We Are Only Men

Antioch was a long way north of Jerusalem, up in Syria, and the gathering there had grown into something new: Jews and Greeks at the same table, praying to the same Lord. Among them were men who taught and men who spoke for God — Barnabas; Simeon, called Niger; Lucius from Cyrene; Manaen, brought up in Herod the ruler’s house; and Saul. One day, while they were worshiping the Lord and going without food to pray, the Holy Spirit spoke. “Set apart Barnabas and Saul for me,” he said, “for the work I have called them to do.”

So they prayed and went without food again, and then laid their hands on the two of them and sent them off down the road. They walked down to the harbor at Seleucia and got on a ship for Cyprus, the island Barnabas came from. A young man went along to help them: John, whose other name was Mark.

They landed at Salamis and worked right across the island, telling the word of God in the meeting houses, until they came out at Paphos. The Roman governor there, a clever man named Sergius Paulus, sent for them, wanting to hear what they had to say. He kept a magician about him called Elymas, who did all he could to keep the governor from believing a word. “Will you never stop bending the straight roads of the Lord?” said Paul, looking straight at him. “The hand of the Lord is on you, and you will be blind for a while.” A mist came down over the man’s eyes, and he went round with his hands out asking to be led; and the governor watched it, and believed. From then on everybody called him Paul — the name he used among Greeks.

They sailed north to the mainland and came to Perga, and there John Mark left them and went home to Jerusalem. The other two went up into the hill country, to another town called Antioch, high in Pisidia — and on the Sabbath they walked into the meeting house and sat down like anybody else. After the law and the prophets had been read, the men in charge sent a message to the two strangers. “Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, let us hear it.”

Paul stood up, and lifted his hand for quiet. “Men of Israel, and all of you here who fear God — listen. The God of this people Israel chose our fathers. He made them a great people while they were strangers in Egypt, and with his arm lifted high he brought them out. For forty years he put up with them in the wilderness. He pulled down seven nations in Canaan and gave our fathers their land. After that he gave them judges, until Samuel the prophet. Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, for forty years. And when he had taken Saul away he raised up David, and said about him, ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart, who will do everything I want.’ It is out of this man’s family that God has brought Israel the rescuer he promised: Jesus.

“Before he came, John told the whole people of Israel to change their minds and be immersed. And as John was finishing his work he kept saying, ‘What do you suppose I am? I am not the one. Somebody is coming after me, and I am not fit to untie the sandals off his feet.’ The people living in Jerusalem, and their rulers, did not know who he was. They read the prophets out loud every Sabbath of their lives, and then did the very thing the prophets said would be done: they judged him. They could find nothing in him that deserved death, and asked Pilate to have him killed anyway. And when it was all done they took him down off the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead. And day after day he showed himself to the men who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, and those men are his witnesses now.

“And we are here to tell you good news. The promise God made to our fathers he has kept for us, their children, by raising Jesus up. It is written: ‘You are my son. Today I have fathered you.’ And in another place: ‘You will not let your holy one see decay.’ David served God’s purpose in his own time, then fell asleep, and was laid beside his fathers, and his body decayed. The one God raised did not. So know this, brothers: it is through this man that forgiveness of sins is announced to you. Everything the law of Moses could never set right in you — in him, everyone who trusts is set right. So take care that what the prophets spoke of does not land on you: ‘Look, you who laugh at other people — be amazed, and disappear. I am doing a work in your days that you would never believe if somebody told you.’”

On the way out, people kept asking them to say it all again next Sabbath, and a crowd followed the two of them down the street, and they kept talking with them and telling them to stay in the favor of God. The next Sabbath, almost the whole city came. Nearly everybody in the town who could walk was in the street outside the meeting house, and most of them were not Jews at all. And when the men who had asked Paul to speak saw the crowds, they were eaten up with jealousy and argued against every word he said.

Paul and Barnabas answered in the open, and did not soften it. “God’s word had to be spoken to you first. You are pushing it away, and by pushing it away you judge yourselves not worth everlasting life — so look: we are turning to the nations. That is what the Lord told us to do. ‘I have set you as a light for the nations, to carry rescue out to the ends of the earth.’” When the people of the other nations heard it they were glad, and praised the word of the Lord, and it went out through that whole country. But the leading men of the city were stirred up against them, and the two were put out of the district. So they shook the dust of it off their feet and walked on to Iconium — and the disciples they left behind were full of joy and of the Holy Spirit.

In Iconium they did the same again, and a great many Jews and Greeks trusted. The ones who would not be persuaded went round poisoning people’s minds, so the two of them dug in and stayed a long while, and God did signs and wonders through their hands. In the end the city split down the middle. And when word came that a crowd was getting ready to stone them, they left in a hurry for Lystra and Derbe, and went on telling the good news there.

In Lystra the people had a language of their own. There was a man sitting there who had never once stood up in his life; his feet had been useless from the day he was born. He sat listening to Paul talking. And Paul looked at him — really looked at him — saw he had faith enough to be made well, and said, in a voice the whole street heard: “Stand up straight on your feet.” And the man jumped up and started walking about.

The crowd went wild. They began shouting to one another in their own Lycaonian language, so fast that Paul and Barnabas could not understand a word of it. What they were shouting was this: “The gods have come down to us! They have come down looking like men!” They decided Barnabas must be Zeus and Paul must be Hermes, because Paul was the one doing the talking. And before anybody could stop it, the priest from the temple of Zeus outside the gate came up the road with bulls, and flowers twisted into wreaths to hang on them, and the crowd behind him, ready to kill the animals in the street as an offering to the two of them.

When Paul and Barnabas worked out what was happening they tore their own clothes — which is what a man did when something unbearable had happened — and ran out into the middle of the crowd, shouting. “Men — what are you doing? We are only men, the same as you! We have the same feelings you have. We came to bring you good news, and the news is this: turn away from these empty things, to the living God, who made the sky and the earth and the sea and everything in them. For all the years gone by he let the nations go their own ways, and even then he never left himself without a witness. He did you good. He gave you rain out of the sky, and seasons full of fruit, and food, and gladness in your hearts.” Even so, they could barely stop the crowd from killing the bulls.

Then men arrived from Antioch and Iconium — the same men who had driven them out of both cities — and went round the crowd, talking to it. It was the same crowd. An hour before, it had been holding wreaths. Now it picked up stones and threw them at Paul until he went down, and dragged him out through the gate and left him lying there, because they were sure he was dead. The disciples came out and stood round him in a ring. And he got up. And he walked back in through that same gate, into that same city, and stayed the night; and in the morning he and Barnabas left for Derbe.

They made a great many disciples in Derbe. And then they turned round and went back the way they had come — Lystra, Iconium, Antioch — into every one of the towns that had thrown them out. In each place they put strength back into the disciples and told them to hold on. “It is through many troubles that we have to go into the kingdom of God,” they said. And in every gathering they appointed elders — older men to watch over the rest — and prayed, and handed them over to the Lord. Then down through Pisidia into Pamphylia, and a ship home to the Antioch they had started from, where they told the gathering everything God had done with them, and how he had opened a door for the nations.

And then the argument started. Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and began teaching the brothers there a thing that settled it all one way. “Unless you are circumcised, the way the law of Moses says, you cannot be saved.” Circumcision was the cutting that had marked out Abraham’s family as God’s ever since Abraham himself, and the law of Moses came with it — hundreds of rules about food and days and washing. What these men were saying was that a Greek could not simply belong: he had to become a Jew first, and take the whole law on his back. Paul and Barnabas would not have it, and there was a long, loud disagreement with no end to it. So the gathering sent them, and some others, up to Jerusalem to put the question to the apostles and elders.

They went up through Phoenicia and Samaria, telling in every town how the nations were turning to God, and the brothers were overjoyed to hear it. In Jerusalem the gathering and the apostles and the elders welcomed them, and they told it all again. And then some men stood up who had come to trust Jesus but who belonged to the Pharisees. “They have to be circumcised,” they said, “and ordered to keep the law of Moses.”

So the apostles and the elders sat down over the matter and argued it back and forth a long time. Then Peter stood up. “Brothers, you know that God chose me, a long while back, to be the one whose mouth the nations would first hear the good news from, and trust it. And God, who knows what is inside a person, told us what he thought of them: he gave them the Holy Spirit, exactly as he gave him to us. He made no difference between us and them. He made their hearts clean by their trusting. So why put God to the test now? Why lay a weight on the necks of these disciples that neither our fathers nor we were ever strong enough to carry? We trust that we are saved through the favor of the Lord Jesus — in the very same way they are.”

The room went quiet, and listened to Barnabas and Paul tell all the signs and wonders God had done through them among the nations. And when they had finished, James gave his answer. “Brothers, listen to me. Simeon has told how God came to look in on the nations at the start, and took a people out of them to carry his name. The words of the prophets say the same. It is written: ‘After these things I will come back and build up David’s fallen tent again; I will build up the parts that were pulled down and stand it upright, so that the rest of mankind may search hard for the Lord — all the nations called by my name — says the Lord, who has made these things known from long ago.’ So this is what I judge. We are not to pile trouble on the people of the nations who are turning to God. We will write and ask them for four things: to keep away from anything offered to idols, and from sexual sin, and from meat with the blood still in it, and from animals that were strangled. As for Moses, he has been read out loud in every city, every Sabbath, from old times until now.”

And that is what they did. The apostles and elders and the whole gathering picked two men the brothers looked up to — Judas, called Barsabbas, and Silas — and sent them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas, carrying a letter. “The apostles and the elders, your brothers, to the brothers in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia who come from the nations: greetings. We have heard that some men went out from among us and troubled you with things they said, and turned your minds upside down. We never told them to say it. So we have agreed, all of one mind, to send you men along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have handed over their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Judas and Silas will tell you the same things themselves. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay no heavier load on you than these necessary things: keep away from what has been offered to idols, and from blood, and from what is strangled, and from sexual sin. Keep clear of these and you will do well. Farewell.”

The letter was read out to the whole gathering in Antioch, and the room was glad of the comfort in it. Judas and Silas stayed a while and put strength into the brothers, and then went home in peace.

Some days later Paul said to Barnabas: “Let us go back and look in on the brothers in every city where we told the word of the Lord, and see how they are.” Barnabas wanted to take John Mark along. Paul said no. John Mark was the one who had turned back at Perga and gone home instead of going on to the work, and Paul would not have him again. Barnabas would not give way either. And the two men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in front of a crowd holding stones had a sharp, hard quarrel over it, and it was not mended. They parted. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, which was home. Paul chose Silas, and the brothers handed him over to the favor of the Lord, and he went out by the north road through Syria and Cilicia, putting strength into the gatherings as he went. So there were two journeys now instead of one. Barnabas sailed off with Mark.