Dr. Rodney Plunket

"God Turns The Tables"

Acts 16:19-40

He sets off with so much excitement.  He and a trusted companion are going to visit communities of faith that he has established quite recently, and they also intend to plant some new churches.  Their visits with the recently established churches go very well.  They are even able to choose one of the newer converts as a fellow-worker to participate with them in their evangelistic mission.

These three missionaries then leave what is today south central Turkey and the area where churches have already been planted.  They travel primarily eastward for about three hundred miles.  But, during that long trip, not once does the Lord permit them to stop and preach their glorious message.  It’s all but burning a hole in them.

They arrive at Troas, the end of Asia, on the banks of the Aegean Sea.  They are on pins & needles.  Why does the Spirit of God keep prohibiting us from preaching?  What’s going on?  Why can’t we preach?  We want to preach!

God finally brings the frustration to an end.  That very night, the Apostle Paul receives a vision of a man saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Ax 16:9).  The text says, “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”

Paul’s vision takes our little band to Europe to establish the first European congregation mentioned in the New Testament.  The place is Philippi.  It is located in modern day Greece.

Please look with me at Acts (Ax) 16, as that chapter is the focus of our lesson this morning.  Look first at verse (v) 13.  There, the New Revised Standard Version says, “On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we sup­posed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there.”  That rendering is typical, but scholars are becoming aware of the fact that it is flawed.  What they have learned is that the Greek word translated as “place of prayer” (proseucheœn) was actually a term used to refer to a synagogue.  So Paul and his cohorts go to the Gangites River on the Sabbath day, because they think a synagogue is there, and they are right.  They find one as they expected.  Only women are there; we are not told why.

Among those women is one named Lydia.  She believes the message about Jesus and becomes Paul’s first European convert.  In fact, she and her whole household are baptized.  Lydia is so thrilled to know and to believe the gospel of Christ that she insists that Paul and his two companions, Silas and Timothy, continue their Philippian stay in the hospitality of her home.

That little band must feel great.  Their longing for a mission from God has been realized, and that mission has met with early success.  They have a place to stay and a core group of believers from whom to work as a base for their outreach into this city.  They had good reason to feel very optimistic.

Then calamity strikes.  Paul exorcises a demon from a fortune telling slave girl.  Her owners, seeing that their source of income has vanished, become very angry at Paul and Silas.  They raise up a mob against them.

Now please follow along as I read Ax 16:19-24.

Her masters’ hopes of wealth were now shattered, so they grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the authorities at the marketplace.  “The whole city is in an uproar because of these Jews!” they shouted.  “They are teaching the people to do things that are against Roman customs.”

A mob quickly formed against Paul and Silas, and the city officials ordered them stripped and beaten with wooden rods.  They were severely beaten, and then they were thrown into prison.  The jailer was ordered to make sure they didn’t escape.  So he took no chances but put them into the inner dungeon and clamped their feet in the stocks.

Now let's jump ahead and read verses (vv) 35-40.

The next morning the city officials sent the police to tell the jailer, “Let those men go!”  So the jailer told Paul, “You and Silas are free to leave.  Go in peace.”

But Paul replied, “They have publicly beaten us without trial and jailed us—and we are Roman citizens.  So now they want us to leave secretly?  Certainly not!  Let them come themselves to release us!”

When the police made their report, the city officials were alarmed to learn that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens.  They came to the jail and apologized to them.  Then they brought them out and begged them to leave the city.  Paul and Silas then returned to the home of Lydia, where they met with the believers and encouraged them once more before leaving town.

The reason for jumping ahead in this chapter is to make it so see what a radical turnaround these Philippian officials undergo.  Notice in vv 35-40 that they have become very courteous and very apologetic.  They are no longer rash and abusive; they have become polite and even fearful.  It seems that on the previous day they had been swept up by the anger of the mob; and, as a result, the city officials had failed to give Paul and Silas any opportunity to defend themselves.

Paul & Silas were likely wearing the apparel commonly worn by Jews.  As a result, it never occurred to these city officials that Paul & Silas were actu­ally Roman citizens.  (Their holding of Roman citizenship may have been due to a service which some forebear had rendered to the Roman Empire, but we do not know how they came to hold Roman citizenship).

The reason the magistrates were “alarmed” to learn that these men were Roman citizens, is because the Roman law “exempted” Roman citizens “from degrading forms of punishment.”  I have even read some sources which indicate that the officials responsible could have been deprived of office and disqualified from ever holding office again as a result of having beaten and jailed these Roman citizens.

The Philippian officials pleaded with Paul and Silas to leave, probably because they were afraid that they would not be able to guarantee their security.  And it seems likely that the result of all this carry-on was that the local officials treated the congregation in Philippi more fairly, after Paul & Silas left, than they would have otherwise.

Yes, the tables are turned.  Officials, who just hours before were puffed up with their own self-importance, officials who had beaten two godly men without even a hint of a hearing, are now seeking to appease those same men.  Yes, the tables have been turned.  They have been turned from anger to appeasement.

I draw your attention to this delightful turnaround because it is the domi­nant motif within this story.  The tables are turned more than once in this series of events.

The point I want to make, as we look at this story together, is the same one that the apostle Paul declares in Romans (Rm) 8:28.  There he writes, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  We know that in the lives of us all, and even in the life of the church, there will be times that seem dark and foreboding.  But walking by faith means that our eyes are looking eagerly for the way that God is going to put dark times to a purpose that is glorious beyond imagining.

But let’s return to our story.  Be reminded that in vv 19-25 the masters of the demon possessed girl create and mobilize an angry mob of Philippians.  The citizens of this city were extremely proud of their Romanness.  So these self-serving men accuse Paul and Silas of trying to undermine their city’s Roman heritage and culture.  These mob manipulators also play up the fact that Paul and Silas are Jews, using Philippian anti-Semitism to further inflame the passions of the mob.

The local magistrates are caught up in all of this pro-Roman/anti-Jewish sentiment.  They seem to give Paul and Silas no chance to say anything and take at face value all that is being said against these two foreigners.  They order them to be stripped and beaten with the bundle of rods that the policemen of that day commonly carried.  This done, Paul and Silas are placed in the Philippian prison’s inner cell, which we might refer to as the maximum-security block.  To further insure their security, they lock their feet into the stocks which would have been built into the very walls of the prison’s inner cell.

This is bleak and dark, but look with me at v 25:  “Around midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening.”  Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns to God.  I suspect that the prisoners and guards had grown accustomed to hearing cursing and swearing from that dark and isolated inner prison.  That night, however, they heard the Creator of the Universe being praised in song.

I love what Tertullian, an early 3rd century Christian writer, said:  “The legs feel nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven.”  Just such a sense of the nearness of heaven is exemplified in the behavior of Paul & Silas here in Ax 16.

Earlier we referred to Paul’s words in Rm 8:28 where he writes, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  Here, singing in the stocks, Paul is showing that he believes what he writes.  He is living it.

A book was written sometime ago entitled, When Life Tumbles in, What Then?  Paul and Silas’s answer to that question?  Well, we sing and pray, what else.

What a glorious example for us.  To know that with God we can go from being beaten with rods to praising our Lord.  With God we can go from rods to rejoicing.  Because we can know, as did Paul & Silas, that God will somehow turn the tables around and bring great good out of something that looks like defeat.

“In the middle years of the second century the most notable” defender of Christian faith was Justin.  He was “a Greek philosopher from Samaria who had been converted to Christianity. . . .  Brought with a number of other Christians before Rusticus, prefect of Rome, in the year 165, Justin refused to sacrifice to the gods” at the command of this Roman official.  He said, “‘No right-thinking person turns away from true belief to false.’  ‘Do what you will,’ said his companions to the prefect, ‘for we are Christians and do not sacrifice to idols.’  So they were led off to execution.”  (F. F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame, pp 176-77).  May our faith be as strong.  May our examples be as convicting.  May our stories of courageous be as worthy of retelling as is the story of Paul and Silas singing from the inner prison of a Philippian jail.

And their story continues.  In vv 26-34 we are told that a violent earthquake takes place.  The stones of the prison walls are jostled so powerfully that the chains forming the stocks simply fall out from between the stones of the walls.  The chains now lie ineffectively on the floor.  The stocks no longer hold Paul and Silas in place.  The doors of the prison are placed under so much pressure that they fly open.  The jailer wakes up and sees all the chaos.  He assumes the worst.  He thinks that all the prisoners have escaped or are escaping.  We are not sure why he prepared to kill himself.  Was it a matter of honor?  Was he saving himself from a certain execution by his superiors?  We do not know.

But that is not the focus of the story.  The amazing thing is that one of the prisoners, a prisoner whom he had ordered to be secured by stocks in the inner prison just the night before, that same prisoner calls out and convinces him not to take his life.  The jailer falls trembling at the feet of these two men who sang in the middle of the night and he says, “Men, what must I do to be saved?”

Why did he ask that question?  Was it the hymns?  Was there just something about Paul and Silas, something that really penetrated his inner person when Paul called out and convinced him to abort his preparations for suicide?  We will, I suppose, never know this side of heaven.

However, we do know what happened next.  His near suicide was turned into salvation, the salvation of God.  God had turned the tables again:  First, from anger to appeasement, then from rods to rejoicing, and now from suicide to salvation.

John Chrysostom, the great preacher of the 4th century, writing concerning v 33 says,  “He washed and was washed.  . . . he washed them from their stripes, and he himself was washed from his sins.”

The Broadway church exists because we believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is still true salvation.  We believe that it alone makes sense of life.  We believe that it can turn lives away from suicide as it does in Ax 16.  But we also believe that it will give people the way out of depression, despair, guilt, and the way out of a life embittered by the vacuum of meaninglessness.  We believe that God’s gospel can still the chaos in human lives as Paul stills the chaos initiated by an earthquake.

We believe these things because God has turned the tables in our lives and the lives of others.  We believe these things because the more we have studied Scripture and been changed by it the more our lives have been deepened and enriched.  The life that Jesus offers, as He Himself says, is abundant life (John 10:10).

The message in all of these exciting turnarounds is be patient, hang on, don’t give up.  God is there.  God is working.  God will indeed vindicate God’s faithful ones in a time and in a way marvelous beyond our imagination.

Charlotte Carnes gave me a copy this week of a letter that she received quite recently from Hong Kong.  It is from a long-time friend of Charlotte’s who works to spread the gospel in China.  The letter recounts a story told by a young Korean Christian who works in North China with the House Church Movement as well as in the distribution of Bibles.  I want to share that story this morning, because it is such a great contemporary example of God’s table-turning power.

Recently a North Korean soldier was assigned the job to execute certain people that had been “declared enemies of the state.”  On examining one of the bodies that he had just executed, the young soldier noticed that a black book had fallen to the ground.  In his mind something clicked that previously his own mother had asked for such a book.  He slipped the book into his pocket and on his next visit to his mother he gave her the book.  She immediately clutched it to her bosom and asked, “Where did you get this book (Bible) and from whom?”  He told her that he had been given the assignment to execute some “sinners against the State” and that the book had belonged to one of them.  The mother confronted her son and told him, “Son you might as well kill me too, for I am one of them and there are many more of us in this area.”  The two spent some four hours together discussing the matter.  In the course of the conversation she told him that he was the biggest sinner because he had killed one of God’s children.

At the end of their time together, the young soldier confessed his need for forgiveness and accepted the Lord Jesus as his Savior.  It was determined that the area his mother lived in could use at least 4000 Bibles.  Due to his military connections, the young soldier was able to go back and forth into China.  He was able to deliver, using a military vehicle, all the Bibles that were needed in the area where his mother lived.  (In North Korea it can still be a crime unto death for being a Christian.)  The latest report revealed that revival is still taking place in this area and many other places in North Korea and China.  PTL!  Please pray for the persecuted Believers in North Korea and China and in other places around the world.

In just a few weeks we plan to have a worship assembly focusing on praying for persecuted believers, but for right now I just want us to hear this story and see God turning the execution of North Korean Christians into an opportunity to provide more Bibles and further spread the message of Christ Jesus.

It is so easy for me to believe in God’s table-turning power and to pro­mote trust in that power right now while I am up here looking on faces that encourage my faith.  But the thing that is so inspirational about the story in Ax 16 is that Paul and Silas had that kind of faith when they were chained to a wall.  Now that is a faith that enlightens all of life, and that is the kind of faith that should live within every one of us.

I know that kind of faith doesn’t just happen over night, but oh how sweet it is when it does happen––when it comes to fruition within us.  You can see its sweetness in Paul and Silas.  You can hear it as they sing while chained to that musty, dark wall in a Macedonian prison.  You can feel its revitalizing energy as the baptismal water washes the jailer and his family and grants to them the new birth from above.  And this is a new birth washing that took place because two men kept believing while in the most dismal of circumstances and, as a result.