AP

Studies in Acts

Paul’s testimony before the Roman Jews (Acts 28:17-31)

Having barely recovered from the months-long voyage, Paul turned his thoughts once again to his calling to testify to Jesus the Messiah among Jews and Gentiles. Just as he had done everywhere else, he turned first to the Jews. He did so after all the hatred and persecution that he had experienced at their hands! What great love and loyalty he showed to his Israelite kinfolk!

The first conversation

It is estimated that approximately forty thousand Jews were living in Rome, and that they had at least ten synagogues. Three days after he had found a place to live, Paul invited the leaders of the most important synagogue to visit him in his home. Taking into consideration the possibility that he had come under suspicion among them as well, he faced the delicate task of first explaining his house arrest and defending his innocence, without thereby alienating these Jews from him in advance. He addressed them warmly and amiably as “men, brothers.” In so doing, he was lovingly respecting the covenant basis on which he continued to stand alongside them.

Next, he explained why they were meeting him as a prisoner. “Although I had done nothing against our people or the customs of our fathers, yet I was delivered as a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans.” The fact that back then the Jews had wanted to kill him, he wisely omitted. For the sake of the gospel, he also avoided mentioning anything whereby he could possibly antagonize these Jews and Gentiles. “After the Romans had examined my case, they concluded that I had not committed a capital offense and wanted to release me. But when the Jews objected to this, and the Romans threatened to hand me over to the Sanhedrin to stand trial, I was compelled to use my Roman citizenship and appeal to the emperor. Moreover, all of this happened without my wanting any revenge or wanting to blame my people because of this bad treatment. I sought my rights and my life only to be able to advance the proclamation of the gospel” (see also Philippians 1:22-24).

“My case involves the core of our belief: the Hope of Israel, the coming of the Messiah along with his peaceable kingdom, and the resurrection of the dead. It is for that reason that I am wearing these Roman handcuffs.” Their reaction was dignified but reserved. They did not talk about Jewish contacts with Jewish members of the Christian churches in Rome, although they had existed for years already and were known the world over (Romans 1:8). For they said that neither officially nor unofficially had they learned anything incriminating about Paul. “We have not received any Sanhedrin letter from Judea about you.” The Supreme Council had apparently given up any further persecution. The assembly had been divided and two governors and king Agrippa II had declared Paul to be innocent. Although there was heavy traffic between Rome and Jerusalem in connection with the great feasts, no one had come to report anything bad about Paul. Perhaps the political tensions that preceded the imminent outbreak of the Jewish Revolt had caused Paul’s case to escape further attention in Jerusalem.

Paul’s visitors did know that he was an exemplary Christian, and that this new orientation had aroused opposition in Jewish circles everywhere. Although they harboured some suspicion, they wanted to learn from Paul himself what his thoughts were. In this way, the hour of grace arrived for these Jews. No less than an apostle of Jesus Christ, a Pharisee rabbi and student of Gamaliel, would prove to them from Scripture that Jesus was the Messiah.

Apostolic testimony in the shadow of AD 70

They decided to hold a separate meeting and reserve an entire day for that. On the appointed day, the Jewish leaders came to him in the morning. Even more than had come on the initial visit. Were Luke and some Jewish Christians also present for the discussions? Paul’s apartment apparently had enough room for everyone. It became a special meeting. The covenant lawsuit between God and Israel involving the legitimacy of Jesus’ messiahship was coming to an end. Only a few years remained before the Jewish War erupted (66-70), which would end in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. At that point, according to the prophecies of John the Baptizer and the Lord Jesus, God’s wrath against Israel’s centuries-long backsliding would be manifested (Matthew 24:1-28; Luke 3:7, 16; 21:5-36). The interim of grace that God had arranged for that purpose would soon come to an end. Faced with this threat, for the last time in this book, Paul testified of Messiah Jesus (cf. 23:11) to numerous Jewish leaders in the centre of the world. 

This testimony was for both the prosecution and the defence. As a witness for the defence, he defended Jesus by testifying that God had raised him from the dead and brought him up to heaven. And as a witness for the prosecution, he had to indict Israel on account of its rejection of the Messiah and call his visitors to separate from their leaders in Jerusalem, who had Jesus crucified. If they would do that, then he could proclaim to them the forgiveness of sins.

From Luke’s extensive account of Paul’s preaching in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia (13:14-43), we already know how he was accustomed to preaching the gospel to Jews. Luke could restrict himself to Paul’s main subject: the Kingdom of God and the place of Messiah Jesus in that Kingdom. Using the Law of Moses, the books of the Prophets, and the Psalms, Paul would have proclaimed how God had begun to restore his royal dominion on earth through Messiah Jesus.

With one citation after another, he proved that all the prophecies about the Messiah had been fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth (cf. Luke 24:27). He was the promised Prince of peace of Psalm 72. He is the Lamb of God who through his sacrificial death had fulfilled the requirement of the Law and had taken away the sin of the world. The Saviour and Pioneer unto life, who according to the Scripture had to first suffer and die. But then, entirely in accordance with the prophecy of Psalm 110, he had taken his seat as the risen Priest-King at the right hand of God. “And I saw him in his heavenly majesty!” Paul could testify. Whoever wanted to enter God’s kingdom should bow before king Jesus. In this way, he sought, with all his insight into Scripture, to persuade the Jewish leaders that Jesus’ way and work were in complete agreement with God’s Word. For an entire day, he lovingly exhausted himself to move his brothers to believe in Jesus.

Regrettably, not even Paul could bring all of them to Christ. Some (the minority?) were persuaded by what he proclaimed. They accepted that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah-King, but others refused to believe this. In this way, division arose among them. The Messiah-believing Jews would join the Christian churches, but those who firmly refused to be persuaded by Paul’s Christocentric explanation of Scripture thereby rejected not only God’s Son, but also God’s Spirit and Word. For one who dares to do this, Scripture ultimately becomes a closed book.

Paul warns against hardening

Before leaving that evening, Paul urgently warned his unbelieving listeners of this catastrophic result of their rejection of the Messiah. If they did not repent of that, they were in danger of facing the same judgement as the Judeans who seven centuries earlier had rejected the preaching of Isaiah. When the LORD called Isaiah to be a prophet, Judah had broken God’s covenant repeatedly. Although an entire series of prophets had called the people back to God and his Word, the people had hardheartedly despised their preaching. Then the time arrived when God’s patience had come to an end, and he said to Isaiah: “I am sending you to this people as my messenger, but I am telling you beforehand that the greater part will not listen to your preaching. But that is exactly my intention! Now I will no longer grant that they understand my Word. I am making their heart as insensitive as stone. Have they stopped their ears against my Word? Then they may no longer hear it. I am punishing them with deafness for my Word. Have they closed their eyes to my deeds of grace and judgement? Then they may no longer observe them! I am striking their eyes closed. Have they hardened themselves in this wickedness for centuries already? Then I am surrendering them to hardening, as punishment for their hardening!”

When God’s Son was on earth, he saw this prophecy fulfilled in his contemporaries. After most of the Jews increasingly turned away from him, he increasingly turned away from them. Then he decided to speak to them not with transparency but with truths cloaked in parables. In sacred irony he added: “They must repent yet once more!” (Matthew 13:10-17; cf. John 12:37-41).

To this same word of judgement Paul directed the stubborn Jewish leaders in Rome (in Romans 11:8 he had already referred to this). He introduced it as a word of the Holy Spirit, through whom Isaiah had prophesied about Messiah Jesus. If they continued to reject him, God’s wrath would come upon them (John 3:18, 36). For then they deserved the same judgement as the one that the Holy Spirit rightly pronounced upon their ancestors when they rejected God’s Word coming through Isaiah, like some were now rejecting God’s Word coming through Paul.

Paul had explained the Scriptures as being Jesus’ proof of legitimacy, but that is not how they wanted to understand them. Well then, they would go on reading, reading, and reading, but they would no longer understand. What had been proclaimed to them as a life-giving aroma would become a deadly odour (2 Corinthians 2:16). Note the poignant history of the Jews throughout the world, though the Lord has indeed continued to graciously preserve a remnant in connection with this judgement (Romans 11:1-5; 2 Corinthians 3:14-16).

Paul had told them about the grace and miracles whereby Jesus had proven that he was the Messiah, but they refused to look at them. Now they would no longer be able to look at them. Despite extensive Bible knowledge, they would not understand Scripture. Since then, this judgement has affected many rabbis and Christian theologians. The cause of their blindness lay not with God, but with themselves. He hardened them because they had first hardened themselves. Anyone who wilfully stops up his ears may eventually no longer hear.

When God looked toward them, they did not discern it as a time of redemption (Luke 19:44). Just like some Jews when Paul daily opened the Scriptures to them, they wilfully and knowingly shut their hearts, eyes, and ears tightly. They were unwilling to see the promised Messiah as having come in the Lord Jesus and they were unwilling to listen to Paul’s explanation of Scripture. They were unwilling to understand the prophecies about the Messiah as speaking about Jesus, for then they would have to repent from their “pious” self-directed righteousness and turn to a life of grace. That is what they refused to do. They were unwilling to be healed (i.e., saved) by forgiveness and sanctification. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I wanted … but you were not willing,” said the Lord Jesus (Matthew 23:37). “This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

Would Paul’s listeners, who knew the Scripture extremely well, have thought of what Isaiah had asked after this word of judgement:

How long, O Lord? And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land (Isaiah 6:11-12).

Only a few years later Jerusalem was destroyed, 1,100,000 Jews lost their lives, and 97,000 others were deported as slaves.

Israel’s fall—the Salvation of the Gentiles

Paul concluded his preaching that evening with a solemn declaration about the progress of redemption in Jesus Christ now that the Jews everywhere had rejected him. He directed it to the leaders (v. 17) of the large Jewish colony. At the same time, he was speaking past them to the entire Jewish world. It is remarkable that in his parting word, he no longer addressed his unbelieving listeners with the word brothers. By their unbelief, they had made themselves unworthy of that title, which they could recover only by becoming Christians. As Israelites, they possessed the oldest rights in the Kingdom of God. Therefore, Paul had proclaimed the gospel everywhere first to them. Only when they rejected it, did he turn exclusively to the Gentiles. In Pisidian Antioch, in Corinth, and in so many other places he did not leave the synagogue before sounding an urgent warning (Acts 13:46; 18:6). Now that in Rome as well, many Jewish leaders had rejected Messiah Jesus, he took leave of them here too in a solemn and prophetic manner.

“You refuse to listen. Israel will fall, except for a remnant; but Israel’s fall will become the rise of the Gentiles (Romans 11:11). God has already begun to make known to them the message of salvation, and he will continue doing that. What you are refusing, they will do: listen unto salvation.” From now on the apostle no longer felt obligated to take the gospel first to the Jews. Although he was hoping that as he brought the gospel to the Gentiles, a number of unbelieving Jews would yet be incited to envy, so that he might still see them saved (Romans 11:14). For after the Jewish leaders had left that evening, that old grief about Israel’s unbelief must have filled his heart once again. After all, these were his kinfolk, who had on that day rejected their own Messiah; that caused Paul constant pain (cf. Romans 9:1-5).

The oldest manuscripts do not contain verse 29: “After he said this, the Jews left, arguing vigorously among themselves.” Therefore, some translations have put it between brackets or in a footnote and others have omitted it.

Paul proclaims the gospel unhindered in the capital city of the Gentile world

Paul remained in Rome for the full term of two years, in the house that he had rented. Because he was a prisoner, he could not lead Jewish or Christian worship services. But he could still exercise his apostolic office. For he could freely receive everyone who wanted to visit him. During those years many visitors from Rome and the entire world, both Jews and Gentiles, had been taught by him about the kingdom of God and his Messiah.

According to the oldest tradition, during this imprisonment the apostle wrote his so-called prison letters (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon). If this is true (but it cannot be proven conclusively), then his fellow workers Luke, Tychichus, Aristarchus, Mark, and Epaphras could have been in regular contact with him. Onesimus, the runaway slave of Philemon in Colossae, would have come to faith here as well, and have served the apostle for a time as his household servant (Philemon 8-20). But these remain assumptions. In any case, in that centre of the pagan world, Paul’s rented house became a centre of gospel proclamation, whose effective influence only God knows.

Because the Lord had explicitly assured him that he would have to appear before the emperor, this would have happened. One day, Paul would have stood face to face with the cruel and capricious emperor Nero and testified before him of Jesus Christ (according to tradition, he was beheaded several years later by this same emperor). In this way, the apostle proclaimed all the way to the highest circles in Rome how an emperor and senators could be saved by Jesus Christ.

How many converted soldiers and businessmen would have brought the gospel from Paul’s home on their travels to sin-darkened Gaul and Germany? Early Christianity was not spread by professional missionaries, but by the oral evangelizing of “ordinary” Christians and their remarkable neighbourly love, for example, for those suffering from various pestilences and others in distress. To all his visitors Paul gave the good news of the kingdom of God, and he provided instruction about the place and work of the Lord Jesus Christ in that kingdom. He was not ashamed before either Jew or Greek for the offense and foolishness of the gospel: simply believe in the crucified Christ, as the power and wisdom of God (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:21-25). For two years the Jews did not bother him, and the Romans placed no impediment in his way.

With this triumphant report Luke concludes his second book. For though Paul was in chains, the Word of God was not bound (2 Timothy 2:9). For two full years he could testify in the capital city: “Jesus Christ is Lord!” Protected by the exalted Lord Jesus Christ, he gave this testimony unhindered!

Fitting conclusion

We would like to have read more about Paul and the outcome of his trial, but Luke leaves us in the dark about that. His purpose, after all, was not to describe the life work of Paul, but the Acts that Jesus Christ performed after his ascension, through his apostles (1:2). They had received from him the commission to testify of him everywhere in the world (1:8). Now, barely thirty years later, the testimony of Jesus by apostles and evangelists had penetrated from Jerusalem via Judea and Samaria all the way to Rome, and the growth centres of the holy, Christian church had been established. When Paul proclaimed the gospel in Rome, this foundational apostolic work was completed. With this Luke had described sixty unique and miraculous years in the world’s history. The approximately thirty years of Jesus’ work on earth in his first book. And the thirty years of Jesus’ unstoppable salvation offensive from heaven in his second book. At that point he could lay down his pen. He had achieved his goal: to describe the Acts of the ascended Lord Jesus. In that context, Paul’s subsequent vicissitudes were not important.

Question:

The Protestant reformers saw the Covenant promises as fulfilled in the Gospel – the believing church was the ‘New Israel of God.’ Where did this leave unbelieving Jewish people? (See Romans 11:25-32).

– Alida Sewell