Chapter 22

Read Chapter 22

Note: we covered both Chapters 21 &22 in one week.

Paul begins the chapter with his address to the crowd...in Aramaic. What is Arameic? It is the most common language of the area, the one the crowd would understand the best. The commander of the Roman soldiers is probably wondering who he has in custody right now. Just how many languages does this man speak???? Not the norm to be multilingual...

Paul, with the crowd hanging on his every word, does what Paul ALWAYS does when he gets a crowd: he tells his testimony. He tells the story of his Jewish days until the day that Christ grabbed him and set him on his new course. All goes well (not to say that they were being swayed but, you know, some might have been) until Paul gets to the end of his story. At that point, he says that God sent him to the Gentiles...blasphemy!

Remember, to the Jews, the Gentiles were for God to smite. But that was never God's plan. In Genesis 12, God tells Abram, 2 "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." How do you bless the other peoples when you avoid them and don't accept them. Don't get me wrong, God had plans at times that involved Him telling them to destroy a society. But the Hebrews were to lead the Gentiles to God. Isaiah says in Isaiah 49 that God told him that, "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." What a charge...and conveniently forgotten by the Jewish leaders. The riot begins again...
The Romans prepare to torture the truth out of Paul and gets an all new surprise. Paul is a Roman citizen. You can understand the frustration that the commander must have felt. Every time he seemed to have the situation under control and figured out, Paul changes everything again. As a Roman citizen, he has rights that the conquered peoples do not. One is that they are not allowed to use their most degrading form of torture on their own. That was saved for the common conquered rabble...

While the commander had to buy his citizenship, Paul's was by birth. We don't know why this is important but it is possible that this meant that Paul's citizenship had greater value in Roman's eyes. His was not earned or bought but by birth. It was common at the time for that to be of value, kind of like how a non-Jew could follow Yahweh but could never become Jewish in Jewish eyes. Regardless, at the end of this chapter, we have Paul being released from chains and the commander, once again, trying to figure out what is going on...

May God bless the reading of His Word....

D