Bible Commentaries

Reasons for Doubt

Acts 26:8

That is a new apologetic; that is a Strategic move of the first order. This is new to me; that is a masterstroke. What a sagacious statesman was the Apostle Paul! Hitherto we had been thinking that it was the place of faith to give reasons; the Apostle pushes the war to the other side, and says, You must give reasons for your doubt. Why, that opens a wide field of criticism and observation and profitable comment. It is the Apostle who says, Stand up, and defend yourself; you are a doubter—why do you doubt? give a reason for the doubt and the fear or the unbelief within you.

I. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that all these outward and sensuous things were created? Tell me, be downright frank with me, why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should have created the universe? I think it is about the most believable statement that can be made; it seems to me, compared with any other theory, the simplest of all philosophies. If I want rest on all these subjects I read Genesis first chapter and first verse: "In the beginning". When was that? The dateless date. "—God." I like that word; it is a kind of sanctuary word, temple word, there is something in it. "—created." That word is the best I have yet heard upon this subject All material forces, magnitudes, splendours, utilities were created, set agoing, shaped, vitalised by a Personality equal to the occasion. I like that explanation best. Sirs, it is the most rational explanation. I must have mystery on the one side or the other; I will either have the mystery of light or the mystery of darkness, and I prefer, let me repeat, the mystery of light. Whoever shaped all these things must have been greater than the things he shaped; if Acts 26:15-18

These words must ever form one of the great charters of missionary work; they are wonderfully comprehensive. They were, indeed, originally the charter with which the Divine Head of the Church delivered to the great Apostle his commission to preach the Gospel first to his own kinsmen, and then to the Gentile world; but they contain, as we should expect, the germs of the commission which will be needed by the Gospel messenger till the times of the Gentiles have been fulfilled, and Israel has been grafted in again, and the number of the elect completed—until the militant kingdom is over.

One of the greatest temptations by which the devil hinders the spreading of the Gospel in the present day is the apparently simple but fatal suggestion, "Is it worth while?"

It is indeed no new trial. The dull reception of the missionary of our own day is the same in kind with that which awaited the Divinely commissioned Apostle on his arrival at the great centre of the heathen world. "We neither received letters out of Judaea concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came showed or spake any harm of thee." Could any reception be less inspiring or fall more flat? Indeed, we might rise far higher and say that this is but following the example of Him who "came to His own, and His own received Him not".

But this temptation under the simple form of the question, "Is it any good?" Acts 26:19

I. The Pauline Message.—This was no sudden revelation to St. Paul in its final form. It was the outcome of a life of discipleship. He was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, and so it grew and expanded before his spiritual eyes until it left nothing outside its range, until it offered to him that unity after which all thinkers are consciously or unconsciously striving, and in the end he was able to conceive it as a whole, to express it, however inadequately, in terms of human language, and to propose it for all time to come as the profoundest and the most ennobling philosophy of the life of mankind.

II. The Heavenly Vision.—We must consider the heavenly vision as it first smote on St. Paul's astonished eyes. For what he then saw and heard held in germ all that he was to learn hereafter. The Lord's first words to him contained implicitly the whole mystery of the Father. It was not merely that the Lord appeared and spoke to him. It proved that He was still alive in spite of death. That indeed was much. It was enough to make him feel that he was found fighting against God, as his master Gamaliel had once feared might be the case. But the Lord's words here, as elsewhere, are instinct with love. They go out beyond the first suggestion of their meaning, and they find their full significance only in the light of the truth which St Paul was himself destined to proclaim. When once we have grasped the corporate relation of Christ and His disciples, the words are discovered to be profoundly significant. If we were to inquire what made the truth implicit we should have to study his whole life for the answer; we should have to consider the three elements of his manhood which fitted him for his peculiar vision. Paul the Hebrew, Paul the Greek, Paul the Roman—all these went to the making of Paul the Apostle. This was the man whose many-sided being found satisfaction in the Christ, when it pleased God to reveal His Son to him.

III. The Pauline Mission.—This was the man who was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Plainly such a man as this was a man to be claimed for a great cause, was a chosen vessel to bear the name of Christ to the Gentiles. Not only had he the large mind which could carry everywhere Stephen's liberal designs, but he knew what he was doing in accepting a mission to those who were beyond the frontiers of Judaism, and he intended absolute unity between Jew and Gentile from the very first, and could never surrender it, no, not for an hour. He could never allow the possibility of a broken Christianity, which should admit of two Churches, Jewish and Gentile. The Gentile was co-heir and concorporate with the Jew or he was nothing at all. In one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same function. The individual must know his place in that body, and fill it with deference and self-restraint. He must recognise that others are as necessary to the body, though they do not serve it with a gift like his. The life of the body is one, though its manifestations are various. It takes all members to make a body, and no member is living at all apart from the whole body. The body is Christ.

Thought and Action

Acts 26:19

St. Paul is now looking back from near the end of his career to the day of his great change. From that day to this his life had been summed up in the two words, vision and obedience.

I. The first apparent view of any life is presented by its output of deeds. The Christian life is not that of visionaries, it is a life of action. The first thought of those who live it day by day is of something immediately to be done. It is this practical quality of the Christian life which keeps it both healthy and honourable. For the soul as for the nation, service is the highest honour. A right man's view of his profession can never be merely that it is a means of gain, but that it is a chance for service; and the same thing is true of even our most intimate and private actions.

Yet this cannot be all. Every one remembers Langland's immortal figure of Haukyn the active Acts 26:19

St. Paul's career as a Christian began in two supreme events—a vision and a commission. To the end he goes back to them, and traces their effect upon his future, telling and retelling the story of his conversion. Yet no reader of his writings can fail to see that vision blends and alternates with action throughout his course. The Epistles are constantly turning from marvellous lights of revelation to most practical directions for living. Thus from him we learn loyalty both to past and present light.

I. Loyalty to past vision. The management of thoughts and swift imaginations is proverbially difficult, and there is much disloyalty to the visions of the past.

Apart from anything for which we are responsible, we are so constituted as to live in a constant change and flux both of moods and of intellectual and spiritual powers. Such changes depend on bodily health, surrounding circumstances, and countless other causes which we cannot wholly command. Accordingly it will often happen that we have to remember what we have once seen, and to carry out the resolutions which then we formed.

In such an hour idleness is fatal. If we cannot see to do the highest things, let us at least do something. "If the energy, the clearness, the power of intuition, is flagging in us, if we cannot do our best work, still let us do what we can—for we can always do something... if not vivid and spiritual work, then the plain needful drudgery." But besides that there is often the necessity for dogged perseverance in a course whose value we can no longer see.

II. Loyalty to present vision.—The grim and cheerless course we have just described is not, however, the normal way of Christian living. There is a snare in trusting to the past too much, and striving to be faithful to brilliant spiritual experiences which are no longer any more than memories. The Christian ideal is loyalty to a vision constantly seen at the time of action. It may be necessary sometimes to fight today's battle by the light of other days, but as a rule of life that is unsatisfactory and insufficient. It is good to remember God's grace in the past, and to recall His promises for the future, but it is better to have some clear vision at the hour. As Constantine saw the cross on the field of battle, so we should see our spiritual help and backing at the time of our practical need.

—John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, p39.

References.—XXVI:19.—A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. iii. p165. A. H. Bradford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p81. Church Times, vol. lx. p58. J. A. Robertson, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv. p612. M. G. Glazebrook, Prospice, p123. J. G. Greenhough, The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, p241. XXVI:19 , 20.—F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. i. p157. XXVI:22. —Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p244. XXVI:22 , 23.—Ibid. vol. xii. p170. XXVI:23.—Ibid. (4th Series), vol. iii. p373. XXVI:24.—M. G. Glazebrook, Prospice, p173. XXVI:25.—Expository Sermons on the New Testament, p134. XXVI:28.—G. Bellett, Parochial Sermons, p43. R. C. Trench, Sermons New and Old, p11. W. H. Brookfield, Sermons, p175. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No871. J. Tolefree Parr, The White Life, p216. XXVI:28 , 29.—C. Bradley, The Christian Life, p305. J. M. Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p264.

The Christian Life Worth More Than All Things Else

Acts 26:29

There are only two scenes in the New Testament which are finer than this, and they are in some respects similar scenes; Christ before Herod, and again before Pontius Pilate. With that exception there is nothing more admirable in history than the Apostle's attitude and language here. He had to plead his cause before an august audience. They were a wholly unsympathetic audience. But Paul was one who feared God and feared no one else, and who, when he got on his favourite theme of Christ, lost himself in it. There he stood, with his rough, much-worn garments, his thin, scarred face, with all the marks upon him of privation and ill-usage, and chains on his hands and feet. And Paul, lifting up his manacled arms in face of all their splendour, said: "Would to God that you could be as I am". He had taken the proper measurement of those men and women. He knew that his life was as much greater, fuller, and happier than theirs as the power of a Csar was more and wider than that of the meanest slave in his empire.

I. It is in the spirit of these words that every real Christian speaks today and makes his appeal to his fellow-men and women. In the spirit of these words he measures and judges all things. In his deepest heart he does not believe that any man or woman is to be envied, no matter how greatly favoured by fortune, or that any condition of life is to be desired, however splendid and attractive its advantages, if there is no Christian faith and Christian hope as its centre and foundation. We who are Christians do not always put the true estimate upon our privileges. We envy the wise, the distinguished, and even the easeful and luxurious who seem to have no crosses and no cares. But suppose some magician were to come and say: I will give you all that, and take away all your crosses; I will make your house a palace of wealth and your names illustrious, if you will just sell me your bit of faith and your hope in God, if you will let go the heavenly light by which you walk. Not for all the world would you consent to that awful sacrifice. No, you would turn from the tempter to look up in the face of Christ and say: Take from me anything Thou wilt, but go not Thou away.

II. We know beyond all question that the Christian life has far more in it than any other. It has more of the things which make for real joy. It has more true friendships. It has far larger objects to strive for. It has greater hopes to stimulate it. And hence you can understand the fervour and the very passion with which we appeal to others to be reconciled to God and to make the Christian life their own.

—J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, p201.

References.—XXVI:29.—J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (2Series), p163. XXVI:30.—Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p293. XXVI:31.—Ibid. vol. vii. p117. XXVII:1.—Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p124. XXVII:6-14—H. Smith, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p417. XXVII:9.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p350. XXVII:12.—Ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p131. XXVII:13 , 14.—J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1Series), p90. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. ii. p485. XXVII:18.—J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1Series), p109. XXVII:20.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No1070.