You can find this post on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/49Wz7LfHp6
Acts 13:13-41 If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2013%3A13-41&version=NLT
So, wow, this is a BIG passage and not just in length. Paul was a great preacher and incredibly well educated and we see it here. I am neither, BUT, like you I have the Holy Spirit and the word of God, so let’s do this!
Quick notes: Paul and entourage have left Cyprus and are now in Pisidian Antioch (different Antioch than the one that sent them on this journey).
John (Mark) has gone home. That’s all it says here, but it becomes apparent in other sections of this story that he didn’t leave very well. It seems like he may have just gotten homesick and decided he didn’t want to be a missionary anymore. Elsewhere it’s pretty clear that Paul was disappointed in him. The fact is, all the way back when the church was newly born, people started well and got sidetracked. They had misunderstandings and frustrations. The church has never been perfect, and until Jesus comes back and redeems the world, it never will be.
If this is hard for you, figure out how deal with it. If you want perfection, look to Jesus. The rest of us are broken. We all need grace.
What? Did you think that ended at the cross? Honey, you and I need grace every minute of every day. So does everybody else, so we can all stop being shocked that Christians screw up sometimes.
The remaining travellers show up at the local synagogue on the Sabbath where, as is customary, some portion of the scriptures is read. Paul is invited to offer some encouragement. This wouldn’t be weird for Paul. He was well educated as a teacher so as a “visiting Rabbi” he would have routinely been invited to speak.
And Paul just happens to have a sermon prepared. After unexpectedly meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul took a second look at the scriptures he had been studying his whole life and suddenly, it all connected. The entire history of Israel, all the prophecies, everything pointed to and was fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. Paul couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before, but now that he had, he was making sure everyone else could too. He begins with the family of Jacob, who had been renamed Israel, growing and becoming a nation while living in Egypt. After 400 years in Egypt, much of which was spent in slavery, God rescued them from that land and took them to a land he had promised to Israel’s grandfather Abraham. If you have read that story you know it was nothing short of a 40 year masterclass in God’s stubborn determination to love and rescue a group of people who made every effort to thwart his purposes.
He goes on to explain the formation of the nation once they were (sort of) established in their promised home. At first, a string of judges were raised up to rescue them from the surrounding nations with whom they were endlessly at war. Eventually they started asking for a king. Their first king, Saul, started well and ended very badly. But God turned the nation’s attention to a young shepherd-poet who, though also very broken, loved God deeply. When Saul and his sons died in battle, David became king and God made some incredible promises to David. The quotations Paul cites toward the end of this passage are portions of those promises. God told David that one of his descendants would sit on his throne forever and never see decay. Since, as Paul points out, everyone eventually dies and their body decays, it’s hard to imagine how God could keep this “holy and sure” promise.
But, Paul explains, God did it! This man Jesus whose ministry was predicted by John the Baptist in accordance with prophecy, fulfilled the promise made to David. As a descendant of David, which is clearly and carefully documented by a couple of the gospel writers, Jesus was wrongfully executed in Jerusalem. But three days later, he came out of that grave, body and all, and he never died again. His body did not see decay, so an impossible promise was fulfilled. God has a way of doing that!
Paul has effectively dropped a bomb here. For hundreds of years, Jews and God-fearing Gentiles had been waiting for this descendant of David that they knew as the Messiah to come and rescue Israel.
Paul says, He came! And we have been rescued!
We know that most of the Jews were expecting to be rescued from their physical enemies, so Paul explains, Jesus came to rescue Israel and the whole world from the curse of trying to keep a law to which they could never measure up. Jesus came to justify, to make people right with God, by fully forgiving their sins. No one could follow the law so perfectly that they could stand before God. The law only demonstrated how far below God’s standard we all fell. Jesus came to offer forgiveness for failing to meet that standard. He came to offer a way to be right with God, since it wasn’t something we could do ourselves.
The Messiah had come. He offered rescue, not just from human oppressors, but from ourselves, from an eternity apart from God who is the only true source of life and peace and fulfillment and joy.
Paul wraps up his sermon with a warning from the same scriptures that he just demonstrated have been pointing to Jesus. He says, the prophets warned that God was going to do something so incredible that people wouldn’t believe it if they told them. Paul tells his listeners, It happened. God did it. Don’t be like your unbelieving ancestors. Jesus is the rescue the whole world has been waiting for.
