Acts 25:1-12

PAUL'S APPEAL TO CAESAR

1-12. Festus, the successor of Felix in the governorship of Judea, like Lysias, the kiliarch of Jerusalem, shows up a very beautiful character in all of his dealings with Paul, but one thing preventing him from releasing him at once, and that was Paul's appeal to Caesar, which I trow was providential. An evangelistic tour in Rome, the world's metropolis and capital, had been the life-long ambition of Paul. Though I traveled that same route, going from Jerusalem to Rome in twelve days, three years ago, in Paul's day, without steam engines or mariner's compass, it was a greater undertaking than the circumnavigation of the globe at the present day. Paul had no money with which to prosecute a voyage of two thousand miles [the way he went]. By appealing to Caesar he thus providentially compelled his enemies to defray all of his traveling expenses. Oh, how God makes the wrath of men to praise Him! At the very time when angry Herod was killing all the boy babies of Bethlehem, to cut off Jesus lest he dethrone the Herodian dynasty, behold Jesus has gone far away into Egypt on the back of a donkey! At the very time when Pharaoh, who symbolizes the devil, was killing all the boy babies born among the Hebrews, in order to cut off some mighty man that might rise in the Coming generation and lead them out of bondage, behold! he had Moses, the very one who was to do the mischief, flourishing like a king in his own palace, and pouring out his own money to hire his mother to nurse him, charging her all the time to give that child every possible attention and to feed him on the very fat of the land. When Festus, immediately after his inauguration at Caesarea, went up to Jerusalem, and the Jewish magnates appealed to him, charging his predecessors with delinquency in duty, and urging him to popularize the very beginning of his administration by inflicting capital punishment against Paul, he assures them the matter shall receive his immediate attention, saying to them,