Acts 13 continued

Names First Journey

Paul has been a Christian for some time now. He has been involved in teaching and ministry for some time now, many years in fact- somewhere between 11 and 14 years in fact.

But now he is being sent off with Barnabas, anointed and chosen by the Holy Spirit. They have been ‘set apart’ for the mission field. And Luke is quite clear on this point- they are not being sent by the Church or the Apostles, they are being sent by the Holy Spirit- this is a divine movement. One that is supported by the Church and the Apostles to be sure, but this is the work, ultimately, of the Holy Spirit, and one gets the sense that everyone else is just sort of along for the ride, as it were.

They arrive in Cyprus, and Luke sneaks in a sentence here that reminds me very much of Abraham and Lot. “They had John to assist them”. This is a fellow by the name of John Mark. Every teacher of the Bible wishes they knew more about John Mark, but here is what we do know: he was a cousin of Barnabas’s. And that is all we know for sure. But it is possible, if not certain, that John Mark was also the author of the Gospel of Mark, using Peter’s notes as its basis. A couple of the church fathers identify him as such, but it is hard to say for certain if that is true or not. Here in Acts 13 he just sort of comes out of nowhere. But he feels like an awkward addition.

The Holy Spirit says “set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work which I have called them” and that’s it. It says nothing about John. It says he is there to assist them. Who decided John should come? What assistance is he providing? Presumably if the Spirit called only Barnabas and Paul to the work then the Spirit is going to empower and strengthen them to do that work, without assistance. If they needed John’s assistance, then one might imagine that the Holy Spirit would have said set aside for me Barnabas and Paul AND JOHN. But He did not.

It reminds me of Lot because, you might remember, that Abraham was commanded to leave behind his family and go to the promised land, but Abraham did not leave behind his family, he brought Lot. He probably thought he was being kind or helpful, bringing someone else who could help support him and his family and also bringing Lot into the promised land following this God Abraham was trusting. But it turned out to be terrible of course for both families. Immediately there was tension between Lot’s family and Abraham’s family and they fought and in the end of Lot’s story he is destitute and in the wilderness in a cave with his daughters and they are so certain that the whole world is destroyed that they think they are the only people left to repopulate the world. It is tragedy. Lot was specifically NOT called to follow Abraham. But Abraham brought him anyway.

Calling is often an overlooked and underutilized theological truth in the Church, and certainly in the world as a whole. God calls us to do different things at different times. And you do not need to be anxious about missing God’s voice- He will be certain to communicate clearly to you when you need to hear His voice. But we as humans are constantly doing things that we are not called to do because it seems to us necessary or wise or helpful or easier or holy or something but it is not our calling and so it causes trouble, pain, and diminishes the Kingdom instead of growing it.

Be careful of guilt. Now guilt may have had nothing to do with John coming on this missionary journey, but I just want to note this here because it is a common error we can make.

Guilt is an emotional wound. A physical wound provides pain that tells us something needs fixing. Something on our body needs attention for healing. Guilt is the pain that we feel from a wrong that we have done and it calls our attention to the wound that wrong causes and motivates us to repent and reconcile and heal that wound, whatever it might be.

So guilt is a necessary and God given part of our human nature because our sin does create wounds and guilt lets us know when that has happened.

But guilt is never, or rarely perhaps I should say to be cautious, but I am tempted to say never, but it is rarely a good platform on which to start a ministry. Do not let guilt lead you to do things you are not called to do. Do not go on a missionary journey, or enter into any kind of ministry or service on the basis of guilt. That is not guilt’s function, it is not what it is designed to do. Your spiritual work in this life should overflow from the blessings you have received from the Lord’s bounty. Your joy in the Lord should be the fuel that drives your ministry engine, and the road you are driving on should be the one the Holy Spirit lays out before you, which is not mapped by guilt, but by assurances and divinely appointed circumstances that also result in joy. Joy being defined as being where you are supposed to be and doing what you are supposed to be doing.

Being a pastor for me is a joyful undertaking because it is where I am supposed to be it is my calling- I am not always happy doing it, just like any other calling there are hard parts to it, but it is joyful for me and it flows out of my faith and my particular giftings and circumstances appointed to me by the Lord.

And this model works everywhere. When do you approach a coworker or neighbor or family member to reach out with the love of Christ? There is no perfect formula, but I know that when guilt has been my motivator nothing good comes of it.

Nehemiah 8:10

“the joy of the Lord is your strength.””

So John is there on the missionary journey, but not called to be there. And this creates problems, as we will see.

Moving on to the narrative, what we see here in Paphos is a model that will continue for the rest of the book of Acts, and it is a model that the early Christians embraced explicitly, Paul talks about it to the Jews in Antioch Pisidia, but it is seen here from the very beginning. Paul arrives in a town, he finds the synagogue, and preaches first to the Jews there. And usually he receives one of two responses, moderate rejection, or extreme violent rejection. Once he has done that he goes then to the Gentiles and preaches on the street corner or in houses to any who will listen.

This fulfills the prediction and calling of our Lord who indicated that He would largely be rejected by those whom He would first invite- in this case the Jewish people. You might remember, for example, the parable of the master who has a banquet (Luke 14) and those whom he initially invites make excuses and don’t come and so he sends His servants in the highways and byways and invites the lame and the poor and then anyone, anyone the servants might encounter is welcomed to the banquet. So Paul and Barnabas are just acting out in their lives the predictions/prophecies of their Lord. The Gospel is going to the Gentiles. The Word is being fulfilled. And eventually, we are told in Romans and in the book of Revelation and in Ezekiel, eventually the Jewish people will also receive the Gospel and accept Christ as the Messiah, like a boomerang that is thrown that gathers millions of Gentiles and then returns home to the Jewish people from which it came.

But in the interim the Jewish people will largely reject the Gospel. That word largely is important, however, because of course there are a minority of Jewish people, then and now, who do recognize in Jesus their Messiah and Lord and they do worship Him and become part of the Church. But most of them, then and now, do not.

Of course, it’s also important to recognize that most Gentiles are also not accepting the Gospel- many are but certainly not most. It would take hundreds of years before the Roman Empire would embrace Christianity as the primary faith of the nation and even then historians estimate that the percentage of people in the Roman Empire who were professing Christians was somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. And that is in the middle of the 4th century AD. And here is the deeper truth underneath all these historical statistics- most people of any era of history reject the Gospel and the Lordship of Christ, even during times when on paper places such as Western Europe in the Medieval era were 95% Christian. The road is narrow and few find it was not pessimism on the part of Jesus, it was realism.

Let’s turn back to our text.

Names are unusually prominent in this first encounter of Paul’s (for now we will refer to Saul as Paul) here on Cyprus, and so we should pay some attention to that.

First, Paul’s name. I don’t think this is a huge deal, but it is something many people misunderstand- I did too for most of my Christian walk- so for the sake of truth and clarity I will lay this out here.

There is no Biblical narrative about God giving Saul a new name, Paul. Paul never received a new name. It is clear that he always had that name, Paul, and that makes sense. As a Roman citizen Paul would have had 2 names, one would be his native Hebrew name, Saul, that he would of course use when working amongst his people in Israel. The second would be what is called his cognomen which functioned something like a nickname that would have been his latin Roman name that of course Paul used once he left Israel to minister to the Gentiles.

So it’s not that remarkable, except there are remarkable truths that lie behind it, for God orchestrates things in ways that are unpredictable to us, but show how all that has happened and all that will happen was foreordained long ago. I think of my own name...my mother knew from the time she was a child that if she had a son she wanted to name him Seth. There are no Seths in our family tree, there were no neighbors or friends named Seth. Neither my mother nor my grandparents know where she got that name from. Judson was the middle name my dad provided, which was the middle name of his best friend in college. So I ended up being Seth Judson, which if you translate that name out in full means in Hebrew, the appointed son of worship, or appointed son of praise. And my first job in the church was a worship pastor. And my parents, both raised atheist, for quite random reasons, named me that.

So the Lord does work through names sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. So think of Paul’s boast in Philippians, a Hebrew of Hebrews, and his Hebrew name has royal overtones, doesn’t it? Saul, the first King of Israel. Proud and strong and handsome and confident. But then he is humbled isn’t he? He is knocked from his perch and eventually even commits suicide. He is a humbled King shall we say, and what does Paul mean? It means little, or humble. And Paul was mighty and strong, a Pharisee among Pharisees, killing off his enemies with his influence and power, and then suddenly, he is humbled.

So, no, the Lord does not change Saul’s name, he always had both names. But how appropriate is it that from his birth he had those 2 names, indicating the trajectory that his life would take?

So we have Paul’s 2 names. We have the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, same name as Paul. They spell it a little different in our English translations to differentiate him but I am not sure why they do that- it is the exact same name. And Luke takes the time to point out that they share a name.

Then you have the magician, who also has two names- Bar-Jesus (which means son of Jesus) and Elymas which Luke tells us means Magician. And Elymas has a decision before himself as well. Will he become, a son or disciple of Jesus, or will he remain a ‘magician’, a false prophet who deceives others?

So we have 2 Jesus’s and 2 Pauls, and all of it means something. These names carry weight and meaning.

And Paul of Tarsus strikes Bar-Jesus, known as Elymas, blind, just as Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew King, was struck blind by Jesus, and humbles Elymas, forcing him to rely on others even to walk around, when before he was a trusted advisor of the proconsul, Paul, who has now given his life to Christ although he is a Gentile and not even Jewish like Bar-Jesus.

So it’s alright if that’s all a bit confusing. What matters is that Bar-Jesus, Elymas, who comes into the story as a man of influence and power, ends up blind and unable to even walk without help from others, and that the proconsul becomes a Christian. And I love how its described here in verse 12.

Acts 13:12 “Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.”

He believed, when he saw what had occurred, in other words the humbling of his advisor, Bar-Jesus, but that’s not WHY he believed, He believed “for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.” A man had been struck blind in his presence but what astonished him was the Gospel. He wasn’t astonished at Paul’s eloquence or his power, he was astonished at the Gospel, the teaching of the Lord. The Gospel was going into the world and continues to do so today and you know when the arrow has hit the heart because what astonishes the soul is the shock of the depth of God’s forgiveness that clears away the entire ledger of sin that you have built up, that invites you into an intimate, loving, trusting relationship with God who invites you into an eternal Kingdom marked by joy and life in place of sin and death, and all you have to do to enter into this kingdom is to believe in the Son of God, trust in His work on the Cross, and make Him your Lord.