Acts 26:1-11

1 Then Agrippa said to Paul, “You have permission to speak for yourself.”

So Paul motioned with his hand and began his defense: 2 “King Agrippa, I consider myself fortunate to stand before you today as I make my defense against all the accusations of the Jews, 3 and especially so because you are well acquainted with all the Jewish customs and controversies. Therefore, I beg you to listen to me patiently.

4 “The Jewish people all know the way I have lived ever since I was a child, from the beginning of my life in my own country, and also in Jerusalem. 5 They have known me for a long time and can testify, if they are willing, that I conformed to the strictest sect of our religion, living as a Pharisee. 6 And now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our ancestors that I am on trial today. 7 This is the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night. King Agrippa, it is because of this hope that these Jews are accusing me. 8 Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?

9 “I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 10 And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. 11 Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities.




Dig DeeperFather’s Day is one of those days that rolls around every year and I usually don’t pay much attention to it. It kind of sneaks up on me and I don’t even realize that the day has arrived until my wife or someone else wishes me “happy Father’s Day.” A few Years back, my wife and sons told me in the morning that we were going to go see a movie that Sunday afternoon after our church gathering with the family of God. I enjoy a good movie now and then and was always particularly excited about spending the day with my family and seeing a film with them. After leaving our church’s building, my anticipation was growing to go see the movie. We stopped by our house to get a few things and then my wife said that she would drive. The movie theater is right around the corner from our house so I was confused when she went the other way and got on the interstate. When I asked her about it, she said to just relax and not ask questions.

I was trying to be patient and trusting but I was a little disappointed because I had my heart set on seeing a movie and now it was clear that we were not going to do that at all. After an hour of driving I still had no idea what we were going to be doing and was starting to feel a little upset that we were not going to be seeing a movie as I had been promised. That is, until my wife suddenly turned us into a drive-in theater. In fact it was the very one that we had gone to on our honeymoon many years before. Even though I had thought our plans had changed I realized that they hadn’t. I had just not understood the signs and trusted my wife’s promise of that morning that we were indeed going to a movie. My expectations had changed and that had caused me some consternation but in the end she had come through on her promise just as she had stated it. In fact the promise was never the problem it was that my hopes of the fulfillment were far too small.

This describes something of the situation that the pre-Christian Paul and first century Jews found themselves in. Israel had great national hopes that they found in the promises of God as handed down to them in the what we call the Old Testament. Israel believed that God really had called them to be his people and to live in covenant with him. They had been disobedient to that covenant and found themselves punished for their disobedience by being dragged off into exile and having the Temple destroyed. But that was over 500 years before the time of Paul and the people of Israel had returned to their land and rebuilt the Temple. But they believed that the important part of the exile was ongoing because God had not yet returned to Jerusalem. Just as important, God had not fulfilled his great promises to bless his people that descended from Abraham and through that family to bless the whole world. They believed that God would do this in one mighty sweep of justice and judgment when God would return and his Messiah would put down the pagan nations that hadoppressed God’s people and sinned against the one true God. At that time, God would judge the nations and exalt his people Israel. He would resurrect the righteous and punish the unrighteous and somehow through that mighty day, all peoples of the world would truly be blessed. This day of the Lord would be the beginning of God’s age to come, or eternal life when he would cleanse the entire world of evil and rule in his kingdom with his people for eternity as the realms of heaven and earth were brought together as one as they were always intended to be. This was the great hope of Israel. It was the hope that Paul clung to before becoming a Christian and it was the same hope that he had embraced in becoming a follower of Jesus.

It was not that Paul had given up his hope and somehow embraced the idea that God had failed to come through on his promises to Israel. The truth was far from that, in fact. It was not God’s promises that had failed, but when the resurrected Christ confronted Paul he suddenly realized that it was the expectations of himself and his fellow countrymen that were wrong and misinformed. God had promised that Abraham’s descendants would become the family of God and that people of all nations would be blessed through that family. God had also promised resurrection to the righteous. All of those things were correct. But just as I had made assumptions about my wife’s promise and missed what she was actually doing, so did Israel with God’s promises. They had shrunk them down.

And that was Paul’s point to Agrippa. He had not abandoned the hope of Israel. He just followed the road signs when they led in a different direction than he had planned to take. In the end, he had arrived exactly where he had hoped and where God had promised all along. God had promised a Messiah who would throw off the oppressor of his people and would, through resurrection, bring his people into the life of the age to come to dwell with God forever. But they had assumed that this would all take place at the end of the present age. They had the right hope but missed the signs for the turn-off and were now steaming ahead in the wrong direction. God had returned to Israel but through the person of Jesus Christ. He had brought about his promised family through Jesus, a descendant of Abraham, but entrance into that family must come by having faith and being baptized into his life. When one did that, they could begin to live out the life of the age to come right then and there in anticipation of the resurrection that will yet take place one day. That was the key. Resurrection and the life of the age to come had broken into the present age through Jesus rather than taking place for all of the righteous at the end of time. And through his death and resurrection, Jesus had defeated death and sin, the real oppressors of God’s people. It was not Rome after all, or any other pagan nation. Sin was the problem and now in Jesus Christ peoples of all nations could enter into God’s family and be blessed and live with the Father for eternity.

Paul’s point was one that he made at every opportunity he had to speak regarding the issues that the Jews had with him. He had not abandoned his people and certainly had not abandoned the promises of God. Paul still had the same great hope of resurrection that he always had but Jesus had shown that God was fulfilling those promises in a way that he had never imagined. Paul was certain that Agrippa knew of those hopes well. Not all Jews had those hopes, certainly the Sadducees did not, but the mainstream Jewish thought lay in the hopes of resurrection. That’s why Paul was on trial. Not because he had deserted the national hope but had followed the obvious signs and realized that the hope lay in Jesus Christ, the true Israel, and not the nation of Israel.

The hatred that had grown against Paul from the standpoint of the Jewish leadership was far more than just the disdain for one that had left their cause and switched his beliefs away from what they hoped for. He was saying that they had missed the signs and that God was delivering on his promises in a way that was outside of their control. They would have to lay down their preconceived notions and trust in Christ but they were unwilling to do that.

Paul understood all of that. He didn’t have some vague or muddled version of the national hope that he received out in Tarsus. He was trained in Jerusalem by the best and brightest and had taken his number among them. He knew exactly what the Jews believed and hoped for. He had believed it so adamantly himself that he was willing to persecute the Christians with great zeal. In fact, what he tells us here goes beyond what Luke has previously told us. Paul and the Sanhedrin had killed numerous Christians (he might here have been intentionally trying to shame the Sanhedrin, of which he had been a part, by admitting to Agrippa that they had illegally put people to death, as the Sanhedrin could only execute those who violated the sanctity of the Temple’s inner courts), and had forced many into renouncing Christ. He well understood why the Jewish leadership was against him so violently.

But he also had come to realize the hope that they had was based on their own assumptions and not what God had actually done. When Paul spoke of the hope it wasn’t some vague notion. It was the promise of resurrection and the age to come. This was the thing that Paul wanted them to grasp above all. If they really believed that God could resurrect people, why not believe that he had called his Messiah to be the fulfillment of that promise? If they would but stop and consider another possibility for a moment, they would see that what Paul was saying was not that far-fetched and that it was not an abandonment of their hope at all. What Paul was declaring was the hope of God’s people if they would only look; if Agrippa would only look he would see the same.


Devotional Thought
Paul’s assertion was that the Jewish people were in danger of missing what God was doing because of their preconceived notions of how God was going to fulfill his promises. Do you ever find yourself in danger of missing what God is doing because you of your own expectations? Take some time in prayer and ask for fresh eyes to see what God is doing in your life and if there are any areas that you have been upset with God or missing his power because you wanted him to work in another way.