue. Then Paul, in the name of Jesus Christ, demands the demon to depart and sets her free from Satan’s power. But this, of course, immediately stops her profession and brings upon the disciples the anger of her employers, who used her clairvoyant gift for purposes of gain. A riot ensues, and by a skillful appeal to the prejudices of the multitude on the ground that they are subverting Roman customs, they are condemned. They are cruelly beaten, bound with stocks and chains and cast into the inner prison. It seems, indeed, as if Satan has triumphed.
9. The Victory It is never defeat so long as we do not lose our song of praise, and that was something the Philippian dungeon could not take away from these early missionaries. They prayed in their dismal dungeon until they could pray no more, for prayer had changed to praise, and they sang their gladness and their triumph until the strange sounds echoed through the dreary corridors and woke up the wondering prisoners. But soon the answer came from the heavenly listeners. There was a great earthquake, but such an earthquake was never known before. Instead of destroying the prison and crushing the inmates to death, it acted with the strangest intelligence, only slipping back the prison bolts and shaking off the fetters from the apostles and the prisoners. That was indeed a grand encore to their song of praise. No wonder the jailer was terrified. No wonder next morning the officials were alarmed. There was something more than a political complication in the situation. The hand of God was here. The victory of faith had been followed by the victory of Almighty power, and best of all, of saving grace, for the brutal jailer who had so needlessly aggravated the torture of his prisoners, casting them into the inner prison and making their feet fast in stocks, was now pleading for mercy, and a little later rejoicing in his newfound Savior and entertaining his prisoners with his converted household in his own home. Next morning witnessed a still more marked triumph. The very authorities, learning that they had beaten a freeborn Roman and thus insulted the majesty of the empire, sent the pleading message to Paul and his companions to please get out of prison as quietly as possible and say nothing about it. But Paul was a man as well as a missionary, and he stood upon his dignity for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the little flock he represented, as the true Christian ever should. Nothing less than an honorable discharge would he accept, and so God vindicated him before the whole community and the highest authorities of the city. But now his victory being complete, it is fitting that he should show a triumph of another kind in the spirit of meekness, which is even higher than the spirit of manhood. His work in Philippi is done, and he determines quietly to retire without pressing his advantage or humiliating his enemies, and so he quietly takes his leave of the beloved little flock, and passing on along the old Roman road 100 miles westward, he pauses next at Thessalonica.
10. Thessalonica We cannot linger over the triumphs of the gospel in Thessalonica and Berea, marked as they were by the usual introduction through the Jewish synagogue, the first fruits that always followed in Jewish and Gentile converts, and then the bitter persecution of the angry Jews from which the apostle withdrew when his pioneer work was done and hastened on to new fields.
11. Athens We must linger over that dramatic scene on the Acropolis of Athens, where Christianity came face to face with the cultured heathenism of Greece and the world. If there be an atmosphere more difficult than any other to penetrate with the message of the gospel, it is that of intellectual and fashionable frivolity. Luke aptly describes Athenian society by a phrase that might not unfittingly be applied to many of our modern social circles. “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas” (Acts 17:21). Against this frivolous spirit the gospel strikes as a cannon ball upon a wall of sandbags. If it was solid rock it might be battered down, but the soft sand just falls over it and fills the vacuum, like the waves after the keel of the passing ship, leaving no impression behind. No wonder that such congregations break the hearts of earnest ministers and wear out even the long-suffering of God. Such an audience now confronted the great apostle. Little cared he for the sights of Athens. “He was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). At length the opportunity came, and the message was equal to the occasion. It deserves to be written in letters of gold. First it began with inimitable tact; complimenting his religious audience, he politely reminded them that he perceived that they were “very religious” (Acts 17:22). Then he told them the happy incident of the altar that he had just discovered to an unknown god whom they were endeavoring to worship, and about whom they must wish to know. He had come to tell them all about Him. And then began that marvelous setting of Christianity over against Greek philosophy and mythology. Standing in the midst of an audience that had no faith in God, he began by pronouncing that one name, “God,” with an emphasis that must have rung in thundering accents from all the splendid array of sculpture and architecture around. Addressing a people that were materialists and denied the doctrine of creation, he next added, “God who made the world and everything in it” (Acts 17:24). Looking in the face of a crowd of Pantheists, who identified matter with God, he declared, “God… is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands” (Acts 17:24). Addressing an audience of exclusive Greeks who looked upon the rest of the world as barbarians, he dared to tell them, “From one man he made every nation of men” (Acts 17:26). Surveying a whole forest of sculptured statues of innumerable gods and goddesses, he reminded them that “we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill” (Acts 17:29). Then growing more deeply solemn, he told them that “in the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30), and soon would meet them in the great judgment day, face to face with that Man of whom He witnessed, “He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The whole address could be repeated in five or six minutes, and yet it outweighs whole volumes of philosophy, theology and diluted homiletics. It was cut short by ironical sneers and a mocking and polite request to defer the remainder of his address to some other occasion. But out of this five minute address came the conversion of one of the distinguished council of the Areopagus, and Damaris, who seems to have been a woman of the town, with others not named. Even in cold, heartless Athens, God’s Word could not return to Him void.
12. Corinth Our space will only permit us to touch for a moment the closing scene of this great missionary journey. Forty-five miles south, and almost visible from the heights of Mars Hill, was the rich commercial city of Corinth. It was the maritime capital of the western world and the metropolis of its vice and sin. Here for a year and a half Paul continued to labor, until he had closed his successful ministry in Greece and the gospel was firmly established in the continent of Europe. The story of Corinth was a record of faith, trial and marvelous victory. Conclusion The whole section emphasizes again and again that great missionary plan which God had so clearly projected upon their vision at the commencement. The keynote of every incident was “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The watchword of every step was “farther on.” The heart of God was reaching out with intense solicitude to the unevangelized, and it is needless to say that still that heart is as intensely concerned for the “regions beyond” (2 Corinthians 10:16). Along with this we constantly hear the echo of that other message, “from the Gentiles a people for himself” (Acts 15:14). It is not an evangelistic movement to convert the world, but to gather out of the world an elect people for His coming. We find this again at Antioch, where “all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48); and we find it in the last scene at Corinth, where the Master’s message to His apostle is, “I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:10). Corinth is not to be converted, Greece is not to be a Christian nation, but God has people there whom He must find. And finally, the supreme lesson that accompanies us all the way is that the work is God’s and the power must be God’s alone. It was not Paul that converted Lydia, but the Lord opened Lydia’s heart. Your camera may be all right, your lens may be perfect, your focus may be exact, your film may be chemically prepared and everything ready for the picture, but without yonder sun there will be no impression on that film. It is the sun that makes the photograph, not the artist. And so the work of the Acts of the Apostles, the work of the Church of God to the end of time, the work of every minister and every missionary, the conversion and sanctification of every soul is God’s and God’s alone, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.