This is a study on the first half of Acts 14, in which we explore various responses to the message of Christ. Paul and Barnabas have two very different experiences in two nearby cities, each demonstrating a sort of iconic response to the gospel message.
We’ll start at verse 1.
Anger
Acts 14:1 Now at Iconium they entered together into the Jewish synagogue and spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed. 2 But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers.
Paul and Barnabas gave the gospel in Iconium. They sought out the Jews first as was Paul’s custom (Acts 17:2), and related to his statement in Romans 1:16 that the gospel comes to the Jews first. It is relevant that Paul preaches Christ in a public forum, nothing like we are accustomed to in the modern world. When seeking out those that are not believers he did not cast his net narrowly to people he had met through the ordinary course of life, but spoke publicly in a way such as to entice anyone who was interested in listening.
I suspect the Greeks in this passage are like the Hellenistic Jews in the earlier chapters of Acts, simply because it appears they were converted through listening to Paul in the synagogue.
It is also clear that Paul is not simply declaring truth that is known to him only through his vision, but that he is speaking in terms of the writings of the Old Testament to “prove that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 9:22). This converts those who have some familiarity with the teachings of God more-so than those who do not.
However, they do not do so without establishing enemies. The unbelieving Jews are those who have hardened their heart against God:
Psalm 95:7b Today, if only you would hear his voice,
8 “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’”
The plain condemnation that Christ has against the Jews of that day, particularly the ones in authority, is that they have long denied the attempts of God to get their attention; then, when Christ came with unprecedented miracles to validate His right to speak on God’s behalf, they rejected even Him.
Ironically, even after Israel’s widespread rejection of Christ, He still spoke to them first. The church, up until Acts 10, is entirely Jewish in character. However, those that did not wish to believe set themselves against Christ.
John 5:46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
The problem with the Pharisees, and the Jewish leaders of the time was not that they were faithful to the Old Testament, but couldn’t understand Christ and the Christian mission in that context. The problem is that they NEVER understood God’s grace and his benevolence toward Him. Their lack of faithfulness to His word is what guaranteed their failure to understand Christ (Rom 1:22).
King Messiah
The picture of Christ in the New Testament is of a King who is destined to rule over everything there is and restore it. To those who were comfortable in the current reign of things, regardless of whether this is what God wants, it is a threat. It does not guarantee their position in the new Order. An evil tyrant whom you can manipulate is often better than a principled ruler whom you cannot, particularly if your power is primarily about the influence you can wield.
The Pharisees and Jewish leaders loved their pride of position (Luk 11:43) and did not want to see their influence diluted. In theory they might wish for a Messiah to conquer Rome, but only if he was going to inaugurate a kingdom in which they would be rewarded for their faithfulness.
When Christ comes and says that he would exalt the poor. In Luke 6:20 he says that it is the poor that owns the Kingdom of God. And whether there was any doubt that this was meant as a rebuke against these very same Pharisees he says in Luke 6:26:
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
It may seem nice that everyone thinks you’re a stand-up guy, but Christ says that this is a precarious situation at best. If you are not ruffling feathers, you are probably not authentically representing God. This is one of the many passages in the Scriptures that appears to teach that we should not be overly concerned with what the world thinks of us. In fact, it sometimes appears that it’s problematic if you are well-regarded by the ungodly.
Acts 14:3 So they remained for a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, who bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands. 4 But the people of the city were divided; some sided with the Jews and some with the apostles. 5 When an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to mistreat them and to stone them, 6 they learned of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding country, 7 and there they continued to preach the gospel.
Despite their work and the miraculous signs that accompanied it, they were run out of the city, with the inhabitants of Iconium desiring to stone them.
The lesson here is that the gospel is offensive. It is offensive to different people for different reasons, as Paul says “foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews” (1 Cor 1:23). Paul points out several times that if he were trying to please people around him he wouldn’t be following God or preaching the gospel (Gal 1:10, 5:11, Phil 3).
This is not dissimilar to what happened to the prophets throughout the Old Testament, and what happened to Christ himself during his ministry. The message of God’s redemptive work is a threat to the powers and principalities of this world (Eph 6:12) and is the target of Christian work.
The Gospel Message
This makes us consider then what the message Paul spoke actually was. When Paul was at Iconium, he was saying “something”. But it is not specifically described for us here. We can presume it is similar to the message preached in Acts 13. I wish I had space to read the entire passage here, but I cannot possibly explain it all in detail.
The core features are this.
Acts 13:23 Of this man's offspring God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as he promised…
32 And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, 33 this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm,
“‘You are my Son,
today I have begotten you…’38 Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, 39 and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.
40 Beware, therefore, lest what is said in the Prophets should come about:
41 “‘Look, you scoffers,
be astounded and perish;
for I am doing a work in your days,
a work that you will not believe, even if one tells it to you.’”
This was the gospel preached to them who were at Iconium. The Messiah of Israel, the one who would carry Israel to glory and inheritance of the world (Romans 4:13) was Jesus. This was proven and fundamentally accomplished by Christ’s resurrection from the dead, as the firstborn from among the dead (Col 1:18).
This now means that the way to God is opened, as described in Hebrews 10:
Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
So then the forgiveness of sins is also accomplished, so that anyone who believes is freed from the guilt of sin.
The wonder then would be, who in their right mind would be offended by this message? Why would anyone desire to stone Paul for the message of forgiveness of sins?
Because as that is good news, it is not all of the good news. The rest of it is that Christ is resurrected, and that he is now King of Kings. This is why in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the “gospel” is almost always “the gospel of the Kingdom”. It is not simply the forgiveness of sins that is offensive but the declaration that the Kingdom of God is at hand. This means that the powers of this world are in retreat. As it says in James, “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (Jas 4:7).
If you’ve seen the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie you know what this is all about. At the moment of the Witch’s seeming final victory Aslan returns from the dead and brings back to life all of the Witch’s foes. As he advances, the dead are brought to life to join the fight against the Witch and her power and army crumbles before his advance.
For those who believed, mentioned in verse 1, this is a fantastic message, that Christ has come as the King, that all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to Him, (Matt 28:18) and that by believing we are taken out of our slavery to the kingdom of darkness and are now citizens of Christ’s kingdom (Col 1:13), which is coming, so that his will is done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10). This work culminates in the final Resurrection, in which we are raised bodily from the dead in the New Heavens and New Earth and reign eternally with Christ. This is the promise of Christianity, not that we will “go to heaven when we die” but that heaven will come here and we shall live! (Rev 20-21).
For those that did not, in verse 2, this is a dangerous message. A king other than Caesar? These men had declared that they had no king but Caesar! (John 19:15)
That’s the fundamental sin throughout the Old Testament and the sin of the Pharisees. They made peace with the world’s powers and made themselves enemies of God (Jas 4:4). They were idolators, preferring the worship of that which is not God, to the worship of God. They put a pretty front on their disbelief with clothing and public prayers and rituals, but their hearts were far from God. This is no different from the condemnations that the prophets made toward the Jews in the Old Testament. This is what they killed the prophets over. This is what Christ condemned the Pharisees for in Matt 23:
Matt 23:29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, 30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. 33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? 34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, 35 so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
Now this is an offensive message. That they are hypocrites and cut from the same cloth as those that murdered the prophets? That they are participants in an even greater sin than the Old Testament Jews had been? That the church whom they were persecuting are the prophets and wise men sent by God Himself, the Messiah, Christ the King? Ironically, their angry response in trying to kill Paul and Barnabas is the fulfillment of the prophecy Christ made in verse 34 of the above.
The reason that these men were driven to murder and rage against Paul and Barnabas is that they dared to proclaim a new King, one who demanded their loyalty and threatened their worldly positions. If you have become rich and satisfied in the kingdom of evil, it’s not good news that that kingdom is coming to an end.
Syncretism
Acts 14:8 Now at Lystra there was a man sitting who could not use his feet. He was crippled from birth and had never walked. 9 He listened to Paul speaking. And Paul, looking intently at him and seeing that he had faith to be made well, 10 said in a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet.” And he sprang up and began walking. 11 And when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” 12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 And the priest of Zeus, whose temple was at the entrance to the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds.
And here is a very different response to the message of the gospel. Here instead of listening to the message itself, they see merely the outward action of the message. And rather than crediting the Living God with the miraculous, they credit Paul and Barnabas, thinking that they are gods. Whereas in Iconium, the people rejected Christ entirely, in Lystra they just figure out how to fit God into their comfortable worldview.
They believe in the gods and that the gods can take human form, so here is the perfectly reasonable explanation for Paul and Barnabas and the miraculous events that they witness. You see this sort of response often in our culture, as we hear about psychological explanations of a person’s conversion experience. You can hear things like “the power of positive thinking” as if belief itself had a magical quality to transform lives.
As a former atheist I can tell you that atheism is intellectually bankrupt. If you are an atheist and you have not realized this, I can only tell you to start reading more and really critically reflecting on what you’ve been told. You’ll quickly find many shadowy corners in the worldview that are dismissed with waves of the hands.
Given that, there is a desperate desire to find so-called “scientific” explanations of the supernatural action of God in history. This is where you get so-called higher criticism to question the origin of the Scriptures, “the search for the historical Jesus” and other such nonsense. You don’t realize just how thin these viewpoints are until you start to really engage them. They are all fluff and no substance.
Reza Aslan, for example, is a popularizer of the “historical Jesus” narrative. He says in his book Zealot, on this particular subject:
“The more I probed the Bible, the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history”
On the other hand he points out:
“Outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently alter the course of human history.”
This is in the introduction to his book and just makes him look stupid, frankly. So he wrote an entire book about how different the “Jesus of history” was from the “Jesus of the gospels”, while also pointing out that there’s basically nothing for him to go on except the Bible. If there’s nothing there, how did you come up with this compelling alternative take on Christ? How did you come to such a firm conclusion that the Jesus of history was different if you couldn’t find any other sources to go on?
What this looks like instead is a desperate desire to fit Christ into a worldview that validates what he already wants to think. This is common among modern scholars who want to see a socialist Jesus, or a self-help Jesus, or a libertarian Jesus, or a “good teacher” Jesus.
They want everything except for a Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords who shall reign forever and ever (Rev 17:14, Rev 11:15). Really they just want a God that fits easily into what they already believe.
Acts 14:14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their garments and rushed out into the crowd, crying out, 15 “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. 16 In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. 17 Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” 18 Even with these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them.
Paul and Barnabas are scandalized by this response, telling them that instead of worshiping their idols and the natural forces of this world, they should give their worship to the Lord God of All Creation.
Instead of merely letting them believe what they want about God, they try to show that God is the true God, above all the gods they have created for themselves. In the modern world we have a tendency to do the same. We do not want Christ’s solution to the problems of this world, we want our own solutions to be validated by Christ. We like some aspects of his message but not others. We might like to hear about forgiveness, but we do not want to hear about judgment. We like the love; we don’t like the submission. We like freedom; we do not like self-control.
Even when confronted by the truth about God, they still wish to keep to their preconceived notions. This is a perennial temptation for every society that is confronted by the redemptive work of Christ. We carry with us the baggage from our cultures’ belief systems. In America, we have an especially difficult problem because while our culture is very secular, it grew out of a Christian culture.
A Christian Heresy
This touches on something that is important for us to understand if we are going to see Christ’s work redeem our own community, transform our own minds and help us to cultivate the mind of Christ. The culture around us grew out of a Christian culture and shares much of the same language and some of the same assumptions as Christianity. However, the language means something different, and the assumptions have been twisted and warped. We have turned away from God’s vision for our lives and our community in many ways. Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees is equally applicable to our culture:
Mark 7:7 …they teach as doctrine the precepts of men.’
8 You have disregarded the commandment of God to keep the tradition of men.”
9 He went on to say, “You neatly set aside the command of God to maintain your own tradition.
Like the Pharisees false religion, our culture’s false religion is not based on nothing, it grew from a failure to guard the rails of Christian doctrine. The fundamental false teaching that led to all of this was the belief that there are aspects of life that are disconnected from religion. By attempting to “secularize” parts of life and community, we simply left the door open for a false religion to take root. Because this false religion does not require belief in a “God” as such, we can be fooled into believing that it is not a religion. But make no mistake. All human practices stem from a religious viewpoint.
A religion is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, the standards of morality and what is important about life here on Earth. Our secular religion has borrowed much of their presuppositions from Christianity, but in divorcing it from God, it was inevitable that major errors would start to develop.
It is not the time or place to go into each bit of the history of this religion’s development, but in essence it is the modern continuation of the “social gospel” movement, the elevation of a person’s material needs above their spiritual needs. This is tied together with the belief that humans are fundamentally good and that “following your heart” is the most important thing you can do.
This did not come out of nowhere. Since the Second Great Awakening, the idea that the Holy Spirit would communicate what you should do in some way more direct than the application of Scripture took hold. The problem there is that people began to elevate this “direct experience” of the Spirit to provide an alternate source of authority to Scripture. The idea that a “leading” of the Spirit is authoritative is nothing more than an elevation of our own personal wants and desires above the authority of Scripture. No longer is it what God says is important in his Word, but what I feel like that decides my actions.
This has been taken and run with in modern secular religion. Follow your heart, seek out your inner child, etc.
These are not ideas found in the Bible. The practice of reading the Bible back into these modern so-called “scientific” views of the world is exactly how this heresy got started. But because they often speak our language and because there is noticeable overlap in ideals and many surface similarities in our priorities, we, as Christians are especially vulnerable to being drawn into these heretical viewpoints.
That is why Christ reserved his harshest words for false teachers. A person who purports to stand up and declare good and evil apart from the authority of Scripture is a false teacher and we must not be led astray.
These Greeks were eager to fit Christ into their worldview. Those of us raised in this culture might be eager to try and make the Bible fit our preferred ideology. Rather than finding the feminism, the moralism, the socialism, the environmentalism, or the libertarianism in Scripture, we should set aside these denominations of our modern heresy and find out what truth the Bible has to say about each of these things. As Paul declared to the Greeks, some of what we already know is a gift from God in order to lead us to Him.
We reject modern feminism, but we agree with Scripture that “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). We reject moralism but we agree with Scripture that “what matters is following the commands of God” (1 Cor 7:19). We reject socialism but we agree with Scripture that “true religion is to take care of widows and orphans” (Jas 1:27). We reject environmentalism, but we agree with scripture that we were created “to care for [the Earth] and to maintain it” (Gen 2:15). We reject libertarianism, but we agree that “it was for freedom that Christ set us free” (Gal 5:1).
All of these were Biblical ideas before they were secular ideas. The heresy was in elevating their importance above the teachings of the Bible. When these things became absolutes, they began to reject other parts of Scripture that seemed to be in opposition to them. Instead of being swayed by what our culture wants us to believe about these things, we should instead seek out what God teaches on the subjects, and allow our minds to be transformed by a careful study of the Word of God. (Rom 12:2)
I will also state that the teachings of a church can become their own version of syncretism. We are not immune simply because we all have Bibles in our houses. If we spend more time concerning ourselves with what the church teaches than what the Bible says we are in serious danger. When that happens, if the church starts to drift from the Word, we will drift right along with it, rather than serving the church by speaking truth and guiding the community back into alignment with God. Being an active member of your local church does not immunitize you from heretical beliefs.
The Proverbs start with several chapters on rejecting adultery. As students of the Old Testament know, adultery is precisely how God sees one of his people that turns away from the purity of Scripture to false teachings in the surrounding cultures. This is also called idolatry. With that in mind, we can learn from this passage in Proverbs, warning us:
Proverbs 6:23 For the commandment is a lamp and the teaching a light,
and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life,
24 to preserve you from the evil woman,
from the smooth tongue of the adulteress…
27 Can a man carry fire next to his chest
and his clothes not be burned?
28 Or can one walk on hot coals
and his feet not be scorched?
29 So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife;
none who touches her will go unpunished…
Thus is God’s warning to those who turn aside from his Word to the false teachings of our culture. As the Psalmist said: “those who worship idols become like them, blind, deaf and mute” (Psa 135:16-18).
Concluding Remarks
So we see in this passage two inadequate responses to the gospel of God. In the first place, we can see hostility from those who are threatened by the authority of Christ over their lives. They wish to hang on to the pleasantries of false religion and hate anyone who declares that Christ has come to overturn those things. Thus, as Christ predicted, they will persecute the messengers of His truth. (Luk 10:16)
The second is the syncretistic response. In this case the people are excited to hear the message of Christ, but want to conform it to what they already believe. They borrow ideas from the Bible to support the way they see the world, rather than letting the Word transform their hearts and minds. This makes us not truly following God at all, but merely simulating being Christians. This was the practice, common even in the First Century of having an “appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Tim 3:5).
We should remember that our culture is one whose official religion is a Christian heresy. While it may seem similar to the Bible in some ways, the similarity is more apparent than actual. The Biblical ideas have been altered to a point where they no longer reflect God’s Word in the way they are understood.
The failure of the church to guard the Word’s authority and to try and “contextualize”, which has meant in practice to “capitulate” has left the church in a shambles. Churches are hemorrhaging members at a historic pace, churches are getting drawn into aligning themselves with secularist organizations, seeking political solutions to spiritual problems. Our people are drawn away into the secularist heresy. Make no mistake, we can never make up in evangelism what we lose in one of our brothers or one of our children going astray into the world’s system.
In my opinion the most important thing the church should be doing right now is educating our people on how to apply the Bible to every area of life, so that they are not taken astray by a culture that has no solutions and no answers to offer, but only death and decay. When we isolate Christian doctrine to merely “how to be saved”, it leaves the practical areas of life ready to be filled in by heretical belief systems. Rather, in everything we do, we should do it for the glory of God (Col 3:17). In this way, the Word can transform our hearts and minds (Rom 12:2).
If you are not a Christian, then there is one and only one message for you. The King has come, and to the increase of His government there shall be no end (Isa 9:7). As the Christmas Carol reminds us, “Joy to the world, the Savior reigns”. He calls you to join his Kingdom, and give up your citizenship in this sick and dying world, and be transferred into the Kingdom that is coming from heaven. When this citizenship is changed, we can know that we will be part of the Resurrection and restoration of all things, and reign with Christ in the New Heavens and New Earth (Phil 3:20-21). The victory was declared on the cross (Psa 22:31, Jn 19:30). We will see it, and it behooves you to “repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19).
Do not allow your love for a dying Kingdom to make you hostile to the one who has come. He has paid for your sins. You have an opportunity to leave the kingdom of death and join the kingdom of his glorious light. He calls you now to repent and be saved (1 Thes 5:24). Turn to him in your heart and you will find peace in his embrace (John 14:27).
Questions for Discussion
The song Hallelujah contains the following lyric, a quote from Revelation: “The Kingdom of this World, is become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”: Who or what might be threatened if this is true?
Why do you think it matters that we believe in a bodily Resurrection rather than simply a spiritual “going to heaven”?
In which teachings of our surrounding culture do you see similarities to Christian doctrine and how do they differ from what the Bible says?