Acts 13:17-41

Paul's Sermon in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, 17-41.

This discourse falls naturally into three divisions:

(a) Acts 13:17-22. A sketch of the grand old story of the chosen people till the days of David.

(b) Acts 13:23-37 Paul speaks of David's great descendant foreseen by the prophets, and points out how all prophecy was fulfilled in the crucified descendant of David, Jesus. He tells them, this crucified but now risen Jesus is their promised Messiah.

(c) Acts 13:38-41. Every one, Gentile as well as Jew, who receives this Jesus as Messiah, may find in Him forgiveness of all sins.

A Rough Paraphrase of Paul's Antioch Sermon , from the Abstract or Condensed Report given by the Compiler of the Acts of the Apostles .

The preacher began with a short sketch of the story of the chosen people, lightly touching on some of its grander and nobler Chapter s. For instance, he told them how, when Israel was a stranger in Egypt, God, as a father towards a child, watched over their fortunes, training them to a higher life, and raising them in the estimation of the peoples of the world. He told them how they came out from Egypt, borne up by the glorious arm of the Lord. He reminded them of the conquest of Canaan, and spoke of the establishment of the monarchy of Saul, and closed the sketch of the older story of Israel with a reference to David, the man after God's own heart; and from David he passed at once to David's great Descendant, whom John the Baptist, the well- known and generally acknowledged prophet, saluted as Messiah.

‘This Son of David was to be the Great Deliverer,' this was the subject of the second division of his sermon in the Antioch synagogue. Surely Israel, argued Paul, ought to have received Him, for His Divine mission was attested 1 st, by His resurrection from the dead; 2 d, by the strange fulfilment in His person of all that was written in the prophets concerning the sufferings of Messiah. Then he told the Antioch Jews and Gentile proselytes that to them were the glad tidings sent, for the Jerusalem Jews in their stubborn self-will had rejected Him; and this sin of theirs was not lessened because through them all that the old prophets wrote of Messiah had been fulfilled. They should have kept their eyes fixed on the high and lofty things prophesied of Him; and knowing well what was foretold concerning Messiah's sufferings, should surely have prevented their rulers from being the chief actors in His humiliation and death.

What a strange, inconceivable folly, to fall into the very sin foretold in the sacred records they were ever listening to! But when these blind ones leaders of Israel had worked on Him (Christ) all the fearful things predicted in the Old Testament, and left Him in the grave, then God, on His side, began to work His work, and raised the crucified Messiah from the dead. God's vast work, begun in the resurrection of Jesus, Paul the missionary told them he was helping to carry on, by speaking thus before the present audience in the synagogue at Antioch, by pointing out to them that the well-known promises to the fathers that a Redeemer for time and eternity should arise was now fulfilled to them, the children, in the person of the risen Jesus.

Alone through this Messiah Jesus, said the preacher Paul, can come remission of sins; alone through faith in Him can men be justified from every sin, a justification they sought in vain in the law of Moses.

Men, then, must beware lest, in rejecting this Messiah, the doom of death foretold in the prophets come upon them.

We possess in this report of the speech either the memoranda of one present (probably St. Luke), and who doubtless wrote these memoranda down at the time, or else it is a copy of the very notes of Paul himself.

Although a full abstract of the great sermon, it is only an abstract, but it evidently preserves many of the very words used by Paul. The last portion unfolds the doctrines known in Christian theology especially as Pauline, and in fact summarises the earlier Chapter s of his famous Epistle to the Romans, where his view of ‘justification by faith only' is laid open in all its breadth and fulness.

The sermon, in its historical introduction, follows that school of early Jewish Christian teaching of which St. Stephen's apology is the great example. Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee, must have heard those winning, eloquent words in the Sanhedrim hall, must have felt their power, and recognised how unanswerable, from a Jewish standpoint, was the argument. The grand old story of Israel was as welcome a theme to the Jew of Pisidian Antioch as it was to the Hebrew of the Hebrews who had never wandered beyond the shadow of the Lord's house at Jerusalem; and the early Christian preacher seems to have won the attention of many an Israelitic congregation by thus appealing to the undying spirit of Jewish nationality.

In the central part of the discourse, Paul, like Peter in his first recorded sermon in the early Chapter s of the ‘Acts,' makes the resurrection the great proof of the Messiahship of Jesus, and with Peter cites the same verse of a well-known Psalm. This making the resurrection the central point of early Christian preaching was no doubt the universal practice of the Jerusalem apostles, who could appeal to so many eye-witnesses of the strange, mighty fact; and Barnabas had no doubt, during their long friendship, instructed Paul in the method of teaching adopted by the apostles of the Lord.

The third division of the discourse may be said to have been exclusively Pauline in character. To speak of the ‘impossibility of being justified by the law of Moses was hardly a development of Christian belief. Jesus had already proclaimed that the reign of the law of Moses' was over for ever, but still this open declaration that justification could alone be found by faith in Jesus, a great truth which the preacher afterwards fully elaborated in the Epistle to the Romans, and that the Gentile equally with the Jew might attain to this great salvation, marked a new point of departure in Christian theology.