Transcription
Why is Damascus mentioned in the book of Acts?
Remember back to the story of Abraham when Lot gets kidnapped and Abraham has to proceed, you know, to rescue him. He pursues and the Rephaim are in this list in Genesis 14. He he pursues this band that that captured Lot with 318 men. He rescues Lot. And where do they find Lot? Where do they catch up to them and rescue Lot? Damascus.
You remember God had said every place that your eye can see and the and the place that on your your feet tread on is going to be your land. God didn't forget that. Again, that the place names are here for a reason. To the Jewish reader, Luke wants to communicate the gospel was taken to every place that Jews are. And that's important because the the the the the Jewish nation needs to be brought back together. All 12 tribes, not just two. They're still in exile. Even in the New Testament period, only two of them ever came back. But God has to heal this rift. And then he's going to use them. He's going to plant them all over the the the known world. They're going to go back home. You know, wherever they're at, they're going to get witnessed to. They're going to believe. They're going to be there because this is now a beach head for the kingdom of God in the gentile world. The gospel is seated in all these places. And you go through the book of Acts, it's to the Jew first also Greek. This is this is Paul's pattern as well. And it's conveyed visually. I mean, we we could go through, you know, the last gentile or the last Jew to be converted is the one in Damascus before you get to Cornelius. Cornelius is again a god-fearing gentile. It's a transition point in the book of Acts. All the Jewish stuff has been taken care of. But now we have to get the gospel because he Jesus is the Messiah of the nations, not just Israel. And so we get the ministry of Paul. And Paul, you know, we know what Paul does. But one of the cool things about Paul is he has this obsession with Spain. Okay. Romans 15:20. Thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation. But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, I mean, I've I've, you know, been everywhere I needed to go. And since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain. Now, he he wants I mean, he's on a ship. He's in chains. Okay? And he's either writing part of Romans there or he writes it once he gets into Rome and he hasn't seen them yet because he's in jail. you know, we don't know the exact circumstance, you know, when Romans was written, but he has not seen the believers at Rome yet. So, he's writing them, I can't wait to see you guys, you know, Romans 1, I want to impart unto you some spiritual gift. We got big plans. And it's like, dude, you're in chains. Like, you know what's going on here? And he actually says to them, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain. Paul, you ain't going anywhere. You know, you're manicled to the ship here. Paul is convinced and he really earnestly wants to go to Spain. And I like I like to say, what what does he like the food? I mean, what what's what's the thing about Spain? Why? Who who would care? Why does he have Spain on the brain? It's because he knows Genesis 10. Now, again, here's our map of Genesis 10, the disinherited nations. Spain, if you know your geography, is right there and it's Tarsish. You say, "Well, who cares?" Well, let's go back a little bit. The book of Acts covers all of the geographical nations, the geographical regions disinherited by God at Babel to this line. This is a little bit past Italy. There's only one nation in the entire table of nations that is not covered. It's Tarses. It's Spain. Paul knows this. Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. And again, I can't prove it, but I believe that Paul believed he would not die until he reached Spain. That's the outlier. I have been to every place that is under dominion of these other gods that was disinherited at Babel except for one. My mission is not over until I get to the last one.
So there you have it. I mean why else would he care? Why else would he care about Spain? Because it's Tarses. He, you know, he quotes Isaiah 66 as well, which talks about the kingdom, including Tarsish and all this stuff. He knows what he's doing. Here's another thing about Paul. Paul does refer to demons occasionally. 1 Corinthians 10:21-22, he actually quotes Deuteronomy 32:17 there about avoiding fellowship with demons. But most of Paul's vocabulary are these words, and you're familiar with them if you've read the New Testament. rulers, principalities, powers, thrones, authorities, you know, all this kind of stuff. What do they all have in common? They are terms used both in the New Testament and outside the New Testament for geographical rulership. In Paul's world, he's not just dealing with demons. Demons are lowlevel. The big players are the ones that control the nations to whom authority was given as a punishment and who became corrupt. This is the those other guys, they're they're the spirits in prison. We don't really need to worry about them until maybe the day of the Lord. Okay? Okay. But the ones we really need to worry about now are the ones who control and have dominion geographically. His vocabulary reflects his worldview. It reflects his theology.
The point is that the people in Jerusalem, they're Jews. They're scattered all over the known world. They're scattered among the nations, the 70 nations known to the biblical writers. They're Jews. How'd they get there? Exile. They were scattered to the wind because of their idolatry. They were put into the nations that God disinherited and divorced himself from. Why would God do that? Because God plays the long game. God knows that at some point the Messiah is going to come. He's going to die. He's going to rise again. The event of Pentecost is going to occur where Jews from all of these nations are going to show up in Jerusalem and they're going to see something pretty spectacular. They're going to see people of their own kin group speaking in the other languages from the regions they're from. And they're going to be telling them the story of this guy from Nazareth who said he was the Messiah and he was crucified by the Romans and he rose on the third day. And they're going to believe. 3,000 of them believe. And you know what they do after they believe? They go home. They're like little cell groups planted among the nations. This is why when Paul and other people get to some of these places, there's already believers.
Wow. It's like a dandelion. You know, God essentially blows the dandelion and the seed of the kingdom scatters all over the Mediterranean to the nations. The messaging is pretty clear. God is now about the business of reclaiming the nations for himself. If you read through the rest of the book of Acts, again, it's not a coincidence. Remember Acts chapter 1, you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world. Samaria, we we have an episode in Acts chapter 8 about Samaria. Why is Samaria interesting? Samaria was the northern kingdom. It was apostate after the kingdom divided. And when the northern kingdom was conquered, the Assyrians in this case came in. They uprooted the populations and deported them to other parts of their empire. And then they took people from other parts of the empire and imported them back into Samaria. And those people would get married and have babies. And you have half breed Jews, the Samaritans. And the Jews have nothing to do with them because they're not pure. But God is interested in them. The gospel goes to Samaria. And right after the Samaritan episode, this is Philip with the Ethiopian unic. Okay. All the way in the south. all the way down to the south, you know, the left side of the Dead Sea. There's somebody even from there. Now, this is a little more interesting because we're not told in the Old Testament why Ethiopia would be significant, but we are told in the Intertestamental period. There is a long tradition and archaeological evidence, abundant evidence and textual evidence as well that a group of Jews left Judah during the time of Manasseh and possibly earlier to escape the idolatry there. And they moved down the Nile and they built a colony at Elephantine. And there were other Jews that settled a little west again in these African regions. The gospel needs to go to them too. Do you see a pattern already? The gospel is being taken to the Jew first and also to the barbarian. That actually started with the barbarian, the Greek, because of Acts 2. But while that was again theological messaging, the book of Acts proceeds in a more orderly fashion. It wants the Jewish reader to know, well, you know, yeah, this is your Messiah, too. So, let's just do it do it geographically. We hit Samaria. Check that off the list. We've got Ethiopia. Check that off the list because there's a Jewish presence there. Philip, after he witnesses to the Ethiopian unic, you just read it. The spirit plucks him out of the chariot and deposits him in a zodus. What's a Zotus? Azotus is one of the Philistine cities. It is in a region that was not under the dominion of the Kingdom of Solomon at its height. The kingdom of Solomon, the kingdom of David, missed that one. But the writer of Acts, Luke, wants you to know that that belongs to God. It's actually covenant territory in the original territorial promises. Every place that matters to the Jewish promises to Abraham gets picked up in either Acts 2 or the rest of the book of Acts.
Okay, this is the story of Pentecost. Again, how many times, how many sermons have you heard on the story of Pentecost? You know, both because it's important and because it's important, you hear it a lot. It's familiar except for what you're missing. It's like most of the Bible really when the day of Pentecost arrived again and it's not because we're we're dumb and they were smart. It's because we don't have the world. We we don't have the eyes that they had to to catch certain things. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as of fire, you know, settle on them. Now I want to just I have the the the column here. I have the word divided clicked on in the column. This is the Greek term diamaridzo. Okay. To be divided. Whoopde-doo. Okay. Well, if we search for that term in the Septuagent, the Septuagent was the Bible of the early church and the New Testament writers. Threearters of the time they quote the Old Testament, they use the Greek translation of the Old Testament to make their point. Sometimes they quote from the Hebrew and then they do the translation on the fly. But other times they quote from the Septuagent, the Greek translation of the Old Testament because you know the world speaks Greek. If we search for Diamaridzo in the Septuagent, it doesn't show up that many times 19. But one of them, lo and behold, is Deuteronomy 32. Wow. Where the nations are divided. That might be a coincidence. Okay, keep reading. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. If we click on bewildered, we look at the Greek term there. It's soon. If we search for that in the Septuagent, guess where that shows up? Genesis 11, which is the story of the Tower of Babel. We've got two terms in the book of Acts which is about people being enabled to speak in other languages because the nations have other languages not just one that hook us back into the division of the nations at Babel. I would suggest to you that Luke wants us to think of the reversing of the nations here. He wants us to think of Babel because now all of a sudden the language issue isn't going to matter. God is going to supernaturally, you know, have people speak in these other languages. Why? What is God doing at Pentecost? Well, here here's a map. I know you can't really see it that well, but if you, you know, you could look later in your in your Bible in the back. This is a map with all of the place names from Acts chapter 2. Again, this is just Acts 2. This is Pentecost. The list, if you read the list in Acts two, proceeds from east and right hand side here, east to west. It moves in a westerly direction. It starts with the easternmost geographical points and starts moving toward the sea. And then when you hit the sea, it divides up and covers the northern Mediterranean and the southern Mediterranean all the way through Sirenica in Africa, which is almost to Italy, you know, or Rome, but we get Italy in the list as well. You say, "Well, is that supposed to mean something?" Yeah, it is. A number of those names, a number of those names are plucked out of the table of nations in Genesis 10. Others get a new name because we're going from Semitic language to Greek. Right?