Clough Acts Lesson 32
Using Missionary Contacts – Acts 13:4-13
Turn to Acts 13 to continue our study on the first Christian missionary expedition. Acts 13 and 14 present how Christian missions began. These chapters are guidance for us; if you are in a Christian church that selects its own missionaries or you are asked to vote to support or not support another one, then you have to have something other than the way the man parts his hair to go on. And the book of Acts gives some criterion that you can use to decide and use to evaluate.
One of the things that we are doing in the book of Acts, particularly from Acts 12 on, because Acts is so highly emphatic on divine guidance, what I’m trying to do is downplay the supernatural aspects of guidance and up play the natural aspects of guidance. That’s not to knock the supernatural but it’s to produce a more ordered balance in our present day situation when the Holy Spirit does not guide us quite like He did the apostles, but the areas where the Holy Spirit does guide us like He did the apostles are in these natural things, the common sense things, the things in our environment. We look, we decide on the basis of data; not on the basis of some roulette wheel, around and around and around and all of a sudden God says this. That’s just not orthodox Christian guidance. Divine guidance in the Scripture is not disconnected from common sense data, data that you would use in normal every day decisions; even the non-Christian would use to make good decisions data.
All of this is to show one basic doctrine
in the Scriptures associated with divine guidance and that is the doctrine of
providence.
The point is that because Americans have basically become humanists in our hearts, regardless of the surface lip profession, nevertheless, humanism has said that not providence, but chance reigns and no one wants to be in a chaos and so therefore “somebody” (quote, end quote) has to step in and bring order out of chance and order out of chaos, there being, of course, no such thing as providence. You see this in the economic realm; years and years ago, in fact in the very year of our independence, in 1776 a famous book was written by a famous economist, Adam Smith, who wrote the book, The Wealth of Nations, and the thesis of the book was that the free market place, guided by what Smith called “the invisible hand” would establish values. Smith argued out of a Christian framework that the market would be controlled by providence, not by the state. But wherever humanism has arisen you’ve had a rejection of the invisible hand in economic affairs and it’s always the government that must step in. Now this is true in our own country in the past, of both political parties.
Let’s go back to one point to illustrate this; let’s go back to the days of the depression. Both Hoover and FDR met the situation by rejecting the doctrine of providence; both insisted that everything would fall apart if nothing were done, when it could be argued that the best thing government could have done in 1932 was to close up shop and go home, and let the free market place get rid of itself and even out. To show, however, that men would much prefer the meddling of a finite fallen man, or men, or committees over what they call chance, than trusting in the God of providence, we have the amusing story told in the diaries of the Secretary of Treasury, Morgenthal, who wrote about the early days of the depression, when the price of gold against the dollar was being fixed on a daily basis and Morgenthal gives us this portrait of how the price of gold was actually fixed:
“Every morning Jesse Jones and I would meet
in the President’s bedroom with George Warren, to set the price of gold for the
day. Franklin Roosevelt would lie back
comfortably in his old-fashioned three-quarter bed, and the actual price that
we set forth made little difference. One
day, when I must have come in more than usually worried about the state of the
world, we were planning an increase from 19 to 22 cents. President Roosevelt took one look at me and
said, 21 cents, it’s a lucky number, the President said with a laugh, because
it’s three times seven.” And so the
In Acts the people believe in divine providence; therefore had these men been the citizenry, the voting citizenry, they wouldn’t have listened to say oh, vote for me because my hand is bigger and I can reach deeper in the federal or state cookie jar for you and bring up the goodies. There wasn’t that kind of appeal at all, that the state was going to control everything. It was God who was going to control things, and so rather than the state as the comforter and protector Christ was their Comforter and protector and so it shall always be: God versus Caesar, one or the other, they both can’t be your protector.
Now in this section in Acts 12 and 13 we’ve noticed the faith and providence expressed several ways. One of these ways that their faith in divine providence is expressed is by taking advantage of family relationships. You usually think of the apostles being guided by some glowing light or some other mysterious mystical system of guidance, but we saw last time that men like Barnabas, the apostle Barnabas, who had a cousin by the name of John Mark, and it’s not any surprise that when the first missionaries are sent out, when Barnabas is included in those missionaries sent out, that John Mark goes with them as sort of the errand boy. That’s a convenient thing because after all, John Mark is his cousin. In other words, common sense; who can we work with best? Members of our own family, so thus John Mark is selected.
And then on that first missionary journey where
do they go first but the
We saw another situation; we found out that
as they moved into the world they used a certain strategy or they used a
certain concept of missionary-apostles, or apostles and missionaries, we’ll put
a hyphen between, that is a system that Christians didn’t invent. The Jews invented that in the days of the
Diaspora, in 586 and 721 BC when Jewish
people were kicked out of their homeland, thrown out into the Gentile cultures,
the only way they could maintain contact with
We saw a third thing in the realm of wealth; how were these first missionaries supported. In the first days of the Church, the churches did not support missions. In the first days of the church the missionaries themselves supported missions; they took their own funds and went out, so does it surprise you then, when the two men out of the five are picked, one of them is the wealthiest of all, Barnabas. They needed somebody with money so they picked somebody with money, it’s just that simple; it’s just that natural. And then we saw something else about their simple use of common sense items at hand, and that was the tactics they used on the field when they got to the field. The first thing they did was they swept through with an evangelist thrust and then they followed it up with teaching. The first wave, much like a military invasion, as to clear the fields for the enemy, secure the high ground, and then later they would sweep in with pastor-teachers to follow up in the local congregations and you can easily compute, no extended mathematics required, you can easily compute the number of hours that the first Christians were taught and this is astounding.
Some of you have heard in the book of Acts
how the first century Christians turned the world upside down; you wonder, oh,
they must have more power than we had.
No they didn’t, the Holy Spirit is the same today, yesterday and
forever. Well, they must have had more
gifts than we did. No, they had the
temporary gifts which we don’t but the canon makes up for that; there weren’t
any more gifts. Well, they must have
been more educated than we are. No, they
were less educated than we are. Well
then they had more of them than we have; no, they had less of them than we
have. One national news magazine says
50% of Americans claim a born again experience and if that’s true it’s a blight
on Christianity because in the first century, in the first century of our
nation we had less than 5% people regenerate, the best church historians
estimate, in the colonial
Now in Acts 13:4 we come to the first
section of this missionary journey. “So they, being sent
forth by the Holy Spirit, departed unto
Now this section depicts part of their missionary struggle and a fifth principle of providential guidance and leading, a very important principle of missionary work. It’s in that little phrase in verse 5, “when they were at Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews,” the word “preach” is in the imperfect tense in the Greek which means they continually did this as a habit. This was a lifestyle, this was their strategy. What was their strategy? Let’s look at it a moment; watch how it compares with strategy today. It had a Roman element to it, it had a Jewish element to it. Now the Romans, wherever they went, actually under the sovereignty and providence of God, were preparing the world for Christianity. They prepared it in many ways; one thing, they united the culture with a common language. They took Greek and moved it eastward and they made… Greek of course, Alexander had made it the lingua franca but the Romans continued to use it adding to it Latin. The Romans devised a system of roads, the Romans, in short, established a law and order environment in which Christianity could flourish.
Now less
this seem a small thing, just think of what it would be like if the Apostle
Paul started out from
So, guess where the first apostolic missionaries went? Did they go into the farms? Never; they went to all the Roman colonies; they went and they piggy-backed Christianity on top of the Roman administrative system. The Romans made right decisions by these colonies that secured points and the Christians just came along after them and said okay, we’ll evangelize this colony, this colony, this colony, this colony, we will not evangelize the countryside. Paul never did that; he evangelized here, here, here, here and then the Christians in the cities would move out and evangelize the countryside. Totally different strategy than modern mission organizations where we get guys locked down to one field, that’s all they do, specialize in one field; that’s not what they did here; they were flexible, they were maneuverable, they had a flexibility in their response to a spiritual situation that we do not have.
Now the
other element, the Jewish element, specifically mentioned here in verse 5,
everywhere there were Roman colonies there was a lot of urban activity and
business, so there’d be a Jewish ghetto here, there’s be a Jewish ghetto in
this colony, a Jewish ghetto in another colony, and so on. There will always be a Jewish ghetto. Now Paul made use of this for the following
reasons. If you were called by God to go
out and evangelize country X, Y, Z, in the middle of
So how did
Paul do it? He didn’t have a summer
institute of linguistics like Wycliffe has.
He didn’t have years of anthropological and sociological studies as are
available today, but he had something else and he made use of it to the maximum. He had a fifth column in every one of these
areas, fellow Jews. He made use of the
dispersed Jewish population; that was his vehicle for crossing the culture and
so we have the Cypriot Jews out here on
Now this is a system of very rapid evangelism. By the way, I know of no evangelistic mission today following this procedure, interestingly enough, and it could still be followed. But in the tribulation there will be 144,000 Jewish evangelists and in the tribulation they are going to make use of the same missionary dynamic that Paul made use of; again in those days, those horrible days just before the return of Christ, when the world is in geophysical upheaval, economic and politic upheaval, the world will be evangelized several times. You say well look, it’s taken us 1900 years to evangelize the world once, how’s it going to be done two and three times in the middle of a seven year period? It’s very simple; they’re going to go back to the missionary strategy of Paul and they’re going to go from Jewish ghetto to Jewish ghetto to Jewish ghetto and then from there fan out into each country, always to the Jew first, and use that as a cross cultural channel.
So this is
what we read in verse 5, “And when they were at
In Acts 13:6, “And when they had gone through the isle unto Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer,” now this little incident about Sergius Paulus is an incident typical of Luke. Remember back in the days when I started the book of Acts, as we’ve gone through it chapter by chapter, we said at the very beginning that one of the things you want to look for in Luke is that he is writing for a Roman audience. Luke’s writing for the whole church but he’s writing in particular for a Roman audience. Some scholars even believe that the book of Acts is the court proof to defend the apostle Paul in his trial. That’s why, incidentally, the book of Acts was never finished; the last sentence in the book of Acts stops and for some reason Luke never finished the book, it does not come to a conclusion. So the book of Acts was written to show in particular that Christianity was not hostile to Roman authority, that everywhere Christianity went it’s okay, Christianity, therefore, Luke would argue, deserves official Roman recognition like Judaism. And so his argument was to show Christianity in a helpful light, not a harmful light. And thus, this little incident about a Roman bureaucrat and governing official, to show that when Christianity came into his area it did not harm but it helped.
Now the particular man, it says in verse 7, his name was Sergius Paulus. Now about 100 years ago the liberal critics of the Scripture began to have a heyday with practically every book of the Bible. I often say that one of the liberal axioms of scholarship is that any one could have written the book except the one the book says wrote it. So anyone could have written the Gospel of John except John, he couldn’t have done it, we know that for sure. We don’t know who else did but we know that for sure. And so it was with the book of Acts; they discredited Acts and said Acts was all screwed up in its history, there’s false fact and one of the places is verse 7, they said there was no such thing as a deputy on the island of Cyprus, it has a proconsul, you don’t have proconsuls on the island of Cyprus in the 40s and early 50s AD. Luke made a historical boo-boo.
And so this was the pitch, until, that is, another man by the name of Dr. William Ramsey came out. Ramsey was interested in the historic basis of the New Testament book of Acts. So Ramsey, not content to stay in the classroom and pontificate from behind the professors desk, unacquainted with the field data, went to the field and he began to investigate site after site after site and he discovered a remarkable thing; hey, Luke was right after all, I’ve found inscription after inscription after inscription that says exactly what Luke said all along, and in particular in verse 7 when it says “the deputy of the country” around this area of Paphos, was at this time in the late 40s called Sergius Paulus. Ramsey found some inscriptions and here’s what Dr. A. T. Robertson says about those inscriptions:
“There were
two inscriptions that have been found with the date, 51 AD and another one 52
AD with the names of the proconsuls of
But
Christianity insist that the powers of darkness rule this world. It insists that the powers of darkness even
influence certain government officials.
One doesn’t have to be a history student to remember back in the days,
in fact if you’ve seen the film, Nicolas and
But Paulus was “a prudent man;” and it’s said in verse 7 that although he “was with the deputy,” the word “was” there is in the imperfect, it was customary, he had a very close relationship with this exorcist. But nevertheless, having heard the Word he “called for Barnabas and Saul,” the word “called” there means he called them into the palace for an official presentation of the gospel to him and probably his advisors in government. Can you imagine this happening today? Can you imagine men of the stature of, say Dr. Frances Schaeffer or someone like this, being asked in to the White House of the Governor’s capital to give an address on Christianity and culture, to the government officials. This is what it was in this verse, Saul and Barnabas.
But then it says in verse 8 they had a problem; “Elymas the sorcerer (for so is his name by interpretation) kept on withstanding,” constantly “withstanding them,” and from what Paul says in verse 10 we can infer certain tactics that this man used. First of all the man, like most of these men, was a yellowbelly. He was a coward, he would never openly debate Paul and Barnabas, face to face and man to man. He was a chicken who always used to wait until after Paul left, then very deceitfully he’d creep back and very deceitfully he’d creep back and he’d begin to say Mr. Paulus, you really don’t want to go with this Barnabas/Paul character because you know, after all, they say that God is sovereign over history; now we can’t have, that would infer providence. It would mean that we’re not in charge, don’t you want to be in charge, don’t you want to have magic powers so that autonomous man might be the final say of all history & so on & so on & so on.
So every time Paul and Barnabas would go out to teach this man would go to un-teach, but he was always sneaky and deceitful, he’d never come out into the open and carry on a rational discussion. And this is why we have in the last part of verse 8 the statement, “seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith.” And when it says “the faith” it refers not to the act of believing but to the content; the content of faith. The emphasis throughout this passage is on content, not a quick pitch to become a Christian—hold up your hand to become a Christian, sign a card, trot down the aisle while we sing 40 stanzas of Just As I Am to make sure everybody has a chance, and a few of the other gimmicks that are used to work up people to a froth. We must stress content, content, content, because our generation hates content; our generation is dominated with TV and TV is just a medium that’s very hard to work with if you want to work with content. TV emphasizes the impact emotionally of the viewer but it doesn’t emphasize the content of the message. And so an entire generation is for TV and against reading. And it’s only in reading and discussion that content is stressed. So Paul emphasizes the content.
Saul, in
Acts 13:9-10 now begins to be called Paul.
Some people think that Saul was his non-Christian name and Paul was his
Christian name. Not so. Saul was his Jewish name and Paul was his
Roman name; he probably also had a Greek name somewhere along the line. So the point is that men in those days had
several names; Luke now calls Paul, Paul, because he’s looking at Paul functioning
as a Roman citizen throughout the length and the breadth and the height and
depth of the
Now this is a concept that many, many Christians dislike; in fact, it’s a no-no to even talk about it in some circles, but there is an imprecatory element in Scripture. Do you know what that means? It means really damning someone. Now this isn’t saying just “damn you.” This means “damn you in the name of Christ.” That is an imprecatory curse and it was a literal cursing of anyone who tampered with the text of Scripture. Anyone who began to manipulate and twist the content of revealed truth was asking for damnation. To show you this and show you that the Bible itself is protected by an imprecatory curse, turn to the last book of the Bible, the last chapter, and the last few verses of the last chapter. You’ll see that your Bible that you hold in your hand is protected by a curse; a curse leveled against anyone who would tamper with that Bible and it is a curse given through the Holy Spirit to protect the canon.
Revelation 22:18-19, this is an imprecatory curse, “For I testify unto every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; [19] And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” Very clearly that is an imprecatory curse leveled against any member of the human race that would tamper with the text and canon of sacred Scripture. That is how God protects truth; you say isn’t that mean of God to do that? After all, going around cursing people; not at all, it’s because God loves you and He loves me and He loves the entire human race, that He pronounces His curse. That’s the only way He can protect us from falsehood; it’s His system of keeping the umbilical cord of grace unsevered, to keep the life pumping in our direction. Anybody that tampers with the umbilical cord of the Word of God is to be cursed; it’s divine protection upon your source of life because God loves you.
Now this
curse that we see in Acts 13, it’s the same kind of thing. Verse 8 has prepared us for this kind of a
curse because this man has deliberately obstructed another member of the human
race from hearing the gospel, and cursed be the man who does this. In Acts 12 you saw Herod Agrippa cursed and
killed by God for standing in the way of the Word. Now you say, we’ll that doesn’t operate
today. Really, has it ever dawned upon
you that one of the most powerful governments and one of the most rich
governments in natural resources is a government that to this day, at this
hour, is putting evangelical Christians to death by the droves—Soviet
Russia. And has it ever occurred to you
that with all the land of the
And thus in verse 10, when Paul says, you, “O full of subtlety,” that’s the word deceit, that means sneakiness, it means that the man didn’t directly confront them, he went around his back. And he said “and all mischief,” it means he’s a slick operator, same kind of word, same kind of politician, “oh you child of the devil,” or son of diabalos,” literally in the Greek, “you enemy of all righteousness,” now that wasn’t nice, Dale Carnegie wouldn’t tell you to start off meeting someone with this kind of an introduction, but that’s the way Paul did it because Paul didn’t operate on the humanistic principles of Dale Carnegie; he operated on Biblical principles of righteousness. And when there was unrighteousness he’d label it as unrighteousness. You’re doing someone a favor to do this. “… wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?” It’s a quotation from Proverbs, “the right ways” are the truths of Scripture and that tells us why Paul cursed this man; cursed him because he opposed the Word.
Now in Acts
Now in verse
12 the result, “Then the deputy, when he saw what was done, believed,” but not
because of the miracle, notice; the miracle happened but the reason he believed
was “being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord.” The emphasis again on the content of what was
taught. It wasn’t the experience. Paul didn’t say now Paulus, all you have to
do is raise your hand and you become a Christian. That may be fine under certain circumstances,
that’s not absolutely wrong; we’re not saying that, but we’re saying in this
place the emphasis wasn’t on the act of believing, it was on the communication
of content and the man just believed while it was going on. A person can become a Christian driving a car
down the street; a person can become a Christian in an airplane at 40,000 feet;
a person can become a Christian in a mine a thousand feet below the surface of
the earth; it doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing. You can be in many, many different activities
and become a Christian and most people, incidentally, throughout church history
have not become Christians by being in a local church. Most people, including myself, were led to
Christ, completely outside of a church, we couldn’t stand going inside a
church, couldn’t stand the minister, couldn’t stand some of the Christians and
so I wouldn’t be caught dead inside a local church. We became Christians outside and this is the
way Paulus was; he wasn’t invited to the local evangelistic meeting at the
first
Now verse 12
ends the sweep through
Now if this
is your first time to read this passage that doesn’t sound like anything, it
just sounds like something happened until you turn the page to Acts 15:36 and
you see it wasn’t a small thing at all.
In Acts
There was an apostolic argument, and notice in the Holy Spirit context the Holy Spirit does not arbitrate and say Paul was right or Barnabas was right; you can guess later on but right here no one umpires this. And here you have a magnificent portrait of the early Church in which apostles who write inerrant Scripture can decide and argue between themselves. And this is a classic case of Christian disagreement and at that point watch how the Holy Spirit uses it; this is the first church split in history and it was used by God. You know the saying, divide and multiply, well often times the Holy Spirit has to use this in church splits. And so we’ve got two missions out of one.
Now here is
Paul and here’s Barnabas. Now using what
we already know about the background of these men, let’s try to reconstruct the
fight they had. That’s what verse 39 is
saying, by the way, that’s a fight, that’s not just gentlemen shaking hands and
so on, they had a real donnybrook going between them over John Mark. Now why?
All right, John Mark is whose cousin?
Barnabas’. So does it strike you
that in verse 39 who does Barnabas stick up for and who does he wind up
with? His own cousin. So quite obviously there’s a family tie and
you can almost hear Barnabas saying well, Paul, I know John Mark, so he dropped
the ball once up there in Perga, but he won’t do it again, give the kid a
break. And Paul is a very intense kind
of person, it took him about ten years to cool off in this argument. Later on when he writes Romans he commends
Mark, but it took him many years before he cooled off about this little
episode, and he said no, John Mark is not my cousin, I have no family ties with
the little brat, and so if he dropped the ball up there and screwed us up while
we were in Pamphylia I’m not going to have him and I’m not going to risk having
the little kid along with me again. So
that was Paul’s position. Notice too in
verse 39 and 40 where they go after the argument; where does Barnabas go? His
home ground of
But there’s
more to this; what did happen at that fateful time when John Mark quit, because
that’s what the text says, he quit. The
men had finished their sweep through
Now in
Galatians 4 there’s a notice about this little episode. We think that this probably was the
situation, we can’t be dogmatic but I give you the background to help you in
your imagination, in your head, when you think of the text and try to visualize
the picture of this in your mind, you think of these men struggling with the
same kind of things that you struggle with.
In Galatians 4:13-14 Paul describes his entrance into
That’s not
quite the PR approach to use if Christ had thought in our terms of PR because
the extra-Biblical forces we have to describe Paul describe him as short,
stooped, bald, squeaky speech and a long beard.
Now isn’t that a real impressive spokesman for the Christian faith. And yet on top of all that the man was periodically
violently sick to the point of being despicable in people’s eyes. It shows you, by the way, about this business
about healing, that everybody should be healed, isn’t it strange the apostle
Paul was never healed. Isn’t it doubly
strange that he had his own private physician with him, Dr. Luke, at all
times. So obviously Paul’s healing
ministry was quite limited, but he would suffer. The man is pictured as going into this
malaria infested swamp, if that’s what he picked up, whatever it was, something
happened, he came up, he climbed and hiked with Barnabas up dangerous roads,
3,600 feet up to Antioch. Somewhere
along here John Mark peeled out. He’d
had enough, and in Acts 13 it tells you where John went; he went back to
To see Paul’s attitude toward these adverse circumstances, let’s conclude by turning to Romans 8. As we get more biography on Paul it’ll be easier to understand some of his epistles. Before we’ve read his epistles but we haven’t been filled in what the man personally suffered. Paul suffered a great deal. He says in Romans 8:35, and keep in mind, here’s Paul, the man who believes in providence. We started off saying all these early Christians believed in providence, the guidance of God’s hand through the environment, but one little warning; John Mark apparently believed in providence too, but when the circumstances, that is providence, when the circumstances got too bad, John Mark chickened out. In other words, John Mark believed only in circumstances; he was guided only by the open door principle and when it was hard to open the door, well, God must have shut the door in my face, I’ll go home to momma, and that was how he ascertained God’s will. Not Paul, he’d go through the door; he might get two broken ribs going through but he’d go through the door because God said that this is what he should do. And his attitude toward circumstances is given in this passage in verse 35. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? [36] As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Paul’s identification with Christ in a fallen universe dominated by Satan meant that he would become the receiver of the attacks of satanic opposition. That’s why you can’t be guided entirely by providence, entirely by circumstances because in the final analysis if you walk out of here and something happens to you, some adversity, you can’t tell without Scripture and without prayer, you can’t tell whether that’s from Satan or from God. This is why circumstances cannot be the sole system of guidance; they are one great part of divine guidance.
Romans 8:37, the confidence, unlike the makers of The Omen and The Exorcist and Exorcist II or whatever it’s called, unlike those men Paul did not believe that Satan and Jesus were equal and opposite reaction. Rather he believed that Christ was over Satan; it wasn’t dualism, it was God as sovereign in Christ and Satan down here. All those movies give you the idea that Satan has the last word; that’s not true. Verse 37, “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” Now look at the list in verse 38 and think of what I just said about hitting the coast of Pamphylia, with all the adversities and the malarial swamp, with the long agonizing climb 3,600 feet up through passes, subject to attacks, robberies and perils, and John Mark had seen so much of this that he ran home to Momma; this is what Paul says, “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, [39] Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Paul had that kind of superior attitude toward his circumstances. That is the basis of his divine guidance, he was led by the Spirit.
Shall we stand and sing….