WWUTT 1102 Turning the World Upside Down?

Paul and Silas came to Thessalonica preaching the gospel. And when the false teachers came against them, they said, these men are turning the world upside down.

Did they really understand what they were saying? When we understand the text. This is when we understand the text, studying

God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Thank you for subscribing. And if this has ministered to you, please let others know about our program.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study in the book of Acts and we're on to chapter 17 today with Paul and Silas journeying to Thessalonica and Berea before going to Athens, where we'll read

Paul's sermon at the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill. So let's start here in Acts chapter 17.

I'll read the first nine verses. Now, when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the

Jews. And Paul went in as was his custom. And on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the

Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead and saying, this Jesus whom

I proclaim to you is the Christ. And some of them were persuaded and joined

Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.

But the Jews were jealous and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd.

And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.

And Jason has received them and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another

King, Jesus. And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things.

And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.

Now, I had talked a little bit about this when we did our study through first and second Thessalonians. I don't know if you've been listening to the broadcast that long.

How long ago was that, a couple of years ago? Anyway, going into a study of those two letters,

I had said that Paul's stay in Thessalonica was not very long. It wasn't as long as some of the other places he's been to up to this point, where he'll stay in an area, plant churches, teach them the gospel, the implications of the gospel, and then he'll move on to another place.

But here he's in Thessalonica for only about six weeks. It says that he taught in the synagogue for three

Sabbaths. So that was at least three weeks. And then he would spend the rest of the time teaching the

Gentiles before he's driven out. So we're talking about six weeks to two months. He wasn't there very long.

So he wasn't able to get through all of the teaching that he needed to build this church up in, especially when it came to talking about Christ's return.

When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians in both letters, first and second Thessalonians, he's talking about things concerning the return of Christ.

The Thessalonians were afraid that because their Christian brethren were dying, that they were gonna miss the day of the

Lord. And then with the second letter that Paul wrote, there was a false teacher convincing the

Thessalonians that the day of the Lord had already come. And so Paul was having to contend against some of the false teaching they had been led in and kind of filling out some of the things he didn't get to say to them while he was there.

But he sent some other teachers to them to perfect them in their teaching, to mature them and grow them in the word of Christ.

So we can tell that this day is very short. And as he goes through this particular area, which is still

Macedonia, they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia and they came to Thessalonica.

This is a route that's referred to as the Ignatian Way. And each one of these cities is about a day's journey from one another.

So he's going to these various towns, preaching in the synagogues as was his custom.

Paul went in as was his custom of the synagogue of the Jews. And on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures.

And here we get even greater detail as to the things that Paul taught whenever he went into the synagogue.

Sometimes it just tells us Paul went into the synagogue and preached. Well, what was it he was preaching? We got a little bit of that from the very first sermons that Paul was preaching to the

Jews, but then we're kind of reminded a little bit more here in chapter 17, that he would explain from the

Old Testament that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, saying this,

Jesus, whom I proclaim to you is the Christ. Now that was not the common belief among a lot of the

Jews at this time. They did not believe that their Messiah was going to come and suffer. And there's probably even some

Orthodox Jews today. They believe the same thing. They do not think that Christ is going to suffer. The Messiah is not going to suffer.

He's going to be a conquering King. He's going to be powerful. He's going to overthrow all the nations and give

Israel back its empire that it once had under David and Solomon.

But we can see from the Old Testament very clearly that the Messiah is supposed to suffer and die and then rise from the dead.

Isaiah 53, verse three. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and is one from whom men hide their faces.

He was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.

And with his wounds, we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

It would have been passages exactly like this one that Paul would have been teaching from, explaining to the

Jews that the prophecies were Christ, the Messiah, was going to come and to suffer.

And in fact, even through Zechariah, the prophet. Chapter 12, verse 10. And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and please for mercy, so that when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child and weep bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn.

They are going to look on me on him whom they have pierced and they shall mourn with a spirit of conviction and repentance that God is gonna give them.

He will give them a spirit of grace and please for mercy. This is what was prophesied through the prophet

Zechariah. Then of course we have Psalm 22. And this was the Psalm that Jesus prayed from the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning?

Oh my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer and by night, but I find no rest.

Skipping down to verse six, I am a worm and not a man and scorned by mankind and despised by the people.

All who see me mock me, they make mouths at me, they wag their heads.

He trusts in the Lord, let him deliver him. Let him rescue him for he delights in him. And that's exactly what happened when

Jesus was on the cross. The people mocked him saying, let God come down and take him off that cross.

That's the way he was mocked. So the Old Testament is clear that the coming

Messiah was going to suffer and not just suffer, but suffer and die. And so in fulfillment of the scriptures, this was the

Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who came preaching the good news, not just to the

Jews, but now also to the Gentiles with the commissioning of his disciples to go out to the world, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded.

As Jesus said in the great commission in Matthew chapter 28, verses 18 through 20.

So the apostle Paul is proclaiming Christ to these Jews, since that's where he was to go first.

Anytime he went into a city, he goes into the synagogue because that's where the holy scriptures were. Paul reasoned first from the scriptures that Jesus is the fulfillment of the

Old Testament passages. He is the fulfillment of all the prophets and the law.

He said this to Jews first, but there were Gentiles there as well. Gentiles would also come in the synagogue and they would hear the word proclaimed.

But when the Jews would reject Paul and his teaching, then he would go out almost exclusively to the

Gentiles, except for those Jews who would then follow him as he would continue to preach to the people in that city.

So he's teaching from the scriptures, three Sabbath days, reasoning with them and explaining and proving.

This is apologetics that Paul is doing here. Oftentimes we think of apologetics as the thing that you do with logic and reason, but doesn't always include scripture.

Like it might, a little bit, but not so much. We're appealing mostly to logic and reason here and we fit the scriptures in whenever they fit, whenever they apply.

But the purpose of apologetics is to get back to the gospel. So you've got to come back to the scriptures when you reason with those who want to contend against the truth of Christ.

As Paul says in Romans 1, 16, I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the

Jew first and then to the Greek. Because the oracles of God came first to the

Jewish people. That's who Paul went to first whenever he would come to the city and he would reason from the scriptures there in the synagogue.

But then when he would be rejected by the Jews, he would go to the Gentiles and he would go to the Gentiles anyway.

He's there to preach the good news of Christ to the nations, to all peoples, not just to those who were descended in the line of Abraham.

So as Paul is reasoning with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that Christ was to suffer and rise from the dead, he is contending against the common

Jewish notion that the coming Messiah would not suffer. He's going to be a king that is going to overthrow our oppressors and we are going to be an empire again.

Indeed, he is that king and he is going to overthrow his oppressors. But first he came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The prophets had foretold that this was going to be the case. So as long as the Jews were looking for a king that was greater than David in the sense that they're looking for somebody who's literally gonna sit on the throne in Jerusalem, then they're gonna miss the fact that the

Messiah has already come and he has come in mercy and grace and peace, but a day is coming in which he will return in judgment.

This is Revelation 19. He comes back on a white horse to judge the nations, to strike them down.

He is going to fill the streets with blood. And if a person does not turn from their sinfulness and self -righteousness in the case of the

Jews and turn to Christ Jesus, then they are gonna be judged with the rest of the world when he comes.

Just because you're descended from the line of Abraham does not mean that you are gonna escape that day of judgment.

It is only those who turn from sin and put faith in Christ. Some of them indeed were persuaded.

Verse four. Well, first of all, the exact words of Paul. This is the quotation we get from Paul's preaching in the synagogue.

This Jesus whom I proclaim to you is the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter's son, the man who was without a place to lay his head.

This is the one whom the prophets had talked about. This is the one who had died and had risen again from the dead.

And some of them were persuaded, verse four, and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout

Greeks and not a few of the leading women. Now, I'm not gonna explain that just yet.

I'm gonna wait until tomorrow because this comes up again when Paul and Silas go to Berea.

It says in verse 12, many of them therefore believed with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.

So I'm gonna wait until tomorrow to come back to that. We've seen this before. When Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch, the

Jews stirred up some of the women who were of high standing there as well. And here we see that happening in Thessalonica, and then we see it happening in Berea.

And these were women of high standing within the Greco -Roman culture, not among the

Jews, but among the Greeks. So again, I'll explain some of that in a little bit more detail tomorrow, but we go on in verse five.

But the Jews were jealous and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar and attacked the house of Jason seeking to bring them out to the crowd.

So the Jews are jealous. They're jealous because they see that they're losing power and influence.

With Paul and Silas preaching a gospel that is different than what the

Jewish teachers had been saying, where now Paul and Silas are saying the law has no power to save you.

Well, I mean, the Jewish officials are getting pretty upset at that, because they're trying to keep everyone under their thumb with the declaration of the law.

And there was this agreement between Jews and Romans to, you know, we would just kind of go our own way.

We'll do our own religion. We're not gonna proselytize you guys. But now here, Paul and Silas standing in the synagogue are using the

Old Testament scriptures to appeal not just to Jews, but also to Gentiles. Well, that has the potential to incite

Roman aggression against even the Jewish religion, since the agreement between the

Jews and the Romans was to just kind of stay within our own groups. We won't bother you guys.

You don't bother us. The Romans were okay with the Jews following their own religion, their own way of life, as long as they paid their taxes.

As long as everybody stayed in order, there wasn't any uproar over anything, because the Jews were,

I mean, devoutly monotheistic. There was no way to convert a Jewish people from their monotheism.

The Romans recognized that. They were going to be just fundamentally devoted to their monotheism.

So instead of making the Jews worship the false Roman and Greek gods, they let them have their religion.

Just pay your taxes, do whatever. Don't bother us. We won't bother you.

So that was the arrangement. But now since Paul and Silas are preaching the gospel, not just to Jews, but even also to the

Greeks and to the Romans, to the Gentiles, well, this is going to make the Romans kind of turn their heads and go, hang on a second now.

I thought we had an arrangement. So the leaders of the Jewish synagogue are going to try to put distance between them and Paul and Silas to say, now, wait a second, they're not with us.

And so, and the means by which they're going to go about this is very aggressive, because they don't want to lose power and influence that they have over the people, which in their eyes,

Paul and Silas are taking away from them by saying, the law doesn't have any power to save you anyway. The law reveals your sin and need for a savior.

These guys aren't going to teach you about a savior. I'm teaching you about a savior from the

Old Testament scriptures, the savior whom the leaders in the synagogue have missed.

Now, Paul is probably not presenting his message that way. He's hoping that the leaders in the synagogue would repent of their sin and come to Christ.

But those who have the power and influence become jealous, realizing that they're losing it. Now, this was also in fulfillment of the scriptures, that these

Jewish leaders are not just jealous of Paul and Silas, but they're jealous to see that this

Messiah who they've been looking for, a Messiah who was going to come for the Jewish people has not come for Jews, but has come for Gentiles.

So there's a jealousy stirred in their hearts, even over that. We read in Romans chapter 10, about the message of the gospel going forth.

Faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. And Paul says in verse 18, but I ask, have they not heard?

Indeed they have, for their voice has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world.

Verse 19, but I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says,

I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation. With a foolish nation,

I will make you angry. Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, I have been found by those who did not seek me.

I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me. So the

Lord was gonna use the Gentiles to make the Jews jealous. When it says here that the

Jewish leaders became jealous, it's likely because of the jealousy that they had of Paul and Silas and the power that they were losing.

But this was still in fulfillment of the scriptures in the sense that I'm gonna make you jealous of a nation that is not a nation.

Those to whom the gospel is going, you're gonna be jealous of them because you thought

God was on your side. You thought that because you were descendants of Abraham, you had inherent favor with God.

But as Paul preaches to the Romans in Romans chapter three, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

There is no one who seeks God, not among the Jews, not among the Gentiles, all have become worthless.

And it is God who has called to himself a remnant from Jews and from Gentiles, that they would come to him through faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ. This is the message of the gospel that is to all the world, not just to one group of people, but to every.

From all the nations of men, God would call to himself people out of slavery to sin and worldliness, and instead would come to him in righteousness and godliness by the righteousness that is given to them in Christ Jesus.

This is the message of the gospel. And this jealousy that the Jewish leaders are displaying is in fulfillment of the prophecies that were made even about them.

For up to this point, Paul has been preaching there in the synagogue, how Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecies, the law and the prophets, but even the

Pharisees and the Jewish teachers become a fulfillment of those prophecies when they find themselves in jealousy against a nation that is not a nation.

Taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, they set the city in an uproar and they attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd.

That sounds pretty similar to when Sodom, the people of Sodom had come against the house of Lot and were trying to bring his two guests out to the crowd.

And yet Jesus said, it's gonna be better on the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than it's gonna be for those who saw and did not believe.

So here, these Jews, they have the scriptures and they've heard the gospel proclaimed and yet they do not believe.

And Jesus himself has said, it's gonna be worse for them than it will have been even for Sodom and Gomorrah.

That's incredible. To think about how great a sin it is to not believe the gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ. Homosexuality is not the greatest sin. An abomination?

Absolutely, there are many sins that are referred to as an abomination. The worst thing, even according to Christ himself, is to not believe in him.

So they come against the house, they're trying to bring Paul and Silas out to the crowd when they could not find them.

They drag Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities shouting, these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also and Jason has received them and they are acting against the decrees of Caesar saying that there is another king,

Jesus. Man, what a proclamation that was. They were not even aware of the truth that they had just said.

These men who have turned the world upside down. What season are we in right now?

The Christmas season, right? I know that Christmas has been secularized. I know that it's been heavily commercialized and it's just full of all kinds of materialism.

I know that. But Christmas is still a holiday that began celebrating the coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnation that God put on human flesh and dwelt among us, that he would die on the cross for our sins and rise again from the grave, that we would have fellowship with God through faith in our

Lord Jesus Christ. His name is printed on every calendar you buy. Christmas day,

December 25th. That's the season we're in and the whole world has been turned upside down by the proclamation of this gospel, which had started 2000 years ago.

We're still proclaiming it. The world has been changed by it, has been revolutionized by it, is still being changed by the message of this gospel.

It has indeed turned the world upside down. Our very calendar system is built around the coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ. We have separated the ages into BC and AD, even secularists.

Now, though they might get into semantics and they wanna change it to before the common era and the common era, that again, that's just a semantic argument.

It's still a calendar that's been set up around when Christ came, the incarnation.

It's beautiful. It's turned the world upside down and we need to continue to change the world by preaching the gospel.

The people in the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things and when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.

So the way that the Jews had driven Paul and Silas out of the city was by inciting the

Greeks against them. It was the same thing that the Pharisees did when they put Jesus to death.

They submitted themselves to their pagan captors. They went to the Romans and cried, please do something about this.

So here they did the same thing with the Greeks. They submitted themselves to the world. They were filled with worldliness instead of godliness.

Instead of with eyes that had been opened by the Holy Spirit of God, seeing and with ears hearing the gospel that had been proclaimed by Paul and Silas.

They instead attempted to persecute them, attempted to silence them. And they stirred up the

Greeks by saying, they're proclaiming another King who is Jesus. And the people in the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things and when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.

This probably wasn't bribery, it was more like robbery. Jason wasn't bribing the people, he was being robbed.

They wanted to harm Paul and Silas. And Jason's going here, I'll give you money to not harm them. And they said, okay.

But part of the agreement was probably that Paul and Silas had to leave. So then they go from there to Thessalonica, or I'm sorry, they go from Thessalonica to Berea.

And that's where we're gonna pick up our reading tomorrow. Let's conclude with prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gospel that has turned the world upside down.

And I pray we would be so bold as to declare it. So we see the world changed by this message that we are to turn from worldliness and turn to Christ likeness, that we would not perish with this world, but instead be delivered into the kingdom of God.

Help us to stand on this, delight in it, rejoice in it, and proclaim it. When we understand the text, in Jesus' name, amen.

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