Acts 26:20

Acts 26:20. But showed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judæa, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God. It is noticeable that the verb in the original Greek, here rendered ‘showed first,' is the imperfect, and implies a continuing activity: ‘I kept on showing.' The course of that long restless activity of his, from the moment of his seeing the Lord by the way, until that very morning when he stood before King Agrippa and spoke these things, is here very briefly in these few words sketched out: ‘From that day have I kept on telling out His message yes, in Damascus and Jerusalem, throughout all the old land of the Jews, away among the isles of the unnumbered Gentiles.' In his short enumeration, the circle of his work is ever widening at first in Damascus, among the synagogues and the few Christians there in those very early days of the faith; then on the broader and more public stage of the Holy City Jerusalem; the circle widens, and the delivery of the message is carried on throughout all the coasts of Judæa. All of a sudden the area is indefinitely increased as the memory of the many congregations of distant Galatia, of remote Lycaonia, of storied Greece, of populous and luxurious Asia, surged up in the apostle's mind; and he adds those broad inclusive words, ‘and then to the Gentiles,' to the heathen world.

We have no difficulty in tracing in the ‘Acts' and ‘Epistles' the story of his preaching at Damascus and Jerusalem. We know from Barnabas' testimony, that he preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus (chap. Acts 9:27); and that in Jerusalem, too, he spoke boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus, and disputed against the Grecians (chap. Acts 9:28-29); but we have some difficulty in exactly fixing the date of the preaching throughout all the coast of Judæa. Dr. Hackett suggests that this part of the work of Paul was carried on when he went to the Holy Land at the time of the famine (see chap. Acts 11:30), or while he was at Jerusalem, between his first and second mission to the Heathen (see chap, Acts 18:22).

The fourth and greatest of his labours here alluded to among the Gentiles, includes all his missionary toils in Asia Minor and Greece.

And do works meet for repentance. Here Paul, as was his custom always in his teaching, is careful to show that his theology was something more than a creed; it was a life. It was by no means enough that the Jew should profess sorrow for the past, for his rejection of the risen Messiah not sufficient that the Pagan should desert the altars of his many gods for the simple, earnest worship of the Christian in their ‘upper room,' if they did not at the same time change their way of living. It is the gravest of all mistakes to suppose that the great apostle of faith ever omitted to press home to his converts the necessity of living the religion they confessed with their lips. With Paul, faith meant the loving, childlike trust in the Fatherhood of God, who, to redeem us and to restore us to our lost home, spared not His own Son. And this loving trust in the mind of Paul would ever show itself in acts and words and thoughts which that Father would look on, and when He looked could love. The expression, ‘works meet for repentance,' is a strange one, and apparently was one of John the Baptist's favourite sayings (see Matthew 3:8). Very probably Paul had been among the rapt listeners of that gallant and devoted spirit who played among the Jews, in the last sad period of their history, the part the monk Savonarola played hundreds of years later among the Christians of the dying Christianity of Italy, and who received at the hands of his fellow-countrymen a like guerdon with John. If Paul had not been himself a hearer of the Baptist, he of course was well acquainted with his preaching (we know many Pharisees came to his baptism, Matthew 3:7); and such a frequent expression as this, no doubt, was graven with an iron pen for ever on the tablets of St. Paul's heart.