First Century Graffiti

He allowed their lives to be torn apart and radically changed and turned upside down for a purpose that we're able to discover in just a few verses. But listen, a few verses to us is months and years of their lives. Oh, God is moving them. He's expanding the gospel and He's going to use these people in dramatic ways and they will be rewarded and now their lives having long ended, they are entering into an eternal immortality and they would never trade a moment of it.

We have that now. But to them it represents agony of years. It represents graves and suffering. In the first year or two of the early church, Christians wrote positive messages on the walls and walkways in and around their cities. They had some religious freedom and they looked for ways to spread the truth of the gospel.

But that freedom ended. Persecution quickly reached the homes and churches of those believers. It tested their faith like nothing else they had ever experienced. As they walk through that difficult time, their lives are a testimony to us. And that's Stephen's focus today in this message here on Wisdom for the Heart.

Keep listening. In the ancient Roman world, only important letters and documents were written on the expensive paper of the day, that is papyrus. The messages of everyday life found their way onto the plaster walls of the Roman Empire, private buildings and public buildings throughout the empire. This is the acceptable form of communication, this graffiti.

The archaeologists who years ago coined the term graffiti or graffito, they have even found walls that bear the name in one or two places, Jesus Christ. Over the course of the last two years, we've been studying these two years of church history in the book of Acts, the messages that would have been written on the wall communicating the thought of the people in Jerusalem toward this new thing called Christianity would have been positive statements, positive messages. Imagine seeing plastered on some wall the message, I once was blind but now I see, literally.

Or maybe the one word, message, forgiven. If they indeed did splash on those walls messages of what Christianity was doing and what was happening, they would have been very, very positive. But we've studied that the religious leaders for the most part were enraged over this movement, of course their jobs were at risk, the movement of Judaism was at risk. And I can imagine how irritated they must have been if there had been a splash of graffiti on a wall near the temple and maybe it could have said something like Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice.

Imagine that. But whatever the case, they have enjoyed the favor of the people, Christ is respected, Christians are revered, it is popular with the masses, too popular. But all of that will change and it will change overnight. A church leader by the name of Stephen will be stoned to death by an angry mob. What was once public favor with the people will now be turned into persecution by the people. Christianity will be now considered public enemy number one and if you turn back with me to Acts chapter 8, you rediscover with me words that we looked at briefly.

As it reads, on that day, now that's a chronological marker for the student of the word, literally on the day that Stephen was martyred, on that very day, the text tells us, a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem. The graffiti would have been positive up until this point and now that's going to be marked or scratched out and splashed across the walls will now be messages like down with the Jesus followers, death to the Christian, loyalty to the fathers. And it wouldn't be long before Christians are thrown to the lions in the arena. Christians will become the butt of every joke, the desired end of every spear. Nero will blame the Christians for the fire that would soon sweep through the city. History will reveal to us that it was Nero who set the fire in order to tax his people and build newer and more ornate buildings.

It would be the Christians who would be blamed for any natural disaster, hurricane, flood, famine. Christians would have a malicious rumor spread about them in the Roman Empire that they were cannibals as the populace misunderstood their use of communion. It would be the believers that would now be in derision among the populace and Nero himself will later impale Christians on tall poles and cover them with tar and light them and so illumine his garden parties at night.

But in the early days it wasn't Nero who was to be feared. It was a brilliant young Pharisee named Saul who will take as his own personal mission the eradication of Christianity from the empire. And we will study his life and conversion at a later time. But we do notice as he's introduced here as verse 2 informs us that some devout men buried Stephen and made loud lamentation over him. Now according to the Mishnah, that is the oral tradition of the Jewish people, it is against the law for a Jew to publicly grieve the death of an executed criminal. And so when it says here that they are burying him, devout Jews, they are burying him with loud lamentation.

They are in effect publicly protesting the death of this man. There is incredible unrest in Jerusalem on this day as persecution breaks into an open flame. Verse 3 tells us, But Saul began ravaging the church, entering house after house and dragging off men and women. He would put them into prison. See, he had become the supreme inquisitor, the grand executioner, this Saul. He will rip families apart.

In fact, you could circle the word ravage and write into your text the word tear. It is a word the Greeks used commonly of a wild animal tearing its victim into pieces. He, the wild beast, is ravaging the church. He is ripping families apart. He is taking men and women. He is taking fathers and mothers, singles, teenagers, whoever will declare loyalty to Jesus Christ, he will stamp them out.

He is ravaging the church and it began on this day. I want you to take your Bibles and turn quickly to chapter 22 where we see Saul later referred to as Paul as he gives his own testimony standing before the Sanhedrin. We will study his conversion later, but look at his own testimony. I find it fascinating as he admits in verse 4, And I persecuted this way to the death, binding and putting both men and women into prisons, as also the high priests and all the councils of the elders can testify. From them I also received letters to the brethren and started off for Damascus in order to bring even those who were there to Jerusalem as prisoners to be punished. Look at verse 19, And I said, Lord, they themselves understand that in one synagogue after another I used to imprison and beat those who believed in thee. Verse 20, And when the blood of thy witness Stephen was being shed, I also was standing by approving and watching out for the cloaks of those who were slaying him.

Flip over to chapter 26. Look at verse 10. Paul admits, Not only did I lock up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests, but also when they were being put to death, I cast my vote against them. And as I punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them to blaspheme. Literally, I tried to make them deny Christ as Lord.

And being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities. You can't imagine how much the church deeply feared this Pharisee named Saul, the last man on planet Earth you'd ever think would convert to Christianity. Go back to chapter 8, verse 4.

Therefore, here's what happened next. Those who had been scattered went about preaching the Word. It's a great phrase. The word translated preaching is the Greek word euangelion. It simply means evangelizing in case you thought you were off the hook and this was up to me. They went about evangelizing on the basis of from the foundation of the Word. That simply means these men and women, young and old alike, left Jerusalem and they simply went into every town and village as if they were on a mission.

Well, they were. Go back to chapter 1. Look at verse 8. Jesus Christ gives them the command. But you shall receive, verse 8, power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, period. Both in Jerusalem, comma, and in all Judea and Samaria and even to the remotest part of the Earth.

This is the mission right here and it's time to expand. Jerusalem has been saturated with the gospel. In fact, the leaders of Judaism will grit their teeth and with scorn on their tongues, they will tell the apostles, you have filled this city with your teaching. And that excited them. They were fulfilling the Word. The church is growing. It's developing.

It's impacting. But there wasn't a period after the word Jerusalem. You see, who in Jerusalem and place yourself there would volunteer to leave and go into uncharted territory? The church here remained alive and well only because they were willing to relocate their message and their effort.

If they had dug in their heels, they would have stagnated. They could have easily said, well, you know, we've gotten this Jerusalem ministry figured out. We don't do Samaritan evangelism. Jerusalem. We finally established a way to target the Jerusalem baby boomer. That's our market niche.

You don't find a market niche in Acts 1-8. Here's a church who is willing like salt to be shaken out of their comfortable salt shaker to cross over financial barriers and racial barriers and they are willing to take the gospel to other cities. And God just started it all by rocking the boat, introducing painful things because he had something wonderful in store. And so this church was willing to relocate rather than surrender. I'll go back to chapter 8 verse 5. Here's a specific illustration of the believers at large. And Philip went down to the city of Samaria and began proclaiming Christ to them.

This is great. We have to take a moment here and look. Samaria is the last place on planet earth you would ever expect a Jewish evangelist to go, especially having come from Jerusalem itself. You remember now, let's take a little history tour. Samaritans are the mixed breeds, you remember?

They're the half breeds. We studied 2nd Chronicles together and survived. Amen? You remember the king of Assyria came and he swept the northern tribes away into captivity. Some of the Jews remained in the land and he brought Assyrians there to live and those Assyrians intermarried with the Jews that had remained.

Their offspring would become known as the Samaritans. And they were the scorn of the Jewish people for having violated their trust, as it were, having married those from the Assyrian kingdom. And they fell into idolatry and followed the gods of the Assyrian kingdom. Well, every Orthodox Jew would pray in Jerusalem and he would thank God for several things according to their standard prayer.

And one of them was, God, thank you that I was not born a Samaritan. That's how deeply the chasm had developed over the 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Before Jesus created his church, Jews hated Samaritans. And it all sort of culminated when the Jews returned to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple after captivity. Those that had remained pure in their bloodline.

And the Samaritans offered their expertise. They said, look, we've lived in this area, in this region, we know where resources are, we'll gladly help you rebuild the temple. We still believe, many of them did, we still believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the Jews in Jerusalem said, absolutely not. And that deepened the rift and it seemed like it would never be bridged until a man named Philip leaves Jerusalem and he crosses over and he proclaims to them, to the city of bitterness, to the city of isolation, to these castaway people, the truth of a castaway king. Do you notice what he proclaims to them? Don't miss that. He proclaimed what?

How to fix your life in three steps or less? He proclaimed Christ. Not Judaism, they distrusted that. He didn't come to them and say, let me tell you about a great church in Jerusalem and we've got to have one here just like it. He didn't preach to them religion, they had their fill of that as well. He preached Christ, what Christ said, what Christ did, who Christ was, what Christ demands of them, what Christ offers them.

That's the answer to their need and that is the same answer today. As Spurgeon preached a generation ago or two, nearly a century ago in London, he said, we have a great need but we have a great Christ. And he proclaimed him.

My friend, if you come to the point in your life where you realize you have an insatiable need, somewhere here, it's longing for reality. And you can try to put into it things and relationships and career and stuff and you will be like Isaiah said you would be, you will be like the driven waves of the sea tossed about. There is no rest until you find your rest in the one he proclaims, Jesus Christ.

Well, let's carry on here. Verse 6, and the multitude with one accord were giving attention to what was said by Philip as they heard and saw the signs which he was performing. A little mini Jerusalem thing going on here, where in the case of many who had unclean spirits they were coming out of them shouting with a loud voice and many who had been paralyzed and lame were healed.

Now, two things are fleeing from Philip's presence, disease and demons, just as they had fled before the presence of Jesus Christ himself. In other words, this man of God authenticated his message was indeed from God by demonstrating the power of God. And authenticating credentials of a man of God here as God is establishing this new church now in Samaria through these supernatural sign gifts.

Eventually as the New Testament completed itself under inspiration, the credentials of a true messenger of God to that day to this day are not supernatural deeds, but scriptural doctrine. Here's verse 12. When they believed Philip's preaching, the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were being baptized, men and women alike, just as it happened in Acts 2. They believed the message, they identified with it by being immersed, baptizomai, they took that stand as a disciple and they were baptized there as a statement of following Christ. Now, Samaria, a city of deep bitterness, internal anguish that went back 400 years.

Can you believe the words in verse 8? And there was much rejoicing in that city. The city of bitterness had become the city of blessing because of the message of Jesus Christ. Okay, what can we apply to us now, having studied what happened then?

Rather briefly, I should say. Three things. Number one, bend whenever God stretches your faith. Jews from the Jerusalem church would have never dreamed of a Samaritan revival. We just can't fathom what must have gone through their minds. Yet the gospel would come to Samaria because people were willing to flex and change and risk and adapt rather than pine away for the old days in Jerusalem. You remember those good old days? The reason we are still reading about these early Christians in Jerusalem is because they didn't close up shop and surrender. Well, God isn't going to do anything more in Jerusalem. It's a tough life.

Let's hang out the white flag. I wonder at this very moment in your life, I hear stories periodically filtering into my office of great, great pressure in the lives of people. Problems, reverses, changes. I don't have a pat answer for it. I don't think we can throw a verse at it. I think if you were seated with a Jerusalem believer who would quickly pack everything he could carry on his back and he grabbed his wife and a little toddler and they headed out running for their lives. And it's so filled with passion for Christ that even though their lives were ripped apart, they shared the news of Jesus Christ. If you were to ask me why or what is God doing, you would be like me. But we do have enough of scripture to know as we've sung about already. And it struck me as I studied these people and it's this, the God of their history is the God of your future. He allowed their lives to be torn apart and radically changed and turned upside down for a purpose that we're able to discover in just a few verses.

But listen, don't let that throw you. A few verses to us is months and years of their lives. We get to it real quick.

We find out the answer. Oh, God is moving them. He's expanding the gospel and he's going to use these people in dramatic ways and they will be rewarded. And now their lives having long ended, they are entering into an eternal immortality and they would never trade a moment of it. We have that now in just a few verses. But to them it represents agony of years. It represents graves and suffering. And it involves a man named Philip who was willing to so restructure his life and bend his life that it conformed to a totally radically different will of God.

Second, bloom wherever God plants your feet. Now I got that right out of a word. It's the word scattered in verse four. You'll see that little word a couple of times in this chapter. It's also the same word by the way that James uses in chapter one where he talks about the scattered tribes he writes to them. It's a farmer's term and you'd be surprised that a doctor like Luke would use a farmer's term. But under inspiration he selected a word that is absolutely magnificent. There are a couple of ways that scattered can be understood depending on the context.

Scattered could refer to the farmer that goes out into his field and he reaches into his sack and he at random picks a handful of seed and he scatters it to the wind and the wind carries it out and it goes wherever the wind carries it. You aren't where you are by accident. You have been placed by the divine farmer in his field called the world to bring forth fruit. And what it takes is for you and for me to be like Philip and Stephen to say, Lord, I don't understand.

I don't know why, but here am I. Plant me for your namesake. And then bloom, bringing forth spiritual fruit. Bend whenever God stretches your faith. Bloom wherever God plants your feet. Third, quickly believe wholeheartedly that God rewards your future.

You say, I'd love to believe that. He guards your future. And when you discover your future, you discover great reward. So believe wholeheartedly that God guards your future. He will reward your faithful future. But you don't know my circumstances. Can I ask you a question?

Are they any worse than they are here in Chapter eight? God has worked in the lives of these people and he's left their record for us to study and to be encouraged and challenged by. He is at work in your life, too, whether you can see it or not. I want you to listen to an account of something that I pulled from a magazine a few days ago. Here's an account of how God worked in the life of a Jewish believer. A Jewish believer that, as I studied this passage, probably could identify well with him, for his life was ripped apart by World War Two. And yet God was at work behind the scenes and he did something rather unusual.

Listen. Marcel Sternberger was a methodical man of nearly 50. He always took the 909 Long Island Railroad train from his suburban home to Woodside, New York, where he caught a subway into the city.

On the morning of January 10th, 1948, Sternberger boarded the 909 as usual. In route, he suddenly decided to visit Laszlo Victor, a Hungarian friend who lived in Brooklyn and was ill. Accordingly, at Ozone Park, Sternberger changed to the subway for Brooklyn, went to his friend's house and stayed until mid-afternoon. He then boarded a Manhattan-bound subway for his Fifth Avenue office.

Now he will personally tell the story. The car was crowded. There seemed to be no chance of a seat. But as I entered, a man sitting by the door suddenly jumped up to leave and I slipped into the empty place. I've been living in New York long enough not to start conversations with strangers, but being a photographer, I have the peculiar habit of analyzing people's faces and I was struck by the features of the passenger on my left. He was probably in his late 30s and when he glanced up, his eyes seemed to have a heard expression in them. He was reading from a Hungarian newspaper and something prompted me to say in Hungarian, I hope you don't mind if I glance at your paper. The man seemed surprised to be addressed in his native tongue, but he answered politely, he may.

During the half-hour ride to town, we had quite a conversation. He said his name was Bela Paskin, a law student when World War II started. He had been put into a German labor battalion and sent to the Ukraine. Later, he was captured by the Russians and put to work burying the German dead. After the war, he covered hundreds of miles on foot until he reached his home in Debratzen, a large city in eastern Hungary.

I myself knew Debratzen quite well and we talked about it for a while. Then he told me the rest of his story. When he went back to the apartment after the war, once occupied by his father, mother, brothers and sisters, he found strangers living there. Then he went upstairs to the apartment that he and his wife once had.

It also was occupied by strangers. None of them had ever heard of his wife or family. As he was leaving full of sadness, a boy ran after him calling, Uncle Paskin, Uncle Paskin. The child was the son of some old neighbors of his and he went to the boy's home to talk with his parents. They told him, your whole family is dead. The Nazis took them and your wife to Auschwitz. Auschwitz was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps and Paskin gave up all hope. A few days later, too heartsick to remain any longer in Hungary, he started out again on foot, stealing across border after border until he managed to immigrate to the United States in October 1947, just three months before I met him there on that subway seat. All the time he had been talking, I kept thinking about a young woman whom I'd met recently at the home of friends and had also been from Debratzen. She had been sent to Auschwitz and from there she had been transferred to work in a German munitions factory. Her relatives had been killed in the gas chamber. But later, she was liberated by the Americans and was brought to America in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946. Her story had moved me so much that I had written down her address and phone number, intending to invite her to meet my family and thus help relieve the terrible emptiness in her life.

It seemed impossible that there could be any connection between these two people. But as I neared my station, I fumbled anxiously in my address book. I asked him what I hoped was a casual voice. Was your wife's name Myra? He turned pale. Yes, he answered, how did you know? He looked as if he were about to faint and I said, let's get off the train. I took him by the arm at the next station and led him to a phone booth. He stood there like a man in a trance while I dialed the telephone number.

It seemed hours before Myra answered. When I heard her voice at last, I told her who I was and asked her to describe her husband for me. She seemed surprised at the question but gave me a description. Then I asked her where she had lived in Bratsen and she told me the address. Asking her to hold the line, I turned to Paskin and said, did you and your wife live on such and such a street? Yes, Bella exclaimed. He was trembling. Try to be calm, I urged him.

Something miraculous is about to happen to you. Here, take this telephone and talk to your wife. Seeing that he was so overwhelmed that he couldn't talk coherently, I took the receiver from his shaking hands. Stay where you are, I told Myra. I am sending your husband to you. At first I thought I had better accompany Paskin, but I decided that this was a moment in which no stranger should intrude. Putting Paskin into a taxi cab, I directed the driver to take him to Myra's address, paid the fare and said goodbye. Bella Paskin's reunion with his wife was a moment so poignant, so electric, that afterward neither he nor Myra could recall much of the details. Myra told me. I remember only that when I left the phone, I walked to the mirror like in a dream to see if maybe my hair had turned gray.

The next thing I know, a taxi stops in front of the house, and it is my husband who comes toward me. Details I cannot remember, only this I know that I was happy for the first time in many years. Even now, it is difficult to believe that it happened.

We have both suffered so much, but, Bella added, God has brought us together. No matter what life is holding for you at any given moment, my friend, no matter what the consensus of public and popular opinion is about the Savior that you hold dear to, I want you to know that graffiti on a wall is not the final word. God will have the final word. Will you believe Him? Will you trust Him? Will you follow Him?

Even if that means He turns your life upside down. With that challenge, we bring this broadcast of Wisdom for the Heart to a close. Thanks for joining us today. We'll be back with the next lesson in this series on our next broadcast. In the meantime, there are several ways you can interact with us, and we'd really appreciate hearing from you. Be sure and follow us on social media. Wisdom International is on Facebook, Twitter, and you can watch videos of Stephen's teaching on our YouTube channel. Our website is wisdomonline.org. Please join us next time for more Wisdom for the Hearts. Thank you.