The Apostle by John Pollock

Author:John Pollock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Paul, apostle, John Pollock, biography, disciple, Christ, missionary maps
Publisher: David C Cook
Published: 2011-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Timothy had brought another money gift from the Philippians. Paul could now temporarily abandon the loom and leather to devote himself to preaching, aided by Silas and Timothy. He concentrated on the synagogue, longing to see a nobility of spirit like the Bereans’, which would create a firm base for advance among pagans.

But Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah reacted like those in Pisidian Antioch: “They opposed and resorted to abuse”—and the word Luke used need not be limited to verbal abuse. Paul may have suffered once again a synagogue whipping, the “forty stripes save one,” in the presence of Crispus, who was the ruler of the synagogue, and all the congregation. If so, there was a terrible irony in Paul’s words when with bloodied back he picked up his torn clothes, drew himself painfully to full height, shook the clothes free of the synagogue’s dust in a symbolic action that all recognized, and alluded to those words of Ezekiel by which a messenger is discharged of responsibility for the death of those who refuse his warnings. “Your blood be upon your heads!” cried Paul. “I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”

His heart was as sore as his back. He longed that Jews and non-Jews should be one in Christ, a “new Israel”; Paul had nothing of the anti-Semite in him. He still hoped to win his “brothers according to the flesh,” and it was for this reason, as well as the convenience and size of the house, and not because he wished to provoke and snub the Jews, that he accepted the offer of Titius Justus to make the house next door to the synagogue the place for preaching about Christ. And the first convert to be baptized, with his household, after Paul’s withdrawal was none other than Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue. A man named Sosthenes took his place.

When the news spread in the city that Paul had been forced out of the synagogue, pagan Corinthians began at last to flock into the church, until early on any Sunday morning the lawn and mosaics round the fountain in the house of Gaius Titius Justus were covered by men and women, sitting separately, all eyes on Paul as he preached and on Silas or Timothy as they baptized afterward.

In Paul’s mind, however, a seed of worry took root, that the pattern of previous cities was about to be repeated; rejection by Jews, progress among the pagans, fury from Jews, and then, just when the gospel gained a hold, expulsion by mob violence or judicial process. The fear grew in him that he would never find a city where he might lay a spiritual foundation and build unhurriedly. One night as he sat late by himself in the upper room at Aquila’s, when the city’s noise had ceased except for the occasional bark of a dog or the metallic tramp of guards on their rounds, depression, which was one of the strands of Paul’s nature, seemed to gain the upper hand.

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