WITNESS UNTO ALL MEN

The mob had almost killed him and he had been rescued by the intervention of Roman soldiers from the nearby barracks. On the steps of the barracks he had obtained permission from the Roman captain to speak to the mob which a moment before had been intent on taking his life. Paul motions to the crowd, and remarkably they fall silent. The charges they had against him are found in chapter 21 verse 28, and they involved ‘the people’, ‘the law’, the temple and Gentiles whom he had, they claimed, brought into the temple area and so defiled it. Paul will respond to these charges and in so doing will give his testimony. He never tired of telling of his encounter with the risen Lord on the Damascus road. The first task was to get the mob to listen. No preacher should begin by antagonising his audience and so Paul does all he can to conciliate his hearers. He spoke to them in their beloved Aramaic, vv. 1, 2. As for the charge concerning the people, he says, ‘I... am a Jew’. As for the law, he was brought up in the law of his fathers at the feet of the honoured Gamaliel, v. 3. He referred to his zeal for Judaism, vv. 4, 5, and he gave them credit for such sincere zeal as his own, v. 5. His courtesy and magnanimity and love for his own people come out strongly. The fanaticism and madness in which they had just been seeking to kill him, he acknowledges as their zeal for God, v. 3; cf. Phil. 3 4ff; Rom. 10. 2. He had been instructed at the very first in his faith in Christ, not by a Gentile, but by one, Ananias, who was a devout observer of the law, and well spoken of by the Jews of Damascus. Again, the Jewish element in his conversion is stressed and, furthermore, that event was the work of ‘the God of our fathers’, v. 14. He was giving his personal testimony. Nothing but a personal encounter with the One whose disciples he had been persecuting could have changed Saul of Tarsus into Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ. What a convincing evidence for the truth of Christianity is the plain fact of a changed life. All appeal and exhortation are valueless if what the preacher is contradicts what he says. Paul’s life had been revolutionised. He was to be a witness to all men for Christ. Here, on the steps, he did just that.