Acts 22:1-29 - Baptism T-Shirts and Illegal Beatings

Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

It is great to be back with you on Tabernacle Talk. Today, we are in Acts 22. Yesterday, we joined the Apostle Paul as he went into Jerusalem, and he got captured.

He was accused of having brought some of his Greek fellow Christians into the temple, which was a big no-no in first century Judaism. You could not bring Gentiles into the temple itself, at least not into those inner courts.

And so a mob rushed on him. A Roman guard came, and as they approached Paul, they stopped beating Paul. And the Romans took Paul because there was such a crazy riot and crowd that was surrounding him.

They were going to bring him up to kind of this central tower, and Paul couldn't even go up the stairs because he had been beaten so badly and because there was such a mob of people.

And so as they bring him up, Paul goes, hey, I want to talk to them. And he says it to the Roman commander. I did this exact same thing yesterday.

The commander of the regiment of that Roman guard, he says it to him in Greek. He goes, whoa, you speak Greek? Aren't you the Egyptian guy who took away 4000 of the assassins into the wilderness?

And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm a Roman citizen. I'm a Jewish person.

I'm from the city of Tarsus in Cilicia. And he says, like, just let me talk to him. I got this.

So he gives him permission. Verse 40 of Acts 21. After he had given permission, Paul stood on the steps and motioned with his hand to the people.

When there was a great hush, he addressed them in Aramaic. So this would be kind of the common language that was used in that region. It wasn't the trade language.

Like wherever you went in the Roman Empire, you could speak Greek. And most of the time, people knew that language. It was what you did commerce in.

A lot of times what you wrote letters in. Kind of everyone spoke that because Greece had been such a giant world power for the past good amount of time. Aramaic here, though, is for this particular region of the world.

Very closely related to Hebrew in a lot of ways. And so Paul addresses them in Aramaic. This is letting them know, OK, I'm one of you.

He says this in Acts 22 in verse one, brothers and fathers. Notice here, he says this very particularly. This would have been the group of people that would have been upset that he would have brought in a Gentile.

As I mentioned yesterday, women weren't allowed into those inner courts either. So he says, brothers and fathers, just the guys, listen now to my defense before you. When they heard that he was addressing them in Aramaic, that became even quieter.

He continued, I am a Jew born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel, according to the law of our ancestors. We met Gamaliel many a couple of weeks ago. Now he was the one that told the Sanhedrin.

He was like, hey, I know we've captured Peter and John, but if they're on God's part, nothing we do can stop them and we don't want to fight against God. But if what they're doing is just human, it'll come to nothing. So we don't have to attack them.

Was what he said. So that was Gamaliel. Paul says, I trained under Gamaliel.

He says, I was zealous for God just as all of you are today. I persecuted this way to the death. So that's Christianity, the way I persecuted this way to the death, arresting and putting both men and women in jail.

That's how severe what he was doing was. It wasn't just like, hey, the men. But here, even those that were viewed as lesser people, like lesser citizens, not as deserving, couldn't go into the inner courts.

He says, I even went after the women and threw them in jail as both the high priest and the whole council of elders can testify about me.

After I received letters from them to the brothers, I traveled to Damascus to arrest those who were there and bring them to Jerusalem to be punished.

As I was traveling and approaching Damascus, about noon, an intense light from heaven suddenly flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? I answered, who are you?

Lord, it's the voice from heaven. You know, it's safe to assume it is the Lord. And here in verse number eight, he said to me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, the one you were persecuting.

Now, those who are with me saw the light, but they did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. That is, they could hear a voice, but they couldn't hear what the voice was saying.

Kind of a Charlie Browns teacher, where Charlie Brown can hear the words that are being said, but we can't. Kind of, that's the thought I have in my head, is kind of the type of thing that's happening here.

Verse number 10, I said, what should I do, Lord? The Lord told me, get up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told everything that you have been assigned to do. Do you know that when you're saved, God has an assignment for you?

He has a goal, a mission for you to accomplish. And while it might not be the exact same goal as the Apostle Paul, all of our goals is that same mission that Christ gave his Apostles at his ascension. Matthew 28.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even till the end of the age.

That's our mission, just like it was for Paul. For Paul, it was, Hey, I want you to start these churches and all of these places, and I want you to speak before kings, as we'll see in the upcoming chapters. And he had an assignment.

You have an assignment from God. And if you're still here, there's still work to do in your assignment. Verse number 11.

Since I couldn't see because of the brightness of the light, I was led by the hand of those who were with me and went into Damascus.

Someone named Ananias, a devout man, according to the law, who had a good reputation with all the Jews living there, came and stood by me and said, Brother Saul, regain your sight. And in that very hour, I looked up and saw him.

And he said, the God of our ancestors has appointed you to know his will, to see the righteous one and hear the words from his mouth, since you will be a witness for him to all people of what you have seen and heard. And now, why are you delaying?

Get up and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name. Here, baptism is always that public confession of faith in Christ.

So, this would be why we wouldn't believe in infant baptism or the baptism of entire families, but instead the baptism of only those that have personally confessed faith in Christ, because it is only those people who then by their public confession,

they are saying, this picture is what happened on the inside. I'm actually wearing a baptism shirt from the company Sunday Cool. It's got 2 Corinthians 5, 17 on it. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature.

The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come. And it's got kind of the water squiggles and stuff on there.

I think it actually might be one of their water reveal shirts. You get it wet and it shows like new letters on it. I think it might say something like made new on the shirt.

Saul didn't have one of these when he got baptized. It would have been cool if he had. But that's neither here nor there.

Baptism is a wonderful thing. Here, Ananias tells him, hey, you believe in Christ, be baptized. Publicly confess, you know, confess Christ is Lord.

And as we do that, as we confess our faith in Christ, he washes away our sins as far as the east is from the west, as the Book of Psalms would put it.

Verse number 17, after I returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw him telling me, hurry and get out of Jerusalem quickly because they will not accept your testimony about me.

But I said, Lord, they know that in synagogue after synagogue, I had those who believed in you imprisoned and beaten.

And when the blood of your witness Stephen was being shed, I stood there giving approval and guarding the clothes of those who killed him. He said to me, go because I will send you far away to the Gentiles.

So all this part of the story, we've known some of the things before. He's giving some more light as to some specific things that were stated.

The Bible isn't quite how maybe we would do an autobiography where it's, or a biography where it's every single element of it is included. You know, we'd have a news report. We want to include all of the facts.

Much of the Bible is written to specifically highlight some key things, and it doesn't tell us everything.

You can think of at the end of the Book of John where it says, basically, time would fail to tell everything that Jesus said and did while he was on earth.

And John says, if you were going to write them down in books, I don't think the world itself could contain all the books that would be written about what Jesus said and did. So here, Paul is shining some more light.

Here, Luke recording the sermon, he might have spoken for even longer than this. And this is just the highlights of what he was saying. But the result of this is in verse 22.

They listened to him up to this point, up until God tells them, I will send you far away to the Gentiles. Then they raised their voices, shouting, wipe this man off the face of the earth. He should not be allowed to live.

If I have not had this circumstance yet, where someone called for me to be killed as a result of my preaching, I am glad I haven't had that circumstance. But this is pretty par for the course for Paul. Verse number 23.

As they were yelling and flinging aside their garments and throwing dust into the air, these are all expressions of grief, like I can't believe someone would say this thing in our presence. We are so offended. Verse number 24.

The commander ordered Paul to be brought into the barracks, directing that he be interrogated with the scourge to discover the reason why they were shouting against him like this. So he's going to be whipped until he gives it up.

As they stretched him out for the lash, Paul said to the centurion standing by, Is it legal for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizen and is uncondemned? He's been through this in Philippi already. We saw that in Acts 16.

When the centurion heard this, verse 26, he went and reported to the commander saying, What are you going to do for this man is a Roman citizen? The commander came and said to him, Tell me, are you a Roman citizen? Yes, he said.

The commander replied, I bought this citizenship for a large amount of money. I highlighted this, I think, when we were in Acts 16, that citizenship was not cheap, and for someone to be a citizen brought with it a lot of prestige.

It brought gladness. You were proud that you were a citizen of the Roman Empire. It got you great benefits.

So the commander says, I bought this citizenship for a large amount of money. You don't seem like a person with a large amount of money. Are you really a citizen?

Paul says, I was born a citizen. He says, I was born into a city that was a Roman city. And so I was born a citizen.

Verse 29. So those who were about to examine him, beat him, withdrew from him immediately. The commander too was alarmed when he realized Paul was a Roman citizen and he had bound him.

I think it is interesting again, highlighting from chapter 21 that the Holy Spirit had said, Paul would be bound. It was for his safety, for his salvation from the Jews.

But here he was working even against what the Romans would have normally done in this particular situation.

So tomorrow we are going to look at Paul and his testimony that he gives before the Sanhedrin and then some of the things that happened after that. Today I want to highlight just two things very quickly. Number one, Paul never got over his testimony.

He could have gone over a lot of, hey, here's all of the things that the scriptures say about Jesus. He does that in many places that we have looked at. But here he didn't get over the fact that God had saved him.

He didn't get over who he was, who he had been, the sins that he had committed. He didn't completely forget about them or wipe them away from his memory. He realized that except for God's intervention, he would never have been right.

He would never have become a Christian. He would never have truly known God himself if God hadn't made himself known to Paul. And I think all of us can have that same heart that says, God, let me never forget that I was your enemy.

I was far away from you. I was pursuing my own ends. I was just being religious.

I was just doing what I thought was right. And then you came and you saved me. And you sent that person into my life who shared the gospel.

You led me to be at church that day when I heard someone talk about receiving Jesus. You put me in that family where my mom and dad told me about Jesus. And so because of what you have done, I'm going to glorify you.

I'm going to speak about you. And here he gives his testimony to these people. And he's telling them, God made a difference in my life.

He wants to make a difference in your life. Secondly, I want to note that he doesn't retaliate against these people. He could do the whole shake the dust of your garments off against the people and be like, all right, you guys deserve what you get.

You deserve to be condemned. But he doesn't do that. He doesn't do that to the Jews who are rioting, who are saying that he needs to be killed.

He doesn't do it to hear the Romans that are breaking Roman law by binding him without checking if he's a citizen. And we're going to beat him even though he was a citizen. He has a graciousness towards those who are doing him wrong.

And I think we all need to embody that as well. That we would be gracious in our situations. People will be a jerk to you this week.

People will treat you unkindly. People will forget about you. People will not do their job, and it will make your life more difficult.

Hopefully, no one will want to kill you and no one will attempt to beat you. Will you choose to be gracious, to be kind, to be forgiving towards others this week?

Well, tomorrow, I'm going to dive into Paul's kind of next interaction, and it will go, I believe, if I remember correctly, just a little bit better than this interaction with the mob. Hope that that would be an encouragement to you today.

Don't be ashamed of your testimony. Remember where God saved you from and be gracious to others. See you tomorrow.