Clough Acts Lesson 43

Legal Effects of the Gospel – Acts 16:35-40

We’ll continue our study of Acts 16, the continued invasion of Europe, which is an event, which we have said oft overlooked by so-called neutral humanist historians who are anxious to keep history safe for autonomous man. But nevertheless, this is an important point, one of the most important points in the history of the west. It’s more important from the west’s standpoint than even the gospel itself, for conceivably Christian could have been buried in the debris of the orient, and never have broken out and become a western religion; had it not done so we would not be here. As Paul and Silas set foot on European soil there’s a series of collisions; a series of collisions that are important, it’s important for you and to me because this theory of collision will be repeated again in our day and is being repeated again in our day. So as we get progressively more degenerate in culture to approximate that of Rome then we’ll have these kinds of confrontations.

In Acts 16:16-24 we’ve already studied the economic collision. We’ve seen how that when the mass of people become Christians, where Christianity has an impact of the teaching of the Word of God, then there is inevitably an economic result, and that economic result takes one or both of two forms. It can take the form of people who become Christians quitting their former business and therefore diminish the means of production in certain areas. There’s a shift, in other words, in the job market when people conscientiously can no longer work in certain professions but must shift to other professions. And there’s that adjustment economically. Then the second kind of adjustment is that people’s values change and as their values change they’re going to be interested in different goods and therefore the price will rise on certain goods and stall on other goods, given the fact that you have this strong an influence in the Christian faith. The reason for this is that price is not set by government decree; price is set by the imputation of credit from the free will of man. Government cannot set, they can try to set price but only the individual person sets Christ by his decree of that price. You can see this when price controls go into effect.

Whenever the government, from Diocletian, has imposed price controls it has always led to scarcity. It always will lead to scarcities. So when price controls are imposed in the last part of this year you can look for scarcities to develop rapidly in the economy, and it’s simply an illogical law of economics, it’s going to happen because politicians don’t like inflation, voters don’t like the solutions and therefore the copout is always the wage and price controls. But with wage and price controls the corollary is always the development of a black market and the reason that black markets develop is because prices aren’t being controlled by the government, they’re controlled by men, men who buy and sell goods. So price control situations always in history has been accompanied by black market and always will. So when you see wage and price controls to come in that’s the time for the Christians to get into the used goods business, or get in some business that’s not wage and price controlled.

This is an area where you see economic impact and economic impact was started in Europe in Acts 16 and in Acts 19; two clear cut cases; in both of these cases you have physical violence being waged against Christians. Now when this happens businessmen always have and probably always will flee to the government, so that the government will finance their unprofitable business. When the market drops it’s essentially saying something to the businessman; it’s saying that your particular product is not sellable at this historic moment; there is no demand behind it. So therefore there’s a demand that the government subsidize an unprofitable product and thus all government subsidies basically finance inefficient allocation of resources. You saw this happen in Acts 16, where the men who were put out of business by the Christian application of the Word of God ran to the government, for the government to impose penalties for people who would interfere with their market. So this is the origination here, in Acts 16:16-24, of the sort of Robin Hood government. Robin Hood government robs from the rich and gives to the poor and then finally robs from both rich and poor alike to give to Robin Hood.

Now in Acts 25-34 we have the second collision. The first collision was economic; the second collision is psychological. In the psychological collision we have the fact that the humanist insists that the psychologist and the psychiatrist have a legitimate claim to counsel. We see already that psychology and psychiatry have legitimate areas. The psychologist has a vast area to study in learning theory, perception, these kind of things. The psychiatrist has a vast area for research; the influence of blood sugar, for example, on how people think and their mood, this sort of thing. That’s legitimate. But when the psychologist and the psychiatrist, in the name of their fields, offer to counsel people who are having problems that involve choices, then they’re out of their pew. They have just jumped over the fence and they have jumped into the pastor’s backyard. They have no job there, they are no more competent to counsel than the auto mechanic. Any Christian who has basic doctrine is as competent to counsel as any person with his doctrine in psychology or psychiatry. The reason: because the psychology and psychiatric studies do not equip one theologically and you cannot dictate to a soul made in God’s image, its choices or even help it in making choices without a theological background.

And we saw here the crisis situation involving both Paul and Silas on one hand and the jailer on the other. We saw how, when they were in prison, verse 25, Paul and Silas handled their crises by doing something about it. They couldn’t do much, they couldn’t complain to the jailer, he wasn’t there. They couldn’t get their lawyer because they didn’t have one. They couldn’t offer bail because they had no money, but they could do one thing and that was they could sing and they could pray, and they did that. They didn’t sit around wallowing in their self-pity, feeling sorry for themselves, blaming God, why did this happen to me, and the other numerable things that we all do when we’re in this kind of a situation. They did the best that they could with their situation, and we said the result, at the end of verse 25, the prisoners were hearing them. They had a testimony, that was the result of doing something in the middle of the crisis.

And then we saw the jailer, how he tried to solve the problem and he tried to solve the problem like increasing numbers of people, both young and old are trying to solve their problems, suicide. If I can’t have my way I will throw the ultimate tantrum, just like a two-year old baby throws a tantrum when it can’t have its own way. And so adults when they throw their ultimate tantrum they kill themselves; it’s as simple as that, suicide is just an exaggerated tantrum by people who rebel against life itself. So the jailer tried to make his ultimate tantrum and the result was that Paul stepped in, in a crisis intervention model, and in verse 28 he walks into the situation with authority. He cuts the crisis down to size by asserting God’s sovereign decree over the crisis. Every crisis can be cut down to manageable size; we don’t say minimized, we don’t say erased, but it can be cut down to solvable bite size portions by applying the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. God works all things out together for good and that includes the evil things and the bad things.

So Paul intervened and he intervened with authority, he intervened with an authority no psychiatrist or psychologist could possibly have because Paul hat theology; he had doctrine, he had training in that area and that qualified him for crisis counseling. We saw the result; the jailer was stopped in his suicidal attempt and the moment he was stopped, like skin of an onion, once one is peeled off you come to the next one, and he came to his second problem. His second problem was graver than his first one. His first one was just the mere problem of prisoners; his second one was the prison of his own soul. And so here was the jailer who was the prison keeper but he was also the one who himself was in prison spiritually, and his second problem was solved with an application of evangelism.

And so we read the famous evangelistic statement in Acts 16:31, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thy shall be saved, and all thy house.” And then it goes on in verse 32 to explain that the Word of God was added to that simple gospel invitation. The gospel is not limited to just verse 31; there’s a long explanation for it. The jailer is converted to Christianity and we see the results of his faith in three ways; his submission to baptism, his offer of medical aid to the prisoners, and hospitality to the prisoners in his own home. Those are two collisions that the gospel precipitated when it came to Europe, the psychological collision and the economic collision.

Now in Acts 16:35-40 we have the legal collision. This legal collision is very interesting from out point of view because right here in Texas, as we’ll see at the end of the service this morning, we have almost an analogous situation that has developed over the last four or five years in our state and it involved a legal collision involving the same principles that we see here in verses 35-40.

Acts 16:35, “And when it was day, the magistrates sent the serjeants, saying, Let those men go. [36] And the keeper of the prison told this saying to Paul, The magistrates have sent to let you go: now therefore depart, and go in peace. [37] But Paul said unto them, They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily? no verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us out. [38] And the serjeants told these words unto the magistrates: and they feared, when they heard that they were Romans. [39] And they came and besought them, and brought them out, and desired them to depart out of the city. [40] And they went out of the prison, and entered into the house of Lydia: and when they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and departed.”

Here we’ve got a model application of a legal confrontation between Christians and the unbelieving society. Let’s watch how it develops and why it develops. Verse 35, “when the day came, the magistrates sent the sergeants,” the magistrates are the praetors, the serjeants are the lictors. The lictors are the men who carried the fasces which was a bundle of rods with an axe in the middle of it. This is a symbol of Mussolini’s fascist party in World War II; it is the symbol of law and order; it is the symbol of corporal and capital punishment, the axe to chop people’s heads off, the rod to beat them. And this is an expression, in a way, of legitimate government power. And so wherever the praetor went he had his lictors. The lictors are the ones who beat Paul the day before and now they send them down to the jail. Obviously the civil authorities think that they have dealt with the problem. From their point of view it surely looks that way; they’ve removed the troublemakers, they stopped the mob, and now they want to get rid of the trouble-makers by running them out of town. Paul is not going to stand for this. So watch what happens.

He sends the lictors to the jail; see, the praetors are never there. But the praetors were there the day before. It was the praetor, not the lictors, that passed sentence; it was the praetors that were ultimately responsible for Paul’s imprisonment. And now we have the lictors who come and they give them a message, and the message, “Let the men go”. And the jailer amplifies the message at the end of verse 36, not just let the men go, but let the men go “in peace,” unlike our hymn, Like A River Glorious, this is not God’s peace; this is the peace of the kingdom of man. And this offer of the peace of the kingdom of man causes Paul to become angry very fast. Here’s why? We studied how the kingdom of man always operates with two presuppositions. These assumptions are continuous. Now they have been applied by Rome, France, Britain, Germany and America. To date, in our country the application of these two assumptions have not done Christians much harm, the reason being that fortunately for us the world hasn’t been consistent in its application of the principle. But these are the two principles that operated then, they operate today and now we’re finding ourselves as evangelicals increasingly with our backs against the wall due to these two principles.

The first principle is that the state is the source of rights, that the state grants rights, rather than recognizes rights. And there’s a world of difference between those two verbs, to grant a right and to recognize a right. As we said before, in the Second Amendment, where it says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That’s talking about a right that exists prior to government. Government doesn’t create the right, government only recognizes the right that was there before it was. But if, on the other hand, we say that the government grants the right to exist to something, or to someone, or to some organization, then we have made government the authority of all rights. And once the government is the authority and source of rights, the government can take away rights with complete impunity. It’s disaster to say that the government grants rights; never use that language. All the government can do is recognize rights; it does not create them, it does not grant them.

This may seem to some of you to be nitpicking, it may seem to be being facetious over English verbs. Not at all; one reads in English history of the Puritans and the whole concept of the Puritans was that the crown of England did not give them the right to exist; God gave them the right, Christ, not the king, gave them the right to exist. And so when King James, who very magnanimously sponsored the translation this translation of the Bible, when King James offered to give them freedom of conscience the Puritans rejected it. They said you don’t give us any conscience, we had it before you and we’ll have it after you. Needless to say, King James was not too pleased with that kind of response. But this is why the Puritans were such irritants in their day. They refused to permit the government to even grant them rights; they challenged that very language, and that’s what we have to challenge in our day. We will not accept anyone granting us rights. We accept only when they recognize God’s rights that we have before them. This was one of the two great assumptions that has worked in the west, like leaven, and now is working to engulf us, that the state grants rights and the state takes rights.

Another feature of this is that Christian is allowed to exist if it is for the bonum communitatis, Latin for “the good of the community.” As long as Christianity furthers the bonum communitatis it will be tolerated; the moment that Christian does not further the good of the community, we shall eliminate it. If, for example, Christian parents sending their children to private schools violates bonum communitatis, then we’ll do away with Christian schools. Christian schools are a hindrance to the bonum communitatis because Christian schools create divisiveness; it means that some children are going to be educated in one framework, other children will be educated in another framework and one unified democracy can’t tolerate voters from two different frameworks. So to make uniformity and a monolithic character to society we will eliminate all competing frameworks from the educational system. That’s the only way we can protect, it is said, the bonum communitatis. So under the plea for unified society, for unification of values, unification of desires, we have the elimination and destruction of the Christian faith.

In the first one, we see this time and time again, every time you see property being taken away from a person by the so-called doctrine of eminent domain, if they want to put a highway through your backyard, basically they can because the soil under your feet, regardless of how many members of your family have owned it, regardless of how many mineral rights you have, regardless of when your family accepted title to your property you do not ultimately own your property in this country; the government ultimately has claim on it. It has so by the claim of eminent domain. If the government wishes to put a highway through your yard it will do so, period. That is the essential residual power of government. Now that’s true, not often applied in our day so you don’t see it operate much but it is there, lurking like a wild animal in a cage and all someone needs to do is unlock the door to the cage and you’ll see it; it’ll spring forth so rapidly you can’t believe it. So these are the two wild animals that are caged inside the political system that now threaten the Christian church. They threatened it back here and that’s why Paul is now going to take his stand and why now there is going to be a legal collision.

The question ultimately goes back to God or man; God has a standard of righteousness and justice. Government, ran by man, is to be run underneath God so that properly speaking government is to take God’s righteousness and justice and reflect that through laws. The laws, in other words, are to think God’s thoughts after Him. They are to use God’s character and God’s revelation, God’s word as a reference point. But modern law does not do this. As some of our people have been working with the abortion issue recently, in 1973 Roe vs. Wade in the Supreme Court made it very clear that the unborn child has no rights whatsoever; the unborn child has no right, he’s not covered by the 14^th Amendment. An unborn child has less status in America than a black slave did before the Civil War. He is a non-person. Not only is he a non-person, he can’t even be represented in court. There have been cases in our country where the fathers of unborn children have gone to court to plead for the rights of their unborn child and they have been rejected from even standing in the court because the court does not recognize that the child is a legal entity and therefore legal nonentities can’t be represented.

This is how far paganism has come in our day and this means that any woman that gets pregnant, who is lazy and irresponsible, can have her child sucked out of her piece by piece, and then the doctors can collect the pieces and do their medical experiments on them. Like one HEW experiment where the head of the fetuses were cut off and kept alive in a test tube for 24 hours so they could do experiments on them. Or if the woman is longer in the term they can inject a salt solution, that way you burn the skin off the unborn child and he’s born a shriveled mass of human flesh. This is the result of American law at work. This is the result when man decides what the standards are. It’s very practical, you see, we’re not talking theory now, are we; we’re talking about bloody practice and it’s brought on by the abdication of absolutes in the area of law.

You have just seen the beginning. 1973 was the start; the next thing will be euthanasia. The Supreme Court has already said that the reason for unprotecting infants is because their life is not meaningful. Now extend the definition; here is your old grandmother who happens to be 85 years old; she’s crippled, she’s sick, and now the court says she no longer has meaningful life, let’s do away with her. And now we begin the second stage, euthanasia or mercy killing, put the non-meaningful people out of existence. You say it’ll never happen in America? Wait, it will happen within 10 years; 1973 was a clear cut beginning. Unless Christians articulate it, you will see mercy killings in mass. Hitler killed six million Jews, almost six million unborn babies have already been eliminated.

So don’t think of America as the prize example of a Christian nation. We, as Christians, have forsaken the insistence that God’s standards apply in this field. We’ve backed up, we’ve apologized, we’ve become spiritual doormats that every humanist that walks along can wipe his dirty feet on our face. And the result of our cowardice is that the humanist now are in control of every piece of major legislation; every conceivable theory of law is controlled by humanists and humanist thinking people; complete adjudication of the Christian. Now that’s our situation very practically right now. It’s brought on because man decided that man will originate laws himself; man is the source of rights, not God.

Now let’s watch how Paul handles himself in such a situation. It was nor foreign to Paul; Paul faced Roman paganism in all of its purity before Christianity even came into the field. This is the first time Christianity has impacted Rome; watch what the Apostle Paul does. Let’s use him as our model. In verse 36, after the serjeants come and they propose to him, let him go, the keeper of the prison, who by this time has become a Christian, he comes to Paul and he relays the message. He says, “the praetors have sent word, now therefore, Paul, go and go in peace.” It’s that last phrase that irritates Paul, “go in peace.” What kind of peace is this? Do I go in peace when these two principles operate, I go in peace when Caesar says that I give you the rights of freedom? Is that the kind of peace that we want? Notice Paul did not sit down in some sort of “SALT talks” to discuss how much rights he could give away, the right of self-defense, for example, to be negotiable. Paul does not believe that; Paul stands up for his rights and in this he is a model for what you ought to be doing as a Christian.

The keeper of the prison has made a mistake, the keeper of the prison has not just passed the word on, “go”, but he’s added that little phrase, “go in peace.” And Paul cannot let that stand, “go in peace,” means that he goes with number one, Rome’s arbitrary justice. He had no trial, he was a Roman citizen and should never have beaten in the first place, even though he were guilty of the crime, and they did it in public to embarrass the Christian faith, and he says I, go in peace, do I? Not on your life am I going to go in peace.

So Paul stops and makes a legal stand here; his legal stand can be seen to be motivated by two primary reasons, three reasons; one is an anti-reasons, the other two are positive reasons. First the negative reason; Paul is not seeking personal vindication at this point. Don’t confuse the spirit; this is not Paul violating Jesus’ standard to turn the other cheek. Now it looks that way but it isn’t. Paul is not saying I’m going to get those guys that put me in jail; that’s not Paul’s spirit at all. Paul follows Christ’s admonition to turn the other cheek in so far as him personally is concerned. Why do we say this? Simple. The Roman orator, Cicero, wrote that any Roman citizen should have stopped the lictors from beating him by crying out, civis romanus sum, “I am a Roman citizen,” and instantly the lictor would have to drop his rod on pain of capital punishment to himself. No lictor could apply a Roman rod to a Roman citizen. That was violation of a law passed in 136 BC. So Paul, we know, had within his power the right to stop his own beating and yet both he and Silas, who together are Roman citizens, when they were beaten on the day before, refused to cry out civis romanus sum. They refused that cry and that shows you, and is proof of the fact that they are not thinking of their own personal vindication by this lawsuit, or this legal stand. It’s for other reasons.

And what are the other reasons? The first of the positive reasons is the jailer himself. Had the jailer said okay, Paul, you’re free, we might not see Paul making this legal stand but when his young convert, just won to Christ, who knew little doctrine, had made this mistake, Paul, you’re free, “go in peace,” Paul knew that the jailer had to be taught a lesson, that the jailer had to be taught that as a member of the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire you must beware that you do not sell your soul to Caesar. Remember, Paul is going to say, there can be no ultimate harmony for peace between Christ and Caesar. The two are in unalterable conflict; there is no peace table, there is no “SALT” agreement between these two forces. They will always be in head-on collision. They have to be; how can you start with God and start with man; we’re back in the Garden of Eden, Eve decided she is going to decide whether or not God’s Word is true and God says My Word is true and you can either believe Me or distrust Me. We’re back to those principles. And you can’t get those principles together, they won’t fit together; they are two opposite principles. So for the sake and benefit of the jailer Paul is going to demonstrate the two different systems, the kingdom of man versus the kingdom of God. And there can be no compromise. The fourth divine institution is going to be the means Paul uses.

He’s going to teach, for a third reason, he’s going to teach that young congregation, in verse 40, that young congregation has just begun, the first congregation on European soil, they, like the jailer, must understand no compromise in ultimate principle between Christ and Caesar.

Now at this point Paul is going to make use of the fourth divine institution. He’s going to make legitimate use of the fourth divine institution. In days to come some of you are going to have to make use of the fourth divine institution and when that hour comes, don’t be embarrassed as a Christian to make full use of the fourth divine institution if you have to—government. God gave it to you to use, to use as much as any humanist uses it. The fourth divine institution may not be run by Bible-believing Christians but it is an invitation of God founded to maintain order.

This morning when we came to the 8:00 o’clock service there were four patrol cars outside the building because a man had tried to break into a storefront nearby and one of our off duty policeman saw it and they grabbed the guy and we had a gun confrontation and everything else out here. Now there is a good illustration of the Lubbock police force maintaining our freedom to worship, our freedom from physical violence. We’re not asking questions whether all those four patrolmen who responded this morning were born again Christians, that’s irrelevant; the issue is that they worked through the Lubbock police system to protect our property in a marvelous way and we thank God for them. Paul is going to use this fourth divine institution to bring pressure to bear upon itself.

Paul is not going to be like many Christians, who in their antinomian piety say well, I will let the Lord take care of this. Now sometimes you have to let the Lord take care of it. But other times, that’s blasphemy to say, when God has put the tools in your hands to do something and you say I’m going to let God do it. That is not an act of faith at that point, that’s cowardice at that point; that’s being an evangelical yellow-belly. And the woods are full of them, who are, in the name of piety, are afraid to make a confrontation, oh, if my name got in the newspaper what would people think. Probably a lot more of you than they now think.

So don’t be afraid to take a stand, if and when it is necessary for high principles; Paul here is showing us it is not to vindicate Paul, it is for the sake of the testimony for the jailer and for the sake of the testimony of that young congregation and he’s going to make his stand, and he does. And so he makes his stand in verse 37, he says to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily?” Bologna, we’re not going to permit that. You can see this little feisty Jew, Paul, let those praetors come down here and open my door, that’s what he said. If they want to come out here they’re going to talk to me, I’m a Roman citizen and I’m using my rights, and Paul was in full authority and blessing of God to use his citizenship rights at this point. Notice the contrast in the adverbs, deliberately set up here to show you something. Notice the word “openly,” notice the word “privately.” There’s the contrast. What is Paul making use of? He’s making use of the principle that when you have an incident like this, the correction of the incident must be equal to the number of people involved in the incident.

This you see again and again in Scripture. Take, for example, Matthew 18; you have a man and a wife at odds, that is an issue that concerns only the husband and the wife; it does not concern the children, it does not concern the in-laws, it does not concern the out-laws or anyone else. It concerns only them. But what happens; you go to a party, a wife makes some snotty remark about her husband, he makes some snotty remark about her and so after they’ve had about five or six social contacts now we’ve enlarged the sphere to include the Jones’ over here, and somebody else over here and now we’ve spread the dirt all over the place, see. And that’s the way a lot of people try to solve their problems, unscriptural. Matthew 18:15 says if you have something to say it to somebody else that’s directly involved privately, period. You don’t spread it all over the place and share it. That is wrong. However, whenever someone else spreads maligning, gossip, rumor, and so on and this goes all over the place, then it becomes an issue, that the solution has to be as big as the number of people involved in it and that’s the principle Paul’s saying. You guys embarrassed the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in front of the townspeople yesterday and I’m not going to let you solve the problem here in jail, buddy, because there were a thousand other people involved and those thousand other people are going to hear my side. And so here Paul stands up; if he was condemned publicly, then he will be freed publicly. It’s a simple application of the principle of responsibility.

But then there’s another principle that Paul’s using. Turn to Romans 2:14, the principle of conscience. Paul has the principle that this itself is going to maintain credibility. He wants that young church to evangelize the city of Philippi. He wants some sort of public demonstration about the credibility of the Word of God to the city of Philippi. How his he going to accomplish this? He’s going to accomplish it by letting that Word of God touch their God-consciousness. Now what’s in their God-consciousness. According to verses 14-15, “But when the Gentiles, who have not the Torah,” the law of Moses, “do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves. [15] Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness….” Now what was the work of the Law? Wasn’t the work of the Law to expose men’s sin, to make them aware of their moral responsibility before God? Sure enough.

So now why, why is Paul making a federal case, so to speak, of this jail business. He’s smart, he’s pulling an evangelistic tactic off. He’s going to expose men’s sin, he says see how arbitrary and autonomous you are? I walk into this town and you can’t get anything on me legally so you get something on me illegally; the sheer application of arbitrary naked state power, unguarded by any legislation. I want that clear in this community so next time you turn around and you brag about how law abiding you are, you’ll remember what you did to Paul and Silas when they came to town. So he’s using it in another way. He’s using it to help prepare their hearts for the gospel of Christ. You see, standing up for your rights can be an evangelistic plus if it’s done with the right spirit and the right attitude. Let someone get away with sheer naked arbitrary power and you’ve said I as a Christian condone that, God condones it. God looks the other way while you go ahead and persecute.

Now this is why we are, as Christians, I think obligated to support the Christians behind the iron curtain with all sorts of noises. If I could get my hands on the list of when the Soviet advisors come to Tech don’t you think there wouldn’t be a nice demonstration out at the airport. So far there’s a bunch of people in town who know I’m after the list and they won’t give it to me. But if I got it they’d be sorry because we’d have about 55 people out there to greet them at the airplane, reminding them what they have done to our brethren behind the iron curtain, because our brethren behind the iron curtain are rotting in cells while we sing our hymns in complete freedom here. And somehow we don’t have any sense of responsibility. Like one of our young men works at a bank downtown, was discussing the problem with one of the clerks in the bank who goes to one of our evangelical churches in town, mentioned the question of the poor people behind the iron curtain who are being arrested and the lady said well, isn’t that what Christians are supposed to do, get arrested? Real sensitivity, loving concern for the brethren. So it was this point that Paul stood up for; he wanted to press home God’s moral claims, so “the Gentiles who have not the law,” they understand and I’m going to rub it into their conscience right here at this point.

So let’s go back to Acts 16 and watch how he does it and watch its effect; it has exactly the effect Paul wants it to have, a very good teaching illustration. He tells the lictors… he goes and tells the jailer, you just go tell the lictors I’m a Roman citizen and if the praetor wants me out of here he can come open the door himself. So in Acts 16:38, “And the lictors told these words to the praetors; and they” that refers to the praetors, “the praetors began to fear, when they heard that they” Silas and Paul “were Romans.” And the reason they began to fear was because of the fear that they were now subject to Roman penalties for beating a Roman citizen. Paul had something on them.

Acts 16:39, the irony of the situation, within a day, on one day we have the spectacle of the representatives of Jesus Christ coming to Caesar and getting beaten by Caesar’s lieutenants, within 24 hours this is reversed, and now Caesar’s lieutenants come begging at the feet of the apostles, because that’s exactly what the verb is, “they came and they brought them, and they brought them out, and they kept begging,” imperfect tense, “kept begging them to depart from the city.” Now who’s in charge, Paul or the lictors? Christ or Caesar? Now the tables have been turned, haven’t they, and we see an opposite situation. Why? Because two Christian men were men and they stood up for their rights; they were not Christian doormats who let the humanists walk all over them.

And you’ll notice something else in verse 39 that’s most interesting; as they keep on begging them a deal is made. Now here’s apparently the nature of the deal; this would be kind of like plea bargaining today. The deal was Paul could have stayed. If Paul stayed that would mean that he would have to stand trial for the breaking of the law back the first day with the economic confrontation; that was a question of Roman law. And he would have had to have stood trial. But in this particular case had Paul stayed and gone on trial it would have meant that he couldn’t preach for many months because of the mechanics of the slow process of getting the thing to trial. So it would have wiped out his missionary strategy for the time.

Now on the other hand, from the other side of the bargaining table, the praetors had a problem; they had violated Roman law and they could be brought to trial. Paul could bring them to trial, we’d have two trials going. Now here’s something to watch, and this is why I say you’ve got to watch the spirit of the passage and the attitude. Paul is not seeking personal vengeance here—he is not seeking personal vengeance! We said first that’s true because the day before he could have said hey, I

[40] And they went out of the prison, and entered into the house of Lydia: and when they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and departed.”