Let the Lord’s Will Be Done

The ship went down the coast in short hops, and at every stop somebody begged Paul not to go to Jerusalem. At Tyre the believers kept telling him all week — and they said the Spirit had told them — that he must not set foot in the city. When he sailed, the whole little church walked him out of the town, men and wives and children together, and knelt on the sand and prayed, and said goodbye.

At Caesarea, further down the coast, a prophet named Agabus came down to them from Judea. He walked in, and without a word took the belt off Paul’s waist and tied up his own feet and hands with it. “This is what the Holy Spirit says. The man this belt belongs to — this is how the Jews in Jerusalem will tie him up, and hand him over to the nations.”

Everybody in the room began begging him at once not to go up. “What are you doing?” said Paul. “Why are you crying, and breaking my heart to pieces? I am ready — not only to be tied up, but to die at Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord Jesus.”

They could not talk him out of it. So they stopped trying, and went quiet, and said the only thing there was left to say. “Let the Lord’s will be done.”

The brothers in Jerusalem welcomed him gladly, and the next day he told James and the elders what God had done among the nations. Then they told him the trouble. Tens of thousands of Jews in that city trusted Jesus now, and all of them kept the law carefully — and all had heard that Paul told Jews out among the nations to give Moses up. “So do this. Four of our men have a vow on them. Go into the temple with them, pay what it costs to have their heads shaved — and everybody will see there is nothing in it.” So Paul took the four men and went in.

The seven days were nearly up when some men from Asia who knew his face from Ephesus saw him in the temple courts, took hold of him, and started shouting. “Men of Israel — help! This is the man who teaches everybody, everywhere, against our people and our law and this place. And now he has brought Greeks into the temple and made this holy place common!” It was not true. They had seen him in the street with a friend from Ephesus and supposed the worst. But the whole city moved at once. They dragged him out of the temple, the doors were shut behind him, and out in the open they set about beating him to death.

The Romans kept a fort in the corner of the temple, with stairs down into the courtyard. Word went up that all Jerusalem was boiling over, and the commander came down at a run with his soldiers behind him — and the moment the crowd saw the helmets, they stopped hitting Paul. He had him chained with two chains and asked who he was and what he had done, and got a dozen answers shouted at once. So he ordered him carried into the fort — carried, because at the steps the crowd pushed so hard that the soldiers lifted him off his feet, and the people came up behind shouting one thing over and over. “Away with him!”

In the doorway at the top, Paul spoke to the commander. “May I say something to you?” “You know Greek?” said the commander, surprised. “Then you are not the Egyptian — the one who led four thousand men with daggers out into the desert?” “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of a city that is nobody’s little town. Let me speak to the people.”

So Paul stood on the steps in his two chains and lifted his hand to the crowd that had just been trying to kill him. A great silence came down. Then he spoke in their own language, and they went quieter still. “Brothers, and fathers — listen while I say what I have to say for myself. I am a Jew, born in Tarsus, brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught to keep the law of our fathers to the letter, and on fire for God — exactly as every one of you is today. And I hunted this Way to the death, tying up men and women both and putting them in prison. I had letters from the chief priest, and I was going to Damascus to bring those people back in ropes.

“And on that road, about midday, a great light out of heaven flashed round me, and I fell on the ground, and I heard a voice saying: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And I said: Who are you, Lord? And he said: I am Jesus of Nazareth, the one you are persecuting. Get up and go into Damascus, and you will be told what to do. And I could not see; that light had taken my eyes, and they led me into Damascus by the hand, like a child. And a man there named Ananias stood beside me and said, Brother Saul, see again — and that same hour I looked up and saw him.

“And afterwards, while I was praying in this temple, I saw him. And he said: Hurry, get out of Jerusalem, because they will not take your word about me. And I said: Lord, they know what I was. They know I went from one meeting house to the next, locking up the people who trusted you and beating them. And when the blood of Stephen your witness was being poured out, I was standing there myself, saying it was rightly done — and holding the coats of the men who were killing him. And he said: Go. Because I am sending you far away — to the nations.”

They had listened to every word up to that one. At that word the courtyard came apart. They began shouting, and pulling off their cloaks and flinging them about, and throwing dust in the air. “Away with a man like that from the earth! He has no business being alive!”

The commander still could not make head or tail of it, so he ordered Paul flogged to get the truth out of him. They had the straps on when Paul said, quite calmly, to the officer over him: “Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman — and who has not even been found guilty of anything?” The officer went out. The commander came in himself. “Tell me. Are you a Roman?” “Yes,” said Paul. “I paid a great deal of money for that citizenship.” “But I was born one,” said Paul. The men with the straps stepped back very quickly, and the commander was frightened himself: he had put a Roman in chains.

Next morning he untied him and stood him in front of the whole council, because he still had no idea what the charge was. Paul looked straight at them. “Brothers, I have lived my whole life in front of God with a clear conscience, right up to this day.” And the chief priest ordered the men beside him to hit him on the mouth. “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall,” said Paul. “You sit there judging me by the law, and you break the law yourself by ordering me hit.”

Then he looked round the room and saw who was in it. Half of them were Sadducees, who said there is no rising from the dead, and no messengers, and no spirits; the other half were Pharisees, who said there are all three. They had argued about it for a hundred years. So Paul called out: “Brothers — I am a Pharisee, and the son of Pharisees. It is about a hope, and about the rising of the dead, that I am on trial here today.” The room went up like a dry field, and the Pharisees found themselves defending him. “We find nothing wrong in this man. What if a spirit really did speak to him — or a messenger?” The Sadducees shouted them down, the shouting turned into shoving, and the commander sent his soldiers in to get his prisoner out before he was torn in half between them.

That night, in the fort, the Lord stood beside him. “Take courage. You have told about me here in Jerusalem. Now you must tell about me in Rome as well.”

In the morning more than forty men swore an oath that they would not eat or drink until Paul was dead. They took it to the chief priests: the council was to ask for the prisoner to be brought down again, as though there were more questions — and the forty would be waiting on the road. But there was a boy in Jerusalem, Paul’s sister’s son, who somehow heard about the ambush, and got himself let into the fort, and told his uncle. Paul called an officer over. “Take this young man to the commander. He has something to tell him.” And the commander did a kind thing: he took the boy by the hand, walked him away from everybody else, and asked him quietly what it was. And the boy told him all of it — the forty lying in wait, the oath about eating and drinking. “They are ready,” he said. “They are only waiting for you to say yes.” “Tell nobody that you told me this,” said the commander, and sent him home.

Then he gave the order: two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen, ready at nine that night, and horses for the prisoner, and get him through to Felix the governor alive. Nearly five hundred men, to move one man sixty miles in the dark. They rode out at the third hour of the night and brought him down to Caesarea. Five days later his accusers came down after him and made their case, and Paul answered that they could not prove a word of it; and the governor put the whole thing off. Paul was to be kept, but not shut away, and his friends could look after him.

Felix sent for him fairly often. Once he brought his wife Drusilla, and they listened to Paul talk about trusting Christ Jesus; but when he went on to doing right, and keeping hold of yourself, and the judgment that is coming, Felix got frightened and stopped him. “That will do for now. Go away. When I get an opportunity I will send for you.” And that is how two years went by. Two years with nothing in them: the man who had never stayed anywhere long sat in one room and waited, and the sea came in and went out below the window. Then Felix handed the province over to Porcius Festus, and left Paul in his chains, to give the Jews something to thank him for.

Festus had been in the province three days when he went up to Jerusalem, and the chief priests were waiting. Would he have the prisoner sent up for trial? They had men set to ambush him on the way. Festus said no. Let them come down and accuse him at Caesarea. So they came, and stood round Paul in the hall, and brought a pile of heavy charges they could not prove. “I have done nothing wrong,” said Paul, “against the law of the Jews, or against the temple, or against Caesar.” And Festus, who was new and wanted to begin well with the people he had to govern, said: “Are you willing to go up to Jerusalem and be tried there in front of me?”

And Paul said: “I am standing at Caesar’s judgment seat. This is where I ought to be tried. I have done the Jews no wrong, and you know it perfectly well. If I have done anything worth dying for, I am not begging to be let off dying. But if there is nothing in what these men say, nobody can hand me over to them as a favor. I appeal to Caesar.” That was a citizen’s right, and once he had said it the case was out of the governor’s hands. Festus talked it over with his advisers. “You have appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you will go.”

A few days later King Agrippa came to Caesarea with his sister Bernice to greet the new governor, and Festus brought the case up. “The chief priests want him sentenced. But there was not one of the crimes I expected. It is all questions about their own religion, and about a certain Jesus who died, whom this Paul keeps saying is alive.” “I should like to hear the man myself,” said Agrippa. “Tomorrow,” said Festus, “you shall hear him.”

So they made an occasion of it. Agrippa and Bernice came in next day with every bit of show they had, and the hall filled up with garrison commanders and important men of the city. Then they brought in a prisoner in a chain. “King Agrippa, this is the man. The Jews have been shouting at me that he ought not to be alive any longer. I found he had done nothing worth dying for; but he has appealed to the Emperor, and I have nothing certain to write to my lord.”

“You are allowed to speak for yourself,” said Agrippa. And Paul put out his hand and began, once again, to tell about a road. “King Agrippa, I count myself fortunate that it is in front of you I am speaking, because you know all the customs and arguments among the Jews. Every Jew knows how I have lived since I was a boy: as a Pharisee, in the strictest party we have. And I stand on trial for the hope of a promise God made to our fathers — the hope our twelve tribes serve him night and day to reach. Why should any of you think it past believing that God raises the dead?

“I shut a great many of the holy ones up in prison here, and when they were being put to death I voted for it. And at midday, on the road to Damascus, I saw a light out of heaven brighter than the sun, and every one of us went down on the ground. And I heard a voice speaking in our own language: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? You are kicking against the goad, and it is hard on you. And I said: Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said: I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting. Get up and stand on your feet. I am sending you to the nations, to open their eyes, so that they turn from darkness to light.

“And so, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. I told Damascus first, and Jerusalem, and all Judea, and then the nations: change your minds, and turn to God. That is what they seized me in the temple for. And God has helped me to this day, so here I stand, telling small people and great people nothing except what Moses and the prophets said would happen — that the Christ would suffer, and rise first from the dead, and bring light to our own people and to the nations.”

And Festus could not hold it in any longer. “Paul, you are out of your mind!” he shouted. “All that learning is driving you mad!” “I am not mad, most excellent Festus,” said Paul. “What I am saying is true, and it is good sense. The king knows about these things, and I speak freely in front of him. None of it was done in a corner. King Agrippa — do you trust the prophets? I know you do.”

And Agrippa said: “In a short time you would persuade me to become a Christian.” “Short time or long time,” said Paul, “I would pray to God that not only you but every single person listening to me today might become what I am — except for these chains.” He was wearing them while he said it.

Then the king stood up, and the governor, and Bernice, and they went out and stood talking it over. “The man is doing nothing that deserves death. Nothing that deserves chains, even.” And Agrippa said to Festus: “He could have been set free. If he had not appealed to Caesar.” But he had. So a ship was found, and Paul was handed over to a Roman officer for Italy — still in the chains, and with the year getting late.