Acts 25

Acts 25:1-27

THE TRIAL Acts 25-26 “Now when Festus was come, into the province, after three days he ascended from Caesarea to Jerusalem”. THERE are some men whose presence cannot be ignored. This is not due to their personality. It is not accounted for on the ground of their accomplishments; but, it is a resultant of office. The Roman governor might be a despicable character. He often was, but his office was not to be disregarded. It was Paul himself who emphasized this principle. He wrote, “Let every soul he subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. “(For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil” (Romans 13:1-3). Not once in all the varied and insulting experiences through which Paul passed did he object to his judge. He seemed to hold what is commonly true, that the just man has little to fear from the machinery of justice. He knew the righteousness of his cause and was not afraid to commit it to even the prejudiced, as this whole study abundantly illustrates, for here he passes from Felix to Festus, and from Festus to Agrippa, trusting that when it is all over, if injustice has been done him, Caesar’s court, the highest, will set it right. Imperceptibly, therefore, we pass from the august appearance of Festus to the central subject—Paul, for, after all, Paul is the hero of this entire story. Let us think, then, of Paul Before Festus, Paul Left Over by Felix, and Paul Appealing to Agrippa. PAUL BEFORE FESTUSThe Jews reveal impatience for his indictment. No sooner had Festus arrived than they had their report ready and their plan outlined. He should send for Paul and bring him to Jerusalem, and they would kill him while on the way.The judge’s office has its distasteful side. Litigants are seldom justice-loving people. The judge is not to them the opportunity of justice. He is, rather, the possible medium of selfish plans. When did any litigant go to court, asking only that the truth be found out fully, and justice be meted out fairly? Is he not commonly there, as the priest and chief Jews were here, with a plan? Has he not already told his attorney what course to take, how to entangle the opposition and how to win the victory? We knew a man who had, with another, a mutual contract that called for an arbitration committee in case of disagreement. The disagreement arose and the committee had to be created, and when the man arrived on the ground where the arbitration was to take place, he found that his opponent had already secured the consent of three of his friends to serve in this mutual capacity, and was profoundly offended when told that such was not the intent of the agreement; that it was his privilege to select one, and one only—the second to be selected by the other party, and the third by those two. And when the spirit of the articles was carried out, and the committee created, the man who had expected to make the committee a medium of self-service, discovered, to his chagrin, that he had to suffer justice instead. One of the marvelous things about the Bible is the fact that its history is true to life. In its personalities you see sample men. Its sacred pages are the reflectors of human nature. Festus, however, had a plan of his own.“Festus answered, that Paul should he kept at Caesarea, and that he himself would depart shortly thither. “Let them, therefore, said he, which among you are able, go down with me, and accuse this man, if there be any wickedness in him. “And when he had tarried among them more than ten days, he went down unto Caesarea; and the next day sitting on the judgment seat commanded Paul to be brought” (Acts 25:4-6). A judge should be an independent man—a man who thinks for himself. A judge should be a man who makes his own plans and determines the conditions of his own court. He should neither be swayed by the eloquence of a lawyer, nor by the swelling tides of public opinion. In this country, the people determine, for the most part, at least, their own judges, and when a man sits in this place of importance and power, to be swayed by popular opinion, or legal eloquence, it is the fault of the people as well as the fault of the judge. Particularly is that fault with the people when they re-elect! Office tests men, and tells on the character. The untried are not to be prejudged, but the public servant, who has known years of service, writes his personal history with indelible ink, and the people read. Some years ago, America put into the presidency a man whose literary and legal talents made him appear to be fitted for the office. At the end of four years, his unfitness was fully revealed and the people retired him, even at the expense of a great party. More than once America has elected to her highest office an untried man. At the end of four years, he has proven himself a true man—brave, independent, dependable, and almost uniformly they have returned him for a second term. And in spite of the tradition that no man should serve a third term, it has been almost impossible to keep the people from demanding that the true man continue in this high station. Paul’s appeal to Caesar’s court was a criticism of Festus’ conduct. In Acts 25:6-9 we find the record of official weakness. When the testimony was all in, it amounted to nothing. The complaints were unprovable, and when Paul had denied them in toto,“Festus, willing to do the Jews a pleasure, answered Paul, and said, Wilt thou go up to Jerusalem, and there he judged of these things before me? “Then said Paul, I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to he judged: to the Jews have I done no wrong, as thou very well knowest. “For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar” (Acts 25:9-11). The highest court is commonly the safest. As a rule, only men of character attain to its honors as judges, and the more character in the judge, the better opportunity for the triumph of truth and right. In fact, in practically all the walks of life, one had best plead his case before the head man. If you want credit at a store, don’t request it of a clerk. Get to the head of the credit department. If you would secure a pass on a railroad, don’t appeal to the chief clerk. Find access to the vice-president. Paul was a judge of men and had a working knowledge of affairs, and he knew the higher up he went the greater likelihood of righteous treatment. It is often more trouble to get to the head man than it is to speak to one of his assistants, but the former is a worth while painstaking. It is rather more expensive to reach a supreme court than to settle difficulties in a squire’s court. But if the case is important, then the judgment involves a master wisdom. For righteousness, Caesar’s court is a thousandfold more satisfactory than the court of Festus. Let us lift the principle a little higher still. There are those who fear the high and holy Judge of all the earth, but we are fully persuaded, both upon the basis of Bible testimony and that of personal experience, that even a sinner stands a better chance before the Most High God than at the court of human society. There is many a man incarcerated in the State penitentiary who fears not the final judgment, since it is more easy to stand before a just and righteous God than it is to appear before unjust and unrighteous society. O, sinner! your hope is not with men, not with the judges of the earth; it is with the Lord—the Judge of all. Paul appealed to Caesar. Your appeal, my appeal, is to Christ. PAUL LEFT OVER BY FELIX“And after certain days king Agrippa and Bernice came unto Caesarea to salute Festus. “And when they had been there many days, Festus declared Paul’s cause unto the king, saying, There is a certain man left in bonds by Felix: “About whom, when I was at Jerusalem, the chief priests and the elders of the Jews informed me, desiring to have judgment against Him. “To whom I answered, It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him” (Acts 25:13-16). The judge is often heir to legal troubles. They are passed down to him from predecessors. They are passed on to him from previous dockets. The court sheet is seldom clean. The man going out of office commonly leaves to his successor a vast deal of dirt-cleaning to be done. This is particularly true in American courts. They are cluttered affairs. They remind the inspector of a warehouse into which has been crowded the ill-mated furniture in many homes, and where, as you walk through, you wonder if there will ever be a clean-up. It is now conceded that the cluttered court is both the occasion and explanation of American crimes. In the mother country, when a man commits a crime, he is promptly arrested, promptly indicted, and if guilty, promptly convicted; if innocent, promptly released. The certainty and suddenness of judgment are moral deterrents. “The case continued” custom, so long and so widely obtaining in America, is a State curse. To be sure, ours is a new country and a great territory, and crimes committed in it are more easily covered than in the English isle, or the nations of the continent; but it is very generally conceded that our chief failure in all criminal procedure is that of speedy detection, speedy trial, and speedy judgment. Our criminals are arrested, and either released on bond or flung into jail. Months pass before any trial is had, causing favor toward the guilty, in that the true case against him weakens with time; testimony is ever increasingly difficult to secure, public feeling dies down, and even the judge himself is influenced by the thought that, though this is a crime, it was committed long ago. The impression seems to prevail with the American bench that attorneys are to determine court procedure, time included, rather than the judge. If they want to drag an indifferent case into days, they are permitted to do so, and often, even the judge himself loses interest in the main objective before the end is reached, and must add other days in order to review and freshen his mind on the whole matter. Meantime, justice waits and crime complacently continues. Festus shared his court troubles with the king. (Acts 25:13-22). This is Herod Agrippa, the second. He had been trained in the Royal Palace of the Emperor, but he had not lost his interest in his own people, the Jews; and when, through the tetrarchy, his dominion was extended, it included Judaea. He was brother-in-law of Felix, and his scandal with Bernice was known to Jew and Gentile alike; and yet, his higher office made its appeal to Festus who both flattered Agrippa, and sought to escape his own duty, by asking his judgment in the Paul-in-stance. There is, however, a dual principle here involved that has both its merit and demerit. It is always justifiable for the humbler office to consult the higher, and the man in comparative authority to consult the man of supreme authority. Therein is the justification of prayer, especially such prayer as appeals to God for wisdom. When the King of Glory can be consulted, what folly to rely upon self-judgment. “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God”. But in this instance, so even in that, men may make of prayer itself a political procedure. That is to say, when duty is clear, they may delay it on the pretense of consulting God. The judge, in humblest office, who knows what should be done, has little need of consultation. What he needs is courage, decision, and so the man who has a plain path before his feet need not ask God which way. The wiser part is to walk steadily therein. In this action, Festus seems to have favored the separation of Church and State. He described these Jewish questions as “matters of their own superstition”, and “doubted of such manner of questions” for State consideration. It was, in fact, a case in point. The Church and State are separate. The first must not essay to control the second, and the second may not attempt to determine the faith of the first. As between the various religious opinions of the sects, the State has nothing to say; but it is very easy to carry even this principle too far, because, when a religious sect clearly violates the letter and spirit of State law, then it becomes commonly criminal as the King David case in Michigan.

Or, when the individual religious opinion becomes inimical to public interest, then the State has a right to self-protection, as in the Wisconsin U. case. That is the principle on which we have advocated the passing and execution of anti-evolution laws. No servant of the state has a right to teach philosophies injurious to the public weal, and attempt to justify himself by naming such philosophies science. If history is replete with illustrations of anything, it is that all atheistic and materialistic philosophies have been hurtful to men as individuals and to men collectively. France was nearly destroyed by deism in her schools, and Germany has lost her “place in the sun” by following Nietzsche too far in his false philosophy. Russia is, at this present moment, a holocaust of crimes committed in the name of sovietism. Those men in America who are striving to drive the Christian faith from the public school educational system and substitute instead a materialistic philosophy that leaves a term, expressing no fact whatever, as the explanation of all things, are enemies of the social organism, and against such the State has a perfect right to speak, as Tennessee has spoken, and Mississippi and Colorado have spoken. Think of the instance of Loeb and Leopold. They adopted the University’s philosophy of life and then proposed to put it into criminal practice, and the State rose and convicted and incarcerated them, and but for their youth would have justly hung them. The true church is the best friend the State ever had; a false one is forever the State’s enemy. The function of the Church is religion; the function of the State is social administration. Their spheres are different, hence the necessity of their separation. But their interests overlap, hence the necessity of their co-operation. But we conclude with PAUL BEFORE AGRIPPA This record is found in the twenty-sixth chapter. Here again, Paul pleads his own case (Acts 26:1-26). It is an instance of noble self-defense. Some of us are in honest doubt if the world needs attorneys. The attorney is supposed to be an expert in law, and to be able to protect the interests of his clients. But the man who sits in the place of judge ought also to be an expert in law, and no one appearing in his court should need other protection from any source. The judgment of the judge should be the sufficient protection of all parties. It is doubtful if there has been a more conspicuous figure on the American continent than the famed “Justice John” of Richmond, Virginia. For years he performed all the functions of the court. Unless somebody demanded a jury, he was judge, jury and lawyer for both sides. He cross-questioned the witnesses. He did not seek to prejudice them one way or the other, but to discover from them the facts, and the public shortly found out that righteousness was favored in that court, unrighteousness was frowned upon, and few of his decisions were ever reversed. It is our judgment that there is no feature of law more fair than that which privileges every man to plead his own case, if he desires to do so; and it is equally our judgment that when one has a righteous case, it would be better for him to adopt the apostolic method and to make his own statement. The modern custom of asking questions and demanding “yes” and “no” answers, is hardly favorable to a knowledge of the truth. Expert attorneys know how to compel it to cover the truth instead. The straightforward rehearsal of Paul’s experience, as reported in these verses, would impress any just judge, and had Paul stopped with his statement, “This thing was not done in a corner”, we believe he would have won his case. It was his personal question that queered him. “King Agrippa, believest thou the Prophets? I know that thou believest”! Agrippa answered, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian”, has about it the suggestion of scorn. It is so now and apparently it has always been so, that even the believing judge on the bench does not want any reference to his faith made. He knows the public expects him to mete out justice and to be absolutely uninfluenced by religious feelings. Hence his resentment if they are referred to in the slightest.

There is a sense in which this resentment is justified. State questions are not to be settled by religious sentiment. On the other hand, the true Christian man will not be silenced concerning the faith that is in him because he happens to stand before a State official.The completion of the Book of Acts will prove that Paul was never put into any place where he felt it out of order, or even in the slightest degree unbecoming to bear his testimony to the Christ; and it was practically impossible for Paul to deal with any man, in station high or low, without trying to win him to the worship of Jesus. If such an endeavor is resented by the judge, it will not be made an occasion of adverse judgment. Down deep in his heart, the veriest man of the world appreciates Christian consistency, and Christian enthusiasm, and Christian courage. Agrippa seems not to have been an exception; for, when the whole matter was over and “the governor, and Bernice, and they that sat with them”, are gone aside to talk among themselves, they agreed, “This man doeth nothing worthy of death or of bonds”.Paul, then, had triumphed. He had convinced the judge of the justice of his case. He had seemed innocent in the eyes of the king! The innocent are always convincingly eloquent. The profound appeal Paul had made to Agrippa is voiced in the last verse, “Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar”.That was an admission, “We find no fault in him”. It carried with it, also, a hint, at least, of contentment in a possible excuse. Felix had had his opportunity to set Paul free and had failed. Festus had had his opportunity to set Paul free and had failed. Now Agrippa has his opportunity to set Paul free, and he fails.

Felix excused himself on the ground that Festus was coming and could hear Paul’s defense. Festus excused himself on the ground that Agrippa was coming and he would wait for the judgment of one in a higher court. And now Agrippa has excused himself on the ground that since Caesar’s court is final, there is no occasion to interfere. Alas, for the maneuvers of men in justifying delay in plain duty. And yet, let it be remembered that the final court will come and it will come for all men. The great day of the Assize will arrive. The final judge will sit in the throne of His glory, “and before Him shall be gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: “And he shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. “Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand, “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: “Naked, and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was in prison, and ye came unto Me. “Then shall the righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? “When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? “Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. “Then shall He say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink: “I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in: naked, and ye clothed Me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited Me not. “Then shall they also answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee? “Then shall He answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me. “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:32-46).