Acts 13:1–12
Introduction:
Antioch became a place of prominence in the mission and development the church. Not only were the disciples first called “Christians” there (11:26), several advances in missional strategy gained life there. After the perspective gained by Peter’s report about Cornelius and the conclusion, “God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life,” some Christians from Cyprus broke the “Jews only” pattern of evangelism and in Antioch “began speaking to the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus” so that a “large number” turned to the Lord (Acts 11:20, 21). Barnabas was sent from Jerusalem to observe this work of grace in Antioch, he taught and encouraged them and saw “considerable numbers” added to the congregation of believers (11:22–24). Seeing that he needed help, he went to Tarsus, got Saul and brought him to Antioch. Barnabas had been the human instrument God used to give Saul acquaintance within the circle of the apostles in Jerusalem and explained both his remarkable conversion and his immediate zeal for gospel truth. In Jerusalem these gifts again were strongly manifested. Saul demonstrated earnestness. His knowledge, courage, preaching, and his apologetic skill showed effectiveness as particular gifts from God (Acts 9:26–30). Now in Antioch together, Saul and Barnabas taught for a full year. The believers demonstrated a manner of life and community in the name of Christ that the citizens of the town began to identify this peculiar people by the name, “Christian.” Though given perhaps as a derisive mark of idiosyncratic lifestyle and belief, the name was received joyfully and became distinctive and publicly acknowledged nomenclature. After a powerful explanation and historical defense of Jesus as the Christ to King Agrippa, the king used the term “Christian” (Acts 26:28). The name had fastened itself to the community so that it became a designation of accusation: “But If anyone suffers as a Christian, he is not to be ashamed, but is to glorify God in this name” (1 Peter 4:16). This is a corporate fulfillment of the message God gave to Ananias for the recently–converted Saul of Tarsus: “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake” (Acts 9:15, 16). During a time of famine, the church at Antioch organized relief for the saints in Jerusalem and sent it to them by Barnabas and Saul. In our passage for Sunday, the Lord prompts this church to send Saul, (soon to be Paul – verse 9), and Barnabas on a foreign mission tour. On this tour Saul of Tarsus began to be called by the Romanized style of his name, Paul.
I. The church at Antioch had prophets, teachers and at least one apostle in their membership.
A. The Holy Spirit gives revelatory, teaching, and ministry gifts to the churches (1 Corinthians 12:28 and 14:5, 6, 29–33, and Ephesians 4:11).
Apostles were appointed by the Spirit as most preeminent in function and in authority. They had seen Christ subsequent to his resurrection and received revelation from the Holy Spirit in showing how Christ fulfilled all the promises and types of the Mosaic, Abrahamic, and Davidic covenants and also opened the door of the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31–34; Ezekiel 36:26, 27; Hebrews 8:6–13). Apostles were equipped and exercised the functions implied in the prophetic, teaching, and evangelistic ministries. Prophets received special revelation and were present in all of the New Testament churches, for in the absence of an apostle, the church still needed revelation to continue in their knowledge of the person and work of Christ, the way of justification and its implications for Christian discipleship. The teaching ministry was done by apostles, prophets and pastors-teachers. The Spirit granted gifts of insight, perception, discernment, communication, and receptivity that they might have personal insight and an ability to communicate that insight effectively.
B. Saul had been set apart as an apostle by God (Galatians 1:1) and recognized as such eventually by the other apostles (Galatians 2:7–9).
He had to defend this apostleship in the churches, not for his own esteem, but for the reception to the gospel he preached (2 Corinthians 12:11–13; Galatians 1:6–12). Along with men from a variety of backgrounds, social status, and ethnicity he served in his apostolic position also as a prophet and a teacher.
II. God issued a specific call to a work of gospel proclamation in an expansive endeavor.
The expansion to the Gentiles now was not idiosyncratic and ad hoc, but was specifically under the command of the Spirit in execution of Christ’s comprehensive statement in Matthew 28:19, 20 and Acts 1:8. If Mark 16:9–20 is a copyist’s addition to the original text, nevertheless, it shows how the commission of Christ was understood by these early Christians: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). When Paul and Barnabas returned, one of the most important parts of their entire mission was reported in these words: “He had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (14:27).
A. They were “ministering to the Lord and fasting” (2).
They were performing the functions to which they had been called and for which they were gifted. Their ministry in service of the people was also an act of worship and an offering of sacrifice to the Lord. Even as the priests of the Old Covenant ministered through the sacrificial system and were supposed to teach the people (functions that they eventually perverted – Ezekiel 34), so the prophets and teachers of the new covenant acted upon the revealed truth of God to form the called into a properly functioning body for the glory of God (Romans 12:3–8).
B. The Holy Spirit revealed to them a ministry (2).
This was a specific call, by name for Barnabas and Saul. To this point both had been serving and exercising their gifts in the context of the local church in Antioch after Barnabas had brought Saul to Antioch from Tarsus (Acts 11:22–26). Barnabas and Saul already had served with each other in taking the relief contribution from Antioch to Jerusalem. Their teaching skills, teamwork, and methods of communication had been refined and expanded in their teaching ministry at Antioch. Apostolic gifts, prophetic revelation, and teaching compulsion do not eliminate the need for work, perfecting of skills, hard study, and substantial experience. This reality stands behind Paul’s admonitions to Timothy (1 Timothy 1:18, 19; 4:6; 4:13–16; 6:11, 12, 20).
C. Again, they fasted and prayed, laid hands on them and sent them away (3).
They were sent not only by a special calling from the Holy Spirit but also as teaching ministers from the church at Antioch. This indicates the two-fold character of any call to gospel proclamation. Paul, in saying that his apostleship was not from man, refers to the ultimate authority for the distribution of all gifts for the building of the church (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). This upcoming journey initiating his call as the apostle to the Gentiles was in its earthly origin a ministry of the church at Antioch.
III. The church initiates a missionary movement (4).
A. In obedience to the specific and unmistakable instruction of the Spirit of God, Saul and Barnabas, along with John Mark as brought to assist them, went to Seleucia on the coast of Syria and boarded a ship.
God’s supernatural gifting does not remove his saints from the necessities of using the means that he has place in the world. God certainly can bypass normal means at times (Acts 8:39) but most often we operate as citizens of the world, using its temporal means for the cause of heaven and eternal truth.
B. Their sailing to Cyprus probably was as a result of this being the birthplace of Barnabas (Acts 4:36).
The island had had gospel witness after the death of Stephen, specifically among the Jewish population (11:19). In turn, men from Cyprus had evangelized Antioch, not only among the Jews but had spilled over their witness about the saving work of Christ to the Greeks also (11:20).
C. Upon their arrival in Cyprus, in order to find an immediate outlet for preaching, they went to the synagogue of the Jews in Salamis, a harbor city nearest the Syrian coast.
They went through the island visiting Jewish synagogues. We have no record of their message, but Luke recorded one in Antioch of Pisidia in 13: 15–21 for an example of how they preached in the synagogue.
D. Having made a trip of about a hundred miles from northeast to southwest Cyprus, they came finally to Paphos.
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- In Paphos, having followed their pattern of preaching in the synagogue, they were invited by a Gentile, the Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, to explain to him the message they were teaching in the synagogue.
- With him, they found a Jewish false-prophet who claimed magical powers. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had warned against false prophets who posed as gentle sheep but were “ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). Such was Bar-Jesus, also known as Elymas, a false prophet and a sorcerer. He was connected with Sergius Paulus, probably because of an interest in the supernatural and the ideas about God that circulated in the Jewish population.
- His religious persuasion focused on metaphysical powers such as the stars or naturally endemic forces of nature that hedged people in to certain patterns of life. Bar-Jesus claimed insight and some degree of power to help align these forces for the benefit of Sergius Paulus. These detours around the moral issues of divine law, trespass, and the need for forgiveness and righteousness operated then as they have in every generation. Paul’s message of reconciliation, not with mystic powers, but with a righteous and holy God rendered the teaching influence and methods of harnessing cosmic powers an absolute irrelevancy. Elymas’s job and his prestige were on the line.
IV. A Gentile, Sergius Paulus, inquires and a Jew, Elymas, opposes (6–8).
A. The interest stirred in Sergius Paulus was probably a spillover from the ministry of the missionaries in the synagogue.
As Luke described responses in more detail in other places, we may infer the same here. Some believed, some hesitated, some opposed (13:42–48; 14:1–4). The intellectual tendency of the proconsul was to learn as much as he could about a variety of ideas. He was a searcher and seemingly unsatisfied with the paganism of Rome, had some proclivity toward mysticism, but also had interest in the monotheism and law of that Jewish portion of his population. These peregrinating teachers of a new interpretation of the Jewish Scripture seemed to arrest his intellectual curiosity.
B. Paulus “sought to hear the word of God,” and while listening to Paul, this Jewish false prophet piped in and began to oppose the message of Barnabas and Paul seeking to dissuade the proconsul from believing them.
Whether this was fueled by jealousy or from the Jewish resistance to this interpretation of the fulfilment of the prophets, we are not told. The opposition, nevertheless, was intense and clearly indefensible from the standpoint of revealed truth.
C. Paul was given insight from the Holy Spirit concerning the character of Elymas (9).
He denounced him using very severe language. Truly, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 14:25, “the secrets of his heart are revealed.” These powerful characterizations, however, are not isolated to Elymas, but are descriptive of the elements of sin that dwell in every fallen son of Adam.
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- Paul said that he was “full of deceit and fraud.” Paul later wrote to Timothy that the first sin arose from Satan’s deceit of Eve (1 Timothy 2:14). Paul told Titus to remind the Christians in Crete that at one time we all were “deceived, serving various lusts” (Titus 3:3). In the recitation of Old Testament passages cementing the doctrine of sin, Paul quotes Psalm 5:9, “With their tongues, they have practiced deceit” (Romans 3:13).
- He called him a “son of the Devil.” Jesus used this language in his attack on the Pharisees in John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” Paul taught again that like the rest all outside of Christ are living in captivity to the “god of this world, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2).
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- Paul said that the sorcerer was an “enemy of righteousness.” He had acted with specific and insistent hostility to the gospel of righteousness, the central focus of which is forgiveness of sins and justification—the imputation to the sinner of the righteousness of Christ. The condition of all men as unrighteous (Romans 3:10) had become for Elymas, not only a moral status, but an aggressive purpose—“you enemy of all righteousness” (10).
- He made crooked the “straight ways of the Lord.” This is directly contrary to the way of Christ, for the prophet Isaiah said in reference to the coming of the Messiah, “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God … The crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth” (Isaiah 40:3, 4). John the Baptists claimed that he was the voice crying in the wilderness declaring the straight way of the Lord. The final words of the prophet Hosea are, “For the ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them” (Hosea 14:9). Peter wrote of false prophets who “have forsaken the right way and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Beor; but he was rebuked for his iniquity” (2 Peter 2:1,15). The straight way is the way of absolute truth, absolute justice, absolute righteousness, absolute goodness. It is the way of the gospel as embodied in the person of Christ and his reconciling work. Elymas set forth a vision of life that not only disregarded these principles but aggressively opposed this revelation of righteous judgment on sin and eternal life through justification.
D. Immediate punishment descended on Elymas (11).
Paul, under the guidance of God and by revelation, told Elymas that the Lord Himself, whom Elymas opposed, would put his hand upon him, not for good, but for a stern discipline. Emblematic of the spiritual darkness in which he lived and for which he campaigned, physical blindness overcame him. As an indication that this was a judgment from God, his physical blindness was accompanied by the descent of a mist that darkened all around him. Independent and autonomous in his view of himself, now he sought someone to lead him by the hand.
E. Based on the specific content of the message and the immediate punishment of Elymas, Sergius Paulus believed (12).
As Paul, by the Spirit revealed the captivity of Elymas to sin, deceit, and Satan, Sergius Paulus saw that such was the state of his own heart without the saving power of Paul’s gospel. He had listened to the sorcerer and had no awareness of the deceitful, dark, ungodly, and unrighteous sense of life being promulgated. Now, alarmed by the palpable manifestation of the radically erroneous path advocated by Elymas, he saw his own danger of such judgment, received the truth of Paul’s message, and believed in the gospel.
POEM
Gracious purpose sealed by pow’r, the Lord gave prophets to his church.
Teaching, praying, fasting, seeking, for God’s will they made a search.
Send your teachers, for the gospel must be preached to all the world.”
Barnabas and Saul must go; into the nations they are hurled.
Aboard a ship they went.
By prayer these men were sent.
Cyprus was the destination; Barnabas knew this as home.
By synagogues through the land in gospel travel did they roam.
They met a man full of scorn while void of conscience for the word.
He challenged Paul, opposed his speech, hostile to the truth he heard.
False prophet, devil’s child,
By Satan’s lies beguiled.
The message of forgiveness caught the mind of Sergius Paulus;
“The Son of God came down to earth with heaven to enthrall us.”
When Paul rebuked the sorcerer as the foe of righteousness,
Made his eyes reflect his heart of deathly spiritual blindness.
The Proconsul believed,
From sin and death relieved.
The grace that brings redemption breaks into a world of darkness.
Sin-bound children of wrath, our hearts reside in moral starkness.
Left to our vile corruptions saving truth offends our false pride.
The searchlight of God’s Spirit breaks bonds and reveals Christ inside.
One man found repentance;
The other just vengeance.
