Acts 16:3

Acts 16:3. Him would Paul have to go forth with him, Silas filled the place of his old companion and brother-apostle, Barnabas, but as yet the loving apostle had no one to supply the vacancy caused by the desertion of the shrinking Mark.

Paul longed for the society and comfort of one who might in time become what he once hoped Mark was a son in the faith. How well he chose is shown in the subsequent history of the devoted and brave Timothy.

And circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters. In this act Paul was influenced entirely by considerations connected with the unconverted Jews in that and in other countries, who would quickly learn the particulars concerning the missionary apostle's trusted companion. The son of a Gentile father and of a Jewish mother, and himself uncircumcised, he would be in danger of being regarded as an apostate from the religion of his mother's ancestors. This would at once excite of itself a bitter animosity against Paul and his doctrines. This circumcising Timothy was not contrary to the decrees just passed by the Jerusalem Council, for these only declared circumcision was not to be forced on any one as though necessary to salvation. Paul recognised this great truth fully, as we see in his steady refusal to circumcise Titus (Galatians 2:3). In the case of Titus, had he complied with the requirement to circumcise his companion, he would have given his assent to their doctrine that circumcision was necessary to salvation. In the case of Timothy, he assented to no doctrine; he simply carried out his words, ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews' (1 Corinthians 9:20), knowing that Timothy uncircumcised would probably prove a grave hindrance to his future mission work in Jewish centres. Chrysostom writes of this act of Paul's as follows: ‘Paul circumcised Timothy in order to abolish circumcision, that is, in order to open an avenue for the gospel to the Jews;' and Luther, with his own bright ready words, thus comments on the transaction: ‘It is just as if I should now go among the Jews in order to preach the gospel, and should find that they were weak. I might in that case be willing to submit to circumcision, and to eat or to abstain even as they do, but I would do all this in no other case and no longer than while I could be with them and labour for the gospel.'