Clough Acts Lesson 40

God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility – Acts 15:36-16:15

We’ll pick up where we left off some time ago. Before we review there was one question asked by the feedback cards about what was covered last week, discussing the life of the fetus, whether or not in fact the fetus was living. And I made mention of Hebrews 10, pointing out that “a body I have prepared” Me that is connected with the hypostatic union, and it’s good that someone raised this question because it shows that people who have been here and have been consistent have gradually begun to pick up the fact that you can’t have one doctrine true without having another one true. So someone asked me well then, when did the hypostatic union first occur, in other words, at Jesus’ conception or at His physical birth, or sometime in between conception and physical birth. Of course, if I could answer that question I could solve the whole discussion that we were doing last Sunday morning, so the point is that that question is unanswerable for the same reason I said last week, it’s hard to determine and why we take a nascent view of life of the fetus and not a full view of life in the fetus. This is not being promiscuous in our flexibility on abortion, it’s simply saying that abortion is not murder, though it’s the next thing to it.

Acts 15; in the book of Acts we are dealing with a book of transition; we’re dealing with a situation where we have Scripture, Scripture that tells us there are two entities in the book of Acts, and I think from the time of Pentecost on down, including our own generation, the book of Acts takes the all-time prize for being the most quoted and misapplied book of the canon of Scripture for I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t receive something on my desk that says oh, if we could only get back to the church in the book of Acts. Now if a person really understood what’s going on in the book of Acts I don’t think you’d want to get back to the church of Acts. The church in the book of Acts is naïve, it’s childish. The book of Acts is a transition book; it is a transition from the days when the kingdom of God was emphasized, that is in the gospel period, on down to the New Testament period when the Church is emphasized. And the book of Acts is written about the gradual transition as the Church takes over and takes over and takes over in a tension throughout the pages of Acts.

Acts documents how the Church arose out of the kingdom message of Israel. Those two words, “kingdom” and “church” are very, very important words. In fact, we want to take up those two words and demonstrate them by use of the divine institutions. As we’ve said repeated, human society can be divided, like this pie diagram, in sections. We call these sections divine institutions, other people will refer to these as creature modes, or spheres of sovereignty. Whatever the title is we’re all talking about the same thing, and that is these distinct creations of God. Now the kingdom of God means that time in history when Jesus Christ will personally rein in every area directly; not through believers, directly. For that reason the kingdom of God has never come on the face of the earth apart from an abbreviated version in the Old Testament. The kingdom still awaits the return of Christ.

This is why when all of us have said the Lord’s prayer at one time or another and when you get to that famous line in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” you are praying for a yet future kingdom. You would not be praying for the yet future kingdom if, in fact, the kingdom was here. So the kingdom of God is not yet here and will not come until Christ returns. When that kingdom does then you will find Jesus Christ straightening out the spheres of life. He will straighten out the concept of personal responsibility that has become so obliterated in present culture. He will straighten out the problem of wealth and money. He will, for example, prohibit fractional banking of the Federal Reserve, which is a theft according to Scripture. He will prohibit inflationary policies of printing press money that expands the money supply in order to keep politicians in office for a so-called positive goal of “full employment,” (end quote). All of this will be done away with as ethical norms and standards begin to be imposed upon the realm of finance banking and currency.

When we come into the area of marriage the Lord Jesus Christ will substantiate that that is a fundamental institution, that and the family, and not the state, over against our socialist friends. He will show that education is the proper function of the home and not the state, and thus public education itself will be undone and will go back to a parental education which the parents hire their own teachers for their own children in their own neighborhood in their own way.

And then we will the Lord Jesus Christ enforcing the law in the fourth divine institution of creating law and order on a Biblical basis. And you will not have promiscuity and you will not have licentiousness in human society in that area. On the international scene the Lord will superintend treaty agreements; they will be under His law according to Isaiah 2. So we will have Jesus Christ establish the kingdom of God in which the Word of God will be law for every sphere, every mode, every area of the divine institutions. That’s the kingdom.

Now all different from that is the Church. The Church is only one sector of life; it’s the sector of grace. That’s where grace is directly operating in a redemptive way, where God is making salvation kind of changes and it’s in that area where the Holy Spirit operates and as Christians go forth into, say the area of money and labor, as they go forth into marriage, as they go forth into the family, as they go forth into government and law, as they go forth into international agreements, as this happens the influence of God’s Word is taken into those areas, true. But it is not directly imposed by God Himself. God is still permitting men to choose for or against Him, and so it is that volition is respected.

In the area, for example, of the first divine institution, money supply, we can see the obvious situation right close at hand with the so-called energy crisis. For 20 years of more Texas companies have tried to tell the politicians that you cannot produce natural gas without capital assets for investment, but everybody thinks that it’s the big bad evil businessmen, they’re just out to deliberately fake out society, that’s all they have to do is sit in smoke-filled rooms and plot big hairy plots about how to screw the consumer. Now that may be the vision of Ralph Nader but that is not the proper vision. Big business must have capital in order to produce and we have had politicians interfere with price structures. They have deliberately interfered, why, we have to keep the prices down… and of course, they have failed to learn the lesson of Diocletian and every other socialist who has tried to intervene in the free market that when you bring the price down you bring the quantity of goods down with the price. So now we no longer have enough gas and enough energy sources; we could have had the free market been allowed to function, oil, gas and gasoline would have been selling at real prices, it would have forced people, years ago, to have gone to solar power and other things. But no, we kept the utilities down, we kept the gasoline prices down, we thought we could create value out of nothing and it doesn’t work because God’s Word says the only thing that creates value is labor. So since we have violated God’s law we’re paying a price and thus we have the cold wave and probably before this winter’s over dozens of Americans are going to literally freeze to death; freeze to death because of a violation of God’s laws in the areas of economics. It is not an energy crisis, primarily; it is an economic crisis mentioned in Isaiah 1 as a sin.

And so we can go from sphere to sphere. During the family training program we went into the area of mathematics and showed that you cannot be neutral, even in arithmetic. Dr. Poitress [sp?] of Harvard University has pointed out that two plus two is four is not the same statement for Christian and non-Christian, that plain geometry is taught from two completely different points of view, depending on whether you’re following the Scriptures or you’re against the Scriptures. There is no neutrality in math; no neutrality in geometry, no neutrality in algebra, no neutrality in trigonometry, every area of mathematics presupposes Christ or is against Christ. And every math teacher is presupposing one or the other but nowhere is math ever neutral and certainly if arithmetic is not neutral then no other subject can be neutral. Dr. Poitress’ essay will be available in the church library in a book called The Foundations of Christian Scholarship.

Now we come to Acts 15 and we come to the missionary journey of Paul. We have seen the rise of the church over against the kingdom. We’re not talking kingdom now, we’re talking Church. The church is separate from the kingdom. And throughout this passage, and particularly as we have come into these last few chapters of Paul’s missionary journey we have seen divine sovereignty play over against human responsibility. Now all of history is a see-saw between these two things; the human responsibility, of course, being under God’s sovereign, not equal to it, but nevertheless these two elements are always there and the book of Acts serves as a model so you can, by reading it and reading it and thinking about it, gradually it dawns in our souls the proper balance, and you see, the faith rest technique, when we faith-rest something, we relax in God’s sovereignty, when we faith-do something we are exercising our human responsibility. And so this boundary between sovereignty and human responsibility is necessary to just operate daily in the Christian life, because we’ve got to make decisions, are we going to rest here or are we going to do here; are we going to do here or are we going to rest here, what is it? And you can’t make that tactical decision on a day by day plain apart from getting some sort of appreciation of how divine sovereignty interplays with human responsibility.

So let’s look at some of the elements we’ve seen so far, training ourselves for the passage at hand, because in the passage we’re going to study today we’re going to watch sovereignty and human responsibility advance the Church into the west. It is in Acts 16 that the Christian message first reaches European soil and this is one of the great momentous points in western civilization. I personally have never seen this point mentioned in any history text I’ve ever studied. It’s just phenomenal that we can teach children and teach college students history and never mention one of the greatest events that has ever occurred in western civilization—the importation and invasion by the Apostle Paul into Greece. That’s coming up but to see how it comes up we want to look at sovereignty and human responsibility, keep looking at it, and look at it some more so after we walk way we just haven’t had a history lesson but we’ve had something that can apply in our lives.

Let’s look at sovereignty; we’ve seen several illustrations of sovereignty in Acts; we’ve seen Paul’s conversion, that was a sovereign act, God chose the moment, God chose the place, God chose the man, God chose the circumstances. Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road was an utter result of God’s sovereign rule and no one else’s. God did not ask Paul for his opinion on how to be converted; God sovereignly initiated the process. We find other examples of sovereignty in Scripture as Peter, Peter’s great role. Every place there’s a major break in the early chapters of Acts the Apostle Peter is the main spokesman for the Christian church. Observing this some have argued, particularly in the Roman Catholic tradition, that Peter, therefore, they say, was the first Pope. We need not draw that conclusion but we can honestly say that Peter was a first spokesman of the Christian position.

We find in the first missionary journey how the Holy Spirit used Peter and Barnabas and their backgrounds. For example, Barnabas’ Cypriot homeland, Paul came from Cilicia and so it was that in those days when the gospel went out it wasn’t going out to some randomly picked mission field; on the first missionary journey Paul went out to areas, he and Barnabas, to their homeland, Barnabas lived on Cyprus, there’s no mystery why the first missionary journey was to Cyprus. They went where they were most welcome, where they were most familiar. Paul, then later on they went up to this area and evangelized this whole area in Acts 13, 14 and 15 because Cilicia is right near a place called Tarsus, that’s Paul’s home. So there’s a reason why the first missionary journey; it’s not mystical at all, it’s simple common sense. We find God’s sovereignty at work in setting up some of the crises that we observe in Acts. We find the great hostilities to the Christian faith exercised on the part of the Jews is all part of God’s plan because that hostility resulted in the great ecumenical conference of Acts 15. The first conference of the entire Christian church in which doctrinal issues were thrashed out to a Scriptural conclusion.

But then on the other side we have noticed men doing things. They didn’t just sit around as fatalists, waiting for God to do something. Paul, for ten years studied and he studied and he studied, and people would probably go by Paul and say Paul, you’re wasting your time, don’t you know if you became a Christian you should be out witnessing; if you became a Christian yesterday fine, today you can be witnessing. Paul didn’t follow that line that is so prevalent in fundamental circles today; Paul studied for ten years because Paul was going to be a professional. Paul had to know what he was doing, he didn’t want to flub around like some amateur and mess up the Christian message. Paul studied.

Then we find Stephen and some of the other men, they were also students. Stephen and these men mastered the lessons of interpreting the Old Testament; Stephen learned how to interpret the Old Testament from Luke 24, when Jesus Christ went through the entire canon of the Old Testament; He went through the Torah, He went through the Kethubim or the Writings, He went through the Nabiim or the prophets and in every book He said men, look at this passage; here is how this passage applies to me; here’s this passage, here’s how this passage applies to Me and so on and so on and so on through the canon. And Stephen and these men did their best to study and study and study until they knew this; that’s human responsibility. And then we find out how Paul studied the Gentile culture; we’ll see a phenomenal illustration of that in Acts 17 when Paul gives one of the most magnificent presentations of the Christian faith ever given to the western man, and it was given in the western man’s intellectual home, Athens. And so it goes. We could show how the men in Acts 15 met together for group problem solving. You have the group solving their problems, they didn’t wait for God to solve their problems, they solved their problems. So there’s human responsibility.

Now the art of the Christian way of life is knowing when to rest and when to do. That is the key factor, and so in our sanctification there is this perpetual learning we’ve got to do of knowing when to sit back, relax and trust the promises, “Casting all our care upon Him, because He cares for us.” There is a definite time and a definite place where you have to do that and not to do that is violating the Word of God. But then there are other times when we are to do something. So we’re going to be particular sensitive to this as we go into this passage this morning. We want to see how we can do that as Christians. Again, sovereignty, the faith-rest and here’s the faith-doing; on the faith-rest side it’ll be claiming the promise of Scripture, where we sit and we wait for something to happen. Faith-rest also is expressed in our acceptance of our circumstances. God creates circumstances, God creates adversity, God creates the trials, we don’t ask for them, He doesn’t ask for our consultation, they just happen in our lives and we are stuck with them. That’s God’s sovereign act; now we have to handle it.

We have certain natural talents that may be given us; we learned that in Psalm 139. These God gave you. You may have talents you aren’t even aware of yet simply because perhaps you’ve been lazy in developing what talents you do have and therefore have never noticed, never put yourself in a position of having to produce something and seeing that in fact God did make greater investments in your soul than you ever thought. And then God has given every Christian at least one spiritual gift and He didn’t consult with us on that either; there’s an expression of the sovereign decree of God. So everywhere we go we can find evidences of God’s sovereign giving to us and setting us up.

But then there are obligations. We have study; now God could have automatically at the point of regeneration took his little tape machine and go ding, and there’s all the doctrine, it would have been in our brains. But it’s interesting that God doesn’t choose to edify us this way. God chooses to let us do the learning through a temporal process of experience and we have to do that. We can take prayer, we can take any other activity of the Christian way of life and if we don’t do it we don’t have it, it’s that simple. James says, “You have not because you ask not.” We can take the Word of God and apply it to the various divine institutions. So whether we’re talking about the Church in Acts or whether we’re talking about ourselves, same thing, sovereignty, human responsibility; sovereignty, human responsibility, sovereignty, human responsibility, faith-rest, faith-doing, it’s the same principle.

Now keeping that category in mind let’s go through the text beginning Acts 15:36. “And some days after Paul said unto Barnabas, Let us go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord, and see how they do. [37] And Barnabas determined to take with them John, whose surname was Mark. [38] But Paul thought not good to take him with them, who departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work. [39] And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus; [40] And Paul chose Silas, and departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God. [41] And he went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches.”

Now here we have the first in a chain series of events, episodes, that will eventually result, under God’s sovereignty, of the gospel coming to Europe. Let’s observe how it starts. In verse 36 the men begin at the place of Antioch. That’s the sending church. Now if you look at Antioch, that’s exactly the first place where it all started on the first trip. The first trip they left Antioch, they sailed to Cyprus. They went through Cyprus to Paphos, then they came up to Perga, they went up to Antioch, they came to Iconium, Derbe, they backed up, came back down and went back. That was the zone of the first missionary journey. Now in verse 36 all that you’ve got that triggers the process for this titanic invasion of Europe is one man with a very simple thought. The man is Paul and his simple thought is we’ve got to follow-up Christians. It did not begin as oh, I’ve got this great burden for the world. It didn’t start that way, and the interesting thing, and it’s comforting, the interesting thing is that not one of the great missionary enterprises in Acts ever began for the human vision. It began by men simply doing the task at hand and as they did the task at hand then God pushed them out. So in verse 36 Paul has only a very small self-contained goal to simply go in a small area and follow the people, teach them the Word of God, answer problems of application of doctrine that they might have run into, and that’s all; that’s all he intends to do.

Well, beginning in verse 37-38, now we have God’s sovereignty begin to work in the situation. Things don’t look too good in these verses, in fact you wonder, you mean the apostles had fights? They sure did. Well, I thought the apostles were infallible. They were when they wrote Scripture. You mean they weren’t continually infallible? Correct. Let’s look at this fight: Barnabas on one side with John Mark, verse 37. Who is John Mark? Well, he’s a teenager of in his young 20s, college age probably by this time. John Mark’s mother was the one who owned a great wealthy home in Jerusalem, maybe, but not actually, maybe the place where most of the meetings in the early part of Acts occurred. But John Mark had gone on that first missionary journey with Barnabas and Paul. Barnabas was his uncle and so John Mark and Barnabas and Paul made it to Cyprus. And what happened? They sailed from this place, they went up to Pamphylia, and when they got there all of a sudden John Mark started looking around and he said hey, you know, I’ve never been in this place before, these people look different than the people I’m used to looking at; people even talk with a little different accent up here than I’m used to and he got scared. And for some reason he just took off and left Paul.

Well now Paul is the kind of guy who doesn’t want some person who is unstable on his team. Paul’s a very stable kind of person, under fire he doesn’t need somebody to cut and run. So Paul is going to stop John Mark at this point and kick him, he fires him from the staff is what it amounts to here. He doesn’t want John Mark to be along; Barnabas says he is going along. Of course Barnabas is John Mark’s uncle so there may be something there. But Barnabas is also of a different nature than Paul. Barnabas, his name means the son of consolation or son of exultation, Barnabas is a man who seems to always have one low in Scripture. You know, each Christian has his own thing where he’s most specialized in. In the congregation you can look out and you can see men who function excellently as committee chairmen; do a great job. And you find somebody else just cannot function, never can and probably never will function, just simply not management material, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless; it doesn’t even mean they’re not needed because those men may have a tremendous gift in a totally different area, teaching for example. They may have a gift of helps; they may have a totally different thing that is absolutely necessary for the congregation and it would be wrong for the congregation or a group of Christians to say hey, you’d better be on the Board, of hey, you’d better be on this committee or that committee.

Now that’s what’s going on here. Barnabas wants to train John Mark; that’s a good goal. He wants to take this guy, okay, John Mark flunked the first test, so what, let’s give him a second one. So there’s legitimate concern. But now here’s Paul; Paul says that’s fine but I’m going to be out there are people are going to be stoning us and I don’t want this kind of clown on my team, he’s not qualified to be on my team. And that is right. So we’ve got two men operating from two Biblical motives and that’s why in verse 39 we find the contention was violent. That shows you how intense can be the differences between godly people. Godliness is not a sufficient reason for not having discussion or argument. Paul is going to eliminate Mark from the team. Mark will go to Cyprus. Now let’s look what happens. As a result of going to Cyprus he gets underneath Barnabas and Barnabas is his right teacher, not Paul. As a result of this Barnabas is going to help Mark and Mark will later on become a great man and he becomes the author of the second Gospel, The Gospel according to Mark. He would never have written that Gospel had Barnabas not been his teacher, comfort him, put him not under an absolute crunch but just a little trial, give him success, another trial, give him success, another trial, give him some more success. This guy needed confidence. Paul was not the kind of guy that had the patience to handle somebody like this and so it was good that Paul not be Mark’s teacher.

Paul, on the other hand, as a result of this is going to get a guy by the name of Silas; Silas is an expert out of the original mother church of Jerusalem, he has the gift of prophecy, and he is going to be a tremendous aid to Paul. So what do we have demonstrated in verses 37-39? We have demonstrated God’s sovereign working, unknown to Paul because even Paul doesn’t really know all that’s involved in this second missionary journey. All he knows is he’s just going around a dangerous area and God is going to show Paul, you’re going to invade Europe. Well if Paul had known he was going to invade Europe he probably would have sought different people on his staff, but God is developing his staff so he gets rid of Mark and brings in Silas; Silas is the right man.

What application can we make of this little episode? Differences in Christians are often due to no other reason than a differential of sanctification. That is, some people are sanctified only so far; some are more mature; these people can do job A, these people cannot do job A and it’s wrong for them to do job A. So you can’t take the same job and cram it down two people’s throats and come out with something that’s worthwhile. This shows the individuality of the gospel.

So they go and they pick Silas and verse 41 shows that they do exactly what he wanted to do in verse 36, he goes to this area of Cilicia, and his job there as he goes through here is to confirm these churches. So far no change. We’ve seen human responsibility, Saul gets moving. The guy that led me to Christ once said God can’t steer a parked car and that’s the point. God is not going to steer where Paul’s going to go until Paul starts going, and then He’s going to steer him. So Paul starts obeying the known will of God, not the unknown will. He doesn’t know what God wants him to do exactly, but he does know it’s right to follow people up. So in the small area of what he knows to be his responsibility he begins to act. The moment he begins to act what begins to happen? God begins to prune him, God beings to fire this guy, bring in this guy, to start arranging things. Now God could never have done 38, 39 and 40 if Paul had to start at verse 36.

So we come now to Acts 16:1, as we go toward this invasion point of Europe. “Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek: [2] Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium. [3] Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek. [4] And as they went through the cities, they delivered them the decrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem. [5] And so were the churches established in the faith, and increased in number daily.” Luke will often put verse 5, that kind of a verse in, to show you all’s going well.

Now what’s happening in these verses; how do we see sovereignty and human responsibility interplay here? As they come to Derbe and Lystra this area, notice it’s still in the sector of simple follow up. Who does he meet but number two on his staff. Number one on his staff was Silas, perfect man because Silas has got connections in Jerusalem, this plugs mother church in Jerusalem into the invasion of Europe, so that the church in Jerusalem has a credible eyewitness man on the scene when it occurs. Second thing is this guy Timiothy shows up. Now why do you suppose the Holy Spirit goes into this little deal in verse 1 about this mother and his father. Well, Timothy is bi-cultural, exactly the kind of staff member that Paul needs to invade Europe with. And this is going to be very useful because the two trouble-shooters in the New Testament are Titus and Timothy. These are the men that go in, they set up a church, get it going, go out, go down the road, start another church, get that going, go down the road, start another one, this one had trouble, okay, send Titus over here, this one’s got trouble, send Timothy over here. Those are the two troublemakers; they were roving apostolic ambassadors in the Church.

So what is happening under God’s sovereignty here? Paul’s staff is being developed? For what? Paul doesn’t know it, God in His omniscience knows it, He knows what’s coming and so He’s the one providing for Paul’s needs here. Notice too, that Timothy was well reported of by the brethren. He had become a Christian, 1 and 2 Timothy tell us how, his mother led him to Christ or at least his mother acquainted him with the Old Testament and then when Paul came along he believed very rapidly. This, by the way, shows you that in the invasion of Europe two women figured very prominently in this point, Timothy’s mother, her name is given in the epistles, and another woman later on in the text. It’s very interesting; both of these women had no men around, either Timothy’s father had die or left or something but his mother was left alone to raise her son. And later on we’ll see Lydia, who is another woman left alone and she has to raise her home. Women in these situations are fully acceptable in the role of a man because God’s Word gives a stamp of approval on it, but she did one thing that the man should do in the home; this woman taught her son the Word of God. She went over it and over it and over it. Paul says Timothy, this is over in the epistles to Timothy, do you remember what your mother did, how your mother taught you and taught you and taught you and taught you the Word of God, which gave you salvation. So we know very well how this man became a Christian. It was largely through his parents which confirms our point about the family training; that kind of training does not belong in the church, it belongs in the home.

Acts 16:2, he “was well reported of” because spiritual qualifications are measured in the New Testament by your performance within some local church; they are not measured because you are a member of some para church hot-shot group. And the woods in evangelical circles are full of these little diddly groups that say well, the local church isn’t doing it’s job and so God has raised us up to do it. So we’ve had tragedy where these cases have arisen. We’ve had some girls, for example, in this congregation over the years study the Word of God and study the Word of God and become very mature Christian women and they’ve fallen for some of these guys in these hot-shot groups. And I have two girls on my mind who married these guys and after they married them the guy said okay Hon, I want you to destroy all your notes and get rid of all tapes; I don’t care who it is, I’m going to be the leader around here. Well, it’s nice to be concerned with being all leader but that’s being a spiritual Hitler. It turns out both of these guys are members of the same extra para church group that’s active in the Lubbock area and apparently it seems to be the axiom of this group to train spiritual Hitler’s that are going to go around and absolutely dictate and (quote) “disciple” people on a one on one basis which I means I will stick my nose in every bit of your private business, we’ll share this, we’ll share that, we’ll share the same Kleenex and so on. So this is what goes on with these para church outfits. Now some of them are good but some of them are very bad and I’m thinking of two girls that are very sad Christian women because they got stuck with two clowns from these groups, so watch it. The para church groups are not family based Scripturally.

Here Paul takes the word of local church leadership and then he says okay, okay, you’ve got a good report, there’s human responsibility, verse 3, “Him would Paul have to go,” the verb “would,” willing, there’s the verb of volition. So there’s human responsibility; God raises in His sovereignty the man, Paul sees the guy and he chooses; so Paul by his own choice acquires Timothy on his staff. For what? Paul still doesn’t yet know what’s coming up but God knows and so God says Paul, use this guy.

In Acts 16:3 Paul circumcises Timothy for the reason here of accommodating to Jewish culture in the same way as Acts 15. Verse 3 should be a warning to us that Paul, as hard-nosed as he was over doctrinal principles could be very, very accommodating. When a doctrinal principle wasn’t at stake he could lean over backwards to be diplomatically compromising with a person, as long as it didn’t involve a doctrinal principle. That’s a lesson many of us have yet to learn, how to balance truth and grace. So verse 4 they continue on the mission, they continue, they “delivered them the decrees,” the word “decrees” in verse 4 refers to Acts 15, that’s the result of the conference. Remember, Gentiles, you can have fellowship with Gentiles, you can eat at the table with them, except you guys, you Gentiles, don’t go out here and serve meat that’s not had the blood drained out of it, that kind of thing. Now verse 5, the result of this, and verse 5 terminates the idea of verse 36 in the previous chapter, the result of all this is that local churches are edified. Now comes the shift.

Let’s look at Acts 16:6, “Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia, [7] After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not. [8] And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas. [9] And a vision appeared to Paul in the night;” now what’s happening here? Something new has occurred. In verse 6 Paul has come down the road to the crossroads of Antioch, you can see it here on the map. These were major highways created by the Roman army engineers. The Romans knew that they could not hold an empire together without lines of communication. This is why the newspapers and the media today still haven’t got the word as to why the military is so concerned about the Soviet navy. We’re not worried about the Mediterranean; that’s bad. What we’re worried about is that when you have an insular power like the United States we have lines of communication that are on the surface of the sea; we import ore, we import rare metals, we export food. Those exports/imports that are the lifeblood of the country, oil if you want a good example, go on the surface of the sea. Those are called in history lines of communication and it’s the fear of losing our lines of communication to the Russian navy that is behind the military concern about the expansion of the Russian navy. But we still have people in congress and the media that have no idea what the words “line of communication” means, leave alone its significance.

So Paul believed in following these lines of communication. As he did so, he approached Antioch and would have swung left at that crossroads and taken the road down to the Mediterranean Sea and finished the zone of follow up. The text doesn’t tell us, except it hints in the verb “forbidden” of verse 6, we “were forbidden” to take the word into Asia. Somewhere between verse 5 and verse 6 Paul had in mind of not making a left turn at the crossroads; he had in mind going straight on over to Ephesus. There was a major highway he was following.

That shows us another work of God’s sovereign plan in the churches life. Somehow, some way the Holy Spirit had stimulated a sense of adventure in Paul; Paul, let’s take the Word of God into a new zone, into a new area, a new province, let’s try it. We don’t know how it happened, we just know it in fact happened because verse 6 says Paul fully intended to drive right straight on through to Ephesus, take Interstate 5 or whatever it was. But when he got to the crossroads, he didn’t want to make the left turn because he wanted to take the Word of God into a new zone. So he tried to go straight ahead through the crossroads and what does it say in verse 6? The Holy Spirit forbade them to go into Asia. That means the Holy Spirit cut off this path and said turn right Paul, right! Now how this happened, maybe through the work of the gift of prophecy in Silas, we don’t know but somehow it was communicated. So he makes a right turn there at the crossroads and begins to head north to a place called Bithynia.

And we read in verse 7, “After they were come to Mysia,” which is a kind of road stop on that road, “they tried to go into Bithynia; but” again, “the Spirit did not permit them.” How the Spirit did not permit them, again we don’t know, but he tried to go up here to another crossroad and head north into Bithynia, by that dot, Dorylaeum, that’s another one of the Roman strongholds that was another east-west highway that intersected that point. So they try to cut north and can’t, and are blocked. Now you say well what is going on here, why doesn’t the Holy Spirit just simply say to Paul, hey Paul, go to Europe. The Holy Spirit doesn’t teach you that way, He doesn’t teach me that way and He doesn’t teach Paul that way. The Holy Spirit only teaches us step by step by step. That’s what’s so infuriating. I’m sure if you’ve been a Christian longer than five years you’ve at least had one great phenomenal encounter with the frustratingly slow way the Spirit teaches you.

Why doesn’t He just put it on the board what I’m supposed to do; and I want to go to the pastor and pastor, get your crystal ball out and find out where it is, I’m tired of fussing about what God wants me to do. You go to the pastor and he doesn’t have crystal ball in his closet; if he does he shouldn’t be your pastor. The way of Christians is to go with the Word of God.

Now when this happens there’s a very clear indication of what was happening to Paul. Paul had the idea of adventure, only in Asia Minor and what the Holy Spirit is doing is Paul, you’re right, there are lot of people here that need the gospel; you’re right that the Word of God should go into these areas and eventually it will, but Paul, today is not the day for adventures in Asia Minor; I’ve got bigger plans for you, you’re going to invade Europe. Can’t you just see Paul, I’m going to invade Europe? Yes, you’re going to invade Europe but before the Holy Spirit gets him to Troas he blocks him, sort of like you’d herd cattle. You know we’re referred to as sheep; well, here’s the herding, he tries to go this way He cuts him off; he tries to go this way He cuts him off, and finally he’s only got one other road out of Asia Minor, he’s got to go to Troas, no other place to go, the Holy Spirit’s wiped out all the other options. So he goes down to Troas and then there, in verse 9 he receives the famous vision of the Macedonian. This is oftentimes referred to in Christian literature, if you’ve been active in Christian circles for some time I’m sure you’ve heard sermons on the missionary call, the call of the man of Macedonia. But today we’re going to approach this in a little bit deeper way than just looking at this Macedonian vision as a missionary call. It’s not just a missionary call. It is a call, but it’s more than that, and to see what it’s more than we have to go back in history to find out what the significance of a Macedonian appearing to Paul; notice it doesn’t say a Greek; it doesn’t say a Roman; it doesn’t say a Gaul, it doesn’t even say a plain man but it says “a man of Macedonia. [Acts 16:9b, “There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”]

Now what’s Macedonia known for in history? Back in the days when Greece was at her heyday, Macedon, Philip of Macedon was one of the great leaders who conquered the area around the Aegean Sea and it was his son, the famous Alexander the Great, conquered the world, I think by the time he was 23. And he was tutored, by the way, his personal tutor all during his teenage years was Aristotle. His father looked around Greece for the best teacher he could find for his son and found Aristotle and said Aristotle, you’re going to teach my son everything you know. And this is why everywhere Alexander went he began to impose Hellenistic culture. He’s a direct disciple of the philosopher Aristotle.

So Macedon, then, is the core of the Greek leadership of the kingdom of Greece. Therefore this should alert us to the four kingdoms of Daniel and the four layers of western culture. Our western culture according to the book of Daniel is made up of four components: the spirit of Babylon; the spirit of Persia; the spirit of Greece; and the spirit of Rome. Even today, England, France, Germany, the United States, are thinking its colors by these four contributions, these four spirits. The spirit of Babylon is the spirit of international trade and banking. It is the economic core of the west. In it’s goodness it’s trying to develop international money; its badness is that from Babylon we have inflated currency and fractional reserve banking; it goes back to the days of Babylon. The Federal Reserve, for example, is a violation of Scripture. It violates Isaiah 1, it violates the command, “Thou shalt not steal,” and Isaiah has a big long discussion about fractionalized banking; it’s wrong, inflationary currency is wrong, but it’s present because of this pollution we’ve inherited from Babylon. Most of the economic advisors of the present in the business community are men who think with the spirit of Babylon.

The second great spirit to mold our west is the spirit of Persia; the Persians were the one who sought to unite the west and the east; it’s the spirit behind one-worldism, the idea that all the men will be subject to one culture, kind of like David Rockefeller in Chase Manhattan Bank, that kind of thing. There’s the spirit of Persia operating. And then the spirit of Greece, the spirit of Greece is very easy to see, it’s the spirit of rationalism, rationalism from Plato and Aristotle. And the spirit of Rome, that’s easy, that’s the spirit of law and bureaucracy. Rome was organization par excellence; these are the four spirits. Now looking at the four spirits of the west, which one is an intellectual leader? Greece. And who was the man in history who took Greek thought and forced it upon the world? The man from Macedonia.

Now let’s go back to Genesis 9 and see that history has a form and a shape and here in Acts 16 we see the form and the shape played out before our eyes as Europe receives the gospel. Genesis 9:25, 26, 27, the three prongs of the human race. Humanity is divided according to the sons of Noah: Ham, Shem, Japheth. One of the fascinating ways to interest your children in history and I highly recommend this to every Christian parent, one thing at least everyone can do and that is in your family Bible or some more or less permanent thing in your home plot out your family tree as far back as you can go; at least you can go back to your grandfather or great grandfather, and develop an interest in your children to see their roots. That’s why this television program Roots, Haley’s novel, has become so phenomenally popular. It’s not just the intrigue of the black slave; the reason that it almost has a subliminal power on the audiences of America as they watch this program is because Haley’s hitting something that’s very sensitive in the human heart—where have I come from, physically. Where’s my home. We Americans all have this because we’re all imports; very few of us are Indians and even if you’re an Indian you’re imported from Asia, came through the Bering Sea. So all of us have this import, and we’re not rooted here, any of us, on this continent. Our roots go back to the old world and there’s something in your soul if you let it express itself that wants to know where’s my roots? Where’s my father? Where’s my mother? Where’s my grandfather, where did they come from and what culture did they bring. Where am I from? And every man has this basic answer, and that’s the way to interest children in history. Take them back in your own family tree as far as back as you can, and then bring them forward from Ham, Shem and Japheth. All of us are from them.

Now this passage, we’ve gone through many times, Ham, the physical needs of men; Shem, the spiritual needs of man; and Japheth, the intellectual needs of man. And it says here that [Genesis 9:26] that “God shall enlarge Japheth,” when Japheth “dwells in the tents of Shem.” And what that means is that all the people that come from Japheth have a tendency in their soul to conquer, they’re aggressive people, they expand and they conquer, they’ve been known in history for this. After all, who conquered the western hemisphere, both North and South America? The Spaniards; they are Japhetic. Who conquered India and came across the Himalayas, all through the Himalayas, the ice and the snow, thousands of feet to destroy the Mohenjo-Daro civilizations and so on? It was the Arians and they came from Indo-Europe, they’re Japhetic. Who came down the Italian Peninsula and destroyed the Etruscans? It was the Japhetics. And so every continent, every subcontinent, every peninsula on the continents of the earth, Japheth has conquered.

Now what releases Japheth, according to this prophecy? What releases Japheth and makes him function is when he lives in the tents of Shem. What does it mean to live in the tent of someone? Well, a tent was a home; it means the necessities of life, it means your basic orientation to life, where you learn, where your mother is, where she teaches you, these kinds of things. That’s the tent. And so when Japheth and schooled and disciplined in Shemitic thought patterns, he will be his most productive self.

So now turn to Acts 16 and watch, the man from Macedon comes and he addresses Paul in the vision in the night, and he says, “Come over and help us.” That is a fulfillment of Genesis 9:27; it is a cry, Japheth to Shem, come and help us, we want to live in your tent. And that’s the significance of the Macedonian vision, the rise of the west. And from this point forward Europe was never the same. Europe began to be politically reformed by the gospel. You have constitutionalism; you never had that in history until the gospel hit the west. In Europe you have economic reform and the rise of the modern capitalism; you never had that until you had a developed Protestant theology with a future orientation to business. And you have intellectual reform, science, philosophy, rise in the west only in the real form after Christianity hits the west. And finally, for the Church itself you have missions. Where have most of the missionaries come from, by the way, in the last 200-300 years? Won’t you agree that most missionaries have come, who have been Japhetic Christians. The Shemitic Christians and the Oriental Christians haven’t sent out that many missionaries. The major missionary thrust has been from western Christians. Why? Because western Christians are Japhetic and they have that conquest nature, the spreading, the enlarging nature of western man.

So here we go with the call of Macedon; that’s why it’s there. This is not just a missionary call, this is a call to change the west, and the west is never going to be the same after Paul steps his first foot on Greek soil. Acts 16:10, “And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.” He crosses, and the crossing across the Aegean took 48 hours, two days, he sailed from Troas up to here, to a place that itself is phenomenal, the colony of Philippi, the place where the epistle to the Philippians was sent to. What’s phenomenal about Philippi? This; in 42 BC a very famous battle was fought on the outskirts of Philippi that decided the political course of the Roman Empire. Octavian and Anthony defeated Brutus and Cassias on the battlefield of Philippi. It was there that Rome was rooted. How significant, isn’t it, Paul sets foot and invades Europe right at the point where the Roman political destiny was determined. There’s a tremendous history of the west involved in this; this is not just a simply missionary story of somebody trotting from town to town, stopping at 7-11 stores all the way. Verse 10 also shows instant obedience: sovereign call, instant obedience in verse 10.

Acts 16:11 “Therefore loosing from Troas, [we came with a straight course to Samothracia,] and the next day to Neapolis; [12] And from thence to Philippi, [which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony: and we were in that city abiding certain days.]” And then verses 13-15, the last three verses of the section this morning, deal with very unpromising, apparently, events. After all of this sovereign leading, we’ve watched God select Paul’s staff, stimulate his desire, guide the desire, get him over to Europe, we’ve seen Paul study, prepare, he’s all ready to go, he comes to Europe and what does he see? He can’t even find a Jewish synagogue to witness to. Apparently the way we read verse 13, verse 12, we were in the city staying several days, then [13] “on the Sabbath” had to wait till Saturday, “on the Sabbath we went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down,” with women [“and spoke unto the women which resorted thither.]” Now for Paul, a Jewish man, with all this great sovereign leading of the Lord, he gets over to Europe and what does he find? He can’t find a Jewish synagogue to go to; he had found this every other place. How come? The fact there’s no synagogue shows you there were less than ten men, Jewish men, in the city of Philippi because if you had ten men you could start a synagogue; there aren’t even ten Jewish men there. And lo and behold, his first European convert is a woman of all things.

Let’s look at this more carefully. Acts 16:14, “And a certain woman named Lydia,” a business woman, “a seller of purple,” that means she was very wealthy, purple was a very expensive product, she didn’t go around selling it to any Hottentot that happened to come down the street, it’s talking about a very wealthy clientele, it’s like she’s the Lincoln/Cadillac dealer of Philippi or something, [“of the city of Thyatira], which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.” Definite sovereign working of God, her heart is being opened. [15] “And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us.” Verse 15 is very important for women whose husbands have left them, as divorcees or perhaps as widows, they have had to raise a family. There is your justification for a woman assuming the role and responsibility of a man. There, whether you know it or not, is a very rare passage in Scripture. I know of no other passage where it talks about a woman commanding her household. This is a term usually used of men; this is an exception and it’s an exception because this woman has lost her husband. When a woman loses her husband she has the right to exercise the authority of any man in that situation. She assumes command and she assumes all the authority of her husband and that is very clearly outlined in the Mosaic Law. So here’s the justification for a single woman ruling her family. Somebody asked on the feedback card should another man… it’d be helpful if she had some male help but God recognizes it because in verse 15 Paul doesn’t say we, stay in a household run by a woman? No thanks babe, we’ll make it at the local motel. Paul goes willingly into a woman’s home and lives under her authority in that home.

But we still haven’t got this last question answered, why the very, kind of a letdown ending, this anticlimax of verse 113, 14 and 15 when we’ve built this up and built this up, the invasion of Europe, the fulfillment of Genesis 9, Japheth is going to get the gospel and we come over to this very unpromising beginning. It’s very simple. It’s a continuation of Paul’s training. When Paul was operating over in Asia Minor he always followed one basic strategy: hit the Jewish synagogue and that was it. Now Paul’s got to change his strategy because you can’t reach western Europe going to all the synagogues. How many synagogues are there in Paris? Paris isn’t formed by this time but I’m being facetious about Gentile cities. So God is training Paul, this is the very first place he sets his foot on European soil, his tactic is totally frustrated. No Jewish man, he’s got to completely overhaul, modify and improve his practice.

The second thing it shows is that Paul is going into a region where society is more and more in upheaval; that’s why the first person led to Christ in the Gospels is coming from a socially abnormal situation, a woman running a house. That’s a picture of Japheth and his social chaos and the gospel is going to have to go into the period of social chaos. So Paul cannot depend on the old-fashioned structured Jewish society where everything was run nicely. You’re going to get into a mess, the Holy Spirit is telling Paul.

And so we see on the one hand God’s sovereignty, on the other hand human responsibility. Hopefully as we read through these passages in weeks to come we’ll get in greater skill in faith-resting underneath God’s sovereignty; faith-doing in the areas of human responsibility. This is how God leads both the church and individual Christians.

Shall we stand and sing…