Week 5, Day 5
Today’s Reading: Acts 25-26
Some thoughts from yesterday’s reading…
Occasionally when reading through the Bible, I come to an account where I would like to know the “rest of the story” (as Paul Harvey puts it). One such account comes in chapter 23 of Acts. There was a conspiracy to put Paul to death, and a group of about 40 men devised a plan to achieve this end. They decided that they were going to send for Paul, having the Roman authorities bring him down to the Jewish council so that they might question him further. However, they were going to lie in wait, and attack Paul on the way, and put him to death. They made the agreement among themselves that they would not eat nor drink anything until they had put Paul to death.
Of course, we discover by reading the rest of the chapter that they were unsuccessful in their plot because word got out and Paul’s nephew was able to warn Paul, as well as the Roman authorities about the plan. It was going to be quite a while before Paul would be put to death in Rome. So, I wonder what happened to these 40 men? Did they fulfill their vow, thus starving to death because they were unable to trap Paul and kill him? I doubt it! If these men were so unscrupulous as to make a vow like this in the first place, and attempt to put an innocent man to death, then I doubt that they endangered their own well being in the fulfillment of such a vow. But, it would be quite interesting to know what the outcome of this vow was!
Another thing of interest in this section of the book of Acts is to notice how the people involved with Paul rewrote history to try and make themselves appear better. For example, the commander changed the account of the arrest of Paul to make himself look better. In verse 27, he made the claim in his letter to Felix that he had swooped in and rescued Paul from the Jews, who were about to kill him. But, if we go back to the inspired account (and thus the accurate account) we see the truth. In chapter 21, verses 32-40, we see that Paul was indeed “rescued” by the commander, but it was not because he was a Roman. The commander did not even find out about Paul’s Roman citizenship until chapter 22:24-29, where he nearly had Paul beaten (which was illegal to do to a Roman citizen). He simply rewrote the history to make himself look much more favorable.
The same thing can be said about the Jews. The High Priest, Ananias along with one of the lawyers, Tertullus, came down to bring charges against Paul before the governor. They made the claim that Paul was a “plague” and a “creator of dissension among the Jews.” They also claimed that Paul had tried to defile the temple (presumably by trying to bring Gentiles into the area where they were prohibited). But, of course, none of this was true. Perhaps the argument could be made that Paul had caused dissension, but certainly not in the manner they tried to imply. He had certainly not tried to defile the temple! They had rewritten the history of the circumstance to fit what they wanted to believe, and what they needed to be true in order to accomplish their own desires. Watching the news today, we can certainly see that not much has changed over the last 2000 years! The trustworthy account is not what the characters changed the story to, but rather the inspired account of events, as told to us by Luke.
There are two good lessons that emerge from these observations. First, don’t make hasty vows. The first point we observed was that these men made the vow that they would not eat until they killed Paul. Obviously they had not taken into account that they might fail! We should learn that we ought not make vows that we don’t intend to keep. God expects us to keep that which we have vowed! (See Deuteronomy 23:21-23).
Secondly, we need to remember that we shouldn’t try to change history to be more favorable to us. If we change the facts of something, and then base an argument on our convolution of that history, we don’t do anything for ourselves. We show ourselves to be dishonest, and we build up some illusion that will fall when the truth is made known. This commander was going to be in trouble when the truth of his actions were made known. He would be punished by his Roman superiors. The Jews too would be in trouble when the truth was made known. If they failed to be honest, they would cause innocent men to suffer wrongfully. That was condemned in the Law, but it would also be punished by God when the final judgment came.
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