Acts, 27:1-44

Alright, let's take a look at, we are, believe it or not, finishing up the chapters in the book of Acts. What we're going to do is take a look at the questions that we had on page four of this five page handout here, so a little different because of the supplement that we have there. And we've got a couple of items there.

Paul had assurance from the Lord himself that he would get to Rome before he was even sent to Caesarea. In this account we read about Paul speaking up at one point to give a warning, apparently based on personal experience. Later when he spoke up it was to give encouragement based on the word of an angel sent from the Lord. Since the Lord had been given assurance in Jerusalem that Paul, excuse me, the Lord had given, should be, Given assurance in Jerusalem that Paul would make it to Rome.

Why did he bother speaking up to the others these times that are recorded? Why didn't Paul just kind of hey, you know, I know what's going on keep it to himself. I Wouldn't he just say hey, you know, I I've been assured to go to Rome. I'm fine Why do I need to bother talking to these other folks?

Yeah, he says, I've seen this before. Yes. Yep. Okay. It was an encouragement. So interesting. Now, was he required to encourage them? Ah, okay. It's because he cared that he spoke up. Yeah. It wasn't simply a matter of, hey, I'm okay, so who cares about the rest? But he cared about them, and obviously, we're not talking about the difference between do you get, you know, chocolate ice cream or vanilla here. These are things that make major difference. Okay?

So yeah, he cared about them, and there were significant events that were happening. Just like we were talking earlier about the hurricane. These are major events. These are not inconsequential. Okay, good. Yeah, Josiah? Yeah, interesting, huh? Yeah.

That that question of you know God's sovereignty and man's responsibility is something that in truth scripture does not resolve not in a way that fits a system of human thinking and a number of you may have encountered it one way or the other where people come up with some some logical system in their mind to try to fill in the blanks and You know, oh, God's completely, entirely sovereign.

He calls every shot. He knows when, you know, a hair falls from my head, there's not much left to fall. But anyway, God controls everything. Or the other end, that God gives us lots of freedom of choice. And see, there's examples here where people have choices.

And Scripture really doesn't logically resolve that. But it teaches both. And I think the responsive thing to Scripture is to say, what does Scripture say? And leave it at that. And recognize that the truth is we are not going to understand everything until we walk through heaven's gates. And then it will take a while. Like eternity. Okay, good. How about the second question we got there?

In verse 21, Paul said, you ought to have followed my advice. Was Paul just giving them an I told you so? Okay? Or is it any different from the I told you so statements that are made in a fleshly way to build up one's esteem in the eyes of others? Or is it for another purpose? Should Paul have said this or not? What do you think? Was Paul just doing an I told you so? You're saying no. So why do you say no?

Well, I don't think he was gloating. He already had credibility because the first thing that he wanted was a ballot to trust the past. Ah, okay. Now he is telling them again, and they're going to respect that identity card. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Good. Tom? Okay, yes.

And the danger is still there. Yeah. I told you it was a problem and I'm not Backing off on that, we still have a problem, but here's the encouraging part of the outcome, right? He is both continuing to let them know that there's a danger here, as well as conveying encouragement and the Lord has assured an outcome here. So good. Good.

Let me run you through some slides. Let me back up a bit here. This is to kind of keep ourselves oriented because we're going to move from chapter 27 into chapter 28, the last chapter. And then the next few weeks, we're doing okay? All right, cool. Anything we can do for you? Okay.

We'll be moving into the last chapter. The next few weeks we're going to be operating this way. We're going to be looking at kind of special topics. within and including the Book of Acts. And so we'll go through the several topics through the end of the month. So today will be our last addressing the chapters and the sections that we've been doing in sequence here.

Now, the deal is this. Here you've got the ship taking off here from Tyre and Sidon area. And then heading off from Sidon, heading up there to Myra last week, we talked about the connection between the Apostle Paul and Santa Claus. And then moving on to Malta, and then from there heading north up to Rome. Can I get you updated here, Marian? Alright, anybody else in need of a copy? Cover here? Was it? Yes. And make sure he needs one too. Okay? Thank you. All right. So anyway, here's Paul on this last journey. And keep in mind something here.

I mean, we're talking a world of shipping where experience counts for a lot because you can't operate on the basis of, you know, hey, we've got radar and we can tell that there's this and that, you know, so far away. There's no get on your cell phone and give the guys over at the port a jingle. You can't put out a distress call. I mean, the bottom line is once you're out there, you're pretty well on your own until you can reach shore. So a real risky proposition. Let's see what happens here. The people in Malta And also it's the port where he shifted out of there were known as, and you'll see it in scripture, as the Sidonians. That's kind of the Old Testament name from Sidon.

This was from an article that National Geographic had on who were the Phoenicians. What's interesting now is they're now doing DNA tests on people to try to see what they can do to trace genealogical background, something they couldn't even do a few decades back. Cydonians here, it comes from the Hebrew and the name is Phoenicians in the Greek, phoenices is red people.

And the name there came from the cloth they made and marketed. What they would do is they would have these shells and they would grind up these shells and use that as a dye. And so that's how they got the name we're familiar with, the Phoenicians. And the main port cities are Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. That's where we get our word Bible, by the way. They would import a lot of the papyrus there. So that's where it comes from.

The Sidonians tend to refer to themselves by the city from which they came. We call them this bunch of people as the Phoenicians. They would call themselves by whichever city they happened to be from. That was their own way of referring to themselves. All right. Here's a sarcophagus from Byblos, a long history there. Here's a Crusader era castle at Sidon, obviously much later than New Testament times.

The nearby port that was used at that time, all silted up. And finally, here's the modern port city of Tyre. We won't go into it here, but this is one that there's actually a whole prophetic background prophecy was saying what's going to happen to the city and lays out the details centuries in advance and So anyway, here's what was an island became a causeway and that's the way you find it now because Alexander the Great in order to take on the island scraped the city of Tyre off the land and shoved it out into the ocean All right, major Phoenician shipping routes and colonies. These are places, and notice how far it goes, all the way up to southern part of England. So here they were traveling a lot of different places. And one of the places that they also had, and we don't have it marked here because it wasn't considered a major one, is the island of Malta that we'll be taking a look at.

Here's a satellite photo. There's St. Paul's Bay that you see, and that's the modern name now. Checking out the geology, the geography, the description, it seems to fit pretty well. So that seems well-named, not just some tradition. This is the way it's set up now.

You've got roadways that come around both sides of the peninsula on either side of the bay there. This was some of the buildings that had been there for centuries. Then they're headed to Rome. Here's the Forum in Rome, the remains of it. And so they're headed in that direction. Okay, let's get to your handout there. All right, background is this. We end up Chapter 27, they're shipwrecked, okay?

So then they land on the island that is called Malta. Melita was the other name that you'll hear of, but we typically call it Malta. Interestingly enough, the thing that you hear of is that they're gathering wood and Paul gets clamped onto by a snake, a viper. And interestingly enough now is there's virtually no forests on Malta now, and no poisonous snakes. But the entire Mediterranean was much more wooded 2,000 years ago, we know from records, than it is now. And you've got an island that's less than a couple dozen miles in each direction. The narrowest dimension is like nine miles.

So if you were to go and seek to eradicate poisonous snakes in that area, you would probably be able to do so. The people there, and the reason we mention the Phoenicians, the people there were largely of Phoenician background. So when Paul goes and lands with all the others on the island there, he's talking to people that came from the port city that he started off from once he left from Caesarea. people that came from that background maybe centuries before. And now, this viper bite, that's an important thing to take note of.

It's the only place we really find in the New Testament where there's mention of a poisonous snake bite in terms of a historical description. But is there any reason we might expect that one or more of the apostles might escape the death or injury from the snakebite. Am I asking a puzzling question? At the end of Mark, and we have a reference here, Mark 16, 18, one of the things that Jesus said, he kind of listed different things that would take place, and one of the things that it mentioned is snakebite.

So here's the one instance that we have reference to. Now the other thing to think of though, and we covered in the notes, is this. In the culture of the time, the thought was that there was this goddess Dike, who is the goddess of justice and the goddess of revenge, and that if someone did something that was horribly wrong, like a murderer, that the goddess Dike would pursue you and you would be somehow killed.

Well, their thought then, when the people on the island of Malta, the natives saw Paul get bit, they said, well, he survived the shipwreck, but now the snake's going to get him. And so that's kind of what was going through their mind, is this was going to be the end of Paul. Then they're looking and usually what would happen is within hours, a few hours to as much as a little over 24 hours, like if you get bit in the hand, the whole extremity would swell up.

And they're watching him and nothing's happening. So then all of a sudden they flip from he's a criminal and this viper's out to get him to now he's a god. Now when has Paul had this problem before? You recall this? first missionary journey. He and Barnabas were in the middle of what we now call Turkey and in doing miracles they looked to them as Zeus and Hermes and usually as we noted the one that spoke out was considered Hermes so that was Paul and so they They thought, well, these two must be gods. And they began moving in that direction as they're going to do sacrifices. Paul and Barnabas are really upset.

And now they've got this situation here. Interesting, we don't see a description of Paul's reaction similarly. Now, the next thing, though, to make note of here, is we've got this fellow Publius who takes them in. Publius is a fellow about which we have no other information.

However, something real interesting, Dr. Luke calls him the chief man of the island, Protos. Protos. And for a long time, a lot of people thought that, well, that's kind of strange, you know, Protos, chief man of the island. It sounds almost like a hokey name that Luke made up, right? And then they go and find this inscription in Greek, and guess what? It calls the guy who's the head of the island, the protos of the island.

The exact same words that Dr. Luke uses. And they also found a Latin inscription that had the basic equivalent in Latin. So it turns out that Dr. Luke is not any more suspicious on this account, but now confirmed, and amazingly so. because that wasn't a typical title used at various islands around the Mediterranean, but was used there. So it just happened to match specifically.

Now, one of the other things that is interesting here, here's Paul. He's staying at the graces of this fellow Publius. Dr. Luke does not make it abundantly clear. Likely, with 276 people, do you think Publius is putting up 276 people for three months? Probably not. Probably more Paul, maybe Julius the Centurion, maybe Luke and Aristarchus. By the way, Aristarchus hasn't been mentioned since they left port, but he may well have been with them.

And why would Publius pay these guys particular attention? Why would they get this hospitable treatment? Yeah, Tom? Yeah, interesting account. We were given some details that are very confirming, that title of Publius being one of them. The other hand is Dr. Luke doesn't describe, for example, exactly how this connection with Publius came. We could speculate reasonably, I think, that possibly the natives' response to, here's Paul, he gets bit by a viper and nothing happens, that that probably you know, put him in Publius' favor, in his good graces, at least got his attention.

And then, so Publius has them come in. Now, Publius' father has got a serious disease problem. And here's Dr. Luke, and so he goes and describes this, right? And back to the Greek word for what we have, dysentery. is the word that comes up. Anyway, Paul goes and heals Publius' father, and I'm sure that made Publius more inclined towards him.

What's interesting is we have no record in here. How is Julius responding spiritually to all these events? Do we know? The centurion? Yeah, we don't know specifically, do we? We aren't told. We are told from the outset that he was favorably inclined towards Paul, probably as time went on even more so, I would think. But it doesn't exactly say.

How about Publius? Yeah, what's interesting is that Publius, we don't have a record that it didn't say he was a believer. it doesn't say that he became a believer. What's interesting is that the extra-biblical record, though a little conflicted, records that he did become a believer. That's outside of scripture, so it doesn't have the same level of reliability.

But you can certainly understand, here's Paul healing his father and healing other people on the island. And Publius is quite aware of this for a three-month period of time. And I cannot imagine that Paul kept quiet about Jesus Christ. Could you? Yeah, it doesn't seem to make sense. So here's Paul with Publius over this period of time when they're ready to leave a few months later.

Publius provides everything that at least those four guys need, and we don't know what other provisions he might have made. but everything they needed for their trip the rest of the way. Now think about it, if you got a shipwreck, it's a good thing to have somebody be able to give you some things because you have no way to come up with it otherwise. So the generosity of Publius was, I'm sure, welcome. Now, they get on another grain ship, but one where the people had decided to winter on Malta rather than trying to go through the storm.

Oh, I forgot one thing. Got to go back a little bit. One place, Dr. Luke says, at one spot, he says, for a couple of weeks we didn't see stars or the sun or anything. Why is that significant? They had had a storm, okay? Yes, good point. And what else?

Well, not so much the dating, but how about just orienting yourself? You know, being able to see where you're at. When you're out there in the sea and you've got nothing but sea moving around on you, Having some visibility of the stars and the Sun things like that or that be how you get yourself oriented So basically what Luke was doing is telling you since we don't see stars or Sun for you know days and days and days They're very disoriented. They can hardly tell where they are That their usual means of having some some way of saying okay. I'm here. You know or at least that's north or something Didn't exist okay Now, back to the story.

They head off and have a relatively uneventful trip, ending up at Puteoli, which is one of several ports that head into Rome. Let's see if I can get this thing back up here. So they end up at Puteoli, and you have a picture on the middle of page two. that is some of the ruins of Puteoli. Puteoli was like this.

It was definitely a port city, but it was for bringing grain and other goods into Rome and also things out of Rome. The way it worked was this. Rather than having a military budget where you go and pay you know, for all the different expenses of the people who are traveling on military. Instead, the way it worked was like this.

The military men could, under Roman law, ask you to walk and carry their stuff for a mile. They could also just go into an inn or any place to get something to eat and just tell the people, I'm a Roman military man, you're going to feed me and put me up for the night.

So, if that's the case, and you run an inn in Puteoli, where there's Roman soldiers coming in and out all the time, are you going to be real happy to see another Roman soldier walk in? No. So, when they arrive at Puteoli, there are believers there who welcome Paul and Luke and Aristarchus and Julius, and so Julius has them stay there for a week. Let's allows them to do so now some people have objected they'd said Julius wouldn't do that Roman soldiers want to get him to Rome But we note a few reasons why Julius might be willing and even happy To stay there in Puteoli with the believers that are there One of them would be this There's a whole lot better accommodations than the ends where the people are tired of seeing Roman soldiers faces Okay, that's one thing The other thing is, remember Felix kept Paul in prison for two years, hoping that he'd pay Felix a bribe during that time? Well, in the same way that Felix was under no legal pressure to get Paul processed legally, the Roman soldiers, when they were told, you have to take this prisoner to Rome, they were not given a time frame.

They could take as much time as they want. As long as they were still taking him to Rome, take whatever. So that would be another reason. Something else we don't know exactly what the specifics were. It may have been that they were waiting for some sort of a Roman transport vehicle. Something of that sort to carry them on the road. We don't know all the details there.

But there would be several reasons why Julius would be inclined to allow them to stay there. The last of which would be that as time went on Though we aren't told that Julius became a believer, perhaps he did, we do see that he had all the more reason to be more and more favorably inclined towards Paul. Right? So, anyway, allowing Paul and his companions to stay there in Puteoli for a week wouldn't be a problem at all.

Anyway, they head on their way to what's known as the Appian Way, and I think you've got a picture of that on page 3. They come into Rome. And the way it works is this. They would typically have some kind of a prisoner's quarters where people would stay at. But in Paul's case, they allowed him to rent a place probably right next to or very near where the Praetorian guards would stay. And that way, because they had to keep Paul chained up to a Praetorian guard in Rome. all the time, 24-7. That way they could easily take shifts and have different guards be connected to Paul. So he stayed in rented quarters there. Dr. Luke ends the account with Paul in Rome. He talks to believers there. He talks to some Jews there.

And the account finishes up One of the things I make note of, and I brought up before, John Mock in 2001 published a book, St. Paul in Exile, and he has done an outstanding job of showing the evidence that Dr. Luke's writing of the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts was a legal submittal on behalf of Paul.

One of the very simple evidences that we have is that he writes to almost excellent Theophilus. Now the only place you see anybody in the New Testament addressed as almost excellent is when you read earlier in the book of Acts when you're addressing someone who's a political position. Theophilus would have been, because we don't know anything else about Theophilus, but by that title he would have been a Roman legal review official. Kind of like an administrative judge. reviewing Paul's case before it goes before Caesar. So here it kind of ends with that spot right there. Now, I have some questions here that are before us.

Dr. Luke did not record Paul objecting to the claim that he was a god in Acts 28, as Paul had done when he was with Paul on his first missionary journey with Barnabas. What might be the reasons for this? Did Paul just blow a key opportunity to speak up? Or might there be another reason that Paul's response is not recorded in the same way as before? And the second question, do we know why Paul would be placed in prison in Caesarea for months, then spend months getting to Rome, then be under house arrest for a couple more years? Is this the optimum thing for God to do with the lone apostle to the Gentiles? What would have What would you have planned for this time in Paul's life if you could do so?

Snicker! Well, anyway, you get to think about those. But aside from the questions I asked you, we've finished the chapters, but we're not done covering subjects. Questions? Comments? Yes. Art. Yes. Yes. Yeah, let's turn to the last chapter of Mark. Art asks a good question. why, you know, this reference to the serpents and the handling of serpents at the end of Mark 16.

What happens is a number of your translations, who has like for example a New International or a New American Standard, something of that sort, you got something? A lot of them will include that but have a note, maybe put this in brackets. We went through this in church history in some level of detail considering how fast we were moving through various things. And the situation is this. A lot of the guys who study various texts will say, well, this one isn't included in a number of the texts that we have. However, there are other pieces of evidence to look at aside from the text. And in fact, let me be a little bold and crazy here and see if I can pull a file up. This would have been church history, second quarter. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, the truth is that there are quite a few texts outside of just the biblical documents because you have the early church fathers also writing. And just like when we write here and we've quoted scripture in the handouts that we've had, they did the same thing. And the thing is that if you have earlier early church fathers records that quote that section repeatedly, That tells you that maybe just the text evidence that you have is not the full story. Let me continue here and see if I can locate this.

Okay, coming through some things here. Ah, okay. Here is the passage. Mark 16, 9 through 20 is usually the section that's in question. You know, the two most reliable ancient sources do not have Mark 16, 9 through 20 is what they say there, for example. And there's another, the Net Bible, which is a newer version.

It gives a little more detail, but leans in the same direction. Whoops. Excuse me. Sometimes they're oversimplifying it because it's not just a matter of text. It's also a matter of other Other Documents and I mentioned commentaries by the early church fathers First of all read Mark 16 8 tell me if you think that sounds like a good place to end the book Is that a good place to end the book does that sound like the story is completed I Now, it doesn't sound like it to me. Some have said that it's a different style of writing, but we ourselves will at various times change our writing style depending on what we're doing and who we're writing to and things of that sort. So that doesn't persuade me.

Several early church authors quote from that section more than a hundred years before the so-called most reliable documents. So why are they quoting from it? And not just a couple, but a number. And they quote Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, and I list down there almost a little more than a half dozen.

Whoa, excuse me. Yeah. Sorry about that. Okay. That most reliable is also missing these documents. Okay. 1st and 2nd Timothy, Titus, Hebrews after 914, and the whole book of Revelation. So should I, on the basis of an absence, throw out the end of Mark as well? I think not.

Here is, I think, a very helpful chart, and what you find is these take those various evidences and does a couple of things. One is it takes the pieces of evidence that we have, and notice that there are over 60 pieces of evidence to work with, and it dates them, puts them in line by date, and it ranks them from favorable to unfavorable and even neutral. One of the things that you notice is that you get before you have anything that is unfavorable, you get almost a dozen references that are either neutral or favorable before you have one that is unfavorable. So there's plenty of evidence before this supposed most reliable document that, yes, it was indeed a part of the end of March.

So anyway, my view is forget the note. What you have in your Bibles is what ought to be there. And every evidence that we have before that supposed evidence of a negative is in the positive or at worst neutral, most of them positive, favorable towards the idea of its inclusion. That's a quick answer to your question. But lots of confirmation that yes, it should be there.

By the way, similar thing you may see in the middle of John, the end of chapter 7, beginning of chapter 8, the account of the woman taken in adultery. Same story. There's lots of confirmation for it, although some of the modern Bibles will have some note that it doesn't have the best representation. I think it's a matter if instead of just being Just looking at the texts to also look at the full range of documents that we had to support it You could if you didn't have any ancient copies of the New Testament you could put together all but about seven verses from the commentaries and lectionaries of the other church fathers of the whole New Testament all but about seven verses just from those quotes and And that whole mass of evidence is not included in those notes that you have that are skeptical of those sections of Mark and John.

Very good question, Art. Other thoughts, questions, puzzlings, ponderings? I'm not aware of the Isaiah reference. I'm not saying it didn't take place. I'm just not aware of it. I'm looking explicitly at the Mark reference because here's Jesus speaking to the apostles and saying that this is what will happen. So there may be something else in Isaiah that I'm not immediately recalling. Other questions?

Yeah? Yes. Yes, yeah. If you were to take that at simple face value by itself, you would say everybody that believes is going to exhibit these. So when Brian gets bit by a poisonous snake 10-15 times, no biggie, right? So that's a good question. Is that what he is saying? Is it a guarantee that every single believer will exhibit these signs? Is that what he means? I think what you look at is, have those things taken place? The answer is yes, they have.

The additional insight that we get from scripture is that one, these are the kinds of things that would take place. For example, one that's listed there that I don't think you'll find recorded is drinking poison. I don't think you'll find that recorded in the New Testament.

But the other thing is that the insight that we have on wonders and miracles And that is that Paul says that these signs and wonders are the signs of an apostle. So it specifically points to them. Hebrews chapter 2 verses 3 and 4 explicitly talk about in the past tense how the apostles did this and that and did various signs and wonders. But it looks back on it in the past tense even at that point.

I was also reading a study more recently that if one plots on a time scale, and kind of like we have with this, only with miracles during the book of Acts and the New Testament time, that you can plot that miracles seem to dwindle in their frequency and intensity towards the end of Scripture. Not dropping off entirely, but diminish. The full picture, going beyond just simply the quote from Mark 16, the big picture is that these are signs that would follow those who are believing now, that is, at the time this was written, that it would be typical of the apostles, that it would be typical of the apostolic era, and that as Hebrews makes the point that these signs and wonders, even by the time of the writing of the book of Hebrews, were looked back upon as a past-tense event, as something that was diminishing even as at the time of the writing of the book of Hebrews.

Did that answer your question? Okay, alright. Other thoughts, questions, ponderings? Okay. What we'll be doing these next few weeks, because we've got about three more weeks, is we're going to be taking topics where we will look at kind of along the length of the Book of Acts and sometimes some evidences outside of the Book of Acts in order to connect everything up. And looking at, for example, the life of Timothy, looking at Barnabas, and kind of getting a longer-term picture, what happened. So anyway, we'll take a look at special topics. I still got got one opening I haven't fixed, you know for the for the last one So if you've got something you'd like to have us take a look at feel free to let me know All right, any other comments questions?

All right, let's pray Lord as we look at this we we see your faithfulness through it. We also see your your guidance and in working that ultimately you worked through Dr. Luke, the author here, not to put the final focus upon a person that is a pure human being, but the final focus is upon you. And as we look at these passages, as we look at the chapters, we see through the lives of various believers your faithfulness. We see that you indeed worked Through hearts and lives in spite of danger and difficulty and Lord we take comfort in that as we look at things in our own lives We thank you for this in Jesus name. Amen