Acts 24:25

“And while he reasoned concerning righteousness [i. e., justification], temperance [i. e., egkrateia, from ego, I, and kratos, government; hence that beautiful self-government in perfect harmony with the Divine law, which is but another name for entire sanctification, showing up the practical side], and judgment to come.” This was an astounding revelation to that avaricious, ambitious, licentious Oriental potentate, not only awfully corrupt in his administration, swindling his subjects for paltry pelf, but debauched in his private life, at that time living in adultery with his wife Drusilla, a royal Jewish Herodian, celebrated for her beauty, the wife of Azizus, the king of Emesa, whom Felix had maneuvered to seduce and leave her royal husband, elope with him and become his wife. To this corrupt and debauched royal train, Paul's sermon on justification, sanctification and final judgment was a thunder-clap of trepidation and dismay from beginning to end. How wonderful the power of the gospel! Here you see the prisoner in chains standing on the lofty pinnacle of Divine truth and inflexible justice, his regal prosecutors in tears, trembling at his feet! Sorry to say, the record of Felix is anything but good. Though he trembled and quaked under the first gospel sermon of Paul, he wore off his convictions, heard Paul ever and anon two whole years, only hardening under his ministry, like multiplied millions who tremble with an earthquake conviction when they first hear some powerful preacher of the Sinai gospel. Unfortunately they pass the gracious opportunity, resist the Spirit, wear off their conviction, become immovable and finally drop into hell. With such, who have actually passed the dead line, this old wicked world is rapidly getting filled up. Felix and Drusilla then and there passed the fatal borne and plunged into ruin temporal and, we fear, eternal, the latter perishing with her only son in an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, buried alive in the burning lava, doubtless a prelude of hell's unquenchable flame, and the former, at the expiration of Paul's two years imprisonment, accused of maladministration, summoned to come to answer charges before the Emperor, narrowly escaping with his life, only to be cast away into perpetual banishment, thus both of them signally verifying the awful warnings so timely given by Paul, but sadly by them depreciated and rejected. Instead of bringing Lysias from Jerusalem, and giving Paul a fair trial, as he had promised, he kept him there two whole years actuated only by the sordid hope that some of Paul's friends would pay a big lot of money for his release. Finally, at the end of the two years his own awful troubles set in, culminating in his dethronement, arrest and prosecution for his life under accumulated charges from maladministration. Hence in his awful emergency, friends were scarce. Consequently he purchased the friendship of the Jews by leaving Paul a prisoner in chains, though from the time of his trial, when first he became a prisoner, well assured of his innocence and his own duty to release him.