Bible Commentaries

Acts 25:19

I. It was essentially the worldliness of Festus which made him regard the resurrection of Christ as an idle superstition. Let us begin by inquiring in what that worldliness consisted. Worldliness—i.e., the preference of the pleasurable to the right, the visible to the invisible, the transient to the everlasting. To feel Christ's resurrection as a power in life demands spiritual sympathy with Christ. Can the selfish see the beauty of unselfishness, or the sensual the beauty of purity? It needs the sense of sin, and of the necessity of a Divine and perfect sacrifice. Does the man of the world feel these? Are not thousands of men, like Festus, simply indifferent to the whole matter? To them the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is a mere story. It may be beautiful and awaken pity; it may at times become solemn and kindle fear; but it lies in their soul's chamber carelessly admitted as true, side by side with the most ancient and exploded errors.

II. Let us consider its aspect for the earnest believer. Turn from Festus to Paul. As we have seen, all his mighty energy of devotion sprang from his belief that Christ lived. There is abundant proof that this was the great theme of his preaching. He proclaimed not the dead, but the living Saviour. (1) The resurrection of Christ was a sign of the Divinity of His teaching. (2) It was a witness to the perfectness of His atonement. (3) It was a pledge of the immortality of man. Christ died our death. He passed into the death kingdom our brother. He came again, communed with men, and then rose, bearing our nature to the Father. There was the witness to the immortal in man. Hence Paul's all-consuming zeal. The radiance of eternal life streamed on his vision through the open tomb of one Jesus, who was dead, but who, he affirmed, was alive for evermore.

E. L. Hull, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 221.

Superstition.

Here Christianity is summarily disposed of by Festus as a superstition. This is a word we are quite familiar with, and we know, in a vague sort of way, what we mean when we speak of a practice or a belief as superstitious, and it somewhat startles us to see Christianity itself dismissed by the scornful Roman as a superstition.

I. The essence of superstition is the having low views of God when it is possible to have higher; in the presence of the higher to maintain the lower. It was, for example, superstition among the Jews in the form of idolatry that was forbidden in the Second Commandment. By that commandment the Jews were forbidden to make any graven image to represent God; and the reason was that the representation of God under human or animal forms was found to debase and degrade their conceptions of God. The Second Commandment is to us a spiritual command. We must study its spirit, not its letter; and its spirit is, Thou shalt not entertain low views of God. We break it when we attribute to God the limitations and imperfections of human nature, whether those limitations or imperfections be spiritual or bodily. It was superstition in the Pharisees when they thought that God connived at their evasion of actual duties because they kept the letter of some human ordinances, when they substituted ritual for deeds of purity and kindness, when they were unjust and cruel under the name of religion. This was superstition, because it meant that their views of God were still so low that they thought it pleased Him that they should worship Him in this way. They thought that God was even such a one as themselves.

II. The evil of a low conception of God is, perhaps, the most subtle and irreparable that can befall the human spirit. Our conception of God moulds our ideal of life. Such as we think God to be, such we tend to become. "They that make them are like unto them," was said of idols and idol makers, and it is true of all conceptions of God. It is a law of human nature. It was precisely because men thought that God took pleasure in torturing men for false beliefs after they were dead that they themselves took pleasure in torturing them while they were alive. That Calvin should have condemned Servetus to the stake, that Cranmer should have signed the death warrant of Frith, are but memorable examples of the evil of holding unworthy views of God. From the fact that higher and lower views of God subsist side by side in a society or country, it becomes a question of interest what is the right attitude in presence of what seems superstition in others. The golden rule, the one absolute, supreme rule, is of course charity—a tender, sympathetic, brotherly love—neither indifference, nor contempt; the desire to raise him, and yet the resolve that while the world yet standeth we will not make our brother to offend. With such charity and sympathy as our guide, we cannot go far wrong.

J. M. Wilson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxx., p. 263.

References: E. L. Hull, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 221; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 248.