Acts 28:9-28

9 Three months busy with blessing thus came out of the catastrophe. Had the ship wintered in Cnidus, as they had wished, or at Ideal Harbors, as Paul proposed, the ship and cargo might indeed have been saved, but a much greater loss would have been sustained by the islanders. Thus God always gets a greater good out of a lesser evil.

11 The Latin equivalent of Dioscuri would be "Castor and Pollux." But this gives the impression that it was a Roman vessel, whereas most of the commerce with Rome was carried in foreign bottoms, and this was probably a Greek ship, having a Greek name.

12 There is a local tradition that Paul himself founded the first ecclesia in Syracuse. The account reads as though the centurion allowed him the utmost liberty.

15 As Paul had written an epistle to Rome there must have been a considerable company of believers there. They showed something of their regard for him by coming out to welcome him on the way. One company came as far as Appii Forum. Another delegation met him at

Three Taverns, about ten miles nearer the city. No wonder Paul thanked God and took courage. He was now near the goal that he had set before him several years before, and though a prisoner of Rome, he had almost all the freedom he could wish. Indeed, from this time he preferred to call himself a "prisoner of the Lord," as he recognized that it was the Lord's will.

17 It is eminently fitting that the final and decisive rejection of the kingdom should follow its proclamation in Rome, the seat of the world's greatest empire at the time. It had been proclaimed in Jerusalem and rejected by the rulers of the Jews in the land, now it has been fully heralded among the Jews of the dispersion, and they, too, have rejected it wherever Paul has gone. The most signal sign of their apostasy is his imprisonment. It reveals the height of their obstinacy. Rome would free him. But his own nation loads with chains the one who would free them from the Roman yoke.

23 Paul must have had many precious meetings with his believing brethren. He must have made known to them those transcendent truths which he teaches in his Perfection Epistles. If the Acts were giving an account of his career or of his evangel, it stops short at the most important point. As a "history of the commencement of the Christian church" it is the most disappointing of all books, for the truths which distinguish the present economy, found in Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, were not made known until its close and are never referred to, much less taught. Those events in Paul's career which are of the utmost importance for present truth, from his sojourn in Arabia to the dispatch of Tychicus with the Perfection Epistles, are quite overlooked in this account. Paul's sojourn in Rome marks the beginning of that vast work of the Spirit of God which has continued down to the present time. Yet all we are told here is the disappointing meeting with the Jews! Instead of closing with a song of victory and sending the church on its triumphant way, he quotes Isaiah's doleful prophecy concerning the apostate nation, showing the failure of the kingdom proclamation and the reason why it should no longer be heralded. What stronger evidence is needed to show that the Acts is not concerned with the so-called "church"? It is no mere history of the apostolic times. It is concerned only with those events which chronicle the fortunes of the earthly kingdom. It deals with a transitional period when the church was still dependent on the favored nation and had a subordinate place in the reign of Messiah over the earth, as promised by the Hebrew prophets.

26 This marvelous prophecy has had a threefold fulfillment in Israel: when they rejected Jehovah (Isa_6:9-10), when they rejected the Lord (Mat_13:14-15), and, in this present instance, when they reject the testimony of the spirit, through His apostles. Israel, in part, has become calloused, until the fulness of the nations may be entering (Rom_11:25).