“And they began calling Barnabas, Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.”
Every once in a while we preachers get a reality check concerning just how well we are communicating and how well people are listening to the things we say from the pulpit.
That’s good. I think God allows these occasions to help us keep our edges honed; to keep us alert to the fact that we need to first be certain we know what we’re talking about ~ as Haddon Robinson said in his book “Biblical Preaching”, “…a mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew” ~ and then once we’re certain what it is we want to say, or rather, what God wants us to say, then we are to be careful to say it clearly and as often as needed to make it understood.
I had one of these ‘reality check’ occasions very recently, and amazingly, it involved this very portion of scripture; a portion I had just that day been contemplating for this sermon.
I want to tell you that story, but first let’s take a look at this account in which Paul and Barnabas found themselves in a situation of having it brought sharply to their attention that their audience was very simply not on the same page as they.
MIXED REVIEWS
Backing up to the beginning of chapter 14 we see that Paul and Barnabas have traveled to Iconium. Even though they were rejected by the Jews in Pisidian Antioch, they followed their custom and went first to the synagogue.
During His earthly ministry Jesus talked often of the many who would come from east and west to sit at His Father’s table. But as far as His own ministry was concerned, He came to His own. Salvation was offered first to the Jew, because God’s chosen people were to be the heralds of the good news to the nations.
“He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” John 1:11,12
So Paul continued that focus, even though the Jews rejected his message. His gospel was always ‘to the Jew first and also to the Greek’.
Now I want you to notice that in verse 2 there is no comma after the word ‘Jews’. It doesn’t say “But the Jews, who disbelieved”, indicating that all of the Jews there disbelieved. It says “But the Jews who disbelieved…” leaving us to think that some of the Jews did believe. So let’s not forget that there is no religious or cultural or national group that is rejected from or rejecting of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Everyone makes the choice in his or her own heart to believe or disbelieve, and in every group there will be some on both sides of that fence.
That is made even clearer as we read down through these first 5 verses of chapter 14, and see that there were those of both groups, Jews and Gentiles, who were so offended by Paul’s preaching that they actually plotted together to stone these missionaries.
But they became aware of it, verse 6, and fled to Lystra and Derbe. Now please don’t think them cowards. It has been said that discretion is the better part of valor, and it is one thing to speak boldly for the sake of the Kingdom, and to be willing to suffer for Christ. But only a fool or someone with suicidal tendencies would hear the news that a large mob is getting ready to rip them apart, and then stand around to see what happens.
Furthermore, if you look at verse 21, you will see that after Jews come from Antioch and Iconium, following the Apostle all the way to Lystra and stoning him there, and after God raises him back up on that road and he goes back into Lystra and preaches some more, he then goes back to both Iconium and Antioch and strengthens the brethren in those cities! Coward? Not Saul of Tarsus!
And let it not escape your notice that although he had been rejected in those cities, churches had started there. God’s Word will not return to Him empty, believer, but will accomplish the purpose for which He sent it out. (Isa 55:11)
Ok, so, going back to verse six, they had come to Lystra and Derbe and the surrounding region, and they continued the work they were commissioned for; preaching the gospel.
Keep that in mind, because in the following verses the gospel, per se, is not reiterated, but as we discuss the coming events it will be important to remember that it is Paul’s preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that they are hearing.
MIXED UP PEOPLE
At Lystra there was a certain man. Luke is being specific. This is not some anonymous man, this is a certain man, lame from birth, never walked, and everyone there knows or is aware of him.
Don’t let it throw you that verse 9 says Paul could see that the man had faith to be made well. This is just an example of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in action.
In Hebrews the writer tells us that God confirmed the word of the Apostles and bore witness with them, “…both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will.” (Heb 2:4)
So as Paul is preaching the gospel to this large crowd, he looks at this man who is listening to what Paul is saying, and the Holy Spirit gives Paul divine discernment for the moment and he simply knows that the man has faith to be healed.
Now this is a bit of a side trail from our main point. But I want you to think about what is being said to us here. It is not that God needs for us to have faith in order for Him to heal us. When Jesus approached the man by the pool of Bethesda who had been paralyzed for 38 years, and asked the man if he wanted to be healed, the man showed neither faith nor even desire. But Jesus healed the man for His own purposes.
Those who were raised from the dead by him were certainly not exercising faith at the time.
But I think what we’re being told in this account is that the Holy Spirit witnessed to Paul’s spirit that the man would respond to a command to use legs he had never used before, and that witness gave Paul boldness to cry out with a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet!”
We can also glean from this that since the man was listening to a story of a man who had been crucified and then came up from the dead as He Himself had predicted, he must have been saying in his own heart something like, “If this One could defeat death, then certainly He could heal me too”.
Up until now, everything is going just great. Paul and Barnabas are preaching the gospel, Paul being the chief speaker, and by the power of the risen Christ Paul speaks a command to a lame man and the man jumps up to his feet; feet he had never used before.
Not unlike other accounts we see in the ministry of Christ and even here in Acts. Peter had done much the same thing in Jerusalem, and the man he healed had also leapt up and went to the temple jumping and leaping and praising God.
But where this man was both listening to Paul and apparently hearing him, he might have been the only one. Because the rest of the crowd, though they were listening, weren’t really hearing.
Let me tell you a story.
According to Greek mythology, recorded by poet Ovid in his work, Metamorphosis, Zeus and Hermes once visited Lystra and were rejected by all of its citizens except one couple. Philemon and his wife Baucis welcomed the disguised visitors and fed them food that they could scarcely spare, being very poor. As a result, when Zeus flooded the area, destroying homes and turning the region into a swamp land, the home of Philemon and Baucis, rather than being destroyed, was turned into a beautiful castle where they lived as prince and princess. When they died, according to the myth, they turned into two beautiful trees whose branches intertwined.
So here are the multitudes of Lystra, worshipers of Zeus and undoubtedly very familiar with this tale of Philemon and Baucis, and not wanting to have their homes destroyed like those who had rejected the gods in an earlier time, and when they hear Paul give this command and a lame man leaps to his feet, by golly, it’s time to sacrifice an oxen or two and keep these guys happy!
They just weren’t listening, were they?
What would Paul have been telling them as he spoke? These were pagan gentiles, so he wouldn’t have been giving them a history of the Jews. Whether the Christ descended from Abraham and David would have meant nothing to them.
No, he would have been talking about Jesus of Nazareth, who went around doing good and healing those oppressed of the devil for God was with Him.
He would have been telling them that rather than the many gods they worshiped, there was really only one true God who was creator of all things and who became a Man, died to pay for men’s sins, then rose again and ascended to Heaven with a promise to return.
That would have basically been Paul’s fundamental message to the Gentiles, and is probably what they were hearing. So when the man was healed and they were amazed, had they been paying attention and really hearing what Paul was saying, they might have asked, “Wow, is this done in the power of this Jesus whom you preach?” And Paul would have said, “Yes!”
Instead, it turns into Mardi Gras. The garlands come out, 76 trombones lead the big parade, the priests of Zeus come running in from their temple which was located just outside the city gates, leading their intended sacrifice, and in their own language they start praising Barnabas as Zeus and Paul as Hermes.
The Roman version of these two gods would be Jupiter rather than Zeus and Mercury rather than Hermes. When you see the logo for FTD florists, the man with the wings on his feet is Mercury, messenger of the gods. The Greek version is Hermes. It’s where we get the word hermeneutics. When Bible College students begin preaching classes they take a class in hermeneutics, which according to the dictionary is the science of interpretation and explanation.
Now what I’m about to tell you I want to preface with a sort of disclaimer. I know a woman who I see often but only in a business setting. I have developed a friendship with this woman and I respect her, and I would never want to embarrass her or lead her to believe that I would treat her with derision, or criticize her behind her back. She’s a sweet lady, and if she ever has occasion to read this sermon, I would want her to know that I only tell this story as an example of an error that any one of us might fall prey to in a time of inattention, or due to a breakdown in communication.
On one of the mornings I went to this woman’s place of business, in the course of our conversation she said she was confused about something. Being always willing to help someone be confused, I lent her my ear.
She said that she had been reading in the book of Acts and had read about Barnabas helping Paul get introduced to the other Apostles. And she said that she remembered her pastor saying that Barnabas was called something else in the Old Testament…or somewhere.
I tried to say no, that couldn’t be, because Barnabas was first introduced in the book of Acts and is given no other name in scripture, but she wasn’t having it. No, she was certain he was called something else somewhere.
Well, it didn’t sink in with me that she was talking about this event in chapter 14. All I could focus on was that she said he was called something else in the Old Testament, and I wondered how she could make that connection in her mind.
The next week I went back to that place of business and she pulled a small New Testament out of her pocket, turned to Acts 14 and read verse 12, the very passage I had been reading that very morning, in preparation for this sermon. I hadn’t thought yet about how I was going to approach it; I was just in the reading stages.
Then she said, “So the Jews knew Barnabas as Zeus, and Paul as Hermes”.
Well, of course I did what I could to explain that it was not Jews, but Gentiles who made that declaration, and I said, “But please notice that Paul and Barnabas were very quick to deny that and say that they were only men, and went on to explain the truth”.
I’m not sure how much she heard, because she didn’t say anything to indicate that she saw where she had been confused. She was just happy to have found the place where Barnabas had a different name. But she’s far from dumb, so I trust that as she thought about it the Lord was able to straighten it out in her thinking.
Now I told you all that because I want you to see this. Whatever her pastor was saying about this passage, I’m fairly certain he wasn’t trying to say that the Jews called Barnabas ‘Zeus’, and I’m fairly certain he wasn’t preaching that Barnabas was called by something else in the Old Testament.
And the amazing thing is, my friend made the same error as she listened to her pastor, as was being exposed in this very chapter that these Lycaonians made as they were listening to Paul. They were there. Their eyes were open. But apparently they weren’t hearing what was really being said to them.
Of course I don’t know how much was my friend’s inattention and how much might have been her pastor’s hiccup in communication, but it served as a reminder to me that we all have a responsibility to really listen to what is being said to us, process the information, question it if it sounds questionable, and make sure we have our facts straight; especially as concerns our understanding of the Bible and how we relay what we’ve learned to the ears of others.
HEARING WRONGLY
We’ve all had the experience of mishearing what has been said to us. Sometimes what we think we heard sounds out of place and inappropriate to the moment, so we ask the speaker to repeat what they said.
Sometimes we misunderstand simply because the person we’re hearing is coming from a different background and we get lost in their diction or their terminology. Some years back I even wrote a limerick to demonstrate this tendency.
I beggeth thy pardon?
What didst thou say?
I hateth to hearken thee, speaking this way!
It hurteth my head to decipher thy word.
“Rad, cool, chill out and get down”? How absurd!
That may have been the principle problem in Lystra, and it may very well be the principle problem in today’s church.
I don’t know why I haven’t seen this in other places; maybe because I wasn’t looking for it; but I have been amazed since I moved to this area almost six years ago, when talking to people, to learn how many of them have such a wide variety in their church background.
Now I’m careful here not to say their “Christian background”, because in some of those cases, although they cite a long list of churches of various denominations that they’ve been a part of, I couldn’t be sure that they had ever understood the gospel message and appropriated its truth by faith for their own lives.
One might think that maybe the churches they’ve attended haven’t been preaching the right thing from their pulpits and in some cases that may be true. But by and large I think we’re seeing a growing community of people in our present day culture who just aren’t listening.
Hasn’t someone called this the communication age? Well, there may be a lot more talking going on, but the communicating part is seriously in question.
I have had people sit under my teaching for up to a year, and at the end of that time they could not articulate back to me that the gospel means that Christ died to pay for their sins, was buried and rose on the third day. Where were they? It looked like they were sitting in front of me, and their eyes were open…
One woman left our church after almost eighteen months, saying we had lied and told her we weren’t Southern Baptist, even though the reason she started coming in the first place was because she had read a newspaper article about our church which stated no less than four times that we were Southern Baptist affiliated. And I don’t know what would make her think I’d lie about that.
Another woman was in our church for a year or more and in all that time I never heard her talk about a personal relationship with Jesus or any Biblical truth applied to her life. I did often hear her mention her dreamcatcher and dream pillows (that’s where you use someone else’s pillow and you dream their dreams ~ sigh…)
Well it’s really no wonder this problem exists.
Our churches are becoming full of people coming out of Seventh Day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormonism, legalistic protestant or catholic backgrounds, non-specific belief systems that just adopt some general philosophy about who and what God is and they let their imagination fill in the blanks, total ignorance of scripture and no desire to know it, listening to too many voices, on TV, on the radio, at the mall, and so on, and they’re unwittingly bringing a lot of their heretical background baggage with them.
Am I saying we shouldn’t accept them? Absolutely not! Most of those coming from these cults and these confused backgrounds have never been given an opportunity to get saved, and we need to give it to them.
But can you see why it is so important that we as Bible-believing and teaching Christians know what we believe to the degree that we are able to verbalize it to others?
Because the pagans aren’t just in the stores and the workplace and the places of recreation and entertainment; they’re in the church! They’re among us and they’re attending Bible studies and engaging themselves in the activities and functions of the church, but there is no change in their life or lifestyle from before they were churched, and they can’t relate back to you any degree of scriptural truth that makes any sense at all, because they aren’t listening and hearing and applying.
Remember, Paul’s greatest opposition came from those who should have best understood his message. These gentiles were coming from a backwards mindset and misunderstood what they were seeing, but it was the religious people that came all the way from Pisidian Antioch to stone him.
HOW WELL ARE YOU LISTENING?
Ok. Well, it’s time to make some brief personal application for ourselves and draw to a close.
I encourage you to stop once in a while, and by that I mean stop what you’re doing, stop what you’re thinking; just stop everything. Then with no distractions from without or within, ask yourself how well you’re listening.
Each time we sit down to study the Bible or just to read it in our devotion time, wouldn’t it be wise to begin with a prayer that says, “Lord, open my understanding to really receive and understand what You want to say to me in Your Word today”?
How much more effective and productive would our Bible reading be, if we asked the Holy Spirit to block out the baggage that we bring in with us and get through to us with the truth?
Our faith is a spiritual faith. We don’t really understand it with the physical senses until it is first understood by the spirit.
So a cavalier, thoughtless approach to any spiritual exercise, whether it be Bible study or prayer or corporate worship or listening to a sermon will avail us nothing, and can even lead to error because information gets filtered through our fallen thinking and the enemy twists it into something perverted and useless.
Just to clarify what I’m saying I’ll use a very poignant example and refer to a book that came out back in the ‘70s, called “Chariots of the Gods”. I think there was a documentary type movie made from it. The author took some verses out of Ezekiel pertaining to a vision the man of God was given, and built an entire theory from them of aliens in spacecrafts visiting the earth.
Now granted, this was done by a man who was not a Christian and had no beginning foundation to build on. The point is, spiritual truth is spiritually discerned, and even as born again believers in Jesus we need to be on guard against ourselves, that we allow God to conform our thinking to His thinking instead of trying to conform His Word to our thinking and our finite understanding.
It wasn’t only the pagans who weren’t listening that day in Lystra. Those there who had the Word of God and read it every Sabbath also missed salvation for lack of hearing when God spoke.
God’s Word goes forth to accomplish that for which He sent it out, and it goes forth from Him perpetually. His Word goes forth to warn and to bless, to declare and to comfort, to call the sinner to Him and to call the saint in deeper.
He gives you and me the same invitation He gave to Jeremiah (33:3)
‘Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’
How can I be confident of that? Because I believe He will reveal Himself as clearly and openly to any one of us as we are willing to know.
Are you listening?
