Pentecost—The New Church: Jews & Gentiles One Body -- June 8, 2025
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Pentecost-The New Church • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 2:24:44
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· 5 viewsWe continue our discussion of Acts 15 and James' quotation of Amos to discuss the Gentiles as objects of Salvation. We deal with Sensus Plenior and Methods of quotation from the Old Testament. The passage is incorrectly used to proof text replacement theology.
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Sunday, March 23, 2025
Sunday, March 23, 2025
REVIEW
REVIEW
Acts 13 is the beginning of the first missionary journey.
Let’s begin with our passage in Acts 13, and read what we have already covered.
Acts 13:2-4
Acts 13:2-4
2 As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, “Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” 3 Then, having fasted and prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them away. 4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
Here is a map of where this is located. We can see Jeruslame, Antioch, Seleucia on the coast and the Island of Cyrus and then Salamis on the East Coast of Cyrus.
Here we are swept out a bit so that you can see where we are in relation to Italy and Rome, to give you some perspective
Here is the world view, swept way back
Acts 13:5
Acts 13:5
5 And when they arrived in Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. They also had John as their assistant.
Contextually what was going on here is that they were announcing the gospel: who Jesus of Nazareth is as the Messiah.
We see that spelled out in Paul’s message when he goes to the other Antioch in Pisidia. After they leave Salamis, taking along John Mark,
We see the next step of their journey
Acts 13:6
Acts 13:6
6 Now when they had gone through the island to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew whose name was Bar-Jesus,
They find good and bad guys when they get to Paphos. The good guy is going to be the proconsul; the bad guy is this sorcerer, the person who is influenced by demonism, a Jewish false prophet whose name is Bar-Jesus. The Aramaic name “Jesus” [Joshua] was a very popular and common name during the first century. The “bar” at the beginning is Aramaic for “son of.” He is a false prophet clearly involved in demonism and is close to a position of power and influence with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus (That he is called a proconsul indicates that this is a province directly under the authority of the Roman senate). So, the proconsul was in a position of tremendous influence and authority because he represented the senate of Rome.
Luke tells us that Sergius Paulus was an intelligent man. He wants to sit down and understand what it is that they are proclaiming and why.
Acts 13:7
Acts 13:7
7 who was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man. This man called for Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God.
——-
But there is a spiritual battle taking place because
Acts 13:8
Acts 13:8
8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so his name is translated) withstood them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith.
There are a lot of similarities here between this confrontation and the confrontation between Peter earlier in Acts with some of those who opposed him.
Acts 13:9
Acts 13:9
9 Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him
This is not the filling of the Holy Spirit that we discuss in terms of the command that we have in Ephesians 5:18, to be filled by means of the Spirit. It is a different verb, and it is not a “filled by means of the Spirit,” it does not use the preposition ἐν [EN] plus a dative; it uses a genitive construction, and it indicates someone who is spiritual and directly guided by the Holy Spirit. It is not a sanctification methodology indicated here. Every time we find this phrase, it is followed by speaking or saying something or, in a couple of instances, engaging in some action resulting from this revelatory ministry of God the Holy Spirit. So, this is not a term related to spiritual growth and Ephesians 5:18. The apostle Paul is now being overshadowed by God the Holy Spirit just as he would be later on when he wrote Scripture, guided and directed in a special way.
Acts 13:10
Acts 13:10
10 and said, “O full of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord?
There is an interesting play on words here between Paul, who is full of the Holy Spirit, and Elymas, who is full of deceit and fraud.
It is the same grammatical construction in saying the word for “full” – πίμπλημι [PIMPLEMI] – that is in verse 9.
So, in contrast to Paul, who is being led, guided, and powered by God the Holy Spirit in a distinct revelatory way, Elymas is full of deceit and fraud. This expresses his character. He is motivated and guided by deceit and fraud, and Paul addresses him immediately. He doesn’t mince words. He speaks the truth.
Not Bar-Joshua but Bar-diabolos, υἱός διάβολος [UIOS DIABOLOS].
10 and said, “O full of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord?
So Elymas has directly set himself up as an opponent of the gospel and an opponent of God, and he is clearly in league with demonic forces. Whether he is demon-possessed or demon-influenced, we don’t know, but at the very least, he is demon-influenced and purporting the doctrines of demons. This means he has rejected the truth of God’s Word, and he is promoting false doctrine. He is an enemy of righteousness; he perverts the truth.
Acts 13:11
Acts 13:11
11 And now, indeed, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you shall be blind, not seeing the sun for a time.” And immediately a dark mist fell on him, and he went around seeking someone to lead him by the hand.
A miracle occurs, showing that the power of the Holy Spirit is greater than all that Elymas can call upon.
Ironically, this is the first of Paul’s recorded miracles and it was performed in conflict with a Jew over giving the gospel to a Gentile
The result of this is that the proconsul believes.
Acts 13:12
Acts 13:12
12 Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had been done, being astonished at the teaching of the Lord.
Notice that the proconsol was astonished as in overwhelmed at the teaching/instruction. Notice that it was the teaching that caught his attention - not simply the miraculous blindness that Paul invoked. As has been the pattern throughout the book of Acts, the purpose of the miraculous deeds are to identify the performer of the deed as the sent ones of Yeshua HaMoshiach himself. The messenger is authenticated so that the message might be believed as authentic and to be trusted.
We mentioned a pastor named John Wember, speaking of the unbilbical Church Growth movement back in the seventies who went through various passages and said what is wrong with the church today is that we don’t believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to heal people and perform miracles. So we need to go back to what the apostles did and have (what he called) “power evangelism.”
The only problem with that is numerous examples in Scripture where miracles were performed, such as the miracles of Jesus, that didn’t convince many people. The ultimate issue is not intellectual; it doesn’t have anything to do with seeing signs and wonders; they are evidence, but they do not overwhelmingly convince people because there were tens of thousands of Jews in Judea at the time of Christ who witnessed those miracles and they just explained them away.
The core issue was that they rejected God, and it didn’t matter how many facts they saw or what miracles they saw; they rejected it. So, the whole idea is that if we had miracles today, as they did in Jesus’ time, people would change. No, they wouldn’t. They didn’t change then, and they will not change now. It is a matter of volition and a person’s desire to know God.
This proconsul had positive volition, and he believed. Notice that that is all he does. It is his response to the teaching of the Lord that generates his belief. The issue we must understand is that it is the content of the Word of God and the teaching and instruction from the Word of God that changes people’s lives under the teaching ministry of God, the Holy Spirit.
Luke presents Sergius Paulus as the first Gentile ruler to believe the gospel. Cyprus was a senatorial island, which means it was Roman-controlled. As a Roman official, Sergius was a Gentile. Unlike Cornelius (10:2), there is no evidence that Sergius attended the temple or was a God-fearer.
Note what was said about Paul by the Lord to Ananias about his purpose for Paul when Ananias was afraid.
Acts 9:15
Acts 9:15
15 But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel.
Having completed their time in Paphos, Paul and his party set sail and came to Perga in Pamphylia, verse 13.
Again, here is a picture. They are now in lower asia minor or what we now consider Turkey.
Acts 13:13
Acts 13:13
13 Now when Paul and his party set sail from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia; and John, departing from them, returned to Jerusalem.
Luke doesn’t seem to make a big deal about what happens here.
Later, we learn that John leaves because he can’t hack it. There is rugged traveling and opposition; it is not easy, and he is too young; he just hasn’t got what it takes to stay with Paul and Barnabas.
Later on, this will cause a split between Paul and Barnabas. When Paul wants to go on his second missionary journey, Barnabas wants to take John Mark with him, and Paul says no, so Barnabas and John Mark go their way, and Paul goes on his second missionary journey.
Later on, we discover that John Mark, when he matured, and Paul became very close, and the apostle Paul depended upon him in 2 Timothy; Paul requested John Mark to bring him some of his possessions.
But at this stage, Paul shows he doesn’t want to put up with somebody who can’t cut it. He is not ready to be patient with some young kid unprepared to take on the rigors of travel.
Acts 13:14
Acts 13:14
14 But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and sat down.
This is a different city in the district of Pisidia up towards the center of Turkey.
They go into the synagogue. This was Paul’s pattern—Romans chapter one: to the Jew first and then to the Greek. Take the gospel to the Jew first.
Romans 1:16
Romans 1:16
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.
Why? Remember, the focal point of Acts from the very beginning is the command to the Jews to repent and to turn back to God, and the times of refreshing would come, as the apostle Peter said in his sermon. There is still that offer of the kingdom going out to the Jews, hoping there would be a turning among the Jewish people.
We will see this again in a few verses
Acts 13:46
Acts 13:46
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
Acts 17:2
Acts 17:2
2 Then Paul, as his custom was, went in to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures,
Acts 18:5-6
Acts 18:5-6
5 When Silas and Timothy had come from Macedonia, Paul was compelled by the Spirit, and testified to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ. 6 But when they opposed him and blasphemed, he shook his garments and said to them, “Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”
Acts 13:15
Acts 13:15
15 And after the reading of the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent to them, saying, “Men and brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say on.”
The word “exhortation” is παράκλησις [PARAKLESIS] and refers to a challenge to the people—“say on.” This was an opportunity given to them, and it was typical that learned Jews came in and were asked to give a message to the congregation.
Acts 13:16-17
Acts 13:16-17
16 Then Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said, “Men of Israel, and you who fear God, listen: 17 The God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land of Egypt, and with an uplifted arm He brought them out of it.
In this sermon, Paul has three points to make.
He brilliantly summarizes several thousand years of Jewish history and six or seven books of the Bible, showing his complete understanding of the Old Testament.
Paul’s first main point is that God sovereignly chose the Jewish patriarchs and made an eternal and unconditional covenant with them, as seen in Genesis 12:1-7; 13:14-17; 15:1-21; 17:1-12. God did these things, exalted the people, and brought them out of slavery.
Acts 13:18
Acts 13:18
18 Now for a time of about forty years He put up with their ways in the wilderness.
He next reminds them that the Exodus generation wasn’t chosen because they were so wonderful. They were grumblers and complainers. They revolted against Moses and God in the wilderness; nevertheless, God continued to work with them.
So we see here that the ultimate hero in the story is “the God of this people Israel,” mentioned in verse 17.
Acts 13:19
Acts 13:19
19 And when He had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, He distributed their land to them by allotment.
Paul synthesizes all of Genesis to Joshua to make the point that God controls Israel’s history.
Acts 13:20
Acts 13:20
20 “After that He gave them judges for about four hundred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet.
—{all of which took} about four hundred and fifty years.”
There is a lot of discussion about the chronology there. The best way to understand this is that he is saying all these historical events took place in a period of about 450 years.
That would include the four centuries when the Israelites were in Egypt. From 1846 BC, when they first went to Egypt with Jacob and Joseph, through the exodus event in 1446. Then add to that forty years in the wilderness, which takes us up to 1406 BC, and seven more years under Joshua’s leadership to conquer the land, which takes us up to 1399 BC—447 years. That is rounded off to 450 years, so he is speaking in terms of generalities up until Samuel.
Acts 13:21
Acts 13:21
21 And afterward they asked for a king; so God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years.
So, he first emphasizes that God entered into a covenant with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, making them a unique people.
No matter how badly they failed, God remained faithful to His promise and covenant.
Once that period of discipline ended in the wilderness, God provided them with a king. That was a lesson in what they didn’t want because Saul was disobedient to God and brought divine judgment on them.
Sometimes, we get the leaders we deserve because God is trying to teach us what we don’t want.
Acts 13:22
Acts 13:22
22 And when He had removed him, He raised up for them David as king, to whom also He gave testimony and said, ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will.’
Did God make a mistake?
Because David indeed sinned.
But when God says that, He is not saying that David is no longer a sinner.
David is a man whose basic volitional orientation is to do what God wants him to do.
Sure, he is going to fail. But can it be said that our prime motivation in life is to do what God wants us to do and serve Him?
We will fail, but is that our primary motivation?
That is what it was with David.
Above all things, he desired to serve God.
God means “A man after His own heart.”
Acts 13:23
Acts 13:23
23 From this man’s seed, according to the promise, God raised up for Israel a Savior—Jesus—
Acts 13:24
Acts 13:24
24 after John had first preached, before His coming, the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel.
Acts 13:25
Acts 13:25
25 And as John was finishing his course, he said, ‘Who do you think I am? I am not He. But behold, there comes One after me, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to loose.’
Here, we see the lead-up to the gospel. Notice how Paul approaches the gospel. Who is his audience? Jews who are knowledgeable of the Old Testament. That is why he can summarize the Old Testament in just a few short sentences. The audience knows all the details and knows all the facts. All Paul is doing is picking the high points so that he can weave them together to make his main point.
When we get to chapter fourteen, we see another approach in the presentation of the gospel. Paul has a completely different audience, one with no Bible background whatsoever.
Acts 13:26-31
Acts 13:26-31
26 “Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent. 27 For those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they did not know Him, nor even the voices of the Prophets which are read every Sabbath, have fulfilled them in condemning Him. 28 And though they found no cause for death in Him, they asked Pilate that He should be put to death. 29 Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb. 30 But God raised Him from the dead. 31 He was seen for many days by those who came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses to the people.
Acts 13:32-35
Acts 13:32-35
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. 33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’ 34 And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus: ‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’ 35 Therefore He also says in another Psalm: ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.’
Okay, Acts, chapter 13. Focus on these Messianic prophecies and promises in the Old Testament. This is important to get under our belt. We need to understand a few key passages in the Old Testament: Isaiah 53, and two psalms that are really important for Messianic prophecies that are the most frequently cited. They are Psalm 2 and Psalm 110. In the book of Hebrews, the writer weaves Psalm 110 and Psalm 2:7. These are fundamental verses for grasping many different features related to the Messianic kingship or the divine kingship of the Messiah and the deity of Christ. We need to look at those.
Psalm 2:7 is quoted and cited here in Acts 13:33. These verses aren’t easy to deal with because our English translations are not the best of the Hebrew text. Not only do we have that problem, but the Hebrew text has also been altered by virtue of Masoretic interference. The inspired original Hebrews were written in consonants, without vowels. But when the Masoretes, who were scribes in the early church age period and were responsible for copying and preserving the text and organizing and maintaining the text of the Hebrew scriptures as Christianity made greater and greater inroads into the Jewish community, the rabbis had a terrible time trying to protect their fortress and to keep Christians from using Hebrew scriptures to act as if they actually predicted Jesus. There were several places where they messed around with the words by changing the vowel points. This is what happened in the early part of the Christian era in order to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew words, the Masoretes developed a system of putting points, which were sometimes a single dot, three dots, or two dots, or a vertical or horizontal line under a letter and those stood for vowels, and you could change a word simply by changing the vowel points that were under the word.
It’s just like in English. If you take the word “here” and the word “hear” and you just write the consonants, they both are spelled identically as “hr”. But if you originally have the vowels as “here” and you change them to “hear”, you’ve changed the meaning of the word. “Hear” is completely different from the word “here,” so there are places in Messianic prophecies where keywords were tampered with by changing the vowel points to change the meaning of the word. We’ll see in Psalm 110:3 that it completely changes the meaning of the verse. In fact, it basically makes that verse untranslatable. It just doesn’t make sense. You can translate it, but it makes no sense in context. It’s just nonsense. Many Christian scholars believe this was an intentional effort on the part of the Masoretes to change the meaning of the text so it would not have an obvious Messianic reference and be related to a Messianic prophecy.
We will have to deal with some of those issues to understand these things. That might mean writing little notes down in the margin of your Bible so you can relate to those things.
As we look at the context, what Paul is saying to the synagogue in Acts 13 has as a background the Abrahamic Covenant. In the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis 12: 1-13, God promised Abraham a specific piece of real estate: “This land I will give to you and your generations in perpetuity.” He promised that there would be a seed that he would give Abraham descendants, and through his seed, all nations would be blessed. So, he promises a third thing: a worldwide blessing.
Genesis 12:1-13
Genesis 12:1-13
1 Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family And from your father’s house, To a land that I will show you. 2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 4 So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. 6 Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh. And the Canaanites were then in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. 9 So Abram journeyed, going on still toward the South. 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to dwell there, for the famine was severe in the land. 11 And it came to pass, when he was close to entering Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, “Indeed I know that you are a woman of beautiful countenance. 12 Therefore it will happen, when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, ‘This is his wife’; and they will kill me, but they will let you live. 13 Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that I may live because of you.”
The three components of the Abrahamic covenant are land, seed, and blessing. Later, all three aspects of the Abrahamic covenant are expanded in their independent covenants.
The land covenant is expanded in Deuteronomy 30, which begins in that first verse, talking about a covenant different from the one given at Mount Horeb, which is another name given for Mount Sinai. So, if it’s not the one given at Mount Horeb, which would be the Mosaic covenant, it’s a different covenant. This is a covenant related to God’s promise that Israel would eternally possess the land. Now, they wouldn’t enjoy possession unless they were rightly related to God spiritually, but the ownership of the land, the title of the land, was theirs forever. If they were disobedient, God would remove them from the land. In the Old Testament, we have an example of this, where God first brought in the Assyrians in 722 B.C. to remove the northern kingdom of Israel. Then, in 586 B.C., the southern kingdom of Judah was defeated by the Babylonians, and most, but not all, of the Jews were deported to other nations and removed from their historic homeland. But they never lost the title to the land. The Assyrians followed their policy of repopulating the land by redistributing other defeated populations into areas they conquered. that way, they dispersed these ethnic groups so they couldn’t join together in a revolt, and so they brought in a lot of ethnic groups from around the Empire and repopulated the area of the northern kingdom.
But there were still members of those northern kingdoms ten tribes in the area. They had fled south to Judea during the invasion by the Assyrians, so you didn’t lose the ten tribes. That’s one of those historic myths that they’re the lost ten tribes. Maybe some historian lost them because he didn’t believe in the Bible, but they weren’t lost. God knew where they were, but the Bible clearly states that they moved south when they saw the Assyrians coming. They evacuated their homes, and they moved south, and therefore, all those tribes had remnant groups that continued in the land. Then, in 586 B.C., they were removed. Now, for seventy years, they were out of the land, but they still owned it. That’s demonstrated historically because God brought them back to the land, and the people that had come in during the intervening period had no rights to the land.
Now, that seventy-year period set a historic precedent for a second time when the Jewish people would be out of the land. It wasn’t seventy years this time. It’s almost two thousand years from A.D. 70 until the early part of the twentieth century. If the Jewish people still owned the land and still had a right of return in 538 B.C., they still have the right of return in 1948 A.D.. It doesn’t matter what the U.N. says, it doesn’t matter what the European Union says, it doesn’t matter what any Arab leader says, the only people who have the title deed to that piece of real estate are the people who God says have the title to it, which is the Jewish people.
That’s the only piece of real estate in the world where God has guaranteed a title deed. Americans don’t have a right to our land. The British don’t have a Divine right to their land. The Germans don’t have a Divine right to their land. The Russians don’t have a Divine right to their land. Neither the Japanese, nor the Chinese … nor anybody else has a Divine right to their piece of real estate. There’s only one piece of real estate on the whole planet that God has given a Divine contract to and has sworn to, and as a matter of fact, that’s that piece of real estate between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean that God has given to the Jewish people. That’s the land covenant.
The second covenant promised an eternal descendant to David who would sit on his throne forever and ever. The eternal aspect of that indicated that whoever fulfilled that would have eternality as part of their character, which would indicate and hint at a deity that would be a Divine king. That’s important for understanding our passage. And then, a promise of a new nature came when the New covenant was put into effect. The New Covenant is said to be between God and Judah and Israel. It’s never said to be with the church. When God said when He brought that into effect there would be a new heart among all the Jewish people. This doesn’t occur until the Messianic king comes to establish His kingdom. When you look at all the different passages related to the New Covenant, the ideas are present in a number of other passages; they all come into existence at the time when the king takes His throne when He is crowned a king, and He takes His place upon the throne of David.
Also important is this coronation imagery, the crowning of the king and establishing Him upon the throne, which are inherent to the passage that Paul uses in Psalm 2.
So we have to understand that the Abrahamic covenant is a backdrop to what Paul says in Acts 13.
The Davidic covenant is also a backdrop. There are three passages on the Davidic Covenant 2 Samuel 7: 12-16 is the primary passage.
2 Samuel 7:12-16
2 Samuel 7:12-16
12 “When your days are fulfilled and you rest with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be his Father, and he shall be My son. If he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men. 15 But My mercy shall not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I removed from before you. 16 And your house and your kingdom shall be established forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
Psalm 89 is a meditation upon the Abrahamic covenant. It’s 54 verses long, divided into three sections. The second part (vv. 19–37) is a review of the Davidic covenant, how God chose and established David as his anointed, and what promises God made to him in the covenant.
Psalm 89:19-37
Psalm 89:19-37
19 Then You spoke in a vision to Your holy one, And said: “I have given help to one who is mighty; I have exalted one chosen from the people. 20 I have found My servant David; With My holy oil I have anointed him, 21 With whom My hand shall be established; Also My arm shall strengthen him. 22 The enemy shall not outwit him, Nor the son of wickedness afflict him. 23 I will beat down his foes before his face, And plague those who hate him. 24 “But My faithfulness and My mercy shall be with him, And in My name his horn shall be exalted. 25 Also I will set his hand over the sea, And his right hand over the rivers. 26 He shall cry to Me, ‘You are my Father, My God, and the rock of my salvation.’ 27 Also I will make him My firstborn, The highest of the kings of the earth. 28 My mercy I will keep for him forever, And My covenant shall stand firm with him. 29 His seed also I will make to endure forever, And his throne as the days of heaven. 30 “If his sons forsake My law And do not walk in My judgments, 31 If they break My statutes And do not keep My commandments, 32 Then I will punish their transgression with the rod, And their iniquity with stripes. 33 Nevertheless My lovingkindness I will not utterly take from him, Nor allow My faithfulness to fail. 34 My covenant I will not break, Nor alter the word that has gone out of My lips. 35 Once I have sworn by My holiness; I will not lie to David: 36 His seed shall endure forever, And his throne as the sun before Me; 37 It shall be established forever like the moon, Even like the faithful witness in the sky.” Selah
1 Chronicles 17:11-14
1 Chronicles 17:11-14
11 And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled, when you must go to be with your fathers, that I will set up your seed after you, who will be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. 12 He shall build Me a house, and I will establish his throne forever. 13 I will be his Father, and he shall be My son; and I will not take My mercy away from him, as I took it from him who was before you. 14 And I will establish him in My house and in My kingdom forever; and his throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
In Acts 13:32, Paul says,
Acts 13:32
Acts 13:32
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers.
which is represented by one word in the Greek EUANGELIZO [εὐαγγελίζω], which is a first-person plural which is where you get the ‘we’ and ANGELIZO [εὐαγγελίζω] is to announce good news, to announce good tidings, to announce good information bringing you a great message. Now, that is defined in the next phrase as the promise. What is the good information? There is an end dash between “tidings” and “that”. Sometimes editors will use an end dash; sometimes they’ll use a colon, which indicates that the following phrase, which begins with “that,” explains the content of the good message, the good news. The good news is about the promise that was made to the fathers.
In America, if you hear “the fathers,” you may think of the Founding Fathers in 1776. But if you’re Jewish, sitting in a synagogue in the 1st century, and you hear the reference to the fathers, you’re going to think of the fathers of the nation of Israel, the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The emphasis is on the male line because it is the male line that will end with the male descendant, who is the heir of David, the king, and the Messiah.
Sometimes, folks today get upset because the women are left out. They think God is a misogynist. Two options exist here. Either God is a misogynist, in which case He is a sinner and all not right, and God is really a nasty, evil God, OR the people have their mentality all twisted out of shape, and they’re nasty and evil because they have distorted the role of women and men. The reality is that people, because of sin, have their sense of priorities and sense of identity all corrupted because of sin. They’re the ones that are out of order. So, the promise was made to the fathers. This is a statement that is very common to the Apostle Paul.
We need to insert some information from Romans, chapter 4. Just a tour.
Romans 4:13
Romans 4:13
13 For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.
Notice in Romans 4:13 that we have use of the word “promise,” “For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the word was not through the Law..” Paul is emphasizing there that receiving the promise which had to do with the promise God made to Abraham through the Abrahamic covenant related to the Israelites and to justification and future salvation. The realization of that promise was not only on the basis of human obedience through the Law but to the righteousness of faith. That is simply trusting and believing in God that He would give it.
This is the basis in verse 9, where Paul says,
Romans 4:8-9
Romans 4:8-9
8 Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.” 9 Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.
In other words, you can’t be righteous enough to get the promise’s blessing but receive it when you trust in Christ as Savior. So, the promise to be heir of the world, which has to do with salvation, was not to Abraham or to his seed through the Law. That’s the point. The promise wasn’t to be realized through the Law but through the righteousness that comes from faith.
In verse 14, Paul went on to say,
Romans 4:14
Romans 4:14
14 For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect,
It’s either faith or works, as far as Paul is concerned and that’s true in the Old Testament. He’s going to give a classic example here. In verse 15, he says,
“Because the Law brings about wrath [condemnation] for where there is no law, there is no violation.”
Romans 4:16
Romans 4:16
16 Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all
Romans 4:18-21
Romans 4:18-21
18 who, contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, “So shall your descendants be.” 19 And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. 20 He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, 21 and being fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform.
This is where Abraham mixes his faith with the promise of God, and realizing it’s of God’s grace that he’s going to receive the promise. Now that’s Romans 4.
He says the same things in Galatians 3. There are three representative verses here but the passage is much broader than these. Let’s get the context starting in verse 13,
Galatians 3:13
Galatians 3:13
13 Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”),
Now the curse of the Law was that unless you were completely clean you couldn’t get into the presence of God and no animal sacrifice could do that.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law having become a curse for us—for it is written, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
Now, what’s interesting is that if you do a word study on the word ἐπαγγελία—EPANGELIA, which is the word translated promise. You run that in the New Testament, that word promise relates to two things, basically. One is the promise that Jesus made in Acts 1 of the coming of the Holy Spirit, which occurs in Acts 2. So that’s one promise referred to, but that’s a New Testament promise. The other use of the word promise is what we see in Romans 4, Galatians 3, and Ephesians 2, which relates to the promise to Abraham. So those are the two big promises you have in the Bible: the promise to Abraham in the Old Testament and the promise of the Holy Spirit coming upon believers in the New Testament.
So in Galatians 3:16, Paul writes,
Galatians 3:16
Galatians 3:16
“Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.”
16 Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ.
Now notice he says the text in the Old Testament does not say to “seeds” [plural, as of many}. This is one reason we believe in verbal inspiration; each word, whether it’s singular or plural, is significant because Paul looks back and says it doesn’t say “seeds” [plural}. You can’t mess around just because you don’t like the case, the number, or something else grammatically about the word. Every word is what it is because that’s what the Holy Spirit intended. It doesn’t say “seeds as of many” but “as of one” and “to your seed which is Christ.” So, Christ is the one who becomes the effective agent of bringing about the promise of the blessing. He goes on to say in verse 17,
Galatians 3:17
Galatians 3:17
17 And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.
So, if the promise was made to Abraham based on faith, that’s 430 years before the Law, so the Law is not significant for realizing the blessing because the Law is against grace. So, the Law is out; it’s not crucial for salvation. The Abrahamic covenant doesn’t have its fulfillment under the Law but in the coming of Christ. Then he says in verse 18,
Galatians 3:18
Galatians 3:18
18 For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.
That’s his logic. It’s grace, grace, grace. God freely gives us based upon His character, who Jesus Christ is, and what He did upon the cross. That’s the key, remembering that. Okay, so Galatians 3 reiterates his emphasis on the promise.
Now Ephesians:
Ephesians 2:12
Ephesians 2:12
12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
Covenants of promise: the Abrahamic covenant, the Land covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the New covenant, those covenants, according to Romans 9, belong to the Jewish people forever and ever and ever. They are eternal covenants, so the Gentiles are considered strangers because they weren’t part of the covenant contract. They’re not party of the first part, which was God, or party of the second part, which was Israel.
Ephesians 2:13 continues,
Ephesians 2:13 continues,
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
So, we become partakers of the promises of Abraham by virtue of our position in Christ. Okay, that’s why Paul emphasizes this thing again and again and again. When we’re saved, we’re identified with Christ, we’re made part of His body, and by virtue of that, we become heirs of the promise.
End of 3/23/2025
End of 3/23/2025
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Sunday, March 30, 2025
REVIEW
REVIEW
We are working through Paul’s first missionary journey having been sent out through the agency of God the Holy Spirit from the very important church at Antioch.
We are in Acts, chapter 13, where we are studying Paul’s message to the synagogue in Pisidian, Antioch. It was in that context that we see Paul, for the first time, truly proclaim the gospel. He is proclaiming the gospel to this synagogue, and he approaches it in a way that is quite different from the way he will approach it later, in the next chapter, where he addresses a Gentile congregation.
He knows that the Gentiles have no frame of reference in terms of who Jesus is, in terms of who God is. They don’t really understand what sin is, and they don’t comprehend the foundational doctrines of the Old Testament.
But a Jewish audience in the first century would understand, having a background in the Torah. He is going to present the case that Jesus Christ has solved the problem of sin as predicted in the Old Testament and has come to give righteousness to His people so that they might be justified. This theme of predicted provision for justification runs all the way through the Old Testament.
In Acts 13:32, Paul says,
Acts 13:32
Acts 13:32
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers.
Now, what’s interesting is that if you do a word study on the word ἐπαγγελία—EPANGELIA, which is the word translated promise. The word means an announcement. The announcement is a declaration to do something with implication of obligation to carry out what is stated: this is a promise or pledge. When we follow up on what that promise is, that word promise relates to two things, basically.
One is the promise that Jesus made in Acts 1 of the coming of the Holy Spirit, which occurs in Acts 2.
4 And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; 5 for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
So that’s one promise referred to, but that’s a New Testament promise. The other use of the word promise is what we see in Romans 4, Galatians 3, and Ephesians 2, which relates to the promise to Abraham. So those are the two big promises you have in the Bible: the promise to Abraham in the Old Testament and the promise of the Holy Spirit coming upon believers in the New Testament.
One other verse is Exodus 12:25, which is the first use of the word promise in the Old Testament.
Exodus 12:25
Exodus 12:25
25 It will come to pass when you come to the land which the Lord will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep this service.
Who did He promise it to? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Abrahamic covenant,
“then you will keep this service.”
So contextually, when doing a word study on this word “promise” as it is used in Romans 4, Galatians 3, Ephesians 2 and 3, it relates to that Abrahamic covenant promise. This is what Paul is bringing out for us in Acts 13. He’s talking to a Jewish audience that is extremely familiar with the contents of the Old Testament. Now, most of the time when you and I are talking to anyone, especially of a Jewish background, they’re as ignorant of the Old Testament as Gentiles are unless they happen to come out of some Orthodox background or training where they’ve been taught more. They’re just like a blank slate, as it were. What Paul does in Acts 13 is to start weaving these Old Testament predictions together for us. He says there’s been the Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic covenant.
Then he said in verse 33,
Acts 13:33
Acts 13:33
33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’
Who are their children? To whom does this refer? That refers to the descendants of the fathers, so this is addressed to Jews. He’s addressing a Jewish audience and trying to connect the dots to show that Jesus fulfills these promises. He’s using the basic word group here from pleroo [πληροω], which is used repeatedly to indicate scriptural fulfillment. He uses a perfect tense verse. Now, that’s important because it shows that he’s referencing an action completed in the past with the results that continue. So God fulfilled, at some point in the past, completely fulfilled this with reference to us, their children, “in that He raised up Jesus..” He uses the standard word for resurrection ANISTEMI [ἀνίστημι]. So now he’s making his point. He’s changed from the promise to the confirmation of the promise. What confirms the promise? It’s the resurrection. See, the resurrection is important, not in reference to the work of salvation but in terms of the application and implication of salvation to people.
So now he says by connecting it to another level that this resurrection, showing that it was predicted in the Old Testament, he goes to Psalm 2. He quotes Psalm 2:7 which reads,
Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7
7 “I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.
You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.” The word translated into the Greek of the Septuagint sometimes gets a little technical
Sometimes, people have no idea the Bible wasn’t originally written in English. “If the King James was good enough for Jesus its good enough for me! Now, we laugh about things like that, but the sad thing is these people make up the majority of evangelical Christians. It’s sad because we have pastors who don’t know much better, and they can’t teach them and train them. We need to be in prayer that God will raise young men who have a passion for knowing the Word of God, get off their rear end, go to seminary, get training to fill pulpits and teach people.
There are a lot of people, I think, who are hungry. It’s just that they’ve been starved to death by ignorant shepherds and ignorant pastors. We need to pray that we will have a new generation of young men who will have the spiritual courage to get training and to trust the Lord for their life and not be so concerned about the physical and logistical sustenance for themselves and their families but would go to seminary and get trained. It’s just really sad. The average evangelical today is just not very bright, and they make decisions based on this abysmal ignorance. I heard it said about the Baptists: They’re wonderful people, but their theology is a mile wide and an inch deep, and I think they think it’s an inch wide and a mile deep.” That’s our problem. People think they know the Bible, and they’re ignorant, and they have no humility. That is why the evangelical church in America is failing, and that is why we’re coming under judgment in time from God because people don’t want to know the truth. So, we have all kinds of problems.
This verse comes from the Old Testament, “You are My Son. Today, I have begotten You.” When you read that in English, a couple of questions should occur. When is today? When is this said? When is this spoken? When is today mentioned in the verse? And what does it mean to say, “I have begotten You.” If you look at the Greek, it is a perfect active indicative of γεννάω GENNAO which refers to a completed past action. So, when this is spoken, it would be understood as “today I have already begotten you.” So, it’s not talking about the time the begetting takes place. But this word is used in another important Old Testament psalm, and we have to see the connection between the two, and that’s the one we mentioned earlier, Psalm 110:3. So let’s turn there because we have to connect some of these dots.
We’ve done that in some other ways, in past series especially when I talked about the whole issue of the Ascension of Christ to the right hand of the Father and the significance of that ascension to our present power and position in Christ. That is something, if you’ve never studied that, it’s heavy, but you need to master that if you want to get out of diapers.
Psalm 110:1 is a verse that is quoted in the New Testament probably more than any other Old Testament passage.
It’s quoted in Matthew 22:44 and in the parallel passages in the Gospels. It’s quoted in all three of the synoptics.
t’s quoted in Acts 2 in Peter’s sermon.
It’s quoted in 1 Corinthians 15:25.
It’s quoted in Hebrews 1:13
and 1 Peter 3:22
and it’s quoted here in Acts 13
The last phrase here relates to our quote in Acts 13.
So in Psalm 110:1,
Psalm 110:1
Psalm 110:1
1 The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
Now, who is the first Lord? If you look at your English text, the first Lord is in the upper case. That is always a translation of the sacred Tetragrammaton, the proper name of God, Yahweh. It’s wrongly translated as Jehovah. Jehovah is really a compound word made up of the four consonants of the sacred Tetragrammaton, the holy name of God, and then, because the Jews didn’t want to pronounce that, in antiquity, they would pronounce Adonai. They put under the consonants of Yahweh the Hebrew vowels of Adonai, which put together gave them Yehovah. They are not real words. They wrote the vowels there to remind people to say Adonai and not to read the word out.
Today, in modern times, you will find Jews using a circumlocution yaschem, which means the name, so when they see the name of God there, they read yaschem and refer to God as “the name”. So we have the first Lord Yahweh, and the second Lord is the word Adonai, so here you have two divine beings discussing something. The first one says to the second one, “Sit at My right hand.” Now, some people say the Jews were monotheists, but the monotheism of the Old Testament wasn’t a singular monotheism. That came later in post-second temple rabbinical Judaism. It wasn’t there to begin with. It’s not here. You have two divine beings who are in unity, so the first one says to the second one, who is the Messiah, “Sit at My right hand until I make your enemies Your footstool.”
This occurs immediately after the ascension of Christ. God the Father, Yahweh, tells God the Son to sit and wait. We’re going to wait out a period of time, and that’s the church age, and when that comes to completion, there will be a judgment on the earth like nothing there has ever been. That’s what we call the tribulation or Daniel’s seventieth week when that ends, based on Daniel, chapter 7. That’s when the kingdom is going to be given. That is when the second one will receive His kingdom. His enemies will be made His footstool at the Battle of Armageddon. The point I want to remind you of is this huge battle occurs just before the coronation and installation of the king.
The second verse says,
Psalm 110:2
Psalm 110:2
2 The Lord shall send the rod of Your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of Your enemies!
In the second verse, the rule is represented as being established through harsh means and strong discipline, “The rod of your strength,” and it is ruling in the midst of Your enemies. The Messiah will establish His kingdom in the midst of hostility. He will put down the revolt of the kings of the earth.
Now our critical verse.
Psalm 110:3
Psalm 110:3
3 Your people shall be volunteers In the day of Your power; In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, You have the dew of Your youth.
YLDTK
Now, what can this mean: “From the womb of the dawn, you have the dew of your youth.”
No idea what that means. It doesn’t even make sense in English.
Do you see anything about birth here? Nothing. Okay.
YaLDuTeyKa = the dew of your youth
YeLiDTiKa = to give birth
The word on the top is YaLDuTeyKa. Remember in Hebrew you only have consonants in the original text. What I did was capitalize the consonants. So what you had was YLDTK. Now if you look at the second word, you have the same consonants but the first word has different vowels from the second one. They are different words. They have the same consonants and different vowels, which make them different words. The first word represents the vowels the Masoretes inserted when they were putting together the text in the 7th, 8th, 9th century A.D. The second lower word is translated as “to give birth” which gives an entirely different meaning to the verse.
So if you look at it that way, Psalm 110 becomes translated, something like the Septuagint translation. The second reading is how the rabbis translated the Septuagint into Greek in the 2nd century before Christ. So, how they translated it into Greek indicates that they saw the second reading, not the first one. So we have a historical witness from the time of Christ and before that read and translated this verse in a completely different way from the way the 8th and 9th century A.D translates it. Now, why did they change the translation later on? Because they wanted to stifle the influence of Christians who claimed this was Messianic prophecy.
The Septuagint is translated,
“In majestic holiness from the womb of the dawn, I have begotten You.”
Think about that. Quite a different sentence but it makes a lot more sense. The Lord [God the Father] said to My Lord [The Messiah], “Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool. The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, Rule in the midst of Your enemies. Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power, in Holy array, from the womb of the dawn, Your youth are to You as the dew.” What does the term “womb of the dawn” mean? It means from eternity past, from the beginning of the beginning. That’s the imagery of the dawn. So the Messiah King, the Divine King, is stated to be begotten from the womb of the dawn. Now, this relates back also to Numbers 24: 17, which talks about there will be a star coming forth from Jacob, from the tribe of Jacob.
Numbers 24:17
Numbers 24:17
17 “I see Him, but not now; I behold Him, but not near; A Star shall come out of Jacob; A Scepter shall rise out of Israel, And batter the brow of Moab, And destroy all the sons of tumult.
That is this birth relationship there. All I want to show here is the connection to this word begotten from yalad, showing that Psalm 110 presents the Messianic king as a divine king seated at the right hand of God the Father awaiting a future victory.
We have the ascension of Christ, who goes up through the first and second heavens to the third heaven, and there he sits in a position of passivity at the right hand of God the Father. This is not His own throne. He has not been enthroned yet. He is sitting there until something. He’s waiting for something. Until God, the Father will defeat His enemies and give Him the kingdom. That’s yet future from now. It hasn’t happened now. That’s the backdrop for understanding Psalm 2.
So hold your place here and let’s go to Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is one of the greatest Messianic psalms in the Old Testament. It’s quoted several times in the New Testament.
Psalm 2:1-3
Psalm 2:1-3
1 Why do the nations rage, And the people plot a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, 3 “Let us break Their bonds in pieces And cast away Their cords from us.”
It starts off with a question, focusing on the fact there is a military conflict taking place on the earth, the nations are raging, and the kings are gathering for battle against the Lord’s anointed. Now, the Lord is mentioned in verse 2 as an upper-case Lord. That refers to Yahweh and against his Mashiach, His Messiah.
The kings of the earth are saying what’s reported in verse 3. “Let us tear their fetters apart..” In other words, they want to throw off all of this God Stuff. They think, “God just wants to keep us from having fun. He doesn’t want to let us run our lives the way we want to; He doesn’t want us to run the kingdoms on the earth the way we want to. You know, God doesn’t believe in global warming, and we think global warming is right, so we’ve got to get rid of God. God doesn’t like gay marriage, so we have to get rid of God because He won’t let us have gay marriage. God is for the ownership of private property. We’re for socialism, so we’ve got to get rid of God because God won’t let the kings have the money. He wants the people to have the money. God is in favor of self-defense, so He wants people to have weapons to defend themselves, and the government says it wants to be the real messiah who protects the people. The kings want to throw off divine mandates and divine government. What their representatives are saying is “Let us tear their [God’s} fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!”
Then there’s a pause. Verse 4 says,
Psalm 2:4
Psalm 2:4
4 He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; The Lord shall hold them in derision.
“He who sits in the Heavens, laughs.”
That’s God. He’s laughing at these puny little politicians. He’s laughing at the Democrats. He’s laughing at the Republicans and at all the Christian socialists. He’s saying, “Christian socialists? What an oxymoron.” Christian socialism is neither Christian nor socialism. It’s just an abortion of politics but that’s what runs and has destroyed Europe. So God is laughing at all these things. He’s laughing at the Marxists and the Stalinists and the “Chicoms” and everybody else.
“The Lord scoffs at them [holds them in derision}.”
God doesn’t respect diversity. God hates diversity because diversity is human beings, creatures asserting themselves against God. He hates that so He laughs at them. God has no respect for rebellious creation.
Psalm 2:5
Psalm 2:5
5 Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, And distress them in His deep displeasure:
In verse 6 God speaks,
Psalm 2:6
Psalm 2:6
6 “Yet I have set My King On My holy hill of Zion.”
Now, has God set His king on Zion yet? No, it didn’t happen at the First Advent. It’s not happening now. It’s in the future. So that tells us the setting of this psalm is sometime in the future when the world’s kings are engaged in a massive military campaign against God. This same situation we have referenced in Psalm 110:2.
Now we come to our verse, Psalm 2:7 where Messiah speaks,
Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7
7 “I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.
So sometime in the future God, the Son, is going to take charge and when He is crowned king and takes the throne, He will remind the world of the decree that God made with reference to Him from eternity past.
Verse 7, “I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to Me, You are my Son. Today I have begotten You.”
Now, when did this begetting take place? In eternity past. But today is referencing the declaration of His begottenness.
“I will declare the decree.”
This is the Messiah talking,
“the Lord has said to Me. You are my Son. Today I have begotten You.”
We have to look at the verb begotten. What that’s telling us is something very significant. Once again, we have to look at it and recognize that when you look at the vowels that are put in there, although all the grammar and the lexicons say this should be in what is called the qal stem, which is the basic usage stem in Hebrew, it could easily also be understood as a hiphel and the hiphel is the causative stem. Either way, both stems, which is what you need to take away from this; both stems are used to indicate a declaration of something. It’s not saying today I have begotten you, but that today I declare you are the begotten one. That’s an important difference. It’s not talking about birth. Begotten is not a term for birth pangs. It’s a term for indicating a distinct relationship of nature. It may involve being born, but it focuses on a son having the exact nature as the father. Here, we see that the Son has the same eternal divine nature. The One begotten has the exact eternal divine nature as the one making the declaration. So, the Father/Son language here should be understood as figurative, not literal.
This is unlike Mormonism, which says that God [Elohim] came down and had sex. That’s not what this is talking about. This is talking about God, the Father, who represents His relationship to the second person of the trinity as one of a relationship of essence. The pagan religions all had the gods having sex with humans or one another, but never in Hebrew. They wouldn’t stand for that. That was blasphemy, so the term “you are my son” indicates that the son’s nature is the same as that of the father. What we have in this passage is an implied comparison or metaphor between the coronation of the king where the crowning of the king at the beginning of His reign is being used as analogous to birth as the beginning of life. So this is the beginning of the reign of the king.
The declaration is a declaration related to the beginning of the Messiah’s reign on the earth. This is quoted in the same way as Hebrews 1, which has the same meaning. The verb ‘begotten’ is also used in John1:18,
John 1:18
John 1:18
18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.
John 3:16
John 3:16
16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
Only with “begotten” indicates a unique class of the word, that this is a uniquely generated person, not born but generated. That is the exact language used in the Nicene Creed to emphasize that Jesus was begotten and not made. Begotten does not mean created; it doesn’t mean made; it doesn’t mean birth; it means generated. An eternal generation is the way the ancient church fathers clarified this. This is a declaration that is made with reference to the beginning of the Messiah’s reign on the earth.
That gives us the core meaning Paul is referencing in Acts 13. Because you’re not Jewish and I’m not Jewish, we don’t have a lot of in-depth facility with the Old Testament theology on these passages. We have to spend a lot of time just explaining this quote that Paul has from Psalm 2:7 and Acts 13:33 so that the significance of this verse makes some sense for us because he starts off first of all in verse 32 that what he’s proclaiming is a fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise. Yet in verse 33 he’s going to connect this to David and to the Davidic king Messiah and the Messianic rule of Psalm 2:7. Then when we get to verse 34, he’s going to connect that to the resurrection in Isaiah 53
Paul’s Gospel Message to Jews Revealed in the Davidic Covenant Acts 13:13-39
Paul’s Gospel Message to Jews Revealed in the Davidic Covenant Acts 13:13-39
It’s very instructive to be able to trace this theme related to tsaddiyq righteousness in the Old Testament. We saw in our previously that Paul begins by saying, “We declare to you glad tidings..”
We could translate it as “We proclaim to you the good news” or “We proclaim to you the gospel.” Gospel means good news. It’s derived from the Greek word EUANGELIZO [e] uaggelizw], which is where we get our word “evangelism.” Paul is doing evangelism here. If we want to learn how to do evangelism, one way to do this is to examine the content of these messages.
We have noted that there are two words that are used in the New Testament for preaching or proclaiming the gospel.
One is euaggelizo [e)uaggelizw], which means to announce good news. If you break it down etymologically, the EU at the beginning is a prefix where ‘u’ is usually pronounced like a ‘v’. It indicates something good. If you stick it at the beginning of a word, you’re saying you’re doing something positive, something good. We see it in an English word: someone gives a well-crafted statement called a eulogy, which conveys a positive message about the person. It’s the same kind of thing. Angelos [a)ggeloj] is the word for messenger, and anggelizo [a)ggelizw] is the verb for making an announcement. When we add the EU for a prefix, it announces good things. It’s announcing the gospel or good news. So, he’s declaring this good news as something that had been announced previously and related to the promise made to the Fathers. That’s a reference referring to the patriarchs of Judaism.
The Bible often relates it to the patriarchs because the emphasis from Adam onward in Scripture is on the male as the head of the home, and the seed terminology emphasized from the very beginning of Genesis 3:15 indicates that the seed was to pass through a male line. It’s not a matter of prejudice. God’s not putting down women. Modern women who feel slighted by this are likely reflecting that they have a limited understanding of the themes of Scripture and why these themes are present. It is tracing that lineage down to the Messiah, who would be a man.
Acts 13:33, Paul says
Acts 13:33
33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’
Even in English, you can pick up that he’s talking about raising up Jesus. It discusses the resurrection and includes the Ascension, where Christ is raised, as well as the fact that He’s the uniquely begotten Son of the Father. He’s the Son of God, indicating He has full deity, identical to the Father. He’s raised up, and Paul’s going to use this raising up terminology in relation to what is said about David being raised up, making that connection there, showing that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant.
Psalm 110 is a Messianic psalm closely connected in its message to Psalm 2. In both psalms, there’s the representation of the Messiah, who is in a place where He is waiting to be given the Kingdom. This is the picture we have here. It’s filled out in Daniel, chapter 7, where the Messiah is referred to as the Son of Man. He is waiting for the Ancient Days [God, the Father] to give Him the kingdom. When the Ancient of Days gives the Messiah, the Son of Man, the Kingdom, that’s when He comes and defeats the armies of man. It’s something predicted for a future time when there will be a massive military conflict between the Son of Man, who is the Messiah, who will come to earth and defeat the armies of man.
There is a post-millennial heresy that developed out of the charismatic movement in the 1940s, and it’s the idea that the church will bring in the Kingdom. This development emerged from the healing movements of the 1940s and 1950s, where interpreters reinterpreted army and battle metaphors as a battle between the church and pagans in the world today. Through allegorization, they took various passages, such as the army in the book of Joel. Sometimes, it is referred to as Joel’s army, and then they would engage in what we call Rorschach exegesis. You know the Rorschach test consists of ink blots, and you’re asked to describe what you see in each one. Whatever comes to your mind, that’s what you say. Something looks familiar here and sounds like something over there, so they combine them. And that’s a lot of the kind of thing they had going on. That’s one of the verses they would cite in support of their view in Psalm 110. The idea of this battle that’s coming forth,
Psalm 110:2
Psalm 110:2
2 The Lord shall send the rod of Your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of Your enemies!
So that’s the call: they believed, for volunteering for this militant army of Joel.
This is not what the text is talking about. It’s talking about the fact that when you put it together contextually with other passages that talk about the same situation that the Lord, one Divine Person, says to “My Lord”, the only other Lord that would be superior to David would be another divine person,
Psalm 110:1
Psalm 110:1
1 The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
So, the position of the second Lord is one of passivity, not militancy, during the time preceding His being given the Kingdom. The Kingdom comes only when it’s given to Him, not through the gradual process that occurs in post-millennialism.
Now these post-millennial dominion theologians. They were into all of this Lord’s army and “naming and claiming” all of this stuff for the Lord, and it’s just the nastiest, gnarliest pit of bad theology you can imagine. This is now happening today again with a Church just south of us down in Redding, called the Bethel Church under the leading of Bill Johnson. a prominent hub for teachings that emphasize cultural transformation, revival, and supernatural ministry. The church is also closely linked to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, which shares similar theological emphases.
The “Seven Mountains” concept refers to seven key spheres or areas of influence in society that believers are encouraged to impact for cultural transformation. It is often associated with dominion theology and the Seven Mountains Mandate. Here are the seven “mountains”:
1. Religion: Spiritual institutions and belief systems.
2. Family: The structure and values within households and relationships.
3. Education: Schools, universities, and the dissemination of knowledge.
4. Government: Political systems, laws, and governance.
5. Media: Communication platforms that shape public opinion and deliver information.
6. Arts & Entertainment: Cultural expression through creativity, including films, music, and sports.
7. Business: Commerce, economics, and the marketplace.
Advocates believe that influencing these spheres can help advance God’s kingdom on earth. This teaching is often tied to movements like the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Would you like to explore its history or critiques?
That’s what this fringe element wants to do. There’s a lot more that goes along with this. One of the major players in this was a man named C. Peter Wagner. Peter Wagner was considered one of the foremost spokesmen for this kind of group. He was the head of the missions department at Fuller Theological Seminary in the 1960s and 1970s and is considered the father of the church growth movement. One of his great disciples is Rick Warren, who is in southern California and who has the purpose driven church. It’s not the Christ-driven or the Holy Spirit-driven church, but the purpose-driven church. I mentioned a book written by Paul Smith, the brother of Chuck Smith, on the new evangelical spirituality that traces many of these concepts. Sometimes it’s just amazing. You don’t know what’s going on. It’s not conspiracy-driven stuff. It’s just showing there are influences.
Fuller Seminary went off the rails in the 60s because they rejected the inspiration of Scripture. They began to get involved in more and more of this kind of thing. There was Peter Wagner and another guy, John Wimber.
He came out of a Quaker background and became part of the Calvary Chapel movement. Initially, he wasn’t sure about tongues, but they were having a church service one night, and they had this guy who had formerly been involved with Calvary Chapel. He was one of the three men who, in a sense, influenced and helped start the Jesus movement in Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley in the late 1960s, known as Lonnie Frisbee.
Lonnie Frisbee was a weird character. He eventually got arrested for propositioning a male undercover police officer in a city park and died of AIDS in 1993. That part of his life was primarily hidden in the late 1970s. He came to John Wimber’s church in Anaheim CA in the late 1970s, during a Mother’s Day service. Lonnie Frisbee was invited to speak, and he called upon the Holy Spirit in a dramatic way, leading to a powerful and controversial experience where many people reportedly fell “slain in the Spirit.”
In essence he supposedly called the Holy Spirit down upon this unsuspecting congregation, led by John Wimber, and everyone fell to the ground.
That’s the report they gave. I doubt that all of that is true; it’s probably exaggerated but this led to the whole power evangelism, John Wimber’s signs and wonders, the third wave of the Holy Spirit. That movement later gave rise rise to the five offices of the church, new institutions of apostles and prophets, that all of this came about. It’s just a spider web of horrible theology and doctrines.
1 The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
This is talking about the Lord when He comes with His saints in Revelation 19, who are the raptured, resurrected, and rewarded church-age believers who come with Him at the end of the Tribulation to defeat the Antichrist, as the False Prophet, and the armies of the kings of the earth.
That’s the picture you get, and the thing we looked at was just the various mistranslations in Psalm 110:3 that throw off the Messianic interpretation. I pointed out that you have these two words here in Hebrew.
YaLDuTeyKa = the dew of your youth
YeLiDTiKa = to give birth
You have only consonants in the original Hebrew text as written by David. He only wrote consonants. That’s all they had. The vowels were not inserted. Vowels did not develop within the alphabet of the Jews until after the destruction of the second temple. So, if you’re reading Hebrew, it was unpointed. The vowels are called points so the vowel points indicate how these words to be pronounced and a group of scribes were responsible for overseeing the preservation and the transmission of the Hebrews Scriptures. They were called the Masserites. Now, they developed some ways to write the vowels in words in order to preserve pronunciation of the words so that if the speaking of it was lost, the words would be preserved by these vowel points. But just like in English, when I use the example of the word ‘hear’ and the word ’here’, if you just write those words as consonants, they’re the same, ‘hr’. But here and hear have completely different meanings.
The Massarites in Messianic proclamations manipulated the text not by changing the consonants, but by changing the vowels. So that, yalduteyka to the vowels on the word to the left yelidtika, changes the meaning. The word on the right is not in the Masoretic text in the Hebrew Scriptures, but that is the word that is translated into the Septuagint. The Septuagint was translated before Christ, so it represents in its Greek translation a Hebrew original that differs in places from the Masoretic text we use, primarily due to these types of changes.
I pointed out last time that Psalm 110:3
Psalm 110:3
3 Your people shall be volunteers In the day of Your power; In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, You have the dew of Your youth.
in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the dawn you have the dew of your youth” should be translated to indicate that Christ “from the time of your begottenness you have the dew of the beginning.”
This indicates the begotten One is eternal. So that word on the right is tied over to the birth of the begottenness of the Son in Psalm 2:7.
Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7
7 “I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.
Now that connection is what I was pointing out last time.
Paul doesn’t quote Psalm 110 in Acts 13, but that’s an important thing to understand that this idea of begotten from yalad, which means to give birth, to be begotten. In Israel today, you see a group of kids and an individual young boy; he’s a yalad. If it’s a young girl, she’s a yalada. If you see a bunch of kids, they’re yaladim. So “yad” as a verb means to give birth, and how you structure that noun indicates whether it’s a male child, a female child, or just a bunch of children. However, it retains the concept of begottenness, which differs from being created or made, as defined in the Nicene Creed, where Jesus is described as the second person of the Trinity, begotten but not made, thereby emphasizing his eternality. As the Son of God, He shares the same divine essence as God.
In Acts 13, Paul weaves together these Old Testament passages and prophecies, showing how the Old Testament predicted someone greater than David who would be resurrected and raised up and would be the future ruler of the Kingdom. This is how he ties this together. He talks about the Messiah as the Lord in Psalm 110:1, who is the begotten One who will be raised and is waiting to be given the Kingdom.
Psalm 2 focuses on the conflict between God’s anointed (Psalm 2:2) and the kings of the earth. Now he’s going to shift this to talk about the Davidic covenant in Acts 13:34. He’s established the Messiah as the begotten one, the eternal one, having eternal deity, and then in verse 34, he says,
Acts 13:34
Acts 13:34
Acts 13:34 “As for the fact that He raised Him up from the dead, no longer to return to decay [corruption]..”
34 And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus: ‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’
That’s an important word because the idea of corruption there indicates the normal process of decay in the physical body after death as it returns to dust. So “he was raised from the dead no more to return to corruption.”
He quotes from Isaiah 55:3, in verse 34, and then he connects that to Psalm 16:10, in verse 35
Acts 13:35
Acts 13:35
35 Therefore He also says in another Psalm: ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.’
Let’s look at Psalm 16:10 for verse 35
Psalm 16:10
Psalm 16:10
10 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
and Isaiah for verse 34
Isaiah 55:3
Isaiah 55:3
3 Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live; And I will make an everlasting covenant with you— The sure mercies of David.
These are some excellent verses to understand and see how they connect to comprehend the Messianic credentials of Jesus.
Isaiah 55 focuses on a message of judgment for unbelieving Israel, but that is also an opportunity for redemption and salvation. God constantly offers redemption and forgiveness to His people. As long as they’re alive, and as long as you’re alive, there’s always the opportunity for things to change. So, in Isaiah 55:1 it says,
Isaiah 55:1
Isaiah 55:1
1 “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk Without money and without price.
[see, you have nothing to bring to God or to salvation. We cannot be good enough because we are inherently corrupt. Come buy and eat.
If we don’t have any money, how can we buy? Because it’s given freely. The food, the water, God is the one who freely supplies to us. “Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” That’s what grace is. Grace does not assign a cost to salvation. It’s given as a free gift.
Does that mean it’s free? No, a purchase price had to be paid. That purchase price was the death of the Messiah. It was when the Messiah died that He paid that price, that penalty for sin. But because it was paid for by someone else, it is free to us. Isaiah goes on to say, “Why do you spend money for what is not bread?” In other words, why are you spending your effort? Why are you going out and performing good deeds and righteous deeds and all this ritual to get something that doesn’t provide nourishment for you? Because it’s false; it’s emptiness. It might make you feel good, but it might give you the trappings of life, but it doesn’t give you life. It’s not real bread. “Why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy?
“Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and delight yourself in abundance. Incline your ear and come to me. Listen, that you may live.”
Now that’s the invitation. Listen to God, and you will have life; your soul will live, and then he says that if you come to God and you turn back to him (Deuteronomy 30: 1-2 where Israel needs to turn back to God and turn from their idolatry
1 “Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God drives you, 2 and you return to the Lord your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, 3 that the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you.
So Isaiah 55:3
3 Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live; And I will make an everlasting covenant with you— The sure mercies of David.
“Then I will make an everlasting covenant with you (Hebrew word for covenant here), an unconditional, unending, permanent covenant] according to the faithful mercies shown to David.”
Now there’s an interesting facet to this in the Hebrew because he uses the word chesed to indicate it’s the faithfulness of God and the grace of God and this emphasizes the certainty of fulfilling the everlasting covenant that God made with David.
Let’s go over this part briefly — The Davidic covenant is covered in 2 Samuel 7:11-14, which emphasizes David’s immediate human descendant, Solomon, in this passage.
2 Samuel 7:11-14
2 Samuel 7:11-14
11 since the time that I commanded judges to be over My people Israel, and have caused you to rest from all your enemies. Also the Lord tells you that He will make you a house. 12 “When your days are fulfilled and you rest with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be his Father, and he shall be My son. If he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men.
Psalm 89
Psalm 89
Psalm 89 is a meditation upon the Davidic covenant and God’s faithfulness to David
1 Chronicles 17:10-14 gives us a different perspective on the same event when God gives the covenant to David.
1 Chronicles 17:10-14
1 Chronicles 17:10-14
10 since the time that I commanded judges to be over My people Israel. Also I will subdue all your enemies. Furthermore I tell you that the Lord will build you a house. 11 And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled, when you must go to be with your fathers, that I will set up your seed after you, who will be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. 12 He shall build Me a house, and I will establish his throne forever. 13 I will be his Father, and he shall be My son; and I will not take My mercy away from him, as I took it from him who was before you. 14 And I will establish him in My house and in My kingdom forever; and his throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
It’s the same event as 2 Samuel 7 but it’s slightly different. The emphasis in 2 Samuel is on the human descent through Solomon. 1 Chronicles 17 emphasizes the one who will ultimately fulfill the covenant, the deity or divine side of the one who fulfills that covenant. We examine this covenant in these passages and see that there are two people involved in making it. There’s God on the one hand and David on the other hand. David stands as a representative of all of his descendants, and God is entering into this as a one-sided or unilateral covenant. God is binding Himself, just as He did with Abraham and just as He did with Israel in the land covenant. In the new covenant, the Davidic covenant, He’s binding Himself, not David. No conditions are being placed on David. The guarantee is all on God. It’s unilateral, and God is granting this to David.
This elaborates on the seed promise made to Abraham in the Abrahamic covenant. There were three parts to that: land, seed, and blessing. The land related to the real estate for Israel, the seed related to the number of descendants of Israel, ultimately focused on the Messiah, and then the blessing is that they were to be a worldwide blessing. Now the sad part today is that this world-wide blessing aspect for Israel is often spoken up under the phrase meaning social justice. This has become sort of the prime directive, you might say, for all Jews. It’s nothing more than social activism and social justice, words that are basically code words for socialism and communism. It’s been twisted that way. The way to be a blessing to the world is to take from the rich and give to the poor, do good deeds, and things of that nature. So this blessing has been taken completely out of context in modern Judaism as a mandate for social justice. This answers the question some people say, “Why is that in the light of the fact we have a Muslim sympathizer in the White House, someone who is anti-Israel but is forced by the exigencies of his political situation to at least act pro-Israel. The answer is that they have sold their souls to social justice and socialism, and because of that, they can’t see reality. They want somebody who is going to make these social equities come into place from the top down rather than from the bottom up, and it has become another form of idolatry.
Zev Chafets is a humorous, amusing, light-hearted writer, known for writing the authorized biography of Rush Limbaugh, An Army of One. He’s great. His book, A Match Made in Heaven is designed to show why Israel needs the support of American evangelicals. It’s very insightful for evangelicals to read this book and for Jews, too. You find out a lot of things you didn’t know. One of the things I appreciated is the chapter called “Israelis are Republicans, Jews are Democrats.” Chafets says Israelis are Republicans because they live under a constant existential threat and are forced to face reality. It doesn’t mean they’re all conservatives. It doesn’t mean there aren’t liberals there. There are those who want to give all the territories of Samaria and Judah back to people who‘ve never had a right to it to begin with, because of their guilt. One of the points Chafets made is that Jews are so committed to social justice that forty percent of the Jewish population in America would rather vote for a president, even if they knew his election would lead to the destruction of the modern state of Israel as long as it preserved the right to abortion. They are saying it would be better to preserve that right on their idolatrous altar than to preserve the modern state of Israel. Many people are amazed by that. Still, you have to understand that the Jewish community is mostly agnostic or atheists, and they have no interest whatsoever in their Biblical heritage or an understanding of it as they’ve been influenced by this work’s righteousness idea.
So we’re back to the Davidic covenant. The Davidic covenant recognizes that man can’t do it. God is going to provide an eternal descendent that will do it. This is evident in the fact that there is a promise of an eternal house or dynasty for David, an eternal kingdom for David, and an eternal throne for David. And only someone who has an attitude of eternality can fulfill those aspects of the covenant. A normal human being can’t do it. So there’s a strong implication here that the one who fulfills this in the line of David here is not only going to be of the lineage of David but is also going to have to be divine and possess eternality as one of their attributes. The lowest common denominator here is the original of this verse,
“I will make an everlasting covenant with you, the sure mercies of David.”
So what is being said here is that when Israel, when the Jewish people have inclined their ear and come to God and turned away from the idolatry of socialism, turned away from the idolatry of atheism and agnosticism and materialism and all of the other isms, when they have turned back to God [Deuteronomy 30:1-3] then God will restore them to the land. This is a restoration passage and God says it will be at that time that “I will make an everlasting covenant with you.” It’s been made with David but this is when it’s activated.
End of 3/30/2025
End of 3/30/2025
Sunday, April 06, 2025
Sunday, April 06, 2025
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Now we have reviewed the Gospel message in the Abrahamic Covenant, and the Mosaic Covenant
And now we are seeing how Paul is revealing the Gospel through the Davidic Covenant.
Paul’s Gospel Message to Jews Revealed in the Davidic Covenant Acts 13:13-39
Paul’s Gospel Message to Jews Revealed in the Davidic Covenant Acts 13:13-39
REVIEW
REVIEW
We are working on the Old Testament Quotations that Paul has been using in his presentation to the synagogue of Antioch
Lets just read our passage, and then we will return to our study from verse 35.
Starting in Acts 13:32-37.
Acts 13:32-37
Acts 13:32-37
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. 33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’ 34 And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus: ‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’ 35 Therefore He also says in another Psalm: ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.’ 36 “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption; 37 but He whom God raised up saw no corruption.
Now we reviewed last week how the Gospel is related to the Davidic covenant, and we are still reviewing that.
Let’s re-read that covenant in its second form as expressed in 1 Chronicles 17. In 2 Samuel it is recorded dealing with the humanity of the seed of David, but here it captures the eternal promise through that Messianic seed to come.
1 Chronicles 17:10-14
1 Chronicles 17:10-14
10 since the time that I commanded judges to be over My people Israel. Also I will subdue all your enemies. Furthermore I tell you that the Lord will build you a house. 11 And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled, when you must go to be with your fathers, that I will set up your seed after you, who will be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. 12 He shall build Me a house, and I will establish his throne forever. 13 I will be his Father, and he shall be My son; and I will not take My mercy away from him, as I took it from him who was before you. 14 And I will establish him in My house and in My kingdom forever; and his throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
The lowest common denominator here is the original of this verse, as recorded by Isaiah.
Isaiah 55:3
Isaiah 55:3
3 Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live; And I will make an everlasting covenant with you— The sure mercies of David.
So what is being said here is that when Israel, when the Jewish people have inclined their ear and come to God and turned away from the idolatry of socialism, turned away from the idolatry of atheism and agnosticism and materialism and all of the other isms, when they have turned back to God [Deuteronomy 30:1-3] then God will restore them to the land.
This is a restoration passage in Isaiah, and God says it will be at that time that “I will make an everlasting covenant with you.” It’s been made with David but this is when it’s activated.
Deuteronomy 30:1-3 is the first passage that deals with the requirement for Israel to SHUB to the Lord
Deuteronomy 30:1-3
Deuteronomy 30:1-3
1 “Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God drives you, 2 and you return to the Lord your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, 3 that the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you.
Then we have other passages that relate to this, such as Jeremiah 23:5-6, which refer to Jesse, David’s father. They refer to the ‘stump of Jesse,” which is the house of David that has been shot down, and all that is left is a stump. Out of the stump comes a branch, and that branch is used to represent the Messiah.
Jeremiah 23:5-6 talks about this,
Jeremiah 23:5-6
Jeremiah 23:5-6
5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. 6 In His days Judah will be saved, And Israel will dwell safely; Now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS
Watch that word “righteous”. This is a significant thing. In Judaism, there’s an emphasis on righteousness tsaddiyq and we have to understand how the Bible presents righteousness.
Righteousness is a concept that needs to be traced throughout the Old Testament. God is going to raise from David a righteous branch. The focus attribute of the branch who is a descendant of David is this perfect righteousness. He is a king who will reign and prosper, and He is a king who will execute “judgment and righteousness.” Grammatically, these are seen as two sides of the same coin, and only because He is righteous will His judgment or His rule be righteous.
So, His rule will be characterized by righteousness. In verse 6,
Jeremiah 23:6
Jeremiah 23:6
6 In His days Judah will be saved, And Israel will dwell safely; Now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS
That hasn’t happened. At the time of Jeremiah in the 590s, the northern kingdom of Israel doesn’t dwell safely. It doesn’t dwell at all. It was destroyed 130 years earlier by the Assyrians, so there was no northern kingdom of Israel at the time Jeremiah wrote this. Judah, at this time, is under the heel of the Babylonians. They were already militarily defeated in 605, and they were defeated again in 595. The first temple was going to be destroyed, and they would be entirely defeated by Nebuchadnezzar.
This is a prediction that, although everything is falling apart right now, the economy is collapsing, militarily, they’re being defeated, and everything is in a state of chaos, there is still a future hope. The future hope is in this future branch of righteousness. In his day, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely. So, once again, if Judah is to be saved and Israel is to dwell safely, there must be a restoration to the land. That hasn’t happened yet. It’s happening now; the restoration has been ongoing for the last hundred years, but it’s just the beginning of this restoration. There are now more Jews living in Israel than living outside for the first time since 586. You have more Jews living in Israel than outside the land. At the time of the first century, you just had a small percentage living in the land. You still had significant Jewish populations in Alexandria, Egypt, and in Turkey, as well as throughout Asia Minor and Babylon. It wasn’t just Judea.
The name by which the Messiah will be known, the branch, the Lord, our righteousness. Again, it is the righteousness of this descendent of David whose righteousness becomes our righteousness.
Now, we’re going to go ten chapters later in Jeremiah. We will hit a few points from Jeremiah 33:14 through Jeremiah 33:22. You might want to make notes in your bible margins here. Make a note at Jeremiah 23: 5-6: “look at Jeremiah 33 and following.”
In Jeremiah 33:14 we have another prediction about the branch,
Jeremiah 33:14
Jeremiah 33:14
14 ‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will perform that good thing which I have promised to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah:
“Behold days are coming, declares the Lord..”
This is written just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586, so it is in the future.
14 ‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will perform that good thing which I have promised to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah:
“…the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the good word which I have spoken concerning the house of Israel and the house of Judah.”
So it’s the fulfillment of all these prophecies and promises that God had made to the fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to others down through the centuries. He says,
Jeremiah 33:15-17
Jeremiah 33:15-17
15 ‘In those days and at that time I will cause to grow up to David A Branch of righteousness; He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. 16 In those days Judah will be saved, And Jerusalem will dwell safely. And this is the name by which she will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS’ 17 “For thus says the Lord: ‘David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel;
So there will be a restoration of the Davidic monarchy.
Jeremiah 33:18
Jeremiah 33:18
18 nor shall the priests, the Levites, lack a man to offer burnt offerings before Me, to kindle grain offerings, and to sacrifice continually.’ ”
Again, there is an indication that a restoration of the temple will occur for sacrifices, and a corresponding restoration of the priesthood will be necessary for these sacrifices.
These are not sacrifices related to salvation. Those were fulfilled at the cross, and they’re not repeated. These are sacrifices related to praise, sacrifices related to thanksgiving, and sacrifices related to ritual cleansing, which will be necessary for entering the Millennial temple. Verse 19,
Jeremiah 33:19-21
Jeremiah 33:19-21
19 And the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, 20 “Thus says the Lord: ‘If you can break My covenant with the day and My covenant with the night, so that there will not be day and night in their season, 21 then My covenant may also be broken with David My servant, so that he shall not have a son to reign on his throne, and with the Levites, the priests, My ministers.
In other words, he’s saying, if you can get night and day to stop, then this covenant is broken, but you can’t get night and day to stop, so this covenant will never be broken. It is permanent, everlasting covenant.
Verse 22,
Jeremiah 33:22
Jeremiah 33:22
22 As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David My servant and the Levites who minister to Me.’ ”
I’ll just stop there. This emphasizes the fact that a branch from the descendants of David will rule.
Now, let’s skip over to Ezekiel. Ezekiel is writing in Babylon roughly at the same time as Jeremiah. Ezekiel was taken captive in the second group of deportees in the 590’s and taken to Babylon. He is ministering to the Jews in Babylon.
We covered this passage when we were doing Ezekiel 38 study.
In Ezekiel 37: 24 and following he says,
Ezekiel 37:24-26
Ezekiel 37:24-26
24 “David My servant shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd; they shall also walk in My judgments and observe My statutes, and do them. 25 Then they shall dwell in the land that I have given to Jacob My servant, where your fathers dwelt; and they shall dwell there, they, their children, and their children’s children, forever; and My servant David shall be their prince forever. 26 Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them, and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; I will establish them and multiply them, and I will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore.
It’s everlasting. The covenant of peace is another term for the new covenant. The new covenant is tied to the fulfillment of the covenant with David.
We have two covenants, the fulfillment of which will occur only when the Messiah comes and establishes His kingdom in the future.
In Ezekiel 21:27 there is a lament of the fallen Jerusalem.
Ezekiel 21:27
Ezekiel 21:27
27 Overthrown, overthrown, I will make it overthrown! It shall be no longer, Until He comes whose right it is, And I will give it to Him.” ’
This refers to the Messiah. Ezekiel 34:23 says,
Ezekiel 34:23
Ezekiel 34:23
23 I will establish one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them—My servant David. He shall feed them and be their shepherd.
Now, when it comes to the language here, some believe this refers to the Messiah as the descendant of David and is simply referring to him as David. There’s another view that David, in his resurrection with the Old Testament saints, will be given the rulership over Israel in the Millennial kingdom while Messiah rules over the whole earth. I think that is the more accurate view, that Jesus as the Messiah rules over the whole earth, and David reigns over Israel and Jerusalem.
We go from there to Hosea 3: 4-5,
Hosea 3:4-5
Hosea 3:4-5
4 For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim.
This refers to the present time when they are under divine discipline. Verse 5,
Hosea 3:5 “Afterward the sons of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king..”
So there’s an initial return in apostasy when they return in unbelief. Then there will be the time known as the time of Daniel’s seventieth week, sometimes known as the tribulation, or the time of Jacob’s wrath, and this ends when the Messiah comes back and rescues Israel from being destroyed by the Antichrist so that is when they turn to God, just before the end of that period, before destruction.
Hosea 3:5 “And they will come trembling to the Lord and to His goodness in the last days.”
Another passage, Jeremiah 30: 8-9,
Jeremiah 30:8-9
Jeremiah 30:8-9
8 ‘For it shall come to pass in that day,’ Says the Lord of hosts, ‘That I will break his yoke from your neck, And will burst your bonds; Foreigners shall no more enslave them. 9 But they shall serve the Lord their God, And David their king, Whom I will raise up for them.
Another passage, Psalm 132:12 and 17,
Psalm 132:12 & 17
Psalm 132:12 & 17
12 If your sons will keep My covenant And My testimony which I shall teach them, Their sons also shall sit upon your throne forevermore.”
[referring to the Davidic covenant]
17 There I will make the horn of David grow; I will prepare a lamp for My Anointed.
Mashiach in Hebrew is the word for anointed, which is CHRISTOS [xristoj] in Greek. Then Psalm 89, which is a long psalm, also references his seed.
Psalm 89:36-37
Psalm 89:36-37
36 His seed shall endure forever, And his throne as the sun before Me; 37 It shall be established forever like the moon, Even like the faithful witness in the sky.” Selah
That takes us through David and the fact that the sure mercies of David will be visited upon Israel.
Acts 13:34
Acts 13:34
34 And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus: ‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’
Now, what’s interesting in the Greek is that you have a word that’s used in reference to the sure mercies; it’s really the holy mercies, it’s HOSIOS [ὅσιος], like HAGIOS [a(gioj] which is the word normally translated holy but it has the same idea. It’s more of a personal holiness.
It’s hosios [o(sioj] and this is used by Paul to segue into the next psalm he’s going to quote, Psalm 16:10,
Psalm 16:10
Psalm 16:10
10 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
It says in the Septuagint, “You will not allow your hosios one.” This raises the issue of Psalm 16:10, which we’ve briefly examined before.
It’s a fascinating study on 16:10 because it says, “For you will not leave my soul in Sheol.”
This is David talking. David says, “You’re not going to abandon me.” That is what the word leave means. It’s a very strong word, and it means you’re not going to desert me or abandon my soul in Sheol. Now David has the confidence that God will not abandon him in Sheol. But the language here is hyperbolic. It’s extreme. It’s an exaggeration. While it is true about David, he’s not going to be abandoned, the hyperbolic language is only fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. There is an immediate sense of application to David, but the real application that Paul is able to make, due to a divinely inspired insight, is that he applies this to Jesus, who will not undergo bodily corruption.
The Hebrew word for corruption is the word translated ‘pit’. It means decay, so using the word’ pit’ involves everything that occurs in physical decay and corruption. So, Paul, under the inspiration of Scripture and the Holy Spirit, applies this to the resurrection of Christ. This is what he shows in verse 36 and the following,
Acts 13:36
Acts 13:36
36 “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption;
He was buried in the grave and his body deteriorated and decayed into dust. But that’s not so for Jesus.
But Christ did not.
Resurrection Confirmation. Acts 13:13-39
Resurrection Confirmation. Acts 13:13-39
We are continuing to work our way through Paul’s presentation of the gospel to the Jews in Pisidian Antioch. If we put ourselves in their place, they were hearing this for the first time. They had probably not heard anything about Jesus or the claims made by Jesus to be the Messiah, and they invited the apostle Paul because they treated him as a visiting rabbi to give them a report from Jerusalem and to bring a teaching from the Word to the congregation. And in that he provides a review of God’s plan for Israel. He explores the Abrahamic covenant, touches on the Davidic covenant, and brings these together in terms of God’s promise to David to have a descendant on the throne forever.
Acts 13:32
Acts 13:32
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers.
Starting in verse 32, he focuses on the gospel. This is really important. There have been several issues related to the gospel. On the one hand, there has been a challenge to free grace. One spectrum of evangelicalism’s presentation of the gospel has been labeled as “lordship salvation.” Lordship salvation, in a nutshell, does not necessarily say you have to make Jesus Lord of your life. That is one manifestation of it. The real core of Lordship salvation is the idea that if you are truly regenerate then you are going to produce fruit that is consistent with regeneration and you will live a certain way. That has come to be called fruit inspection. It is that you can somehow quantify this fruit so that you can look at your lifestyle, life change, or absence of sin as the validation of your belief that you are saved.
On the other hand, there is the position that has come to be called free grace, which for some people is a redundancy, but that is because many people use the term “grace” in a manner that is not free. For example, people firmly believe in the concept of lordship; Roman Catholics firmly believe in the concept of grace; many others firmly believe in the idea of grace. But as one lady once said: “You are earning a lot of grace.” You can’t earn grace; grace is something that, by definition, is freely given. We have consistently had this distinction among Christians from time immemorial; it is not just a modern manifestation.
However, the modern manifestation has been crystallized and clarified in terms of particular debates. In the history of this, in the late 70s and early 80s, it became explicitly crystallized by the rise of Zane Hodges, who took a specific confrontational approach in several very good books, analyzing the scriptural interpretations of the lordship crowd, specifically John MacArthur but also numerous others, most of whom were in the Calvinistic camp.
It has been a misnomer and a mischaracterization by many people in the grace camp to try to say all Calvinism is Lordship. There have been numerous movements within four and five-point Calvinism since the sixteenth century that have not held to the lordship approach to the fifth point of Calvinism, the P in TULIP—the perseverance of the saints, the view the saint who is truly regenerate will persevere in being faithful or enduring in his faith in Christ; he is not going to give it up, not going to finally reject Christ, not going to commit certain sins continuously, but if he is “genuinely” saved regeneration somehow limits his sin nature. There is no real support for this in Scripture; it is essentially a theological deduction from their definition of regeneration.
However, there are many other Calvinists—such as Lewis Sperry Chafer—who believe that the P in perseverance refers to Christ persevering in keeping us saved, which is how many of us understand eternal security. That view was a dominant view among many Calvinists. It is just in the last 40 or 50 years that among Calvinists that the perseverance/lordship crowd has become the dominant thinking within Calvinism.
End of 1st Service 4/6/2025
End of 1st Service 4/6/2025
Now we were speaking of Calvinism and the beginning of what is called the Free Grace movement kicked off by Zane Hodges as a resistance to the false teaching of Calvinism, the back loading of Perseverance, which is actually an introduction of obedience as part of their definition of Faith. You see, our neo-Calvinist (a term that means the rebaking of the cake of Calvinism, but they are using different ingredients) so, neo-Calvinist friends have asserted that Faith actually means obedience, not belief. This is an example of what we call Theological Imposition where you place a foreign theological concept on a word to change its meaning.
On the other hand, we have the Free Grace movement, and unfortunately, within this movement, there has been another split, another conflict over the gospel. It has to do with the understanding that Zane Hodges himself had of the gospel, which was not always clear to people who read him because it is easy to read into someone’s statement of the gospel that is fairly close to being on target, a correct understanding of the gospel when the issue that is being addressed on the page of the commentary or whatever is focusing on analyzing and understanding a distortion related to lordship salvation.
However, it became apparent about years ago that Zane had always held a rather unusual view of the gospel: that the gospel was simply the offer of eternal life by Jesus. He cites a couple of passages in John as his support, and, of course, these statements were made before Jesus went to the cross. Therefore, they would not be passages that focused on the cross, but rather passages that focused on Jesus’ offer of eternal life to Jews in a dispensation that preceded His final payment on the cross. So, as far as Zane was concerned, the gospel was an understanding that Jesus could accomplish what He promised to accomplish, which was to give eternal life, and that you were believing Him for eternal life, and that because what Jesus was giving was eternal life that meant—embedded within the definition of eternal—that it was not a life that could be lost or taken away.
Where that went was that if you didn’t have an understanding that the life you were getting when you believed in Jesus was something you couldn’t lose, then you didn’t believe Jesus for eternal life; you believed Him for a life that you could lose. So, if you didn’t have an understanding of eternal security in some sense at the moment of trusting in Christ, then you weren’t really saved.
Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about the cross, anything about the fact that Christ died for our sins, or believing that Christ died to provide forgiveness for your sins, or justification. For that reason, that view of the gospel, which came to dominate the Grace Evangelical Society and others, came to be called “the crossless gospel” because you didn’t have to believe that Jesus died on the cross. That is not part of what Jesus offered in John 5. He offered eternal life. He hasn’t offered the cross yet because He hasn’t gone to the cross yet; it was before the cross.
The reason for bringing this out is that we will see how Paul interacts with these Jewish unbelievers in the chapter of Acts 13. There are five key prophecies from the Old Testament that are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Paul is looking at a couple of them here.
Acts 13:33
Acts 13:33
33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’
We’ve looked at Acts 13:33, the quotation there from Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7
Psalm 2:7—“From the womb of the dawn I have begotten you.”
7 “I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.
Psalm 110 is clearly a messianic psalm related to the elevation of the Messiah to the right hand of God the Father.
Psalm 110:1
Psalm 110:1
1 The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
The point is that the Messiah ascends and sits at the right hand of the throne of God in a position of passive waiting for the kingdom to be given, which is given by God the Father, the Ancient of Days, as stated in Daniel chapter seven, just prior to the Son of Man coming to the earth to defeat the kings of the earth and then establishing His kingdom. Psalm 2 focuses on the battle that takes place, and Psalm 2:7 is the announcement, the validation by God of His previous declaration that the Messiah is the Son of God, possessing full deity.
32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. 33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.’
Then Paul goes to another verse. Notice what he is doing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He is stringing together two or three different prophecies to show how they are fulfilled in Jesus with reference to the promise, the covenant given to David.
This is a quote from Isaiah 55:3 NASB
Acts 13:34-35
Acts 13:34-35
34 And that He raised Him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, He has spoken thus: ‘I will give you the sure mercies of David.’ 35 Therefore He also says in another Psalm: ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.’
This is a promise fulfilling the Davidic covenant. God promised David an eternal house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne.
Isaiah 55:3
Isaiah 55:3
3 Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live; And I will make an everlasting covenant with you— The sure mercies of David.
That promise to David was a promise of an eternal house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne. David was from the root of his father, Jesse. Isaiah 11:1, 10 makes it clear that there will come forth in the future—Isaiah was written about 720 BC. He is in the southern kingdom, the northern kingdom has fallen, and he is warning prophetically that the southern kingdom, the kingdom of Judah, which was still ruled by a king who was a descendant of David, would be destroyed by Babylon (and Babylon wasn’t even dreamed of at this point as a mighty kingdom). That would, in effect, cut down the tree of David so that all that would be left is a stump. So what would happen then if the Davidic tree is cut down? Would God remain faithful and fulfill His promise to Israel—from the stem of Jesse, a little green shoot? A branch will grow out of its/his roots.
Isaiah 11:10
Isaiah 11:10
10 “And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, Who shall stand as a banner to the people; For the Gentiles shall seek Him, And His resting place shall be glorious.”
Typically, when we encounter the phrase “in that day” in the prophets of the Old Testament, it refers to future events, such as the day of the Lord or the end-time. This is an important messianic prophecy, and what we learn from the verse is that a descendant of David will attract Gentiles to himself when he comes to establish his kingdom for Israel.
There will be specific characteristics associated with this. We need to pay attention to the word “righteousness” here. It is essential to note that righteousness is a critical issue in the Old Testament. Job said, “How can a man be righteous before God.” The word “righteousness” in both the New and Old Testaments really has two connotations. One connotation is experiential righteousness, i.e., doing good things and living a just life following the standards outlined in God’s Word. But even though human beings do good things, we are all flawed. This is a problem that is repeatedly stated in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament. So, while man can accomplish certain good things—and there’s nothing wrong with doing good to our fellow creatures—it is wrong to think that doing that good curries favor with God and to think that that becomes the basis for our salvation. That is the problem.
Jeremiah 23 gives us a promise related to David as the Branch.
Jeremiah 23:5
Jeremiah 23:5
5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.
The Branch of righteousness is distinct from David. He is raising to David as a result of those promises God made to David in an eternal covenant, someone who is described metaphorically in this passage as a branch. He is a righteous Branch. That righteousness is going to be an inherent, intrinsic character quality of this individual. He is then described as a king. Royalty is ascribed to Him, which makes sense as He is a descendant of David. He is one who fulfills the promise of an eternal throne, an eternal dynasty. Because He is inherently righteous, His rule will be righteous.
It will be the only time in history that we have a truly righteous ruler in any kingdom. There are no righteous rulers today; all rulers today are unrighteous to one degree or another. But if we don’t have an understanding of man being inherently flawed—or as Christians describe it, as sinners—because of sin, then we constantly think that human beings can bring in a perfect environment. That thinking is called utopianism. It has never worked and will never work because human beings are flawed, and as long as they are flawed, they will always fail when they govern.
They are susceptible to power lust and the abuses of power. The founding fathers understood this, and it is why, in the Constitution, they established three branches of government as checks and balances against one another, so that no one branch would rise above the other two. They didn’t design it so that passing laws and changing laws would be easy. However, today we live in a world where people often become frustrated. They operate on the false assumption that people are basically good and that those who govern are also basically good, with our best interests at heart. They don’t! They want to accumulate power and take it away from the people.
Jeremiah 23:6
Jeremiah 23:6
6 In His days Judah will be saved, And Israel will dwell safely; Now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS
Jeremiah writes at a time when Nebuchadnezzar has already invaded once, and he is writing prior to the final destruction of Judah in 586 BC. He has already announced that they are going to lose and that the Babylonians will destroy them. Now he is saying that all hope is not lost, there will yet be a future, and God is going to be true to His promises. He is saying that in the days of the Branch, the righteous Branch, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely. There will be the restoration of the nation in safety, and when the righteous Brach rules, He will be called ‘The LORD our righteousness’.
In Hebrew, this could be translated a couple of different ways because there is no verb there. It could be read as it is literally: Yahweh tsidqenu, which means Yahweh our righteousness. But it could be as how the 1986, more up-to-date translation of the Tanakh translates it: The Lord is our vindicator. They have inserted the “is” there, which is viable, but this form of the word tsedeq does not mean vindication. It is not translated as that, it is the same form as in Jeremiah 23:5—
Jeremiah 23:5
Jeremiah 23:5
5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.
But it is the same form of the word. You can’t say that, you have to be consistent in translation. The reason the 1986 Tanakh changes that is to get away from the implications of righteousness.
As we examine these Old Testament passages, the question is whose righteousness leads us to heaven. We see that the Old Testament makes it clear that the righteousness that leads Jews in the Old Testament and anyone in the world, including those in the New Testament, to eternity is the righteousness of the Messiah.
The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tenakh stated it very clearly, “the Lord our righteousness,” and that translation is consistent historically with the various Targums or commentaries that had been written in Jewish history on Jeremiah chapters 23 and 33. It is only in modern times that it has been shifted to avoid the messianic Christian interpretation.
Jeremiah 33:14-17
Jeremiah 33:14-17
14 ‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will perform that good thing which I have promised to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah:
And then he begins to discuss David, so the promise he is referring to here takes us back to the Davidic covenant. It is crucial that when we help people understand the Bible, we ground our teachings in the promises and covenants that God made to Abraham, David, and the Jewish people, regarding their eternal possession of the land.
15 ‘In those days and at that time I will cause to grow up to David A Branch of righteousness; He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. 16 In those days Judah will be saved, And Jerusalem will dwell safely. And this is the name by which she will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS’ 17 “For thus says the Lord: ‘David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel;
Zechariah 3:8
Zechariah 3:8
8 ‘Hear, O Joshua, the high priest, You and your companions who sit before you, For they are a wondrous sign; For behold, I am bringing forth My Servant the BRANCH.
So we’ve moved from the pre-exilic announcement that God is going to raise up a Branch from the root of Jesse to now calling the Messiah the Branch. He is “My servant the Branch.”
Zechariah 6:12
Zechariah 6:12
12 Then speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, saying: “Behold, the Man whose name is the BRANCH! From His place He shall branch out, And He shall build the temple of the Lord;
This is speaking of the future temple of the Lord built during the messianic age.
Jeremiah 33:18-22 continues to talk about God’s fulfillment of the covenant to David. Verse 20
Jeremiah 33:20
Jeremiah 33:20
20 “Thus says the LordM: ‘If you can break y covenant with the day and My covenant with the night, so that there will not be day and night in their season,
Ezekiel 21:27 is Ezekiel’s cry of woe at the defeat and destruction of Jerusalem.
Ezekiel 21:27
Ezekiel 21:27
27 Overthrown, overthrown, I will make it overthrown! It shall be no longer, Until He comes whose right it is, And I will give it to Him.” ’
That is a reference to the Davidic king, the Branch who will rule in Jerusalem.
Ezekiel 34:23
Ezekiel 34:23
23 I will establish one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them—My servant David. He shall feed them and be their shepherd.
Hosea 3:4
Hosea 3:4
4 For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim. 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days.
Jeremiah 30:8
Jeremiah 30:8
8 ‘For it shall come to pass in that day,’ Says the Lord of hosts, ‘That I will break his yoke from your neck, And will burst your bonds; Foreigners shall no more enslave them.
See also Psalm 132:12, Psalm 132:17;
Psalm 89:29, Psalm 89:36-37.
Psalm 132:12
Psalm 132:12
12 If your sons will keep My covenant And My testimony which I shall teach them, Their sons also shall sit upon your throne forevermore.”
Psalm 132:17
Psalm 132:17
17 There I will make the horn of David grow; I will prepare a lamp for My Anointed.
Psalm 89:29
Psalm 89:29
29 His seed also I will make to endure forever, And his throne as the days of heaven.
Psalm 89:36-37
Psalm 89:36-37
36 His seed shall endure forever, And his throne as the sun before Me; 37 It shall be established forever like the moon, Even like the faithful witness in the sky.” Selah
Acts 13:35 brings in a third passage. He has brought in Psalm 2:7 and Isaiah 55:3, now he brings in Psalm 16:10.
Psalm 16:10
Psalm 16:10
Psalm 16:10 “For You will not abandon my soul to Sheol; Nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.”
10 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
Here David is speaking about himself because he is convinced that he is going through problems and that he will die, but there will be a resurrection for him. However, God, the Holy Spirit, through inspiration from Paul, is revealing another application. He can do that because the Spirit inspires it. If we were to read Psalm 16:10, we would not derive the doctrine of resurrection from it in the sense that it applies to Jesus. That comes under the divine inspiration through the Holy Spirit, as given by the apostle Paul. David is convinced that there will be a resurrection for himself and that he will remain in the grave, but one day, someday, there will be a resurrection for him, and that is what he is referring to.
Paul, under the inspiration of Scripture, takes this and applies it to the resurrection of Jesus, that His body saw no corruption, no decay, no deterioration in the grace whatsoever because He was raised from the dead almost instantly after His death—three days later but considering the time frames it wasn’t hundreds or thousands of years—and given a new resurrection body. Peter also stated this on the day of Pentecost. Notice it is “Holy One,” singular, not a plural.
Paul states in Acts 13:36
Acts 13:36-37
Acts 13:36-37
36 “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption; 37 but He whom God raised up saw no corruption.
He is not contradicting David’s belief in a future resurrection. David did indeed see corruption, but Jesus Christ did not. Paul is making a connection here. He has spoken about the Davidic king who will come and sit at the right hand of God the Father, who will then defeat the enemies of God (Psalm 2).
When that happens, the “sure mercies of David” will be given to them in fulfillment of the Davidic covenant. This is seen, vindicated, and validated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as prophesied in Psalm 16:10.
Psalm 16:10
Psalm 16:10
10 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
He does this in these verses to establish that Jesus can do what He claimed to do, having achieved victory over physical death.
From that, Paul is going to draw a conclusion.
Acts 13:38-39
Acts 13:38-39
38 Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; 39 and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.
What he is saying is that there are some things you could be justified in the Law of Moses. You couldn’t be justified by anything from the Law of Moses, but in Jesus, you will be justified. In verse 38 he said: “through Him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.” This is the verb katangello [καταγγέλλεται] – angello in the Greek is the word to announce something; it is intensified with the prefix. It means to proclaim or preach something. It refers to preaching the gospel, as we see in 1 Corinthians 9:14
1 Corinthians 9:14
1 Corinthians 9:14
14 Even so the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel.
What is the proclamation of the gospel? We’ve had this problem historically with understanding the gospel. Does the gospel mean to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you truly believe, if you genuinely believe, if you rightly believe, then you will see an inevitable change in your life, and by that, you will know you have believed? Most people are smart enough to know if they have believed something. It is simple; it is not hard, but people will get all wrapped around the axle and say: “I’m not sure.” Well, do you believe it? Yeah. Well, then, you know it; that’s it. Notice that “believe” is the only condition that is stated in verse 38. They preached forgiveness of sins. Notice it doesn’t say they preached eternal life.
Does Paul have a different gospel than the Apostle John? No, the gospel manifests itself; there are different facets. One facet relates to eternal life, another facet relates to regeneration, becoming a new creature in Christ, another relates to redemption, and another to forgiveness. They are different facets of the gospel, but proclaiming any one of those facets is proclaiming the gospel. If you believe in Jesus for forgiveness of sins, you don’t have to believe it again for eternal life, and you don’t have to believe again for redemption, for propitiation, for reconciliation; they are all different aspects of the same gospel. But Zane Hodges comes along and says you have to believe in Jesus for eternal life, but if you believe in Jesus for anything else, you are not saved. That is as phony a gospel as John MacArthur’s gospel. This is what led to a significant division within the Free Grace movement in the early 2000s and the formation of the Free Grace Alliance in 2004.
End of 2nd Service 4/6/2025
End of 2nd Service 4/6/2025
Sunday, April 13, 2025
Sunday, April 13, 2025
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Resurrection Confirmation. Acts 13:13-39
Resurrection Confirmation. Acts 13:13-39
Acts 13:38-39
Acts 13:38-39
38 Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; 39 and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.
The gospel is clearly stated here as related to the forgiveness of sins. The word for forgiveness is aphesis [ἄφεσις].
It means a release or a pardon, the cancellation of a debt, that that debt was wiped out. When Christ died on the cross, the debt was paid, so the issue now isn’t whether you want to pay the debt or not; the issue now is do you want to accept the payment of the debt or not, and when you accept it you get Christ’s righteousness.
38 Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; 39 and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.
Notice it is not saying everyone who believes and continues to believe; not everyone who believes and bears fruit; not everyone who believes and abides; not everyone who believes and attends church, is baptized, or engages in any other practice, but what is required is simply faith alone.
Faith is belief.
Everyone who believes is justified. It is a present tense for continuous action if you believe you are justified,
and justified is the Greek word DIKAIOUTAI [δικαιοῦται], which is a legal term meaning to declare righteous before God. And you couldn’t be justified from all things by the Law of Moses. That is the sense of the verse.
The question is Job 9:2
Job 9:2
Job 9:2
2 “Truly I know it is so, But how can a man be righteous before God?
If we want to focus the gospel it is related to all of these things, but this is the core issue. It is the Hebrew word Tzedek, which refers not only to experiential righteousness, used to describe the positive application of believers, but also to the forensic or legal declaration of someone brought before a judge—the declaration of their righteousness, indicating that they have met the standard of righteousness. They may not be righteous, but they are declared righteous.
The answer to Job’s question doesn’t have to do with doing righteous deeds. Why? Because at the very core of our being, we are viewed as so flawed that while we can do relative righteousness things that when compared to other people, are good, but in terms of the absolute righteousness of God, they are not.
Isaiah 64:6, quoting from the 1918 translation of the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Tenakh:
6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
When it says, “we are all:” who is left out?
That includes every single human being.
6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
In other words, it is stained, and we cannot gain favor with God no matter how good our deeds are. That is what Isaiah says.
God is described as absolute righteousness. In Psalm 9, we are told that He will judge the world by righteousness. That is His absolute standard. So if our righteousness is as filthy rags and He is going to judge us based on our righteousness, we are not in a good place.
Psalm 9:8
Psalm 9:8
8 He shall judge the world in righteousness, And He shall administer judgment for the peoples in uprightness.
Psalm 11:7
Psalm 11:7
7 For the Lord is righteous, He loves righteousness; His countenance beholds the upright.
He can only approve that which is righteous. So if our righteousness is as filthy rages, how can God ever approve us?
The answer is given in Genesis 15:6 .
Genesis 15:6
Genesis 15:6
6 And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.
Righteousness comes by faith, not by works. It was because Abraham trusted God, not what Abraham did, that he was given righteousness.
In Isaiah 53, one of the most significant messianic passages, we are told how God deals with the unrighteousness of man and how He is going to justify the sinners, the unrighteous, that are mentioned in Isaiah 64:6.
Isaiah 64:6
Isaiah 64:6
6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
Isaiah 53:4
Isaiah 53:4
4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.
It is the core corruption that is sin. It is substitutionary; He bore our sins; He took our suffering upon Himself. The idea that runs through this is that there is this one individual, the servant, who takes upon Himself our problems. He solves the problem. That is substitutionary.
This is the same picture as on the day of Atonement when the lamb is brought out when the goats are brought out, where the high priest places his hand on the goats and recites the sins of the nation. They are transferred to the goat, and that is the picture: the goat is going to be sacrificed, while the other one is sent out into the wilderness, bearing the sins of the people. But the blood of the bulls and goats couldn’t permanently take away sin. But this is the servant of God who is going to take away sin permanently. It is God bringing the judgment upon the servant.
Isaiah 53:5
Isaiah 53:5
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.
What the servant would go through was not because of what He did but because of our sin. Notice that this verse has shifted from discussing the disease metaphor to addressing sin and iniquity, as that is the actual problem. The crushing here is something that would produce death. He takes your place in terms of punishment—in substitution.
Isaiah 53:11
Isaiah 53:11
11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.
He is looking upon the spiritual transaction, the substitutionary payment on the cross. He will be satisfied—propitiation, the essence of what is depicted on the day of Atonement: God’s justice being satisfied by the blood being put on the mercy seat over the broken Ten Commandments.
11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.
The Servant is righteous, but the people aren’t. The Servant’s righteousness is true righteousness, and by His righteousness, many shall be justified. Why? Because He shall bear their iniquities.
So, how do we get the righteousness of God, as Job asked? It has to be given to us, and it is given to us by the One who paid the penalty for our sins. The New Testament tells us how this is fulfilled in Jesus. This is what Paul says in Acts 13:38-39:
Acts 13:38-39
Acts 13:38-39
38 Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; 39 and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.
Isaiah predicts this for us - speaking about the coming Messiah: here the Lord is speaking to the Messiah:
Isaiah 42:6
Isaiah 42:6
6 “I, the Lord, have called You in righteousness, And will hold Your hand; I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people, As a light to the Gentiles,
That is what is getting ready to happen in Acts 13 because some of the Jews are going to respond but most of them are going to reject. So Paul is going to turn from the Jews because they have willingly rejected the offer of eternal life and the offer of forgiveness, the offer of justification, and he is going to turn to the Gentiles because the gospel is to be a light to the Gentiles.
Isaiah 49:6
Isaiah 49:6
6 Indeed He says, ‘It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob, And to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, That You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”
That gives us an understanding of how the gospel is presented in the Old Testament, where all the prophecies are woven together, and we must know this to be effective witnesses.
Volition and Sovereignty. Acts 13:40-52
Volition and Sovereignty. Acts 13:40-52
If we you to understand the issues related to Calvinism and Arminianism, and if you are studying those issues and are dealing with somebody who holds to a strong Calvinistic view of salvation and the doctrines of salvation, then two of the passages that they will go to in order to substantiate their view on unconditional election and predestination are found in Acts 13:48 and Romans 8:28-30.
Acts 13:48
Acts 13:48
48 Now when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
Romans 8:28-30
Romans 8:28-30
28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. 29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. 30 Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.
There are other verses, but those are two of the central verses that are brought into the debate in an attempt to understand the relationship between the sovereignty of God and the volition of human beings. So it is always important to study these types of ideas in context because so much of the time in theology, you get people making bullet points. They will give the Scripture references and actually cite their Scriptures, but they are just citing the verse, or maybe two verses, and you don’t get the context and the flow of argument surrounding that verse. Often, by taking a verse out of context, it sounds like it is saying one thing, and in reality, it isn’t saying that at all.
I was just dealing with a person who was asking me about fears over committing the unpardonable sin. This is based on taking a verse out of context. Even after explaining the context of Matthew 12 and 13, they were having a hard time. It is the abandonment of
We have been focusing on the principles seen in Acts 13 where Paul is explaining the gospel. This is the first in-depth presentation of the gospel that we see from the apostle Paul to a Jewish audience. He follows the principle he states later on in the first chapter of Romans, taking the gospel to the Jew first and then to the Gentiles. He believed that that was his mandate from God even though he is the apostle to the Gentiles. There was still this mandate to take the gospel of the kingdom to the Jews and to give them the opportunity of first refusal, which happened almost every time. Then, there is a free, open, and clear door to take the gospel to the Gentiles who were receiving the gospel with open arms and enthusiasm.
The last few lessons have been to help us to understand how Paul is structuring his presentation of the gospel. It is important to have a very good grasp of the Old Testament presentation of the gospel. Any of us ought to be prepared to walk somebody through a gospel presentation without going to the New Testament, except maybe at the end, just to lay that groundwork. But that would only be with certain kinds of an audience. With other kinds of audiences, you do other things; everybody is different. You don’t just have one or two canned approaches; you need to know the Word so that the Holy Spirit can use it.
We have been dealing with the basic presentation of the gospel in Acts 13:38, 39.
Acts 13:38-39
Acts 13:38-39
38 Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through this Man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins; 39 and by Him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses.
It has been pointed out that the focal point here in his explanation of the gospel of salvation is the good news of the forgiveness of sins. There are different ways to express the message of the gospel. One way is to talk about it in terms of forgiveness of sins. That is very important for some people, depending on their background and history. For other people, the issue may be reconciliation; for others, an understanding of justification; for others, it might be an understanding of the gift of eternal life. The focal point is always on Christ's work on the cross that provides these. These are just different facets of what was accomplished on the cross.
A major debate that has occurred is one that is between a group that we will call fatalists or determinists, for lack of a better term. These are those who emphasize the sovereign authority of God, that God oversees and controls history to the degree that human beings really don’t have ultimate freedom in the areas of the will. They have freedom at the lower level; they can decide whether to put on a pair of cowboy boots or something like that, but when it comes to significant patterns in life, especially salvation, man does not have free will; he does not have responsible choice. He cannot make those kinds of choices, they are predetermined by the sovereign control of God.
On the other side, there is a group that has so rejected God's sovereignty that they emphasize human freedom to the point that man basically determines God’s will. Everything is determined by God. Ultimately, somebody has to determine everything; it is either God or the creature. So, the way it is set up is to polarize these two positions, where there is either a totally sovereign God or a totally free creature.
In recent years, there has been an even weirder heretical view on the side of freedom. This came out in the nineties and became known as open theism. Open theism held to the basic view that if God is going to know that something will certainly happen in the future then you have two options. Either He totally controls everything to bring that about—which means there is no freedom—or He is really just making an educated guess. He is not omniscient He is just open to the future. But God can’t know with certainty what will happen in the future without being able to control what will happen in the future. In reading the literature on this we find that a vast number of the books that are written are written not from a biblical perspective, even though theologians are writing them. There is a tremendous amount of discussion and argumentation that is based on pure philosophical constructs.
But we just want to deal with what the Scripture says. And want is frustrating for a certain number of people is that on the one side, the determinist side represented historically by two great figures, the bishop of Hippo, Augustine, and John Calvin, and on the other side Pelagianism. Pelagius was a British monk who believed that everybody had the same freedom that Adam had and that everybody was born with the same neutrality as Adam. So there was the initial debate between Augustine and Pelagius, and then later on between Calvinists and a group of former Calvinists out of Holland who were known as Arminians because they were following a theologian professor named Jacobus Arminius. That is the historical context and people think that everything can be divided into two ways.
Calvinists and Augustinians tend to emphasize the grandeur, greatness and authority of God. They will try to pin their opponent and say, who is in charge, God or man? They are creating a false dichotomy. They have created a God who is less powerful because it is either His control or man’s control, He doesn’t have the power and authority to oversee creation and maintain His control over the flow of history, working in and through human volition behind the scenes without controlling it. That is a larger, greater God than a God who controls the volition of everybody. Because He is so much greater than all of the circumstances and people He is able to sort of guide and direct the whole process without sacrificing the individual responsibility of the creatures.
The whole concept of freedom is another bag because Adam had one level of freedom, but his descendants don’t have that same level of freedom. We all know that we were born slaves of the sin nature, Paul explains in Romans chapter six. So this idea that we are free is really a kind of misnomer. It is like the term “fair” which has so many ambiguities to it that one person’s fairness is another person’s inequality, and another person’s socialism is another person’s communism. Freedom gets the same way, so we have to be careful about some of these terms. One of the things we need to emphasize and come back to is what the Bible emphasizes: personal responsibility, personal ability to make certain decisions and be held accountable for those decisions.
As we look at Acts 13:38 Paul says, “Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through Him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, [39] and through Him everyone who believes is freed from all things, from which you could not be freed through the Law of Moses.”
This is emphasizing the human individual responsibility aspect of the gospel. You determine you eternal destiny—“everyone who believes.” It never says everyone who is preordained, everyone who is elect, or everyone who is determined by God. The Scriptures never put it that way.
This gets into another little rabbit trail. We need to be educated and aware of some things that are happening. We have pointed out that within the free grace gospel, the Free Grace Evangelical Society narrowed the gospel to simply an offer of eternal life and believing in Jesus for eternal life; anything else wasn’t the gospel. The problem with that is that that is just one facet of the gospel presentation. You can believe in Jesus for forgiveness of sins, eternal life, justification, redemption, or reconciliation. Or you can believe in Him because you know that is the only way to heaven, you are just going to trust Him and you really don’t understand all of the other stuff—as with a six-year-old, because that is the level at which you can comprehend it. You are not going to sit down and go through nineteen points on the doctrine of regeneration when you are six years old. But what happens when people start trying to slice the baloney really thin and ask certain questions like what is the smallest amount of information you have to believe in order to be saved? That can lead you down the wrong trail. That is one wrong trail that the GES crowd went down. The other crowd started getting upset about talking about volition in salvation, that faith wasn’t volitional. In reading their literature, it is thought that what they are really reacting to is a branch of evangelism and tent revivalism—Billy Graham type evangelism—where people say you need know when you decided to trust in Christ, and if you can’t pin-point when you made that decision for Jesus then you are not saved. It is decisional. That seems to be what they are seeking to refute, but what they end up saying is that faith isn’t really volitional. So that created another little problem. It is important to understand these distinctions.
Here, “everyone who believes.” When you put a word like believe into an imperatival context, either an imperatival participle or an imperative mood verb, the imperative demands a response, yes or no. You have to make a decision. It is simple grammar. And yet the twists and turns and the gymnastics people went through to try to argue that faith really wasn’t volitional! They ended up saying things that Calvinists would say on the side of irresistible grace.
There is the presentation of what Christ did—provide forgiveness of sins. Then there is the challenge to the individual—“everyone who believes.” That is the condition. Then the result is “justified from all things, from which you could not be freed [justified] through the Law of Moses.” That is the presentation of the gospel.
Then there was a challenge, and the challenge is a warning of judgment that is about to come if they reject this free offer of God’s grace.
Acts 13:40
Acts 13:40
40 Beware therefore, lest what has been spoken in the prophets come upon you:
That is his statement for introducing a quote from the Old Testament.
There are four basic different ways by which New Testament writers quote Old Testament passages as being fulfilled.
The first type of quotation is literal prophecy; literal fulfillment. Example: Micah 5:2.
Micah 5:2
Micah 5:2
2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Though you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me The One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, From everlasting.”
Then there is a second category of quotation in which a historical event occurs, but is used by the New Testament writer as representing a type or pattern of future fulfillment.
Hosea 11:1
Hosea 11:1
1 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son.
Matthew 2:15 takes that verse and shows that this represented, just as the Jews coming out of Egypt, a type or a picture of Jesus coming out of Egypt after the family fled there when Herod was threatening to kill all of the male babies and then came back.
Matthew 2:15
Matthew 2:15
15 and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”
The third way of quoting is when a statement is not a literal prophecy in the event in the Old Testament, it is a pattern that is simila. So, it is quoted as this is similar to that. It is not a literal fulfillment. E.g. Joel 2, the prediction that your old men will dream dreams and your young women will prophesy, etc. The context indicates that that comes at the time of the day of the Lord. Peter quotes from that in Acts chapter two but it is not a literal fulfillment. Of all the things that are mentioned in Joel 2 none are found in Acts 2. The one thing that happens in Acts 2, speaking in tongues, isn’t mentioned in Joel 2. Peter is saying that this event is similar to that, and he’s just using that prophecy to point out a pattern or a similarity of how God works.
That is what we have here in Acts 13.
He is quoting from Habakkuk 1:5 in order to show that there is a pattern in the way that God deals with sinful disobedience. When people reject His offer of grace then God brings judgment.
Acts 13:41
Acts 13:41
41 ‘Behold, you despisers, Marvel and perish! For I work a work in your days, A work which you will by no means believe, Though one were to declare it to you.’ ”
There is a certain proper self-righteous indignation here. He looks, and it just seems that God is letting them get away with everything. Such evil is going on, and God doesn’t seem to deal with it. Habakkuk is going to God at the beginning of the book and saying, Why don’t you deal with it? God says He is going to deal with it, He is going to bring the Chaldeans who are going to destroy the country.
Habakkuk 1:5-6
Habakkuk 1:5-6
5 “Look among the nations and watch— Be utterly astounded! For I will work a work in your days Which you would not believe, though it were told you. 6 For indeed I am raising up the Chaldeans, A bitter and hasty nation Which marches through the breadth of the earth, To possess dwelling places that are not theirs.
God is saying watch and see what I am about to do. It is a literal prophecy.
Is it literal in Acts 13? Is that the fulfillment? No, this was fulfilled in the Old Testament. Paul is saying that just as God brought judgment upon the Israelites at that time because they rejected God’s grace and turned from worshipping God to worshipping idols, so now you have a chance to turn back at this point, worship God, and accept His Messiah as your savior who has provided you with forgiveness of sins; but if you reject that then you will face the same consequences, the same kind of consequences that the Israelites faced in 586 BC. The implication in Acts is that their hearts are hardened, and many of them won’t believe, no matter how well it is declared to them. They are like the people of Judah in 586 BC. They rejected God, rejected the prophets, and had everything painted for them very clearly, and they still said no. That is negative volition. It blinds us to the truth. This is how Paul closed his gospel presentation. It generated a lot of discussion.
Throughout Acts we find the same subject matter, so what Paul is saying fits with all of these messages. It is the same challenge, this warning that there will be a significant judgment on Israel.
Acts 3:22-23
Acts 3:22-23
22 For Moses truly said to the fathers, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you. 23 And it shall be that every soul who will not hear that Prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.’
Judgment will come if you reject Jesus as Messiah.
Acts 4:11-12
Acts 4:11-12
11 This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ 12 Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
Acts 10:42
Acts 10:42
42 And He commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that it is He who was ordained by God to be Judge of the living and the dead.
Acts 17:30-31
Acts 17:30-31
30 Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, 31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”
The point: there is judgment coming.
Acts 13:42
Acts 13:42
42 So when the Jews went out of the synagogue, the Gentiles begged that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath.
These are Jews and seekers of God among the Gentiles. When he uses the term “Jews,” he is not just talking about ethnic Jews. All through the Gospel of John, John refers to “the Jews” as the bad guys. But John is a Jew, Jesus is a Jew, the other disciples are all Jews, and many of those who believed in Jesus were Jews. The term refers to the leaders of the group, leaders of the Jews. So when the leadership left the synagogue, the Gentiles, these proselytes, seekers of God, hung back in order to talk to Paul.
The term translated “begged” here is the word παρακαλέω PARAKALEO. It is sometimes translated “challenge,” sometimes the basic meaning of calling to one’s side; but it also has the idea of making an urgent request for something. So they are pleading will Paul to stay another week and then to address the synagogue again next Sabbath.
Acts 13:43
Acts 13:43
43 Now when the congregation had broken up, many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.
This would be talking about the Orthodox-like of the group, and these would be among the leaders, the more devout among the group.
43 Now when the congregation had broken up, many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.
We are seeing a transition in Paul’s ministry, and now the focus is going to be more upon the Gentiles. The Jews here would be those who were really serious about studying the Word, who were really seeking out its meaning, and the Gentile proselytes who were also genuinely involved in trying to understand the Word of God and to make it a part of their lives. They are the ones who truly express positive volition and are the ones Paul is focusing on here.
During that next week, we could speculate that Paul and Barnabas didn’t leave town and that people are coming around and having ongoing discussions. They would discuss what Paul had been saying in the synagogue the week before. This was the main topic of conversation in the Jewish community and among the Gentiles: whether this was really true. And if we can bring in some ideas from some of the other places that Paul went, the more devout are probably searching the Scriptures to see how these messianic prophecies that they knew fit in with Jesus. So the next week, after the excitement had been building all week, almost the whole city came together to hear the Word of the Lord (Kurios) from the apostle Paul.
Acts 13:44-45
Acts 13:44-45
44 On the next Sabbath almost the whole city came together to hear the word of God. 45 But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy; and contradicting and blaspheming, they opposed the things spoken by Paul.
They were filled with envy. In Romans chapter eleven, Paul says that the Jews will look at God’s blessing on the Gentiles and, eventually, stir them to jealousy so that they will want what the Gentiles have. But that is not what is happening here; just the reverse is happening. A certain segment of the Jews becomes jealous of the Gentiles, and they begin arguing and disputing with Paul.
What happens in this kind of context is that all of a sudden, it becomes about ego. Nobody is listening and trying to get to the truth of the matter; they are more concerned about refuting whatever the other person is saying so that they look like they win the debate. That is what we see a lot of today in politics and the news. People debate each other; nobody cares about the truth; they just care about being able to sound better, look better, or put down the other person. It doesn’t matter if their facts are correct, just as long as they win the debate.
Here, they are contradicting Paul. And the use of “blasphemy” in Scripture isn’t usually against people; it is against God. You can revile against some people—same word as used for blasphemy—but primarily it is used against God. They are contradicting Paul, and the blasphemy is against God. Their contradiction and hostility to Paul and Paul’s message of the gospel is a blasphemy against God. And so they are opposing everything that Paul has spoken. Again, we have to understand the Jews here are the leadership in the congregation.
Then Paul and Barnabas respond with great confidence and boldness.
Acts 13:46
Acts 13:46
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
They spoke out boldly against those who were challenging them. Remember, they were in somebody else’s house. One of the things we tell young pastors is that if they are invited to speak in someone else’s church, they should be careful they don’t step on their toes. They are not there to correct the pastor in front of his congregation, and they are not there to correct the congregation about views they have; they are there to preach the truth as clearly as they can without creating trauma in the process. Here, Paul and Barnabas are having to create trauma because they had been attacked as they had been teaching the Word. They would stand their ground and not back off, and they responded boldly.
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
This is the first time something is introduced that has some sort of implication of necessity or something that has been determined. But it is not in the deterministic sense. It is that God had a plan, and that plan was that they were supposed to take the gospel to the Jews first. So because that is the way God planned it, that was the way they executed it, so that by doing so, the rejection by the Jews would make it evident to all that the gospel should go to the Gentiles.
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
this is what we want to focus on here. Where is the emphasis on the terms of responsibility? It is on the individual Jew in the congregation. They are the ones who make the decision to reject what they have been told:
Acts 13:46 “You judge yourselves,”
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
There is a reflexive pronoun there for emphasis:
Acts 13:46 “unworthy of eternal life.”
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
It is really interesting how Paul sets this up and Luke presents it. If we don’t understand this verse, we can’t understand verse 48, which is the key verse that Calvinism stands on. What was the gospel message that Paul proclaimed? That Jesus died so that you could have forgiveness of sins. But now, he doesn’t mention forgiveness of sins here; he mentions something else—eternal life.
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
How did they judge themselves unworthy of everlasting life? By rejecting the gospel message of Paul. So, the responsibility is there. He doesn’t say, “You rejected it because you were ordained to eternal condemnation.” He doesn’t say, “You rejected it because you were predestined to the lake of fire.” He doesn’t say, “You rejected it because you were not one of the elect.”
He says, “You rejected it because you judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life.” It is all your decision. Because of that, it has consequences, one of which is that we turn to the Gentiles.
Verse 46 is followed by an explanation with a quote from the Old Testament.
Acts 13:46-47
Acts 13:46-47
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. 47 For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, That you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”
It was predicted in the Old Testament that the Jews would be the gospel bearers to bring light to the Gentiles.
Isaiah 42:6
Isaiah 42:6
6 “I, the Lord, have called You in righteousness, And will hold Your hand; I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people, As a light to the Gentiles,
So this is part of God’s command to the Jews. They were supposed to be a light to the Gentiles. And that is fulfilled through the gospel ministry of the apostles.
Isaiah 49:6
Isaiah 49:6
6 Indeed He says, ‘It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob, And to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, That You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”
Paul recognizes that and applies it to the situation.
Then, we see the contrast. It is between the Jewish hostility and their rejection of the message of forgiveness and their rejection of the offer of eternal life.
The Gentiles welcome it.
47 For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, That you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ” 48 Now when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
This is one of those verses where Calvinists stake their claim for unconditional election. When they read that, they say what precedes belief is that in eternity past, God had to make a decision as to who would be ordained to eternal life and who would not. They base that on the fact that the verb form there, “had been appointed,” is a perfect tense verb, which refers to an act that was completed at some time in the past with results that continue on through history. So, they take this phrase, “as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed,” and say that if you are not appointed to eternal life, you won’t believe.
We have to stop a minute and say let’s look and see if that is really the best way to translate this in light of the context. “As many as had been appointed to eternal life believed” is contrasted with the response of the Jews in verse 46: “since you repudiate/reject it, (not “since you weren’t appointed to eternal life”” and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, we turn to the Gentiles.” What it sounds like in the way it is usually translated is that on the one hand, there are the Jews who are making a decision to reject the gospel, and on the other hand, the Gentiles respond because they were appointed to respond. But that is comparing one idea, which is of volition in verse 46, with a deterministic idea in verse 48, and that is like contrasting apples with oranges. It doesn’t make sense, it is contradictory. It looks that way in English, so we have to go back to the original languages.
End of 2nd Service 4/13/2025
End of 2nd Service 4/13/2025
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Last week we ended looking at
47 For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, That you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ” 48 Now when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
This is one of those verses where Calvinists stake their claim for unconditional election. When they read that, they say what precedes belief is that in eternity past, God had to make a decision as to who would be ordained to eternal life and who would not. They base that on the fact that the verb form there, “had been appointed,” is a perfect tense verb, which refers to an act that was completed at some time in the past with results that continue on through history. So, they take this phrase, “as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed,” and say that if you are not appointed to eternal life, you won’t believe.
We have to stop a minute and say let’s look and see if that is really the best way to translate this in light of the context. “As many as had been appointed to eternal life believed” is contrasted with the response of the Jews in verse 46: “since you repudiate/reject it, (not “since you weren’t appointed to eternal life”” and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, we turn to the Gentiles.” What it sounds like in the way it is usually translated is that on the one hand, there are the Jews who are making a decision to reject the gospel, and on the other hand, the Gentiles respond because they were appointed to respond. But that is comparing one idea, which is of volition in verse 46, with a deterministic idea in verse 48, and that is like contrasting apples with oranges. It doesn’t make sense, it is contradictory. It looks that way in English, so we have to go back to the original languages.
The verb that is translated “had been appointed to eternal life” is τάσσω TASSO, a perfect tense verb, which means completed action. The first word, “as many as” is a pronoun ὅσος HOSOS that indicates a large number of individuals, and it focuses on each of the individuals in that group who had at some time in the past had been something, usually translated as appointed or sometimes ordained—to eternal life. That whole phrase is the subject of the verb “believed.” We have to understand what the word tasso means. Its general meaning is to appoint or station, to rank or to bring order to something. It is used as a military term, and it is obvious that some people want to bring the military context in to understand the word's meaning. However, the military context of ordering someone in ranks is just one application of this term. The lexicon Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich is the third edition of the most respected lexicon of Koine Greek. Among the meanings of the word tasso, it lists to belong to a group—“as many as belong to eternal life believed.” That is a totally different idea, isn’t it? “As many as were classed among those with eternal life.”
The second meaning listed in Arndt and Gingrich says, “It has the basic idea of giving instructions as to what must be done.”
So, if I am going to appoint you to a task, what I mean when I am instructing you is I am appointing you to a course of action. That makes the best sense to take that phrase, as identified by Arndt and Gingrich, as the second meaning of the term and to use that. It makes a little more sense. It also clearly, in other passages, has the idea of determining, appointing, or fixing something. However, we have to look at contexts to determine how these words are used. When we look at the phrase “as many as were classified (or ranked) among those with eternal life believed.” That is one way of interpreting this. That is the idea of “as many as were identified with eternal life.” The second option: “As many as were given instructions as to what must be done for eternal life believed.” That was the second idea given by Arndt and Gingrich.
Suddenly, everything is cleared up because it fits the context. This emphasizes personal decision-making, and it is contrasted to the wrong decision made by the Jews with the right decision made here.
Another suggestion that has some merit is to translate this as “As many as were devoted or oriented to eternal life.”
Who are the ones who believed? The ones who believed were the more devout Jews and the more intent Gentile proselytes who converted to Judaism and studied the Word intensely. These were the ones who followed Paul and Barnabas out and were plying them with questions because they really wanted to understand the truth. You could say they were devoted to eternal life. This word tasso is translated that way in 1 Corinthians 16:15 where at the close of the epistle, Paul is giving some personal instructions.
1 Corinthians 16:15
1 Corinthians 16:15
15 I urge you, brethren—you know the household of Stephanas, that it is the firstfruits of Achaia, and that they have devoted themselves to the ministry of the saints—
The other thing is that tasso is in a present passive or present middle construction. Middle is a reflexive mood. In Greek, in certain tenses, they don’t have a different ending for the passive and a different ending for the middle voice; they are the same. You have to discern from context whether it is going to be middle or passive. Here, it is used as an aorist middle, which has the idea that they have devoted themselves or focused on something. That makes a tremendous amount of sense if we look at Acts 13:48 again, that in contrast to verse 46, there is this one group of unbelievers who reject the truth. They consider themselves unworthy of eternal life, and in contrast to that are Gentiles who have devoted themselves or focused themselves on understanding eternal life. They are the ones who have been instructed in eternal life, and they are the ones who believe.
Acts 13:46,48
Acts 13:46,48
46 Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. 47 For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, That you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ” 48 Now when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
That makes a lot more sense than bringing in the idea of using it as “as many as were ordained or appointed.” It is not even protasso—pro = before—which would be “foreordained.” It doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t say “as many as were foreordained to believe,” it says those who were tasso to eternal life. It skips over “believe.” They are not foreordained or predestined to believe but foreordained for eternal life. Another way to understand this is that God has ordained a path to eternal life, and that path to eternal life means that you have to believe and accept the gospel. And if you accept the gospel, you are ordained to eternal life because you have followed the path that God set forth to get eternal life, and that is by faith alone in Christ alone.
Acts 13:49
Acts 13:49
49 And the word of the Lord was being spread throughout all the region.
So there was this tremendous positive response by the Gentiles and they are telling everybody about the fact that they can have forgiveness of sins by trusting in Jesus Christ alone for salvation. In contrast, the Jews are creating hostility. They are stirring up the devout and prominent men. In other words, they are going to the leaders in the community and slandering and making false accusations about Paul and Barnabas, stirring up everybody against them so that they are raising up persecution against them with the result that they are kicked out of the town and the province.
What Paul and Barnabas do is shake the dust off their feet against them, a symbol of the fact that they did not hold themselves accountable for the decisions of the people.
Acts 13:50-52
Acts 13:50-52
50 But the Jews stirred up the devout and prominent women and the chief men of the city, raised up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their region. 51 But they shook off the dust from their feet against them, and came to Iconium. 52 And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
The term “disciples” is not a synonym for the people who are saved. There are people who are saved who aren’t disciples. A disciple is someone who is committed to being a student of somebody. Some people are believers who aren’t concerned about being a student of the Scriptures. The disciples are those who are pursuing spiritual growth and making that a priority in their lives. The result is that this is another one of those statements that Luke makes in bringing us up to date on the expansion of the gospel. Those who were pursuing spiritual growth were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
This isn’t the word used in Ephesians 5:18 to be filled with the Spirit, the word pleroo. This is the word pimplemi, a descriptive term related to maturity and spiritual growth.
18 And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit,
In Ephesians 5:18 there is a verbal command with a dative of means—Be filled by means of the Spirit. Here we have a description: they were full of joy and full of the Holy Spirit. Their life was characterized by a walk by this.
Expansion: Belief vs Disobedience, Signs and Wonders. Acts 14:1-12
Expansion: Belief vs Disobedience, Signs and Wonders. Acts 14:1-12
We are now in Acts 14, where we see the continued expansion of the church. The church is now being expanded from a purely Jewish framework to a Gentile framework. This transition takes place over the next forty years and continues into the first part of the second century. It was not until approximately 135 AD that the second Jewish revolt against Rome, the Bar Kochba revolt, was seen, and a genuine, hard and fast separation of Jews and Gentiles, Judaism and Christianity, was seen. Christians still went to the synagogue until the first Jewish revolt (66-70 AD). Those who received Jesus Christ as Messiah were just considered to be another sect of Judaism, and there wasn’t this hard distinction that developed later.
The first time that a major explosive division between Judaistic Jews and Christian Jews took place was at the time of the Jewish revolt. As the armies of Rome surrounded Jerusalem, the Christians in Jerusalem recognized the prophecy of Jesus that saw Jerusalem being surrounded and that they were to flee to the mountains. After the death of Nero, there was a pause, and the Christians who were in Jerusalem and Judea left; they got out of Israel. This was viewed as an act of treason by many of the Jews, and that continued to be a problem all the way up to the second Jewish revolt in 135 AD. It is interesting that, according to the sources that we have, not a single Jewish Christian lost their life in either the first or the second Jewish revolt, because of Jesus’ prophecy that was part of the Olivet discourse.
So, this is the beginning of this outreach to the Gentiles. Paul follows the standard procedure of taking the gospel to the Jews and then to the Gentiles. He has left Antioch and gone to Iconium.
Acts 14:1
Acts 14:1
1 Now it happened in Iconium that they went together to the synagogue of the Jews, and so spoke that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed.
The “they” referred to Barnabas and Paul. They went together to the synagogue of the Jews, and again Paul has left one location and will repeat the same procedure in a second location and give the gospel first to the Jews. There is an immediate response where a large number believed. But it was to also stir up a little trouble.
This is in the province of Galatia, and this is one of the groups that the apostle Paul addressed in his very first epistle, the epistle to the Galatians. He goes from Antioch to Iconium and then to Derby and Lystra, and it is these believers who come to the gospel—they believe and are saved—but then they become confused because of the Jews who come in and pervert the gospel that Paul had proclaimed.
The name Iconium has a Phrygian background, an interesting legendary one. They had a story, a mythology, of a great flood that destroyed mankind, and life was restored when Prometheus and Athena (of Greek mythology) breathed life into human beings made from mud left over from the flood waters. So, we see how pagan myth always has a sort of core, residual memory of actual truth. They had the story of the universal flood and the idea of man being created from the chemicals of the soil. As this new life, these new human images, as they referred to them, came into existence; they were called icons. The Greek word for an image is ikon, and the root of the word Iconium is ikon.
During the Greek period, after the death of Alexander the Great, Iconium was part of the territory controlled by the Seleucid kings and controlled by Syria, and this turned Iconium into a Hellenistic city where the language was no longer the language of the Phrygians, but it became the language of the Greeks. In 36 BC, Mark Anthony gave the city to Antimus, one of the eastern rulers, and when he died in 25 BC, Iconium joined the neighboring cities of Lystra and Derby.
So Paul comes to this city, goes to the synagogue, and there proclaims the gospel. The positive news is that the Jews and the Greeks believed. The word here for believing is [πιστεύω—PISTEUO], and it simply means to believe something. To believe something means that you agree in your mind or you assent to the fact that that something is true. There are those who think that that is a weak definition of faith, that faith isn’t just intellectual assent. But that is a perfectly sound definition. First of all, if it is not intellectual, then with what organ of your body are you believing it? Some say it is heart faith, but there is no intellectual activity taking place in your heart. The heart is the physical organ that pumps your blood. So, the seat of your belief is the mind. The mind is the source of thought, and so faith is an intellectual activity.
To believe something, you have to first understand it. That doesn’t mean that you exhaustively comprehend it. For example, when the apostle Peter was out on the fishing boat and the Lord Jesus walked on the water, Peter did not understand the physical properties that allowed Jesus to walk on the water. But he had enough understanding to know that Jesus, as God and as the creator, could control these things and that he could trust Jesus to enable him to walk upon the water. So, he did it. So, faith doesn’t mean you have an exhaustive understanding of something, but you have to understand something. It is not vacuous, you don’t say, oh well, the pastor said it, so I believe it. You can’t believe something you don’t understand. That doesn’t mean you understand it exhaustively, but you have to at least be able to comprehend and restate something in your own words in a limited sense, otherwise you can’t believe it. Belief is something that says, I understand what X is, I believe that to be true. That is what faith is. It is an intellectual activity, it is not an emotional activity, and it is a result of a volitional act because you have to come to understand that something is true. That means you are moving from a position of non-understanding or non-comprehension to a position where you say you understand what that statement is expressing, and you are convinced from the evidence presented and explained to me that it is true. Another way of saying that is that we have been persuaded by evidence, by explanation, or by logic that something is true. So, there is one form of activity called persuasion, and then there is the response to the information given, to choose to be persuaded and to believe, or to resist the evidence and to not believe.
There is a reason for expressing it this way, and that is because within the so-called free grace theology, something came up that has also eroded the orthodoxy of some theologians. It was in reference to understanding the gospel. One of the problems was that they began to ask the question about what is the least amount of information I need in order to be saved, and they limited that to Jesus’ statement in John 5 that it was to simply believe in Him for eternal life.
Another aspect that came up was the aspect of persuasion. They went to these two words that we are going to see in these verses. We need to be aware of this. Part of the job of a pastor is to protect the sheep from the ravenous wolves. And the way to do that is to help the congregation to understand some of the issues that are floating around out there.
pisteuo is a word that means to believe. What is the opposite of believing? Unbelieving, disbelieving, and that would be apisteuo—negative prefix.
Acts 14:2
Acts 14:2
2 But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brethren.
We get an opposite statement here in verse 2, as translated wrongly in the NKJV. They understood a contrast is going on, so the translators of NKJV put it as belief versus disbelief or unbelief. But the Greek here translated “the unbelieving Jews” (NKJV) is not apisteuo, it is ἀπειθέω--APEITHEO. There is an etymological connection between pisteuo and peitho, but it doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t mean they are tied together in terms of usage. According to Arndt and Gingrich, apeitheo has two meanings in the text: to be disobedient or disobey. It doesn’t mean unbelief. It is related to unbelief because what is the result when you don’t believe the gospel? But remember, it is cause and effect. When you disbelieve the gospel, you are disobedient, but disbelief is not a synonym for disobedience. They are two different things.
Apeitheo is consistently translated as " disobedient in a lot of passages.
Luke 1:17
Luke 1:17
17 He will also go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, ‘to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,’ and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
John 3:36
John 3:36
36 He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
The nkjv translates it “unbelief” or “disbelief in John 3:36, which is wrong. The NASB gets it right.
John 3:36 NASB
John 3:36 NASB
36 “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
The nasb translates it correctly in John 3:36: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
The word (according to the Greek dictionaries and usage) apeitho means disobedience.
The verse that our errant brethren in the free grace movement have camped out on is Acts 28:24.
Acts 28:24
Acts 28:24
The NKJV translation reads:
24 And some were persuaded by the things which were spoken, and some disbelieved.
Once again Paul is proclaiming the gospel. Some were persuaded, and that is the word peitho. The basic, fundamental error of logic from the free grace guys is that they said: “Ah, peitho (persuade) is the opposite of disbelief.” They go to this verse as if they are opposites. Where they go with that in their theology is to say that belief is simply being persuaded; it is not a decision. So in their view it is not decisional.
What they are really arguing against is the idea that is expressed in some Baptist and some other evangelical quarters that if you can’t pinpoint when you made a decision for Jesus, then you can’t be sure you are saved. They refer to that ultimately as “decisional evangelism.” They are right as far as it goes at that point. You don’t have to know when you made a decision to trust in Jesus.
A.T. Roberston, an extremely well-known Baptist Greek scholar from the early part of the 20th century, has a somewhat confusing statement in his commentary called Word Pictures of the New Testament. He says, “Strictly, apeitheo does mean to disobey, and apisteuo mean to disbelief.”
As far as he goes at that point he is absolutely correct. But then he says,
“But that distinction is not observed in John 3:36 or in Acts 19:9 or Acts 28:24.”
But that is only in the English translations. He wrote in the early part of the 20th century, when basically there were a couple of other English translations, but primarily everything was going off the KJV. That distinction isn’t observed in the English translations but in the original Greek text. He then goes on to say that the word apeitheo means to be apeithes, which is to be unwilling to be persuaded, or to withhold belief, and then also to withhold obedience. He is waffling here. This is where critical reading skills come into play.
He starts by saying strictly peaking, apeitheo means disobedient and apisteuo means disbelief. He is waffling slightly and trying to act like he didn’t mean that. And lastly, he says the two meanings run into one another. Well, they do because one leads to the next, but they are not the same; they are not interchangeable or synonyms; there is a process that goes on. In any movement of the will and decision to believe in something, the facts persuade first. Then, when one lets himself (passive activity) be persuaded by the facts or information, then he chooses to believe or not. A person can resist facts and logic because they really don’t want to believe where the argument is taking him. He is not teachable and doesn’t want to follow that chain; he has already made up his mind, and no matter what the facts are, he is not going to respond. He doesn’t want to be persuaded.
But if he has an open mind, is humble and objective, then as he learns the facts, he is willing to be persuaded. So, you go through that process of persuasion, which culminates in his saying yes, he believes what you are saying. But the conclusion of the process of persuasion is belief. Being persuaded is not the same as believing. Persuasion emphasizes someone convincing another person of the truth, so belief and persuasion are not the same. Belief results from being willing to be persuaded. That is where volition enters in.
But our free grace brethren want to take volition completely out (some of them, not all) of this equation and say it is passive: you are being persuaded, and suddenly, you’ve been persuaded. There is a very uncomfortable similarity between how they explain this and how our high-Calvinist friends explain irresistible grace. Because you don’t make a decision, it is just something that happens to you due to an external process, and your will isn’t involved at all.
But the issue is, if the lexicons are correct, if A.T. Robertson is correct, and if most English translations translate apeitheo correctly, it means to be disobedient. Disobedience is an act of the will, a choice to reject something. This is why belief in the gospel is presented as a command in some places, like Acts 16:31.
Acts 16:31
Acts 16:31
31 So they said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
If you ignore or reject the command, it is disobedience. God commands us to obey the gospel, which means to believe that Jesus died on the cross for us. If we reject the gospel, then we are disobedient to God; that is an act of the will. So if disobedience is an act of the will, and it is an act of negative volition, then belief is a positive act of the will.
The “unbelieving Jews” in that verse mean the disobedient Jews. The term refers to unbelievers who are disobedient because that is the end result of unbelief: disobedience to the gospel.
Acts 14:2
Acts 14:2
2 But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brethren.
The word for “minds” is ψυχή PSUCHE or “soul.” We get our English word PSYCHE from this. It views the thinking part of the soul here, but it affects the entire immaterial part of life. This is one of those places where the soul simply refers to the immaterial part of a person’s being. Poisoning or embittering the minds originates with the sin nature, but it is a mental attitude. The translators correctly caught the Greek idiom here: that their thought process towards their brethren, i.e., those who responded positively to the gospel, has developed into bitterness, and that results in division in the synagogue.
There has been a huge response of Jews and Gentiles to the gospel, and they leave the synagogue and meet separately.
Acts 14:3
Acts 14:3
Acts 14:3 NASB “Therefore they spent a long time …”
3 Therefore they stayed there a long time, speaking boldly in the Lord, who was bearing witness to the word of His grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.
Long time is really not what it says in the Greek. The Greek uses the word hikanos, which means “sufficient.” They stayed there a sufficient amount of time, long enough to teach basic doctrine to those who had now become Christians.
“…{there} speaking boldly {with reliance} …”
Greek: [παρρησιάζομαι—PARRESIAZOMAI] which means to speak with boldness or confidence.
“… upon the Lord, who was testifying [μαρτυρέω--MARTUREO] to the word of His grace …” The “word” is logos, often referring to the written Word but it can also be translated “message.”
Arndt and Gingrich has long columns of different nuances to the word logos. It is the word from which we get our word “logic,” and also the word “logo.”
It has to do with a word, a message, a statement, the statement of something, the science of something. One of the meanings is simply message, so every time we see the message of God, we tend to look at it and say the Word of God, the Bible. But it is really the message of God. In context, what are they talking about? The message that the apostles are bringing. It is the message of God’s grace: they can have a free salvation because Jesus Christ provided salvation for them. So, it is a better contextual translation to say that the Lord was “bearing witness to the message of grace.”
How?
“ …as granting that signs and wonders be done by their hands.”
It was an external witness. The word there “to be done” is ginomai, something that came into existence, something that was not part of their experience but now entered into their experience—miracles to be done by the hands of Barnabas and Paul—primarily Paul.
Barnabas isn’t an apostle, capital A, like Paul is. We have to understand that basically, there are different kinds of people who are called apostles in the New Testament. The Greek verb apostello means to commission or send somebody out on a mission. It depends on who is doing the commissioning or sending, who is being sent, and what they are being sent for. So, one group in the New Testament is commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ and sent out on a mission to take the gospel to the whole world. Those are the apostles, capital A. Then, another type of apostle is commissioned by individual local churches, who are sent out on a mission. Those are apostles with a lower case A. Barnabas is not one of the original eleven; the Lord Jesus Christ does not commission him, and other passages of Scripture tell us that the requirement for being an apostle is being a witness to the resurrected Jesus Christ and being commissioned directly by Him.
We must take a little time to look at “signs and wonders” in the New Testament. This has become a confusing thing down through the ages because a lot of folk don’t understand the nature and function of the signs, wonders, and miracles in the New Testament. We have an example of their primary purpose here in this verse. Miracles were performed to bear witness to the message. It is confirmatory, it is not authenticating. It confirms the credentials of the apostles and the credentials of the Lord Jesus Christ. But it isn’t in and of itself convincing. If miracles were convincing, everybody in Iconium would have responded positively to the gospel, and Jesus would not have been crucified. Jesus performed many different signs, as John tells us in his Gospel, and He was crucified. So the performance of miracles is not designed to convince people of the truth. This was the basic error that led to a lot of confusion in the 70s, 80s, and 90s under the term “power evangelism,” which was promoted out of southern California by a pastor by the name of John Wember. It was also known as “the third wave of the Holy Spirit” and “the vineyard movement.”
There were many, many Jews as well as Gentiles who were unconvinced by the miracles because they were negative in terms of their will.
The term “signs” is used 77 times in the New Testament; 61 times in the Gospels. Remember that three of the Gospels are very similar to one another, which is why they are called Synoptic Gospels. Then the Gospel of John uses the term in a little bit of a distinct manner because he is going to present the signs that Jesus did to authenticate His Messiahship—and Acts; only seven times in Revelation, which leaves only 16 uses between Romans and Jude—so it is not a significant topic in terms of New testament epistles. Many of those uses point out the Antichrist's false miracles and problems in the end times. So, it does not talk about the miracles that church-age believers should experience.
One of the most significant signs in the New Testament is the sign of resurrection.
Matthew 12:38-39
Matthew 12:38-39
38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” 39 But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
The signs and wonders movement reverses that and says you need signs. Jesus is saying that the desire for signs is wrong. He gives signs, but seeking a sign is not putting faith and trust in the statements of Scripture. The word “signs” is only used one more time in Acts,, and that is in the next chapter (15:12).
Acts 15:12
Acts 15:12
12 Then all the multitude kept silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul declaring how many miracles and wonders God had worked through them among the Gentiles.
So after Acts 15, the term “signs and wonders” doesn’t appear again in the book.
The second word that is used here is “wonders”—teras in the Greek—occurs only 16 times in the New Testament: three times in the Gospels, where it is usually referring to false wonders in the end times, nine times in Acts, and four times in the epistles. This is not a major doctrine. When we examine the usage, it is really not talking about the expectation of the miraculous in the church age. Usually it refers back to the Gospels like in Romans 15:19
Romans 15:19
Romans 15:19
19 in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.
Paul is using the term in our passage to refer to the miracles that occurr at the beginning of his ministry, as he will shortly explain to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 12:12
2 Corinthians 12:12
2 Corinthians 12:12
12 Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds.
NASB “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.”
Paul is talking to the Corinthians about his second missionary journey. So, even though Acts doesn’t use the term signs and wonders, some miracles occurred when Paul was in Corinth during the second missionary journey. But they were the signs of an apostle; they weren’t performed by the everyday believer. They were authenticating signs to the apostles, who were the church's foundation (Ephesians 2:20).
Ephesians 2:20
Ephesians 2:20
20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,
There are also passages where these words are used in the negative: the coming of the lawless one or the Antichrist is according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders.
Signs and wonders were miraculous events used to establish the credentials of Jesus as the Messiah and the apostles as His messengers. For example, the prophecies of the Old Testament in Isaiah 42:7; 29:18; 35:4 talk about the fact that when the Messiah came the lame would walk, the blind would receive sight, the deaf would hear. These would indicate the coming of the Messiah.
Isaiah 42:7
Isaiah 42:7
7 To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the prison, Those who sit in darkness from the prison house.
Isaiah 29:18
Isaiah 29:18
18 In that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book, And the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness.
Isaiah 35:4
Isaiah 35:4
4 Say to those who are fearful-hearted, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, With the recompense of God; He will come and save you.”
Isaiah 35:5-6
Isaiah 35:5-6
5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 6 Then the lame shall leap like a deer, And the tongue of the dumb sing. For waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, And streams in the desert.
So there was a prediction that there would be miracles that would authenticate the claims of the Messiah.
Jesus’ miracles, therefore, were not performed at random or indiscriminately. He didn’t always heal those who needed healing or perform on demand. He only healed those at certain times and places related to what He was teaching and specifically to establish His credentials. Jesus didn’t heal just to heal. Otherwise, He would have healed everybody.
During the apostolic era, healing followed the same pattern. There are several examples in Acts.
End of 5/4/2025
End of 5/4/2025
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Synagogue Jews
One of the most significant signs in the New Testament is the sign of resurrection.
Matthew 12:38-39
Matthew 12:38-39
38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” 39 But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
The signs and wonders movement reverses that and says you need signs. Jesus is saying that the desire for signs is wrong. He gives signs, but seeking a sign is not putting faith and trust in the statements of Scripture. The word “signs” is only used one more time in Acts,, and that is in the next chapter (15:12).
Acts 15:12
Acts 15:12
12 Then all the multitude kept silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul declaring how many miracles and wonders God had worked through them among the Gentiles.
So after Acts 15, the term “signs and wonders” doesn’t appear again in the book.
The second word that is used here is “wonders”—teras in the Greek—occurs only 16 times in the New Testament: three times in the Gospels, where it is usually referring to false wonders in the end times, nine times in Acts, and four times in the epistles. This is not a major doctrine. When we examine the usage, it is really not talking about the expectation of the miraculous in the church age. Usually it refers back to the Gospels like in Romans 15:19
Romans 15:19
Romans 15:19
19 in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.
Paul is using the term in our passage to refer to the miracles that occurr at the beginning of his ministry, as he will shortly explain to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 12:12
2 Corinthians 12:12
2 Corinthians 12:12
12 Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds.
NASB “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.”
Paul is talking to the Corinthians about his second missionary journey. So, even though Acts doesn’t use the term signs and wonders, some miracles occurred when Paul was in Corinth during the second missionary journey. But they were the signs of an apostle; they weren’t performed by the everyday believer. They were authenticating signs to the apostles, who were the church's foundation (Ephesians 2:20).
Ephesians 2:20
Ephesians 2:20
20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,
There are also passages where these words are used in the negative: the coming of the lawless one or the Antichrist is according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders.
Signs and wonders were miraculous events used to establish the credentials of Jesus as the Messiah and the apostles as His messengers. For example, the prophecies of the Old Testament in Isaiah 42:7; 29:18; 35:4 talk about the fact that when the Messiah came the lame would walk, the blind would receive sight, the deaf would hear. These would indicate the coming of the Messiah.
Isaiah 42:7
Isaiah 42:7
7 To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the prison, Those who sit in darkness from the prison house.
Isaiah 29:18
Isaiah 29:18
18 In that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book, And the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness.
Isaiah 35:4
Isaiah 35:4
4 Say to those who are fearful-hearted, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, With the recompense of God; He will come and save you.”
Isaiah 35:5-6
Isaiah 35:5-6
5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 6 Then the lame shall leap like a deer, And the tongue of the dumb sing. For waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, And streams in the desert.
So there was a prediction that there would be miracles that would authenticate the claims of the Messiah.
Jesus’ miracles, therefore, were not performed at random or indiscriminately. He didn’t always heal those who needed healing or perform on demand. He only healed those at certain times and places related to what He was teaching and specifically to establish His credentials. Jesus didn’t heal just to heal. Otherwise, He would have healed everybody.
During the apostolic era, healing followed the same pattern. There are several examples in Acts.
What about Mark 16? First of all, there is a textual problem. It has an extended ending, but it is not well documented in terms of the text. There is a shorter ending. Nobody is really sure where the ending is. But assuming this is true:
Mark 16:18
Mark 16:18
18 they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
All of those things happened under the apostles. They didn’t last beyond the apostolic age. Jesus is not saying that all believers will exhibit these things. He is just saying that these things will occur with the gospel in the future under the apostolic ministry.
The word “signs” is used frequently in the Olivet discourse, which discusses the signs of the end times. The disciples asked, “What are the signs of your coming?” He is not talking about anything miraculous; he is talking about the indications of the Second Coming. He is talking about the counterfeit miracles of the Antichrist as well as the prophetic fulfillment of the various signs indicating the proximity of Jesus’ coming.
The Gospel with the most significant word usage is the Gospel of John. What was the sign they had just had in chapter 20? The resurrection.
John 20:30-31
John 20:30-31
30 And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
It confirms to us who Jesus Christ is. That is the function of signs. When these signs occurred in the early church,, they established the credentials for the church, for Jesus as Messiah, the apostles, and their ministry. They don’t need to be repeated in every generation, every decade, and every century. They happened once when the church was established. You don’t get reborn every decade of your life; you get born once, and then you grow on the basis of that foundation.
So we have these signs and miracles of the apostles, and the result is a division. It is not that everybody believed, but …
Acts 14:4-6
Acts 14:4-6
4 But the multitude of the city was divided: part sided with the Jews, and part with the apostles. 5 And when a violent attempt was made by both the Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to abuse and stone them, 6 they became aware of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding region.
They had accomplished their mission. They had stayed sufficiently to teach the new body of believers there, and then they left and fled to the smaller towns.
Acts 14:7
Acts 14:7
7 And they were preaching the gospel there.
Expansion: Opposition and Acceptance. Acts 14:12-28
Expansion: Opposition and Acceptance. Acts 14:12-28
Denis Prager made the observation that of all the things that he talks about and opinions that he expresses on his shows and in his programming, the one thing that consistently generates the most significant amount of hate mail and angry responses and hostility is when he talks about the fact that this nation was founded on biblical principles and that the founders had their thinking shaped by the Bible.
Because, as he pointed out, the school systems in this country, both private and public, all the way up to higher education, continuously teach the Founding Fathers as if they were just a bunch of 20th-century secularists and not products of a strong 18th-century theistic worldview, most of which was biblically based. That doesn’t mean that they were biblical exegetes, great theologians, or always the most orthodox theologians, but they thought with a biblical, theistic worldview. They looked at the world as that which a personal, infinite creator created, that there were absolutes of right and wrong that dictated all areas of behavior, and they believed that the fundamental problem of the human race was that it was corrupted by sin.
Their understanding varied from person to person, but they all shared a general worldview, just as almost everybody in our country today shares a relativistic worldview. Even most Christians have a relativistic worldview because of the culture they grew up in. It has influenced them through various media, including television, radio, movies, peers, and professors.
When we as believers take a stand for the truth and we recognize that more and more people that are in this room and people out there who are live-streaming have a level of knowledge of history, of the Bible, of theology that puts us probably … and this is not being said out of pride or arrogance, it is a condemnation of the rest of the culture. This is not elevating us because we don’t think that when we stack up against many Christians in previous generations, we are that much more knowledgeable. However, when we are compared to our generation, they are probably less than 1/1000th of a percentile range in terms of our knowledge and understanding of these things.
It’s not because we know it so well. It is because the education system, both in the church and in the culture, has deteriorated so drastically over the last thirty or forty years that people who think they know a lot are dumber than wood stumps. They simply don’t know; they don’t take the time to find out. They haven’t been educated; the education they have is misinforming them terribly. And so, we are operating on many erroneous ideas, especially when it comes to history and the Bible, particularly when people think they know the Bible because they watch shows on the History Channel or TikTok Videos.
So whenever we speak the truth we are going to face opposition, because the real issue isn’t knowledge, it isn’t education, it isn’t culture, it isn’t economics; it is a spiritual issue, and it is the same for every single individual, and all of these other collateral factors are irrelevant as far as God is concerned. Because the teaching of the Scripture is that, because of Adam’s sin, we are all corrupt in every area of our being, and if we reject God, then it just sets up an entire scenario of self-destruction in terms of our life and our mentality.
The hope is that if we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and study the Word, we can have a tremendous, complete, and rich life that is available to us as part of God’s grace package. That is where the trajectory of the passage we are studying in Acts 14 ends up.
So we see what happens as Paul goes to this town called Lystra. A miracle takes place, and this miracle sets up a validation and a hearing for the message of the apostle Paul, the message of the gospel. As a result of his message, there will be a response that sets in from the people that is entirely erroneous, but is illustrative of the reaction we get from many unbelievers. They want to reinterpret whatever is said, whatever the Bible says, in terms of their framework and their previous understanding. Then, once their errors are pointed out to them, some respond, and some enter into a hostile reaction. That tells the story of what happens in Lystra.
Acts 14:8-13
Acts 14:8-13
8 And in Lystra a certain man without strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. 9 This man heard Paul speaking. Paul, observing him intently and seeing that he had faith to be healed, 10 said with a loud voice, “Stand up straight on your feet!” And he leaped and walked. 11 Now when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” 12 And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 Then the priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front of their city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates, intending to sacrifice with the multitudes.
In our text, Lystra was a town inhabited mainly by the remnants of a small Anatolian tribe. The town was founded by Caesar Augustus in 26 BC, and he gave it a colony status in 6 BC. During that time, a number of retired Roman army veterans moved to this area. They assimilated into the town, so there wasn’t a lot of Roman influence on the culture in this area. However, the language of Latin did have an impact, and there are a number of inscriptions that have also survived that were written in Latin. It was a somewhat rural, rustic market town in a backward area in central Turkey. We don’t know why Augustus established this colony or why it was important. They did have a couple of deities in the Greek pantheon: Zeus, who was the counterpart to Jupiter in the Roman pantheon, and El in the Canaanite pantheon. The messenger of the gods was Hermes, Mercury in the Roman pantheon, and they were the patron deities in this area. That played a role in what happened in Lystra.
Some statues have been discovered from this era in this region. One has an inscription of a dedication to Zeus, and another to a dedication to Hermes. There was a statue of Zeus outside the gates, which sheds a little light on Acts 14:13, which talks about the priests of Zeus.
The temple was in front of their city. This shows us that what Luke records here about the people in Lystra and the culture of Lystra fits with everything discovered archaeologically. Once again, we see that nothing in the Bible gets contradicted by empirical evidence that survives. Nothing has ever been discovered in archaeology that contradicts the Bible. Archeology can’t prove the Bible to be true but archeology can provide evidence of what the people were like, what these towns, villages and empires were like, and what we learn from that is that everything that we find the Bible saying about a time period, a location or a culture fits perfectly with what we discover in terms of the remnants of cultures and those societies.
In Ovid‘s Metamorphoses 8.626ff there is a legend that Zeus and Hermes had visited the towns and villages of the region in human form, but did not receive any hospitality. When they came to the home of the poor and elderly Baucis and Philemon they were invited in, the couple gave them the last of their food and the best comfort they could. As Baucis prepared the meal, there was plenty of food and the wine kept “welling up of itself.” The couple became greatly afraid because of the miracle, so the gods revealed themselves and told them that they were the only people to welcome them; they would be blessed while the whole region was destroyed. The couple asked only to be priests in the temple of Zeus and that they die at the same time, so that neither had to see the tomb of the other.
Paul spoke Greek, but the crowd spoke in the Lycaonian language. As a result, Paul and Barnabas do not know what is going on!
The crowd swells and preparations for sacrifices are made by the Priest of Zeus. The Temple of Zeus was just outside, the city, perhaps on the main road into the city. Bulls and wreaths are brought for the sacrifice where the wreaths were flowery decorations for the bulls.
Notice that in this altar relief, pigs are shown. Pigs were sacrifices to Ares / Mars, so it is unlikely a pig was in this procession for Zeus and Hermes
If there is any connection between this story and the legend from Ovid mentioned above, then it is quite likely that the crowd was not going to allow Zeus to visit them again without proper worship.
We see that in Lystra there was this certain man “who had no strength in his feet, lame from his mother’s womb, who had never walked.”
Acts 14:18
Acts 14:18
18 And with these sayings they could scarcely restrain the multitudes from sacrificing to them.
Everybody in this small town knows who he is, and that he has a significant constitutional defect since birth.
You may want to compare this with what occurs in John Chapter 5, by the pool of Siloam where Christ heals the man lame for 38 years - but does so on the Sabbath.
Or John Chapter 9, where Jesus heals the man blind since birth - again on the Sabbath.
; Acts 3. There is a parallel here between the miracle that is performed and the miracle Peter performs, in Acts 3, which shows an identification of the two in terms of their role and function in God’s plan. Again, it is an aspect of God’s validation of the ministry of Paul and Peter. This man has always had this problem, and so he listens to Paul and responds to his message.
8 And in Lystra a certain man without strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who had never walked.
Note the phrase “lame from his mother’s womb.” This is the Greek phrase ἐκ κοιλίας EK KOLIAS and it means “from the womb.” There are some folks in terms of the abortion debate who want to identify this as “inside the womb.” But that is not what this means. Inside the womb we have no idea whether he is a cripple or not because he is still developing. “From the womb” means from the time of birth. It is not talking about a time period before birth. This is a prepositional phrase. A prepositional phrase is grammatically composed of two elements. There is a preposition and there is a noun. Sometimes there is an article with the noun, and sometimes not. But whatever the language, a prepositional phrase is the same; it is a preposition plus a noun object of the preposition. So, in this prepositional phrase, whether we are talking about the Greek side of it or the Hebrew side of it, it means “from birth.”
Now it is important to understand that in Hebrew, there is both a verb and a noun for the word “conception” [הָרָה—HARAH]. The debate we have today is whether life begins at conception or at birth. What are the parameters of life? What does the Bible say about the parameters of life and death? When does life begin? Does it begin at conception, or does it begin at birth?
We discover in the Old Testament that there is a verb and a noun for conception. The reason that is important is that if you were a Jew in the Old Testament period and you wanted to say that life begins from conception, you had the vocabulary to say that literally. You could say “from,” and use the noun form for conception. However, that is never used in the Old Testament. Instead, what you have is the phrase me beten, from the preposition men—the preposition for “from,” for derivation, source—and the word for the womb, beten. They have to do this because in Hebrew, there was a verb for birth, yalad. However, a prepositional phrase requires a noun to be the object of the preposition, not a verb. So, you have to have a noun form of the verb in order to have a prepositional phrase, “from birth.”
But in Hebrew, there is no noun for birth; it doesn’t exist. So, what you have to do is have a word substitution. You use an idiomatic phrase, or what is called a circumlocution—circum = go around; locution = a statement word (from the Greek word logos). So if you can’t say something one way, you have to go around and invent another way of saying something. It is sort of like the euphemism when somebody dies and you say they passed away. Since in Hebrew they didn’t have a noun for the concept of birth, they used another expression and the phrase beten. Again and again and again, whether talking about Job or Jeremiah (when God called Jeremiah from the mother’s womb) it is from birth. If they wanted to say from conception, they had a perfectly good noun for conception to use. They never used it.
The question is: If full life begins at conception, then why do we have zero examples in the Scripture of this? Usually, the translators translate it as in the NKJV “from the womb,” which is just a literal translation of an idiom. In one example in Luke, chapter one in the NIV, someone correctly translated the phrase about John the Baptist, which he would be called “from birth.” The phrase in the Greek is “from the womb,” but they understood that it meant “from birth.”
All of this is basic knowledge and is supported in the lexicons. But for some reason, because of the political antagonism generated by the Roe v. Wade decision, it is like nobody really wants to pay attention to the data. They want to go off and deal with other issues. But just because human life doesn’t begin at birth, it doesn’t validate abortion. This is another fallacy that occurs in this debate, that if full life doesn’t begin at birth, then it is okay to perform an abortion.
An article in a Jewish encyclopedia details the Orthodox Jewish view. We believe this is the correct biblical view—the nascent life view is the correct term. This is the view that when the egg is fertilized in the womb, unless something unusual happens, the end result of that fertilization is going to be a fully ensouled human being at the time of birth.
Therefore, since God has brought this together and will eventually culminate in full human life, there must be extremely serious justification for interfering with that process. So, while it is not viewed as murder because it is not a full human life yet, neither is it viewed as a wise or justifiable decision to interfere with the normal process of gestation, because this is going to be a human being eventually. We don’t have the right to interfere unless it is going to cause a major health problem or threaten the life of the mother.
This was historically the Jewish view and a prominent one in the early church. In fact, it wasn’t until sometime later that there were some different views on how the soul is transmitted. There was in the third century a theologian by the name of Tertullian—the man who coined the term trinitos to describe the doctrine related to the three persons, one essence, of the Godhead—who believed the soul was corporeal, transmitted physically through copulation (Declared heresy in the Roman Catholic church by Thomas Aquinas). So, this whole idea that life begins at conception is based on this Traducian view of the transmission of the soul, which was viewed in the Roman Catholic church as heresy.
But that did not justify abortion. Somehow, in all of the debates and antagonism that we have had, we have gotten the idea that if the soul is not there, then it is okay to abort, and that is not true. Jews have never accepted it in the Old Testament or Christians in the New Testament unless it was to save the life of the mother.
By the way I heard Arnold Fruchtenbaum comment on the rabinical view, when asked when they believed the child hada a soul? was it at conception? at birth?
Acts 14:9
Acts 14:9
9 This man heard Paul speaking. Paul, observing him intently and seeing that he had faith to be healed,
Paul is watching him and has an understanding, probably because Paul, as an apostle, has the gift of prophecy and understands that this man has faith to be healed. The Greek word for healing is the word sozo, which is usually translated in theological contexts as salvation. But the broad use of the word sozo was to be made whole, healed, and delivered from life-threatening consequences. It is used in numerous healing passages in the Gospels where Jesus heals. He either uses the word iaomai, which is the more precise word for healing, or sozo. So it is not talking about the fact that he had faith to be saved, but contextually he had faith to be healed of his crippling position.
Acts 14:10
Acts 14:10
10 said with a loud voice, “Stand up straight on your feet!” And he leaped and walked.
Notice he immediately leaped up just like the man in Acts chapter three when Peter healed him on the temple's steps. The miracle not only involves a restoration of his ability to walk. All of those atrophied tendons and muscles and nerve endings and everything that goes into the operation of his feet suddenly work. God brings all of this together, and he doesn’t have to learn how to walk, take steps, or balance himself. In contrast to many of the so-called healings advertised today, this is a constitutional defect documented by the fact that everybody around him has known him all his life and knows that this is a problem that he has. It doesn’t occur in some large arena where nobody knows the person who has come forward.
There are a lot of these so-called healing services where people will come and they have bad backs, bad knees, bad hips, and all this other stuff, and the healing part is put off until the end of the service. But they are all told to come up to the front to be put up on the stage for the healing that will occur later on. They get tired, so the little gimmick the faith-healers use is that they have wheelchairs there so that people can sit in the wheelchairs. Then it looks to the audience as if this person can’t walk because they’re in a wheelchair. They are rolled out on the stage (they could walk before, and they can walk afterwards) and they are told to get up and walk. Everybody cheers because they have just been “healed.” Well, that wasn’t the problem to begin with.
A little caveat here: God still performs miracles. He does it directly in the lives of people here and there. So, we are totally justified in praying for healing. God intervenes many times, but many times He does not. And if we direct our attention to a verse at the end of the chapter, verse 22
Acts 14:22
Acts 14:22
22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.”
They are already believers. They are already saved, so entering the kingdom is not a synonym for getting saved. It has to do with entering the fullness of life that God has for us.
How do we experience the fullness of life? We grow through testing, adversity, and going through hard times. And God knows just exactly what is needed for us. We have limitations in life; we have diseases, financial catastrophes, all kinds of things. How we handle that based on doctrine prepares us in terms of spiritual maturity for our future destiny in the kingdom of God. And that is why God doesn’t remove these things. That is why when we say, “Lord, I have this terrible situation, please remove it,” and God says just like He did to Paul, “No, you need to learn humility, to trust me, and the only way you are going to do that is if you go through this circumstance; I am not going to take it away from you.” Without that adversity, we don’t get those opportunities to grow spiritually.
The man heard Paul speaking and Paul “said with a loud voice, ‘Stand upright on your feet.’” A comment about this says there are two important things about this. First, Paul observes him intently with a stare, and second, with a loud voice. These were often two elements found in Greco-Roman myths about the coming of the gods, when the gods would become human beings and interfere with human history. And these details suggest, the comment says, in part, why the crowd reacted as it did in identifying Paul and Barnabas as incarnations of Zeus and Hermes.
Acts 14:11
Acts 14:11
11 Now when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!”
There is a response that sets in here. This is an excellent illustration of the principle in Romans 1:18-23. Especially when teaching children or grandchildren Scripture, we have these abstract principles that we find throughout the epistles of the New Testament. However, real-time stories and events in the Old Testament and New Testament often illustrate abstract principles. This is an excellent illustration of how people react to the truth of God’s Word.
Romans 1:18-19
Romans 1:18-19
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
So, what is introduced here is that when people reject God's revelation through nature, through His creation, they choose ungodliness. They either choose to know something more about whoever the creator is or they worship the creation. That is the thrust of this whole passage.
Whenever Paul encounters unbelievers, he always brings the gospel to the issue of whether or not you are worshipping the creator or the creature. With the Jews that he addressed in Antioch, he understands that they are worshipping the creator, but they have a completely flawed view of the creator and have confused things. But he approaches them from the common background of accepting the truth of the Old Testament.
With the Gentiles, as we will see, he starts with creation. Paul often expressed the gospel by starting with creation, because creation matters. Creation is not a secondary doctrine that is irrelevant to the gospel. If you don’t have the correct view of the creator God of Genesis 1-3, you don’t have a correct view of sin. You can’t completely understand the gospel. Paul always starts there. If creation doesn’t matter, why does Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, cover creation when he is dealing with Gentiles?
This is a problem for us today in communicating the gospel because a lot of people are so brainwashed by Darwinian evolution that they don’t have an accurate view of God at all. Romans 1:18 tells us that everybody knows about God, and Romans 1:19 says, “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.”
There is an unregenerate soul in the unbeliever, a depraved, corrupt soul governed by sin, and inside of that there is internal knowledge of the creator God. That is true for everybody no matter how agnostic or atheistic they are.
The Scripture says there is a knowledge of God manifest in them and God has shown it to them. But as the last phrase in Romans 1:18 says, they are suppressing that truth in unrighteousness.
This is operation truth suppression. What they have is a worldview, a mentality that is all informed by their pagan ideas, and as long as they are giving that priority, as soon as they hear the truth, they immediately reshape it and redefine it, transform it, gobble it up, and re-articulate it in terms of their worldview. This is an instantaneous action of their soul. They hate the truth, suppress it, twist it, and distort it; that is how it comes out.
We see a perfect example of it here in Acts 14. As soon as they saw this man get up and walk, they began chatting to themselves in their ancient language, which Paul and Barnabas did not understand. All they heard was a lot of excited chatter and talking. Instead of saying Paul and Barnabas were coming here to tell us about the truth, they immediately say this is Zeus and this is Hermes. They instantly reshape what is happening and reinterpret everything within their false presuppositions. Pagan, non-biblical thinking is just eating up the truth instantly and reshaping it. That is how truth suppression operates.
Paul says, Romans 1:20
Romans 1:20
Romans 1:20
20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,
It is clear to them that they have just been suppressing it forever. They are without excuse, i.e., there is enough information given in creation for them to know that God is there so that they can be held accountable for that.
The word for “clearly seen” is καθοράω—KATHORAO, meaning to see or perceive something thoroughly. They have a complete and thorough understanding; there is no excuse for them whatsoever. It is understood (νοέω--NOEO), they know God exists somewhere in their soul.
Romans 1:21
Romans 1:21
21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
They come to know God (γινώσκω-GINOSKO) but they don’t glorify Him as God. Their souls become empty and futile and worthless through the use of this word ματαιος--MATAIOS, meaning just to be rendered empty or null and void. Their opinions, their reasoning, everything becomes distorted because of negative volition, their hostility to God, which means their hearts are darkened. They are called foolish hearts, which indicates senselessness. It doesn’t matter how many degrees they have or how educated. Because they rejected God they became foolish.
Romans 1:22
Romans 1:22
22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,
This is what happens here in Lystra. We see how they redefine everything.
Acts 14:12-14
Acts 14:12-14
12 And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 Then the priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front of their city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates, intending to sacrifice with the multitudes. 14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and ran in among the multitude, crying out
They are just horrified.
End of 5/11/2025
End of 5/11/2025
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Pagan
Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Gospel for Pagan
We are dealing with the issue of Paul’s gospel presentation to the Pagan city of Lystra.
Let’s drop back into the text to see what is happening.
Acts 14:8-13
Acts 14:8-13
8 And in Lystra a certain man without strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. 9 This man heard Paul speaking. Paul, observing him intently and seeing that he had faith to be healed, 10 said with a loud voice, “Stand up straight on your feet!” And he leaped and walked. 11 Now when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” 12 And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 Then the priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front of their city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates, intending to sacrifice with the multitudes.
Acts 14:14
Acts 14:14
14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and ran in among the multitude, crying out
This is where we get to their presentation of the gospel.
Acts 14:15
Acts 14:15
15 and saying, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them,
We often say this but what we mean is stop. The implication here is: Stop doing these things.
“… We are also men of the same nature as you …”
The Greek word is ὁμοιοπαθής-HOMOIPATHES, which indicates the same emotions, the same makeup, the same human beings—We are not gods.
“… and preach the gospel to you that you should turn from these vain things …”
Gospel is [εὐαγγελίζω, the good news] Turn is the Greek word ἐπιστρέφω, a synonym for metanoeo, and it means to turn. It is simply saying to quit believing the things you have been believing and turn toward God; quite believing the empty things and turn to the living God.
“… to a living God …”
He is a living God. He talks about Jesus, who was raised from the dead. [εὐαγγελίζω, the good news]
“… WHO MADE THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH AND THE SEA AND ALL THAT IS IN THEM.”
When we say that today we hear, what about evolution? People get into a debate right away. Paul’s model for evangelism must be flawed. No. If you can’t get God right, you can’t get the gospel right. We have to ensure that the person isn’t just thinking about their view of God and sin. We have to clarify and define all the terms so that they are understood. Most people in our culture today don’t have a clue who God is. They have a lot of misconceptions because they have heard a lot of Christians who are legalistic, extremist in different ways, and they don’t know much about the Scriptures. It is incredible that the vast number of pastors teaching the Word today have had no training, and the many who do have training are then swayed away from the truth through academic arrogance. So, there are very few who really teach the truth. But there are at least “seven thousand” who haven’t bowed the knee. They are out there, but they are just rejected or ignored.
Common Grace: Repentance and Turning to God. Acts 14:12-28
Common Grace: Repentance and Turning to God. Acts 14:12-28
Paul has faced considerable hostility and antagonism, and he possesses the spiritual courage that informs his moral courage, enabling him to stay the course despite threats, anger, resentment, and conspiracies that often culminate in physical violence and attacks. This happens in Lystra before they leave and head to Derby.
In this section, we examine a few verses that focus on his message in Lystra, as well as two key doctrines: common grace and aspects related to repentance and turning, including the role of repentance in salvation.
At the end of his ministry in Derbe, Paul is going to reverse course. That demonstrates the courage of the apostle Paul, as he was essentially driven out of each of these locations. Now he is going to go back because of his commitment to the ministry that the Lord Jesus Christ has given him, where people are there who wish to take his life, to make sure that these groups of believers are well-founded and well-led.
We see that this is another example of truth suppression. The response of the unbeliever sitting on negative volition, hostility toward God, is that when he hears the truth, he reacts against it. The position of the unbeliever, having rejected the evidence of God in the heavens (as articulated in Romans 1:18-19, as we reviewed it last week) is that he is suppressing the truth.
Romans 1:18-19
Romans 1:18-19
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
What happens in the psychology of truth suppression is that, before long, people get to the point where they are believing the lie so profoundly that they can’t think in terms of truth or objectivity anymore. Two things happen. One is that they no longer understand the truth. It doesn’t make sense to them anymore because they have completely reversed the polarities in their thinking so that, as the prophets of the Old Testament say, they are now calling bad good and calling good bad. And once a culture as a whole gets so caught up in a psychosis of rejection of Scripture, then you have a culture that is operating on pure fantasy. They have made up their own reality. They start with their own idea of how the human race came into existence; they hate the idea that God created the human race in the image of God. They hate God and they want Him out of the picture; they are suppressing and rejecting that truth, so they have to come up with some way to explain how we got here.
In the ancient world, they had creation myths, and in the modern world, we call it science, but evolution is just another creation myth. And it flies entirely in the face of what the Bible says in terms of who man is and how man got here. Either the Bible is right completely and totally, which means that God created recently (maybe 5-6000 years ago), and He made everything, including the human race, in six consecutive 24-hour days, and He created a perfect world for the habitation of the human race. And the human race was created as a representation of God to rule over creation, not for creation to rule over them. As Christians, we should call it creation, not nature. Nature implies some autonomous entity that exists as a result of happenstance, whereas creation makes it clear that it has a creator and that that creator designed the creation to be exactly what it is. And man was set over that creation and is unique as a living being because mankind is in the image and likeness of God. He is to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and the beasts of the field. He, therefore, is given responsibility to watch over and to care for God’s creation, not to destroy it.
There is a biblically correct view of how man is to be a steward of creation. In contrast, ninety-nine per cent of what we get out of the so-called green movement is politically motivated from pagan mythology where creation is worshipped over the creator, because the creation—what they refer to as nature—is autonomous, the product of an evolutionary process that is not the creation of God, and therefore nature must be maintained. If it is destroyed, then they blame the human race because, in the view of the ecological movement's mythology, it is mankind that is the malignant disease on the planet, and it would be better for humanity to be removed.
Many people don’t understand the distinction between a biblical view of creation and responsible stewardship, and what is often referred to as environmentalism. However, many aspects of environmentalism are borrowed concepts from Judeo-Christianity. There are numerous Mosaic Laws in the Scripture related to the proper and responsible stewardship of creation. This has always been part of the Judeo-Christian ethic. However, in paganism, creation is deified, so that the human race now serves creation, rather than overseeing and ruling over it. This is all part of truth suppression, where the unbeliever redefines everything from A to Z in the creation and ends up worshipping the creature rather than the creator.
The Scripture is clear, both in Old and New Testament passages, that there is enough evidence in the universe, in the heavens and on the earth, of the order and purpose and structure of everything in creation, that there is a creator; enough evidence to make man accountable so that, as Romans chapter one puts it, “they are without excuse.” So that when they stand at the end of time before the great white throne judgment, they will be held accountable for having rejected God.
Romans 1:20
20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,
This really forms a backdrop to Paul’s message in Acts 14. Initially, they performed a miracle on a man who was born a cripple. It was such a profound miracle that all of the people in Lystra knew about it, and they made this assumption from their pagan, non-biblical worldview that these must be the gods of their pantheon, the Greek gods Zeus and Mercury.
Acts 14:12-13
Acts 14:12-13
12 And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 Then the priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front of their city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates, intending to sacrifice with the multitudes.
As soon as Paul and Barnabas catch on and realize what is going on, they have a typical Jewish response to something that is blasphemous, and they begin to tear their robes.
Acts 14:14
Acts 14:14
14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and ran in among the multitude, crying out
There was an immediate reaction, and they immediately tried to stop what was going on.
Paul begins to challenge them, and he gives a succinct message to them. Notice the difference between this message and the message he gave in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia. When he started in Acts chapter thirteen in Pisidian Antioch, he started with the Old Testament.
Acts 13:16-17
Acts 13:16-17
16 Then Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said, “Men of Israel, and you who fear God, listen: 17 The God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land of Egypt, and with an uplifted arm He brought them out of it.
By “our fathers,” Paul means the patriarchs of Israel. That started in Genesis chapter twelve. Because he recognizes that his audience is scripturally informed and educated, they are familiar with the Old Testament. So he doesn’t have to define God for them. They know who God is because they are familiar with the Old Testament. But this is a different group in Acts chapter fourteen; they are pagans. When they hear the word “God,” they think of the gods of the Greek pantheon, which are just grandiose images of human beings. The Bible says that God created man in His image, but in paganism, the human race returns the favor and creates the gods in their image.
So, Paul has to address this crowd differently from the other Jewish crowd. This is a principle that we have to learn. Not everybody we witness to is going to be the same. They will have different backgrounds and understandings, and what we need to do sometimes is talk to them, not just use vocabulary familiar to us, because they may not have a clue what we are talking about. When we talk about God, we have no idea what they are hearing and what they are listening to. When we talk about Jesus, they may have no idea who Jesus is.
Acts 14:15
Acts 14:15
15 and saying, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them,
What Paul says to these men, as unsaved, untaught, scripturally ignorant Greeks, is that they should turn from these useless things to the living God. The emphasis is on the living God. The Lord whom we worship is the Lord Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead. He is a living God, the source of life. Notice he is teaching by way of contrast.
Paul isn’t being politically correct here. He says, “I want you to turn from these useless things.” He would immediately be thrown out of America because he is too negative, too critical. How arrogant can he be to call their religion useless?!! But if you are a biblically-based thinker, you have to recognize that any religious system other than biblical Christianity is futile; it is not going to provide anything for you. Paul immediately brings in creation, and he is paraphrasing here from Exodus 20:11
Exodus 20:11
Exodus 20:11
11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
Paul doesn’t even explain the gospel here, does he? The closest he gets is that you have to turn away from these useless things to the living God. He will eventually develop it, but not here.
It is important to understand the terminology here. The word is “turn.” The Greek word is ἐπιστρέφω—EPISTREPHO . It means simply, to turn, to return, or to turn back. It is the word used in the LXX to translate the Hebrew word shub, the word used in Deuteronomy 30:2.
Deuteronomy 30:2
Deuteronomy 30:2
2 and you return to the Lord your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul,
What is interesting is that we tend to equate this word as if it were a perfect synonym for another word that is heavily loaded theologically, and that is the word “repent.” Repent is not an exact synonym to turn. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for “repent,” NACHAM, is never translated by epistrepho in the LXX; it is always translated by the word group metanoeo.
The basic meaning given from the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology for metanoia means change of mind, repentance, or conversion. The verb metanoeo means to change one’s mind. Some would argue that it means having remorse or regret. There is a problem with that. Sometimes we experience remorse or regret, but sometimes when we change our mind about something, it is not accompanied by any particular emotion. The word “remorse” is a challenging term because, in translations across the board, there are people who want to translate “confess sin” as “feel sorry for sin” or “have remorse for sin.” It is taking a secondary feature, emotion, and making it a primary part of the word's meaning. The primary part of the meaning of this word is to change your mind: META is the Greek preposition, which means “after”; NOIEO has to do with thinking, the mind, and so it is an afterthought. You have done one thing, you have second thoughts, and so you change your mind, and you go in another direction.
But there is an element of regret there, and that may accompany the sense of the term. Metanoeo does seem to have, at times, an emotive idea. But that is a different idea than the word “turn” or shub.
The question that arises for people is: Do we need to repent of our sins in order to be saved? This is the answer of many Calvinists or many legalists who say: “Oh, you haven’t repented of your sins.” Well, which sins? The ones I have committed or the ones I haven’t committed yet? That is just a facetious question that needs to be asked. What sins am I repenting of? The past ones or the future ones? And how much should I repent?
Here’s another thing to think about. If you think repentance is necessary to be saved, then the Gospel of John, written specifically so people could be saved (John 20:31),
31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
uses the word “believe” over 95 times, but it never uses the term “repent.” If repentance is necessary for salvation, then either repentance doesn’t mean what people think it means, or you can’t get saved reading the Gospel of John. Those are the only basic conclusions that you can go with.
New Testament thought is shaped by Old Testament thought. This can be demonstrated simply by the fact that when John the Baptist and Jesus showed up on the scene in Israel, the message was: “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” The word used was metanoeo. So, when preaching “repent” to the people, they had to know what it meant. Where did they get the idea? They got it from the Old Testament, so they already knew what repent meant. They were not like modern Christians who have had two thousand years of bad theology to confuse them over the meaning. Therefore, we must look to the Old Testament to understand the meaning of this word. We have one very clear passage that gives us a good understanding of what the word “repent” means.
Jeremiah 8:6
Jeremiah 8:6
6 I listened and heard, But they do not speak aright. No man repented of his wickedness, Saying, ‘What have I done?’ Everyone turned to his own course, As the horse rushes into the battle.
So this is how they would repent of their wickedness—“Saying, ‘What have I done?’” The word there for “repent” is נִחָם֙--NICHAM, and to repent means to second-guess what you’ve done. It doesn’t necessarily imply remorse. It may imply regret. Regret does not have to be a heavily emotive term. It can be: “I’ve made a bad decision; now I have to straighten it out.” That gives us the idea. What we have there is that the idea of repent means, 'What have I done?' It is regret; it is changing the mind.
Repent has a narrower meaning. You can repent in the sense of just being sorry for your sins, or sorry that you were caught. But you have to turn. Turning is a volitional concept that also includes the idea of changing your mind. The turning goes beyond repentance; it is the next step.
On a logical timeline, the first thing that must happen when a person hears the gospel is for them to change their mind. They repent. But that is not enough. Perhaps you simply have a greater sense of regret. This is if it is addressed to an audience of unbelievers. If it is addressed to an audience of believers, it doesn’t mean the same thing as when you address unbelievers. For believers, it essentially means confessing one's sins. You need to admit you’re wrong, acknowledge your sins, and then reestablish your fellowship. However, with an unbeliever, it means they need to change their mind about those false gods or false systems of thought they have held, and then make the mental shift from where they were to where they need to be, which is logically followed by belief.
If someone says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,” then when you believe, what have you done? You have, without stating it, changed your mind (METANOEO), turned, and believed. It summarizes the whole process. Some people say you have to repent, but repentance isn’t mentioned everywhere. It is not mentioned here; Paul merely says to turn. However, to turn, it presupposes a change of mind. These terms are not precise equivalents, but they effectively describe statements about what happens before faith. Faith is simply believing in Jesus Christ: that He is the one who died on the cross for your sins.
Acts 14:16
Acts 14:16
16 who in bygone generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways.
This is the doctrine of common grace, basically. In the ancient world God worked only through the Gentiles from the time of the creation of Adam until the call of Abram in Genesis 21:1. But because of the rejection of God on the part of the human race, especially as it was exhibited at the tower of Babel, God turned away from the Gentiles and focused on blessing the entire human race through the descendants of Abraham—specifically Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. What Paul is describing here is that in bygone generations, i.e., back at the time of Genesis 12, God allowed the nations to follow their own ways.
Acts 14:17
Acts 14:17
17 Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.”
He provided for all of the Gentile nations. This introduces the concept of common grace.
Notice Romans 1:18 and Psalm 19:1-3
Romans 1:18
Romans 1:18
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
Psalm 19:1-3
Psalm 19:1-3
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. 2 Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard.
Common grace refers to God's extension of blessings to all human beings through His general providence, encompassing His oversight of history and the general benefits He provides for all individuals in their daily lives.
Matthew 5:45
Matthew 5:45
45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Psalm 145:8
Psalm 145:8
8 The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, Slow to anger and great in mercy. 9 The Lord is good to all, And His tender mercies are over all His works.
Romans 2:4
Romans 2:4
4 Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?
So the goodness of God is designed to lead people to that point where they can change their minds about God.
In terms of grace, there are general blessings to all mankind. There are blessings related to God’s sovereign plan. God had a sovereign plan related to the British Empire in the 19th century. As the British Empire sent its soldiers to establish colonies and conquer nations and peoples, it always accompanied them with missionaries who took the gospel to numerous places around the world. That was part of God’s general blessings to all of mankind. It doesn’t mean that God was putting His stamp of approval on everything that the British Empire did, but God, in His general common grace, used that to bring the gospel to millions of people.
We have blessing by association. We have generations of Americans who are blessed by their association with the founding fathers who established a just and righteous form of government, and one that, while not perfect, contained within itself means of correction so that it could continue, if the Constitution is followed, to provide liberty and freedom to all.
There are blessings related to the general quality of life that apply to both believers and unbelievers. It has nothing to do with what they have done. And God also restrains evil.
2 Thessalonians 2:7
2 Thessalonians 2:7
7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.
That is a reference to the restraining ministry of the Holy Spirit during this age.
This is common grace, and this is what Paul began with.
Acts 14:18-19
Acts 14:18-19
18 And with these sayings they could scarcely restrain the multitudes from sacrificing to them. 19 Then Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there; and having persuaded the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead.
Notice how the crowd turns on a dime. One minute they want to worship them as gods, the next minute they are stoning them. That is a perfect picture of truth suppression. They didn’t fit with that pagan idea. They tried to absorb and redefine what they were teaching. And when Paul and Barnabas said no, what was the pagan response? They went from adoring them to hating them, and they began to stone them.
The Greek word translated “supposing” is νομίζω—NOMIZO, which usually means to suppose something that is not true; a false assumption. Paul wasn’t dead. If he were Luke would have said he was dead.
Acts 14:20
Acts 14:20
20 However, when the disciples gathered around him, he rose up and went into the city. And the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.
In vv. 21 to the end of the chapter we have a summation of what they did.
Acts 14:21
Acts 14:21
21 And when they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch,
A disciple is not equivalent to a believer. A lot of believers are not disciples. A disciple is somebody who is a student of Jesus. There are a lot of people who are just believers. They are going to be saved but they haven’t made a decision in their soul to be a student of the Word of God. So they made disciples and then returned back to all of those places that ran them out of town,
Acts 14:22
Acts 14:22
Acts 14:22 strengthening the souls of the disciples …”
22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.”
They did that by teaching them the Word of God again.
22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.”
Don’t give up. Just because you are saved, that is not the end game. The ultimate goal is to achieve spiritual maturity, so that you are prepared to go and rule and reign with Jesus Christ in His kingdom.
Who is Paul talking to here? He is talking to disciples, those who have already been saved. They want to press on to spiritual maturity. So when he is telling them about entering the kingdom, entering the kingdom doesn’t mean getting saved. They are already saved. Entering the kingdom is about the future role and responsibility of ruling and reigning with Christ in the millennial kingdom. That only comes through going through Tribulations. All believers are heirs of God, but only those who suffer with Christ will be joint heirs of Christ and will rule and reign with Him in eternity. This is the second category. Paul is encouraging them to press on in the adversities of life, stick with their beliefs in Christianity and the Word of God, so that they’re prepared for their future in the kingdom of God.
Acts 14:23-26
Acts 14:23-26
23 So when they had appointed elders in every church, and prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed. 24 And after they had passed through Pisidia, they came to Pamphylia. 25 Now when they had preached the word in Perga, they went down to Attalia. 26 From there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work which they had completed.
What About Those Goy? Acts 15:1-4; Gal 2:1-10
What About Those Goy? Acts 15:1-4; Gal 2:1-10
Concluding Acts chapter fourteen.
Acts 14:21-22
Acts 14:21-22
21 And when they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, 22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.”
Several key points need to be highlighted here to help us understand the role and purpose of pastoral ministry. We have the phrase “preached the gospel” here. That needs to be clarified. Two participles are translated with the English “ing” in verse 22—“strengthening” and “encouraging/exhorting”. What does it mean to strengthen and exhort, and how does that relate to verse 21, because as we look at these two verses, they are one sentence. The participles “strengthening” and “exhorting” modify the main verb, which is “they returned.” Therefore, we must be careful to exegete this and evaluate the grammar, as it helps reveal what they are doing more clearly than what is apparent on the surface in the English text.
First of all they “preached the gospel,” and once again we have the familiar word that has come over into the English as “evangelize” or the noun “evangelism.” It is the word euangelizo, and it is an aorist middle participle here. That is important because grammatically participles give their time sense, if it is an adverbial participle like this one, from the main verb. The main verb, “returned,” is in the aorist tense. When you have an aorist participle with an aorist tense verb, or with any verb, the action of the participle comes before the action of the main verb. With a present tense participle, the action is at the same time as the main verb, and a future tense participle comes after the main verb. The English translation of “preached the gospel” implies a simultaneous action, using the temporal word “when.” This is accurate; it is a temporal participle. But an aorist participle precedes the action of the main verb, so it should be “after they had evangelized the city.” The best translation would be “after they had explained the gospel to the city.”
The following participle is the word for “making many disciples,” derived from μαθητεύω-MATHETEUO, which means to make a disciple or a student of someone, or, in a slightly more active sense, to teach or instruct someone. So they are doing two things here. First, they are evangelizing, and secondly, they are instructing those who have responded to the evangelism. This is the mission of the universal church. Jesus said to the disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. So, they are fulfilling that function of what is called the Great Commission.
Matthew 28:19-20
Matthew 28:19-20
19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
Then, in Matthew 28:19-20, it goes on to describe how the disciple-making process continues—by baptizing. That doesn’t mean they are saved by baptism, but in the early church, it was understood that if you trusted Christ as Savior, there was nothing that hindered you from receiving water baptism. It was assumed that you would be baptized immediately. It didn’t make you more saved or less saved, more sanctified or more spiritual. It was a powerful object lesson to illustrate the reality of positional truth. If people are saved and undergo water baptism, then they have the opportunity to be taught the significance of being baptized by the Holy Spirit. Water baptism symbolizes the believer's identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, so that they are now raised to new life in Christ. And by having new life in Christ, as Paul explained in Romans chapter six, that old life of being a slave to the sin nature has been broken, and we are no longer under that tyrannical relationship where the sin nature is the only master.
So when Matthew 28 says we are to make disciples by baptizing, that is summarizing the whole evangelism operation—“and teaching,” which is what you do after salvation. Sadly, there are too many congregations where all the pastor does is evangelize. There is never anyone telling believers what to do after they are saved, and so we end up with a lot of spiritual bed babies who are just in a spiritual nursery, and no one seems to know how to get them out of the nursery.
So, what Luke is reminding everybody here is that they are doing what they were told to do. They are going out and sharing the gospel with everybody, and then they are teaching them. They then returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, even though there was going to be a lot of persecution, possibly, and maybe it would cost them their life. There were those who hated them and had already demonstrated that they were angry enough to kill Paul.
Then, verse 22, which in English appears disconnected. The first word, “strengthening,” is the Greek word ἐπιστηρίζω--EPISTERIZO, a participle here. Participles without an article modify the verb; they are adverbial participles. Here, it modifies the main verb, which is “returned.” So, they returned strengthening. How does strengthening relate to returning? Returning is a past tense verb, an aorist tense, and now we have a present tense participle. What did we see previously? Past tense comes before, present tense comes roughly at the same time, and future tense happens after. As they returned, they were strengthening the souls of the disciples. That is the main idea, and it has the idea of strengthening, supporting, and building up. They are teaching them the Word.
How do we know that? That is explained in the very next participle, “exhorting.” This again is a present active participle, but it should be understood this time as an instrumental participle. So, they returned, strengthening the disciples' souls by exhorting them. There shouldn’t be a comma there in English. How do you strengthen them? By challenging them with the Word. You are teaching them the Word and then challenging them to obey the Word and transform their thinking according to what the Word says.
They are exhorting them to continue in the faith. That involves a couple of things. First of all, the phrase ” here doesn’t mean to continue believing in Jesus. It is not to continue in faith but to continue in the faith. When there is the article in front of the noun for faith, it refers to the set body of beliefs, the entire body of doctrine that a person holds to.
They were challenging the believers to continue in the faith, i.e., to adhere to sound doctrine, to continue studying and understanding the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles, and to continue growing and maturing based on that established body of beliefs. They challenged them to continue because that threat, the temptation for believers, is to give up.
The word for “continue” is a form of the word meno, ἐμμένω—EMMENO, which the Lord Jesus uses in John 15 when He says, “Abide in me.” It is a word that is related to fellowship—continue in fellowship, continue walking with the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. So they are challenged to continue in the faith.
And they are teaching, related to the kingdom of God, that we must go through many tribulations to enter the kingdom of God. This is interesting because there are people today who think that we are in some form of the kingdom of God. In Acts, the issue is repentance, for the kingdom will come. The kingdom is a literal, physical, geographical, and political kingdom on earth, headed by the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus ascended, according to Revelation 3:22, He was seated—not on His throne, He is not the King yet—on His Father’s throne at the right hand of the Father, and according to Daniel chapter seven is waiting for the Ancient of Days to give Him the high sign to take the kingdom. He hasn’t become the King yet, and we have a lot of really sloppy language today where people talk about doing something for the kingdom and worshipping our King, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not our King yet. He is not going to assume the crown and be crowned as King until the Second Coming.
What Paul is teaching here is the importance of challenging people to persevere in doctrine, to study the Word, and not give up in their study of the Word. And the teaching is summarized: “we must go through many tribulations to enter the kingdom of God.” Here, Paul is using a slightly different way than he has in other places. It is obviously not talking about salvation. Entering the kingdom for this passage implies preparing to serve in the kingdom.
Acts 14:23
Acts 14:23
23 So when they had appointed elders in every church, and prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
Notice the last phrase, “in whom they had believed.” It is not as clear in English, but in Greek, the verb there is PISTEUO, and it is a pluperfect active. A perfect tense verb means completed action in the past, and it emphasizes the present results of a completed past action. The pluperfect refers to the past results of a completed past action. A perfect is the present result of a completed past action; the pluperfect intensifies that and talks about the past results of a completed past action. The point is that they had already completed their action of believing a long time before the events of vv. 22, 23, and it had results from that belief before vv. 22, 23. So their justification for salvation had occurred the first time Paul went through town.
Now he comes back and encourages them to stay the course, saying, “Through many tribulations you will enter the kingdom.” He is talking about the same thing as in Romans 8:17 in relation to inheritance: “heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ if we suffer with Him.” Therefore, it is not being saved because the context indicates that they have already been saved. They are not getting saved again by going through tribulations; that would be a works salvation.
There are three terms in the New Testament for church leaders, for a pastor. One is the term “bishop” or “overseer.” That focuses on the leader in terms of his authority and his responsibilities. The term “elder” focuses on his maturity. The term “pastor-teacher” emphasizes his responsibility to feed the flock and to lead. These terms are used interchangeably in 1 Timothy, Titus, and Acts, and this gives us our understanding.
Acts 14:27
Acts 14:27
27 Now when they had come and gathered the church together, they reported all that God had done with them, and that He had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.
That last phrase is crucial for understanding the historical flow of events in Acts. Now the door is fully open to Gentiles. When the church first started in Acts 2, it was all Jewish. So, this phrase is a transitional statement to foreshadow the focus of the next chapter, which is the Jerusalem Council.
Acts 14:28
Acts 14:28
28 So they stayed there a long time with the disciples.
That is, those who had made themselves students or learners of the Scriptures.
Acts chapter fifteen comes at the end of the first missionary journey, and what we will see here is how, even during the apostolic period, when there was direct revelation from God to the apostles, a progressive understanding of doctrine still emerged among them. It is not that anything changes, but that they get greater clarity, especially on the gospel. The issue that comes to a head—it’s not the last time, nor is it the first time—is when the apostles and the elders meet together and confer in a more detailed manner on the issues related to the Gentiles coming into the church. This had already begun in Acts, chapter eleven. This is critical here because they have to define this. Paul has come back from his missionary journey when there has been this explosive outreach to Gentiles and this extremely strong and hostile, violent reaction from a certain percentage of the Jews in the synagogues.
Now it is becoming increasingly clear that the nature of this new movement, the church, will focus more and more on the Gentiles, and therefore, they must raise this question. What do we do with the Gentiles? They come in and do things and eat things that are offensive to the Jews, who didn’t think it was really spiritual according to the Mosaic Law. There were conflicts between a Pharisaic element in the church (by now there were a number of Pharisees who had trusted in Christ as savior) who still had a holdover of legalism from their days before they were Christian. They are going to come into conflict with the apostle Paul.
The first part of Acts 15 raises the problem. In verse 5, the phrase “some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed” makes it very clear that these individuals are believers. In their post-salvation spiritual life, they have become entangled in legalism. “… saying, 'It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses.”
There is a conference involving the apostles and the elders (a term referring to the pastors in the congregations of Jerusalem), during which a lengthy debate ensues. Verse 7 “After there had been much debate …” They really hashed this out, and it is a progress in understanding. God isn’t just dumping a revelation on them to handle the problem; they've to wrestle with the scripture they’ve been taught and come to a conclusion. This is another important passage for understanding the principles of decision-making and God’s will. The Holy Spirit is directing them, but not in a way that they can be consciously aware of it. He is the invisible hand that is unseen and unfelt, yet overseeing the entire process. And when they do make the right decision, we read that they say, “It seemed good to us,” two or three times. Notice they don’t say, “God revealed this to us.” After working through all the issues, they must apply doctrine from the wisdom stored in their own soul to this highly contentious and divisive issue. Then they must decide how to implement their decision among the congregations.
Acts 15:1
Acts 15:1
1 And certain men came down from Judea and taught the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”
These aren’t leaders. This is not a deputation sent from Jerusalem to Antioch; it is just some men with their own theological agenda.
1 And certain men came down from Judea and taught the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”
This is reiterated in verse 5: “But some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed stood up, saying, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses.’” This is the first time they are identified as Pharisees. They were believers, but they were coming out of a legalistic background. After the resurrection, a large number of Pharisees responded to the gospel, some of whom held on to the legalistic background.
What we should recognize here is that we look at this through specific theological lenses. We need to eliminate that and adopt a different perspective on this.
Think of this as if we were an extremely patriotic first-century Jew. What had happened in your history? Approximately 320 BC, after Alexander had conquered most of the Middle East, the Greek empire was divided among his generals. For the next 200 years or so, there was a prolonged period of conflict between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. And who was in between? Israel, which sits on most of the major trade routes that go through the Middle East. The Ptolemies controlled the area for the first part of that period, and then the Seleucids took over in the early 100s. They had a really evil Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes. He was a type or picture of the Antichrist from the Old Testament. He was so horrible and hated the Jews so much that he had a pig sacrificed on the altar in the temple and pig blood scattered on the inside of the holy of holies. He desecrated the temple, and the Syrians passed laws that made it illegal for Jews to circumcise their male children. It was a death penalty offence to hold copies of the Torah. Their goal was to obliterate Judaism completely.
The sign of the Abrahamic covenant was circumcision. In second temple Judaism, circumcision also became a symbol of some being obedient to the Mosaic Law. We have a passage from one of the apocryphal books (with good historical value but not part of the Old Testament), 1 Maccabees 1:11-15, which gives us a sense of what was happening in Israel. People were wanting to give up their Judaism; they were losing their identity as Jews. This is what this passage in Maccabees shows:
1 Maccabees 1:11-15
1 Maccabees 1:11-15
11 In those days there appeared in Israel transgressors of the law who seduced many, saying: “Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles all around us; since we separated from them, many evils have come upon us.” 12 The proposal was agreeable; 13 some from among the people promptly went to the king, and he authorized them to introduce the ordinances of the Gentiles. 14 Thereupon they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem according to the Gentile custom. 15 They disguised their circumcision and abandoned the holy covenant; they allied themselves with the Gentiles and sold themselves to wrongdoing.
This created a huge controversy among the Jews there, and the culture is just polarized and imploding because of this large number of Jews who were compromising with Greek heathenism. And they “made themselves uncircumcised.” The issue was that circumcision was a patriotic act. It indicated that a Jew was devoted to the Abrahamic covenant, dedicated to the tradition and history of the fathers, and it was a sign that he wasn’t assimilating to the enemy, that he wasn’t becoming a cultural traitor. This is the background. When we enter the first century and observe the Pharisees and Sadducees' emphasis on the importance of circumcision, we need to cut them some slack, as they view this as a sign of their historical devotion to the covenants of Abraham and Moses. This was a significant thing for them, and so they are bringing all of that history to the table. It is not just a theological issue for many of them; it is a racial pride and historic pride that they must maintain by being circumcised.
We need to delve into some background, starting with Acts Chapter Eleven, and then examine Galatians Chapter Two. Basically, when we get into this, what we will discover is we have to fit this with these two other passages—Acts 11:30 and Galatians 2:10. There are basically four positions. One is that the visit of Galatians 2:10 is identified with Acts 11:30 and Paul’s second trip to Jerusalem. We believe that is the correct view. The second view is that Galatians 2:1-10 is actually referring to the trip to Jerusalem in Acts 15. Then we always have the position of the liberals. Liberals basically ignore facts; everything is made up by everybody else, whether you are a liberal theologically or a liberal politically. The third view is that none of this actually happened historically, so quit trying to figure out how all the parts fit together because there really weren’t any parts to begin with. Then there is the other view that we aren’t given enough detail, so quit trying to put it all together.
What we have to do is look at this because it helps us see the flow of how the apostles increased their understanding of the issues related to the purity of the gospel as faith alone, not faith plus circumcision, faith plus works, or faith plus anything else.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Grace vs Legalism. Acts 15:1-4, Galatians 2:1-10
Grace vs Legalism. Acts 15:1-4, Galatians 2:1-10
We have come to Acts 15
The focus of this chapter deals with grace and legalism. As much as we discuss grace and legalism, many still get confused over what grace and legalism mean. First of all, what they are not. Grace is not permissiveness; grace is not antinomianism; grace doesn’t mean that it is open to do that which is wrong, to justify it or rationalize it in some way simply because Christ already paid the penalty for sin, or that we can confess it later and be forgiven by God. There are still consequences to sin. Sin is still wrong. We are prohibited in Scripture from many things and commanded to do many things. Emphasizing the prohibitions and the commands in Scripture, especially those that apply to believers, is not legalism. There are a lot of Christians who have been heard over the years who have said if they were someone who emphasizes that Scripture says this is right and this is wrong, we should not do these things, we should do these, that they have been branded legalists. But that is not legalism. Legalism claims that God’s blessing is caused by whether we do or do not do certain things. That’s it in a nutshell. The issue in the Christian life is not about seeing what we can get away with, which is an abuse of grace.
On the other side, as spiritual infants often take advantage of God’s grace and abuse God’s grace. That is not right, but it is normal, just like children who take advantage of their parents’ absence or their parents’ lack of being observant and will disobey them. But that doesn’t make it right; that is typical of immaturity. Maturity recognizes that they might be able to get away with something that is wrong, but they are not going to do it simply because it is wrong. That is the difference between grace and legalism. Grace is that God does not take into account our failures as the basis for our salvation. He gives blessings to us, not on the basis of who we are or what we have done, but on His character and what Jesus Christ did on the cross. Grace means that God is not conditioning His free gift of salvation or the free gifts of other things to us on the basis of our personal righteousness.
On the other hand, God has given us all of our blessings at the instant of salvation, but if we don’t demonstrate the maturity and capacity to handle blessings, then God may not distribute those blessings. But the cause of receiving blessings from God is not whether or not we follow certain rituals, procedures, or a certain code, such as the Old Testament Law of Moses.
This is a significant issue that the early church had to resolve. It has already occurred, as we have seen, with what are we going to do with the Gentiles? In Acts chapter fifteen, the focus is on this. This is when one of the significant decision points comes up: how to handle this issue. It is usually referred to as the Jerusalem Council. Still, it is not a formal council such as church councils were in later centuries; it was more of an informal gathering of all of the leaders and pastors in the church at Jerusalem, where they could debate, discuss, and argue about these issues and then come to a conclusion. It is essential to understand that that was their way of making this decision. How do you resolve a theological conflict? Do you pray to God, meditate quietly in your closet, waiting for a little liver quiver for God to tell you what to do? Or do you exegete the Scriptures, analyze the Scriptures, hash it out, debate, and come to a conclusion that everyone can agree on?
So Paul returns from his second missionary journey. They went to Antioch first. In this chapter, we read that they are going to make their way down through Phoenicia, Sidon, and Tyre, encouraging the Gentile congregations with what happened on their first missionary journey.
Paul would have been saved in 35 AD, within two years of the death of Christ on the cross. A problem we have in putting this chronology together is in Galatians 2:1, where Paul says,
Galatians 2:1
Galatians 2:1
1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and also took Titus with me.
The question is: When did this trip to Jerusalem occur? He doesn’t say, "Well, for the second time or for the third time, I went to Jerusalem," so we don’t know. He doesn’t pin that to anything other than his conversion. It is fourteen years after his conversion.
The way chronology was counted in the ancient world is very different from how we count numbers today. We look at things and say that if a person has done something for three years, we either take it as a full three years or we take it as pretty much most of the first year, second year, and most of the third year. We are fairly literal in that. Whereas in the ancient world, the way they counted was different. For example, as we see in Kings, in both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom at different times, the way they counted the years of the king’s reign was different. Many times, they used what was called the accession year method of counting. Let’s say the king becomes king on December 31st of 2012. Well, 2012 became the first year of his reign, even though he was on the throne for only one day. It is the first year. And let’s say he died on January 2nd, 2020. Well, 2020 would be the ninth year. Even though he only reigned for one day of that year, that would be counted as the ninth year. Any part of the year, no matter how tiny it might be, would be counted as a full year.
So when we look at the date of AD 35, Paul is saved, and he says fourteen years later, we count 35 as the first year and 47 as the last year. Therefore, some time in 47 would be the trip that he is talking about in Galatians 2:1. The Jerusalem Council is generally seen to be around 49; nobody wants to put it in 50. But if we put it any earlier, then it is not the visit he talks about in Galatians 2:1.
One problem is that many people who try to work out the chronologies take a 30 AD crucifixion date. So, their chronology doesn’t work for a 33 date.
Why is this important? The Bible claims to be writing true things about what happened, and even the chronological numbers are from the breathed-out Word of God. They are inspired and thus inerrant. If the Word of God took place in space-time history, then we ought to be able to resolve these conundrums satisfactorily based on the way in which people thought and used numbers at that particular time.
The basic issue was that there had been many Jews, in particular Jews with a Pharisee background, who had now trusted in Jesus as the Messiah. As they bring their Law-based, rigid legalism to Christianity, now that Gentiles want to be saved, they still think of Christianity as a Jewish-based and Mosaic Law-based development in the history of God’s relationship to Israel. They were teaching that unless a person was circumcised according to the custom of Moses, he couldn’t be saved. So this was the first of two types of legalism. First, there is salvation legalism, and this is the idea that a person must do something more than believe in Jesus and His death on the cross for salvation. In this case, it was to believe and be circumcised (males). Later, it was to have infant baptism, sprinkling, or some external form of dedication. Many different things have been added to be saved. Second, in spiritual life, legalism, they may believe that you are saved by faith alone in Christ alone, but if you are going to receive any of God’s blessings, then you have to follow a particular ritual, maybe follow the Mosaic Law, and in their case, here it was to be circumcised.
Remember that circumcision was a sign of the Abrahamic covenant. But at this time, it was associated with the Mosaic Law, and it was also emphasized because it was a sign of patriotism and loyalty to being a Jew.
Acts 11:19
Acts 11:19
19 Now those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to no one but the Jews only.
In Acts chapter eleven there was a situation where Paul was invited back to Antioch by Barnabas (v.19) and after a period of time in the church there, there was a prophet, Agabus (v. 28)—early first century spiritual gift of prophecy—who “stood up and {began} to indicate by the Spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world. And this took place in the reign of Claudius.”
Acts 11:28
Acts 11:28
28 Then one of them, named Agabus, stood up and showed by the Spirit that there was going to be a great famine throughout all the world, which also happened in the days of Claudius Caesar.
So then the disciples determined to send relief to brethren dwelling in Judea. This is the congregation coming together and saying they would send financial aid to the church in Jerusalem because the famine is hurting them. They took the money and sent it by the hands of Barnabas and Saul. This is referred to in chronological discussions as the famine visit. This is the second visit that Paul makes to Jerusalem. It is after this that Paul goes on his first missionary journey, and after the first missionary journey, in the fall of 49, they had the Jerusalem Council.
The issue is: What is Paul describing in Galatians 2:1-10?
Galatians 2:1-10
Galatians 2:1-10
1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and also took Titus with me. 2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated to them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to those who were of reputation, lest by any means I might run, or had run, in vain. 3 Yet not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. 4 And this occurred because of false brethren secretly brought in (who came in by stealth to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage), 5 to whom we did not yield submission even for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. 6 But from those who seemed to be something—whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no man—for those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. 7 But on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been committed to me, as the gospel for the circumcised was to Peter 8 (for He who worked effectively in Peter for the apostleship to the circumcised also worked effectively in me toward the Gentiles), 9 and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. 10 They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.
This is important because here Paul describes a journey to Jerusalem, where the issues that are addressed are very similar to the issues addressed in Acts 15 where they are dealing with Gentiles and whether or not they should be required to be circumcised in order to be saved. Galatians deals with the error of adding obedience to the Law as a part of justification. It leads to the conclusion that we are not justified by the works of the Law but by faith alone.
Galatians 2:16
Galatians 2:16
16 knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.
So the point he is making here is related to justification. In chapter three he is going to start dealing with the issue of sanctification, and that is where he makes the statement:
Galatians 3:3
Galatians 3:3
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
—human ability, observing the Law, ritual, morality, etc.
In Acts 15, we see that even with the apostles, they are developing (not changing their doctrine) their clarity, focus, and understanding of doctrine. Too often, people get a quasi-mystical idea of how the apostles came to understand truth. There were perhaps times of revelation where they were given specific information, but generally they sat under a special kind of ministry under God the Holly Spirit. They studied the Word and had to figure it out through study of the Word. They didn’t just sit down and instantly come to the correct answer. We see that displayed in this process.
This was a significant shift from the way that they had always been brought up and had always thought, and they are grappling with it to come to an understanding of the church age and the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the church.
Galatians 2:1
Galatians 2:1
1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and also took Titus with me.
There is no mention in Acts of Titus going with Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem. This doesn’t mean Acts is wrong; it just means that Luke didn’t think that was relevant to his storyline, what he was trying to communicate. But Luke left a lot of things out. Whenever anybody writes, there are a lot of things that can be said and there are a lot of things that need to be left out. Not everything is necessary to make your point and argue for your basic thesis.
Galatians 2:2
Galatians 2:2
2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated to them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to those who were of reputation, lest by any means I might run, or had run, in vain.
Notice here that he said “because of revelation.” That means that he goes up privately; it is not a public thing. In Acts 15, it was public. The word “submitted” is an aorist tense, meaning past tense. “I preach” is a present-tense verb, indicating that he is still preaching. “I communicated to them in the past the gospel that I continue to preach”—faith alone in Christ alone. He communicated privately “to those who were of reputation,” i.e., to those in the church; it is a private meeting to see if they agree.
There are primary ways in which this is interpreted in terms of understanding and relating it to Paul’s trips in Acts. There is one group that equates Acts 15 to Galatians 2:1-10. The other primary group sees Acts 11:30 as the visit stated in Galatians chapter two.
In Acts 15, Paul and Barnabas are sent as part of an official delegation from the church at Antioch to Jerusalem to resolve this dispute in the Antioch church by these men who have come up from Judea. In Galatians 2, however, Paul says he is prompted in going to have this private visit by revelation. He will deal with the issue of the role of the Gentiles privately. The reason he is going to deal with it privately is because of the revelation. It is dealt with publicly by an official delegation in Acts 15. That is the second reason that Acts 11:30 fits better. The conference in Acts 15 was a public meeting that involved lengthy discussions, which were all out in the open.
A third reason is that if Galatians chapter two talks about the Acts 15 visit, then it never mentions the conclusion of the Acts 15 council. The conclusion reached in the Jerusalem Council was that it was fine for Gentiles to join the church. They didn’t have to pass any inspection related to the Mosaic Law; they only needed to stay away from things sacrificed to idols and from fornication, which everybody understood they needed to do anyway.
Fourth, the conclusion of the Acts 15 visit was to tell the Gentiles they didn’t have to follow the Law. They had to stay away from things sacrificed to idols, eating bloody meat, and sexual immorality. Whereas in Galatians 2:10 the conclusion is:
Galatians 2:10
Galatians 2:10
10 They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.
So, their conclusion as to what they were expecting Gentiles to do is very different in Galatians 2:10 from what was decided upon in Acts 15.
When Paul goes to Jerusalem with Barnabas in the famine visit, he knows that he will have a private meeting with the leaders there, and so in order to clarify the issue, he takes Titus along with him as a test case. The reason is that Titus is a Gentile and has not been circumcised. So, the issue: Will the apostles in Jerusalem accept Titus on a full footing, or will they require that he be circumcised? If everybody in Jerusalem gets upset with Titus because he hasn’t been circumcised, then that would create major divisions and problems within the infant church. Paul wanted to deal with this in private so that there wouldn’t be a huge public explosion.
Galatians 2:3
Galatians 2:3
3 Yet not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised.
The Acts 11:30 visit comes after Peter took the message to Cornelius in Acts chapter ten. At that point in Acts 11, their understanding is that Gentiles have equal access to be a member of the new church, and they are not emphasizing the Mosaic Law. They have an understanding of grace. So the leaders in Jerusalem passed the grace test, and they did not require Titus to be circumcised.
Galatians 2:4-5
Galatians 2:4-5
4 And this occurred because of false brethren secretly brought in (who came in by stealth to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage), 5 to whom we did not yield submission even for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.
He stood the ground for grace.
Galatians 2:6-8
Galatians 2:6-8
6 But from those who seemed to be something—whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no man—for those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. 7 But on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been committed to me, as the gospel for the circumcised was to Peter 8 (for He who worked effectively in Peter for the apostleship to the circumcised also worked effectively in me toward the Gentiles),
In these verses, we come to understand that there is a division of focus between Paul and Peter, that Peter was primarily the apostle to the Jews. But that didn’t mean he didn’t visit the Gentiles. He was God’s choice to open the door to the Gentiles by taking the gospel to Cornelius. In the same way, just because Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles, it didn’t mean that Paul was wrong if he took the gospel to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles. Paul wasn’t prohibited from evangelizing Jews any more than Peter was prohibited from evangelizing Gentiles. It is just that that wasn’t their primary area of focus.
Galatians 2:9
Galatians 2:9
9 and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
This precedes the first missionary journey.
Galatians 2:10
Galatians 2:10
10 They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.
Let’s look at the next section in Galatians because it shows us the confusion in the early church, even with someone like Peter. After the famine visit to Jerusalem, Peter subsequently came to Antioch, and there was another confrontation. So, in this chain of events, there was the first little confrontation between God and Peter: the sheet from heaven incident. Peter finally got the point and took the gospel to the Gentiles in Acts 10. In Acts 11, he gave a report back to the church at Jerusalem, and everything seemed to be fine. Then we get to the famine visit at the end of the chapter, and though Acts 11 doesn’t go into it, Galatians 2:1-10 does, and there is another discussion about the role of Gentiles in the church. Then there is another confrontation that occurs back in Antioch, and this is described in Galatians 2:11-15.
Galatians 2:11
Galatians 2:11
11 Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed;
So we find out that Peter has been vacillating and has been hypocritical about how he has treated Jews and Gentiles. Paul explains.
Galatians 2:12
Galatians 2:12
12 for before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision.
They were the Jews but they were still emphasizing circumcision.
Galatians 2:13
Galatians 2:13
13 And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy.
So, even though they had gone through this transition of understanding, with revelation from God to Peter in Acts 10 and 11, even though there has been a resolution of the issue described in Galatians 2:1-10 of the famine visit in Acts 11:30, there is another meeting that is not described in Acts. This is when they came up to Antioch, and Peter was called out for his hypocrisy. It has carried away all the Jews except for Paul. He is the only one who clearly understands the issue.
Galatians 2:14
Galatians 2:14
14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews?
That is the issue here. Paul is keeping his eye on the objective and the ball. It is the purity of the gospel that it is faith alone in Christ alone.
14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews?
Galatians 2:15-16
Galatians 2:15-16
15 We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, 16 knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.
Galatians 2:17
Galatians 2:17
17 “But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!
Galatians 2:19-21
Galatians 2:19-21
19 For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. 21 I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.”
That is the bottom line. If we get righteousness from what we do then Christ died in vain. That is why the gospel excludes every manner of works. If you add anything to the gospel, anything to faith alone, you destroy the gospel.
This is clarified. So we have the issue of Peter going to Cornelius, the visit of Acts 11:30, the confrontation with Peter in Antioch, and then after the second missionary journey with the tremendous response among the Gentiles there is a fourth meeting in Acts 15 to deal with this issue of what is going to be required of the Gentiles.
Acts 15:3
Acts 15:3
3 So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through Phoenicia and Samaria, describing the conversion of the Gentiles; and they caused great joy to all the brethren.
There were probably a lot of males who thought it was quite wonderful that they weren’t going to have to be circumcised! That’s probably the subtext here. But Barnabas and Paul are taking their time travelling south. They are visiting all the congregations, emphasizing this free work of grace that God was doing among the Gentiles, and that they are not required to be saved by also entering into the Mosaic Law via circumcision.
Acts 15:4
Acts 15:4
4 And when they had come to Jerusalem, they were received by the church and the apostles and the elders; and they reported all things that God had done with them.
But a conflict comes up.
Acts 15:5
Acts 15:5
5 But some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses.”
These Pharisees are believers, but after accepting grace, they have decided to add something to the mix. More is going on here than simply saying they need to be circumcised; they need to do something in addition to the cross to be saved. They are still thinking that to become the people of God they have to become Jewish. They haven’t understood the distinction between Israel and the church. This is the reverse side of the group that comes along later on and says that God has replaced Israel with the church. They didn’t understand that there were two distinct peoples of God in God’s plan. There was a Jewish plan in the Old Testament, and with the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah, God’s plan for Israel was put on hold; there was a pause. God has generated a new people where Jew or Gentile issues are not related, only faith in Christ, and that at that moment we become a new spiritual entity in the church where Jew and Gentile are not part of it.
There are many different types of messianic congregations. Some fail to understand this issue because they are now in the church. Their Jewishness is not a factor in terms of anything because their reward and inheritance are going to be with the church. It is not going to be a future land. They are neither Jew nor Greek in the church, and their inheritance is not related to the land; it is distinct from God’s promise to Israel. This is the problem: understanding that God has a particular plan for the Jew and a distinct plan for the church. God will return to a focus on Israel after the Rapture of the church, but until then, the focus is on this new entity where neither Jew nor Gentile is an issue.
Acts 15:6
Acts 15:6
6 Now the apostles and elders came together to consider this matter.