Sermon Central
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In The Synagogue & School Of Tyrannus Series
Contributed by John Lowe on Nov 28, 2017 (message contributor)
Summary: To this city of Ephesus, wealthy, profoundly religious, with a religion that was in itself worse than an absolute absence of it, the apostle came. There were many adversaries; adversaries among his own brethren in the synagogue, as he revealed in his....
In the face of such evidence, presented by Paul in Holy Spirit power, the hard core of Ephesian synagogue Jews refused to believe. They “BELIEVED NOT,” says the Holy Spirit, using an expression that first occurs in the New Testament in John 3:36, “He that BELIEVETH NOT the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” They expressed their unbelief by speaking EVIL of God’s revealed WAY of salvation through Christ, and by agitating the multitudes against the WAY. Again the Holy Spirit uses a significant word, one used in Matthew 15:4[3], which warns that cursing one’s father or mother puts a person in danger of death. The rejection of Christ by the unbelieving Jews, then, followed a pattern of unbelief manifested elsewhere in Acts (14:2; 17:5), which was unjust and total.
HE DEPARTED FROM THEM, AND SEPARATED THE DISCIPLES, DISPUTING DAILY IN THE SCHOOL OF ONE TYRANNUS[4]. As soon as Jewish unbelief reached the stage of cursing Christ, Paul SEPARATED himself and his converts from the synagogue altogether. He chose as his new meeting place the lecture hall of the well-known teacher in town, “ONE TYRANNUS.” What a name for a teacher; Tyrant! Was that his real name or the nickname given to him by his students? According to some authorities, where a town had a large number of Jews, they organized a divinity school as well as a synagogue. Possibly TYRANNUS was one of Paul’s Jewish converts who, when matters came to a head in the synagogue, put the facilities of his divinity school at Paul’s disposal.
It has been suggested by some that Paul used the building from 11 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon, during the heat of the day (no air conditioning in those days) when TYRANNUS would not be using the building himself. That would normally be the time of the midday and afternoon siesta. Thus Paul would labor at his tent-making in the early hours of the day (20:34) and would devote the siesta hours to teaching the Word to those who would come. And come they did. In addition to his public teaching in the hall of TYRANNUS (probably a large room/lecture hall or gymnasium), the apostle went from house to house instructing and admonishing the disciples in Ephesus—“You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house . . . So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears” (20:20, 31).
10 And this continued by the space of two years; so that all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks.
If at Ephesus Paul followed his usual policy of devoting his mission time to establishing a thriving evangelistic church in the city and encouraging his converts to get busy evangelizing the surrounding area. We learn from Revelation 2 and 3 and elsewhere that churches were planted in Colossae and Hierapolis as well as in Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, though Paul himself does not seem to have visited them. This gives us some concept of how the Word of God was growing in that day. Apparently, from this vantage point, the church in Colossae came into existence before Paul wrote to the Colossians as he did to the Romans before he had visited them. Yet he was the founder of those churches. How could this be? By the simple fact that from the school of TYRANNUS the gospel sounded fourth—it went out everywhere. When the Corinthians wanted Paul to come over to them, he wrote to them, “For I do not want to see you now and make only a passing visit; I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. But I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me” (1 Corinthians 16:7-9). For two to three years the Gospel sounded out so that everyone had heard it in the province of Asia. Probably the seven churches of Asia came into existence through the preaching of Paul the apostle here at Ephesus. This may have been where he had his greatest ministry.
