Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Greeks believed. But the Jews who refused to believe stirred up the other Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to perform signs and wonders. The people of the city were divided; some sided with the Jews, others with the apostles. There was a plot afoot among both Gentiles and Jews, together with their leaders, to mistreat them and stone them. But they found out about it and fled to the Lycaonian cities of Lystra and Derbe and to the surrounding country, where they continued to preach the gospel.
In Lystra there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and had never walked. He listened to Paul as he was speaking. Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, “Stand up on your feet!” At that, the man jumped up and began to walk.
When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them.
But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting: “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. In the past, he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them.
Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.
They preached the gospel in that city and won a large number of disciples. Then they returned to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” they said. Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust. After going through Pisidia, they came into Pamphylia, and when they had preached the word in Perga, they went down to Attalia.
From Attalia they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they stayed there a long time with the disciples.

• Acts 14:1-28

Noted Biblical Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Comments

Acts 14 ‘mainstream mediocre religion’: “Those of us in ‘mainstream’ denominations are, by and large, respectable. There are two things you won’t find much of in our ordinary day-by-day life. You won’t find much in the way of persecution. And you won’t find much in the way of signs and wonders. The lows have gone, but so have the highs. As long as our churches are places where we struggle to sustain an hour or two of public worship per week, with ‘real life’ only minimally affected by it, we will be like a bunch of vaguely religious cows in a field, mooing on Sunday mornings and chewing the cud the rest of the time. But if we really worked at trying to be for our world what the apostles were for their Jewish world, things might change!”

• N. T. Wright, Acts (from the For Everyone Bible Study Series)

Acts 14:1 ‘Iconium’: “A cultural melting pot of native Phrygians, Greeks, Jews, and Roman colonists, located eighty miles southeast of Pisidian Antioch.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Acts 14:3 ‘granting signs and wonders’: “See … on 2:19. Acts of such divine power confirmed that Paul and Barnabas spoke for God.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Acts 14:4 ‘apostles’: “See … Romans 1:1; Ephesians 4:11. Barnabas was not an apostle in the same sense as Paul and the Twelve since he was not an eyewitness of the resurrected Christ nor had he been called by Him. It is best to translate ‘apostles’ here as ‘messengers’ (cf. 2 Cor. 8:23; Phil. 2:25). The verb means ‘to send.’ The Twelve and Paul were ’apostles of Christ,’ (2 Cor. 11:13; 1 Thess. 2:6), while Barnabas and others were ‘apostles of the churches’ (2 Cor. 8:23).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics

Acts 14:5 ‘stone them’: “This proves that their Jewish opponents were the instigators, since stoning was a Jewish form of execution, usually for blasphemy.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Acts 14:6 ‘Lystra and Derbe, cities Lycaonia’: “Lycaonia was a district in the Roman province of Galatia. Lystra was about eighteen miles from Iconium, and was the home of Lois, Eunice, and Timothy (16:1; 2 Tim. 1:5). Luke mentions no synagogue in connection with Lystra and, since Paul began his ministry there by preaching to a crowd, it likely had a small Jewish population. Derbe was about forty miles southeast of Lystra.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Acts 14:11 ‘from being called gods to being stoned by the same crowd’: “The name of Christ was totally unknown in the town of Lystra. At the gates of their city was a great temple dedicated to Zeus (Jupiter). Paul and Barnabas entered the town and began to talk about Jesus, the Son of God, who had come down from heaven, had suffered and died, and had again ascended up on high. Among the crowd a lame man listened with marked attention. Paul, in the middle of a sermon, either by the exercise of judgment or by the promptings of revelation, concluded that this man had faith to be healed. Paul cried, ‘Stand up on your feet!’ The lame man leaped and praised God! The population was all amazed, and knowing a tradition that Zeus and Hermes (Mercury) had once appeared in that town, they concluded that they must have come again. They identified Barnabas, who was probably the elder and the nobler looking man, as Zeus; and that Paul must be Hermes, his messenger, the god of eloquence. They rushed to the temple and told the priests that the gods had come down. The priests brought forth the sacred bulls and the wreaths and were about to offer sacrifice before Paul and Barnabas. Such homage these men of God indignantly refused; they tore their clothes and ordered them to do no such thing. The next day Paul found himself exposed to peril; he was stoned, dragged through the streets as dead, and by the people who worshiped him just yesterday as a god, left to die as a villain outside the city gates. But Paul’s preaching had not been in vain. ‘Many disciples’ remained faithful. God acknowledged and rewarded his ministry (vv. 21-23).”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Acts 14:15 ‘We need a powerful God’: “You don’t need what Dorothy found. Remember her discovery in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? She and her trio followed the yellow-brick road only to discover that the wizard was a wimp! Nothing but smoke and mirrors and tin-drum thunder. Is that the kind of god you need?
“You don’t need to carry the burden of a lesser god … a god on a shelf, a god in a box, or a god in a bottle. No, you need a God who can place 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the universe. You need a God who can shape two fists of flesh into 75 to 100 billion nerve cells, each with as many as 10,000 connections to other nerve cells, place it in a skull, and call it a brain.
“And you need a God who, while so mind-numbingly mighty, can come in the soft of night and touch you with the tenderness of an April snow.”

• Max Lucado, Traveling Light

Acts 14:16 ‘allowed all nations’: “The path that they all have walked is described in Romans 1:18-32.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics

Acts 14:19 ‘they stoned Paul … supposing him to be dead.’: “Paul did not die from the stoning as some claim, who link it to his third-heaven experience in 2 Corinthians 12. ‘Supposing’ usually means ‘to suppose something that is not true.’ The main NT use of this word argues that the crowd’s supposition was incorrect and that Paul was not dead. Another argument in favor of this position is that if Paul was resurrected, why didn’t Luke mention it? Also, the dates of Paul’s third-heaven experience and the time of the stoning do not reconcile.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Acts 12:26 ‘the grace of God’: “Another theme becomes evident in 14:26—the grace of God. We’ve seen it before in Acts 11:23 when Barnabas went to Antioch and then in 13:43 when Paul and Barnabas exhorted the believers to continue in God’s grace. This is important for several reasons, one of which is that Paul’s letter to the Galatians was likely written around this moment in the story Luke is telling, in other words, before the great Council of Acts 15. I’m inclined to think that the ‘Galatians’ addressed were precisely the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, and that the ‘agitators’ who had come in to disturb them by insisting on circumcision had done so fairly soon after Paul had left them behind (see Galatians 2:11). If that is so, and even if it is otherwise, then we have to say that Luke’s quiet emphasis on grace corresponds closely to Paul’s insistence on grace in Galatians. The new life in the gospel had nothing to do with human qualifications. It was dependent utterly on God’s free gift.”

• N. T. Wright, Acts (from the For Everyone Bible Study Series)

 

My Thoughts

The Jews of Antioch had plotted against Paul and Barnabas, mostly Paul since he seemed to do the most talking.  They went to Iconium.  Again they spoke at the synagogue.  In Antioch, it took the second Sabbath before the Gentile crowd “offends” the Jews.  In Iconium, the telling of the story leaves the time element out, but maybe it happened faster.  But it could also be that some of the Jews from Pisidian Antioch followed Paul and Barnabas.  The text says that the Jews did not believe.  While many non-Jews became believers, since the Jews did not believe, The message to the Gentiles grew, but the unbelieving Jews poisoned the crowd and they developed a plot to stone Paul and Barnabas.  As noted in the scholarly quotes, “stoning” was predominantly a Jewish thing.  Thus, this is being spearheaded by the Jews of Antioch and Iconium.

So, Paul and Barnabas leave to the countryside.  The next bigger towns are Lystra and Derbe in the region of Lycaonia.  While in Lystra, Paul heals a lame man.  The man had the faith within him to be healed and God did the healing, but the people misinterpreted the healing, thinking that Zeus and Hermes had arrived in human form.  Since Paul did most of the talking, they thought Paul was Hermes, the messenger for most of the other gods on Mount Olympus.

When they started to give sacrifices in their honor, Paul and Barnabas ripped their clothing, telling the people that they had the wrong idea.  Paul and Barnabas were mere men.  Then Paul preaches a sermon about how they were trying to show that God was the one who brought the rain and the harvest, and these other gods could not do such things.

Note that Paul’s sermon here was in a crowd, not in the synagogue. The crowd had many farmers and few Jews. Paul preached a totally different sermon in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, preaching based on the knowledge of Israel’s history. The history of the Jews would have meant nothing to the crowd of Gentiles.

The next day with the crowd spurred on by Jews from Antioch and Iconium, the crowd took Paul out and had him stoned.  They thought he was dead so they abandoned his body.  The people who believed Paul’s message administered aid to him and he revived.  He and Barnabas went back into the city where he had been arrested by the mob, but then they left for Derbe.

It is possible that this is where Timothy received Jesus into his heart.  When Paul returned to Derbe, Timothy was ready to join Paul and Silas for their missionary journey.

Now comes the interesting part of the journey.  They could have taken a shortcut back to Antioch, but Paul and Barnabas went back through the towns they had previously left, being forced to leave or die, and they ministered to the believers, establishing church leaders in each church.

They arrived in Attalia instead of their original arrival port of Perga.  They returned to Syrian Antioch and reported that the Gentiles were joining the church.  A door had been opened to spread the Gospel to all corners of the globe.  They remained in Antioch for some time.

Some Serendipitous Reflections

Acts 14: 1. Seeing Paul and Barnabas‘ courage, faith, and endurance, how are you challenged to serve the Lord more completely?
“2. What does the difference between Paul’s sermon (13:17-41) and his speech in verses 15-17 teach you about sharing your faith with various groups of people?
“3. The people Paul and Barnabas encountered along the way interpreted the gospel through their own lenses, even calling them Hermes and Zeus. How do people you know interpret the gospel by their own prejudices and beliefs?
“4. What was one of the biggest misunderstandings about Christianity you had to overcome before you could believe?”

• Lyman Coleman, et al, The NIV Serendipity Bible for Study Groups

There is one set of questions for Acts 14.

Substitute whatever group for any reference to a small group or ask who could come to your aid.

If you like these Thursday morning Bible studies, but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Thursday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.