Verses 1-40
Chapter 21
21:1-16 When we had
torn ourselves away from them and had set sail, we sailed a straight
course and came to Cos; on the next day we reached Rhodes; and from
there we came to Patara. There we found a ship which was sailing across
to Phoenicia and we embarked on her and set sail. After we had sighted
Cyprus and had left it behind on the left hand side we sailed on to
Syria and came down to Tyre, for there the ship was to discharge her
cargo. We sought out the disciples and we stayed there for seven days.
They told Paul through the Holy Spirit to give up his journey to
Jerusalem. When we had completed the days we left and proceeded on our
journey, while they all, with their wives and children, escorted us
outside the city. We knelt down on the shore and prayed and bade each
other farewell. Then we embarked on the ship and they returned home. We
continued our voyage and arrived at Ptolemais from Tyre, and when we had
greeted the brethren we stayed among them for one day. On the next day
we left and came to Caesarea. We went into the house of Philip the
evangelist, who was one of the Seven, and stayed with him. He had four
daughters who were virgins and who prophesied. While we stayed there
longer a prophet called Agabus came down from Judaea. He visited us and
he took Paul's girdle and he bound his own hands and feet and said,
"Thus speaks the Holy Spirit. The Jews in Jerusalem will bind the man to
whom this girdle belongs like this and they will hand him over to the
Gentiles." When we heard this both we and the people of the place kept
pleading with Paul not to go to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, "What are
you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be
bound but to die in Jerusalem for the sake of the name of the Lord
Jesus." Since he would not be persuaded, we held our peace and said,
"Let the Lord's will be done." After these days, when we had packed up,
we set out on the journey to Jerusalem. Some of the disciples from
Caesarea went with us. They were to bring us to Mnason, a man of Cyprus,
an original disciple, with whom we were to lodge.
The narrative is speeding up and there is an atmosphere of
approaching storm as Paul comes nearer Jerusalem. Two things stand out
here. (i) There is the sheer determination of Paul to go on no matter
what lay ahead. Nothing could have been more definite than the warning
of the disciples at Tyre and of Agabus at Caesarea, but nothing could
deter Paul from the course that he had chosen. During one of the sieges
in the Spanish Civil War, some in the garrison wished to surrender but
one of their comrades said, "I would rather die on my feet than live on
my knees." Paul was like that. (ii) There is the wonderful fact that
wherever Paul went he found a Christian community waiting to welcome
him. If that was true in Paul's time, it is still more true today. One
of the great privileges of belonging to the Church is the fact that no
matter where a man goes, he is sure to find a community of like-minded
people into which he may enter. The man who is in the family of the
Church has friends all over the world.
Agabus is an interesting figure. Jewish prophets had a certain
custom. When words were inadequate, they dramatized their message. There
are many instances of this in the Old Testament, for example, Isaiah 20:3-4; Jeremiah 13:1-11; Jeremiah 27:2; Ezekiel 4:1-17 ; Ezekiel 5:1-4; 1 Kings 11:29-31.
In the King James Version the antiquity of the language may be misleading. Acts 21:15
says, "We took up our carriages and went up to Jerusalem." That may
sound as if Paul and his friends travelled by carriage. But in the
sixteenth century, used like this, carriage meant not something which
carried a man but something which a man had to carry; it meant baggage.
21:17-26 When we
arrived in Jerusalem the brethren received us gladly. On the next day
Paul along with us went to visit James; and all the elders were present.
He greeted them and recounted one by one the things which God had done
among the Gentiles through his ministry. When they heard the story they
glorified God. They said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands
there are among the Jews who have accepted the faith. Now they are all
devotees of the Law. They have heard rumours about you which allege that
you teach all the Jews who live in Gentile territory to abandon the Law
of Moses and to stop circumcising their children and to stop living
according to their ancestral customs. What then is to be done? They will
be bound to hear that you have arrived. So you must do what we tell
you. We have four men who have taken a vow upon themselves. Take these
men and be purified along with them; and pay their expenses that they
may shave their heads, and then everyone will know that the rumours they
have heard about you have no truth in them but that you yourself also
walk in observance of the Law. As for the Gentiles who have accepted the
faith, we wrote decreeing that they should abstain from things offered
to idols, from blood, from anything that has been strangled and from
fornication." Then on the next day Paul took the men and was purified
along with them; he went into the Temple, and announced his intention of
completing the days of purification until the offering was made for
each one of them.
When Paul arrived in Jerusalem, he presented the church with a
problem. The leaders accepted him and saw God's hand in his work; but
rumours had been spread that he had encouraged Jews to forsake their
ancestral faith. This Paul had never done. True, he had insisted that
the Jewish Law was irrelevant for the Gentile; but he had never sought
to draw the Jew away from the customs of his fathers.
The leaders saw a way in which Paul could guarantee the
orthodoxy of his own conduct. Four men were in the middle of observing
the Nazarite vow. This was a vow taken in gratitude for some special
blessing from the hand of God. It involved abstention from meat and wine
for thirty days, during which the hair had to be allowed to grow. It
seems that sometimes at least the last seven days had to be spent
entirely in the Temple courts. At the end certain offerings had to be
brought--a year old lamb for a sin-offering, a ram for a peace offering,
a basket of unleavened bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with oil and a
meat offering and a drink offering. Finally, the hair had to be shorn
and burned on the altar with the sacrifice. It is obvious that this was a
costly business. Work had to be given up and all the elements of the
sacrifice had to be bought. It was quite beyond the resources of many
who would have wished to undertake it. So it was considered an act of
piety for some wealthier person to defray the expenses of someone taking
the vow. That was what Paul was asked to do in the case of these four
men and he consented. By so doing he could demonstrate so that all could
see it that he was himself an observer of the Law.
There can be no doubt that the matter was distasteful to Paul.
For him the relevancy of things like that was gone. But it is the sign
of a truly great man that he can subordinate his own wishes and views
for the sake of the Church. There is a time when compromise is not a
sign of weakness but of strength.
21:27-36 When the
seven days were nearly completed and when the Jews from Asia had seen
Paul in the temple, they stirred up the whole mob and they attacked him
shouting, "Help, men of Israel! This is the man who teaches all men
everywhere against the people, against the Law and against this place.
Furthermore he has brought Greeks into the Temple and defiled this holy
place." For they had seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city
and they thought that Paul had taken him into the Temple. The whole city
was disturbed and the people rushed together. They laid hands on Paul
and dragged him outside the Temple and immediately the doors were shut.
While they were trying to kill him, the report reached the commander of
the battalion that all Jerusalem was in an uproar. He at once took
soldiers and centurions and ran down to them. When they saw the
commander and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul. Then the
commander came up to him and arrested him and ordered him to be bound
with two chains. He asked who he was and what he had done. In the crowd
some shouted one thing and some another. When the commander was unable
to discover the truth of the matter because of the disturbance, he
ordered him to be taken into the barracks. When Paul came to the steps
he had to be carried by the soldiers because of the violence of the mob.
For the mass of the people were following, shouting, "Kill him!"
It so happened that Paul's compromise led to disaster. It was
the time of Pentecost. Jews were present in Jerusalem from all over the
world and certain Jews from Asia were there, who no doubt knew how
effective Paul's work in Asia had been. They had seen Paul in the city
with Trophimus, whom they very likely knew. The business of the vow had
taken Paul frequently into the Temple courts and these Asian Jews
assumed that Paul had taken Trophimus into the Temple along with him.
Trophimus was a Gentile and for a Gentile to enter the Temple
was a terrible thing. Gentiles could enter the Court of the Gentiles but
between that court and the Court of the Women there was a barrier and
into that barrier there were inset tablets with this inscription--"No
man of alien race is to enter within the balustrade and fence that goes
round the Temple, and if anyone is taken in the act, let him know that
he has himself to blame for the penalty of death that follows." Even the
Romans took this so seriously that they allowed the Jews to carry out
the death penalty for this crime.
The Asian Jews then accused Paul of destroying the Law,
insulting the chosen people and defiling the Temple. They initiated a
movement to lynch him. In the north-west corner of the Temple area stood
the Castle of Antonia, built by Herod the Great. At the great
festivals, when the atmosphere was electric, it was garrisoned by a
cohort of one thousand men. Rome insisted on civil order and a riot was
unforgivable sin both for the populace who staged it and the commander
who allowed it. The commander heard what was going on and came down with
his troops. For Paul's own sake he was arrested and chained by each arm
to two soldiers. In the confusion the commander was able to extract no
coherent charge from the excited mob and Paul was actually carried
through the seething mob into the barracks. There was never a time when
Paul was nearer death than this and it was the impartial justice of Rome
which saved his life.
21:37-40 When Paul was
about to be brought into the barracks he said to the commander, "May I
say something to you?" He said, "Can you speak Greek? Are you not then
the Egyptian who some time ago started a revolution and led four
thousand men of the Dagger-bearers out into the desert?" Paul said, "I
am a man who is a Jew, a native of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city. I
ask you, let me speak to the people." When he had given his permission
to do so, Paul stood on the steps and made a gesture with his hand to
the people. When a great silence had fallen, he spoke to them in the
Hebrew tongue.
The Castle of Antonia was connected to the outer courts of the
Temple by two flights of stairs on the northern and the western sides.
As the soldiers were struggling towards the steps to reach the sanctuary
of their own barracks, Paul made an amazing request. He asked the
captain to be allowed to address the furious mob. Here is Paul
exercising his consistent policy of looking the mob in the face.
The captain was amazed to hear the accents of cultured Greek
coming from this man whom the crowd were out to lynch. Somewhere about
A.D. 54 an Egyptian had led a band of desperate men out to the Mount of
Olives with a promise that he could make the walls of the city fall down
before him. The Romans had dealt swiftly and efficiently with his
followers but he himself had escaped and the captain had thought that
Paul was this revolutionary Egyptian come back.
His followers had been Dagger-bearers, violent nationalists who
were deliberate assassins. They concealed daggers in their cloaks, mixed
with the mob and struck as they could. But when Paul stated his
credentials, the captain knew that, whatever else he was, he was no
revolutionary thug; and so he allowed him to speak. When Paul turned to
speak he made a gesture for silence, and, almost miraculously, complete
silence fell on that roaring mob. Nothing in all the New Testament so
shows the force of Paul's personality as this silence that he commanded
from the mob who would have lynched him. At that moment the very power
of God flowed through him.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)