The World and the Way of the Cross
Brothers and fathers, hear the defense that I now make before you. Acts 22:1
Acts 21:37–22:29 – The Story of the Church: Living Into This Drama in the 21st Century
First Sunday of Advent – November 28, 2021 (am)
Before we read our passage for today, it would be good for us to recall the state Paul is in as our passage begins. He’s just been drug out of the Temple by an angry mob that was stirred up by Jews who had followed Paul from Asia.
The mob had been beating him with the intent of killing him until Roman troops had been sent to rescue him. As the Romans worked to rescue him, they had to resort to carrying him through the crowd because the Jewish mob was so violent Paul couldn’t even walk through it.
As our passage begins he was – as one commentator describes him - “. . . a sorry figure—bruised, battered, begrimed, and disheveled.” But, as this commentator points out, we will see “he is quickly in command of the situation.”[1]
Read Acts 21:37-22:29
Introduction:
I recently heard it said that “apologetics used to be about explaining the church to the world, but now it’s more about explaining the world to the church.”[2]
Are you confused by the world in which we live? Would it be nice to have someone come and explain all the ways the world has changed in the last decade? Do you struggle to come up with biblical answers to the shifting landscape of questions and challenges the world poses? Do you know how to defend your faith in ways that our world would receive or even understand?
To communicate and explain and defend our faith before a watching world, we must first understand that watching world. We must understand what it thinks about things like faith and truth, right and wrong, goodness and beauty. But we need more than a knowledge of what our world thinks – we also need to know how our world thinks – how it goes about defining what is true and right and good, what its sources of authority on these subjects are, and how these arguments are made.
When we do, we see that the world around us is changing and it seems to be doing more quickly now than in recent memory. The way the world understands the human individual is changing. What is being defined as good, and true, and beautiful is changing. How the world shapes its arguments about what is good and true and beautiful is changing. Where the world looks to find peace and happiness and human flourishing is changing.
As I studied our text for this week – I found myself wondering how our world would see and interpret what takes place there. A text that contains an oppressing mob and an oppressed individual, a text where Paul uses his personal story as form of self-defense, a text where Paul is ultimately cancelled by the culture around him. As I read this text, I saw themes emerging that have become hot button topics in our world today and I wondered, what does our text have to say to those issues. Does it confirm them or does it refute them? How does it speak to them?
So my goal this morning as we walk through our text is to try to answer some of these questions – to see what Luke’s account has to say about four hot button issues in the world around us – and in doing so I hope to provide a little help in explaining the world to the church – and to see if the testimony of Scripture confirms the direction our world is headed or refutes it.
I’ll do so in four points – having changed the third and fourth points from what you see in your bulletin:
1. Oppression or Opportunity?
2. Self-Actualizing or Self-Identifying?
3. Deconstruction or Redirection?
4. Cancelled or the Way of the Cross?
Introduction to Our Text
Turning to our text for today, we see that much of what we read is a repetition of what we’ve already heard back in Acts 9, which raises the question, what do we do with a text that largely repeats what we’ve already heard? Do we just pull up the sermon from Acts 9 and play it on the screen all over again? Chances are we could use a refresher of what was said back then. Or do we just skip this part of the passage and focus on the events that frame it – Paul’s interactions with the Roman tribune? Or is there something different going on here than what was going on in chapter 9 – something worthy of our attention and our time and our focus?
Probably not! Let’s just skip it and go get lunch! Just kidding. There are a few things I’d like to point out about Acts 22 as we begin this morning. Things that help us to see this is not just a passage we should skim over or skip and move on.
First, we should recall that when we read about Paul’s Damascus road conversion back in chapter 9 we were reading Luke’s description of these events, but here we have Paul’s testimony in his own words and so Acts 22 gives us a window into those events through Paul’s eyes.
Second, in Acts 9 Luke was simply narrating the events that were taking place as the gospel continued to spread from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and especially to the ends of the earth as Paul was to be the man who would take the gospel to the ends of the earth. But here, Paul’s testimony serves a different purpose. It is not being recounted as part of the story of the spread of the gospel, we are not reading a narrative as we read Acts 22, rather, it is being recounted by Paul as a speech, as a speech to a crowd, more importantly, as a speech being given in defense of who Paul is and what he’s been teaching. That too gives our account a new thrust.
And thirdly, where the audience in Acts 9 is simply the readers of Luke’s second book, here the audience is still the readers of Luke’s second book, but also a Jewish mob! Boiling over with anger! And that also ought to shape how we read this passage.
Each of these differences from Acts 9 cause us to ask some important interpretive questions and help us to get at the meaning of this text. It helps us to ask not just – what happened when Paul was converted but, why is Paul telling these people about his conversion? How does he tell them about his conversion, what does he put in? What does he leave out? What does he hope it will accomplish by this? And how do the crowds respond?
Transition: So let’s move now into the first part of our passage, revisiting the end of Acts 21 in the first point for this morning . . .
1. Oppression or Opportunity? (Acts 21:37-40)
As our passage begins, we find Paul beat up and chained up, but by no means has he given up, he seems to be just getting started.
Without skipping a beat, he turns to the Roman commander who has just saved his life but who has also taken the first steps to imprisoning Paul and he does something very shrewd. He asks him a question – he does it politely, beginning with – “May I say something to you?” – and he does it in this man’s mother tongue.
Perhaps there’s a lesson there for some of us.
Clearly it catches the soldiers attention – and by doing it in this way it accomplishes two things simultaneously. First, it clears up a misunderstanding the tribune had formed in his own mind. He had mistook Paul for an Egyptian who had stirred up a revolt some three years previously, a revolt that the historian Josephus tells us was carried out by four thousand men to overthrow the Romans, a revolt that had been crushed by Felix, the Roman governor, but not before the Egyptian ringleader had escaped.[3] By addressing the tribune in Greek, Paul made it clear that he was not this Egyptian revolutionary but rather a fellow Greek speaking man.
Second, by addressing the tribune in this way, Paul earns himself the opportunity to speak to those who just tried to kill him, saying to the tribune, “I beg you, permit me to speak to the people.”
Before we look at what Paul says, let’s pause for a moment to consider the apostle Paul as he stands before this angry mob. Let’s pause to consider what is foremost on the mind of the apostle Paul as he faces a mob that was stirred up by Jews from Asia who have done nothing but make his life difficult ever since he first met them.
Let’s consider whether Paul, in this moment, focused more on the oppression he was experiencing or the opportunity it had afforded him.
The idea of oppression is our first venture into what our world is thinking about and talking about these days. There is much talk about who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed and what should be done in response to these observations – who should be elected, who should not; what needs to be reformed, or done away with all together; which trials ought to go a certain way and what it means if they don’t; and who is at fault.
In our text for today, we get a window into how Paul the apostle responded in real time to the oppression he was experiencing. Now it should be pointed out that oppression is defined as “prolonged cruel or unjust treatment” – so it could be argued that Paul is not the victim of oppression per se, given that the treatment he’s experiencing is fairly new in his life – a point I’d be willing to grant – but I’ve still decided to use this word for the sake of to our present climate. That said, Paul certainly is being vehemently opposed by the people around him. He certainly is the victim of injustice. And were it to continue for Paul and people who would follow in his paths – which it would – we could call it oppression.
So how does Paul respond? Does he cry out for justice or does he do something else? While we see that justice is not far from Paul’s mind – for by the end of our passage he claims his Roman citizenship to stop the injustice of being whipped – it is not the first place he goes. Instead, Paul zeros in on the opportunity his situation has afforded him.
Amazingly - with very little time to process what had just happened, with fight or flight responses still pumping adrenaline through his veins, with an increasing awareness of each blow that had been landed on his body, with chains on his harms and soldiers on his sides and a ravenous crowd in his face, Paul says – “I beg you, permit me to speak to the people.”
Why? Because Paul sees an opportunity for the gospel.
In preparing for the evening of prayer for the persecuted church – I reached out to a number of our Global Outreach partners to see if there was any way we could pray for the persecuted church in their region. As I reached out to our two partners in Indonesia – who for security reasons we’ll call Mr. O and the K-Family – I was asked to pray for the conversion of people who were strongly persecuting the church because, they have found, persecutors, once converted, make great missionaries.
One of our partners went on to tell me about one such person, a guy who had been a criminal prior to coming to Christ and who had spent time in jail for his crimes but was now a church planter. He described this man and men like him as wild men, courageous, fearless – and went on to say how this man had been arrested again – this time for sharing his faith, and over the course of his time in prison he had converted 39 men. If that isn’t amazing enough, it turns out that many of these convicts turned Christian were from an people group in Indonesia that the church had not yet been able to reach, but now the gospel was being shared to them by their own people. He was a persecutor turned pastor who saw jail time as an opportunity to reach an unreached people group.
Paul was the OG of persecutors turned pastors. He was a wild man for Christ. He was courageous and fearless, but more than any of those things – he was also filled with love for the people who were oppressing him, and so he asks if he can speak to the crowd and tell them about what Jesus has done for him.
In a day and age when we are hearing a lot about oppression, a lot about systemic forms of oppression, a lot about who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed and about the need for social justice and reform – I think it is important for the church to be made aware of Paul’s example – to recognize that in his moment of being oppressed – his first reaction was to see it as an opportunity for the gospel, to share about Jesus Christ, while also recognizing that he justice wasn’t a distant second, as he appeals to it in the verses that follow.
I think this is important for us to see because I’m afraid the world around us and the cultural climate in which we live may encourage us to think that the push for justice comes before the proclamation of the gospel. That the establishment of my rights takes priority over encouraging sinners to repent.
But that is not what we see here from Paul and I don’t think we see it from Paul because he didn’t see his oppressors simply as oppressors – he saw them as people who were oppressed themselves – people who were oppressed by sin and by Satan and by the flesh and who needed Jesus just as much as he did. And so he takes this opportunity to tell them about Christ.
Is that how you’re wired? Is that how we’re wired? Are we wired to give the gospel before we get justice? Can we see those who oppress us as being oppressed themselves – oppressed by sin and in need of a savior? That is the example Paul lays before us at the outset of our passage.
Transition: Moving into our second point for today – we recall that prior to being captured by the Romans, Paul had been captured by Christ, and that is what he wants to tell the Jewish mob in front of him.
2. Self-Actualizing or Self-Identifying? (Acts 22:1-21)
Our next two points are both an analysis of Paul’s speech in Acts 22. Both of them aim to answer the question “What is Paul doing when he gives his testimony to the crowd and why is he doing it?”
As we’ve already read, Paul calls to attention the crowd and then explains to them how it is that he became a Christian. He begins with his past, telling them about his birth and his education and his former way of life – of how he persecuted Christianity – known as “the Way” by his audience – and how the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, some who may have even been in the crowd, could vouch for him.
He then tells about his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road. About Jesus’ appearance to him in a bright light such that he was blinded and needed to go to Ananias to receive his sight again before being baptized into the faith.
Finally he tells about a second vision he had of Jesus while in the temple once back in Jerusalem. It’s this vision Paul uses to relay Jesus’ calling upon his life to go to the Gentiles with the gospel. At which point the crowd shouts him out and he is removed by the Roman tribune.
So what is Paul doing here? Why, when faced with an angry mob, does Paul tell his conversion story? Why doesn’t he launch into a sermon about all the ways Jesus fulfilled the prophecies about the Jewish messiah? Why doesn’t he call the mob’s attention to Isaiah’s prophecy that Israel was to be a light to the nations in order to explain his being sent to the Gentiles?[4] Why doesn’t he dispel the rumors against himself and clarify what he teaches about the law and circumcision? Why does Paul just give his testimony?
One suggestion that might come from our modern mindset is that Paul doing something called, “self-actualizing.”
Self-actualizing is a term that was popularized by Psychologist Abraham Maslow in the mid-1900’s but has found increasing use in our day and age to describe the path to true happiness and well-being. This is the path of introspection, of looking inside oneself to discover who you truly are and then self-actualizing that truth by making decisions and surrounding yourself with those who support those decisions as you seek to become the truest form of yourself all in pursuit of happiness and fulfillment.
To give an innocuous example of how this might play out – a person may discern that they are, at their core, an artist and so they self-actualize by orchestrating their life such that they can give themselves to and be encouraged to give themselves to the creation of art. But it is also the rise of self-actualization that leads to statements such as “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”.
Since self-actualization is so popular now – I think it is important to ask, is that what Paul is doing here? Is he sharing his testimony, his story of who he is, as a means of explaining what is true for him? Is he defending himself before this crowd by explaining that being a Christian is just the truest form of himself? Is he aiming to win the crowds empathy, seeking their acceptance for who he is, while also empowering them to discover their deepest truths and become who they feel called to be?
I don’t think so. I don’t think Paul is self-actualizing. The story itself shows he isn’t, because the conclusions he’s come to and the course he’s on is not the product of introspection, of looking inside himself, rather it’s the product of outside intervention – of Jesus stopping him in his tracks and turning him around.
So what is Paul doing? When we look at the details Paul shares in his testimony here and compare it to the other places in Scripture where his conversion is described, like Acts 9 or Acts 26 or Philippians 3, what we see is that this account of his conversion, of his story, is that it is given in a way that would have been particularly compelling for his Jewish audience.
We see this when Paul begins is defense by speaking to the crowd in the Hebrew dialect – with speaking in the people’s heart language. He then invites them to listen to him by saying “listen up ya’ thugs” but by addressing them as “brothers and fathers.” He identifies himself as a Jew, raised in Jerusalem, and educated by a prominent Jerusalem Pharisee. He calls the law the law of our fathers. He relates with the crowd on their zeal for the things of God saying he was just as zealous as they are in their resistance to him. He cites his zealous persecution of Christians in partnership with the Jewish leaders. He identifies Jesus as a Palestinian Jew by saying Jesus of Nazareth. His conversion is confirmed by Ananias, a devout man according to the law well-spoken of by all the Jews. Ananias refers to Jesus as the Righteous one, a Jewish term for the Messiah. And when Paul receives his commission to go to the Gentiles, he communicates having received it in while praying in the Jewish Temple.
In everything Paul says he “stresses his personal loyalty to his Jewish origins and faith.”[5] And I believe he does so – not as a means of self-actualization, but of self-identification. That is to say, he does it to identify with his audience. He wants them to see all the ways that he is like them so that he might earn their ear and clearly communicate what has caused him to become who he is now.
Now before we move on to our next point, I’d like to point out that while Paul is not guilty of self-actualization here, we often times are. The idea that we need to live in line with our feelings is very much something we wrestle with each and every day. It is not just the transgender community that finds themselves doing this – it is also anyone who says “I know I’m right because what I do makes me feel good” or who says “I know your wrong because what you’ve done or what you say doesn’t support me.” We’re all guilty of living by ethics based on feelings, of finding justification in simply being me, and of praying “I thank you Lord, that I’m not like those other people.”
Recognizing this helps us to be humble and to show compassion when we see it in others.
And compassion towards others is the product of being able to identify with them, just as we see Paul doing here. When we see others who believe differently from us, who think differently from us, who reason differently from us – one question we need to ask ourselves is – “how am I like that too.” To do so opens a door for us to love those who we see as being different form us, even when those who are different from us are actively oppressing us. That is, identifying with others helps us to see not just oppression, but opportunities, and opens a door to our being able to share the gospel.
Transition: And that was Paul’s goal here – to identify with the crowd so that they might hear and receive the story of what Jesus has done in Paul.
3. Deconstruction or Redirection?
We concluded in the last point that Paul doesn’t use his personal story as a means of self-actualization – but our world might offer another possible explanation for why Paul uses his testimony as his means of self-defense, and that is the possibility that Paul is trying to deconstruct Judaism before his Jewish audience.
Pastor and Theologian Jonathan Leeman helps to explain what we mean by “deconstruction” in an article from the most recent edition of the 9Marks Journal. For those doing deconstruction, Leeman writes:
. . . the name of the game is not my understanding of the Bible versus your understanding of the Bible. It’s my understanding of the Bible versus your Story. And by Story, I mean people’s personal stories, their lived experiences, as well as those stories writ large in the histories of a people and documented by social scientists . . . Deconstruction doesn’t begin with exegesis, but with exegeting the exegete.
That is to say, deconstruction doesn’t begin with trying to understand the Bible but with trying to understand the one who is arguing from the Bible and then deconstructing their argument based not on what they are arguing, but on who is making the argument.
Perhaps an example of deconstruction would be helpful: A person – a pastor or theologian or member of a church might say, “I believe that husbands should be the heads of their households because of my understanding of Ephesians 5.” To which the one deconstructing the argument would say – of course you do – you’re a man and that interpretation serves to keep you in your position of power. I’ve lived long enough to learn that wives are just as fit to lead their homes as the husbands are – so I reject your assertion.
Or, the one doing deconstruction might look at the argument I made earlier, emphasizing Paul’s situation as an opportunity for the gospel before it being an opportunity to correct oppression and say – of course you’d see it in that way – you’re a white man – one of the primary oppressors in our world today – of course you’d want to make addressing the injustice of oppression a secondary issue.
This is what is happening in deconstruction and it is yet another way we see our world changing in the way it thinks and reasons – but could it be that Paul is doing this very thing? He is, after all, responding to theological arguments that have been made against him (He’s teaching everyone everywhere against the people and the law and this place) and he does not respond with a Bible saturated argument but rather with his own personal story. Is Paul pitting his story against their Scriptures?
To answer that question I think we must first observe that his accusers weren’t making a very theologically sound argument themselves. If they think it’s unacceptable on biblical grounds to speak against the people of Israel and the temple then they perhaps they need to go back and read the biblical prophets again. And if they think Paul is teaching people against the law, then perhaps they hear what he will write to the Romans and see how he upholds what the law teaches, using it to show our need for a savior.
So Paul can’t be committing the deconstructionist act of pitting his story against their Scriptures because their arguments against him aren’t from Scripture. But why doesn’t Paul just point that out? Why tell his testimony – why bring his story into his self-defense?
Well, the careful reader will see that the story Paul is really telling here, and the story any of us tell when we give our testimonies, is not our story – but the story of how God has invaded our story and redirected it, bringing it in line with His story.
When Paul tells his story, he tells it not to deconstruct Judaism but to show his adherence to Judaism, but not Judaism as his crowd understood it, rather Judaism as the prophets in Scripture had explained it. Paul’s story is one of that highlights the fulfillment of prophecies made to the Jewish people – like the prophecy of a Messiah who would come to save his people and the prophecy that the Jews would be a light to the Gentiles in a day and age when God’s people were being transformed – like dry bones that have been given flesh, and as people with God’s spirit within them, a people who knew the law not just in their heads but also in their hearts, and whose sins had forever been forgiven.[6]
Thus Paul story isn’t in opposition to the Jewish Scriptures, but in line with them. It is a story of a life being lived as if Jewish prophecies were yet unfulfilled only to be redirected by the very fulfillment of those prophecies – Jesus Christ – so that he might live in line with them.
And Paul’s transformed life is the evidence that this has happened. That’s why, when Paul was praying in the temple and Jesus tells him it’s time to get out Jerusalem, and quickly, “because they will not accept your testimony about me” Paul points Jesus to his transformed life.
He says, “Lord, they themselves know that in one synagogue after another I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. And when the blood of Stephen your witness was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving and watching over the garments of those who killed him.”
The point being, Jesus, how could they possibly not accept my testimony about you? Look at who I was and look at who I am now! His life had been redirected by Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, and his transformation is the evidence and he wants his Jewish brethren to experience this too.
But Jesus just says, “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” And Jesus’ command is corroborated by the accounts we read elsewhere in Acts of the Jews in Jerusalem who had plotted to kill Paul – a plot we see playing out once again as the Jewish mob calls for his death. Jesus knew then what Paul sees again here, the evidence of Paul’s transformed life would not be enough for them to come to Christ.
That’s hard to swallow for the reader of Acts. It causes us to ask why not? Why wasn’t Paul’s redirected life enough to convince the Jews that what he taught really was in line with their Scriptures and was in fact the fulfillment of their Scriptures?
To answer that question – we must understand the relationship between truth and power. Jonathan Leeman explains that for the person doing deconstruction, the assumption is that people believe only in truths that keep them in power. Thus in the act of deconstruction, one goal is to challenge the truths that keep their opponents in power and then define truth in a way that aims to correct the power structure – resulting in their own rise in power. It is what Leeman calls “truth in the service of power.”
We see in the gospels that one of reasons the Jewish leaders struggled with Jesus was because he was threatening their power.[7] That power struggle continues into Acts with the Jews and Paul, one example being Paul’s ministry in Thessalonica where, following Paul’s preaching, some Jews were persuaded to join them as did a great many devout Greeks and not a few leading women, a situation of which Luke tells us the Jews were jealous and stirred up a mob that sought to bring Paul to an end.[8] Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It sounds like what is happening again here in our passage.
When truth operates in the service of power, anything can be true, so long as it keeps the one claiming the truth in a position of power. Or another way we might say it is, when truth is in the service of power – no truth can be accepted that might jeopardize one’s power.
We read that when Paul tells of his being sent to the Gentiles, the Jewish crowd reacts in a way that ends Paul’s speech prematurely and calls for his death. I think the Jewish crowd responds this way because this truth more than the others in his story threatened their power. It was the truth that the Gentiles were now welcomed members of God’s people and that they didn’t need to go through Judaism to get there. In fact, Jews needed to go through Jesus, just like Gentiles, according to Paul’s truth – a truth he received from Jesus – and this was too much for them to swallow. So they came up with murderous plots against Paul, the one Jesus had entrusted with preaching this truth, that he might not threaten their power, and they lived by another truth, a truth that said – anyone who speaks against this people or our law or this temple must die.[9]
If deconstruction is one way of reasoning in our modern world, if our world operates on the assumption that truth is in the service of power – how should we operate as Christians? Well, we are to be the opposite. We are called to live out a posture of power in the service of truth.
That is what we see in Paul’s story – he had plenty of power before he met Christ. He had his Roman citizenship, he had his Jerusalem upbringing, he had his top-notch education, he had his religious zeal, and he had his letters from the high priest and elders giving him permission to pursue and arrest Christians – but by God’s grace, all of that power crumbled when he came face to face with the truth of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, blinding him from heaven, as he traveled the Damascus road. And the result for Paul, was that he immediately laid down his power in service of the truth.
Paul tells us in Philippians 3, another account of his conversion, that “whatever gain [he] had [from his former life]” whatever power and prestige and position he had, he now “counted as loss for the sake of Christ.” He says he counts it as “rubbish, in order that [he] may gain Christ and be found in him . . .” so that he might “know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”[10]
That is what power in the service of truth looks like! And that is what we are called to as Christians. We are called to know the Scriptures as our source of truth and to allow truth to correct our power hungry hearts – seeking not a power of our own – but rather the power of Christ to transform us and make us like Jesus with the hope that if we do, we won’t just be like Jesus (a glorious though in itself), we will one day be with Jesus, in heaven for all of eternity.
And knowing we’re called to power in the service of truth – our testimonies ought to reflect this. When we are asked by others to give a defense of what we believe, we should consider the power of our testimonies to draw attention to the glorious truths that have transformed our hearts, the truth of how Jesus has redirected our hearts and brought our stories in line with His story. Ours, like Paul’s, are stories of how truth has the power to transform lives, lives once lived for ourselves but now lived in in the service of King Jesus.
Transition: And when we tell our testimonies like that, we will find that we have power that is entirely outside ourselves. It is the power of Christ’s Spirit at work in us, speaking His truth for the sake of saving others. And some will hear it from us as it is, the very power of God to save, but others will not, as we see in our text for today, which brings us to our final point.
4. Cancelled or the Way of the Cross?
Our last observation about our world is that there are those who, when confronted by the truth, will seek to cancel it rather than embrace it. We see from our passage today that though the term “cancel culture” might be new, the idea of canceling those who are seen as a threat is not.
So we read that after Paul says that Jesus sent him to the Gentiles, the crowds “raised their voices and said, “Away with such a fellow from the earth! For he should not be allowed to live.”
Though cancel culture itself is not new, what is new for many of us is that Christian beliefs and Christian ideals and the things that identify us with Christ are moving more and more into the crosshairs of those driving the cancel culture movement. Christian opinions are called bigoted, Christian beliefs are labeled hate speech, and Christian ideals are cast as harmful and dangerous to the society’s well-being.
So how should we respond when our testimonies lead to our being cancelled rather than to conversions, as it did for Paul in our passage today? How should we respond when cancel culture comes for us?
I think we begin by reminding ourselves that we’re in good company.
Jesus was cancelled when he came to save sinners. Those who sought to cancel him did so by secretly arresting him, falsely accusing him, stirring up a mob against him, and calling for his death.
With remarkable similarity, Luke describes the Jews attempt to cancel Paul in our passage today in very similar terms. Paul too is unjustly apprehended, falsely accused, has a mob stirred up against him, and hears calls for his death.
These similarities are no coincidence, they are to be expected for anyone who aims to follow Jesus. For Jesus himself said, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”[11] And as Paul would go on after his arrest to write to Timothy, “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”[12]
To be canceled for Christ is to find ourselves on the way of the cross. For Jesus, the way of the cross was the way of winning salvation for sinners through the sacrifice of himself. For us today, the way of the cross is the way discipleship – it is the way of experiencing the same suffering Christ experienced, the way of becoming like Christ as we endure the suffering he endured, and allowing that shared experience to transforms us all the more into his image.
And it is another opportunity for us to become people who submit our power to the truth. Rather than raging against cancel culture in an attempt to maintain our power we can prayerfully look to the truth that just as Jesus was cancelled, so also will we be cancelled, but also to the truth that he who the world tried to cancel rose from the dead and now reigns from heaven, the truth that though culture may succeed in canceling us for today, it will never be able to cancel us forever.
So, as we conclude for today, let us look to Paul’s example in this passage and pray that the Lord would lead us further down the way of the cross. A way that sees oppression as an opportunity to share Christ. A way that identifies with our enemies that we might better communicate Christ. A way that calls attention not to our story but to God’s story, and how he has redirected us into his truth and is transforming our hearts. And a way that expects persecution and cancellation and uses them to grow more into Christ’s image.
And let us walk this way together – encouraging one another every day, that none of us may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Works Cited
Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts (Revised Edition). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, 1988.
Boice, James Montgomery. Acts. Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1997.
Hansen, Collin & Carl Trueman. “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.” Gospelbound Podcast, The Gospel Coalition, November 17, 2020. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/gospelbound/the-rise-and-triumph-of-the-modern-self/
Leeman, Jonathan. Editor’s Note: Defending Sound Doctrine Against the Deconstruction of American
Evangelicalism. IX Marks Journal. November 16, 2021. https://www.9marks.org/article/editors-note-defending-sound-doctrine-against-the-deconstruction-of-american-evangelicalism/
Stott, John. The Spirit the Church and the World: The Message of Acts. InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, 1990.
[1] F.F. Bruce, 412.
[2] Collin Hansen mentions having heard this said by Carl Trueman in the podcast referenced below.
[3] F.F. Bruce, 412 – citing Josephus (BJ 2.261-263; Ant. 20.169-72).
[4] Isa. 49:6
[5] Stott, 347.
[6] Ezek. 37, Jer. 31
[7] John 12:19
[8] Acts 17:1-9
[9] Stott writes: ““In their eyes proselytism (making Gentiles into Jews) was fine; but evangelism (making Gentiles into Christians without first making them Jews) was an abomination. It was tantamount to saying that Jews and Gentiles were equal, for they both needed to come to God through Christ, and that on identical terms.” (Stott, 348)
[10] Phil. 3:7-11.
[11] John 15:20
[12] 2 Tim 3:12
NEXT WEEK: Acts 22:30–23:11