33 Just before dawn Paul urged them all to eat. “For the last fourteen days,” he said, “you have been in constant suspense and have gone without food—you haven’t eaten anything. 34 Now I urge you to take some food. You need it to survive. Not one of you will lose a single hair from his head.” 35 After he said this, he took some bread and gave thanks to God in front of them all. Then he broke it and began to eat. 36 They were all encouraged and ate some food themselves. 37 Altogether there were 276 of us on board. 38 When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they lightened the ship by throwing the grain into the sea.
39 When daylight came, they did not recognize the land, but they saw a bay with a sandy beach, where they decided to run the ship aground if they could. 40 Cutting loose the anchors, they left them in the sea and at the same time untied the ropes that held the rudders. Then they hoisted the foresail to the wind and made for the beach. 41 But the ship struck a sandbar and ran aground. The bow stuck fast and would not move, and the stern was broken to pieces by the pounding of the surf.
42 The soldiers planned to kill the prisoners to prevent any of them from swimming away and escaping. 43 But the centurion wanted to spare Paul’s life and kept them from carrying out their plan. He ordered those who could swim to jump overboard first and get to land. 44 The rest were to get there on planks or on other pieces of the ship. In this way everyone reached land safely.
Dig Deeper
Near the end of his book known as the gospel of Luke, our author Luke describes a scene that has come to be called “the road to Emmaus.” He recounts an encounter between Cleopas and another disciple, possibly his wife Mary, and the resurrected Jesus Christ. They fail to recognize Jesus immediately and as they walk down the road talking together, the mysterious stranger, at least in their minds to that point, begins to explain to them how all of the Scriptures that we now call the Old Testament pointed to Jesus. As the scene progresses the two disciples urge Jesus to stay with them and continue teaching them. They eventually sit down for a meal and they break bread together. It is only at that moment, Luke tells us, that Cleopas and the other disciple recognize that they have been in the presence of Jesus all along. Their eyes were opened, Luke declares, using a statement that is full of the imagery of Genesis 3 at the moment when Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit and their eyes were also opened. Adam and Eve took part in a meal and it opened their eyes to a world of sin, a world of doing their own will instead of God’s. But the death and resurrection of Christ had changed all of that. Jesus had opened up the world to a new way, to the life of Christ where humans could enter through faith and actually keep God’s will by living the life of Christ. When they broke bread together, their eyes were opened, so to speak, to this new creation. And Luke uses the facts of the encounter with Jesus and masterfully weaves them with the imagery of the Fall of man to make his point crystal clear.
Luke Chapter 24 is one of the most incredibly well-written and crafted pieces in all of literature and is especially masterful in the way that Luke ties together literary imagery and the facts as they happened. It is a powerful tool in Luke’s arsenal. A tool that is on display not only in Luke 24 but also throughout Acts 27 as Luke describes the events surrounding Paul’s trip to Rome and the shipwreck that he suffered through on the way.
On a straightforward surface level, Luke is telling us about the harrowing journey of Paul as he makes his way towards Rome and his audience before the Caesar. But Luke’s underlying theological agenda is to explain the spread of the gospel as it made its way through Jerusalem and on to the ends of the world. As readers of Luke we always have to stay on the alert because there is often even more to Luke’s writing than just those two levels of the story. Just as there were echoes of Genesis and the reversal of mankind’s fall that Luke was weaving in under the surface, helping us to understand the larger purpose and meaning of what he was writing, so there are echoes lying under the surface of this chapter and throughout the shipwreck. But before we get to that, first we’ll look at the situation of the shipwreck itself.
After two weeks of tirelessly fighting against the storm to save their lives, the crew was exhausted. It is likely that the seas were so rough that it was nearly impossible to prepare food. Paul’s statement that they hadn’t eaten anything in two weeks is probably a bit of hyperbole, but the point was clear that they were exhausted and had barely eaten. Paul is again depicted in a role of surprising leadership as a prisoner, but in desperate times, men will follow true leaders, and that certainly describes Paul. He knew that the road ahead of them was going to be tough and he wanted the men to be prepared physically for the challenge. Not only did he urge them to eat but he lifted their spirits, reminding them that they would all be spared by God’s mercy.
After eating, the crew jettisoned the remainder of the grain cargo. They had previously thrown much of it overboard but had evidently kept some on board. Now, though, they knew that the only chance they had was to find land and beach themselves as close as they could, so they wanted the boat to be as light as possible. When the sun rose and daylight came they did not recognize the beach on the Island of Malta but they knew that it was their best opportunity, so they cut the anchors and attempted to get to the beach. The plan didn’t quite work, however, as they run aground on a sandbar still a ways off from the beach.
Realizing that they were stuck on the sandbar and would have to swim to the shore, the soldiers reverted to their soldier training. They might have gotten close to these prisoners and even respected the leadership of Paul, but a Roman soldier was a Roman soldier and they knew quite well that allowing prisoners to escape would mean their own execution. So they planned to go by the book and kill the prisoners rather than risking their escape. But the cooler head of the centurion prevailed. Perhaps he knew Paul and these prisoners well enough at this point to know that they would not try an escape, or maybe he just valued Paul and was intrigued enough by him that he didn’t want to have Paul killed with the others. Whatever the reason, the strange intersection of God’s sovereign will and man’s free choice superimposed once again, and the centurion acted to save Paul’s life. God had a mission for Paul in Rome and had acted once again, this time through the centurio, to save him for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel.
And it is in that important detail of Paul being saved that we begin to bring into focus the shadows of what Luke has been masterfully showing us throughout this shipwreck scene. In translating the language into functional, English many translations, including the NIV, somewhat obscure Luke’s obvious clues throughout this passage. It becomes clearer if we go back through this passage and translate identical terms consistently. The folks on the boat gave up hope of being “saved” and began to give in to bitter despair (v. 20). If the men didn’t stay with Paul they could not be “saved” (v. 31). Paul urged them to take some food for it would “save” them (v. 34). The centurion wouldn’t allow the people to be killed because he wanted to “save” Paul (v. 43) and as a result everyone on the ship made it to the land and was “saved” (v. 44). The constant theme was that they needed to follow Paul through the waters that caused death and be saved.
To make the imagery complete, Luke described the meal that Paul gave those on the boat. In so describing a normal scene of Paul taking the bread, giving a standard Jewish prayer of thanks to God, and then distributing the food, Luke has drenched the scene in the biblical language of his gospel that is reminiscent of Jesus before miraculously feeding the multitudes (Luke 9:16); the last supper (Luke 22:19); and Jesus sitting down at the table with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:30). It is probable that the rest of the men on the ship saw this as simply a much-needed meal but Paul and the other Christians, including probably Luke himself, saw it as a participation in the Lord’s Supper for them. And in describing the meal, Luke used the language of the Lord’s Supper to signal what he was portraying under the surface here.
Luke’s underlying point throughout this section was that if you want to be saved, if you want to embrace Paul’s message of the gospel, then it was as simple as going through the water to be saved and somewhere in the midst of that to embrace the meal of God’s people. The pattern of going through the water to be saved was something that God had been showing in pictures to his people over and over again. Noah had to go through the deadly waters to be saved. Israel had to go through the deadly waters of the Exodus to be saved. Jesus declared that if people wanted to be saved they would need to go through the waters and enter into the life of Christ. That was true for Paul, it’s true for us, it’s true for anyone who wants to be saved.
Life and salvation lay just on the other side of those deadly waters. That was the way for anyone who wished to enter into table fellowship with God’s people and be accepted into his family. Or as Paul so eloquently put in Galatians 3:26-29: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
Devotional Thought
Both Paul and Luke lived in a world that was full of other ideas of how to live but they never wavered in their knowledge that one must go through the waters of baptism, die to themselves, and enter into the life of Christ to be saved. Are you prepared to boldly declare that truth to others today? Have you yourself died to self and entered into His life so that you can declare that truth to others?
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