WHEN PRESSURE MOUNTS
ACTS 23:1-22
NASB
1 Paul, looking intently at the [a]Council, said, “Brethren, I have [b]lived my life with a perfectly good conscience before God up to this day.” 2 The high priest Ananias commanded those standing beside him to strike him on the mouth. 3 Then Paul said to him, “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall! Do you sit to try me according to the Law, and in violation of the Law order me to be struck?” 4 But the bystanders said, “Do you revile God’s high priest?” 5 And Paul said, “I was not aware, brethren, that he was high priest; for it is written, ‘YOU SHALL NOT SPEAK EVIL OF A RULER OF YOUR PEOPLE.’”
6 But perceiving that one group were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, Paul began crying out in the [a]Council, “Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; I am on trial for the hope and resurrection of the dead!” 7 As he said this, there occurred a dissension between the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. 8 For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor an angel, nor a spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all. 9 And there occurred a great uproar; and some of the scribes of the Pharisaic party stood up and began to argue heatedly, saying, “We find nothing wrong with this man; suppose a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” 10 And as a great dissension was developing, the [a]commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces by them and ordered the troops to go down and take him away from them by force, and bring him into the barracks.
11 But on the night immediately following, the Lord stood at his side and said, “Take courage; for as you have solemnly witnessed to My cause at Jerusalem, so you must witness at Rome also.”
12 When it was day, the Jews formed a [a]conspiracy and bound themselves under an oath, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. 13 There were more than forty who formed this plot. 14 They came to the chief priests and the elders and said, “We have bound ourselves under a solemn oath to taste nothing until we have killed Paul. 15 Now therefore, you [a]and the [b]Council notify the [c]commander to bring him down to you, as though you were going to determine his case by a more thorough investigation; and we for our part are ready to slay him before he comes near the place.”
16 But the son of Paul’s sister heard of their ambush, [a]and he came and entered the barracks and told Paul. 17 Paul called one of the centurions to him and said, “Lead this young man to the [a]commander, for he has something to report to him.” 18 So he took him and led him to the [a]commander and said, “Paul the prisoner called me to him and asked me to lead this young man to you since he has something to tell you.” 19 The [a]commander took him by the hand and stepping aside, began to inquire of him privately, “What is it that you have to report to me?” 20 And he said, “The Jews have agreed to ask you to bring Paul down tomorrow to the [a]Council, as though they were going to inquire somewhat more thoroughly about him. 21 So do not [a]listen to them, for more than forty of them are lying in wait for him who have bound themselves under a curse not to eat or drink until they slay him; and now they are ready and waiting for the promise from you.” 22 So the [a]commander let the young man go, instructing him, “Tell no one that you have notified me of these things.”
23:1 [a]Or Sanhedrin [b]Or conducted myself as a citizen 23:6 [a]Or Sanhedrin 23:10 [a]I.e. chiliarch, in command of one thousand troops 23:12 [a]Or mob 23:15 [a]Lit with [b]Or Sanhedrin [c]V 10, note 1 23:16 [a]Or having been present with them, and he entered 23:17 [a]V 10, note 1 23:18 [a]V 10, note 1 23:19 [a]V 10, note 1 23:20 [a]Or Sanhedrin 23:21 [a]Lit be persuaded by them 23:22 [a]V 10, note 1
NLT
1 Gazing intently at the high council,[*] Paul began: “Brothers, I have always lived before God with a clear conscience!”
2 Instantly Ananias the high priest commanded those close to Paul to slap him on the mouth. 3 But Paul said to him, “God will slap you, you corrupt hypocrite![*] What kind of judge are you to break the law yourself by ordering me struck like that?”
4 Those standing near Paul said to him, “Do you dare to insult God’s high priest?”
5 “I’m sorry, brothers. I didn’t realize he was the high priest,” Paul replied, “for the Scriptures say, ‘You must not speak evil of any of your rulers.’[*]”
6 Paul realized that some members of the high council were Sadducees and some were Pharisees, so he shouted, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, as were my ancestors! And I am on trial because my hope is in the resurrection of the dead!”
7 This divided the council —the Pharisees against the Sadducees —8 for the Sadducees say there is no resurrection or angels or spirits, but the Pharisees believe in all of these. 9 So there was a great uproar. Some of the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees jumped up and began to argue forcefully. “We see nothing wrong with him,” they shouted. “Perhaps a spirit or an angel spoke to him.” 10 As the conflict grew more violent, the commander was afraid they would tear Paul apart. So he ordered his soldiers to go and rescue him by force and take him back to the fortress.
11 That night the Lord appeared to Paul and said, “Be encouraged, Paul. Just as you have been a witness to me here in Jerusalem, you must preach the Good News in Rome as well.”
12 The next morning a group of Jews[*] got together and bound themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. 13 There were more than forty of them in the conspiracy. 14 They went to the leading priests and elders and told them, “We have bound ourselves with an oath to eat nothing until we have killed Paul. 15 So you and the high council should ask the commander to bring Paul back to the council again. Pretend you want to examine his case more fully. We will kill him on the way.”
16 But Paul’s nephew —his sister’s son —heard of their plan and went to the fortress and told Paul. 17 Paul called for one of the Roman officers[*] and said, “Take this young man to the commander. He has something important to tell him.”
18 So the officer did, explaining, “Paul, the prisoner, called me over and asked me to bring this young man to you because he has something to tell you.”
19 The commander took his hand, led him aside, and asked, “What is it you want to tell me?”
20 Paul’s nephew told him, “Some Jews are going to ask you to bring Paul before the high council tomorrow, pretending they want to get some more information. 21 But don’t do it! There are more than forty men hiding along the way ready to ambush him. They have vowed not to eat or drink anything until they have killed him. They are ready now, just waiting for your consent.”
22 “Don’t let anyone know you told me this,” the commander warned the young man.
[23:1] Greek Sanhedrin; also in 23:6, 15, 20, 28. [23:3] Greek you whitewashed wall. [23:5] Exod 22:28. [23:12] Greek the Jews. [23:17] Greek centurions; also in 23:23.
In 1865, the year America found peace after four years of civil war, a baby boy was born on the other side of the world in Bombay, India —just one of thousands in a region few people knew or cared to know about. Born to wealth and privilege, he never suffered poverty except vicariously by living alongside the millions inhabiting Punjab, where his father had moved the family when he took a job as curator of the eminent Lahore Museum. His family’s privileged position in British society surrounded him with elegance and nobility.
His father, an artist in his own right, recognized the boy’s artistic genius early and made sure he received the finest education England could provide, both in the British Isles and in India. By and by, the world began to recognize the literary genius of this boy, Rudyard Kipling, and would award him the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of forty-one. Despite his acclaim among sophisticates, he never lost his earthy connection with the common people. If he was criticized for anything, it was his affection for those less fortunate than he; many of his wealthy peers disparaged him and delighted to cut him down with sarcasm. Nevertheless, he endured with dignity and never turned from his convictions.
Perhaps while enduring a particularly stinging assault, he wrote these words to his son:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream —and not make dreams your master;
If you can think —and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings —nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And —which is more —you’ll be a Man, my son![200]
Eighteen and a half centuries before Kipling released those poignant words, there lived a man who also was misunderstood. He also was a genius. He also was honored. As best we can tell, he was hailed among the temple elite as a rising star in Jewish culture and government. Then his theology changed. He no longer preached the Law as the way to salvation; he now proclaimed a gospel of grace, authenticated by the resurrection of Jesus, whom he accepted as the Messiah of Israel and of his own life. The great Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Small, an apostle of Jesus Christ. When hated, he did not hate in return. When he saw the truths he preached twisted against him, he stood firm and resolutely gave himself to them all the more. But even Paul had his tough days. Having survived a riot in the temple and arrest by the Roman guard, he stood to face his former colleagues in the Sanhedrin, now graying with age and wrinkled with time after some twenty years, but all the more powerful in the realm of religion and politics.
The commander of the Roman guard arranged for this hearing, but Paul didn’t see this as a trial to determine the future course of his life; he left that to God. Instead, he saw yet another opportunity to confront his countrymen with their sin and, hopefully, call them to repentance.
— 23:1 —
Acts 23:10 implies that the commander observed the hearing along with several troops. On the other hand, if Paul was standing in the chamber, he would have known that the high priest had addressed him (23:5), if not by sight then by the location of the voice. Therefore, I’m inclined to believe that the Sanhedrin assembled somewhere in the common area of the temple to accommodate the commander’s request without compromising sacred tradition.
Paul began his address with a bold declaration both the Sadducees and the Pharisees should have appreciated. He lived with a “perfectly good conscience before God” (23:1), not because he had never sinned, but because he had earnestly devoted himself to pleasing God and because Christ had justified him by grace through faith in His sacrificial atonement for sin on the cross.
— 23:2-3 —
Paul’s claim to have a “perfectly good conscience before God” (23:1) did not please the high priest, who broke with Sanhedrin protocol to have an attendant punch the apostle in the mouth. Notably, Jesus experienced the same treatment during his hearing before Annas (John 18:22). Whereas the Lord had rebuked the high priest gently, Paul condemned the man sharply, calling him a “whitewashed wall” (Acts 23:3). The metaphor could have two references. The first pictures the whitewashed front of a burial cave, the implication being that the high priest only appeared pure on the outside but was full of dead men’s bones within (see Matt. 23:27). The other reference alludes to an image used by Ezekiel in which the Lord condemned false prophets for speaking lies in His name (Ezek. 13:10-16). The high priest’s hypocrisy enraged Paul. They had gathered to examine the accusation against the apostle that he had escorted a Gentile into the court of Israel, among other charges, yet the high priest violated the rules of the Sanhedrin in front of everyone.
— 23:4-5 —
The comment by someone observing the hearing illustrates the twisted logic at work in the Sanhedrin. Paul objected to the high priest’s violation of the Law, and he was rebuked for being disrespectful of the office! The apostle’s response is difficult to interpret. Some see this as evidence, along with Galatians 6:11, that he suffered from failing eyesight, but “looking intently” in Acts 23:1 argues against this. There are two reasonable explanations: (1) He in fact didn’t recognize the high priest because he wasn’t wearing his traditional vestments for this hearing and the office had been occupied by several men since Paul last visited Jerusalem; or (2) he responded sarcastically, saying, in effect, “He wasn’t acting like God’s high priest, so I didn’t recognize him.”
Paul’s quoting Exodus 22:28 (Acts 23:5) favors the latter explanation. He highlighted the irony of his situation: He stood before the council voluntarily, in deference to their authority, to hear their complaint about his supposed denigration of the temple and flouting of God’s Law. Meanwhile, God’s high priest broke the law in the first moments of his appearance. Or, as one commentator states, “Paul’s quotation from Exodus 22:28 showed that he was in subjection to God’s revealed will that he was on trial for repudiating.”[201]
— 23:6-8 —
Paul had appeared before the Sanhedrin as a courtesy to the Roman commander, to listen to and then respond to any complaints the temple officials had against him. He immediately saw that he would never get a hearing with the council, so he decided to show his Roman audience that the religious officials were pathetically irrational and hopelessly corrupt. It occurred to Paul that he could use the polarized views of the Sadducees and Pharisees to make his point. Probably looking at the Pharisee majority, he suddenly cried out, in effect, “I’m not on trial for denigrating the Law. I’m a Pharisee. I’m on trial because the Sadducees don’t like our theology, brothers!” (see 23:6). And with that, the trial ended. The council turned on themselves, some defending Paul as a fellow Pharisee, all of them compulsively drawn into their never-ending theological debate (23:7-8).
— 23:9-10 —
Again, I maintain that the hearing took place informally in the common area of the temple complex, where the commander and his troops could observe. If so, the audience extended beyond just the council: Common Jewish worshipers heard the great “dissension” (stasis [4714b]) developing, and dangerous arguments rippled among the general public. Such dissension often degenerated into dangerous public mayhem, and therefore the commander began to worry that “Paul would be torn to pieces” (23:10). To restore order and rescue a Roman citizen from danger, he motioned to the Fortress of Antonia, and troops poured in to extract Paul and return him to the garrison.
Josephus didn’t refer to this incident in his chronicle, but he describes the political tone in Jerusalem leading up to the end of Felix’s term, a time period coinciding with Paul’s trial and subsequent imprisonment in Caesarea:
And now arose a sedition between the high priests and the principal men of the multitude of Jerusalem; each of whom got them a company of the boldest sort of men, and of those that loved innovations, about them, and became leaders to them; and when they struggled together, they did it by casting reproachful words against one another, and by throwing stones also. And there was nobody to reprove them; but these disorders were done after a licentious manner in the city, as if it had no government over it.[202]
Evidently, the dissension between the Sadducees (“the high priests”) and the Pharisees (who represented “the principal men of the multitude”) grew steadily worse after Paul’s hearing.
— 23:11 —
When the commander had realized Paul was a Roman citizen, he released him from custody (22:30), so Paul didn’t stay in the barracks against his will. He had most likely spent the previous several nights under the protection of the commander, and this night would be no different. Ironically, Peter had spent the night in this same structure under very different circumstances. Agrippa I had locked him up intending to execute him upon the conclusion of Passover. On the eve of his execution, an angel visited Peter, released him from his chains, and led him out of the fortress (12:1-11).
This time, Paul had a very different experience. As darkness fell over the garrison and the soldiers slept, Jesus appeared to the apostle to provide comfort and reassurance. He told Paul that he would not be walking out of the prison that night, and then He revealed the purpose of Paul’s arrest and what lay in the future. Paul had hoped to visit Rome; Jesus assured him that he would, just under different circumstances than he had planned. Notably, Jesus stood by Paul’s side as if to say, “I’m right beside you all the way.”
— 23:12-15 —
Josephus reports that under the procurator, Felix, people routinely hired the Sicarii, “dagger men,” to assassinate their enemies. Originally, the Sicarii were an extremist faction of zealots who used cloak-and-dagger methods to rid Israel of those they considered enemies of an independent state: Gentiles, Roman sympathizers, Hellenistic Jews, Herodians, and so forth. They degenerated into nothing more than blades for hire. Josephus records,
The robbers went up with the greatest security at the festivals after this time; and having weapons concealed in like manner as before, and mingling themselves among the multitude, they slew certain of their own enemies, and were subservient to other men for money; and slew others, not only in remote parts of the city, but in the temple itself also; for they had the boldness to murder men there, without thinking of the impiety of which they were guilty.[203]
A cadre of more than forty men, probably aligned with the Sadducees, approached the high priest and his cronies with a plan. The chief priests would call another meeting of the Sanhedrin on the pretext of giving Paul a fair hearing, only they would ensure that he never made it across the temple courtyard (23:15). They bound themselves to the plot with an unusually severe oath (anathematizō [332]) even more extreme than the Nazirite vow (23:12, 14). The anathematizō describes a pagan vow that calls down divine curses upon oneself if one should renege or fail to fulfill the commitment. They promised not to eat or drink until they had assassinated Paul. Of course, Paul lived for several more years after this. Either the murderous enemies starved to death —not likely! —or they found clever lawyers to wheedle their way through a loophole.
— 23:16-22 —
Paul’s nephew by his sister discovered the plan. Paul referred to him as a neanias [3494] (23:17), the same term used of Eutychus in Troas (20:9), indicating that he was an adolescent perhaps ten to seventeen years of age. The centurion called him a neaniskos [3495], which Philo reports that Hippocrates described as “a boy till his beard begins to grow, and that time is the end of a third period of seven years”[204] —between fourteen and twenty-one. He may have been devoted to temple service, not unlike an altar boy in the Catholic Church, and overheard talk among the temple leaders.
Paul was not a “prisoner” (23:18) in the sense that he was detained; rather, he remained in protective custody. Moreover, as a citizen, he could request the cooperation of a Roman commander. Rather than deliver the warning himself, he let the commander hear of the plot directly from his nephew. The way Luke describes the scene suggests he was there in the barracks with Paul at the time —visitors were commonly allowed, especially under circumstances like Paul’s.
The commander took the boy’s report seriously. He knew exactly what to do. This was his realm of expertise.
APPLICATION: ACTS 23:1-22
Facing the Past, Planning the Future
As I observe this passage with a little imagination, two truths emerge.
First, the grace of God can overshadow any guilt within us. When Paul stood to face the Sanhedrin, he had come full circle. He had not interacted with these men, his former colleagues, since leaving for Damascus on his deadly errand more than twenty years earlier. The last time he spoke with a high priest, he had received letters authorizing him to deputize Jews in the synagogue of Damascus, round up Christian Jews, and return them to Jerusalem to face trial. On this day, he was the defendant. By the time of his original departure, he had amassed an impressive record of arrests and convictions, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people. Even so, he stood before the council of Israel and declared, “Brethren, I have lived my life with a perfectly good conscience before God up to this day” (23:1).
The grace of God gave him permission to make that claim. That same grace frees us to say the same. Perhaps you need to stop listening to the condemnation of other people and take your stand on grace with Paul. It is amazing how Christians heed the voices that continually underscore guilt and wrong and failure and inadequacy and incompetence! But it is remarkable how the reassurance of God comes in grace and says to you, “All is forgiven. I have Rome in My sights. If I didn’t have a plan for you,” says the Father, “I would take you out of this world. Because you are alive, I am still at work, barracks or not, mistreatment or not. I know what I’m doing.” You see, God specializes in imperfect people. The grace of God can overshadow any guilt within us.
The second truth I’ve found here is that the power of God can overcome any plot against us. If you have placed your trust in Jesus Christ, you stand before God as His child, justified, declared righteous, destined for a greater purpose than anyone —including you —can possibly imagine. It is an invincible, unalterable, irrefutable plan! And God will get you there! He’s committed to it, failure and mistakes and sin notwithstanding. He knows you, He knows what He wants to accomplish, He sees beforehand what threatens to undermine His plan, and nothing can stand in His way.
Stay focused on what the Lord wants to accomplish through you and let Him take care of potential dangers. The power of God can overcome any plot against us, even those hatched by Satan himself.