The Storm, and the House in Rome

They handed Paul and some other prisoners over to an officer named Julius, and put them on a ship, and sailed. Luke went with him, and so did a Macedonian named Aristarchus, who had been with him for years. Julius was decent to him from the start. At Sidon, the very first stop, he let Paul go ashore to his friends and be looked after.

After that the wind was against them the whole way. They crawled along under the shelter of Cyprus, and at Myra the officer found a big Alexandrian grain ship going to Italy and put them all on board. That one was slow too. Days of it, hardly moving, until they got past Cnidus with difficulty and had to duck down under the shelter of Crete and creep along the coast to a bay called Fair Havens. And by then it was late in the year. The autumn fast had gone by already, which meant winter, and nobody in that part of the world sailed in winter if he could help it. Paul told them so. “Men, I can see that this voyage is going to end in damage and heavy loss — and not only of the cargo and the ship. Of our lives too.”

The officer listened to the helmsman and the ship’s owner instead, which was the sensible thing to do; they were sailors and Paul was a prisoner. And Fair Havens was a poor place to spend a winter. Most of them voted to try for a better harbor up the coast and wait there. A gentle south wind came up, and they thought they had it. They pulled up the anchor and slid along the shore of Crete, close in. And then the wind came down off the mountains of the island — the north-easter, the sailors called it — and hit the ship and took her. She could not turn her head into it. There was nothing to do but give up and let her run.

The next day, still being flung about, they began throwing the cargo over the side. The day after that they threw the ship’s own gear over with their own hands — the spare spars, the tackle, everything they could get loose. And after that there was no sun for days, and at night there were no stars. Nobody could tell where they were or which way they were going, and the storm did not let up for an hour. From then on, all hope that they would be saved was slowly taken away from them.

Nobody had eaten for a long time. And in the middle of it Paul stood up among them. “Men — you should have listened to me and not put out from Crete. And now I am telling you to take heart. Not one of you is going to lose his life. Only the ship. Because last night a messenger of the God I belong to, the God I serve, stood beside me.” “Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand in front of Caesar. And look — God has given you every one of the men sailing with you.” “So take heart, men. I trust God, that it will turn out exactly the way it was told to me. But we have to run aground on some island.”

On the fourteenth night, out in the sea they called the Adria, about midnight, the sailors began to feel that land was coming. They dropped a weighted line over the side: a hundred and twenty feet. A little further on they dropped it again: ninety. Land, coming fast, in the dark, with rocks in it somewhere. They threw four anchors off the stern to hold her, and prayed for morning. Some of the sailors tried to get out. They let the ship’s boat down into the water, pretending they were going to lay out anchors from the bow. Paul saw it. “Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.” So the soldiers cut the ropes and let the little boat fall away into the dark, and that was that. Everybody was staying.

And just before dawn Paul made them all eat. “This is the fourteenth day you have gone on waiting and watching and taking nothing. Please — have some food. You need it to come through this. Not one hair is going to be lost off the head of any one of you.” And he took a loaf, and thanked God for it in front of all of them, and broke it, and began to eat. And every man there cheered up and ate something too. There were two hundred and seventy-six people on that ship. When they had had enough, they threw the wheat overboard as well, to lift her in the water.

When it got light they did not know the coast, but they could see a bay with a beach in it, and decided to run her up on it if they could. So they cut the anchors away, and untied the steering oars, and hoisted the little foresail, and made for the beach. But they struck a place where two seas met. The bow went in and stuck fast and would not move, and the stern began to break up behind them in the surf. And the soldiers’ plan — because a soldier who lost a prisoner paid for it with his own life — was to kill the prisoners then and there, so that none of them could swim off. The officer stopped them. He wanted to bring Paul through safely, and he would not let them do it. “Anybody who can swim, over the side and get to land. The rest of you, take a plank.” And that is how it happened. All of them came safely through to the land. Every one. All two hundred and seventy-six.

The island turned out to be Malta. The people there could not speak Greek and did not need to. It was raining and it was cold, and they built a big fire on the beach and took every one of the shipwrecked in, and showed them a kindness that was nothing ordinary. Paul went and gathered an armful of sticks and laid them on the fire, and a snake came out of the heat and fastened on his hand. The islanders saw it hanging there. “That man is a murderer, for certain. He came safe out of the sea, and Justice would not let him live after all.” He shook it off into the fire and went on with what he was doing. They stood watching him, waiting for his hand to swell up, or for him to drop down dead. They watched a long while. Nothing happened to him at all. So they changed their minds all the way round and began saying he was a god.

The chief man of the island was named Publius, and he took them in and fed them for three days. His father was in bed with fever, and Paul went in to him and prayed, and put his hands on him, and healed him. After that everybody on the island who was ill came, and they were cured; and when the three months were up and a ship was ready, the islanders loaded them with honors and put on board everything they needed.

Syracuse, three days. Rhegium. Then a south wind, and Puteoli in two days, where they found brothers who kept them a week. And so, at last, they came to Rome. The believers in Rome had heard he was coming, and they walked out to meet him — some as far as the Forum of Appius, which is a good thirty miles down the road, and others to a place called Three Taverns. He had never seen one of their faces before. And when Paul saw them standing there at the roadside, waiting for a prisoner they did not know, he thanked God and took courage.

In Rome they let him stay by himself, in a house he rented, with one soldier to guard him. The soldier was chained to him. Three days after he arrived he called the leading Jews of the city together and told them how he had come to be there. “I have done nothing against our people or the customs of our fathers. The Romans examined me and wanted to let me go, and when my own people spoke against it I was forced to appeal to Caesar. It is because of the hope of Israel that I have this chain on me.” So they set a day, and came in numbers to where he was staying, and he laid it all out for them from morning until evening, out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets, about the kingdom of God and about Jesus. Some of them were persuaded. Some were not. And they argued with each other on the way out.

And so Paul was in Rome. He stayed two whole years in his own rented house, and he welcomed everybody who came to him, telling them about the kingdom of God, and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ — openly, and with nobody stopping him. And there he was, still talking to whoever came in at the door.