Paul

Transcript

I thought for our Sunday school class, we would take a look at the Apostle Paul. Obviously, the life of the Apostle Paul, we're not given a whole lot of information about his early life as far as where he grew up, that type of thing. We know that he was from Asia Meyer, from Tarshish. Next week, we'll probably look at the importance of that city. We know that he had Roman citizenship as well, so that obviously is going to help him in the preaching of the Gospel. But we'll get into that in our next classes. We'll probably have four classes, I think. Is it 31 days in March? So we do have four classes. So what I'd like to do today, anyways, with that said, the Apostle Paul, we'll do a deep dive into his life, probably, beginning today, but definitely in the following classes. What I'd like to do today, anyways, is kind of give an overview of the world that Paul lived in. What was the world that he lived in? We read these epistles, we read the Acts of the Apostles. They're doing all of these things, there's miracles being performed, the Gospel message is being preached to all of these different cities. But what did it look like? What did Paul have to deal with as he traveled around the Roman Empire? Was it easy? Was it hard? When he went into the cities, what did they look like? What were some of the trials and tribulations that he had to deal with just with travel? When he talks about this in 2 Corinthians 11, where he kind of lists all of the things that he had to go through to preach the Gospel message, to start these ecclesias everywhere, to make sure they were running properly, make sure that they had sound doctrine within them. That was like a big thing if you look at all of the epistles, particularly ones to Timothy and the Corinthians and others, Paul, of course, was concerned about doctrine. Were they following the doctrine that was given to them by his own mouth and by the other disciples that were preaching? We'll get into that a little later on. What was the world like? What was the world like of the Apostle Paul? And so hopefully we can answer that question. So here are some of the things we'll take a look at, the Roman and Greek world, obviously, what were the cities like? When you say I went into Thessalonica, what did that mean? Yeah, I lived in Rome, what did that mean? We read about these cities in the Old Testament, maybe in history as well. Oh yeah, he went here, he went there. But what did that mean? What did it mean to do these things? Paul just didn't wake up. He's like, oh, I'm in Ephesus today, hold on, boop, kind of like when Stephen was taken to the eunuch, the Ethiopian eunuch and then taken away. That didn't happen with Paul. Paul wasn't by the Holy Spirit. God didn't put him here. And then, OK, you're going to stay here for a week. And then I'm going to transport you over to this area. He had to use the mechanisms of travel afforded to him at this point in time in the ancient world. What were roads and waterways like? We learn, we hear a lot about Roman roads. And it's true, they had a lot of roads. But one of the easiest way to travel was by water. It was actually a little safer. And you could carry a lot more things or transport a lot more things on a ship than you could on roads. That didn't mean people didn't travel on roads, believe me. But shipping was the big way to travel. And Paul did that, right? Sometimes it worked for him, right? Other times it didn't. Like the last story that we'll look at in Paul's kind of life is the big shipwreck, right? And kind of the stuff that went on. It's a great story, by the way. That's why as the older I get, I kind of do things that I'm interested in. And I'm interested in Paul. Outside of Jesus, Paul did the most to spread the gospel message of Christ. And God told him that. He said, you're going to be my mouthpiece to the Gentiles, the apostle to the Gentiles. You're going to speak before kings, Christ tells him. All right. In our life, we live in a Christian country for the most part, OK? Obviously, we know that there's a separation of church and state. Christian laws don't necessarily apply in the secular world, although there is certainly influence. We have to kind of wipe our mind. And I know it's very difficult. We have to wipe our mind of the modern world. Because it really, in a lot of ways, it's extremely different. It's almost like a different earth almost. And our minds are kind of geared towards the modern world and all of the conveniences that it has in it, all right? So we've got to, you're sent out as a Jew, as Paul, he's a Jew. And he's going out into the vastness, the complexity of the Roman world. And what are the things that he had to deal with? Well, certainly other religions. Paganism was the order of the day. Cults, astrology, oracles, magicians. I actually did a few years ago, I did a midweek class on some of the cults and stuff like that that were around there. Again, something that I found interesting. I hope you did too. But this was the world. No one knew about Jesus. No one knew about Moses and the promises made to Abraham. And God's plan of salvation is given to the prophets in Judaism. No one knew anything about that. No one cared. And so this is the world that Paul was being sent to by Christ to change the world in a very fundamental way, a total change of the Roman world. It's going to take about 300 years. But Rome is going to go from a hardcore pagan superpower to a Christian empire, a Christian kingdom, in about 300 years, 350 years. Pretty amazing. And then the Jews in the Gentile world, what did that look like? Number one. And then number two, is Paul going to use that kind of relationship? We know he's going to. He's going to use the fact that the Jews were very comfortable for whatever reason, they were very comfortable kind of living in other places. You know, they weren't a group of people that just kind of stayed in their own little area of Judea and Israel. They didn't. They went out. We talked about, I think, last time how some of the Jews went with Alexander the Great to go on his conquest of the Persian Empire and into India. There were Jewish soldiers that went there. There were all kinds of Jewish settlements in the east and all kinds of Jewish communities throughout the Roman world and all of these big cities. And this was like a perfect setup for Paul. Perfect setup. He was very comfortable, right? Very comfortable in the synagogues. He could preach. He knew the law. He grew up at the feet of Gamaliel. We'll see what that's all about. And so he's preaching all of these things first to the Jews, right? He tries to, you know, get the Jews on board, but it wasn't a two year period. It wasn't great, right? He had all of these fights in these different synagogues. And word would travel before him. Oh, here comes Paul and Barnabas. They're teaching some strange doctrine. And a lot of times there would be uproars, right? There'd be riots, which happened all the time, brothers and sisters, in these ancient, ancient, ancient cities. Riots all the time. All right. Pax Romana, the Roman piece. You know, this was one of the things that God is going to use. The fact that Rome was that relative piece during this time and trade when everywhere people were going back and forth. It was a great kind of situation. All right. So very quick background on Rome. OK, Rome is located in what country, Judy? What country is Rome located in? Italy. All right. And so it really started out as a very, very small little kind of backwater town, right? You guys hear about the story of Romulus and Remus. The wolf is going to keep them alive until these two twins are going to be found by a shepherd. The shepherd is going to raise them unbeknownst to the shepherd. These two were nobles, right? They were the future king, or Romulus was, anyway. OK, they slowly, very, very slowly, they're going to get into fights with the other tribes in Italy. Shocker, I know. And through battles and deals and diplomacy and stuff like that, again, very slowly, they're going to take over all of Italy, all right, and the vastness of Italy, and particularly up in the north, the Po Valley, very rich in agriculture. Up in the north as well, there's mines, like gold mines, silver mines, there's copper in this area, too. But listen, the Romans were never satisfied with just Italy, and they kind of pushed. They pushed northward. They had a big fight with the Carthaginians, who were from the city of Tyre, and the Phoenicians, which should be, we should know them as well, because they were neighbors of the Jews. They were neighbors of the Israelites, up north, and in fact, Ezekiel has a lot to say about Tyre, and their kind of obsession with monetary things, with material things, and that kind of fits exactly with the history of the Phoenicians. They were really obsessed with trade and with material things, and they're going to start a big city called Carthage. They're going to get in a big fight with the Romans, and the Romans are eventually going to win, and very slowly, they're going to kind of take, they're going to conquer Spain, they're going to conquer Gaul, and Greece, Asia Minor, so on and so forth, in a very slow process. I probably should have moved you up to the front in the first place, you know what I'm saying? Susie's in the background, he's paying attention now, but very easily distracted. You're in the right spot, buddy. I talked to your mom and dad, actually, it's like, put him in the front row, perfect, or

you're the type of kid that's like, oh, Mr. Leon forgot my glasses, you know what I'm saying? I know the tricks, guy. All right, so the Punic Wars is going to give the Romans complete control over the Mediterranean Sea. And so what this does is, it is going to unify all of these people under one kind of set of rules and regulations. That doesn't mean that the cultures of these different places didn't continue on. We know that they continued on, because in fact, the Romans are going to, it's like a soft conquer, all right, they're going to soft conquer Judea, they're going to put in

like that, they're going to be their client kings. But we know that the culture of the Jews continued on. Had their temple, had all of their rituals and their customs, and Rome would allow that all the time. They'd say, okay, as long as you're paying your taxes, you're not causing us problems, everything's good. Just make sure you pay your taxes. And we know the Jews begrudgingly did this, and eventually it's going to come to a head. But anyways, there's a great little story, I've probably told this before, but there was a group of people that, you know, they wanted to fight Rome, again, Rome was kind of bullying people. And one of these great lines was one of the Roman generals goes, and he has this conversation with the other general, and he says, look, Rome offers you war or peace. It matters not to Rome. Oh, oh, we're dealing with a tough guy here, right, and so that's, this is Rome's attitude. They weren't going to take over everything, we're Roman, we're the best, that type of thing, okay. They were heavily influenced by the Greeks, and so when historians talk about this period, oftentimes you may hear, and you've heard this, the Greek and Roman period, okay, because, you know, the Romans are like, oh, the Greeks, yeah, we love their culture. They were really impressed by Greek culture, okay. They thought that the Greeks were a little too effeminate for the Roman taste, but whatever. You know, the learning, the literature, the culture, that type of thing. So in their religious beliefs, as we're going to say, the Romans completely copied all the Greeks, just gave them different names. Like for instance, Zeus, right, the main god of the Greeks, he turned into Jupiter, right. Same guy, did the same thing, same story, same fables, that type of thing, so. All right, questions, comments from me before we go on? All right, first 15 minutes, beautiful. Beautiful, I haven't lost anybody, I don't think. All right, what do these cities look like? What was the deal with the cities? Okay, so this is a picture, I believe, of Calcutta, I think. Oh, no, you know what this is? This is Medellin in Columbia, on the hillside. These places is actually where Escobar and a lot of the drug dealers, this is where they kind of, you know, cut their chops and made their, you know, made their, you know, a name for themselves, you know, in kind of places like this. So take a look at this, okay. Ancient cities were super crowded, you know, like modern day Hong Kong. You ever see pictures of Hong Kong? There's an apartment complex in Hong Kong that you don't have to leave the apartment complex to get anything you want. They have supermarkets in there. It's this massive complex that you don't even have to leave, and it's kind of stacked. And then they have these massive, gigantic apartment complexes that you can't even see when you're down on the ground, you can't even see the sun. That's how kind of congested Hong Kong is, I'm sure you've seen pictures of it. It's a congested city, all right. Very small group of people were kind of crammed into a very small area. Sanitation, great, no. Were there no-go areas in these cities? Violence, absolutely, sure. Violence was endemic in a lot of these places. Fire, plague, disease, earthquakes, crime, violence, you know, open sewers. They didn't, you know, some of the more wealthier kind of nobility would have kind of running water. They would have like a fountain that would came in running water into their, they'd actually have a little tap too that they could, you know, a little thing that they could stop the water from coming in. But the regular guys, regular Joe Schmoes like us, we're not going to have running water. Okay, these cities would have public toilets though, you could go there. That's, you know, you did your business, public, like in Rome they had fountains everywhere. They would bring the water into Rome, but it was your, you had to bring the water from Rome into your home if you didn't have it. So, there's that aspect. A lot of different people coming to these cities. The cities were where it was at. Cities was where you could make your money, make, you know, get, you know, go into a different lifestyle, that type of thing. People from all over the Roman world are going to come to these cities. Incredible amounts of trade. You know, when we think of trade we know, you know, they, I was reading an article the other day about the cranes that lift up, the massive cranes that lift up all of the stuff off the cargo ship. I guess 90% of all the components of these cranes are made in China. And I guess there's like spy software that the Chinese put into these cranes that they can actually like monitor the things that are coming in. It was wild. And so the Chinese are making these cranes, but they're also putting little spy technology and software into the mechanisms of the crane. So anyways, you know, just kind of think about the hustle and the bustle and all of the cargo that is coming through like Long Beach, California. Think about that. It was no different with Rome, right, on a scale, on a scale. People from the time the sun went up to the time it went down, people were busy, okay. And it wasn't like, you know, I need my own time, I need my own space, right. It didn't happen in these big cities. You didn't have your own space, particularly if you were kind of like the working poor, which unfortunately the majority of us would be if, you know, you look at the numbers. We'd all be like working poor. We'd have a job maybe. Maybe one of us would scrap it a little bit and maybe make a, you know, make a little bit more. But, you know, come on. Hopefully we would all be free men. We would be citizens at least. But again, the numbers tell us probably the majority of us are either going to be working poor or slaves, right. Not great. So again, this is the type of people that Paul is coming to contact with. A lot of slaves, right. A lot of disenfranchised people. A lot of people that are kind of sick and tired of just kind of the rituals of the pagan temples, right. They weren't offering anything to the people. And that's going to be a big thing with Paul. Paul's going to offer them something. Paul's going to offer them not only salvation in the future, the gospel of salvation for all mankind, but what Paul in Christianity is going to offer the people is some type of community. A community of people that could help each other, that could work together, that had a set of ethics, morals, and beliefs as their foundation that they all agreed upon. And that's going to fundamentally kind of alter the thinking of people, all right, particularly in these cities, all right. Small population of rich, right. You're probably talking about like a 5 to 95 percent, 5 percent were really wealthy, right. You had some kind of middle class, very small middle class. And then the rest, like I said, slaves, working poor, just trying to make ends meet, okay. Sometimes you had enough food, sometimes you didn't. Some, you know, you had a lot of kids, obviously. There wasn't access to birth control, that type of thing. You know, four kids, oh, sorry. I apologize. Four kids would be small back in the day, right. You'd have, you know, seven or eight kids. A lot of them, unfortunately, as we know, would not survive to adulthood. And so when we talk about, you know, the ages of when people die, you know, the life expectancy in the ancient world was like at, you know, 40, okay, 40 years old, all right. But does that mean that no one lived to be like 60, 70 years old? No, it didn't. A lot of people lived to be 60 and 70. The thing that drops down life expectancy is infant mortality, okay. If you have something that's doing zero, right, you have one person that, you know, obviously, you know, dies when they're an infant or a baby or something like that, or lives to be three or four years old, and then you have another person that lives to be, say, 100, well, what's your life expectancy going to be? 50. But you're like, wait a minute, this guy lived to be 100 years old. Well, you know, you know, we know how it works, okay. But that's what I'm saying is, were there very old people? Did people live into their late 60s and 70s and sometimes even 80s? Yes, absolutely. Okay. But a lot of people are going to die when they're young, too, because of disease. And that's why we get, you know, oh, people only lived to be 40 years old. That was the life expectancy. Yeah, just by a numbers point of view. But, you know, thousands and thousands of people are going to live into their 60s and 70s and 80s and so on, okay. All right. So we talked about that. All right. So are we getting a good picture of what, you know, the world that Paul is going to go into, right? He knew this world, by the way, brothers and sisters, right? He had one foot, you know, he was a Roman citizen. He grew up in Tarshish, which was a city in Asia Minor. We'll look at that next week, Lord willing. But he was immersed into Judaism. He loved it, right? He was like in a hardcore sect of Judaism, Gamaliel. He knew the law. He knew all of the Psalms. He could probably recite all of the law of Moses by memory. Right? Every day he would pray. We've seen pictures of him at the wall, at the Wailing Wall. He was just kind of rocking back and forth, you know, saying their prayers. There's a movement with a lot of the prayers, okay? And so Paul knew all about it, right? You know, what does he say in Romans? You know, he was a tribe of Benjamin, of the Jew. You know, he's like, listen, I'm the Jew of Jews, right? I know all about it, people. Okay. All right. So what are we dealing with when we're talking about numbers here as far as these cities are concerned? Well, number one, Damascus. We know Damascus is still around. But back in the day, 45,000 people lived there. Ephesus, 51,000. Alexandria, 250,000. All right? And that may even be, you know, more. Like for instance, Rome, 500,000 in Italy. There's going to be times when in Rome that the population is going to be close to a million people. Think about that. A million people. No electricity. There's no pumps. There's no natural gas. Nothing. Just think of it. It's almost an impossibility to really kind of think about it as living in a world. And kind of like putting ourselves in that. It's like, you know, no healthcare. Like I'm going to the doctor's. I don't feel good. Oh, you broke your arm. Well, we've got to go to the hospital. No, I'm sorry. No hospitals around, right? You had to kind of fix that yourself. You broke your foot. Or you have like a heart issue or something like that. Big thing back in the ancient world? Parasites. Sorry to say. You know, intestinal parasites were a big thing in the ancient world. Cholera. These types of things. Unsanitary conditions. All right? We haven't even gotten into preaching the gospel yet, brothers and sisters, right? And so when Paul kind of goes through all of these things, he doesn't kind of mention like the day-to-day struggles that he would have to go through just to kind of preach the gospel. He talks about like some of the big stuff. I just think day-to-day, what am I going to eat in the morning? You know? Or I just got beat up last night. Almost to death. They chucked me out of the city. You know, what's the process to get from that situation to back on your feet and traveling again? You know what I'm saying? Like it doesn't tell us, like the Acts of the Apostles doesn't tell us those details. But unfortunately, it's almost like you're craving those details. Like, okay, well, you know, Paul's, they left him for dead outside the city. You know, they just chuck rocks at this guy and say, get lost. Chuck him out the city. And then everyone thinks he's dead. But no, he's not dead. He just popped right back up. You know what I'm saying? I don't know. It's just, it's an interesting thing. Like how did he get from that position to back on his feet again preaching? It's amazing. Really is amazing. And I think that goes to show you kind of the mentality of Paul, the zeal of Paul, the commitment and love that he had for Christ. He would go through all of these things. And as he says, not only going through all of these physical and mental things, he's also got a what? He's got to kind of manage the Ecclesiastes too, right? He's got to take care of some of these issues. And this is where we get the letter. So and they're beautiful letters, aren't they? They're almost, in some cases, they're beautiful written literature, right? From a literature point of view. But we can see the love that he has for people, right? You can see the love that he has for his brothers and sisters and the love that he has for Christ. And he's going to, throughout all of this, throughout all of his travels, all of the things that he's going through, he takes time to kind of write these beautiful letters to his brothers and sisters, right? And the majority of them are what? They're upbeat, they're positive. You know, something, you know, you kind of have to drop the hammer on some people, understood, but the majority of them is like, listen, show the same love that Christ showed. Show it to each other. Be meek and gentle and kind to each other, right? These types of, you know, what does he say there in Ephesus? Be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake. As forgiving you. I just think that that is a wonderful statement of hope, of joy, of community, while he's going through all of this kind of trial and tribulation navigating the Roman world. And he sits down and he writes these kind of beautiful, encouraging words to us. Words to the early day brothers and sisters. He writes to us as well. You know, he didn't care about himself. He didn't care about his own kind of, you know, he says, I count all things like refutes, right? He says, they're all junk to me. They're all trash to me, except for the gospel of Christ. And so just, you know, lastly, kind of cities where, like, we talked about this, right? It's a place where things were happening, right? You want to, maybe you wanted to kind of work yourself into the good graces of one of these noble families or something like that, right? Become, they would sponsor you. They would be your patron, all right? You know how, like, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, they made all of these things? They didn't have another job, you know, they weren't like shearing sheep on the side. They do this in their part-time. This was their full-time job. They had clients, though. They had patrons that would pay their money to work on certain types of things. And so without the wealthy giving, like, Michelangelo and Leonardo and others, you know, Bonicelli and all these other people from the Renaissance, they didn't have the resources. They would never have done the things that they did. So this is a way of resources. You see genius, you apply the resources, and then boom, you know, you get the Sistine Chapel and, you know, all of these other things as well, all the great inventions of Leonardo. And that's how it worked in the ancient world, brothers and sisters. It isn't like you went to the bank and said, I would like a loan for 500,000. I'm going to start my own business. Yeah, do some paintings. I'm really good at the marble and whatnot. You know, it's like, you're not getting a loan. There's no one. But if you do find a rich person that says, oh, you know, he's really into art, and he loves, you know, he loves sculptures and colors. He's really into that, and he's got a little extra money, boom, the other guy. Rich people do that today, right? Wealthy people, some of the prices of this ridiculous art, it's still going on today, all right? And so, if you had some type of skill, you didn't want to just kind of hang out in the hills of Judah, right? Maybe you would, you know, if your mind was someplace else. But other people, other people didn't want to just stay in the hills of Judah and live a nice, quiet life. I want to go to the city, baby. So the action is, let it ride, right? And so this is what happens. It was a place of learning, all kinds of different temples, people everywhere. You're running into different types of people, and you can understand in this environment how quickly a new religion and a new way of living would spread, right? You, Paul talks to a sailor, sailor man, right? Blah, blah, blah. Talks about Jesus Christ, this, that, and the other thing. Sailor looks at him, okay, I got you, I got, sounds a lot to my neighbor, the Jewish guy. He sounds a lot like this, oh, yeah, yeah, it's a lot like that. Let me tell you something about Jesus. Well, anyways, he tells you, you get on your ship, you go out to Spain from Rome, now you are carrying this colonel. Maybe you talk to somebody. You say, you know what, this guy really made an impression on me. And so, you know, you've got it now, and this is how it's going to, maybe another guy comes in contact with you, Ben, right, who came in contact with Apollos or something. You know, we don't know how the Holy Spirit worked in this situation, but it's fascinating. Right? Eventually, it's going to spread through the whole Roman world. You guys, I'm sure, have heard the old maxim, all roads lead to Rome. I'm going to, I have a couple of pictures to show you that that indeed is true, okay. But, you know, Rome, you know, they didn't build roads because they were magnanimous to people. Oh, you need a road, sure, buddy, I'll build you a road. You need help with the transportation, do you? They didn't, they weren't, they didn't build roads for that. They built roads for one reason, to get their war machine to the people that they wanted the war on, and this is why there's so many roads. Particularly, as we're going to see, the roads go north because that's where the Gauls were, the Celts, the Celts of which I am, you know, descended from, and so the Romans are going to have these massive battles, as we know with the Celts up in what's modern day France, okay. It was called Gaul, and there's going to be a big slaughter up there, but anyways. So, these roads are first built for them to get the allegiance to different places. They're going to be used by everybody, though. The road is built, now it's like, oh, nice, flat area, I can take my goods. It's a lot easier than walking on these little paths through up and down foothills and in forests and stuff like that. Look at this, nice, straight road, and then they would use it as well. And so they would go before they would build these roads to go up to, say, like up into Germany or something like that to fight the barbarians. And then afterward, when they were done, they didn't rip up the road, here you go, here's your road, and so they would use that. People that were traveling would use the roads. Traders, obviously, common people. They weren't safe, though. A lot of times they weren't safe. There were areas on the road, there were a lot of bandits, you'd get robbed. This was one of the things why, you know, like travelers, traders, overland traders particularly, they were always armed. They always had like a contingency. Some of the bigger caravans, right, we're talking about 400, 500 different types of animals, they would have an armed escort, right? They would have an armed escort. In fact, we know about this because in Ezra, he didn't want

a guard. He didn't want the Persians to give him soldiers. He said, I'm going to trust in God. I don't need your soldiers. So this is interesting. The first group of Jews that came back from Babylon to Jerusalem did it without an escort, without an armed escort. They did it themselves, which is pretty scary. And so there were scary spots as well as they went to different locations, okay? Thievery, you know, robbery. Well, we know, the Good Samaritan, right? What happened to this guy? He was just going from Jerusalem down into Jericho. What happened? He got beat up and he got robbed. Happened all the time, okay? And Paul talks about this, right? Perils, perils here, troubles here, fearful. You know, I could deep dive into the psychology of Paul while he went through all of these things. Like there had to be a time, I'm sure. He says this a couple times in his writings. We despaired even unto death. Remember he said that? Well, look at that later on. He despaired even unto death. He's like he just wanted to die. It was so grievous to him. So difficult. And it just shows you the type of individual. A lot of these stones would get slippery when wet, all right? So you didn't have a lot of good traction. The Roman soldiers actually had little nubs of metal on there, kind of like cleats on the bottom of their boots, their sandal boots. And that's how they kind of kept traction, particularly when you have a mass of men crashing up against you. You wanted to have cleats to kind of stay in your position. Yeah, so long distances. Again, if you can't do it by ship, you know, obviously there's places on the earth that you can't get to directly by ship. And so what would happen is obviously you'd ship a large, you know, shipload full of goods and then it would be transported to different places, kind of like we do. You know, the big ships come in unloaded by the spy software Chinese cranes and then they're put on what? They're put on trains or trucks, right? Usually trains, they go and they, you know, trains can haul massive amounts of, you know, stuff, right? And that's how we do it. We're still doing the same thing just on a larger, more, you know, just on a larger and a more, not intimate, but more complex, more complex way. And we're using modern technology and internal combustion engines, that type of thing. All right, so a couple, just a couple right here. Number one, you can see all the different roads, where they went. You can see the trade routes as well in the Mediterranean Sea. Look at all the different shipping routes in the Mediterranean Sea. He's going to use, he's going to take advantage of this, okay? Paul's going to take advantage of this. He's going to travel everywhere via ship. You know, you go to like Joppa, which was the main, the main shipping in Caesarea in Israel at this time, hundreds of ships would be coming in and out of those places constantly. Boom, unloading things, loading things back on, you know? It was just boom, boom, boom. So, roads, shipping, shipping lanes, that type of thing. All right, pretty complex, pretty complex world that Paul is going to be having to deal with. All right, I got this off of Facebook or Twitter or something like that. All roads lead to Rome, a data visualization unveiling mobility patterns. Ooh, at a very large scale, created with routing algorithms. So, this is all the different, you know, this is AI now. And they put together all different roads, okay? And you can see there's like, what, three or four main roads that lead out of Rome. But then there's all kinds of smaller ones that connect to those bigger tributaries that lead all the way into Rome. So, pretty, and guess what, brothers and sisters? You go there, they're still using the same, the same paths and the same roads today

that were, the Romans made them bigger, but they had been there for thousands and thousands of years. Like, I was watching Rick Steves travel, great show, okay? And he was talking about the Swiss Alps, and one of the roads, the Dolomite Road, he said that this road was one of the passes that have been used for thousands and thousands of years to get from Italy up until Germany and also up until Gaul, which is modern day France. I thought that was pretty interesting. It's like, you know, if it's not broke, don't fix it, let's just leave. So, a lot of these roads in Europe, Roman roads, they just repaved them. They started another thing, too, like, they were comparing like a modern road with all the potholes and asphalt and everything. Like, this one is trash. This road from Rome 2,000 years ago is still in operation. It's not that easy, but they do have a point. Okay, is this? Yes, Steve? Somebody was saying that the trains now, when you look at a train track, it's, you know, the width of a train track. You wonder, like, why is it that wide? Have you heard this story? I have, yeah. Go ahead, tell it. It's the same width as the chariot wheels. Is that true? Yes, that's right. So, if you, the chariot wheels, right, it's the gauge of the track is very close. I think it's actually almost exactly the same, and they use that as kind of a, you know, a measurement that they could use, you know. From the ancient world, Steve, we still have it. It's still affecting our modern world. It's awesome. All right, this is probably one or two slides here. One of the Greek poets, Hestoid, said that there were 33,000 gods in the world, Roman world and other places, okay. Roman gods, Egyptian gods, North African gods, Mesopotamian gods, temples everywhere. Thirty-three thousand gods, right? The ancient man was very fearful of the gods, okay, because the gods, for the most part, particularly the Greek and Roman gods, really didn't care about people. In fact, the gods, the Greek gods, had a lot of the same characteristics as people, like negative characteristics, jealous, vengeful, you know, without pity, without mercy. They're no compassion, that type of thing. And so, you know, a lot of writers would say that, you know, human beings are kind of just like playthings for the gods. They had a different understanding of their relationship with their gods. It was one of fear, that at any time, a god could get angry. Zeus could get mad at you, Tammy, get mad at you, boom, it's over, it's over. He's been saying some stuff about you, and so there was a lot of religious anxiety, like, oh, what are the gods going to do? Are the gods going to send rain, right? Are we going to have a good harvest, that type of thing? Along with this, there were also very secretive kind of mystery cults, religious societies that were dedicated to one special god, okay, the cult of Mithras. Mithras. This involved a lot of killing of a, it was like in an underground place. There was a goat, not a goat, an ox that would be killed, and then the blood would be slowly kind of sprinkled on the priest and stuff like that. It was a whole ritual. But Isis was a big one. You know, these different types of cults, okay, that were secretive and they were just dedicated to one particular god. There were oracles. You would go to find out, you know, what was going to happen in your life. You would go to different oracles with a question, and hopefully you would get some advice. Like the one in Delphi, okay, that's kind of the most important one, the one, the most famous one that was located in Greece. And people would go on pilgrimages to go to the oracle of Delphi. Like that was important. Before any big, like a general goes on campaign or something, there's a big battle. Oftentimes they would go. Like Alexander the Great went to the oracle of Delphi.

Other great, you know, Greek generals would go to the oracle of Delphi. And they would have a question, you know, am I going to be victorious, this type of thing. And so there was a whole like scam going on at the oracle, okay, because the way that they had the temple set up, there's two things. Number one, they had kind of like, not crawl spaces, but walk spaces between the wall and the outside wall. There was like a little walkway or a little hallway in between that a priest could kind of sneak in, and he could listen to what they were talking about, okay. They would get all of this information. He would go and he would share that with the girl who was the oracle, okay. So now you have some background information, number one, all right. Number two, the girl would be intoxicated by wine, number one, and also they would put like hallucinogens, like mushrooms, okay, mushrooms today, call them magic mushrooms, whatever. Psilocybin, I think it's called, okay. And they would put, ground up some mushrooms, put it in the wine, okay. So now you have a, you know, a psychological now, okay, and this is the kicker. It was underneath like a volcanic fault, okay. There was like a crack in the ground. You can actually go and see this crack in the ground. During this time, small amounts of gas would be coming out of these cracks. And so not only do you have this young woman who is intoxicated with mushrooms and also wine, now she is breathing in these fumes, and it's causing her to kind of say really like cryptic crazy things, like in languages that couldn't be understood, word associations that wouldn't make sense to the average guy. Good thing we have the priests though. The priests were there, and they could translate for the oracle. And with this background information, a lot of times, you know, right on baby, you got it, okay. So, interesting. This was very important. We kind of smile and smirk and hee hee ha ha. This was deadly serious to ancient man, to the Romans, deadly serious. He didn't make fun of the oracle. Good way to get killed, Nate, cracking jokes about the oracle of Delphi. And then obviously, you had, you know, astrology. Astrology was big during this time, different phases. Remember, you know, at nighttime, they didn't just turn on the TV or they were on their device, you know, whatever. It was nothing. Pitch black for the most part, outside of, you know, a little lamp or something like that or a fire. And so what did people do to kind of, you know, they would look up, they would see the stars, and there was no pollution, light pollution, right. And so the movements of the celestial objects in the sky, big, big business, big business. Like if you understood astrology and the movements of the different things, just think about that type of stuff. Like that's secret knowledge. You knew when the next eclipse was. Oh man, that's some big time secret knowledge, okay. And so a lot of this stuff, and Paul is going to run into some of these people that we're going to look at, right. He's going to run into some of these characters, the musicians, the magicians, those type of people. Different types of amulets that they would keep, right. That they would, they had special power in the amulet of the Tasman, they would call, right. And so it would protect you. You know, oftentimes people, you know, wearing a crucifix or something like that, something along those lines, all right. And so these amulets in these special, you would go to a, like a woman that knew chants and knew incarnations, kind of like Saldi with the Witch of Endor. But you would go and they would, they could put a curse on your enemy. You go to one of these ladies, you put a curse on your enemy. It's actually a death sentence. You find out you were putting curses on people, gone. Death sentence. In fact, in the Middle Ages, and this comes out of this, but, you know, a lot of times if like a king wanted to get rid of somebody, right, they would trump up charges of witchcraft. And, you know, that type of thing and say, yeah, he was, he put a curse on the king. This is, remember when the king got sick? Yeah, and they put a curse on him, gone. But watch yourself, buddy.

Transcript

So, last week, if I remember correctly, we had gone over just, you know, because what the ancient world looked like, you know, in the time of Paul. We're looking at the Apostle Paul. I always like to kind of give some background information on the world so we can actually understand what is going on during this time. It never really made sense to me just to talk about a person and their actions and their decisions and stuff like that. And how we're really understanding the environment that this person was in. So, it's really, it's important to understand the environment that not only the Jewish people were in, but by extension, the Apostle Paul as well. And how that affected the psyche of Jewish people living in a pagan world, a hostile pagan world a lot. And the same with Paul. How did that affect their psyche? Well, look at that. You know, some people chose different paths. Some Jews chose the path of integration. We're going to go into the Rome or this other city. We're going to set up a little community. We'll do our own thing. Other people said, no, we're going to stay right here in the land. We're not associating with them at all. This is the land that God has given us. We're not going. And I think those two types of Jewish people had a very different outlook on

the world. Okay? And so, that's going to be an issue that is going to rear its ugly head as we go on here. So, what is this all about? Major revolts and riots in the empire. I want everyone, maybe you've already been staring at this for a little bit, but take one minute and just take a look at that.

And then I'd like some feedback on what you think is going on in this map. Major revolts and riots from 4 BC, okay, to 200 AD. Every fire represents a major revolt in the Roman world. So, what do you think? What is, Ben, what is something that jumps out at you? Okay, yes, around the frontier, very good, at the extent of Roman control, very good. Somebody else? Going once, going twice. How about, let's take a look at the area of what is known today as Israel, okay? Ben made a great point that a lot of these revolts are happening, for the most part, on the edges of the Roman Empire, and that's absolutely true. Unfortunately, for the Romans, the Jews were on the edge of their empire and their area of control, and also for the Romans, the Jews were right next to their hated enemies, the Romans' hated enemy, which were the Parthians or the Persians. And so, the Jews were right there on the border, and that was no bueno for the Romans because what the Romans wanted was a stable area, a nice buffer zone between the Persians and themselves. The Jewish people were not giving them a stable buffer zone at all. In fact, if we look at here in the corner, the bottom right-hand corner, look at all the fires in that area, okay, particularly like Alexandria. I think we talked about this. There was a sizable Jewish community in Alexandria, and they actually had a lot of battles with the Greeks. The Greeks hated the Jews. The Jews hated the Greeks. It wasn't great. And then, you know, of course, you see the revolts that happen in and around Judah, in and around Israel. I count one, two, three, four, five anyways, okay? So, this was an area of unrest. This was an area that was constantly on the minds of the Roman government because they were concerned about it. And so, I just want to kind of give you, you know, a little sense of what, you know, how the Romans looked at it. The Romans didn't look at it as the Jews would just allow a little backwater. They, in some cases, they were, but they were also extremely important to the security of the Roman Empire. So, all right, moving on. So, let's take a look at this, Jews in the Gentile World. Just a quick comment on the right-hand side about the

picture that we have up there. This is, this is of a biblical scene.

Anyone know? Anyone venture a guess on what this scene is presenting to us? Oh, Ben is, Ben's the A student, this is why he sat up front. So, this is, this is, Moses is found by Pharaoh's daughter, drawing him out of the water, right? And you have the different people. You can see the little, the little, you know, the Ark of Vorush is there. They kind of made it like a, like a little, like a building or something like that. It's interesting. Now, here's another little interesting thing about this. This was found in a Jewish synagogue, this painting, this fresco, in a Jewish synagogue on one of the outposts on the border of, with the Persians and the Romans, okay? So, Jews were right there on the, on the border as well. Right down the street from this synagogue, what was, what was there as well? Anyone know? This is around 200 A.D. Right down the street from the synagogue. There was a Christian church, a house church, and they have this. You can actually go, I think I showed some pictures of this. But, so this, this just shows you that, you know, right down the street from this synagogue, in Dora Ryopa, you had a very small house church that was going on in the 200s and 80s. And so, even during this time, you had interaction between the early day Christians and the, and the Jewish communities. Unfortunately, they're going to grow further and further apart as we're going to find out, you know, and, you know, we have the situation that we have now. All right. So, we know that the Babylonian captivity is going to happen around 600 B.C., right? We're talking about 2500 years ago. Okay? We know that they were dispersed. The Assyrians came down first into Israel, the scattered tribes, the lost tribes of the, you know, we have no idea where they were taken. The same with some of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity as well. They lost to history. We know that there was a sizable community in Babylon for hundreds and hundreds of years of Jewish people. I don't think there's anybody, I think, I read someplace that there's like two Jews now living in Iraq or something like that. It's crazy. And we know that there was a massive trend, you know, they, massive population exchange, you know, in 1948, the Arabs kicked all the Jews out and they had to go to Israel. But anyways, so, the Hellenization of the ancient world is going to have an impact on the Jews and the Hellenization just means the spreading of Greek culture in language, in their philosophy, in their outlook on life, that type of thing. Okay? And so, in a lot of ways, through war and conquest, Alexander the Great is going to spread Greek ideals to everybody, including the Jews, including the Jews that were living in Israel at this time. And some of the Jews are going to go with Alexander the Great on his adventures. And there's going to be Jewish soldiers in Alexander's army and Alexander is going to give them certain, you know, land and, you know, cities that they can live in. So anyways, so they're going to come in contact with all kinds of different peoples. Antiochus Epiphanes, without getting into it, Antiochus Epiphanes, was a Greek who controlled the area of Syria. Without getting into it, Alexander the Great is going to die. He's going to divide his giant empire into four different sections. They're going to all fight each other. Boo, boo, boo. You have the Antioch up here. You have the Ptolemies down here, down in Egypt. Boom, boom. They're always fighting. Anyways, Antiochus Epiphanes is kind of one of the great scoundrels of history and Jewish history. He's actually going to attack Jerusalem and he's going to attack Jerusalem, destroy a portion of it, and take Jews captive. We don't really talk about this, but Daniel makes mention of it, okay, in the 12th, 11th to 12th chapter. Anyways, he talks about Antiochus Epiphanes in very kind of cryptic language, but he is going to, you know, destroy portions of Jerusalem. He's going to kill tens of thousands of Jews and he's going to take them captive as well, enslave them, and this is going to be the catalyst for the Maccabee Rebellion, okay, which was a group of very devout Jews that said we've had enough of this. We need our own country. We need to control our borders. We need to control our own culture because we're getting destroyed by these Greeks. These Greeks are coming in and doing whatever they want, and so the Maccabees and other people are saying, look, this needs to stop. We cannot have this influence over and over again. We're losing our culture. We're losing our identity. We're being scattered to the winds, and so the Maccabees are going to revolt against the Greeks, and they're going to be victorious. And in fact, they're going to establish, I think for over 100 years, 150 years, they're going to establish an independent Jewish state during this time. Now, was it from the House of David? No, but the Maccabees and their descendants are going to control this area. They're going to be kings. They're going to be leaders, and this is, you know, Herod's going to come out of this as well. He wasn't a Maccabee. I believe Herod married into the Maccabee family, and he's going to kind of wheel and deal and become Herod the Great. Anyways, there's going to be a deep divide, like a palpable hatred, between the Greeks and the Jews, okay. They're just going to be so different. The Greeks are going to look at, they only believe in one God. Might as well be an atheist then, right. Look at all these kind of rituals that they go through. You know, circumcision was a big one for the Greeks, right. Weirdos. But the thing is, without doing a deep dive into circumcision, but, you know, the Jews, there were other peoples as well that practiced the circumcision as well, notably the Egyptians, okay. So it wasn't like this weird thing. The Greeks were just looking for stuff, you know, to get bothered by. A lot of riots are going on, okay, between the Greeks and the Jews. So, you know, to counter this, and this seems very comfortable to us, I think, okay, to counter this influence from the Greek world. Well, the Jews said, you know, we've got to remain, you know, committed to our traditions, committed to Yahweh, committed to the rituals of the law. This is important. Not only is it a religious thing, but it's a cultural thing as well. Like, the identity of a people in the ancient world was always tied to religious beliefs. Always. And so if you destroy a god or a temple in the minds of the ancients, you've destroyed a people. And so the Jews are understanding this, you know. Every time someone goes into Jerusalem and takes something or kills people, comes into our land, we lose a piece of ourselves. And so this is why these revolts are going to happen, and they're going to become, this is where the Pharisees are going to come out from, okay. And the Pharisees are going to get, and rightfully so, they get a bad rap because, you know, they were putting all these different burdens on the people. They loved the power and the control that their religious positions afforded them. But in a time of kind of upheaval, it was the Pharisees that kind of coalesced the people, the poor people, and impressed upon them the importance of tradition. Impressed upon them the importance of Yahweh, obviously, but also their culture. They tied it all together, and they became kind of the traditional, the traditional religious Jews that we know from the New Testament, okay. It all came out of this period. And so one thing that I find fascinating, and I give this a lot of thought sometimes, you know, God uses situations, and he uses events of this time period to bring about his purpose. All of these things created the environment for the birth of Christ. God chose this very specific time period using all of these events to bring his son into the world, okay, at that particular time. And I think it's just amazing, you know, God, and God in our lives as well. Sometimes we can't see it. You know, the Jews, the faithful Jews couldn't see this, but God was working. He was working in the world to bring about his purpose. Daniel talks about that too, right, the watchers, the angels, you know, the, what did he say, the prince of Persia withstood me for a certain amount. And I think a lot of this, you know, is going on here as well. So there was a separation, a major separation between the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews, okay. And, you know, there's a lot of disdain on both sides. There's a lot of hatred on both sides, right. The Greeks hated the Jews. The Jews hated the Greeks. And there was arrogance on both sides, right. The Jews were saying, you know, we're the chosen people. Hashem, Yahweh has blessed us. We have the oracles of God. These Greeks are nothing. They're dirt to us, okay. This is how some people thought, right. And there's still sects of Jews that think like that, okay. And then you had the Greeks looking down on the Jews as well as were uptown. So it wasn't a great situation. And this is where the idea of a religious martyr comes in. This is the idea where the zealots come into. You know, the zealots were a group of people where the Pharisees, it wasn't good enough. You know, we've got to use violence to get rid of some of these people. You know, we got rid of the Greeks with the Macedonians, but guess who rolled in after the Greeks? The Romans, okay. And the Romans were a different people. Romans had a different outlook on life. A little more, you know, they wanted to control this area. The Greeks, for the most part, didn't like the Jews, but kind of let them do their thing. When the Romans roll in around 60 B.C. with Ptolemy, they take over the whole place. You're a province of Rome. Congratulations, right. Now, this is going to afford certain people like Paul the ability to get citizenship. Because in Tarshish, where there was a sizable Jewish population that we'll look at, Lord willing, next week, a lot of them had citizenship. It was a Roman city. They were born in Rome. You know, they were born with Roman citizenship. That was important. So just think about that. We have a time period in Roman history where they were giving Jewish people, Jews, citizenship. They were full citizens of Rome. That was important. There was power in that. And we know that Paul is going to use that power that he has to help his fellow, you know, Christians, but also to help himself, right, to get out of another beating or something like that, right. And I love, we'll look at this, but I love the way that Paul goes after, you know, the centurion. You know, no, they beat us in public. You're going to apologize in public, you know, different stuff like that. And there's a great line with, you know, Paul tells the centurion, you know, I'm a free man. And the centurion goes, with a great price I bought this freedom. How did you get it? How did you get it? How did a Jew get, you know, citizenship? Oh, Natasha's, buddy, sorry. Can't take it away from me. Let's see, many Jews leave Israel. Okay, yeah, Jews are going to leave Israel for better prospects. We know that. They're going to settle in the big cities. And you know what? The Jews are going to, you know, as they kind of move throughout Europe and North Africa or stuff like that, they're going to choose the cities, right, to go in. There's a lot of opportunity, a lot of trade, a lot more interaction, that type of thing. In other words, Jews are not leaving the land of Israel to go farm, all right? They're looking for other opportunities in these big cities, whether it's Rome, Antioch, or, you know, Alexandria, a huge population of Jews living in Alexandria, huge, like 200,000 Jews living in Alexandria. And this is going to be the time period when the Septuagint, okay, the Old Testament is going to be translated from Hebrew into Greek, okay? Greek was like the lingua franca, okay, the language that everybody used, kind of like the language that everybody uses in the

airplane industry, aviation, right, which is what language? Aviation language? That is correct. And that aviation language would be airplane English, is that what you said? Airplane English, perfect. Yeah, it's, the language they use is English, okay, and so this is the same thing, like Greek was spoken particularly in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, that was the language everybody used. And so if you wanted to get ahead, you wanted to do something, you had to learn the language. And that's what the Jews did, they go there and they learned the language, you know, you have to, you know, like if you don't speak Latin in the ancient world and you go to Rome and try to make a living and get ahead, not happen, okay? All right, questions, comments before we move on? Fantastic. All right, let's take a look at this, dispersion of the Jews, we already talked about that, right? It was a state of being, and so they had this connection, the Jews in ancient world had this connection to the land, they had the connection to Jerusalem, and they would go to Jerusalem, a lot of them, you know, I think there was three times that they had to present themselves to the temple, okay? The major one was Passover, all right, and so that was the big thing. And so we know from the Old Testament, from the New Testament, that tens of thousands of people came from all over the world, Jews are going to come and worship here during the Passover. And we know from Psalm 137, this is kind of a foundational aspect of Judaism, the remembrance of Jerusalem, if I forget the old Jerusalem, right? Psalm 137, very sad Psalm, but the Jews keep this kind of, you know, in the back of their minds, to always remember Jerusalem, all right. You know, the Jews weren't just like, you know, they weren't just like 5,000, you know, Jews throughout the ancient world, the Roman world, sizeable amount, five to seven million Jews are lived in the ancient world. There's what now? Sixteen million in the world today, so, you know, they were doing pretty well in the ancient world. They were doing very well. They had their own little communities in these different cities, they would set up a synagogue, and this is going to be the kind of the center of worship for the Jewish people in all of these different cities, these major cities. Wow, it's almost as if God was kind of setting up a foundation for the teachings of Christ to spread to the Gentile world, weird, weird. So you have all of these little centers of worship for the Jewish people, it's perfect. It's perfect for some, maybe a traveler that is, you know, maybe has intimate knowledge of the law, has respect from the Jewish community. Imagine if someone like that would be converted, and then we sent this guy to all these different places. Imagine we could spread this message. Hmm, we'll see, see if that happens. Synagogues have become the center of worship in Jewish culture. We talked about this already, but I just want to reiterate it. State of tension between the Greek Roman world and the Jews, okay? Always this tension. Jews are different, right? They're obnoxious. Sometimes the Romans call them obnoxious. They are obnoxious with their religious beliefs. They're obnoxious with their rituals and their, you know, their diet. Oh, so obnoxious. I think it's kind of like when you have like, and listen, I apologize to all the vegans out there, okay? It's kind of like someone that's really into veganism, right? It's like they're always talking about the diet and what they're doing, all right? And, you know, a certain amount of that is going to be healthy, right? But just, you know, it's one of those things like this guy is so annoying about the veganism, you know, did you know, you know, I'm probably just isolating a lot of people. Well, I am vegan, Richard.

All right. So the synagogue gives them a place to center themselves, a community center and a place of worship. So just imagine this, okay? This, and we can understand this because in a lot of ways, this is our place to center ourselves again, right? We use Christ to center ourselves again. And so they're going to use these synagogues to center themselves, you know, just think about it, every day you're getting pressured. Pressure, pressure, paganism, paganism, the Roman world, the Roman world. Ah, you can go there on Friday nights like, oh, you see the pictures of the, you know, all the frescoes, there'd be frescoes reminding the people of different events in the Old Testament. You have Jewish food there, you know, you're speaking in Aramaic or Hebrew, whatever it is, it's like, ah, this is the area, this is where, this is my home, okay? And a lot of times, you know, they were spiritual homes to these Jewish people that were remembering the past, but also kind of in the modern world, which to us is the ancient world, but it was the modern world, right? And I think some of the trials and tribulations, some of the things that they had to go through, and we have to go through too as a community, okay? We're a small community. The Jews in relation to everybody else, we're a small community. And so we have to be mindful of that, you know. Is our ecclesia a place to center ourselves? Is our ecclesia a place where people can come to be reminded of the things of God? And that's what was going on in these synagogues. All right, very quickly, just, I want to just show you a couple maps here that kind of give us an idea of what's going on. The Jewish dispersion routes, you can see in the green there, you can see where they went, all right, major cities, boom. They went to Mesopotamia, but look, they started in the east and they moved west, and they went to all of the different cities here, even up in modern day France. Doesn't look like there's anything in Britain up there, but eventually there was. And here are some of the synagogues. Here are some of the towns where synagogues have been found, okay? Remnants of synagogues, and you can see they're all scattered everywhere. Look at it, even up in the Black Sea, up by the Crimea, right, one, two, three. There's still Jews in the Crimea region as well. And so wherever there was trade, wherever there was people, wherever there was communities and cities, for the most part you're going to find a Jewish community there. And if there wasn't a community, a synagogue, there was still a group of people in fact, and we'll look at this in Acts, where they went, Paul went, where was it, was it in Philippi, where they found, they were down by the river, okay, and he found women worshiping down by the river. And so that was an area where they used to worship before there was a synagogue, before there was enough Jews, I think you needed to have 12 or 13 male Jews in order to have a synagogue, and so if you didn't have that, they would look for other places, and that would be one of the places that would be the river, okay? All right, I want to save, let's do it, let's do it, okay. Here's an important thing to remember, it wasn't just Jews and Gentiles, okay, and there was no like in between, there were proselytes as well. In other words, there were pagans that had converted to Judaism. All right, increased Jewish numbers in the Roman world. We're not going to look at these in Isaiah, but the general theme is that the Jewish people were to be a light to the Gentiles, and by extension, Christ would be that light as well, he'd fill the whole world with his light. But it's starting now with these little dots of synagogues, little communities of Jews everywhere, here, there, and everywhere, okay. Here's a quote from Rabbi Eliezer Ben-Pedat in the third century, God sent Israel into exile among the nations only for the purpose of acquiring converts, okay, that's interesting. Are the Jewish people known for their conversions? In other words, do we have Jews knocking on our door? We don't, that's not how they do it, they're not aggressive in that way. What they do is they set up a synagogue, and they allowed Gentiles that were interested to come, to listen, okay. So they had an open door policy as long as you were respectful. They allowed Gentiles to listen, okay. Here's another one from Josephus, we all know Josephus, all the time they, the Jews, were attracting to their worship a great number of Greeks making them virtually members of their community, interesting. So around the first century, you had Greeks who were interested in the Jews, and they converted to Judaism. Every Friday, Saturday, they'd be at the temple, or in this case, the synagogue. All right, and then lastly, Church of Adolf von Harnack, okay. It is utterly impossible to explain the large number of total Jews in the diaspora by the mere fact of the fertility of Jewish families. We must assume a very large number of pagans trooped over to Yahweh. That was real interesting to me. So even before Paul is on the scene, you already have what Paul refers to, when you can look these up in Acts 13 and Acts 16, Paul refers to them as God-fearers, fears of God. They were there, they were Gentiles, but they had converted from being a Gentile, from being a pagan, to Judaism. So imagine you have these, and we'll stop here, imagine you have this person, and he just converted to Judaism like three or four years ago, right? And then the Apostle Paul comes scrolling in, and he's like, you know what, I'm changing my religious beliefs again. You just got here! Yeah, see you later.

Transcript

All right, this was the last slide, brothers and sisters, that I believe we looked at.

And again, just to kind of get our minds going on what we've been talking about the last couple of weeks. This is our third class, we've got one more I think, is that our third, yeah, third class. We've got one more after this, so just a reminder that the children of Israel, because of the diaspora and because of the fact that they were conquered by the Babylonians, but also began to spread out into the Greek world with Alexander the Great. I think we talked about last week that some of the Jewish people, Jewish soldiers joined up with Alexander and kind of got to see the world, and it kind of opened up their eyes to a lot of different things, and very similar, brothers and sisters, where the way that the Middle East was opened up during the crusades to the Europeans. The Europeans, through conquest obviously, went into the Holy Land and took Jerusalem on the first crusade. But more importantly, there was this interchange between the Muslim Arabs that were living in that area and the Jewish people as well with the European knights, and so cultural exchange happened. And the same thing is going to happen with the Jews, they're going to spread out outside of Jerusalem and outside of the land of Israel. They're going to look for economic prosperity, and

they're also looking for different ways for trade and things of that nature. So they're going to spread out, they're going to be living in all types of the big cities in the Mediterranean world, both in the Greek-controlled areas and also the Roman-controlled areas. And we looked at this, right?

God sent Israel into exile among the nations only for the purpose of requiring converts. And so a lot of this stuff is taken from Isaiah, from the 49th chapter in Isaiah 60, a light to the Gentiles. And so a lot of the Jewish people, as they spread out because of the diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people brought their customs, brought their ideas, and brought their religious beliefs as well into these different cities. You know, they were welcomed as long as they paid their taxes and stuff like that, but as we've seen in the past, there was some friction, wasn't there, with the Greek speakers and the Jewish speakers as well. But there were God-fearers, and let's just take a look at one of these, in Acts the 13th chapter. And when we get into, probably next week, when we look at some of the journeys of Paul, he uses this phrase quite a bit, but in the 13th chapter, verse 16. And on the Sabbath we went out of the city by a riverside where prayer was wont to be made and we sat down and spoke unto the women which resorted there. So there were women by the river who were what? Well they were praying. And so there's some speculation here at Philippi that a synagogue, they didn't have enough people for the synagogue, and so a lot of times the Jews, to remember Jerusalem, would go down to a river and to pray there. So yeah, it's interesting that a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple was there, whose heart the Lord opened that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul. And when she was baptized in her household, she besought us saying, if ye have judgment to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and abide there, and she constrained us. And so here we have Paul kind of finding other believers, you know, Jews that were there, but also Gentiles who were called God-fearers. In 13 verse 16, then Paul stood up beckoning with his hand and said, men of Israel, right, so that's one category, men of Israel, and his second category, and you people that fear God, listen to me. Okay, and so there were other people outside of men of Israel. They were Gentiles, they were God-fearers, they were interested in Judaism, they were interested in this idea of a one God. They saw most likely the religious strength and the communal strength of a synagogue, and they wanted a piece of it, they're like, oh, they were welcomed there. This is another thing, too, brothers and sisters, that sometimes you don't think about. The Jews did not proselytize, they didn't go and preach the message of Judaism through the world. That isn't how, you know, you don't have Jews knocking on the door talking to you about the law of Moses, that isn't how they roll. But you know, they did preach, I guess you could say, by the communities that they would set up in these different cities based upon the synagogue, and you know, people would be, you know, they're looking for something, they're in this pagan world, it's a jumble, you know, there's a lot of confusion on religious things, and then you have this one group of people that just believe in one God, and they are committed, baby, right? You can imagine just kind of very, you know, conservative Jews how different they would be from the Romans. You know, their day was very different from a regular Roman day. And this had appeal to some of the Roman citizens, maybe to some of the slaves that were there as well, you know, you know, this sense of community. This is one of the things that unfortunately was lacking in the Roman world, particularly with the underclasses, they just were constantly working all the time, particularly slaves, you know, you don't have control over, you don't have physical control over your body, you're told to do this and you're told to do that. And so it was demoralizing a lot of times. And so something like a synagogue where people come together and to worship together and to support it, it was very important to a lot of people in the ancient world. And this is something that's going to, you know, you have the, you know, Judaism, but out of Judaism comes early, you know, early age Christianity, and that as well was also very appealing to people as well, this idea of community, helping each other out. What does it say in Acts that they pulled all of their resources together? They had all things common. Like that, that isn't something that you naturally found in the Roman world, right? This idea of kind of communal living together, sharing all of your things. Very different. All right? Questions, comments before we go on here? Very good. Quick map that I found interesting just to give us a scale of travel during this time, and this really fits very nicely obviously with Paul because we know of three journeys that he took, right? We maybe think like the three journeys of Paul, and we just kind of gloss over that sometimes, like the three journeys of Paul. I think this map kind of figure, tells us a little more information about what that entailed. This was not an easy thing to do, okay? If you find, so find Italy for me, okay? Judy, you found Italy? Judy! Judy, where's Afghanistan on this picture? It's not on, that's a trick question, trick question. All right, so we found Rome, that little red dot in the middle of the boot of Italy, okay? Anything that is blue, okay? Any city or village or area in the blue would take you anywhere between three to seven days to get to, depending on how far it was, okay? So yeah, under a week travel in the blue areas. The green areas, well, it's going to be a little longer than a week, could be a week and a half to two weeks. Yellow, you're pushing three weeks, four weeks. Anything in the red, you're looking at a month plus, when we're talking about travel. The combination of taking a ship or, you know, walking, riding an animal, that type of thing. So you know, travel today, you know, you can't jump on a plane and be out on the west coast today in like eight hours, right? Less than that, right? Probably six hours, right? Obviously was not the case, we didn't have jet power during this time. So anything in the red is going to be a major journey. But anything outside of the blue is going to take you at least two to three weeks to get to. And so Paul, in his travels, is going to be spending months and months, in fact, when you look at all of his three journeys, years on the road, and what that entails, and we'll look at that probably next, our next class, Second Chronicles, Corinthian, sorry, the eleventh chapter, where he kind of goes through all of his, all the trials that he went through to travel. Alright, so let's get to actually the place where Saul most likely, well, not most likely, where he grew up and got an education to a certain degree. We know that he is going to, at some point in time, most likely with his sister, is going to move to Jerusalem. How old Paul was when he moved to Jerusalem to become part of the religious school of we're not told, but most likely it was when he was like a teenager, because usually that's when you made a decision to kind of go to one of these schools, these religious schools to be taught a really in-depth, like a deep dive, you're going to become what, a doctor of the law? Well, where do you go to be a doctor of the law? Well, you go to one of the schools that the Jews had set up specifically for teaching of the law and the intricacies of the law. But before we look at that, let's go back, well, where was Paul born? We know that he was born in Tarshish. Tarshish was not like a backwater city at all. It was a main city. In fact, you could kind of compare it to one of the major cities of America, a New York or like a Chicago or something along those lines, Los Angeles, a big, big city. In the ancient world, 250,000 people, okay? Historians and archaeologists say that in Rome was probably a million people somewhere around there, okay, at its height, and so this was not a small city. Think about in the ancient world, 250,000 people living in one area and what that entailed. It was bustling. You had all of these people doing this, that, and the other thing. If you ever watch any travel shows or anything, I like watching Rick Steves travel with the PBS, all right, Settle Down Nerd, okay, I get it, you do a lot of PBS, do you? That's a shocker.

So when he travels around, he goes to these cities, particularly these European cities or Middle East, the cities like Cairo, they do one on Cairo, and it's just bustle everywhere. You go down to the, there's no really big supermarkets or anything. You go down to the market and get everything. This is how they're doing it right now, and so I like watching these things, you know, shows because it puts, it gives us a perspective into how the rest of the world lives, right? We can be very isolated in a kind of a, you know, one of the top areas of the world to live in New England, access to medical education, all the things that we have access to, okay? It's not true of the rest of the world, but the majority of the world, okay? So anyways, one of the greatest cities of the Roman world, it was the center of trade of Asia Minor, you can see that it's located right on the coast at a beautiful harbor. It was located on a river, so they would go up the river, so it was a nice, it was a, it was a city that was situated in a very nice area as well. Here's the, here's a very important thing for Taurus, Tasha, sorry. It was a free city. In other words, it could govern itself. It had its own council. Didn't have to worry about, like, the, the Greeks from another place getting involved in their politics. Rome couldn't even get involved in their own politics unless there was some type of revolt, because it was in Roman territory. But they, they could run their business as, as they see, they saw fit. And so this was something that the Greeks gave to the, the people of Taurus, Tarsus, and the Romans continued that as well. Didn't have to pay any taxes, no duty taxes. So people are going to flood to Tarsus, because this was where money was being made, okay? There was a lot of opportunity to become successful. You know, things that drive us today, right? People move to different areas of the country or areas of the world for opportunity. Same was true in the ancient world. Oh, Tarsus is a free city? Great, I don't have to pay taxes, I can start my business with the trading? Fantastic, okay? And this is what a lot of people do. Tremendous amount of wealth here. In fact, the they were known for, the people of Tarsus and the leaders of Tarsus were known for their massive investment into infrastructure. There were great roads, there were public fountains. There was you know, an amphitheater for theater and stuff like that, okay? I, I believe they had a small, I call a sea of type of structure for games and things of that nature. But it was a nice city, it was really nice. They put a lot of, they, they reinvested a lot of the money that they got from trade, which was considerable, back into the infrastructure of the of the city itself. Beautification pro, projects, that type of thing. There are mountains located, the Taurus Mountains are located in this area. And there are a lot of minerals and lumber in and around the mountains. And so, considerable amount of wealth is going to be taken out of this. This was interesting. There used to be huge herds of black goats that used to graze in and around Tarsus, and they would use the hair of the wool. The goats have wool, what was it called? Goat hair, goat wool? Goat hair, probably, right? Goat hair. They would use that to make cloaks and kind of heavy duty kind of outside jackets, things of that nature. So again, you know, you have minerals, you have the lumber, you have trade of all types of goods. You have you know, the, the whole industry of processing goat hair, right? Think about the industry of all of these things, okay? It was a, it was a bustling city. Now, this was, this is also interesting, was a university town. There were all kinds of different schools that were going. You get a really great education at in, in the city. And there are some you know, some historians that kind of call Tarsus the Ivy League of the ancient world because you had all these kind of different types of early day universities or schools that you know, taught the wealthy the wealthy and their children, they got an education. They got a really good education. You guys may be familiar with the philosophy, the Greek philosophy of being a stoic, right? Not letting, not getting too high, too low, just kind of going with the flow. Focus on the renewal of one's self, strengthening your, your own self, this idea of discipline, disciplining yourself, keeping yourself under subjection, huh? Those are things, those, that's a philosophy that Paul is going to kind of weave into his, into his letters, isn't he, right? I, you know, I bring my body into subjection, he says, a few times. He compares himself to a runner or to a boxer. And this is kind of the stoics thought, you know, thought like this as well. Paul knew classical Greek, and we know this from his writings. He was, he had really good Greek. He knew, you know, and so he had really good Greek. He knew all, you know, he was, he was, and he could speak fluently in Konine Greek, which was kind of the day to day, the day to day language in the Greek world. He had two main languages in this area. Number one was Greek, number two was Aramaic, and the third would be Latin, okay? Most of the people in the Middle East, particularly around Syria and Israel, that area, all sp, spoke Aramaic, okay? That doesn't mean Hebrew wasn't spoken, but it was, Hebrew was spoken only for a religious language. Kind of like Latin is with the Roman Catholic Church, right? You know, people aren't conversing in Latin. But when you go to, you know, a Catholic mass, you're going to hear a lot of Latin. And so the same was true in the ancient world. Hebrew was the language of religion. It was the language of God, really. That's how the Jews, some of the Jews looked at it. And, and because of that reason, it was almost lost. But the Jews understood that if you lose your language and culture, you lose your people. And so this was one of the reasons why the Jews had an emphasis on education. And they still do today. They put a heavy, heavy emphasis on education. And this comes from the reading of the law, right? You had to read the law, you had to know how to write, right? And so the law of Moses is tied up into reading and writing. And so this is why, you know, to truly understand the word of God, you needed to read it and to, you know, and to, and to write it as well. And so schools were set up for the very purpose of keeping the Hebrew language alive, keeping the religious rituals alive as well, keeping the culture of the Jewish people alive. And this is not only happening in Jerusalem. It's happening in Jerusalem on a large scale. Because this is kind of the religious center of the Jewish world, Jerusalem. They went there four times a year for the, particularly during Passover as well. And so Paul was a highly educated Jewish young man. He had his whole life in front of him. He could have been a, you know, made very, he most likely came from like a middle class, upper middle class family. We're not really told, you know, you know, what Paul's dad did. Right? But he, we know that he was, he worked with leather, right? He was a tent maker. And tents were made primarily from leather. Which wasn't a great job, by the way, in the ancient world, to get the, you know, to take animal skins, the whole process by which, you know, the sca, the scraping of kind of animal, you know, fat and stuff off, off of the skin. Urine was used as well to kind of break down the skin. It's a whole process. The tanners, right? The tanner area of the ancient world, very smelly, very smelly place. You have all this kind of rotting animal, animal, you know, byproduct. You have urine being used as well to break down the skin. So it wasn't a great place. So Paul would have been very familiar. Saul would have been very familiar with this process. I don't think he was involved in the process, kind of make, you know, making the leather, but he got the, kind of the final product of the, the manufactured leather and then he made tents from it. I'm guessing. But maybe he was involved in it. I don't know. He was most likely some type of, you know, like a, a leather trader or something like that, or a tent trader, something along those lines. Now, tents were very important. It was actually pretty lucrative. If you, especially if you got a, a Roman, a contract for the Roman army. All right? Because all those guys needed tents, didn't they? Small tents, big tents, that type of thing, so. All right. The biggest thing with Paul, brothers and sisters, was he was a Roman citizen. You know, we want to talk about privilege in the ancient world. He was a privileged guy. He could do what he wanted for the most part, okay? He was a voting member. If there was any type of voting membership into something, he could vote. He could, if he wanted to, he could be part of the council. He could run for office, political office. There were special tax things as well that were designated for citizens. He could go to law, right? If he didn't like ruling against him, he could appeal it. He couldn't just be taken off the street and beaten, right? That's going to happen to him, right? And then he's going to, he's going to get into this conversation, this great conversation with the centurion, because I'm a Roman citizen, right? You beat, you beat me in front of everybody. You're going to apologize to me as well in front of everybody. We'll, we'll look at that. All right, now this is from, I'm sure to put his name up here, I didn't, historian. This is what he says now about a Greek-Roman education that Paul would have been part of. There's two types of things here, brothers and sisters. There's a Greek and Roman secular education, right, that Paul is going to get. He's also going to get a very strong religious education as well on the school of Gamalio, okay? So Paul obviously is going to, he's going to show signs of like an aptitude for the things of the law. And it comes out in his writings, like some of the stuff, the connections that he makes. He's, when you read it, you're like, oh wow, this guy's, he's got his mind around it, you know what I'm saying? Obviously being directed by the Holy Spirit. But still, you know, God uses people's intellect to further the gospel message. You're going to use Paul as well, the kind of the secular education that he got. Anyways, Greek-Roman education was liberal in its scope, okay? In other words, it, they're going to learn about a lot of different things. It's not just kind of a narrow, a narrow education. Slaves supervised boys in their early years by giving them their first lessons and then leading them to and from private schools until they graduated into adulthood with a great deal of ceremony. As young men, they could attend universities at Athens, Rhodes, Tarshish, Alexandria, and other places to study philosophy. Rhetoric, law, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, geography, and botany, right? And so, again, a liberal education. All right, so, you know, Saul's a smart guy, right? He's not, he's not a dummy. He's a smart guy, he had a great education, okay? And so, in a lot of ways, brothers and sisters, Paul has two feet in both camps. He knows all about the Greek and Roman world. He knows how everything works in the Greek and Roman world. The biggest thing, he can speak the language. He can speak Greek fluently. He can write classical Greek fantastic, okay? It's interesting, if you look at the Greek from, you know, the book of Revelations and Paul's Greek, Paul's Greek is the best. Like, he really does a great, you know, Greek. If you look at the Revelations, the Greek that's used in Revelations for whatever reason, it's not so great. Paul's Greek is better than, say, John's Greek, which, you know, which is interesting to me because it's not like God, you know, they're moved by the Holy Spirit, inspired by the Holy Spirit. But God is using their abilities, right? He's like, hey, not everybody's going to have perfect hemanship. Your Greek is going to be better than my Greek. Your Spanish is going to be better than my Spanish, right? But God is still using people, regardless of whether or not their Greek is classical, right? It isn't a competition. It's like, get the message out there, right? All right, what have we got for time? You know what, I'm going to start, I'm going to, we're going to start with this next week. We'll start with this, this slide for next week, the zealous hammer of God, right? This is, this is Paul. We're going to get an insight into Paul's kind of, you know, what his worldview, his thinking, that type of thing.

Transcript

anyways I wanted to start today um just with a couple um

paintings um and this is obviously a scene that has been painted quite a bit but these two paintings uh I saw a few years back um uh Le and I and the girls went over well Mckenzie was already there studying but we went over to uh Italy and you know so we went to Florence and we also took a day trip to Rome we went into the Vatican and you know just to see you know kind of all the great historic pieces that they had these were these were two of the uh paintings that really affected me I guess in looking at them particularly the one on the right like the one on the left is a very realistic kind of situation right where you have you can see the you know the hatred really and the violence associated with the stoning of Steven this is what we're looking at right he's and uh Steven praying you know for to forgive them and then in the back kind of poignantly you have the Apostle Paul right laying they they would they took off their cloaks right and laid them at the feet of Saul so they could really you know put some uh real you know they didn't want anything tying up their arms when they threw the stones at at stepen

um and then you know the one on the right is for some re you know you know how you look at a painting and one person it could be yes it's all right uh I don't really care for it but then like another painting you look at it and you're like oh man that's

it for for whatever reason it's hard to articulate but there's it's a very poignant painting for me on the uh on the right hand side with Paul there there's kind of a duality with the light not getting into like odd history and CR critiquing it but look at Paul there's a PO of him that's in the Shadows on that right one right and um and then you can see Steven Stephen's almost contorted there's really you know you're trying to look for a human being there but he's just being pounded by by stones and just like the the raw naked aggression of man against this in innocent uh believer of Jesus um so you know and this is this is this is the way obviously you know before you know multi medeor and all this kind of stuff this is how ideas and emotions uh were transmitted to people through paintings like this you can see both of these in the Vatican or use the Googs either

one all right let's get into it uh those of you that are asking are we going to have a multimedia presentation of course maybe I could have gotten through a little more stuff without the multimedia presentation perhaps some would say that I would not all right let's take a look um at Galatians the first

chapter just to kind of set the scene here and it's a I think it's a it's a chapter and a verse uh that we that we we are familiar with this is Galatians was one of the first uh first letters that Paul is going to write it's one of our earliest letters that we have along with uh the Thessalonians I believe First the Thessalonians was written before Galatians but in any event call uh Paul kind of sets the stage for us in the 13th verse of the F first chapter of Galatians where he writes for you have heard of my uh conversion in time past in the Jews religion how that beyond

measure I persecuted the Ecclesia of God and wasted it and profited in the Jews religion above many my equals in my own Nation being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers and so Paul is kind of laying it out clearly in black and white um and just the words he used I persecuted the church of God and wasted it like he Paul Paul really Saul was really on the verge of wiping out this very early you know Jesus movement that that is kind of it's uh it's coming out of Judaism and it's in its infancy and Saul is the guy that is sent by the chief priest uh to wipe it out and he got very close to it except you know God had other plans right um in Acts chap 8 we you know we know um you know we we know the story in Acts chapter 8 where you know he's on the road uh to Damascus and one of the things that's kind of interesting to me just in a psychological way is you know Paul grew up outside of Jerusalem and outside of Judea historians have said that perhaps you know Saul came to Jerusalem to study at um in galo's kind of school you know the different rabbis would have different schools where you would go and you would learn according to the their method um their philosophies based upon the law that type of thing hila was another one during this time Gia was another one and so Paul is going there why Paul went to Jerusalem we're not told but it may have been and again this is speculation on my part and other historians um it may have been that being a Jew living in a gentile area uh he wanted to get closer to Judaism he did you know what was going on his town he was kind of living one foot in the Gentile world and one foot in the Jewish world and he really wanted to commit himself to the traditions of his people uh which is interesting and so he's leaving kind of a very Urban as we talked about a very Urban kind of Cosmopolitan we got all kinds of different people all kinds of different religious beliefs here in tashes and he goes to a place where you know there's one religion and it is Hardcore right but and he what what does he say say there you know above I was zealous above everybody about the traditions of my elders um and he need he was looking for that he was looking for that um firm conviction in the things of God uh and he got it he got it at the feet of Galeo he was instructed in the things of of Judaism and the things of the law and the Torah and he took them to H he was zealous um and he he used the zealousness to persecute so let's look at acts the 4th chapter

um and at that time first verse there was a great persecution against the Ecclesia which was at Jerusalem and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles

so I I like to look at things from a different perspective sometimes that you know it could be good and bad you know you can spend all your time looking at a different different perspectiv but anyways the perspective of the phes I think was this they were living in a very difficult time because they felt as if they were losing

control uh of you know kind of Jerusalem to the powers that were over them which were the Romans okay they were kind of being hemmed in you had the Sadducees who were doing business the Senate of Israel at that time were doing business with the Romans that type of thing um but also you have this outside pressure affecting Judaism but now we have internal chaos well what's the internal chaos well we have this movement that started with Jesus of of Nazareth and it's upending it upended Jewish Society at that time right Jesus is coming he's healing people he's touching them uh he's preaching the Good News of the kingdom of God to the poor you know think about how how radical The Sermon on the Mount would have been at that time right and so they got rid of that problem and even Caiaphas right in John I think it says you know it's expedient that one man will die for Israel and he's referring to Jesus he's going to die let's get we got to we got to you know we got to crush this right now we're going to have major problems and they thought they did right they thought they did with Christ but he was raised from the dead and uh you know people saw Thomas is going to touch his body and he puts puts his fingers on his wounds that type of thing and it's going to make such an impact upon these apostles like that's the only reason why in my own mind you know why did the apostles go after their leader is kind of destroyed crucified in the most horrific way buried in a tomb why would they be so moved to preach the kingdom of God this new gospel they saw Christ they saw the Risen Christ they were given the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost they couldn't be stopped but Saul in his mind thought he could stop this the Chief priests in the political in the government of Israel at this time thought they could stop it that they had the power to stop it but Gia had some insight right because remember Peter and John are going to be brought to the temple and Gia is going to be the one that's going to say he's going to give a little history lesson without looking at it he goes look I remember this guy remember this guy he had a little following he went out in the wilderness who knows what happened to him and then he mentions another one I think but he says look if it's God's will that it will continue you we can't stop it if it's of man we sure we can stop it but if it's of God we can't do anything and he was right and it was a it was a hard lesson for Saul to learn um that he wasn't in control he he wasn't you know the he wasn't the Hammer Of God that he thought he was you know he thought he was the good guy he wasn't the good guy and it and it took him this incredible conversion

to finally realize that as he writes in Galatians he wouldn't have written this before his conversion we know that right um beyond measure I I wasted the Ecclesia you know I you persecuted Ecclesia guard and wasted it he would never say that he goes I was doing the Lord's good these guys were Heretics I was wiping them out they were a cancer spreading throughout Judaism had to be destroyed and this is the same thing too uh just kind of looking at the conversion of Saul he's p part of this unjust killing of a righteous man he's part of it he M he he was part of a murder of stepen murdered him by Stones

intimately an intimate killing of another human being Paul was there he consented he agreed to it yes stoneless man and he was part of that whole

process and so you have that type of mentality the conversion on the way to the Damascus and then this very Paul very very same man is able to write First Corinthians the 11th chapter right this beautiful letter of love love is patient love is

kind you know just I I think of that like the differences between

Paul really the murderer of the of the of the lovers of Jesus he was murdering those people putting them in jail taking their children and their wives away from them and he says after the conversion love is

patient love is

kind love does not keep track of wrongs he was keeping track of wrongs wasn't he you know he had a whole list of grievances I got a lot of problems with you people

um and so I think it's just a wonderful conversion that we have it's one of the great stories in scripture right and it it should give us hope um it should make us kind of rise up and say you know what if if you you know we're going down the wrong path if we're heading up to

Damascus I think everybody in our life has had a moment where we're heading up to

Damascus and God you know Christ is going to put a stop to

it um and it's a lesson too that you know there's always Second Chances there's always conversion with Christ that's what that's what it's all about changing our hearts from a Heart of Stone to a heart of Flesh where the word of God can be written Upon Our

Hearts all right um now here here this is interesting too in verse three um in Saul he made Havoc that's a great like uh Old English word Havoc find that in the uh you know it's one of the great lines

um Hamlet maybe I think it might be Hamlet Cry Havoc oh that that's from a juliia Caesar Cry Havoc release the dogs of war um and so this is that's a it's a great little word so he's just chaos

everywhere um where was I so oh yeah um entering into every house and Hauling men and women committed them to prison he's he's grabbing people out of homes he's destroying people's livelihoods destroying people's families zealous of God love measure you wonder what he was thinking at this time I probably know what he was thinking got people deserve it Heretics destroying a religion not listening to the tradition of the elders saying that the Messiah has come who are

you we have the Oracles of God

um therefore they they that were scattered abroad went

everywhere preaching the

word I think that's hilarious uh you know on a certain level despite the awful circumstances um it it had the opposite effect that Saul thought it was going to have he thought he was going to crush this thing immediately within Judea first he was moving up to Samaria right he's he's moving northward he's even going up to Damascus as well he's got all the power of the priest behind him the power of the Judean uh government at this time

but I think it speaks to the conviction of the early followers of Jesus that despite the fact that they were being run to ground they were being ground to dust by Saul and his soldiers in the uh with the support of the government of the Jews at this time they still preach the word of God wherever they went it's like hey what why are you here in this new town oh we just I just lost my whole family to Paul but let me tell you why I did I lost this is this this man named Jesus of Nazareth he has preach these wonderful things so just imagine the mindset brothers and sisters of somebody that is being persecuted being scattered from their home their livelihood everything is taken away they're kicked out of the synagogue you're gone you're not part of Jewish Society anymore and instead of keeping their mouth shut they do the opposite we're going to preach more and so wherever they were scattered by Paul Paul actually Paul actually is preaching the gospel right now even though he's thinking he's destroying it he's allowing the gospel to be spread by his own hand his own hand of

violence and so that's just another reason brothers and sisters or another example

of God

using bad

circumstances evil

circumstances to bring about his will this was a this very difficult time for the early Believers I mean immediately this small group of people is pounced upon by the Wolves they they remain strong they remain convicted and you ask yourself

why why do they remain convinced why why do they go on preaching just think about their faith brothers and sisters and what strengthened their faith well they saw Christ they saw Christ before they saw him on the cross and they saw him after he was raised from the dead and it convinced them that he was the Messiah and it should convince us and I Know It convinces us all right uh questions comments before we go on I'm doing a lot of talking chis brother

Chris you got it to invite a question absolutely just uh from a historical standpoint uh you know initially the Ecclesia we see had all things in common and things were flourishing they had converts in the thousands uh and then with the stoning of Steven so we see the scattering that you're referring to but those that remained in Jerusalem did they go underground or was it so from the we have Li we have limited kind of primary sources as far as what they did but yes um they went they went underground the the Ecclesia at Jerusalem uh went on the ground the apostles stayed in in the Jerusalem area so they didn't go it was really other people that fled from the persecution of Paul the idea of the Apostles was you know if we die we die we're dying in the service of Christ Christ told us that we were going to go through these things but yeah during this time of persecution they went underground but we're told um and it's it's up there in the ninth chapter of uh acts that finally things settled down so it was a I think it was a very short period of very intense persecution Chris and then things kind of di down and their attention went to other people thank you very much all my opinion all right

um let's see we kind of we talked about that right let's talk about Barabas uh real uh with couple things here with bonovas let's take a look at acts the 4th chapter and verse 36 of the four chapter of Acts and joses who by the apostles were was surnamed Barnabas which is being interpreted the son of consolation a levite of the country of Cyprus having uh having land sold it brought the money and laid it at the apostles feet um but I just want to mention here Barnabas the son of

consolation uh Barnabas was known as being someone that would comfort people okay I try to you know try to get them get them going the son of consolation the son of comfort not not a bad thing to be known for right there's a lot worse things to be known for so the so the other Apostles saw Barnabas as somebody um that had a special quality he he had the ability to make people feel

better it's pretty good quality you know I think a lot of times like on social media you'll see particularly younger generation what's your superpower what's my superpower okay barnabas' superpower was he made people feel better okay he took time to make people feel better all right and he's going to be the perfect guy the goet right to all the brothers and sisters that Paul you know years ago three four years ago had wasted them in their family and it's going to be Barnabas is going to bring this kind of community together it's really fascinating right and we know people like this we have people in our Ecclesia like this right make you feel better uh you know and so I think there's uh there's an exitation in there you know um we have to know about our brothers and sisters right we should be checking in with each other obviously during Sunday but also through the week whatever our networks are we all have different networks um and we should be sons of consolation we should be daughters and sons of comfort to each other just like Barnabas was he was he was like that to uh Paul of course but he was also that to to the um to the community this early Community he wanted to comfort the community and he wanted to bring these people together so with that in mind ninth chapter of

Acts

um verse 26 this is after Paul escapes um from Damascus with the basket and everything he's lowered Down the Walls and everything you know immediately excuse me Paul is now involved in all of this stuff right his life goes from he's up on top right he's got he's got an A small little army and everything he's got papers he's got documents from uh the government saying I can do what I want right um and now he's getting lowered down in the basket no one wants him everyone's scared of him the chief priest are like this guy's a traitor what's going on with Paul we haven't heard from him I heard he went down into the desert now he's back and the and now the early day Christians are like who who Saul let's take a look at what happens uh verse 26 and when Saul was come to Jerusalem he ISU to join himself to the disciples hey guys how you doing Paul new new guy uh but they were all afraid of him uh and beli not that he was a disciple nah n you're not tricking me there's no way that Paul the Destroyer the waster of the church is now he's a Christian now he's a believer in Jesus sure it's just a trick

infiltration you know Paul is going to try he's try he couldn't do it by force of arms now he's going to infiltrate us right he perfectly reasonable right I used I I tell kids a lot of times you know we're having a conversation about something he's talking and I usually say hey it ain't paranoia if it's true right you know ain't paranoid if it's true and so these guys were paranoid they you know these early Christians are paranoid uh and so it was up to Barnabas so let's let's go on and Barnabas took Paul and brought him to the apostles and declared unto him them how he had seen the Lord in the way and that he had spoken to him and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus and he was with them coming in and going out of Jerusalem and he spake boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus and disputed with the Greeks so on and so forth so Barnabas is going to be the one that is going to bring these two sides together he's Barnabas is going say hey I've seen this guy preach he's the real deal he's preached to the Gentiles with power and conviction and he's speaking to our Jewish Brethren with power and conviction as well and then About the Name of Jesus Christ the saving name of Christ uh and eventually you know they come around and like wow this is incredible and I think it says in one location that they praise God they praise God that this had happened that their number one enemy at this time had been converted that Christ had changed the Heart of Stone of

Paul into a appliable heart that the that so the name of Christ could be written upon it so and then uh in verse 31 of that same of the ninth chapter of Acts in 30 uh 31 yeah then all of the churches rested throughout all of Judea in Galilee and Samaria and were edified and walked in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit were multiplied so there was finally some rest you know this persecution slowly died out

um and you know they everyone everything calmed down and kind of slowed the process of this persecution and now people could preach without kind of you know getting you know getting killed for whatever reason yes brother Chris yeah it's interesting to see actually that that peace that seemed to settle down between the uh Jewish community and the Christian had to seem to do with the conversion of Paul who led you know who who led this havoc and with his conversion it seemed to bring peace yeah I and that's a great Point brother Chris because I think Paul uh you know Saul at the time

um I he might have been like the ring leader of this like he was really promoting this um and it may have been his project he's like give it to me I'll I'll handle it right now and once once he was stopped from going up to Damascus and then he goes you know he he goes down uh into you know Saudi Arabia um for a few years right once he's taken out of the way the persecution just kind of dies off it's almost like people didn't have the hot for it Paul had the hot for it at the time but once he's taken out of the way everything kind of calms down and we know that in life right we've been in situations I'm sure at work or maybe even our families right you take one piece right you bring them in or you bring her in BR and take that person out the whole dynamic changes right whatever reason without getting into things so things calm down a little bit now Paul as we've talked about as he travels throughout the Greek and Roman World he's not going to lose sight of his Jewish roots in fact he's going to use those Jewish roots to spread the gospel it's really fascinating uh you know he's going to use the synagogues as his base of operations oh there's a synagogue here there a synagogue there synagogue there well why why are there synagogues everywhere why aren't the Jews just in Israel well we know why there were several diasporas there had been several scattering of the Jewish people throughout history Babylonians well even before the Babylonians there were people that were scattered uh with the Assyrians up in Israel not everyone in Israel uh that was scattered was lost to history they they open you know they they started synagogues Here There and Everywhere and so God is using again a very difficult time in the history of the Jews

to bring about his purpose to lay the foundation of the spreading of the Gospel message of Hope to all mankind and he did it on the foundations of uh of uh synagogues that were built in all of these major cities um during this time and so with this synagogue system that was set up throughout the Greek and Roman world and then the system of going to Jerusalem to sell celebrate the four main holidays right particularly Passover um you have a way of spreading this message first by word of mouth right you go to the synagogue and you talk to them but also other people they hear it oh I heard Paul speak in Corinth very powerful this was talking well what was he talking about well he was talking about this and so you go and now you're spreading the message and this is how it happened uh very slowly at first but you know within 200 years um you know close to half the population in the Greek and Roman world are going to be uh going to be Christian some form of Christian that's another fascinating history like all the different kind of sects that that bubbled up during this time it gets very complicated very very quickly in early day Christianity really does