Reaching Out
HAZARDS AND HEARTACHES
Section IV: A Pacemaker
War on materialism always means a fight (2 Tim. 3:12; 4:5). To those in Philippi (Phil. 1:27, 28), and to Paul, opposition meant that the enemy had been engaged.
Paul’s battle for the minds of men cut through all divisions of race and class. It divided the world between those who fought to bring man closer to God through obedience to His Word and those who resisted and fought against God. This fight must be fought in each generation.
Strife and Struggle
One of the early stories of opposition which Paul faced is that of the Roman employers in Philippi. When Paul gave the woman they exploited the answer to her materialism, the employers said “that their hope of making money out of her had disappeared.” They raised a riot in the city. They had Paul jailed, beaten with the rod and the whip, on the charge not that he interfered with their exploitation, but that he taught “customs which it is illegal for us as Roman citizens to accept or practice” (Acts 16:19-24).
On another occasion the opposition came from the workers, (materialism is not limited to any one class) the silversmiths of Ephesus. They held a policy meeting because, due to the spread of Christianity, the bottom was dropping out of the idol market. So they, “furiously angry,” rallied the whole city with the cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” It was a zeal for Diana so out of the ordinary and easily explicable that the city official was able to handle the mob by pointing out that Paul and his colleagues had neither been speaking against their goddess nor stealing from her temple; that the courts were available to the silversmiths for any charges they cared to prefer; and they had better all go home without further ado before they had to answer to the higher authority for the day's disorder (Acts 19:23-41).
Something of a similar nature may be behind Paul’s warning from Rome to Timothy in Ephesus concerning Alexander the Coppersmith, “who did me a great deal of harm . . . and I should be very careful of him if I were you. He has been an obstinate opponent” (2 Tim. 4:14-15).
In Antioch, the preaching of the Gospel was quickly and gladly taken up by the people considered pagan, by the Jews. But the Jews raised a persecution against Paul by enlisting some of the chief men and leading women of the city. They drove Paul from the region. From Antioch Paul goes to Iconium, where again he has a tremendous effect and splits the whole city – the ringleaders of the opposition being of his own race. Paul finally left when a plot to kill him was uncovered. From there he goes to Lystra and Derbe. Again there is a tumultuous response to his message, and again the same forces rise to oppose him. Only this time the opposition is being organized by his opponents from Antioch and Iconium (Acts 10:45-52; 14:1-6, 19).
In Salonica Paul won “a great many believing Greeks and a considerable number of influential women”; but his own people, “in a fury of jealousy, got hold of some of the unprincipled loungers of the market place.” They set the whole city in uproar, and developing a sudden and unusual loyalty to the Emperor, accuses Paul and his friends of acting “against the decrees of Caesar.” This smear troubled the rulers of the city because it touched them on their most sensitive spot. Paul then moves on.
From there he went to Berea, where the attack against him was inspired by his enemies who came from Salonica. The intellectuals of Athens mocked and snubbed him, an age old method of wriggling out of facing uncomfortable truth (Acts 17:4-32).
Organized Opposition
It is significant that Luke includes these facts on organized opposition. It is the same battle today. Good people, steeped in tradition but without Christ, never think of uniting on a world front to establish what is right. Thus they find it extremely difficult to believe people can unite on a world scale to establish what is wrong. It gives rise to the ‘It can’t happen here’ theory which has cost many their freedom politically and their souls spiritually.
The opposition to Paul followed him incessantly throughout his career. On his last visit to Jerusalem he is in the city less than a week before he is seized and beaten by a fanatical mob organized and incited by men from Asia Minor – the very ones who had attacked him in one city after another (Acts 21:27, 28).
This time they cleverly accused him of teaching men against “the people, the law, and the Temple”; the issues most calculated to rouse the prejudices of a Jerusalem mob and insure his destruction. This technique of labeling the man under attack with the most unpopular issues of the day is still a stock-in-trade of the opponents of Christianity.
Not all of Paul’s persecution came from the avowed enemies of Christ. A good deal came from those who accepted Christ in principle and associated with Paul, but who, not having broken fully with the world, were not totally committed to Christ and His will.
Acceptable Attitude
But though Paul had bitter and dangerous enemies, no one had an enemy in Paul. This was the beauty of what he preached through Christ. Paul was against neither Jew nor Roman, employer nor worker. “To the Jews,” he says, “I was a Jew that I might win the Jews.” To the weak, he was weak; to the Roman, he was a Roman. “I have ... been all things to all sorts of men that by every possible means I might win some” (1 Cor. 9:20, 22; Acts 22:25). He knew how to take Christ out where the lost sinners are.
