Joy and the Holy Spirit
Acts 13:44-52 · Vern Peterman · Dec 3, 2017
Acts (2017-18), No. 43
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926610495856

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning, and a blessed and Merry Christmas to you all. We're going to be venturing into this passage here in Acts of the Apostles, chapter 13, verses 44 through 52, as Courtney has just read for us here. As we go into this passage, we've been going through the book of Acts. We're getting close to what is by chapters around the halfway point. Certainly much left to go here in terms of the content. We're still in the early part of the Apostle Paul's first missionary journey.

He's been sent off from Antioch initially with Barnabas and John. and John Mark. And John Mark has left them and gone home after their travel through the island of Cyprus. And now he's been moving on to what is known as Pisidian Antioch or Antioch of Pisidia, a different Antioch from where they were sent, which is Antioch on the Orontes River or sometimes called Syrian Antioch.

So you have this as your map here of this missionary journey. They are at this point in time at Pisidian Antioch. This is Antioch and Phrygia, as the region is also known. And this is going to, with today's passage, is going to wrap up the chapter. It's going to wrap up their time in Antioch, and they're going to move on to Iconium. And so we'll see that as we venture through. And so here's Acts 1344.

Here is the way Dr. Luke records it. It says, the next Sabbath, after they had first spoken there at the synagogue, the next Sabbath, nearly the whole city assembled to hear the word of the Lord. Now I can imagine, let's suppose that something were to happen at Holly Hills that people were extremely interested in.

Let's see, in the greater Denver area, there's nearly three million people. We don't have room for that. Matter of fact, I think the official count is we can hold 240 here, right? So even as a stretch, we wouldn't even come close. So, while the proportions are not exactly the same, that's something to try to absorb and take in here, they assembled for what purpose?

To hear the word of the Lord here. Now, so here would be a very large crowd of people. One of the things you may notice in this particular picture I've chosen is that there's a fair representation of the color purple. Now, do you know why there would be the color purple in this? Well, it proves they're all Rockies fans, right? So that's why.

So anyway, so the Jews were a significant minority here in the region of Galatia, including Pisidian Antioch and over onto Ephesus. What had happened is the Jews, of course, starting off in Israel after the Exodus, a lot of them went over to Babylon.

Later on, The Greek emperor, who was in charge of the area over Babylon, offered to the Jews, this is about 200 BC, they offered to the Jews, if you will move over to the area around Ephesus, the city in Antioch, that whole area, if you'll move in there, we'll give you 10 years tax-free. Now, how many would move for 10 years tax-free? Well, 2,000 Jewish families decided that was a deal they couldn't pass up.

And so there were quite a few Jews in that whole area all the way over to Ephesus, and for that very reason. So the Jews are a significant minority in this area. Not only does this verse tell us that a great many people came to this particular thing, Pisidian Antioch, we happen to know, in the vicinity had more than 50,000 residents within that area. Most of those were of Gentile background. Now this is important. So when it says the whole city showed up, or most of the whole city showed up, we're talking about thousands of people and even though there's a significant minority of Jews, lots of Gentiles.

So you imagine this whole scene. For the Jews, this is something they have never seen in their lifetime, is to have that huge a crowd show up for their Sabbath services. The Jewish synagogue was overwhelmed by this huge, gargantuan turnout. Massive turnout. To give you an idea, here's Coors Field where the Rockies play. It has a capacity of just over 50,000 people.

So this would be about the size, if that were full, that would be about the size of the city of Pisidian Antioch. So you can imagine if most of those showed up at a synagogue building, right? Probably to give you some idea what that would be like, it would be, you know, let's say 30,000 people showed up to come to Holly Hills. Good luck with that, right? So anyway, but just gives you an idea. This was quite an event. as I understand it, you know, we have in times past, even before I've been here, had much larger than the capacity of the church show up, hoping to come to some event, and usually what happens is you get a lot of people mad and frustrated.

Now, so the picture we get here is the Gentiles overwhelmed the synagogue, okay? Picture from Acts 13-44 is what was ordinarily a pretty large synagogue, was overwhelmed with the Gentiles of the city. And that's the only way you could get most of the people showing up. There are so many Gentiles coming to hear Paul and Barnabas, the number was way, lots of A's in there, right?

Over the capacity of the synagogue, the Jews could not control the crowds. Now notice the words that Dr. Luke chose. Crowds, plural. You can spell that with a Z if you like. But anyway, so crowds plural, not just a crowd. They didn't just have a lot of people. They had a lot, a lot of people. Okay?

Now, there's one other thing that really disturbed all the Jewish leaders here at the synagogue. You know what it was? with the bacon vendors. The bacon vendors show up and they're, bacon, get your crispy bacon here! A dozen bacons, we'll call it a baker's dozen for a shekel. And make that five shekels and we'll supersize it. Can you imagine that? And so these guys were going bonkers over this thing. How do we control this stuff? The bacon vendors are driving them nuts. Keep it out of the synagogue?

Good luck with that. They might well have had this over at the amphitheater at Pisidian Antioch. This is the amphitheater. That's it. But even that could not have handled the large numbers that they had. This amphitheater is not in as good a reconstructed condition as some of them, but you get the idea. This was a huge event, probably one of the larger events that happened during the time of that city.

Now he talked about the Word of the Lord. Now it's interesting, that's a term that's used and we give all the references here, including this one, starting in Acts 8.25, going on down the list on into chapter 19, a couple times, 19 and 20, with one exception where it means something else.

But the Word of the Lord here, with that one exception, Acts 11.16, is used consistently as a term in Acts here that means the content of the gospel that must be believed in order for a person to be saved. So the word of the Lord, that term, means to share the content of the gospel, okay?

Equivalent terms that are used in the book of Acts, and this is not an exhaustive list nor exhaustive reference, but just to give you an idea, sometimes it is simply called the word, And that's Acts 8.4.

The Word of God, Acts 13.46, is an example of that. The gospel as we've used it, which means the good news.

So Acts 14.7 and 15 and 21, and we're going to see that here in the next chapter.

And then finally, sometimes just preaching Jesus or preaching the Lord Jesus is also another term that has been used twice, and we're going to see it again. So several different terms are used for this, the content of the gospel that must be believed in order for someone to be saved. So one of the other things to take note of is while there is doctrine in the book of Acts, and it's some important doctrine, especially at certain points, Much of what Acts records is about evangelism. Now, that is valuable because some of the ways that people get evangelized these days are not fully biblical, and this spells out what's biblical. That's very important. We'll take a look at that in a bit here.

Here's Acts 13.45, "...but when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began contradicting the things spoken by Paul and were blaspheming, especially the bacon vendors." So out in the Gentile lands, the Jews were eager to tell others about their religion. You see, this is something we've got to kind of get in our mind here.

In the area around Jerusalem, you have these Sadducees, right? They were only in the area around Jerusalem. When you go out to these other areas outside of Israel, there's Pharisees. There's no Sadducees. There's nobody from the Essenes. They don't exist. They're all Pharisees. It's all Pharisee teaching.

That's two-thirds of the Jews lived outside of Israel at this time. So that means most of Judaism is focused on these Pharisees. Now, so these Pharisees are kind of missionary about their Jewish religion, or at least their belief in it, how they took it.

So you can imagine, most of the time people would show up and they would try to get the Gentiles to come, they would even talk to the Gentiles in other places, They'd talk to them and they usually couldn't get more than a small number of Gentiles interested. They did get them interested, don't misunderstand me, but they didn't get great numbers like this.

Here it was tough enough to have very many Gentiles come and even listen to the Jews. They'd have to work at it. The numbers of Gentiles that came to hear Paul and Barnabas was way, way over the top. Way out of control. Now, so what happened? Did the Jews say, Whoopee! We got lots of Gentiles here, isn't that wonderful? No, instead, they are filled with jealousy.

Now, it's important to understand, this is how Dr. Luke writes about this word filled. He uses the word filled a lot. As a matter of fact, he uses it more than once just in this passage. Dr. Luke uses the word filled, and when he uses it in the book of Acts, what he's talking about is to be totally in some state, either emotionally or spiritually.

In this case, he's expressing the Jews. The Jews who are usually working hard to get a few Gentiles to listen here are just, instead of being in a state of rejoicing over, oh wow, we've got a lot of Gentiles, they're instead very jealous because here is Paul and here is Barnabas and they have come to town and now they've managed to get lots and lots and lots of people to show up.

And it must be because of Facebook and Twitter and email, right? So it has to be that. No matter how much the Jews ever wanted to get a crowd together, they never were able to get crowds, plural, together like this. So what do they do? Because of their jealousy, they contradicted and blasphemed. By the way, good luck with that. Good luck with that. So, crowd control is often very tough. Trying to get enough contradiction and blaspheming together so you've got all these thousands of people listening to you is not going to be very effective.

So, what they did here, because they were jealous, because they were trying to contradict, is they end up saying, we've got to take a different strategy. But their badly underpowered response was to try to contradict the words of Paul and Barnabas, and to speak evil of this Jesus whom they had preached. Oh, Jesus, He isn't what they make Him out to be, and He's all this and that. Here's Acts 13, 46 and 47. Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said, It was necessary that the Word of God be spoken to you first, since you repudiate it and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life.

Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us. He says, I have placed you as a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the end of the earth. Now, first of all, we notice here he's going to the Jews first. That's the pattern we've seen, actually. In the first part of the missionary journey, we're going to continue to see it. It's something that he states in the Book of Romans. So they'd come to the Jews first.

The overall responsiveness to the gospel among the Jews is not great, as opposed to the Gentiles. Among the Gentiles, however, the response is very great. The Gentiles are very interested. So now they're going to turn to the Gentiles. That's where the response is. And as we see in Romans chapter 1, verse 16, and then chapter 2, 9 and 10, so three times in Romans 1 and 2, to the Jew first and also the Greek, who is in that part of the world the representative Gentile, right? So the Jew first and then the Gentile, that's the sequence and the priority everywhere they go.

Acts 13.47 draws from Isaiah 49.6 and the part here that he draws from is, I will also make you a light of the nations, and the word nations is the word that's often translated Gentiles, in the Greek it's ethnos, so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

So Acts 13.48, when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.

So you can imagine, now there's lots of Gentiles, right? There's Gentiles by the thousands. So when they hear this, what's their response? It's a very enthusiastic response, and as a matter of fact, you would call it an uproar. So imagine, consider the viewpoint of the Gentiles at this point in time. Think about this. Put yourself in the place of the Gentiles who had never heard the gospel before.

Do the gods love you? The gods don't love you. Isn't that sad? The gods don't love you. They really don't care about you. In fact, you could just put it this way, they don't give a hoot. They don't care about you. Why should they care about you? So all the pagan gods, they'd have temples to them and everything else. They really didn't care about you. You had to get their attention.

Paul is going to write to the church at Ephesus, God the Father has blessed you with every spiritual blessing. Do you know how many of the pagans could expect to have their God bless them? It didn't happen, right? So here is the Apostle Paul saying, all you have to do is believe, and here is a God who really loves you.

As a matter of fact, instead of you paying the price for the relationship, He'll pay the price for the relationship, and He won't back off. This was like such astounding news to them, no wonder there was such a response, and that's exactly what he got here. The Gentiles have been looking at the truth here through the lens of the Jews. little, you know, visibility here. You imagine, here are the Jews, and they're trying to say, okay, I'm going to gather here next Sabbath, and make sure you don't break the Sabbath rules.

We have 39 different considerations as to what is work. Hope you got those down. And we have a list of exceptions. Make sure you got those memorized, too. And that's just one of the 613 laws. Good luck with that, right? Now, in the midst of all that, here is Paul and Barnabas.

Says something real simple. Christ, the one promised, died for your sins, was buried, and rose again. Do you believe it? Great! That's it. God will take it from there. That is an entirely different kind of message than anything they'd ever heard before. Paul and Barnabas have been telling the truth just as clearly and plainly as it can possibly be presented. without corruption, okay? It's clear, it's gracious, and it is spectacular. Wow!

A God who not only loves me and will bless me, but a God that doesn't charge me, right? A God that does not expect me to work to get His attention. One of the things we have of record is the Gentiles frequently saying, I don't know what the God wants. I can't figure out how to get the God's attention. They were often frustrated by it because they couldn't get the God to pay any attention to it. Here is a God who loves you unconditionally and paid the price for the relationship. You know what he wants? He wants you to believe. It's that simple.

So the Gentiles are responding with great enthusiasm here at Pisidian Antioch. rejoicing among themselves for what Paul and Barnabas had been revealed, giving God the glory for it. So the Gentiles were rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, or as we put it, the word of God, the gospel, the word, Jesus, or whatever other term one might use out of the book of Acts. The content of the gospel is fantastic news. Fantastic news.

Now, as soon as you see in 1348, appointed to eternal life. He was appointed to eternal life, believed. As soon as we say appointed, the Calvinists say, oh yes! Right? And they're very excited about it, and we would say, not so fast. Right? Why? Certainly, the Bible does teach, here's Ephesians 1, 3, and 4, that God the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, back before he said, let there be light. That's true. So much is true.

That doesn't mean all the rest of the Calvinist doctrine is correct. Doesn't mean that all the rest is biblical teaching. Believed, by the way, in this same verse, the Greek says that they actively believed, not that they were made to believe, right? Or forced to believe, or God, you know, caused them to believe. They actively believed, and so it doesn't put things straightly into a Calvinist mindset. So one of the things to learn from this, Scripture is inspired, it's not exhaustive. Scripture tells us things, it is inspired by God, but there are things that it doesn't tell us, and one of those things is how do I logically reconcile God chose me with I choose Him. Scripture doesn't reconcile that.

So what people want to do is they want to boil it down, reduce it down to something that people can understand. Isaiah 55, 8 and 9, God's thoughts are higher than my thoughts. So what do we do? We come up with a system where we reduce God's thoughts down to my thoughts, down to human thought. That's exactly what Calvinism is. Calvinism, Arminianism, and open theism are all man's thoughts. But biblically, we don't need Calvinism. I don't need Arminianism. I don't need open theism. I don't need botulism.

So, what are these things? To put it simply, Calvinism is God is sovereign in everything. So you may think that you're choosing, but not really. Arminianism says that man's will is sovereign, which typically as associated with it, you can lose your salvation. Open theism is God doesn't know the future and God changes.

So what are all those? Those are all things that people invent to try to make what the Bible says about salvation understandable to me as a human being. Instead, we were called to believe what God says and leave what we can't quite understand to Him.

So we have a one-page handout. Can you imagine taking all of Calvinism and reducing it to one page? That's what we've done. Isn't that almost magical? So anyway, there's a supplement on that if you'd like to take a look at it. It starts off with the tulip of Calvinism. So anyway, you're welcome to take hold of that. I'd be glad to talk with anyone about it if you would like to do so.

Here's Acts 13.49, and the word of the Lord was being spread through the whole region.

So what happens, here's Paul and Barnabas, and they're going out to neighboring towns and cities and whatnot, and talking to them and spreading the gospel from there. So that's going on. In addition to that, those who had just become believers were also spreading it along to others as well, passing it along. So you had that effect. Paul and Barnabas didn't go everywhere in the area, try to go to a number of different places, and then there were those within the region who responded as well and passed the message along.

So the gospel of Jesus Christ, which was entirely by grace through faith, is just phenomenally very, very good news. It's good news for the Gentiles. It's also good news for the Jews. The Jews were often hoping, oh, I'm going to make it because I've got 613 laws and I'm trying really hard to stick by all those, right? And they thought that somehow would do it.

And what the Apostle Paul told them at Pisidian Antioch. We saw it last week in the passage, is the law of Moses will not justify you, not happening. That's what the book of Romans says. You're going to see it in the elective and then Romans here this next year. This is what the book of Galatians says in chapters 2 and 3. It's good news for Gentiles and it's good news for the Jews, both.

Here's Acts 13.50, but the Jews incited the devout women of prominence and the leading men of the city, instigated a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district. So let's take a look at what's this devout women of prominence.

We're going to see here as we proceed in the book of Acts, there were two places in fact in the Roman Empire where women could have high social status and one of those was this area In Galatia, women could have high social status and standing. And another one we're going to see is in the area around Philippi and Thessalonica and that area. Those two areas in the Roman Empire, women could have particularly high social and economic status and that's true here and we see it reflected in Dr. Luce's writing in both cases. So Galatia and Macedonia were those two places we see it here So dr. Luke makes note of their great influence either for good as we'll see in the case of Lydia and Acts chapter 16 or for worse as we see here and So we'll see they actually cut both ways.

It'll sometimes be a good thing and sometimes not so good here It's not so good It also talks about this word devout or God-fearing. We've mentioned this before. Gentiles could be called God-fearing, and that's a term used a few different times in the book of Acts, or devout.

It means they could be influenced or manipulated by the Jews because essentially these were people who were sympathetic to a lot of the Jewish message. And these devout women of prominence that Dr. Luke wrote about here could be Jewish or Gentile women who were favorable to the Jews, but very influential locally because of the local socioeconomic rules that worked in their favor. It also talks about the leading men, and these leading men, along with the devout women of prominence, were politically and socially influential in Antioch. They all pressed to join the Jews in speaking badly of Paul and Barnabas and say negative things about him. The leading men may also include, and likely did, some Roman officials.

Oftentimes the Jews would appeal to the Roman officials, because the Roman officials didn't like things getting stirred up. They want everything to stay calm, keep everybody on with business, and of course, because you don't want things disturbed, because that disrupts the collection of taxes.

And you don't want that, right? so together they put pressure on Paul and Barnabas to leave the area so as the verse tells us these drove them out of the city of Antioch at Pisidia and the area around it so here's Acts 13 51 but they shook off the dust of their feet and protest against them and went to Iconium okay so here's Paul and Barnabas Shaking off the dust of one's feet was a cultural symbol that communicated that the impurity of those who rejected the good news was also being rejected. You reject the good news, we're rejecting also you in this. Jesus had even recommended that. We see it in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all contain some direction on Christ's part for shaking the dust off your feet.

It meant that rejection of the city would not deter the progress of the gospel going forward in other places. They're not going to let that bother them. They're not going to let that slow them down. They're going to continue to move on. In fact, they will come back through, as we'll see later on. So from there they went to Iconium. Paul and Barnabas would travel about four days to get from Pisidian Antioch to Iconium.

There are a couple of major towns in between and they very likely would stop at those, so it may have taken longer than that to stop at these other places. But it certainly would take them into a different political and cultural area and away from the pressures and the difficulties that they'd encountered there at Pisidian Antioch. Iconium was one that maintained a good standing with the Roman Empire. They particularly wanted to curry favor with the Emperor, and it may have become a colony if that took place.

It was a couple of decades right after this time. Iconium would offer Paul and Barnabas a fresh opportunity for the gospel, right, because they I hadn't heard it before. They did not have all the political things lined up there, so they would proceed there.

Here's Acts 13.52, which finishes up the passage in the chapter. And the disciples were continually filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

We first saw this word disciples back in Acts 6.1.

It's one of several terms that are used for those who are believers in Christ. Sometimes, for example, they're called brethren. We would call them church-age saints, members of the body of Christ, as Paul later wrote. John 15, 1 through 9, makes it clear the word disciples is aimed at having intimacy with, dependence upon Christ and knowing Him personally and directly.

The disciples here means Paul and Barnabas and those just newly saved. So here we have filled with joy and the Holy Spirit filled as with Dr. Luke generally means in totality, means maxed out or maybe filled to over the top. These disciples are exceedingly joyful which is a joy that does not depend upon the circumstances. These disciples also are having unique filling of the Holy Spirit, which is an enablement and an empowerment that is specific to the apostolic era and therefore to this specific time.

So we find it in the book of Acts. It is a phrase that's used in a unique way because Acts is, as we've said, a transitional period. So what do we do with all this? As we look at this, here is the Apostle Paul. He's completed what we have recorded for us in chapter 13. He's alongside Barnabas. They actually have much more to go in their first missionary journey. So one of the things we do as we look through this, we examine the gospel that we believe and tell to others to be sure that it's biblical.

And to summarize it quickly, that Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again, do you believe it? We don't invite people to make a commitment to Christ and just leave it at that. We don't simply say, well, you need to invite Jesus into your heart. You need to just join the church or some wording such as that.

We make it clear what the gospel is and that it is to be believed. We found our faith in the absolute truth of God's word, the singular given truth that is intended by God to be truly knowable. That is, the word of God is singular. God had one intent in it. It is intended by God to be knowable, that we can know and understand what God intended for us to learn and for it to say.

We keep going when it's clear that God tells us to keep going and we change course when God says to do so. One of the things we're going to find as we go through the book of Acts is we're going to get good guidance on how do we know the will of God. And so we have in the next slide here a good foundation for that. We're going to keep returning to this because there are good principles we're going to see along the way.

One of those, God's will is Fixed and irreversible includes your position and possessions in Him. That's in fact the elective, the unfathomable riches of Christ that we have for this next year. That's God's sovereign will is fixed and irreversible, that we know exactly what God has put in place for those who believe and what won't be changed or lost. Secondly, God's moral will is revealed in scripture and intended to be lived by the life of Christ.

So we have that next thing. And so that's not fixed and irreversible, but it's made clear in scripture. And it's also made clear that it should be lived out by Christ's life and not our own. Thirdly, God's individual will consists mostly of learning to make wise decisions with godly wisdom rather than worldly wisdom.

So we're going to be looking at that as we proceed through the book of Acts. How do I know that I'm in the will of God? And the book of Acts, as we proceed through it, is going to give us some insights and understandings to that. And isn't it great, as we look at this, that people oftentimes get real tortured and stressed, you know, boy, I want to do what's God's will, and I want to be in God's will, and that kind of thing. And Scripture actually gives us guidance and understanding. in these things. We can trust Him in it, and we can trust what He's revealed to us.

Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for the relationship that you have spelled out here for us. Thank you. As we look at this, we can see your faithfulness with Paul and Barnabas, but also in that we see your clear guidance. We see your gospel is clear. We also see, Lord, as we proceed along, we see that Paul and Barnabas moved along from where they were. They stayed in Antioch for a time and then knew when it was time to move on.

And we can know and understand such things as well. And so we just pray that we would learn these things, and that you would guide and lead us, and in the midst of that, that we walk in intimacy with you and dependence upon you. We pray, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen.