You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.
Welcome to More Than Ink. Today we look at issues of life and death with Saul, who's come to Jesus, and with Peter, one of his apostles. So, Saul is receiving death threats, but Peter is raising the dead. Two different issues of life and death, today, on More Than Ink. Well, hello and good morning. I'm Dorothy. And I'm Jim.
And this is More Than Ink. And we are here at our dining room table. We've been talking about Saul and his conversion, how the Lord Jesus literally converted him and said, it's time for the scales to fall off your eyes. Saul, wake up and see. And so, where we left off last week was after his conversion, he was spending days in the synagogue in Damascus, speaking great truth about the name that he had set out there in order to stamp out. And the identity of this name of Jesus as Christ, as God's anointed one, has been a central issue all the way up to this point in Acts.
Who is this guy? And the religious leaders had forbidden the disciples to speak in the name of Jesus. That's what Paul was gonna stamp out. But here he is in the middle of Acts 9, proclaiming in the synagogue, this Jesus is the Son of God.
He had declared him as the Christ and was arguing, literally proving to the Jews there that this was so. And so that's kind of where we left off the story. Right. And you know, the identity of Jesus is, I mean, that is the topic of the New Testament. That's right. It's a central thing.
And so we see it unfolding here. But there were two really competing ideas. I mean, the religious leaders at the time, Paul included, who was named Saul at the time, were convinced that Jesus was a counterfeit. He was not the Messiah. He didn't fit their mold for what the Messiah was supposed to be like. He was garnering some crazy, dangerous sized crowds, which from a populist perspective could be trouble for the religious leaders. I mean, they saw Jesus as a total counterfeit, not the Messiah at all. And Paul so firmly believed that he was going all over the world. Well, and as we said last week at the very end, I think, you can be so blind, so convinced that what you see is correct, that you cannot determine with reality what's right in front of your face until the scales fall off. That's where that expression comes from.
Scales fall off. This very passage of the scales falling off of Paul's eyes. So now we have the new Saul, right? He's been completely renewed. Who has completely changed his view of the identity of Jesus.
Filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaiming this name to be the one and only name by which one must be saved, to quote Peter. And so we find that trouble is following him pretty much everywhere he goes now. Yeah. He's out there doing it. He's being very insistent. He's talking about Jesus everywhere he can go. So we're going to pick up today, if you're with us, in chapter 9 of Acts. And Paul is going to continue to preach. So we're starting at verse 23. Want me to start reading?
Okay. So when many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him. To kill Saul. But their plot became known to Saul. And they were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him.
But his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket. Okay, wait a minute. You know, it strikes me that these first little vignettes here in this chapter, all are lessons in humility. Totally. For this man. Right now he had a couple before, when he was so blind they had to take him by the hand. Right? And lead him into the city. But this must have been a huge blow to his ego. He would have come marching into the city as a man of substance, to do a job of substance. He was the enforcer. Yeah. He was the enforcer and now he's having to sneak out of town because if he doesn't sneak out of town they're going to kill him.
Because there's a plot to kill him and he had been part of similar plots not so very long before. Yeah, yeah. So they decide the best thing to do is just to get him out of town. After dark. Yeah. In a basket over the wall. In a basket, in fact. He didn't even climb down. No. They put him in a basket and they lower him down.
This is humiliating. If you know walled cities, there's very guarded access into and out of the city through the gates. And those gates were all manned.
And so there was just no way he could get out unless he somehow snuck out over the wall and down a basket. Isn't it interesting there in verse 25 it says, but his disciples. So he had been preaching so powerfully that he had gained people who were actually following him. And in one of his letters he says, now follow me as I follow Christ. Yeah.
So that's the model that he has set up here. Yeah. It turns out this basket incident, he mentioned in his second letter to Corinth, and I'll just read it for you, it's in chapter 11. He says, at Damascus the governor under king Aretas, which is important I'll say in a second why, was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands. So not only just the general people but the governor himself. Right.
Well, yeah, and you mentioned Aretas. He's historically documented as having been king in this area or ruler in this area. And because of that history that we have about that king at this time in Damascus, we know that the events we're reading right now took place somewhere between 37 and 39 A.D. We just know it. It's pretty precise.
And if he was three years in the previous episodes we saw and you subtract that back, that means his conversion happened somewhere between 34 and 36 A.D. Well that stacks up as we've been reading it. It all works. That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, yeah. So he's being let down in a basket because, well, things aren't going well in Damascus. So now where do you go?
Where do you go after Damascus? So that's where we pick it up in verse 26. Verse 26, and when he had come to Jerusalem.
Okay, so that's about a week's walk away. He attempted to join the disciples and they were all afraid of him for they did not believe that he was a disciple. Well, because a matter of weeks or months before he had left there steaming to stamp them all out. A visible, violent enemy of Jesus.
Here he is back probably less than a year later and they're like, whoa, we're not sure we can trust you. And verse 27, but Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus. So he went in and out among them at Jerusalem preaching boldly in the name of the Lord. And he spoke and disputed against the Hellenists, but they were seeking to kill him. And when the brothers learned this, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.
Wow. Again, again, the message of Jesus causes people to want to kill the messenger. Well, and again, Saul is being subjected to this humility treatment, right? He can't get an in with the disciples until Barnabas comes alongside and introduces him, right? And then he gains some freedom, but then he makes such a big splash that they have to take him out of town. You know, we gotta protect you, brother.
You don't know what you're doing. Yeah. And there's a clue about this argumentative nature in verse 29. He disputed against the Hellenists. Well, the Hellenists, those are the Greeks and the Greeks think Socrates and Plato and those guys who were very used to arguing logically about religious stuff. So he was engaging the toughest argument people in the world.
I mean, these guys have their act together. And so he spoke to them and disputed with them so much so that they could not refute his arguments and decided we need you to silence the guy by killing him. Isn't that often the way it goes even today?
It does. When you can't meet the argument, you resort to character assassination. That's what we do today.
Or something worse. Yep. That's what you do. You stop arguing the issues, you start attacking the person.
Yeah, it's everything, these things just don't change. But there was a lack of peace in Jerusalem because of this. Right.
Because every day there's these arguments going on and there's these death threats and all. So the brothers learned about it and they took them down to Caesarea, that's up north of Jerusalem a couple days, and sent them off to Tarsus. Now why Tarsus? Well, that's where he was from. Right. He was educated in Tarsus.
Yeah. And Tarsus advised to be one of three of the most powerful academic cities in the world. And that's where Paul came from. That's where he learned the Old Testament. That's where he became an academic and an intellectual. That's where he got all his hot stuff that he's using to dispute these guys. It's really interesting to me though that here in this very early part of Saul's converted life, his new self, he finds himself in the middle of desperately hot disputes because he simply will not let it go. Yeah. Now to be fair, there are instances we'll find in the rest of Acts where his reception is not uniformly good. That's right, that's right.
It's going to cause problems. In fact, they're going to leave him for dead up in the center of Turkey, present day Turkey. So it's not, but there are places where he does go and he's welcomed. But if you will remember the Lord Jesus had said to Ananias, I'll show him how much he must suffer for my name. He who had inflicted much suffering. Yeah, yeah. Well, and at this point in the story, at the end of verse 30, we don't see Saul for quite some time. A little while, yeah. Is it chapter 13, I think it is, that he comes back? I can't remember.
We're going to find out in a couple of weeks. Most commentators when they try and do the math on the calendar here, they figure that from this point at the end of verse 30, we don't see Saul slash Paul for another eight to 12 years. And so he's gone.
He's not recorded. So in a second here, Luke is going to switch his history and start talking about non-Paul stuff. Because Paul is just out there, again, learning and growing and listening to the Lord. He's deepening, he's maturing. But he's not doing much public that Luke decides to document in Acts.
So it's kind of a quiet year. From this point, there's a decade before we'll see Paul come back in his records. Well, and we didn't mention, and partly it's kind of hard to find exactly where it fits in the chronology, when Paul himself says he went away into Arabia for a number of years.
We don't know exactly when that took place. But anyway, he's off the main radar. He's off the radar center of what God is doing in Jerusalem and in Israel for a little while. Right. But I love verse 31.
There's this kind of almost a tongue in cheek statement. So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. Right? That follows immediately upon they brought Paul down to Caesarea and send him off. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it multiplied. Right.
The fear of the Lord, the proper view and understanding of who he is. Yeah, and it's just nice not to have those Hellenists constantly walking around trying to kill somebody. It's interesting that the Hellenists don't here have a documented Acts to grind against the apostles. No. But they do against Paul. So I would chalk that up to maturity and maybe a lot of factors that maybe perhaps for Paul needs to be softened in the next decade.
Yeah. But it is nice without that constant conflict and threat of death. The church is not suffering conflict with the Hellenists.
It's growing and it's maturing and it has peace. And it's in his very short two sentences there in 31 he describes the church that's in the place it really ought to be. Walking in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
And by the way that word comfort is the same word Jesus used for the comforter. Right. The Holy Spirit.
Periclesis. And so it multiplies. Right? This untroubled, undisturbed well-being.
The church has a season of peace. Right. What a blessed thing after this very tumultuous beginning.
Yeah. So Saul is aging like a good wine now before he comes back on the page. I might also mention another historical turning point right here. When you get to the end of verse 31 we are very likely around 37 AD.
Very very likely. 37 AD two important things in these stories happen. One thing Caiaphas the high priest is replaced.
Now after this point Caiaphas isn't in the picture anymore. But more importantly in terms of leaders being replaced it's at this time in 37 that Caligula becomes Caesar. He replaces Tiberius and he starts a reign of terror against the Christian church unparalleled. Things start going crazy.
It gets really bad. So persecution is not going to just be something that Paul deals with as he argues with the Hellenists. It's going to be something that the church finds universally experienced. Right.
Worldwide in the Roman world. Yeah. So let's push on. Saul is off the picture historically. We're shifting gears now back to Peter. Back to Peter. Back to Peter. So verse 32.
You want to read for us? Oh yeah. We don't know exactly how these dovetail together time wise. This is not strictly after Paul was sent off now Peter went here and there. Peter had been going here and there among them all.
So pick it up in verse 32. Now as Peter went here and there among them all he came down also to the saints who lived at Lydda. And there he found a man, Aeneas, bedridden for eight years who was paralyzed. And Peter said to him, Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you.
Rise and make your bed. And immediately he rose. And all the residents of Lydda and Sharon saw him and they turned to the Lord.
Oh boy. There's an echo of something Jesus did right there isn't there? Yeah. We have the paralytic who was lowered down through the roof and he says, your sins are forgiven. Get up. Right? And the guy at the pool of Siloam he says, do you want to be well?
Get up and be well. It's fascinating to me that Peter had observed those. And here he is saying exactly the same thing. He's literally walking in the shoes of Jesus. Walking with Jesus. And this is the way it works because just as we said about being filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter's filled with that Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the same Spirit that was in Jesus, is in Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the same Holy Spirit.
This is the same God. So you should expect that if Peter shares the same Spirit that Jesus did, Peter should be doing similar things. Now, but Peter has an advantage here that Paul did not or Saul did not have. And that is that Peter had been with Jesus and seen him do this. And he is proceeding exactly as Jesus did. What he saw.
Yeah. Now we don't have any examples yet of Saul healing people. That's not until he comes back later and he's known as Paul when the Lord does healings through him.
But it just strikes me how alike Jesus this is. And we're going to see it again in the next little story. Even more so. Yeah. Oh, very much.
Yeah, even more so. Yeah. So just to keep your geography straight, Lydda is present day LOD, L-O-D. It's over toward the coast.
Yeah. It's just outside of Tel Aviv actually. In fact, the first time I went to Israel, we went to the LOD airport. Well, that's what it was called, wasn't it?
It was called that. Yeah, it was called the LOD airport, L-O-D. I think it's the present Ben Gurion airport. But it's the big international airport you come into when you go to Tel Aviv. But that's the city. That's Lydda.
That's Lydda. So we are almost on the coast around by Tel Aviv at this point. That's important to know as the story goes on. Okay. Shall we read on?
I'll do it. 36. Now there was in Joppa. Okay, wait. A little farther up the coast from where they just were. It's very near. Yeah, it's on the coast. Very near.
Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which translated means dorkus. I forgot. Is that gazelle? I think so. It's an animal thing.
I forget what it is. Okay. Anyway, she was full of good works and acts of charity. In those days she became ill and died. And when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. And since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples hearing that Peter was there, sent to men to him, urging him, please come to us without delay. So Peter rose and went with them. And when he arrived, they took him to the upper room.
And all the widows stood beside him weeping and showing tunics and other garments that dorkus made while she was with them. But let's just stop right there for a second. Okay.
That's a nice set up to what will happen next. Okay. So this wonderful woman who's highly appreciated in the Christian community. She's dearly loved. Dearly loved. She dies.
Sad. So the people there in Joppa know that they've heard that Peter's close by in Lydda, in Lod. So, you know, let's see if he'll come. Do you think they're expecting him to raise her from the dead or just maybe to come and bring some comfort to the widows? Well, they know that many healings have taken place in association with Peter. The Lord is doing it, but Peter was there.
And so perhaps that's all they know. But, you know, as we read on to this story, even at this point, it started sounding to me familiar. Well, you know, there is an account that three of the Gospels record. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the account where Jesus is called to the bedside of a child who is dying. And there's great weeping and an assumption that she is gone. She's irretrievable.
She has died by the time he gets there. And so this, if you lay this story alongside those, all three of those Gospels are very, very similar. It reads so parallel. I encourage you readers to do that, because again, this is one of those cases where Peter is like, oh, this sounds familiar. I saw the Lord Jesus. I saw how he responded to the people. I saw what he did.
And we're going to see Peter do the same thing. In fact, the two people who were raised from the dead have very similar names. This one here is Tabitha, if you say it right.
The other one is Talitha. So it's very interesting. I mean, the parallels are just spooky.
The one place I went just to check, if you want to find one of the references in Mark 5, near the end of Mark 5. Anyway, so he's basically going to walk in Jesus' shoes right here. So they're weeping. They're showing tunics and garments that Dorcas had made for them.
I mean, it's just a great scene. So we start back, what, in 40? Verse 40. But Peter put them all outside and knelt down and prayed and turning to the body. So it's very clear she's dead. Turning to the body, he said, Tabitha, arise. Well, that's exactly what Jesus said to the little girl. That's Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes and when she saw Peter, she sat up and he gave her his hand and raised her up.
Then calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive. And it became known throughout all Joppa and many believed in the Lord. And he stayed in Joppa for many days with one Simon, a tanner.
Ooh, bum, bum, bum. That sets up an interesting story. That's an interesting story, but that's for another time.
Yeah, let's circle back here to this amazing thing. Yeah, so why do you think God had Peter basically completely reenact the Talitha episode here now in Joppa? That's an interesting question. It's almost a carbon copy.
It really is. I wonder if it's possible that some of them had heard. Could be, yeah. The story. Because there is another story intertwined with it in the gospels of the woman who had that years and years of bleeding and was healed. The supernatural activity of Jesus here being replicated in Peter.
I don't know. I don't have a definitive answer for you, but the parallel is striking. It's really striking. In fact, if anyone had seen the other event, had seen this event, it would be the perfect kind of act of authenticating that Peter is an emissary of Jesus. Right, exactly.
It's exactly the same. There's one part that always, it makes me chuckle and scratch my head and wonder a little bit. This phrase right after that, after he says, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes and when she saw Peter she sat up.
I noticed that too. I mean picture her laying on this bed with her eyes closed. Suddenly she's alive. She opens her eyes. She sees the ceiling. Of course if you're a movie fan you're thinking, let's see, am I in heaven or am I in hell? She was expecting to see Jesus.
Yeah, so where am I? And so she's still lying there until she sees Peter and then she sits up. Well, now did she know him? We don't know. We don't know. We don't know, but I'm sure she comes to the realization that she's not in heaven. Right, right. So she figures, well I guess I'll sit up.
I don't know. That whole scene is really kind of funny to me. But in any case he brings her out and presents her. Look, she's alive, right? Now this is Peter who early, early days in the ministry of Jesus, his mother-in-law had been laying sick in bed with a fever. Now she wasn't dead. But Jesus came in and healed her and raised her up. So Peter from the very beginning of his association with Jesus has seen the Lord Jesus by his power. Raised people from death or near death.
Right, right. I love the touching thing here too about him. He gave her his hand and raised her up. It says she sat up, but it's just such a warm and tender thing to take her hand and to seat her up. It's a warm little inclusion that Luke puts in that just kind of makes me go, oh, that's really nice. Because I don't think he does that with the little girl.
I don't think he does that with Talisha. She just gets up and starts walking around. She's a 12-year-old.
Well, I can't remember. I'd have to go look at it again. But it's possible also that this woman was elderly. She's surrounded by widows and she has been doing what she's doing for some time. And maybe she needed help to get up because she just was still in that body. I think that's exactly right.
Yeah. And also he says he presented her alive, which means, see, there's no one in the room at this moment. Just like with Talitha before, there's no one in the room. Except Peter, James and John were there to witness it. That's right. So he presents her alive, which means he walks her out of the house, walks her out the doorway where everyone has been said, go outside.
And he says, look, she's alive. It's just a wonderful thing. And it became known throughout all of Joppa and many believed in the Lord. No wonder. Yeah. Just an amazing thing. Amazing thing.
And so they're just totally overwhelmed with what they've seen just happen. And of course their invitations are, stay with us, stay with us. And verse 43, that's exactly what he does. He stays in Joppa.
It's a little coastal town near where Tel Aviv is today. And he tells us in verse 43, where we'll stop today, he stays many days with this one Simon who's a tanner. Now just to kind of tweak your thinking, a tanner is someone who is perpetually unclean. Right.
Because they're touching dead animals. So something is starting to change because the old Peter, who is an observant Jew, would never have gone to stay in the house of an unclean man. Maybe that's kind of a foreshadowing something that's going to happen at Simon's house.
And actually it is. Well, the next story gets even better. Yeah, it gets even better. And Peter's in for some big changes that rival or even surpass the change we saw in Saul's life last time we were looking at this. Peter's going to go through one of the most remarkable changes because he's staying at the house of Simon the tanner in Joppa. And God's going to meet him there and have his thinking radically rewritten based on what happens to him there. We're out of time.
We are totally out of time. So we're going to continue to follow Peter. Next time we come back, we're going to go back to Simon's house and God has in store for him one of the most unexpected events in the entire New Testament, which will actually be argued about really for some time throughout Acts. And that whole issue is about the Gentiles and it's about food.
Those two things will plague the early church. So I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we'll see you next time here on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you are there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself.
And you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. Welcome. This is Jim. This is Jim and Dorothy. Let's start. Here's your second chance. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.
