The High Priest Insulting Paul
“And Paxil, earnestly “beholding the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day. And the high priest Ananias commanded them that stood by him to smite him on the mouth.” — Acts xxhi. 1, 2.
“A FTEK we were gotten from them” (ch. xxi. 1) means Xjl after we had torn ourselves away. It was a tender meeting, and a painful parting. They all wept sore. They sorrowed to see the missionary going away, and sorrowed most to hear him saying that they should see his face no more.
Two thoughts, constituting a pair, suggest themselves here: (1.) Christians suffer as much as others from the necessary partings that occur in life, or rather they suffer more, for their faith increases their susceptibility. The affections run deeper and wax stronger in a nature that has been mellowed by faith. But (2.) Christians who live up to their privilege enjoy consolations correspondingly great. If their partings are painful, their hopes of meeting again are sure. The pain of temporary separation is overbalanced by the expectation of being soon and always together with the Lord. The loving hope absorbs the sadness as the fire licked up the water in the trench round Elijah’s altar, and a balance of blessedness remains.
The course of the voyage is noted briefly but clearly. First, the ship made a straight course to Coos, a small island, twenty-three miles long, divided from the mainland by a narrow channel. The ground is fertile and the traffic large. Next day they made the large island of Ehodes. Passing with a fair wind through the channel which divides it from the continent, they brought up in the harbour of Patara, the shipping port of the city Xanthus on the mainland.
From Patara the ship’s course no longer lay along the coast. She stands out to sea in a south-easterly direction, leaving Cyprus on the left, and steering for Tyre on the Syrian coast. At Tyre the ship discharges her cargo. As there must be a detention of several days here, the missionary will take advantage of it, and prosecute his own business. He goes ashore, and soon finds the Christians who reside in the port. Tyre is one of the most ancient and most celebrated of cities. It was a great seaport in Ezekiel’s time; and the course of events seems to point to it, or to some spot near it, as a great entrepot between Europe and India in the twentieth century.
Paul found the disciples that were in Tyre. Some were found in every city throughout those regions; and by the law that “like draws to like,” they soon found themselves congregated in one company to hear the apostle of the Gentiles. Here accordingly the traveller remained a week, as in Troas, preaching, no doubt, to a great assembly on the
Lord’s Day. That Sabbath would remain marked in the memory of Tyrian believers, even unto old age, as a well springing in the desert.
Although the brethren warned Paul, through the spirit of prophecy, of the dangers that awaited him in Jerusalem, he would not desist from his purpose of visiting it. He had repeatedly consented to retire from danger when his life would have been exposed without adequate cause; but he would not allow himself to be diverted from his course when he had a great object in view by any kind or degree of personal danger. Here accordingly occurs another tender separation. The whole assembly, including women and children, accompanied the missionary to the ship. They knelt together on the shore and prayed. There was a temple consecrated to the worship of God — its floor the sea-sand, its canopy the vault of heaven, its organ-peal the roaring of the waves as they broke upon the beach! There, though marked by no material cross, and circumscribed by no manmarked line — there is a spot of holy ground. How dreadful is that spot on the sea-shore near Tyre — how dreadful and yet how gladsome! It is the gate of heaven, through which the ardent spirits of those ancient Christians, led by the lips of Paul, went in to the throne of grace — by which the Lord who heard them came forth to be with them unseen, as fulfilment of his promise. Such holy places on the surface of this earth have all the disciples of the Lord, — the sacredness, however, adhering not to the ground, but to the memory of those who have met their Lord there.
Claudius Lysias, the Roman tribune commanding the garrison of Jerusalem, and in the absence of the governor responsible for the peace of the city, found it necessary to take Paul by force from the excited populace, and shut him up for safety in the Castle of Antonia. Uncertain still as to the nature of the charges which were so violently preferred against the eminent missionary, he gave orders that he should be examined by scourging; but as the men were binding his hands, Paul quietly asked the superintending centurion whether it were lawful to scourge a man that was a Roman and uncondemned. Again he appeals with success to imperial law for the preservation of his own life.
Next day, in order to get the matter cleared, Lysias summoned a meeting of the Jewish great council, and requested them to examine the prisoner. When the Sanhedrim was duly constituted in a hall attached to the Temple, Lysias conducted Paul from the castle and placed him at their bar. The tribune, no doubt, after all that he had seen, took the precaution of stationing a military guard near enough to prevent any attempt against the prisoner’s life.
As we enter here the last section of the history, it may be useful to pause and observe the difference in character and design between it and all the preceding portions. At this point the scope of the history becomes narrower. It is now the track of Paul alone. All other actors disappear from the scene, except in as far as they were mixed up with his experience. Nor is it only that the history concerns itself henceforth with the course of this single missionary; for even with regard to him the character of the narrative undergoes a change. Although he maintains his character as a witness for Christ to the last, the history is no longer a record of missionary journeys to found churches, and to revisit them for comfort and consolidation. The main line now is a memorial of Divine Providence, preserving the missionary’s life until he should be in a position to preach the gospel in Rome as he had already preached it in Jerusalem. Precious in God’s sight is the death of his saints, and precious also in his sight is their life. He will lay all the powers of nature and all the kingdoms of the earth under requisition to protect a life that he needs as an instrument in his work of righteousness until his work be done. Paul must witness for Christ at the centre of the world’s power; this is fixed as the end, and the means are all provided. The remaining portion of the book is the record of these provisions.
Henceforth our theme therefore must be the arrangements of Providence for the spread and establishment of the kingdom of grace. Our business now is, to see God’s hand working rather than to hear his word instructing; but to the open and watchful ear, the still small voice of the gospel will ever and anon break forth in the intervals of the earthquake and the thunder. He that hath an ear may still hear, in the concluding portion of Paul’s history, “what the Spirit saith unto the churches.”
The history of apostolic missions is finished; but before the parchment is rolled up, the line of one life is carried a few stages farther forward into the centuries, by way of specimen, that we may see how the Lord fulfilled his promise, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” We learn here how the Lord reigneth; how he sits King upon the floods; how he stills the waves and the tumults of the people; how he makes effectual his own command, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm. When we see the waves rising, we cry, like Peter, in despair, as if all were lost. In this portion of the history the Lord addresses us with mingled reproof and encouragement — “0 thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”
The Sanhedrim had assembled; Paul was led in. As soon as he entered it is intimated that he eyed the assembly — “earnestly beholding the council.” There is much power in a human eye. If there be courage in the heart, it finds expressive outlet by the eye. Cowards cannot stand erect under a brave man’s look. Lions, it is said, wince under a man’s steadfast gaze more than under the lash which he inflicts. The eye is both a channel of emotion and an instrument of power. In this case a good conscience and a strong faith added power to the look with which the solitary missionary met the gaze of the assembly, and made the priestly judges cower under the eye of the panel at their bar. Paul did not wait till a question should be put or a charge preferred. He is not, properly speaking, on his trial before the Sanhedrim. He is sent by the Roman authorities to the native Jewish council in order to obtain a skilled and competent investigation of his case. The court are charged, not to try a criminal, but to investigate facts for the guidance of the governor. Such seems to have been Paul’s own view of the situation, for he is himself the first to speak. With a salutation entirely friendly, but by no means cringing, he began to lay before the council a narrative of the steps that led to the present complications.
I think Paul had an intelligent object in view when he addressed the members of the council respectfully but manfully as “brother men.” He is by this time such an one as Paul the aged. He saw on these benches many who had been his fellow- students, and some, no doubt, who had been both his juniors and his inferiors when they sat together at Gamaliel’s feet. He had done nothing to forfeit his position as their colleague and equal. He had honoured the law in confessing Christ its fulfilment. He will not, by word or deed, relinquish his position. “My brothers,” says the intrepid preacher, as he opens his address. In one aspect the salutation is kind; in another, it carefully maintains his dignity and his rights. He humbles himself before God, but he will not humiliate himself before men.
As soon as Paul had uttered the first sentence of his speech, the high priest Ananias interrupted him by abruptly giving an order to the officers of the court to smite him on the mouth. This is a very remarkable statement. It reveals a condition of extreme corruption and degradation in Jewish society. Their chief magistrate, on his seat of authority, surrounded by his council, perpetrates an act of ruffian rudeness fit only for the lowest haunts. In rejecting the Messiah the Jewish hierarchy have sunk into a low moral tone. They seem to have been given over to a reprobate mind.
We obtain here a glimpse of a general law. When a chief sinner accepts Christ in simple faith, there is an immediate and great elevation of the moral sense in the converted man. In more than one aspect he becomes a new creature. But the converse also holds good. When Christ is brought near to any mind, and his claim touches the conscience, and the man, self-pleasing, ultimately rejects the offered Christ, the last state of such a rejecter is worse than the first. Those who waste privileges and quench convictions seem to sink lower than those who have never enjoyed them. Beware of stifling convictions — of crucifying Christ.