Acts 23:11

Acts 23:11. And the night following, the Lard stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul; for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome. Probably the Lord Jesus made this revelation to the apostle in a dream. Paul saw his Master standing by him, and heard His comforting cheering words. It was indeed a most solemn crisis in his eventful life. He had but just escaped death, owing his safety on the two preceding days alone to the intervention of the Roman soldiery. He was on the threshold of a prison whence he knew that, owing to the sleepless cunning of the Jewish hierarchy, there would be no going out till the morning of his execution. He had, besides, good reason for feeling very dispirited with the result of the witness he had borne at Jerusalem.

All these gloomy thoughts no doubt weighed on the wearied apostle's mind as he lay down and tried to sleep that night in the barrack prison-room in Antonia. But the Lord had pity on His harassed servant, and reassured him, telling him that not only would he be preserved in all his present dangers, but that, improbable as it then seemed, he would live to bear his gallant testimony in distant Rome in Rome where he had so long and so earnestly desired to labour. ‘So may one crumb of Divine grace and help be multiplied to feed 5000 wants and anxieties' (Alford). Paul's voice, so said his Master to him, was to be heard in the two capitals of the world in Jerusalem the metropolis of the religious, and in Rome the metropolis of the civil world. The results of his preaching in each of these centres deserve attention. In Jerusalem, Paul's mission was a complete failure: his words there were spoken to the winds, they were written upon the sand; but when Paul left Jerusalem, the days of the city were numbered. In about ten years from the day when his pleading voice was drowned by the execrations in the temple, and a few hours later in the Sanhedrim hall, not one stone of the doomed city was left on another. In Rome he helped to build up a flourishing church. His presence had been long looked for in the great metropolis; and when the sovereignty of the world was lost to the imperial city, the once despised religion of Paul and his companions restored to the Rome which had welcomed him and received his message, a new and even grander empire than the proudest of the early Cæsars had ruled over. The words of the Master in the vision were indeed fulfilled fulfilled, too, in that deeper sense which the solemn word ‘to bear witness' was beginning to assume in the familiar language of Christians.

Paul would be preserved to help in laying the foundation stories of the Roman Church; and besides this, the day was not so far distant when the veteran soldier of Christ should again bear his true loyal witness to the Master, when in the martyr's painful death he should pass to his rest at Rome.