One Hour. One Book: Acts

The book of Acts provides a detailed and orderly and eyewitness account of not just what Jesus did, that's really Luke's gospel, but the growth of the early church and the spread of the gospel.

There are many who indicate that the gospel that the book of Acts ends on, um, rather abruptly in Rome. But I think that's the point of the book. I think the point of the book is to take you from Jerusalem to Rome. And so Acts chapter 1 will be Jerusalem and Acts chapter 28 will be Rome. And it's how the gospel got to Rome. But it's much more than that.

The gospel according to Luke was to give you the first part of a story. In Luke, uh, he tells he tells Theophilos that he's going to tell the story, uh, in order of Jesus's ministry. But in the book of Acts, he picks up with the word. And you see in the very beginning that this is a continuation of that. This is Jesus began to do and teach in the Gospel of Luke, but the church picked up the work in the book of Acts. So, it's more or less a sequel to Luke's gospel. In my opinion, there is a trilogy in his mind that he he's going to write a third book, but it doesn't happen or we don't have it. But the important thing is that it's the sequel to Luke's gospel.

Um, it focuses primarily on the ministry of Peter and then the ministry of Paul. There are other uh profound players, but I think that there's probably something that should help us to understand the ministry of Paul in a very unique way, and we're going to talk about that in in the next lecture.

As far as authorship, I mean, we're walking around assuming that Luke wrote this book, but it doesn't actually say that. The evidence for that, um, that he is Colossians 4:14, Luke the physician, Colossians 4:14. Um, the evidence that he is the writer is probably mostly related to the early church writings. There are a couple of people that write concerning uh, Luke as the writer. One of them is a fragment called the Anti-Marcian prologue to the Gospel of Luke. It's written between 150 and 250. And it actually uh says these words: Luke is a Syrian of Antioch, a Syrian by race, a physician by profession. He had become a disciple of the apostles, and later followed Paul until Paul's martyrdom, having served the Lord continuously unmarried without children, filled with the Holy Spirit. He died at the age of 84 in um Bethia. We don't know how true that is. We just know that it's an early statement. So he may these things may be true of him.

We also have this little fragment that was found by a fellow um, Father Moratori. It's called the Moratorian fragment. It's also from the second century and it says uh, it's a little bit, there's 85 lines of a manuscript and it's very difficult to read. Um, what we have is this manuscript that suggests that Luke is the author of the book of Acts. So we have two sources from the second century that tell us that. If you count Irenaeus's uh statement and Clement of Alexandria's statement that also happened in the second century, those are reflections of the same thing. So you may have as many as four or five different early church writers that assume that Luke is the writer.

Now, how would Luke get the information in the book? In the Gospel of Luke, he says in Luke 1:2 that he went around and collected eyewitnesses. Let me suggest to you that Luke and Acts as a set get their source material from the preaching and teaching of Paul and from the work of the Holy Spirit in the eyewitnesses that are speaking to Luke. And so Luke weaves together these eyewitnesses and the things he hears say Peter say and Paul say, but mostly the preaching and teaching of Paul since he follows around Paul. So I would lean heavily on Acts containing a lot of backfill information for for Pauline documents.

Let let me say it this way. You have learned up till now a Hebrew world context for the prophets, for the law, for the writings, right? I mean, you've learned a lot about the way Hebrews think and the way the basic biblical context was a Hebrew worldview. That is not true anymore. As you hit the book of Acts, you leave that view. Jerusalem is descending in its importance. Rome is ascending in its importance. So, the context for the book of Acts and the context for the epistles is the Roman world. We're no longer interested. When when you mention the law, you may be talking about the Torah, but often you're talking about the common law of Rome. So Paul is going to have to say a lot of things that have never been said before because the the gospels were in the context of a Hebrew world. The prophets, the writings, the law were in the context of a Hebrew world. When you hit the book of Acts, you leave the Hebrew world. The gospel is now going out.

Evidence for that. When Paul was born, he was born Shaul, Saul of Tarsus. We call him Paul not because he was Saul, then came to Jesus and became Paul. All Jews had two names. If you go to a bris, if you go to a circumcision, they say it this way: His name shall be called among the sons of Israel, Shaul. His name shall be called among the gentile world, among the goyim, Paulus. He was always both. So why do we call him Paul? Because the bulk of what we have is his mission activity outside of the Hebrew world. And so much of the New Testament is set in Roman law.

Here's the thing. We haven't done a lot of Roman law. You, your entire context for the Bible so far has been the Hebrew world. And from here on out, we're going to do an awful lot of Roman stuff. The reason I'm steeped right now in studying the Roman world is because I am convinced that where, um, where what happens is we end up having people who understand Rome and the Greco-Roman world and try to look at the Old Testament through it, or we have Hebrew thinkers trying to look at the New Testament. But you've got to become two people in order to do this. You've got to have two totally different mindsets about what's going on. What is going on in the common street understanding of something in Rome is not the same as a kid growing up in Jerusalem. A kid growing up in Jerusalem has a different worldview. In the same way that today, you cannot project yourself into the mind of a North Korean. You, you don't think like they think. You, you can't do it without real study of who they are. There's no way you're understanding an Iranian today. They're, they're not Arabs. They're ancient Persians. And their, then the intricate way in which they think and the intricate way in which they dialogue and the beauty of their artwork and the and the foundations of one of the most ancient societies in the world lead them to believe that the United States is a is a relative kid on the block. And so as a result, when we're looking at worldviews, we've got to take time to put on the skin of a person from that background. You have effectively up till now put on the skin of a Hebrew, but now you're leaving the Hebrew world.

Paul was an unbelievable example of this because he's a guy with a Hebrew heart, a Greek tongue, and a Roman mind. He has a a Roman mind. And we're going to talk about what the Roman mind is because it's absolutely essential for understanding how the epistles work. You have to understand that a Roman doesn't think like a Hebrew in his normal foundational thinking. Romans were great franchisers. If you had to hold together an empire with 18 different languages, with the over 600, 700 different gods, with different holidays, with different alphabets, how would you hold them all together? The philosophy isn't the same. The songs they sing at Happy Birthday aren't the same. How do you hold them together in one empire? What you do is franchise. You create a Roman city called a colony and you stamp it out like a franchise city and you put a Bob Evans next to a Home Depot next to a a Walmart next to a McDonald's next to and you start doing it everywhere you go. And Rome is all about civitas. Civilization is cityism, making cities. What city? Rome. Stamp Rome everywhere and everybody will be Roman. And their whole idea of their their own destiny, their own manifest destiny to bring civilization to the world is fundamental to understanding who they are.

Okay, so let's go back to the book of Acts for a minute and ask this question. H how does this book come together? Well, you do have Paul's preaching and teaching, but there's also a number of we sections in the book. Write down the following three we sections because they will become important to you. The first one is in chapter 16, verses 10-17. Acts 16:10-17. I'll explain the we sections in a minute. Acts 16:10-17. The the second one is Acts 20:5-21:18. 20:5 to 21:18. And the third one is 27:1 to 28:16, or just 27 and 28. Chapters 27, 28. What happens in these chapters is there's a movement from the third person, they, to the first person plural, we. In other words, the writer seems to be in the story during those three sections.

So, let me just highlight what those sections are. Um, in Acts 16:9, Paul is in trouble because he doesn't know how to go forward. He gets himself into a situation where he's trying to figure out what God wants him to do next. By the way, Acts 16 is a wonderful passage because it's Paul trying to discern God's will for his life. See, it happens to people who are apostles, too. What do I do next? Which school do I go to? Do I marry him? Do I not? You know, and so Paul's not sitting on the side of the the road picking daisies going, "He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not." What is he doing? Well, what he does is he goes to the Lord and he's trying to find out what God wants him to do. And what Paul's typical MO is is that he'll try to do something and God will stop him. So he decides he's going to go northeast and God says, "No, not so much." And then he decides he's going to to plot out a ministry southwest and God says, "Not so much." And then he goes to bed and he has a dream. And in that dream, there's a man. Where's the man from? Do you remember the story? Acts 16. Macedonian, a Macedonian man. Now, in my view, Paul is looking at Luke. And the reason I think he's looking at Luke is Macedonians don't dress any different than anybody else. In other words, if he doesn't know the guy, how's he know he's a Macedonian? I mean, it could be that there was like like an RB sign that said Macedonian floating above his head. It's a dream. I mean, who knows what he I don't know what he's seeing, but it seems to me that somebody he knows in Macedonia would make more sense than floating signs of, "Hi, I'm a Macedonian," in the middle of his dream. Although I've had some weird dreams and you can never tell with dreams.

The interesting thing is as soon as he has that vision, he goes across to Neapolis or Kavala and then goes to Philippi and there he'll have the the Lydia seller of purple experience. And it's, I always thought it was a great humor of God that um he had this incredible vision of a Macedonian man and the first person he reached was not a man but a woman, and not a Macedonian but somebody from where he was coming from, not where he had arrived to. I just thought, you know, God is being funny. Okay. It's biblical humor. Work with me here. Okay. The the point is that after that, he picks up a we section. Luke seems to join the team at that point. If Luke is the writer, clearly the writer joins the team after he arrives in Macedonia. So, it may well be that he is of Syrian Antioch background. Uh, but he's he's living in Macedonia at the time. I don't know. At any rate, um, when Paul gets there and he starts traveling with him, the dream corresponds with the beginning of the we sections.

Now, let me just say this. Looking through the book of Acts, I know the we does not include Silas or Sylvanus. I know it doesn't include Timothy. I know it's not Soper. I know it's not Aristarchus. I know it's not Sundus. I know it's not Gas. I know it's not Tykus. I know it's not Trophamus because they're all mentioned, but Luke is not. So, since Luke was mentioned by virtually everyone else in the second century as a companion of Paul, and all the other companions are named and he's not, it seems to me that the obvious conclusion is that Luke's the writer and that he joins him during parts of his trip.

In my view, I I think that uh Luke is probably writing a document to Theophilos. Now, Theophilos means friend of God or lover of God. Fileto is one of the forms of love, but it's a friendship love. And he's writing to Theophilos, and I think he's writing him a trilogy. And I think what he's doing is saying, in my view, I I subscribe to the view that Theophilos is probably the lawyer that's going to represent Paul. So, I think Luke is writing him a defensive treatise on, "Okay, you're probably wondering how a 5-foot bald Jew and a Macedonian doctor ended up in Rome waiting to be questioned by Nero. Well, it all started with Jesus." And he goes back and tells the story of Jesus. And then he picks up in Acts chapter 1 and says, "Now, you've heard what Jesus did until he was ascended and how he began to do and teach these things. Now, I want to show you how the church picked up as the body of Christ the work of Jesus that he was doing in the Gospels." And he'll follow through with that.

What I want to do now is talk a little bit about the uh profile of the Apostle Paul. And Acts 1:23 says that the apostles chose the successor to the hanged Judas. And the choice came down to two, Matthias or Barabbas. And Joseph called Barsabus or Matthias. Matthias was chosen and he's never heard from again. He goes off the pages of scripture and he might have been a great guy, but we just don't know what he did. Some people argue that maybe they were out of step with God because God was sculpting a 12th apostle. Out in the wings a few years later, a barely 5-foot tall balding man named Saul of Tarsus becomes the obvious missionary, pioneer missionary to many, many churches.

Interestingly enough, um, there are five things about his profile that I think are worth noting. First, he's controversial. Um, Pseudo-Clement in the Apostolic Fathers writing set called him an illegitimate charlatan. Other people call him highly regarded as an apostle. So, he's controversial. And you know the definition of a pioneer? Guy who goes through the wall first and gets the first arrows. He, he's controversial, but he's also second, expansive. And what I mean by that is visionary. Jesus came for Jewish people. He said that, "I came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Salvation is of the Jews." But Paul came during a time when God redefined the the movement of the Spirit into the gentile world. So there's a vision expansion going on in Paul that you don't see in Jesus. Up until the end of the Gospel of John, you've been looking about at a Jewish story. The way to follow God was to come under one umbrella. And that umbrella was the umbrella of the Jewish people. And if you wanted to be blessed, you stood under the umbrella with them. You did not become a Jew. You became a proselyte. A proselyte means that I want to stand under the umbrella and get the blessings of the covenant. You're born a Jew, you die a Jew. You don't become a Jew, but you can become like one. You can stand under their covenant by accepting certain things that the Jewish world laid out in front of you. Paul's expansive.

The third thing I know about him is he's revolutionary. Paul broke ground on issues that confronted him that were not part of the issues of the gospels. You see this when he's writing 1 Corinthians in chapters 6 and 7 and he says, "Of these things the Lord did not speak, but I speak concerning these things." He's not saying, by the way, I'm making up the Bible. When he says, "Of these things the Lord did not speak," he means Jesus. Jesus never talked about this divorce in the Roman world. He only talked about divorce in the context of the Jewish world. So I have to speak. I've got to plow some new ground here because there's nothing for us. What would justify you taking Hebrew law and dumping it into the Roman world and mass without rethinking how the applications and principles work? So Paul says, "I have to walk in, and I need to use Roman law as the window into New Testament problems." And that's new. So he's going to talk about, for instance, the behavior of women, or he's going to talk about family issues, or he's going to talk about eschatology, but he's going to do it with a wider view. You already know this. It's not that Isaiah didn't say that the world wasn't going to be blessed through Messiah. He did. It's that it's not clear how. It's not clear how the the world was going to be, um, uh, grappling with the salvation that comes in the heart. They didn't understand that. That's why that's why in the gospels, in Matthew in particular, the outreach to the Gentiles is a mystery. And you pick up in Ephesians the word mystery, mustērion, the idea that Gentiles will be part of the kingdom of God. This is a mystery to the Jewish writers of old. So, he's going to be revolutionary in his breaking ground on things about women, on his breaking ground on family issues and things like that.

The fourth thing I know about him is that he's relational. Paul gets a lot of bad rap for not being relational. But remember, the Spirit of God used the quill of Paul to tell us about the image of the body. The church has a connected body and ligaments and joints. The church is is is all related to the head, but it's also related to one another. So, he's a very relational guy. It's interesting because he has a very Eastern mindset when it comes to connection. This idea that the priesthood of the believers means I don't need to show up to church because I have everything without the rest of you is not a biblical one and it's not Pauline at all. Paul doesn't believe he can pull off Christianity on a golf course by himself. He actually thinks he's part of a body. He actually thinks that the body is is joints and ligaments fitly joined together and that we need each other as much as we need to be connected to the head. His argument is, if we're not connected to each other, we're not connected to the head. If you sever this hand off the body, it's not connected to the head, but it's also not connected to the arm, the leg, or any other part of the body. And that's his argument. So, he's a very relational guy.

The fifth thing that I want to say about him is that he's uniquely exposed. He's uniquely exposed. Look, the gospels are about Jesus and they contain in it the Spirit's remembrance of the words of Jesus. But we have a very unique look at Paul. We not only have a testimony of a guy who's traveling with him with a, you know, with a handy cam as he's watching him, you know, videotaping what Paul's, and you know what I mean, somebody who's actually writing down the history of it, Dr. Luke. But, but we also have letters from Paul's hand. We don't have a letter from Jesus's hand. We have his speaking as recorded by somebody else, but Paul's letters we have as recorded by Paul. "I, Paul, signed this letter." That's a dead giveaway to Paul's claiming of authorship. So we have a biographer, but we also have epistles. We have letters. Epistles are in effect letters written by church leaders to other church leaders and to churches themselves. And what makes them different than just a normal letter is the Spirit of God has used those as cyclical teaching devices. Meaning devices that get passed around from one church to another. So when Paul writes to Ephesus, the spiritual truths and principles in Ephesians are also true in Corinth because these are epistles, not just letters. These are uh broadened concepts and principles that are exchangeable among the believers of the church age.

Okay, let me just give you some nine different things about Paul that may help you sort of sketch him out. First, let's talk about his name. He doesn't have a name. He has two because he's Jewish. So his one name, Shaul, S H A U L, Shaul is the name of the first king of Israel who was a Benjamite king. And what do you know about that first king? He was a reluctant king. He was hiding in the baggage during his coronation. And he was a very tall guy, uh, considered a pretty handsome strapping uh young guy. Interestingly enough, the word Paulus means short stubby one. So he's the big little guy. And interestingly enough, uh, it was John Chrysostom, the golden mouth, who said he was barely 5 foot tall with a reach that touched the stars. That's how we get the idea of his height. So he's um, the tall short guy.

The second thing I want to give you are some dates for him. My view is that he is born somewhere around five in the common era, 5 AD, and he dies around 68 AD. I want you to be a little bit flexible with those because we don't actually know the fixed dates, but he's born in the middle of the first decade of the first century. He's a young man at the stoning of Stephen, which happened in about 32 in the common era. Um, he never met Jesus before the cross, but he did meet him after the cross. He met the resurrected Jesus in a personal counseling and discipleship mentoring relationship in the desert. However, he never, he was a younger contemporary of Jesus. He didn't meet him while he was walking around ministering. Paul had the blessing though of meeting so many people that were touched by Jesus. And he got his lessons from Jesus, but then could come back and see people that confirmed that in his mind and heart.

Third thing I want to tell you about is his home. He grew up in Tarsus of Cilicia. Uh, he was proud of his city according to Acts 21:39. He said, um, in Acts 21:39, he said, uh, "You might have heard of it. It's not not a small city." Actually, Strabo, the Greek geographer who lived just before the time of uh of Jesus, said it was the third largest center of Greek learning in the Roman Empire. It's the third largest university town. So Paul grew up in a place that had education oozing out of its pores. He was a free citizen. And we know that in the place where he grew up in Tarsus, um, about 171 years before Jesus, um, in order to stimulate business, the emperor moved, actually the republic at that time, the Republican senatorial proclamation was to move Jews there to increase business, and they could become free citizens if they in fact moved there. So they were promised citizenship if they moved. Maybe his family moved there a couple of hundred years before he was born, or 150 years before he was born, so that they could become free citizens, and Paul was born a free citizen. That means that some things to a free citizen are going to be open. Doors open to Paul because he was a Roman citizen. Also, method of death is curtailed. They don't crucify citizens. You can be beheaded, but not crucified. And if that, if you're not uh understanding the blessing of that, you should watch both. So John, was John the Baptist considered, he's not a citizen. Okay. Yeah. He's, he's not a Roman citizen. Okay. Jesus himself, not a Roman citizen. He belongs to a province under a client king. That makes him indirectly part of the empire, but not a direct Roman citizen with free citizenship. And in fact, Paul will use his citizenship to appeal to Caesar. Jesus could not appeal to Caesar. Under Roman law, Jesus didn't have a standing as a citizen. So, one of the things I want you to see is that he is from Tarsus. It's a very, very well-educated town. It's an interesting environment. I would imagine if he comes from any kind of wealth, which he apparently does because he's educated, a part of his education is done in Jerusalem. And if he's sent away for education, it means that they're not flat broke. If he comes from any kind of wealth, he probably comes from a villa culture. V I L L A, villa culture. And a villa culture is a specific kind of culture where otium, O T I U M, is observed. Ootium means um productive pleasure. So, he's probably grown up listening to some plucking of the lyre as someone espoused poetry after dinner or sat in on a symposium-like discussion around some three-sided reclining tables, triclinia. He's come from a society where there was a lot of education and a lot of ideas passing by him. We know that Paul was familiar with contemporary literature and that he had read, was fairly well read. We know that because he quotes from poems, Greek poetry, which means he must have studied it somewhere because he memorized it.

Interestingly enough, let's go on to the fourth thing, his occupation. He was a binder. A binder, sometimes called a tent maker. He was a binder. Uh, Cilicia, the area where he's at from what is now southeastern Turkey or southern Turkey. Um, he, that area has goat hair tents that, uh, there's kind of a black goat hair called Cilician tents. They were used by the army, which means they had a government contract, which means a lot of guys worked in that field. But the other thing is that they also did leather binding and canvas work for ships and things like that. So imagine he did heavy sewing. The two things that that will require is, um, is dexterity of the fingers. That is the ability to do fine work because even though it's heavy sewing cloth, you still got to get it in the right place and you got to sew it so it doesn't look like a three-year-old did it. But the other thing it's going to take is good eyes. And Paul will apparently have some problems with his eyes later in his life. He has problems with his eyesight as best we can tell. Um, I think they're probably making army tents, but he picks up a craft that allows him to move from one place to another. If you were to take a trip with me to Ostia, not far outside of of uh Rome, I could take you to a plaza or bazaar that was found. Ostia is the first colony outside of Rome, and it's also the harbor of Rome. And in the Ostian environment, what they found were these um shipping caves. It's a large port area where people could come down and find a boat going to where they're going. And they had mosaics in the floor that told you the nature of the ships that were going or the crafts of the people on that ship. And so you could actually join another group of people who were tent makers and go to the next place where tents are being fabricated. It was a way of moving people around. And you looked at the mosaic floor and you said, "Okay, I want to I want to get on this boat because this is this is the line where the boat that I need to be on because that's my craft." And so people were trading in that way.

Okay, let me go to a a fifth thing. Talk about for a moment his education. Paul was uh Hebrew in background. He says he's a Hebrew of the Hebrews. That means he is able to understand and use the Hebrew language. He speaks Greek. It's very obvious that he does that. It's mentioned in the book of Acts that he spoke Greek. Um, he may have some good Aramaic background. Um, but being a Hebrew of the Hebrews, it means he's also skilled in letters of the Hebrew language. No doubt he has some Latin as well. So when you look at Paul, don't look him at a country bumpkin. He's walking around with four languages. What do you got? Uh, he learned his Old Testament, his Hebrew scriptures, not in Hebrew. He learned them in the Septuagint version, the LXX version. I know that because by the way, remember the Septuagint was formed about 250 BC, 3rd century BC, as they took the Hebrew Bible and put it into the Greek language. I know that because when Paul quotes, he quotes from the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, not the Hebrew version. So when you're reading in his epistles and he quotes something from the Old Testament and you go back and check Isaiah or Jeremiah, it doesn't read exactly the same because Paul was taking it from Hebrew to Greek into the New Testament writing, and the other writers were taking them and transporting it direct from the Hebrew.

Interestingly enough, he studied under Gamaliel, or Galiel, who was a moderate Pharisee. Gamaliel was was a reasonably good guy. Remember he shows up in the book of Acts and his piece of advice on the Christians is, "Look, if God is is for them, then we ought to be for them. And if God's against them, they're going to get wiped out anyway. So let's not make a big deal out of this." Gamaliel is a moderate. Paul is not. Can I just say it's not his fault? Okay. Gamaliel did a good job of of giving him a sort of a moderate view of Pharisaism. Gamaliel taught mostly from the school of Hillel, from which it was his own family comes. He was what would be considered a a moderate to liberal Pharisee. What does that mean? That means he accepts the law, the prophets, and the writings all as canonical, all as a standard of the Bible. If he came up from the Sadducean sect, he would come up from the Zealots that only accepted the five books of Moses. He does not. He believes that Daniel and the prophets are real and and God's word.

You're talking about, um, Paul or the the Pharisee that he studied under, both. Okay. Paul himself believed Paul believed all of the Hebrew scriptures that you have as scripture. Uh, not everybody did. And imagine that an early Christian who comes to Jesus Christ but doesn't believe the prophets and the writings as canonical, their theology will be largely skewed by that. So imagine that not all Christians will come out with the same identical theology. It depends on where they started. If you started off as a Sadducean Jew, you're probably filtering the message of Jesus through the Sadducean Judean understanding. It doesn't mean you don't have one because Deuteronomy 18 did tell you another prophet was coming, but it means you don't necessarily see him the same way that a Pharisaic Jew does.

Okay, let's, uh, let's think tribally for a minute. Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, and so was Saul, his namesake. He's from the tribe of Benjamin, which is the heartland of Israel, just north of Jerusalem, and it's between Jerusalem and the main body of Samaria. He is a Sanhedrin member according to Acts 26:10. So he is a member of the Sanhedrin before he, remember that these are titles. The Sanhedrin titles are passed to you. So he's a, he's a Sanhedrin member. Some people therefore believe he had to have been married. Although it was normal to be married as a Sanhedrin member, it was not required to be married to be a Sanhedrin member. There's a debate about there is a requirement for that, but it comes in writings of Rabbinicism that are 100 years after Jesus, from the time of Judah HaNasi, and we don't know that it goes back to the time of Paul. He's not required to be married, is what I'm saying.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about his family. And uh, seventh thing I want to tell you, his family. He probably had a number of brothers and sisters. He only mentions one sister in Acts 23:16. He mentions his sister. His Jew, he had Jewish observant parents, no doubt, because he had language training in Hebrew. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He says he, we know he's a Pharisee because Philippians 3:5 and 2 Corinthians 11:22 say that he was a Pharisee. Interestingly enough, that was Philippians 3:5 and 2 Corinthians 11:22. Interestingly enough, there's no mention of his mother. He never mentions anything concerning his mother. He does allude to his father in Romans 16. There's just an allusion to his father, but nothing about his mother. Maybe she's dead. We don't, we just don't know. We do know that, um, he, he mentions his sister and he alludes to his father. That's as good as we can do.

Uh, let's talk about his successes for a minute. Paul had the interesting history of either bringing a riot or a revival to every place he went. He was by definition a fanatic. You know the definition: can't change his mind, can't change the subject. And Paul found himself in one situation after another where he, people responded or reacted to Paul. They either responded to the gospel or reacted against it. Paul's the kind of guy, I mean, that's why one of my favorite verses, you know, "Paul left, and the church rested." I love that. Okay. He's the kind of guy that you want to have around, but he's just plain exhausting. And here's the one-third of the New Testament comes from his quill. We know of 14 epistles, letters to young churches and pastors. Even 2 Peter said that Paul's writing was hard to understand. I love that. I think it's great that we have first-century apostles going, "You know, that other guy's writing it, and it's the Word of God, but I'm not sure I get it all." I love that.

Now, here's the problem. When you're reading the epistles of Paul, you are on one end of a phone conversation. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that, um, you can hear only one side of the problem very often. Look, the first readers, the readers in in Thessalonica, the readers in Philippi, they knew the situation. You don't. So, you're reading his response to a situation that isn't defined for you. The problem with 1 Corinthians 7 through 16 is, "I'm going to answer your questions," but we don't know the questions. So, one of the problems is to try to reverse the narrative and figure out what the question is. If this is the answer, what's the problem? And that's a huge problem because we have a lot of people using Paul's answers for the wrong question. When you use the right answer to the wrong question, that is as bad as the wrong answer to the right one.

So here you you end up with this Energizer Bunny. Paul traveled 10,000 land miles. I have followed his life. It took me five years to do what he did and follow his life. And I've been to the places where he's been and where he's preached. And I know those cities. And here's what I can tell you: this guy was the Energizer Bunny of the New Testament. And we've made this note before, but it's a very important note. One of the things I know about Paul is when he books a boat, don't get on. It usually goes down. He has a whole period of swim time authorized by God periodically in his life. You know, the other thing that I know about him is that that Paul is offering answers because he's broken over the assault against the, um, Jewish believers and Gentile believers of the early church and their misunderstanding of one another. If Paul wanted to say all Christians should just keep the law, we could do away with most of what he wrote. If Paul wanted to say the law is finished and no Christian, no Jewish believer should do anything of the law, we could cut a third off the New Testament. But because God wasn't doing the same thing among Gentiles as he was doing among Jews, it's very complicated. God told Jews for all their generations to keep Sabbath. But the Gentile church, as they came to Jesus, didn't need to worry about that. God told Jews for all their generations to observe laws that he gave them regarding certain festivals and feasts and certain foods. But a Gentile didn't need to know Deuteronomy 13. And he didn't even want to know Deuteronomy 16:16 and when to go to the temple. It wasn't important to him. So you had two economies running at the same time all under one church. And that made a mess out of church dinners. It made a mess out of the calendar. The church wants to put a calendar together, but these guys are leaving for Passover. What's going on? And this is part of the problem. The reason it's so complicated is God's not doing the same thing with everybody at the same time. By the way, he still isn't.

There is an objective of the enemy to make us all the same. Not unified, uniform. There is a difference between God's commands to a woman and to a man. I have very specific restrictions on my life. I am not to counsel young women and help them love their husbands. That is the that is the work of the older women in the church. That's not my work. So, as a pastor, can I tell you how many times I am frustrated by young women who are dressing immodestly and speaking badly about their husbands, and no older woman will step up and do the job? All I can do is say it. That's what I can do. I can say, "Somebody please do something about this." I don't do that, and I'm not supposed to. By the same token, God has made very specific statements concerning through Paul's quill what a woman should or should not do in leadership of a public assembly at the church. What we have is an effort today to wash away those distinctions so that we can have the pastor-ess and the elder-ess, except for they're not in the New Testament. It's not my view. Find them. They're not there. It's not like I made it up and I'm trying to be chauvinistic. I'm telling you they're not there. That's what I'm telling you. And I'm telling you that there are specific black and white statements by Paul. We don't allow this in any of our churches. End of statement. But somehow the enemy keeps working on the church to try and get us all to do the same things. Because there's an American statement that if we don't all get all the same opportunities, we're not equal.

Let me just say that the major issue in the success of Paul is this: He navigated the territory of two very different things God was doing at the same time, and explained how to live on either side of that fence. Yes, we are one new man. Yes, we are one body. Yes, there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, Jew nor Gentile, as it regards salvation, but not as it regards lifestyle. We still have separate restrooms. We still learn separately, and we still have separate restrictions, but we are saved the same way. And what I find is people misusing those verses to act like, "Well, there's neither Jew nor Gentile." And I just look at them and say, "Yes, but there's still boys and girls." And male nor female comes right after it. So it must not mean as it as it regards our lifestyle. It must mean as it regards our justification, not sanctification.

Okay, let me get down to his death because we're going to end our little discussion about who he is with his death because that's where most people end at least their physical existence. Um, the death is that he was beheaded in a place called Three Fountains, we believe, which is outside the restricted limit of the city of Rome. He's outside the city of Rome as it was demarcated at the time of Paul. Why? Because you can't execute a Roman inside the demarked city unless it's on a parade ground. That is the only place a Roman can die on Roman soil is in a parade ground setting or the Mars Exercises of the army setting. So he's outside of the city. It's a liminal monument or a liminal edge to the city. And he's taken to Three Taverns. He traditionally died at the hands of either Nero or the the governor of Rome when Nero was out of town. Here's the problem. Most people think he he died around 66 or or, um, at the late '67. The problem is Nero was in Greece playing actor until '67. He didn't get back until '67. Nero was not in Rome when when Rome burned. You'll hear them all, you know, we all have these things about him fiddling and watching Rome burn from the hills. He wasn't there. He was away from Rome at the time, but he comes back and starts rebuilding Rome fairly quickly. I think he dies somewhere probably in 68 after Nero's return and shortly before Nero, um, is pushed out of office and eventually kills himself after the Senate proclaims that he's no longer emperor, and he realizes the hoof prints are coming or the hoofbeats are coming and they're about to kill him, and he musters the courage to take his own life as a Roman should in such circumstances.

All right. So, so Paul dies, he's beheaded because he's a Roman citizen, so he can have the better way to die. Um, truthfully, if you have a choice, beheading beats crucifixion hands down. One takes three or four days to die. The other one pretty much, you're here and then you're with Jesus, and that's about as good as it gets. Um, they are, they use broadswords and axes, and they were very good at this. So today we go to a place called Three Fountains.