EPISODE 71 ACTS CHAPTER 28 "God's Word Is Not Chained"

Welcome to Share the Word. We've reached Acts 28, the last chapter of Luke's account of the growth and development of earliest Christianity. In this chapter, we'll see Paul arrive in Rome as a prisoner in chains. Over the next two years, Paul spends his time in custody. Now, will Christianity be able to move forward? Let's find out.

Acts chapter 28. God's Word is not chained. We've come to the last chapter of the book of Acts, the history Luke left us of the development of earliest Christianity. I hope you've enjoyed it, learned some things, and been challenged. I think that's the best thing we can say about Acts in the canon of Scripture. It's very challenging.

It tells us about people who changed their world. How do you think he's going to end this story? You might be surprised, so stick with me today. By the time we get to Acts chapter 28, we are in the years 60 to 62 A.D. The apostle Paul, a man now around 60 years old, has appealed the charges the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem have been pressing against him for many years to the Roman emperor, which was his right to do as a Roman citizen. As we learned last time, he was placed in the custody of a centurion named Julius, and they boarded a grain ship headed for Israel toward Italy.

Luke was with Paul at this point, as was another Christian associate named Aristarchus. The course was supposed to hug the coastline below what is now Turkey and Greece, but as Margie described last podcast, their ship was caught in a violent storm in the Mediterranean and driven westward for 600 miles over two weeks of time until they shipwrecked on the sandbars of the isle of Malta. That small island is about 50 miles south of Sicily. Luke describes the shipwreck and their harrowing escape in great detail. Have you noticed how detailed Luke is often in his descriptions, noting specific distances, time between events, random people's names that come in and out of the story? He even records the depth soundings here.

The captain of the ship made us there. Out-of-commission ship was driven aground at Malta. These details make his record ring authentic, and archaeologists have noticed that too. Interestingly, a research team led by a former FBI investigator named Robert Carnucci, using Luke's details in this chapter, located what they are reasonably sure is the exact site this ship broke up. And even more, some of the remains of that wreck, the large anchors mentioned by Luke here, were located right at the depth Luke says they were cut loose. You can read articles about that interesting discovery online.

All 276 people aboard were miraculously spared and made their way to the shore at Malta. They built fires there, Luke says, with the help of the locals to dry themselves out and warm themselves up. Paul was helping by carrying wood. When he threw a bundle of branches he'd gathered onto the fire, a venomous snake jumped out and latched onto his hand. Ouch! Ouch!

Ouch! Paul shook it off into the fire. Luke says the natives who saw that, standing nearby, knowing Paul was a prisoner, imagined that he must be a very bad man who, although he had survived the shipwreck, the universe was now somehow taking justice against him. They waited for him to keel over, and waited, and waited. But after a while, when Paul seemed just fine, they changed their minds and decided he must be a god. Maybe Luke is telling us this because he found it funny, pointing out how foolish the superstitions of people are.

People still make these kinds of rash judgments about others based on circumstances that befall them. Not us, of course, but other people. Seriously, we don't have the right to do that. We don't have the insight to do that, and we shouldn't pass judgment on other people when bad things happen to them. While on Malta, the apostle Paul, as always, did his best to minister to the local people there, including healing the father of the island's governor, who had been very sick with dysentery. Luke says they were well taken care of by the natives on the island, and when spring came, they found another grain ship, which had harbored there over the winter, and they were able to resume their voyage with them.

Again, the details. Luke notes this ship's home port was Alexandria, Egypt, and it had a figurehead, he said, of Castor and Pollux. I think he's describing something like we've seen on Viking ships, carved figures at the bow. Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Zeus in Greek mythology. They were supposedly gods that brought good luck to sailors. I think Luke, again, is pointing up the superstitions of the pagan religions that influenced the Roman world, just as earlier when he described Paul being bitten by a poisonous snake and some people's reaction to that.

They sailed in this new ship north to Italy and around the southern tip, then up the western coast, reaching a port called Puteoli on the north shore of the Gulf of Naples. They stayed there for a week, Luke says. Apparently, the centurion in charge of delivering Paul to Rome had business there. Paul was very encouraged that Christians from nearby towns, hearing that he was there, came out to greet him. After they completed whatever the obligation was that delayed them at Puteoli, they headed on foot up the famous Appian Way toward the imperial capital. And so, Luke says, and so we came to Rome.

Certainly not the way Paul had imagined coming to this great city, but Rome was near the top, if not at the top, of his destinations. He wanted to take the gospel of Christ, and he was finally there, albeit as a prisoner. Once they got into the city of Rome, Paul was allowed to secure a rented house rather than be locked in prison. But he was still under guard, a kind of house arrest situation. He was also given the privilege of having people come and go at his place, so he did not allow his confinement to prevent him from sharing the good news. As he later wrote from Rome to his protégé Timothy, For the sake of the gospel, I am suffering even to the point now of being chained like a criminal.

But God's word is not chained. In fact, while he was in this situation, a confinement that lasted two more years, he wrote several of the New Testament letters, often referred to as his prison epistles. We'll get to them, God willing, as we work our way through the New Testament. This situation also gave Paul the opportunity to delegate responsibilities now to those he had been training for years, like Timothy, Titus, Aristarchus, and others we've met. They came and went from Rome to places Paul assigned them, acting as his go-betweens, carrying correspondence to the many churches his team had planted over the last years and bringing him back reports of their progress.

So, as frustrating as I'm sure it was for Paul to be confined like this, and as exasperating as it was waiting month after month to see what would happen with his legal case, nevertheless, he was an optimist, saying, The word of God is not chained. The Great Commission work is going on. To the Jew first, Paul had once written to the Romans before he ever got to the city. To the Jew first, Paul had, a few years before, written an epistle to Rome, a very detailed and systematic treatise on Christian doctrine and practice. We have it preserved in our New Testament. We call it the Book of Romans.

In his introductory remarks there, you find my favorite verse in the Bible, and it's Romans chapter 1, verse 16, which says, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who will believe it, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentiles. Remember, Paul, a trained rabbi of the Pharisaic tradition, understood clearly God's choice of the Jewish people first as His own. He always tried to bring the gospel first to the Jewish community where he went. So it was no different when he reached Rome here. After a couple of days of settling in, he reached out to the leaders of the Jewish community, and he invited them for a meet and greet. They came because they were curious about Saul of Tarsus, now Paul the apostle of Christ.

He was a very notorious person at this point in the empire, and they wanted to understand how he became who he became and what growing Christianity was all about. And of course, Paul was anxious to tell them. And so they set an entire day aside for a meeting to hear what Paul explained to them about the claims of Christianity. Do you remember Luke writing about the two Jewish men on the road to Emmaus who Jesus met on the evening after His resurrection? This is Luke chapter 24, the last chapter of his gospel account. He told us that Jesus, starting with the earliest prophecies in the Old Testament, explained to those discouraged and confused followers that the Messiah had to suffer before he could enter into his glory.

When the day for the meeting with the Jewish leaders in Rome came, Paul took exactly that same approach. Luke says that at his residence that day, Paul witnessed to them from morning till evening, explaining about the kingdom of God. From the law of Moses and from the prophets, he tried to persuade them about Jesus. I'm sure there was a lot of dialogue back and forth, and I would have loved to have heard it. Realize how foreign to these religious Jews the message of the gospel sounded. Wait, Paul, you're claiming this man Jesus, a condemned man who died on a Roman cross, was our Messiah, and you think that God is offering salvation now, forgiveness, not on the basis of a person's actual righteousness, but to anyone who will believe into this Jesus to save them, even Gentiles.

Wow, this was all very foreign to everything these people thought and understood. That's probably why the dialogue lasted all day. Luke says some found Paul's testimony, and you know he shared that, as well as he showed from the Old Testament prophets about the Messiah, they found it persuasive, but others in the group would not accept it. In fact, some of them, after Paul had done his best to explain the truth about Jesus and why we all need him, must have said something that ticked him off a little bit, because as the meeting broke up, Luke says he quoted from an Old Testament prophet, saying, Some of you remind me of the prophet Isaiah and what he wrote about your forefathers. For these people's hearts have become calloused. They hardly hear with their ears.

They have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. As has now happened in many other places, Paul then told those who rejected his message that day, I've shared the good news with you, but since you reject it, know that God is going to offer it to the Gentiles, and they will listen. The final verses in Luke's history of the early church that we call Acts says this. So for two whole years, Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

I love the line in the last of Paul's letters preserved in the New Testament, that is 2 Timothy, where he wrote that even though he was suffering and was in chains, God's word could not be chained. The work went on through many leaders that Paul had by now prepared. The fact that Luke leaves this story right here with Paul still in this Roman house arrest situation indicates, for one thing, that Acts was written before Peter and Paul, his two main characters, had died, or more accurately, had gone to heaven. He certainly would have told us about their passing if it had happened before he finished this account.

But when he had brought the story of the development of early Christianity up to their present time, to the time he and Paul were in Rome awaiting a hearing before the emperor, he bound together his parchments and delivered them first to whoever that mysterious Theophilus person was. By the way, I just remembered this. One more specific theory about who that man actually was that makes sense is that Theophilus was quite possibly a Roman attorney who they felt was sympathetic to the Christian cause and who they hoped would defend Paul in his legal case coming up. What Luke wrote then may have been to provide him with a thorough historical context to understand the charges against Paul. Anyway, I feel sure Luke or another scribe they employed made a few more copies of this writing too.

Paul would have encouraged Luke to do that, and the Holy Spirit would have impressed on them to do that because this was important for posterity. It is the definitive record of earliest Christianity, very important for history. Luke has spent a lot of ink on the Apostle Paul's acts, as we call them, because he was on Paul's team for many years, but realized there were others spreading the good news at the same time in other places. Peter was not only a key leader in the Jerusalem church, but he also traveled throughout Roman Asia, Cappadocia, and Bithynia. Remember Barnabas and Mark, who had years before split away from Paul's team, maybe ten years earlier now. They had continued their missionary travels just in different directions.

And extra-biblical writers mention the other apostles of Jesus and record places they carried the gospel in obedience to the Great Commission. For example, a leading early church writer named Eusebius, in his book Church History, written shortly after the 300 A.D. year, says about Thomas, remember the one who first doubted the resurrection, that Thomas traveled as far as Parthia, which was in eastern Turkey and Afghanistan today. Another writer said that Thomas made it as far as India, where he was martyred. We know from Paul's writings that some of those he trained traveled as far into Europe as Serbia, called by the Romans Dalmatia, while there is some evidence Paul himself may have been released from this house arrest for a time and traveled west to Spain before being re-arrested in 64 A.D.

We also know the gospel had penetrated North Africa because Apollos, who became a powerful and eloquent spokesman for Christianity, was from there. Perhaps the Ethiopian court official that Philip shared the gospel with clear back in Acts chapter 8 was the first to take the gospel to that continent. There are stories about many others of the apostles and their associates and where they went, but suffice it to say, Christianity spread rapidly and persistently. The earliest Christians obeyed Jesus' Great Commission. In a world that was already saturated with religions and gods and goddesses, Christianity gained ascendancy rather quickly over the first couple centuries, despite periods of serious persecution, because the foundation was very strong. It was based on a lot of factual eyewitness testimony.

And it also grew, and we shouldn't discount this, because of the positive life changes in so many people who believed into Jesus. Their personal testimonies of God's power in their lives, their unshakable faith, even under persecution, these were effective as testimonies, and just as effective, if not more so, than testimonies we hear today about God radically changing people's life through the gospel. Some of the ancient Roman writers marveled at that time about the difference in the early Christians' lives from the rest of the people in their society. The Christian movement grew rapidly enough that many in the Roman elite, who did not understand it at all, began to fear that Christianity, which did not honor their pagan deities as gods, including the Caesars themselves, and insisted that only Jesus Christ is Lord, would somehow overpower them.

Famously, the young Emperor Nero, who wanted to rebuild Imperial Rome according to his own grand visions, apparently had the city set ablaze in July 64 A.D. Ten of Rome's fourteen districts burned badly, and Nero scapegoated the Christians, blaming them for this enormous catastrophe. I'd love to know if Paul actually ever got the chance to stand before that Nero in a hearing. Do you realize at that time Nero, Claudius Caesar, was only in his mid-twenties? Can you imagine what he was like, a 25-year-old guy having supreme power over the whole Roman Empire? The false charge, blaming the still misunderstood Christian community for Rome's great fire, set off the first officially sanctioned persecution of Christ's followers, and that led to atrocities.

You've no doubt heard of some of them. Christians were rounded up who would not recant their faith and were killed in the Colosseum for sport by wild beasts or gladiators, or burned like human torches in Nero's gardens. I've often tried to imagine the scene. Can you imagine if the Apostle Paul actually was called to a hearing before that apparently mad young Roman emperor? I can almost guarantee you, if it happened, given any opportunity to speak, Nero would have heard Paul's conversion story, how he himself had gone from a determined persecutor of Christians to a believer and an apostle after meeting the risen Lord on the Damascus Road. Knowing Paul's boldness and his fervor, he would not have been intimidated.

He would have relished that opportunity. Even though Paul and Peter, a couple years after this, were martyred, Christian faith continued to grow because it was, by this time, well past being controlled by a human government, as Tertullian, an early Christian writer in the second century, eloquently puts it. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. But we're well ahead of where Luke left the story. He finished his record of early Christianity's development with Paul in confinement, making the point that the gospel continued to be shared and Paul's oversight of the early churches he'd planted continued to go on, even from there. Luke's closing lines about Paul in Rome under house arrest were, He was welcoming all who came to him and boldly teaching about the Lord Jesus.

That may not be the grand climax of the story we'd like, but the more I've thought about it, I think it was a very good way to leave the story. He did not end with a dramatic event like Paul being beheaded or Peter being crucified, nothing like that. But rather, Luke leaves us with no period at the end of his story. He leaves us with a picture of the gospel continuing to go out, the Christian faith continuing to grow. Why? I'm pretty sure this is why.

Because the Acts did not end with Paul or Peter or that first generation of apostles and Christians. The Acts continued. In fact, the Acts are still continuing to this day because the gospel is still being proclaimed, leaders are still being developed, churches are still being planted, the invisible body of Christ, the kingdom of God Jesus so often talked about, is still growing and expanding. Share the Word is, in fact, one small part of the Acts that are still going on in our time. We're part of the continuing, unfolding story of how Jesus' followers that began in the first century was sparked then, set ablaze a movement that continues to affect the whole world, even to our time. Because God's Word cannot be chained.

Thanks, Paul. Well, we've reached the end of the Book of Acts, and might I suggest that you take the time to listen to it again and again. It's simple to do. All you have to do is go to sharetheword.org and check out all the archives of everything we offer: podcasts, blogs, and instructional information about the Bible. We are so appreciative that you've joined us here today, and we hope that you continue to listen and share this podcast with others. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.