St. Paul Deserted
Tuis thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me; of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes. A.V.
Thou knowest this, that all those in Asia turned away from me; among whom are Phygelus and Hermogenes, Wuo Phygelus! and Hermogenes were we do not 2 Tim. i. know. No other mention of either occurs in Scripture I5. or in any early trustworthy quarter outside its pages; Phygelus we can only suppose that they were men so well Hesnievenes known as adherents of St. Paul that their defection was particularly noticeable and painful. I may remark by the way that this quite passing allusion to individuals by name, without any assignable reference to things or persons otherwise known, is altogether unlike a fabricator’s methods; it is a true token of the authenticity of the Epistle. But these two men were only chief examples of a host of people, all alike in this, that they lived in Asia and that they had deserted St. Paul in his evil hour. ‘Asia’ is a word which has curiously changed Asia and St. its reference in the course of ages, till it now denotes eet that vast region of the globe of which ‘ Asia Minor’ is but a district, while the whole embraces Arabia, Persia, India, China, and enormous tracts beside. Under the Roman system ‘Asia’ was smaller than
1 We should spell the name thus, not Phygellus.
2. im; 1, 15. even Asia Minor; it was a narrow province, including only Lydia, Mysia, Caria and Phrygia. And good reason can be given for thinking that with St. Paul here it meant a district narrower still, the country of Lydia only, precisely the region in which stood the ‘seven churches in Asia’ of the Revelation of St. John. Its capital was the mighty Ephesus where St. Paul (Acts xx. 31) had spent three complete years at the height of his activity, working in the city and from it as a centre, till St. Luke could say (Acts xix. 10) that ‘all they that were in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks,’ and Demetrius the silversmith could complain (2bid. 26) that ‘almost throughout all Asia this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods which are made with hands.’ Among his ‘friends’ there and then (ibzd. 31) were ‘certain of the chief of Asia,’ or more properly ‘certain of the Asiarchs,’ a recognized body of magnates, known to us from other sources as an institution of Asian public life. Altogether, looking back over only a few years, some six or seven before this date, we find St. Paul a very powerful personal influence indeed in the whole region in question, from Ephesus and the coast-country up to Colosse, the little town far inland in the glen of the river Lycus. As we read the quiet narrative of the Acts we may easily fail to realize how great, how phenomenal, his position was, such a position that the pagan life of the country was probably affected by it visibly, so that the temples of the Gods were manifestly less frequented and their sacrifices and revenues sensibly reduced. The man
St. Paul Deserted
who in his unconverted days seemed just about to 2 Tim. i. prove the national hero of Israel was apparently now 15- about to prove in heathen Lydia a public religious
force upon a national scale.
Think then of the tremendous reversal indicated The in these few words of the dying Letter, ‘All those Desertion. in Asia turned away from me.’ He refers evidently to the dreadful crisis when, somewhere in or very near that district, he was seized for transportation to Rome. The deed was done in the midst of the very population which he had lately swayed with such power for Christ; would there not be a strong popular movement to rescue him, or at least would not the people cheer him with open sympathy, and send him away to his trial with the assurance of a general regard of love and honour? Alas, no; ‘all those in Asia turned away from him.’ It was worth no one’s while to be seen in connexion with him now. He was the suspected and dreaded victim of the alarmed State, the defeated leader of a hated and mysterious movement, now encountered by a reign of terror. Nobody stood up for him; he was left alone.
That surely was one of the bitterest hours of the The Pain Apostle’s life of sorrows. His heart was perfectly pesene human; this dying Letter is ample evidence to that effect. He felt, at least as much as we should feel, the complex woe of a time when an irresistible tyranny seized him and at the same time a host of former admirers and followers simply washed their hands of him. Only that MasTER who had so fully tasted the same experience, when the tumultuous Hosannas had passed, within a few brief days, into the fierce call to ‘ crucify Him,’ could quite enter into that grief. But He could do so, and He did. And meanwhile His heart-stricken servant ‘knew Him whom he had trusted,’ and therefore was at rest about it all. Had he merely followed his own emotions, or his own calculations, till they ended in such a collapse, he must have failed under the stress of this tremendous apostasy, the ‘turning away from him’ of a whole country full of ‘almost Christians.’ But he had followed Jesus, and he was sure of Him. His weariness leaned against the Rock of Ages, and so it became strength, even when his heart was pierced by the cruel coldness and disloyalty of the very men for whom he had spent his soul. He only paused a moment, as we shall see, to breathe a prayer of love for some of ‘those in Asia’ and to bid Timothy be stronger than ever in the Lord.
For the Lord Jesus Christ is anodyne as well as power to the man who trusts Him altogether.