Acts 21

Division 4. (Acts 21:1-40; Acts 22:1-30; Acts 23:1-35; Acts 24:1-27; Acts 25:1-27; Acts 26:1-32; Acts 27:1-44; Acts 28:1-31.)Into the Roman Prison. The last division of the Acts is plainly of a very different character from those before it. The progress of the gospel is over; the chief evangelist, the apostle to whom is committed the whole Gentile field, is shut up in prison, not (as far as the history given to us goes) to escape from it again, whatever partial relief might be obtained. Rome, the capital of the world, shows herself, only less bitterly, alas, than Israel, the enemy of God and of His grace. The word of God is indeed not bound; it is His word who is over all, and who is with it; but its ministers are confessors, and its witnesses are martyrs. There is no conversion of the world, nor does it change its prince; and it is prophetic of the future of Christendom itself the welcome that Rome extends to Paul and to his gospel, the fullest chords of whose music sound from the place of his captivity. It should not be strange to find therefore, in the whole narrative before us now, the prophetic character (which indeed underlies all Scripture history) becoming very manifest. The broad features are of the clearest, although details may be often hard to read. Legalism has been all through, and not simply at the beginning, more than the profane world itself, the enemy of the gospel, and the inspiration of the world in its attacks upon it. Rome has been judaized, never truly Christianized; and judaized Rome has had more martyrs than Pagan Rome ever had. Babylon the Great is the false woman on the wild beast’s back, -the seven-hilled city in her “mystery” phase. But it is enough here to indicate in general terms what is before us; the details will develop as we proceed.

Acts 21:1-14

Subdivision 1. (Acts 21:1-14.)Forewarnings. Not without full warning does the apostle come into soldier’s chain. God utters His voice with absolute plainness, and it is not due to any lack in this respect that the disaster happens which occupies so many pages of the Acts. We see here a reason why it could not be in its totality the Acts of Jesus; why the Acts of the apostles do not fully represent these. The voice of the Lord is heard now in protest against the act of one of His most devoted servants; even although that act itself is one of complete self-sacrifice, and although it is permitted for purposes of wise and holy, far-reaching design. There is no more mystery here than in a multitude of the ways of Him around whom in divine government clouds and darkness so often are. He can be completely over what He cannot sanction in anywise; and what an immense comfort is it to know this! What a confusion would the world be if it were not so! whereas the very exercise which this now involves for us is itself most truly helpful in that discernment of good and evil in which so much of our education here consists. The warning given is a double one. The apostle is first told, plainly and unequivocally, not to go to Jerusalem; and then the consequences of going are put before him. Had the latter been announced alone, with one such as Paul, they might not have been sufficient; coming after the other, they reiterate the prohibition. Spite of all, the apostle certainly sees nothing of the kind; there is a veil over his eyes very solemn indeed in character, by reason of its being that of an impulse possessing him so exalted and so pathetic as was that love to Israel which he himself has recorded for us in the epistle to the Romans 9:1-4. That epistle was written in contemplation of this very journey (Romans 15:25); he had long treasured in his heart the thought of it, and the apparent failure of his previous attempt to reach the object of his desire had only perhaps made more absorbing that desire. Under the control of this he seems incapable of realizing any hindrance to its effectuation. Ready to any extent to sacrifice himself, how could it be possible that God should be against that which was in fact the fruit of the Spirit of Christ?

1. He wrenches himself away therefore from the beloved Ephesian disciples, a need greater than theirs pressing him on; and with a straight course and all things favoring, pursues his voyage to the Syrian coast. At Tyre he lands, and there they find disciples, with whom they remain seven days; and now comes the first distinct intimation from more than one of these, speaking by the Spirit, “that he should not set foot in Jerusalem.” It is strange to find, spite of the explicitness of this, Lechler contending that it was only the knowledge of Paul’s sufferings in Jerusalem that they had by the illumination of the Spirit, while “the entreaty itself, that Paul should not visit Jerusalem where such dangers awaited him, was not dictated by the Holy Ghost, but was prompted solely by human opinions and affections.” He appeals, of course, not to the passage before him. but to the prophecy of Agabus which was after this, and to the language of the apostle himself in Acts 20:23, which we have already considered, in proof of what he advances; but such a way of reading Scripture could make almost anything of it. Not a word is said here about any sufferings that were to result from the visit, but “they said by the Spirit that he should not” go there. If this were not prophecy, as we know it could not have been, then it could only be guidance; and we may notice again how fully it is confirmed to the apostle by the mouth of at least two witnesses. It is quite true that he is not really guided by it, and we may not be able to account fully for his neglect of such an intimation; but we must not set aside the plain words which we find here, and which alone put in its true light much that follows, as well as some things that have gone before.

Certainly there was upon Paul the spell of a wondrous love, if we do not say, its delirium; a love, which those for whom it was, rejected, as they did the much more wondrous love of the Son of God, of which this was but the reflection. Had he not caught it in the glory of that Face, into which, we know, he was habitually looking? Another farewell scene is depicted for us here with these brethren of Tyre, who with wives and children accompany their visitors to the ship, and with prayer take leave of them. A shadow of what is at hand seems falling upon these little companies of believers, which is lightened up with the tender constancy of an affection which has in it the assurance of eternity. 2. The party of Paul take ship once more, coasting the Syrian shore to Ptolemais, which we now call Acre, where again they find disciples; few towns there were now, no doubt, without them. And next day they are at Caesarea, at the house of that Philip the evangelist with whose work at Samaria we are well acquainted. We have here a glimpse of what helps us to realize the way in which the gifts of the Spirit were manifested through the assemblies. Philip has four daughters, all prophetesses, a lovely picture just put before us, one would say, that we might admire it (for we have nothing of them more than this), perhaps that we may remember that the same Spirit is with us still, and that we may covet, as we are exhorted to do, the gifts of His grace. We may also understand that women as such are not shut out from them, however there may be for them (as women) a suited sphere for their exercise.

It is nature that has marked out this sphere; which grace does not set aside, nor limit on this account the fulness of blessing that may be theirs who covet it. How good it would be to see more of this coveting in faith, and that we would put to the proof in faith these assurances that are given us. How great would be the result, not to the individual only, but in the assembly as a whole, of believing hearts that craved from God their portion! We have not, because we ask not; we ask and have not, because our prayers are too much a conflict with God for what, if He granted, it would be disaster for us, instead of desires that rise after those blessings which are laid up for us in Christ already, and may be claimed with the full confidence of faith. One cannot say again with Lechler that this account of Philip’s daughters stands in no immediate connection with the events here related. Why should we make our own capacity to discern such things the measure of what is really in them; disparaging Scripture in the proportion in which we elevate ourselves above it? When the Church is being left of its great apostle, is it not suitable that we should be shown how fully, nevertheless, the endowment of the Spirit is upon it, even in its weakest members? that the Lord’s care for it neither fails nor is abridged; and that it need neither fail nor fear because of this? But Philip’s daughters have no prophecy for Paul: it is Agabus of whom we have heard before, who, coming down from Judea, announces to him that which awaits him from the people upon whom his heart is set. It is Paul’s own girdle, however, that binds his hands and feet; that is, it is his own zealous service to them that puts him into their hands. The meaning is given to him, and in the most emphatic way, as a declaration of the Spirit, of the Holy Spirit, who thus reveals to His servant the unchanged evil in the hearts of those once the murderers of the Saviour, and now ready to be his own. Was not He too delivered to the Gentiles? a likeness which could not but affect the apostle, so closely to follow in his Master’s steps. Yet was not that Gentile cross to which they gave him up the very symbol of salvation for men? So with himself also, might the apostle argue, if this were but a means by which the tardy hearts of Israel were to be smitten to repentance, would not suffering be light that should have this result?

So when those around begin in their distress to beseech him not to go up to Jerusalem, he is fixed and resolute, moved by their tears indeed, but not altered. Did they not know him ready even to die at Jerusalem for the Name of the Lord Jesus? But the Spirit had spoken nothing about death. The captivity of years, shut up from the work he loved, and with which he was so identified, would it not be worse than any death could be? How if he had recognized it as the shadow of that setting aside of his gospel also, in days not far off? And in fact such an intimation we, at least, may read in it. The judaizing of the Church, which he had already been called so earnestly to contend against, was to be a worse enemy to the free grace of God he published than this Jewish people now menacing himself. Alas, it would be armed with all the natural resistance of the self-righteous heart against that which humbles it, even while it exalts immeasurably the soul once humbled. Who that knows anything of himself but has known this Jew in him, not one of God’s Israel indeed, but such as confronted Christ and now Paul, with his circumcision of flesh, and not of heart, and his steadfast resistance to the truth at all points. Such in the professing church at a later day the Lord Himself characterizes as those “who say they are Jews, but are not, but are the synagogue of Satan:” words which let in a terrible light upon the degradation ensuing upon their prevalence (as prevail they did), and which changed the heavenly to the earthly, spirit to flesh, grace to law, the company chosen out of the world into a confusion of Church and world together; the adversary’s attack by low imitation upon that which Christ is sanctifying, cleansing it by washing of water by the Word, to present it to Himself a glorious Church! We can understand by this, not only the apostle’s captivity -that is, his gospel’s, -but how this Judaism (false to the core, as false in its abuse of Christian names) gave up what it had first polluted into the hands of the world, and thus riveted the chains of a long captivity. Sad it is, though profitable, to trace, step by step, the awful transformation. It is not for us to do it now; it is enough to show how fully the history which is before us here has its spiritual counterpart in that of the Church afterwards. Judaism had only the external form of separation from the world, which could not yet be actual; the new Judaism coming in after the separation was accomplished, brought back (and of course into the place of power) the world once more. It was the Babylonish captivity of the Church of God.

Acts 21:15-22

Subdivision 2. (Acts 21:15-40; Acts 22:1-29.)The Arrest. The story of how Paul actually falls into the hands of his enemies implicates the Christians in Jerusalem, who by their advice, which he takes, and to satisfy their zeal for the law, puts himself into the very place of chiefest danger, and where the presence of one known to advocate the equal footing of Jew and Gentile would be sure to lash the unconverted Jew to fury. His own compliance, though from pure desire to be to the Jew a Jew, to win the Jew, yet not only puts him into the hands of his enemies, but takes him off the higher ground upon which he habitually walked, and renders his steps less certain. It is a painful history all round.

1. The cause of Paul’s arrest is traced briefly but clearly, and shown to rest with the Jewish Christians. Before we come to this, it will not be amiss to note that it cannot be for nothing that we are told of the place in which the apostle at this time lodges: some meaning must certainly attach to this, whether or not we are able to find the meaning; and some relation there must be also to the narrative with which it is connected. Those also who believe in God’s absolute control of history, and that Scripture everywhere shows this control, can have no difficulty in accepting a meaning flashed out of a name as a true, if hidden, indication of the mind of God. Now Mnason, at whose house Paul lodges at this time, is from a word which means “to sue for, court,” and Paul is certainly here as a suitor, and in a strange place for him: he is in a place not his own. The man in Christ, which he has but lately told others it was all his boast to be (2 Corinthians 12:5), is here in the guise of one walking orderly and keeping the law.

And it is the suit he has in hand that brings him down to this. He is really lodging with Mnason, the disciple from the beginning, or early disciple, as the term used is.

Was it not, in fact, such early disciples, belonging to the time when Christians could be reckoned but as a sect of the Jews, among whom would naturally be found those of whom it was asserted as a universal truth that they were “all zealots for the law”? Mnason himself would be actually included here. Could Paul be ranged among these? No one could imagine it. But he certainly was laboring to make himself acceptable to these. No doubt, the law was to him a thing indifferent, and that it was his acknowledged principle to become to the Jew a Jew, that he might gain the Jew.

But would they not have understood by it something more? and does not “walking orderly and keeping the law” imply that he belonged to the house of Mnason, rather than that he was but lodging there? There surely was not a selfish thought in the apostle’s heart.

He was walking in the spirit of pure self-sacrifice, to win his Jewish kindred to the Lord; but if he had declared to them his exact position with regard to it -“to those under the law as under the law, not being myself under the law” (1 Corinthians 9:20, R.V.), would it have been, could it have been, a means of winning them? The meeting that is pictured for us as taking place is at James’ house, and with the elders. The apostles seem by this time to have scattered from Jerusalem, and nothing is mentioned with regard to them. Nor indeed does James himself seem to take any prominent part, such as he took at the council to decide the place of Gentile converts with respect to the law. It is more than possible that those most fanatical as to Moses were the most forward, as they had indeed made their voices to be heard first on the former occasion. Paul himself, in the natural progress of divine revelation, had doubtless made advance, while it would be well if under the influence of their alarm at the steadily growing questions involved by the increasing Gentile element in the assemblies, these had not gone backward. There was a strong feeling abroad as to Paul, and a multitude behind who must needs come together.

While it was the nation still in unbelief of which Paul was surely thinking, he is faced with this opposition first to be encountered of the converted and Christian Jews. On their side they must needs recognize also the wondrous work of divine grace which God has been working by him among the nations. They will make no doubt that all the reports that have come to them concerning him are but perversions. They are ready to assume that he is really as good a Jew as ever; what they propose to him then is not a concession: it is a justification of himself from calumny merely. Let the Gentiles, as they have conceded, remain Gentiles; he could not have taught the Jews to apostatize from Moses, and not to circumcise their children, nor to walk according to the customs. Let him take then these four men who, being believers like himself, could yet bind themselves with the Nazarite vow, and presenting himself with them in the temple purified, take upon him the expenses necessary for their completion of it, and that publicly, that all might recognize clearly his own relation to the law. Nothing is proposed to him, as many have thought, about taking upon himself the vow in question. He is merely to purify himself ceremonially, for his appearance in the temple, and it was no new thing that they advised, but what is known to have been done by others very near the time at which all this took place. In fact there was nothing in all that was advised that the apostle could not have done with a good conscience as a part of his privilege to give up his own liberty in toleration of the ignorant infirmity of others; but the question returns, and will return: Was it to be understood in this way? Here among “zealots for the law,” there was indeed ignorance on every side; could he then adapt himself to this, raising no question, leaving them to grow into the truth, as necessarily they would? not forcing any, as in fact he had never forced, -tolerant where God yet was tolerant? Could he not in such a case, without professing anything where it was at present hopeless to bring round this mass of prejudiced opposition to the higher truth, as he saw and followed it, simply go through the ceremonial as they prescribed it to him, and remove out of his way this hindrance to that upon which his heart was set, the proclamation of Christ to his kindred by one whose very advocacy itself was evidence of the truth that he proclaimed, who with his own eyes had seen Christ Jesus the Lord, and had seen men bow before that sacred Name as he had? Yes, it was indeed vain to expect to quell in any other way the storm that was beginning to manifest itself, though in its first zephyr breathings. He had seen the whirlwinds of Jewish passion aroused in the very midst of the Gentiles, and able to carry with them the Gentiles themselves, otherwise cynical and indifferent. What would it be with such questions started here where the crowd was one, and Christians too were in zealous opposition to whatever seemed to touch the authority of Moses? But what then did all this do but echo the words which shortly were to come home to him with terrible confirmation as he faced the wild tumult from the castle-stairs, “They will not receive thy testimony concerning Me”? The apostle of the Gentiles must renounce all hope of being God’s messenger to Israel; and he who sought it, spite of the burning, uncalculating love that had brought him there, was necessarily out of the path to which God had called him. The testimony to Christ indeed was to be permitted him, though it could but demonstrate once more the hardness of heart to which they could only be given up. The Lord would and does own His faithful servant in a testimony, to which He would not nevertheless have sent him. Over it all He was; and the history of that which follows becomes, as has been said, the prophecy of long centuries to come, in which such scenes would be in principle re-enacted upon a larger scale. History is averred to repeat itself, and the reason is obvious: for man repeats himself; and poor fallen man is in every generation but the reflection of his father Adam.

And where God’s grace has made a difference, still there remains even here a nature which maintains but too much of the likeness. God’s hand has overruled in this case to forecast the future for our instruction; yet even this could not be so impressive and complete if it were not founded upon a similarity of moral elements which in their inter-working present a more than superficial parallel. It is a parallel of causes as well as effects, -fruits and consequences which we can trace to roots and seeds which are in ourselves also, and present grounds of real and profitable self-judgment. 2. The counsel of the elders is acted on by the apostle. He does not, for he could not, declare himself under the law. He treats them all, one would say, as those who were not ripe for disclosures of this nature, which must wait for a fit season to be made. Enough that he can undertake this charge and perform this purification in the same way in which he had circumcised Timothy some time since. The shadows for him had passed in that which had fulfilled them: these with their zeal for the law were in the shadow still, and he must wait upon God for their deliverance.

But it is evident, nevertheless, that here he is in no position to help them, but that his present action must encourage them in their own. But his heart presses him on to reach a place in which his voice may be heard with acceptance by his people, and he stoops to the present sacrifice required: to what it will lead on he does not know. In fact, the plan seems to be working well; the days are almost completed, when that comes of which he has been warned. Some Jews from Asia find him in the temple, having seen him previously in the city with an Ephesian Greek -one of his Gentile “nurselings,” as they might taunt him, from the name. Outside, they had endured him, as it seems, or at least had refrained from an attack; but now this man with his disreputable tastes had dared invade the sanctuary itself; doubtless the same man inside, as he had been out: he had brought his Greek there, no doubt. Instantly there flashes out the wrath of the impetuous, haughty race. The city is moved, and the people run together, and dragging him out, shut to the temple-gates. Paul is in those well-known hands that spare not; and only by the intervention of God the Romans become his saviors from the violence of the raging mob! The plan which appeared so reasonable has ended only in disaster: Paul need take no more trouble to appease the Christian Jews, and is in the very worst possible position to reach the unbelieving ones! It is significant that Lysias, the chief captain’s name, means “one who looses, or delivers,” and that nothing but the Roman arms in fact accomplished the deliverance Of the believing Jews from the legal system in which they were bound up. It was not to be more than a decade, if so much, until that temple which was its necessary centre and heart should be overthrown, according to our Lord’s prophecy, by the Roman power, and the people scattered over the face of the earth. Their house, long bereft of the divine Presence, but where alone the blood of atonement could be offered for their sins, and with which all their ritual was connected, was taken from them utterly, and the system ended, although unbelief might still grip it with dead hands. In the rejection of the grace which was now going out to the Gentiles, they had rejected that which was their only possible salvation, and judgment in brief time followed; though not before the last word should be uttered by him whom in fact, though not in form, they had delivered to the Gentiles, bidding the true in heart amongst them go forth out of the camp (Hebrews 13:13). That he should have the last word for them, who had sought them with such earnest desire, was the divine recognition of him whom they had treated with unworthy suspicion, and betrayed, however undesignedly, into the hands of his enemies. “According to the wisdom given to him,” says the apostle of the circumcision, “our beloved brother Paul has written to you” (2 Peter 3:15). The voice that had been closed by their own folly while among them now spoke in all the majesty of the truth which could no more be silenced. 3. Yet he is permitted also here one last appeal in behalf of his Lord and Saviour. Won by the demeanor of his prisoner, the chief captain gives him leave to address the mob from whom he has rescued him; and Paul uses his liberty to relate to them the story of his conversion and of the revelation made to him. He reasons with them, reminding them of his past, in which he too had shown himself with as much false zeal for God as they were now showing. As men do commonly, he had followed the belief in which he had been trained, as both the high priest and elders could bear witness of him, persecuting to the death believers in Christ, whether they were men or women, and even hunting for them beyond the borders of the land. Nothing had stopped him but that intervention from heaven itself which had revealed to him Jesus the Nazarene in glory!

Those with him had seen also the light, but had not heard the words* that were uttered, which were for himself alone. He had heard the Lord declare Himself the One he persecuted. Blinded by the glory of that light, he was led into Damascus, there to await, as he was bidden, further revelations.
Paul narrates more fully than the previous history has done, the visit of Ananias, -“a pious man,” as he remarks, according to the law," -through whom at once his sight is restored to him, and he is declared to be one chosen by the God of their fathers to know His will and see the Righteous One, and hear, as a special witness for Him, a voice out of His mouth. Then he is bidden to be baptized, and have his sins washed away, as he thus owns the authority of Jesus. It is a clear example of baptismal remission of sins on entering the kingdom: on God’s part he who truly bows to Christ is absolutely forgiven; but on man’s part, as openly admitted by baptism, this can be but a conditional announcement, available, not for introduction into heaven, but into the company of disciples upon earth. As a kingdom of truth (John 18:37) the kingdom means discipleship.
The crowd listens to this yet, spite of the claim made for the Crucified One: but we are soon to find that this is not acceptance. The apostle comes now to what is pressing upon his spirit, as he looks upon those dark, upturned faces, upon which one can imagine, however restrained as yet, that he sees the storm gathering. What can he presage else, as he repeats, emphasized as they are by recent occurrences, words from the lips of truth itself which had long since warned him, “Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem, for they will not receive thy testimony concerning Me.” How he must have watched them as he related his ineffectual pleading at that time! “Lord, they themselves know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue those that believe in Thee; and when the blood of thy witness Stephen was shed, I also was standing by and consenting, and keeping the garments of those who slew him!” Was Paul not just the witness now to be believed?
But He who spoke had broken off appeal: “Go,” He said: “for I will send thee to the nations afar off.” 4. For what then was he standing there? and what was in his mind as he declared thus to their face their unrepentant stubbornness? Would he break them down by it, even then, that they might show it to be but a thing of the past, and no longer applicable? Or did it announce the hopelessness which had now taken possession of him, the past and present linking themselves together rapidly in his mind, as when facing death they are known often to come up? If so, it was confirmed in a moment as he stood before them plainly avowed, the apostle of the Gentiles.* At once the short quiet is over. All the arrogant pride of an elect people, with which all that should humble man most may in fact inspire him, burst out of that heaving and gesticulating human mass confronting him, crying out madly for his death.

The Roman captain, baffled by the foreign tongue that had been made use of, and conceiving by the outcry that there must be some proportionate cause, commands to examine Paul by scourging. It was the custom of the day, and for many a day; but from which the Roman citizen was exempted. Paul, as we know, was that; and his simple question, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman and uncondemned?” brings the chief captain to inquire, and ends the matter. That the apostle was well within his legal rights, none can, of course, question; but it has been questioned whether it was according to the height of the truth which he proclaimed to plead such rights; but the governments of the earth have always their place with Paul, and are recognized as a ministry of God for good to His people; why not thankfully use them for that, when it needed only a word of information to secure it, and there was not a thought of resistance?** With the man in Christ, as such, the governments of the earth have nought to do; nor is it to forget such a place to realize that as the creatures of God, still upon the earth, we have other relations than those implied by this. All natural relationships lie outside of it; while the peace and power and object of the man in Christ are to go with us everywhere, through all. \