1 Five days later the high priest Ananias went down to Caesarea with some of the elders and a lawyer named Tertullus, and they brought their charges against Paul before the governor. 2 When Paul was called in, Tertullus presented his case before Felix: “We have enjoyed a long period of peace under you, and your foresight has brought about reforms in this nation. 3 Everywhere and in every way, most excellent Felix, we acknowledge this with profound gratitude. 4 But in order not to weary you further, I would request that you be kind enough to hear us briefly.
5 “We have found this man to be a troublemaker, stirring up riots among the Jews all over the world. He is a ringleader of the Nazarene sect 6 and even tried to desecrate the temple; so we seized him. [7] [a] 8 By examining him yourself you will be able to learn the truth about all these charges we are bringing against him.”
9 The other Jews joined in the accusation, asserting that these things were true.
10 When the governor motioned for him to speak, Paul replied: “I know that for a number of years you have been a judge over this nation; so I gladly make my defense. 11 You can easily verify that no more than twelve days ago I went up to Jerusalem to worship. 12 My accusers did not find me arguing with anyone at the temple, or stirring up a crowd in the synagogues or anywhere else in the city. 13 And they cannot prove to you the charges they are now making against me. 14 However, I admit that I worship the God of our ancestors as a follower of the Way, which they call a sect. I believe everything that is in accordance with the Law and that is written in the Prophets, 15 and I have the same hope in God as these men themselves have, that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked. 16 So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man.
17 “After an absence of several years, I came to Jerusalem to bring my people gifts for the poor and to present offerings. 18 I was ceremonially clean when they found me in the temple courts doing this. There was no crowd with me, nor was I involved in any disturbance. 19 But there are some Jews from the province of Asia, who ought to be here before you and bring charges if they have anything against me. 20 Or these who are here should state what crime they found in me when I stood before the Sanhedrin— 21 unless it was this one thing I shouted as I stood in their presence: ‘It is concerning the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial before you today.’”
Dig Deeper
A few years back I lived in a county that went through a rather tumultuous time in local government. The men and women that had been elected to run the county affairs had failed to live up to their duties and had instead mired the county in scandal and crushing debt. The worst part was that everything they did was technically legal, although most everyone agreed they had violated moral standards of what should rightly be expected from elected officials. So what did they do? They voted themselves and other government workers one of the sweetest retirement and pension deals imaginable. It gave all of these county workers massive pension plans that numbered in the millions of dollars per person and continued to pay them handsomely until the time of their death. They quickly and quietly signed it into contract with the union that represented them all and it took the force of law with no legal recourse to ever nullify the deal. The primary problem was that this retirement plan could not be afforded by the county. In fact, it hurtled the county towards eminent bankruptcy. Once the public discovered what had happened, they were furious and did the only thing they could which was holding recall elections to boot all of these people out of office. The officials who were responsible for all of this simply left office after being voted out and went home with their huge retirements and left the financial mess for someone else to deal with.
As a result of those recall elections a new county executive and representatives came into power vowing to bring a new era of transparency and responsibility and they came through on those promises in general terms. And although that new era of financial accountability had begun they still had to deal with the mess of the current debt and situation that they found themselves in. Simply declaring a new era in county government did not take away the hard work of implementing the values of that new era in the present mess. Make no mistake, although the main leaders had left there were still many who opposed this new era of strict financial discipline and cost-cutting and the new leaders faced incredible opposition. They quickly discovered that for many people that taste a new era, they reject it saying “the old is better” (Luke 5:39).
That was the task that was facing Paul. He really did believe that something monumental happened the moment that the resurrected Jesus walked out of the tomb and out from the jaws of death. It was more than just someone raising from the dead. It was something different. It was a new era; the moment when God’s promised new creation began to break into the present age. It wasn’t the once-and-for-all moment that the Pharisees had hoped for when God would return and sort everything out himself. God had acted definitively but consistently. God has always worked through human beings and he didn’t change that at the resurrection. Jesus really was king and the new era really had begun in Christ, but he had left his family in charge to sort out that new era in the mess of the present age. This was the gospel in a nutshell. Jesus was king and now it was up to us to accept that, live that way, and take part in the reconciling of the present age. Paul knew that and declared it boldly but he also knew that doing so would bring him into a great deal of opposition. That’s what brought him before the Roman Governor Felix.
The high priest had secured a lawyer named Tertullus to present the Jewish leadership’s case against Paul. He went about his task as any skilled lawyer of the day would have as he began his case with flattery aimed towards Felix that didn’t just border on the untrue but sped through that line like a runaway train. Felix was not a very skilled governor and there certainly wasn’t much in the way of unencumbered peace during his rule. But Tertullus’ purpose was not to declare the truth but to curry favor with Felix, because once he got to the actual charges against Paul, it becomes obvious how thin the charges against Paul actually are. Tertullus accused Paul of inciting riots all over the Roman world and with trying to desecrate the Temple. Of course Tertullus didn’t mention that no Roman authority had ever found Paul guilty of anything significant and that the only witnesses that they might be able to produce to claim that he had desecrated the Temple would be lying through their teeth. The Jewish leadership backed the lawyer’s claim but offer nothing in the way of actual evidence or proof that Paul was guilty of these charges.
When finally given a chance to make his defense Paul acknowledged the rightful authority of Felix to judge over the situation and expressed his gratitude at the possibility of making his case before a capable judge. Paul engaged in the same culturally expected respectful opening that Tertullus did without stepping into the realm of not telling the truth.
Paul pointed out that his exasperation at the charges stemmed from the fact that he was being charged with the very sort of thing that he had gone to great trouble to avoid. Despite how hard it must have been for him, Paul was trying to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. He didn’t want to raise further alarm among the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and didn’t want to bring any additional and unnecessary persecution on his brothers and sisters. But from the time of Paul’s baptism God had made it clear that Paul would suffer persecution for the sake of the gospel (Acts 9:16) and although Paul had repeatedly asked that this thorn of constant conflict and persecution be taken from him (2 Corinthians 12:7), God instead told him that he would have to rely on God alone for his strength. So it must have been very difficult for Paul to face charges of causing problems when he had worked hard to avoid that very thing.
Yet, his point to Felix was straightforward. He did nothing in Jerusalem but act like a God-fearing, Temple-revering Jew. This fact might seem difficult for a modern Christian to grasp, though. If the Temple and sacrifices for sin were made unnecessary by God’s true Temple, Jesus Christ, then why would Paul continue to pray there and show respect to God’s Temple? The only plausible answer is that Paul and the other first century Christians were living during a strange but brief period of overlap where the building of the Temple still stood and meant a great deal to the Jews and Jewish Christians, but Christ had declared himself to be God’s true Temple and the resurrection had made it clear that this was indeed the truth. Thus, there was this strange period of overlap that took awhile for the early Christians to fully work out. But in AD 70 God made the situation very clear when he allowed the Roman army to lay waste to the Temple and destroy it.
Paul was adamant had not engaged in any preaching against or denouncing of the Temple while in Jerusalem and he certainly hadn’t desecrated it. In his mind all he had done was to worship God in Spirit and truth. Paul was not trying to rebel against the God of their ancestors. He was not engaged in a blasphemous coup against the God of Israel. He was, in fact, obeying the word of God and going where that word led him.
To understand what Paul was arguing it might be helpful to think of those pictures that look like little more than a mass of dots but after staring at it for a time, something else under the surface begins to become discernible to the eye. Suddenly you don’t just see a random design any longer but a beautiful picture emerges. In a sense, Paul was saying that the Old Testament was something like those modern paintings. The Law and the Prophets were a collection of promises and prophecies that were now emerging as a beautiful picture of Jesus as the Messiah and the fulfillment of those very Scriptures. Paul wasn’t inventing some new religion or doctrine. He was following the clues and arriving at the destination that the Old Testament had pointed all along and it was the same hope of resurrection, the same hope of God putting things back to order in the world that most of his fellow Jews believed in and waited for.
In fact, in following where Moses and the prophets led, Paul arrived at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and saw that this is where all the signs on the road had been pointing all along. God had inaugurated his new creation and already begun to set things in order through his people who would embrace the resurrection life of their Messiah.
It might be surprising that Paul summed up his ministry to the Gentiles by highlighting the collection that he had been taking for years among them to support the brothers and sisters in the Jerusalem church who had fallen on hard times. That collection, was, for Paul, a real-life example of the resurrection life breaking into the present age. Pagan nations were honoring God by sacrificing for Jews that they now considered part of their family rather than enemies. What could that be other than the life of the new creation bursting into the present age?
How could anyone seriously claim that this was not of God? But just to make clear that Paul was not a blaspheming pagan in anyway, when he returned to Jerusalem he gave the gave the collections to his Jewish brothers and sisters, and went to pray at the Temple as a ceremonially clean worshipper of the one true God. Paul emphasized for Felix that he was not causing trouble. If he could be accused of anything it would be for nothing more than proclaiming the resurrection of the dead, the very thing that constituted the hope of Israel, at least those not numbered among the elite Sadducees.
Paul was simply brilliant in the way that he declared the truth of the gospel while taking great pains to show that he was not simply rebelling against God, his people, or the faith of his youth. If anyone with a fair mind would give Paul a chance they would have seen that he was honoring God and his faith by following where God’s word led him. For those of us that have found ourselves raised in faith that more resembled tradition of man than the true and radical gospel of the resurrection life available in the family of God, we can find much to learn from Paul’s ministry.
Devotional Thought
Declaring the truth of the gospel against the constant opposition and persecution of his countrymen had to be very difficult for Paul. Do you have the same commitment to speaking the truth regardless of the consequences that Paul had. Which difficult or intimidating conversations in your own life or within your own family or sphere of influence have you been avoiding?
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