Acts 13:45

‘But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with jealousy, and contradicted the things which were spoken by Paul, and blasphemed.'

And the result of the ‘jealousy' of the Jews was that, instead of again hearing Paul (Acts 13:42) they stood up and contradicted all he said, and ‘blasphemed', which probably means that they sought to discredit the name of Jesus and what God had done according to Paul's teaching. In other words, being unwilling to be saved themselves, and being wrapped up in the narrowness of their own thinking about God, they attacked Paul's message and tried to put the Gentiles off from responding and being saved. How unbelievable it was, and yet it happened. They saw a work in their day and it was too much for them with the result that they wondered and perished.

Paul had to recognise that a wholesale dispute carried out in an antagonistic manner would do no good to anyone. He had to recognise that it was not of their doing. It was of God. As with Peter in the face of the cloth full of unclean beasts which had been sanctified by God, they also were being called on to choose. On the one side a dry, antagonistic, spiritually empty synagogue (all the spiritual ones were already with Paul and Barnabas), and on the other a multitude of ‘unclean Gentiles' who were undoubtedly touched by God. And they knew that they could not doubt the choice that they were having to make. They really had no option but to desert the synagogue (by necessity, not choice) and preach to the Gentiles, because the synagogue would not allow the Gentiles to crowd in to hear the word of God. (No wonder he was later horrified at the teaching that these converted Gentiles were then to become like these Jews. God was here teaching him an important lesson that he had not realised before).

It was the first time that they had been faced with this stark choice, but they both recognised that they had no alternative. If they had to choose between being allowed into a sedate, half empty, narrow minded synagogue, where their tongues were to be tied, and where they would no longer obtain a hearing, or going somewhere where they could proclaim the Good News to thirsty and receptive Gentiles, who were unquestionably ready to hear and respond in large numbers, there was only one choice that they could make. Indeed the Jews had made the choice for them.

How his own quotation of Habakkuk must have come back to him. Here indeed was work in their day which was almost unbelievable. How then could he be one of those who wondered and perished?