Acts 14:8-20

In Lystra and Derbe
8 In Lystra there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and had never walked. 9 He listened to Paul as he was speaking. Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed 10 and called out, “Stand up on your feet!” At that, the man jumped up and began to walk.

11 When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” 12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them.

14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting: 15 “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. 16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way. 17 Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” 18 Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them.

19 Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. 20 But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.



Dig Deeper
I am personally convinced that one of the most powerful, and potentially dangerous, human motivators is disillusionment. Disillusionment is quite different than many other human emotions and motivators because it can swing someone’s motivations, loyalties, and actions wildly and erratically in the blink of an eye. One moment someone can be deeply in love with someone but once disillusionment sets in that love can radically switch to blind rage and vitriol in the matter of seconds. This is particularly true when it comes to the church. It is vitally important that churches and ministers do their dead-level best to ensure that new Christians and younger members have a realistic view of the church. It is quite easy for a young Christian to to come and visit a church and quickly fall in love with everything about it. If the members of that church are not extremely careful and wise, they can easily, in their zeal, give the impression that everything about the church is wonderful, that the minister is the best thing since sliced bread, and that their life will simply be better in every way imaginable if they become part of the believing community.

The problem is that no church is perfect. Every church is flawed because all humans are flawed. The New Testament promises that we will need to have great patience, forbearance, and love for one another because we will fail one another. But if people are not clear on all of that they will come to idolize the church, the minister, or certain Christians within the church. The problem is that it is only a matter of time before they realize that the church is flawed and people are not perfect, despite their genuine desire to live as God’s family. That’s when disillusionment sets in and people who were once loyal and loving members of a church can easily become bitter enemies in an instant. What they once revered they now would like to destroy.

In fact, the greater someone’s hopes are built up before being dashed, the deeper the disillusionment and the greater the bitterness. At the core of this account is that very reality of disillusionment. Great hope was put before the people but they misunderstood. It was not what they thought and what they were hoping for and so their great adoration and amazement turned almost instantaneously into hatred.

As Paul and Barnabas arrived in Lystra, they encountered a man that had been lame and unable to walk since birth. Everyone would have known him well and been quite convinced of the fact that he would never walk. In fact it is safe to presume that him being healed and walking never even crossed their mind. But as Paul came to town this man listened intently. Something about the announcement that Jesus had resurrected from the dead and showed himself to be the true king of the world and that the kingdom of God was breaking into the present world through that resurrection must have caught the attention of this man. As Paul was speaking we can assume that the Spirit drew his attention to this man, although the text doesn’t say that explicitly. Paul saw an opportunity to demonstrate the kingdom of God. It would be a manifestation in the present age of God’s future age to come, a time when God will restore the entire creation back to its intended wholeness. Nothing demonstrated that truth better than healing a man who had been lame from birth. Nothing verified the truth of his words about that coming age more than telling this man to walk.

As Paul spoke, he discerned, again presumably through the guidance of the Spirit, that this man had the faith to be healed. This man had come to faith through Paul’s words. It wasn’t that he believed that he could be healed because that wasn’t even an option yet. But he had come to believe that God had given promises to restore his creation and that those promises were being fulfilled through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and now through the preaching of the gospel. Because he had faith in that, Paul would heal him and show a sample of that coming reality. Paul told him to stand up immediately and walk, something that the man did instantly. We can only imagine the shock of the crowd around them as they observed the pure and bewildering joy that the man must have felt and the confident lack of shock on the faces of Paul and Barnabas. His getting up and walking was of no great surprise to them. To the crowd, this was the most incredible thing they had ever seen. And they immediately jumped to conclusions.

We must understand that there was a local legend preserved in a Latin poem by Ovid. According to this legend, the gods Zeus and Hermes had visited this region looking for lodging many years before. They were turned down at house after house, and were eventually sent away by one thousand homes in the area. Finally the pair of gods came upon an elderly couple named Philemon and Baucis who were unaware that they were having an encounter with the gods. They eventually welcomed the divine pair into their home. The gods later returned and turned the home of the elderly couple into a temple in honor of their hospitality but they were enraged with the rest of the region and they destroyed all of the houses that had rejected them.

As Paul and Barnabas came upon the scene and performed such an incredible and miraculous healing, the people immediately interpreted it in the only way that their worldview would allow. These must be the gods returned to earth. It is possible that Barnabas was the larger and more physically dignified of the two and so they mistook him as Zeus, while Paul was mistaken for Hermes who was the spokesmen for the gods. Whatever the case, they were clearly determined not to make the same mistake that their people before them had. The people went shouting and declaring in Lycaonian that the gods had returned to them and they quickly got busy making the proper preparations to honor them with appropriate sacrifices. The scene was no doubt chaotic and dizzying along with the fact that neither Paul nor Barnabas spoke that language or knew what was happening around them.

Upon finally understanding what the crowds were thinking and what they had in mind, Paul and Barnabas were horrified. They tore their clothes in response to this well-meaning, but blasphemous attempt to honor them. In that act, the people were demonstrating that they truly had no understanding of the one, true God. They weren’t gods that typically brought varying degrees of bad news and destruction. They were men just like them that were there to preach the good news about Jesus Christ.

Paul’s words were thoroughly in the style of the Old Testament as he warned them that the gods and idols they worshipped were lifeless and worthless. They were wasting their time worrying about the favor of the gods, because the favor of the one, true God, the one who created the world and everything in it, had been finally made available to all. In the past they were outside of God’s family with little hope to come into it (see Eph. 2:11-19). God had always been there, though, providing through nature and they should have recognized that but they had turned instead to worshipping elements of the creation (cf. Rom. 1:18-23). This sermon as Luke has recounted it looks very similar to Paul’s sermon in chapter 17 and no doubt continued on to describe the good news of the resurrection of Christ just as he did there.

But the people were so locked into their own worldview that despite Paul’s powerful sermon pointing them to the true God through his Son Jesus Christ, they still had trouble shifting their paradigm and still wanted to make sacrifices to them as gods. The reality is that false religions stem from people’s desires rather than the other way around. This is why Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:3 that it is not that people are tricked into false religions and false doctrines but rather that they gather around them people that teach what they want to hear based on their desires. These people wanted the type of religion that they had already and despite the incredible miracle they had just seen were apparently not open to the stunning truth of the gospel.

If their desire had been for the truth that lies in the gospel they would have embraced it but instead, Luke tells us, that a group of Jews came over from Antioch and Iconium, and convinced them to reject what Paul and Barnabas had been saying. These people who wanted to worship Paul and Barnabas were now quickly swung in the other direction. They were enthralled thinking that the gods that they desired to worship had come to visit them but their excitement quickly turned into disillusionment. Their moment of hope that the gods had returned and they had a chance to please them disappeared. All that was left was the simple truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the men who were preaching that gospel. Their dashed hopes turned to blind rage and they dragged Paul outside of the city to stone him.

This was no day at the beach. Stoning was a violent act that was intended to kill someone and they thought that this time was no different. Although it didn’t kill him, the event clearly left an indelible impression on Paul who mentioned it as many as three times in other writings (2 Cor. 11:25; 2 Tim. 3:11; and possibly Gal. 6:17). What happened next is one of those incredible things that has made Paul a hero to many in the faith ever since. He had been rejected and beaten down by those who wanted nothing to do with the idea of being part of God’s family but the disciples gathered around him and gave him strength. Buoyed by their love and support, Paul rebounded and got right back up (Luke does not say that there was any specific miraculous element to Paul’s getting up and does not seem to imply any such miracle either). We might expect him to have gone somewhere safer and immediately flee Lystra but Paul was not going to let them get the best of him and the gospel. He picked himself up and walked right back into Lystra. Paul would leave for Derbe the next day, but it would be on his terms and not because of fear.


Devotional Thought
Can you identify with Paul’s situation here. It is unlikely that most of you reading this will ever be in danger of being stoned for the gospel but it can sure feel like it sometimes when we are rejected or mistreated for our faith. When that happens, what is your response? Is it to slink away and look for safety or is it to surround yourself with disciples, get re-energized, and go right back at the leading of the Holy Spirit? When you face your next “Lystra,” what will your response be?