One Hour. One Book: Acts

the book of Acts provides a detailed and orderly and eyewitness account of not just what Jesus did that's really the luke's gospel but the growth of the early church and the spread of the gospel there are many who indicate that the gospel that the book of Acts ends on rather abruptly in Rome but I think that's the point of the book I think the point of the book is to take you from Jerusalem to Rome and so Acts chapter 1 will be Jerusalem in Acts chapter 28 we'll be wrong and it's how the gospel got to Rome but it's much more than that the Gospel according to Luke was to give you the first part of a story in Luke he tells he tells Theophilus that he's going to tell the story in order of Jesus's ministry but in the book of Acts he picks up with the word and you see in the very beginning that this is a continuation of that this is Jesus began to do and teach in the Gospel of Luke but the church picked up the work in the book of Acts so it's more or less a sequel to Luke's Gospel in my opinion there is a trilogy in his mind that he's going to write a third book but it doesn't happen or we don't have it but the important thing is that it's the sequel to Luke's Gospel it focuses primarily on the ministry of Peter and then the ministry of Paul there are other profound players but I think that there's probably something that should help us to understand the ministry of Paul in a very unique way we're going to talk about that in the next lecture as far as authorship I mean we're walking around assuming that Luke wrote this book but it doesn't actually say that the evidence for that that he is Colossians 4:14 Luke the physician Colossians 4:14 the evidence that he is the writer is probably mostly related to the early church writings there are a couple of people that write concerning Luke as the writer one of them is a fragment called the anti Marcion prologue to the Gospel of Luke it's written between 150 and 250 and it actually says these words Luke is a Syrian of Antioch a Syrian by race a physician by profession he had become a disciple of the Apostles and later followed Paul until that Paul's martyrdom having served the Lord continuously unmarried without children filled with the Holy Spirit he died at the age of 84 in Bethea the we don't know how true that is we just know that it's an early statement so he may these things may be true of him but we also have this little fragment that was found by a fellow father morituri it's called the moratorium fragment it's also from the second century and it says it's a little bit there's 85 lines of a manuscript and it's very difficult to read what we have is this manuscript that suggests that Luke is the author of the book of Acts so we have two sources from the second century that tell us that if you count Irenaeus as statement and climate of Alexandria's statement that also happened in the second century those are reflections of the same thing so you may have as many as four or five different early church writers that assume that Luke is the writer now how would Luke get the information in the book in the Gospel of Luke he says in Luke 1 2 that he went around and collected eyewitnesses let me suggest to you that Luke and acts as a set get their source material from the preaching and teaching of Paul and from the work of the Holy Spirit in the eyewitnesses that are speaking to Luke and so Luke weaves together these eyewitnesses and the things he hears say Peter say and Paul say but mostly the preaching and teaching of Paul since he follows around Paul so I would lean heavily on Acts containing a lot of backfill information for for Paul line documents let me say it this way you have learned up till now a Hebrew world context for the prophets for the law for the writings right I mean you've learned a lot about the way Hebrews think in the way the basic biblical context was a Hebrew worldview that is not true anymore as you hit the book of Acts you leave that view Jerusalem is descending in its importance Rome is ascending in its support importance so the context for the book of Acts and the context for the epistles is the Roman world we're no longer interested when when you mentioned the law you may be talking about the Torah but often you're talking about the common law of Rome so Paul is going to have to say a lot of things that have never been said before because the the Gospels were in the context of the Hebrew world the prophets the writings the law were in the context of the Hebrew world when you hit the book of Acts you leave the Hebrew world the gospel is now going out evidence for that when Paul was born he was born Schaal Saul of Tarsus we call him Paul not because he was Saul then came to Jesus and became Paul all Jews had two names if you go to a bris if you go to a circumcision they say it this way his name shall be called among the sons of Israel show his name shall be called among the Gentile world among the glean Paulus he was always both so why do we call him Paul because the bulk of what we have is his mission activity outside of the Hebrew world and so much of the New Testament is set in Roman law here's the thing we haven't done a lot of Roman law you your entire context for the Bible so far has been the Hebrew world and from here on out we're gonna do an awful lot of Roman stuff the reason I'm steeped right now in studying the Roman world is because I am convinced that we're where what happens is we end up having people who understand Rome and greco-roman world and try to look at the Old Testament or we have Hebrew thinkers trying to look at the New Testament but you've got to become two people in order to do this you've got to have two totally different mindsets about what's going on what is going on in the common street understanding of something in Rome is not the same as a kid growing up in Jerusalem a kid growing up in Jerusalem has a different worldview in the same way that today you cannot project yourself into the mind of a North Korean you don't think like they think you you can't do it without real study of who they are if there's no way your understanding in Iranian today they're they're not Arabs they're ancient Persians and then the intricate way in which they think and the intricate way in which they dialogue and the beauty of their artwork in that and the foundations of one of the most ancient societies in the world lead them to believe that the United States is a relative kid on the block and so as a result when we're looking at worldviews we've got to take time to put on the skin of a person from that background you have effectively up till now put on the skin of a Hebrew but now you're leaving the Hebrew world Nepal was an unbelievable example of this because he's a guy with a Hebrew heart a Greek tongue and a Roman mind he has a Roman mind and we're going to talk about what the Roman mind is because it's absolutely essential for understanding how the epistles work you have to understand that a Roman doesn't think like a Hebrew in his normal foundational thinking Romans were great franchisors if you had to hold together an empire with 18 different languages with over 600 700 different gods with different holidays with different alphabets how would you hold them all together the philosophy isn't the same the songs they sing a happy birthday aren't the same how do you hold them together in one Empire what you do is franchise you create a Roman city called the colony and you stamp it out like a franchise city and you put a Bob Evans next to a Home Depot next to a a Walmart next to a McDonald's next to and you start doing it everywhere you go and Rome is all about savita's civilization is City ISM making cities what city Rome stamp Rome everywhere and everybody will be Roman and their whole idea of their their own destiny their own manifest destiny to bring civilization to the world is fundamental to understanding who they are okay so let's go back to the book of Acts for a minute and ask this question how does this book come together well you do have Paul's preaching and teaching but there's also a number of we sections in the book write down the following three we sections because they will become important to you the first one is in 6 chapter 16 verses 10 to 17 acts 16 10 to 17 I'll explain the way sections in a minute act 16 10 to 17 the second one is acts 20 verse 5 through 21 18 20 verse 5 to 21 18 and the third one is 27 1 to 28 16 or just 27 and 28 chapters 27 28 what happens in these chapters is there's a movement from the third-person they to the first-person plural we in other words the writer seems to be end of the story during those three sections so let me just highlight what those sections are in acts 16 9 Paul is in trouble because he doesn't know how to go forward he gets himself into a situation where he's trying to figure out what God wants him to do next by the way acts 16 is a wonderful passage because it's Paul trying to serve God's will for his life see it happens to people who are apostles to what do I do next which school do I go to do i marry him do I not you know and so Paul's not sitting on the side of the road picking daisies going he loves me he loves me not he loves me he loves me not what does he do it well what he does is he goes to the Lord he's trying to find out what wanting to do and what Paul's typical MO is is that he'll try to do something and God will stop him so he decides he's gonna go northeast and God says no not so much and then he decides he's going to hit to plot out a ministry Southwest and God says not so much and then he goes to bed and he has a dream and in that dream there's a man where's the man from do you remember the story back 16 a Macedonian man now in my view Paul is looking at Luke and the reason I think he's looking at Luke as Macedonians don't dress any different than anybody else in other words if he doesn't know the guy how's he know he's a Macedonian I mean it could be that there was like it like an RB sign it said Macedonian floating above a said it's a dream I mean who knows what do you I don't know what he's seeing but it seems to me that somebody he knows in Macedonia would make more sense than floating signs of high I'm a Macedonian in the middle of his dream although I've had some weird dreams and you can never tell with dreams the interesting thing is as soon as he has that vision he goes across to Neapolis or Kavala and then goes to Philippi and there you'll have the the Lidia seller of purple experience and as I always thought it was a great humor of God that he had this incredible vision of a Macedonian man and the first person he reached was not a man but a woman and not a Macedonian but somebody from where he was coming from not where he arrived to I just thought you know God is being funny okay it's biblical humor work with me here okay the point is that after that he picks up a wee section Luke seems to join the team at that point if Luke is the writer clearly the writer joins the team after he arrives in Macedonia so it may well be that he is of Syrian Antioch background but he's he's living in Macedonia at the time I don't know at any rate when Paul gets there and he starts travelling with him the dream corresponds with the beginning of the we sections now let me just say this looking through the book of I know the Wii does not include Silas or Sylvanus I know it doesn't include Timothy I know it's not so Peter I know it's not Aristarchus I know it's not secundus I know it's not Gaius I know it's not tychicus I know it's not trophimus because they're all mentioned but Luke is not so since Luke was mentioned by virtually everyone else in the second century is a companion of Paul and all the other companions are named and he's not it seems to me that the obvious conclusion is that Luke's the writer and that he joins him during parts of his trip in my view I I think that Luke is probably writing a document to Theophilus now if the Ovilus means friend of God or lover of God Phil that always one of the forms of love but it's a friendship love and he's writing to Theophilus and I think he's writing him a trilogy and I think what he's doing is saying in my view I subscribe to the view that Theophilus is probably the lawyer that's going to represent Paul so I think Luke is writing him a defensive treatise on okay you're probably wondering how a five football Jew and a Macedonian doctor ended up in Rome waiting to be questioned by Nero well it all started with Jesus and he goes back and tells the story of Jesus and then he picks up in Acts chapter one and says now you heard what Jesus did until he was ascended and how he began to do and teach these things now I want to show you how the church picked up as the body of Christ the work of Jesus that he was doing in the Gospels and he'll follow through with that what I want to do now is talk a little bit about the profile of the Apostle Paul and Acts chapter 1 verse 23 says that the Apostles chose the successor to the Hanged Judas and the choice came down to to Matthias or barsabbas and Joseph called barsabbas or Matthias Matthias was chosen and he's never heard from again he goes off the pages of Scripture and he might have been a great guy but we just know what he did some people argue that maybe they were out of step with God because God was sculpting a twelfth apostle out in the wings a few years later a barely 5 foot tall balding man named Saul of Tarsus becomes the obvious missionary pioneer missionary to many many churches interested interestingly enough there are five things about his profile that I think are worth noting first he's controversial pseudo Clement in the Apostolic father's writing set called him an illegitimate charlatan other people call him highly regarded as an apostle so he's controversial and you know the definition of a pioneer guy who goes through a wall first and gets first arrows he he's controversial but he's also second expansive and what I mean by that is visionary Jesus came for Jewish people he said that I came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel salvation is of the Jews but Paul came during a time when God redefined the the movement of the spirit into the Gentile world so there's a vision expansion going on and Paul that you don't see in Jesus up until the end of the Gospel of John you've been looking about at a Jewish story the way to follow God was to come under one umbrella and that umbrella was the umbrella of the Jewish people and if you wanted to be blessed you stood under the umbrella with them you did not become a Jew you became a proselyte a proselyte means that I want to stand under the umbrella and get the blessings of the Covenant your border Jew you diet you you don't become a Jew but you could become a like one you can stand under their covenant by accepting certain things that the Jewish world laid out in front of you Paul's expansive the third thing I know about him is he's real Ellucian arey paul broke ground on issues that confronted him that were not part of the issues of the Gospels you see this when he's writing first Corinthians in chapters six and seven and he says of these things the Lord did not speak but I speak concerning these things he's not saying by the way I'm making up the Bible when he says of these things the Lord did not speak he means Jesus Jesus never talked about this divorce in the Roman world he only talked about divorce in the context of the Jewish world so I have to speak I've got a plow some new ground here because there's nothing for us what would justify you taking Hebrew law and dumping it into the Roman world and mass without rethinking how the applications and principles work so Paul says I have to walk in and I need to use Roman law as the window into New Testament problems and that's new so he's going to talk about for instance the behavior of women or he's going to talk about family issues or he's gonna talk about eschatology but he's going to do it with a wider view you already know this it's not that Isaiah didn't say that the world wasn't going to be blessed through Messiah he did it's that it's not clear hell it's not clear how the world was going to be grappling with the salvation that comes in the heart they didn't understand that that's why that's why in the Gospels in Matthew in particular the outreach to the Gentiles is a mystery and you pick up in Ephesians the word mystery was Terry on the idea that Gentiles will be part of the kingdom of God this is a mystery to the Jewish writers of old so he's going to be revolutionary in his breaking ground on things about women honest breaking ground on family issues and things like that but the fourth thing I know about him is that he's relational Paul gets a lot of bad rap for not being a relational but remember the Spirit of God used the quill of Paul to tell us about the image of the body the church as a connected body and ligaments and joints the churches is is all relate to the head but it's also related to one another so he's a very relational guy it's interesting because he has a very Eastern mindset when it comes to connection this idea that the priesthood of the believers means I don't need to show up to church because I have everything without the rest of you it's not a biblical one and it's not Paul right at all Paul doesn't believe he can pull off Christianity on a golf course by himself he actually thinks he's part of the body he actually thinks that the body is is joints and ligaments fitly joined together and that we need each other as much as we need to be connected to the head his argument is if we're not connected to each other we're not connected to the head if you sever this hand off the body it's not connected to the head but it's also not connected to the arm the leg or any other part of the body and that's his argument so he's a very relational guy the fifth thing that I want to say about him is that he's uniquely exposed he's uniquely exposed look the Gospels are about Jesus and they contain in it the spirits remembrance of the words of Jesus but we have a very unique look at Paul we not only have a testimony of a guy who's traveling with him with a you know with a handycam as he's watching him you know videotaping what Paul said you know what I mean somebody who's actually writing down the history of it dr. Luke but what we also have letters from Paul's hand we don't have a letter from Jesus's hand we have a speaking as recorded by somebody else deposit letters we have as recorded by Paul I Paul signed this letter that's a dead giveaway to Paul's claiming of authorship so we have a biographer but we also have epistles we have letters epistles are in effect letters written by church leaders to other church leaders and to churches themselves and what makes them different than just a normal letter is the Spirit of God has used those as cyclical teaching devices meaning devices that get passed around from one church to another so when Paul writes to Ephesus the spiritual truths and principles in Ephesians are also true in Corinth because these are the pistils not just letters these are broad and con's epps and principles that are exchangeable among the believers of the church age okay let me just give you some nine different things about Paul that may help you sort of sketch him out first let's talk about his name he doesn't have a name he has to because he's Jewish so his one name show sha ul sha is the name of the first king of Israel who was a Benjamite King and what do you know about that first King he was a reluctant King he was hiding in the baggage during his coronation and he was a very tall guy considered a priest handsome strapping young guy interestingly enough the word Paulus means short stubby one so he's the big little guy and interestingly enough it was John Chrysostom the golden mouth who said he was barely five foot tall with a reach that touched the Stars that's how we get the idea of his height so he's the tall short guy the second thing I want to give you are some dates for him my view is that he is born somewhere around five in the Common Era five ad and he dies around 68 AD I want you to be a little bit flexible with those because we don't actually know the fixed dates but he's born in the middle of the first decade of the first century he's a young man at the stoning of Stephen which happened in about 32 in the Common Era he never met Jesus before the cross but he did meet him after the cross he met the resurrected Jesus in a personal counseling and discipleship mentoring relationship in the desert however he never he was a younger contemporary of Jesus he didn't meet him while he was walking around ministering Paul had the blessing though of meeting so many people that were touched by Jesus and he got his lessons from Jesus but then could come back and see people that confirmed that in his mind and heart third thing I'm going to tell you about is his home he grew up in Tarsus of cilicia he was proud of his city according to Acts chapter 21 verse 39 he said in acts 21 39 he said you might have heard of it it's not a small city actually struggled the Greek geographer who lived just before the time of Jesus said it was the third-largest center of Greek learning in the Roman Empire it's the third largest university town so Paul grew up in a place that had education boozing out of its pores he was a free citizen and we know that in the place where he grew up in Tarsus about a hundred and seventy one years before Jesus in order to stimulate business the emperor moved actually the republic at that time the republican senatorial proclamation was to move jews there to increase business and they could become free citizens if they in fact moved there so they were promised citizenship if they moved maybe his family moved there a couple of hundred years before he was born or 150 years before he was born so that they could become free citizens and Paul was born a free citizen that means that some things to a free citizen are going to be open doors open to Paul because he was a Roman citizen also method of death is curtailed they don't crucify citizens you can be beheaded but not crucified and if that if you're not understanding the blessing of that you should watch both he's not a citizen yeah he's he's not a Roman citizen Jesus himself not a Roman citizen he belongs to a province under a client king that makes him indirectly part of the Empire but not a direct Roman citizen with free citizenship and in fact Paul will use his citizenship to appeal to Caesar Jesus could not appeal to Caesar under Roman law Jesus didn't have a standing as a citizen so one of the things I want you to see is that he is from Tarsus it's a very very well educated town it's an interesting environment I would imagine if he comes from any kind of wealth which he apparently does because he's educated a part of his education stunt in Jerusalem and if he's sent away for education it means that they're not flat broke if he comes from any kind of wealth he probably comes from a villa culture the I ll a a villa culture and a villa culture is a specific kind of culture where otm oti um is observed otm means productive pleasure so he's probably grown up listening to some plucking of the lyre as someone espoused poetry after dinner or sat in on a symposium like discussion around some three sided reclining tables triclinium he's come from a society where there was a lot of education and a lot of ideas passing by him we know that Paul was familiar with contemporary literature and that he had read was fairly well read we know that because he quotes from poems Greek poetry which means he must have studied it somewhere because he memorized it interestingly enough let's go on to the fourth thing his occupation he was a binder a binder sometimes called a tent maker he was a binder cilicia the area where he sat from what is now southeastern Turkey or southern Turkey he that area has goat hair tents that there's kind of a black goat here called silicon tents they were used by the army which means they had a government contract which means a lot of guys work in that field but the other thing is that they also did leather binding and canvas work for ships and things like that so imagine he did heavy sewing the two things that that will require is is dexterity of the fingers that is the ability to do fine work because even though it's heavy sewing cloth you've still got to get it in the right place and you got to sew it so it doesn't look like a three-year-old did it but the other thing it's going to take is good eyes and Paul will apparently have some problems with his eyes later in his life he has problems with his eyesight as best we can tell I think they're probably making army tents but he picks up a craft that allows him to move from one place to another if you were to take a trip with me to Ostia not far outside of Rome I could take you to a Plaza or a bazaar that was found OST is the first colony outside of Rome and it's at also the harbor of them and in the ostian environment what they found were these shipping days it's a large port area where people could come down and find a boat going to where they're going and they had mosaics in the floor that told you the nature of the ships that were going or the crafts of the people on that ship and so you could actually join another group of people who were tent makers and go to the next place where tents are being fabricated it was a way of moving people around and you looked at the mosaic floor and you said okay I want to I want to get on this boat because this is this is the line where the boat that I need to be on because that's my craft and so people were trading it in that way ok let me go to a fifth thing talk about for a moment is education Paul was Hebrew in background he says he's a Hebrew of Hebrews that means he is able to understand and use the Hebrew language he speaks Greek it's very obvious that he does that it's mentioned in the book of Acts that he spoke Greek he may have some good Aramaic background but being a Hebrew of the Hebrews it means he's also skilled in letters of the Hebrew language no doubt he has some Latin as well so when you look at Paul don't look him it as a country bumpkin he's walking around with four languages what do you got he learned his Old Testament his Hebrew Scriptures not in Hebrew he learned them in the Septuagint version the lxx version I know that because by the way that remember the Septuagint was formed about 250 BC third century BC as they took the Hebrew Bible and put it into the Greek language I know that because when Paul quotes he quotes from the greek version of the hebrew scriptures not the hebrew version so when you're reading in his epistles and he quotes something from the Old Testament and you go back and check Isaiah or Jeremiah doesn't read exactly the same because Paul was taking it from Hebrew to Greek into the New Testament writing and the other writers were taking him transporting it direct from the Hebrew interestingly enough he's studied under Gamaliel or Gamaliel who was a moderate Pharisee gamla was was a reasonably good guy remember he shows up in the book of Acts and his piece of advice on the Christians is look if God is is for them then we ought to be four of them and if God's against them they're gonna get wiped out anyway so let's not make a big deal out of this gamma leo is a moderate Paul is not can I just say it's not his fault okay gamma leo did a good job of giving him a sort of a moderate view of Pharisee ISM God we will talk mostly from the School of Hillel from which it was his own family comes he was what would be considered a moderate to liberal Pharisee what does that mean that means he accepts the law the prophets and the writings all as canonical all as a standard of the Bible if he came up from the sad you see in sect he would come up from the Zeta kites that only accepted the five books of Moses he does not he believes that Daniel and the prophets are real and behind God's work both Paul himself believed Paul believed all of the Hebrew Scriptures that you have as Scripture not everybody did and imagine that an early Christian who comes to Jesus Christ but doesn't believe prophets and the writings as canonical their theology will be largely skewed by that so imagine that not all Christians will come out with the same identical theology it depends on where they started if you started off as as sad you see and Jew you're probably filtering the message of Jesus through the sod you seein Judaic understanding it doesn't mean you don't have one because Deuteronomy 18 did tell you another prophet was coming but it means you don't necessarily see him the same way that a fare sake Jew does okay let's let's think tribally for a minute Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin and so was Saul his namesake he's from the tribe of Benjamin which is the heartland of Israel just north of Jerusalem and it's between Jerusalem and the main body of Samaria he is a Sanhedrin member according to acts 26 verse 10 so he is a member of the Sanhedrin before it remembered that these are titles the Sanhedrin titles are passed to you so he's a he's a Sanhedrin member some people therefore believe he had to have been married although it was normal to be married as a sin head remember it was not required to be married to be a sin head remember there's a debate about there is a requirement for that but it comes in writings of Rubinius ISM there are a hundred years after Jesus from the time of you who died on a sea and we don't know that it goes back to the time of Paul he's not required to be married as what I'm saying ok let's talk a little bit about his family and seventh thing I want to tell his family he probably had a number of brothers and sisters he only mentions one sister in acts 23 16 he mentions his sister his Jew he had Jewish observant parents no doubt because he had language training in Hebrew he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews he says we know he's a Pharisee because Philippians chapter 3 verse 5 and second Corinthians 11:20 to say that he was a Pharisee interestingly enough that was a Philippians 3:5 and second Corinthians 1122 interestingly enough there's no mention of his mother he never mentions anything concerning his mother he does allude to his father in Romans 16 there's just an allusion to his father but nothing about his mother maybe she's dead we don't we just don't know we do know that he mentions his sister and he alludes to his father that's as good as we can do it let's talk about us successes for a minute Paul had the interesting history of either bringing her bringing a riot or a revival to every place he went he was by definition of fanatic you know the definition can't change his mind can't change the subject and Paul found himself in one situation after another where he people responded or reacted to Paul they are the respondents of the gospel or reacted against it Paul's the kind of guy I mean that's why one of my favorite verses you know Paul left and the churches rested I love that okay he's the kind of guy that you want to have around but he's just plain exhausting and here's that one third of the New Testament comes from his quill we know of 14 epistles letters to young churches and pastors even second Peter said that Paul's writing was hard to understand I love that I think it's great then we have first century apostles going you know that other guys write in and it's the Word of God but I'm not sure I get it all I love that now here's the problem when you're reading the epistles of Paul you are on one end of a phone conversation what do I mean by that what I mean is that you can hear only one side of the problem very often well the first readers the readers in in Thessaloniki the readers in Philippi they knew the situation you don't so you're reading his response to a situation that isn't defined for you the problem was first Corinthians 7 through 16 is I'm going to answer your questions but we don't know the questions so one of the problems is to try to reverse the narrative and figure out what the question is if this is the answer what's the problem and that's a huge problem because we have a lot of people using Paul's answers for the question when you use the right answer to the wrong question that is as bad as the wrong answer to the right one so here you UN you end up with this Energizer Bunny Paul traveled 10,000 land miles I have followed his life it took me five years to do what he did and follow his life and I been to the places where he's been and where he's preached and I know those cities and I here's what I can tell you this guy was the Energizer Bunny of the New Testament and we've made this note before but it's a very important note one of the things I know about Paul is when he books about don't get on it usually goes down he has the whole period of swim time authorized by God periodically in his life you know the other thing that I know about him is that that Paul is offering answers because he's broken over the assault against the Jewish believers and Gentile believers of the early church and their misunderstanding of one another if Paul wanted to say all Christians should just keep the law we could do away with most of what he wrote if Paul wanted to say the law is finished and no Christian no Jewish believers should do anything of the law we could cut 1/3 off the New Testament but because God wasn't doing the same thing among Gentiles as he was doing among Jews it's very complicated God told Jews for all their generations to keep Sabbath but the Gentile church as they came to Jesus didn't need to worry about that God told Jews for all their generations to observe laws that he gave them regarding certain festivals and feasts and certain foods but a Gentile didn't need to know Deuteronomy 13 and he didn't know what to know Deuteronomy 16:16 and when to go to the temple it wasn't important to him so you had two economies running at the same time all under one church and that made a mess out of church dinners it made a mess out the calendar the church wants to put a calendar together but these guys are leaving for Passover what's going on and this is part of the problem the reason it's so complicated is God's not doing the same thing with everybody at the same time by the way he still isn't there is a an objective of the enemy to make us all the same not unified uniform there is a difference between God's commands to a woman and to a man I have very specific restrictions on my life I am NOT to counsel young women and help them love their husbands that is the that is the work of the older women in the church that's not my work so as a pastor can I tell you how many times I am frustrated by young women who are dressing him honestly and speaking badly about their husbands and no older woman will step up and do the job all I can do is say it that's what I can do I can say somebody please do something about this I don't do that and I'm not supposed to by the same token God has made very specific statements concerning through Paul's quill what a woman should or should not do in leadership of a public assembly at the church what we have is an effort today to wash away those distinctions so that we can have the pastor s and the elder s except for they're not in the New Testament it's not why do you find them they're not there it's not like I made it up and I'm trying to be chauvinistic I'm telling you they're not there that's what I'm telling you and I'm telling you that there's specific black and white statements by Paul we don't allow this in any of our churches end of statement but somehow the enemy keeps working on the church to try and get us all to do the same things because there's an American statement that if we don't all get all the same opportunities we're not equal let me just say that the major issue and the success of Paul is this he navigated the territory of two very different things God was doing at the same time and explained how to live on either side of that fence yes we are one new man yes yes there is neither male nor female bond nor free Jew nor Gentile as it regards salvation but not as it regards lifestyle we still have separate restrooms we still learn separately and we still have separate restrictions but we are saved the same way and what I find is people misusing those verses to act like well there's neither Jew nor Gentile and I just look at them and say yes but there's still boys and girls and male nor female comes right after it so it must not mean as it as regards our lifestyle it must mean as it regards our justification about sanctification okay let me go down to the his death because we're gonna end our little discussion about who he is with his death because that's where most people end at least their physical existent the death is that he was beheaded in a place called three fountains we believe which is outside the restricted limit of the city of Rome he's outside the city of Rome as it was demarcate 'add at the time of paul why because you can't execute a roman inside the demarked city unless it's on a parade ground that is the only place a roman can die on Roman soil is in a parade ground setting or the Mars exercises of the armies set so he's outside of City it's a liminal monument or a liminal edge to the city and he's taken to three taverns he traditionally died at the hands of either Nero or the the governor of Rome when Nero was out of town here's the problem most people think he died around 66 or at the latest 67 the problem is Nero was in Greece playing actor until 67 he didn't get back until 67 Nero was not in Rome when when Rome burned you'll hear him all you know we these things about him fiddling and watching Rome burn from the hills he wasn't there he was away from Rome at the time but he comes back and starts rebuilding Rome fairly quickly I think he dies somewhere probably in 68 after Nero's return and shortly before Nero is pushed out of office and eventually kills himself after the Senate proclaims that he's no longer Emperor and he realizes the hoofprints are coming where the hoofbeats are coming and they're about to kill him and he musters the courage to take his own life as a Roman should in such circumstances all right so Paul dies he's beheaded because he's a Roman citizen so he can have the better way to die truthfully if you have a choice beheading beats crucifixion hands down one takes three or four days to die the other one pretty much you're here and then you're with Jesus and that's about as good as it gets they are they use broad swords and axes and they were very good at this so today we go to a place called three fountains whose heart I'm coming back I went away to find the place Patel and I'm coming back I'm leave the light if you're ready to

Channel: One Hour. One Book.

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Id: zJI-vjWcVMY

Length: 45min 22sec (2722 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2013