WWUTT 1081 Bar-Jesus the Magician?

The Apostle Peter had an encounter with Simon the magician whom he rebuked. The Apostle Paul is also going to have an encounter with a magician whom he will rebuke, leading another man to the Lord, when we understand the text.

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text, as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt .com.

Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Antioch’s Prophets and Teachers and the Call of Barnabas and Saul

Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of the book of Acts. This week we're going to be in chapter 13, and today we'll start out by reading verses 1 through 12. Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Menean, a lifelong friend of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul.

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

The First Missionary Journey to Cyprus and the Synagogues of the Jews

So being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews, and they had John to assist them.

When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they came upon a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Barjesus. He was with the proconsul Sergius Paullus, a man of intelligence, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God.

But Elimus, the magician, for that is the meaning of his name, opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?

And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time. Immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand.

Then the proconsul believed when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord. So we come back to the start of this chapter. This is really the beginning of Saul's first missionary journey that we're reading about here.

You probably have maps in the back of your Bible, and one of those maps is going to show through various arrows the missionary journeys that Paul took. You'll have one color for his first missionary journey, a second color for the second missionary journey, and then, of course, a third.

Well, this one is Paul's first missionary journey. It wouldn't expand out very far. It's just kind of the northeastern region of the Mediterranean Sea. And we start here at Antioch. Now, I mentioned before that Antioch is right there where what is modern-day Turkey meets with the northeastern shore of the Mediterranean.

Along that eastern shore, you've got Jerusalem in Palestine. You go up from there to Damascus. You go up from there to Seleucia and Antioch. And then, of course, to the northwest of Jerusalem, out in the Mediterranean Sea, is the island Cyprus, which we have talked about here.

And to the northeast of Cyprus is Antioch. Directly north of Cyprus is Turkey. You have Galatia in there and Lystra and Derbe. And these are all going to be places that Paul is going to visit over the course of this first missionary journey.

So we start once again in verse 1. Now, there were in the church at Antioch, and if you'll recall what we read previously in chapter 11, is that it was at Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.

That was chapter 11, verse 26. For a whole year, they met with the church. Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians.

We leave that story and we go to read about James being killed by Herod, Peter being imprisoned and rescued, and now we're coming back to the events that are happening at Antioch here at the start of chapter 13.

There were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers. And there's always going to be kind of a distinguishing understanding of who prophets and teachers are in the New Testament. They're not the same.

So a prophet is probably going to see a vision from God. A teacher is going to be one that helps the church understand the oracles of God, whether it's the teaching of the Old Testament and how Christ fulfilled those things, or the teachings of the apostles and how they pertain to the church.

That's going to be the role of a teacher, whereas a prophet is going to be seeing things that would otherwise be hidden to human eyes, disclosed by the Holy Spirit. They may not necessarily be gifted teachers, but then what they say will be tested.

Of course, if it comes true, it was from God. If it does not come true, then they've spoken presumptuously, and it was not from the Lord. What a prophet prophesied always, always came true. If they were in Christ, what a prophet prophesied happened.

There was none of this one in every hundred prophecies comes true. Oh, so therefore, that person must be a prophet of God. See, that's exactly the kind of ratio of success to failing prophecies that you would expect there to be for somebody who's just making stuff up.

And that's the modern-day prophet. That's the kind of prophet that you find in most charismatic churches, the guy who says one thing and might get it right, and 20 things that are wrong, but because he gets that one thing right every once in a while, somehow he's gained some kind of credibility as a prophet of God.

There are no modern prophets of God. There are not people who are doing this. Hebrews 1 .1, Long ago at many times and in many ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.

These prophets represent a passing era into this apostolic age that they are in. So God, once speaking to men by the prophets, he's now speaking to them through the apostles who are delivering the word of Christ.

The prophets are not the ones that are communicating the teaching of Christ to the church. They're still having visions as God is giving them visions, according to a gifting of the Holy Spirit, but they are not the ones that are speaking for God.

The apostles are the ones that are doing that, because the Holy Spirit and Christ is upon them to carry this word, the very word of God, to his church, the kingdom that is being built here on earth. So you have this distinguishing between a prophet and a teacher that's even made here in Acts 13 .1.

And then we mentioned some of those other names that are present there at the church at Antioch. Barnabas, of course, who we had read about in chapter 11, is being there. Simeon, who was called Niger.

That word means black. And so some have figured that Simeon was probably from Africa. Lucius of Cyrene. Now, there are some scholars that have argued that Lucius of Cyrene is Luke, but that wouldn't be the case, because Luke, who is the author of Acts, that's his Greek name.

Lucius is a Latin name. And it's highly unlikely that Luke would have referred to himself by that name. The next name that we have on here is Menean, a lifelong friend of Herod the Tetrarch. Herod the Tetrarch is mentioned quite a bit in the Gospels.

He was the heir to the throne after Herod the Great had died. And his cousin was Herod Agrippa I. And this was the Herod that we had just read about died in Acts 12. So Herod Antipas was the Herod that had reigned during the ministry of Christ.

And Menean was a lifelong friend of his. But here you see that he is a Christian now. He's a Christian, and he's here at the church at Antioch. This is a pretty significant name. Somebody who was rubbing shoulders with a guy who was responsible for putting Jesus to death.

And here he's become a Christian and is at the church at Antioch. So this is pretty significant that you've got this name that's listed here among the members of this church. And then, of course, you have Saul.

And Saul is now going to be the central figure from here on out in the book of Acts. We last read about Peter in Acts 12. Peter shows up in Acts only one more time, and it's at the Jerusalem council coming up in Acts 15.

Meanwhile, our attention is focused upon Saul, also called Paul, which is referenced in this particular passage. And he's the guy that we're going to be following through the remainder of this adventure story as we're reading about how the gospel made it to the whole world.

Rome is the capital of the world. You get the gospel there, it can go out all over the place. Because, of course, as the old adage goes, all roads lead to Rome. Likewise, all roads lead out of Rome. So that's what Saul wanted, Paul wanted.

He wanted to be able to get to Rome, share the gospel there with the church that was there, so that it might be able to go out to the far reaches of the Roman Empire and beyond. And Acts is telling the story of how the gospel made it to the whole world.

The book of Luke, which, of course, Luke also wrote, that is the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ. And then Acts is about how that gospel made it to the world. So now verse 2, it says, Now we don't know how the Holy Spirit communicated this to them.

Could have been that the Holy Spirit said it to a prophet, and then the prophet would have said it to the whole church. Maybe it was done that way, since we had this mention of prophets and teachers at the start of chapter 13.

Or it could have been something that the Holy Spirit clearly communicated to all of them. But once again, just like with the prophets, whatever this is, it was clearly understood. It was not some of those things where somebody makes a random statement, and then maybe it comes true.

The book of Deuteronomy is clear. If a person makes a prophecy that they claim is from God, and it doesn't come true, then what they said is not from God, and you should not even regard them as being from the Lord.

They have disqualified themselves. And this is a person who has claimed to speak for the Almighty, but instead was speaking according to his flesh. They were being deceptive, whether or not that was their intention to deceive.

And the penalty for this, according to Deuteronomy, was death. A false prophet was to be taken out and stoned to death. Now that's not the penalty that we see in the church, but most assuredly, a person who was prophesying falsely would have been immediately removed.

They would have lost all credibility. No one would be able to believe anything they said now, for are they speaking from their flesh, or are they actually speaking from God? So what a prophet said was from God.

If they were wrong, it was not from God, and they were discredited as a prophet. Here with the Holy Spirit speaking to them, it was clearly understood what the Holy Spirit was saying, and everyone heard it and obeyed it.

Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them, Saul and Barnabas, and sent them off. Now we're going to have a contrast here between these prophets in the church to whom God was actually giving visions and revelations, and we're going to have a contrast between them and a false prophet named Bar-Jesus, or Elimus.

That's the section we come to next year, starting in verse 4. So being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Siliusia, and once again from there at Antioch, Siliusia was like a jog. It was less than a day's journey.

They're going from one city to another and continuing to preach the gospel there. From there they sailed on to Cyprus. Siliusia was right there on the coast. They would have sailed out from there a little bit to the southwest to the island of Cyprus.

Again, that would have taken not even a day. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews, and we're going to see that routinely throughout Paul's ministry, is that first, when he goes into a city, he goes to the synagogue, and he preaches the gospel there.

If the Jews reject the gospel that he's proclaiming, then he goes to the Gentiles. If the Jews receive the gospel that he's proclaiming, well, he continues to proclaim the gospel, and Gentiles will come, but they'll come meet there at the synagogue.

That would still be like a church in that vicinity, in that locale. Saul would go there. He would teach there. That's where the scrolls were, so it's not like he walked around with a Bible. There was no printing press.

But he went to the place where the sacred writings were and taught from them, and that, of course, would have been the synagogue. This also is in fulfillment of the command of Christ to his disciples that they should go out preaching to Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

So they go first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles. Paul says in Romans 1 .16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So the gospel is being proclaimed, the oracles of God coming to the Jews first before it goes to the Gentiles.

So he's proclaiming in the synagogues, and they had John to assist them. This was John the apostle. When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, a word that means light, they came upon a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bargesa.

So here, again, we have that contrast between the true prophets that were in the church and this false prophet, a magician. We've already read about a magician previously. Remember that episode between Peter and Simon the magician?

So this is an episode now between Paul and Bargesa the magician. I had said at the start of our study of Acts that we would see some similarities between the storytelling of Peter and the storytelling of Paul.

And here is one of those places where their stories look kind of similar. Here's Paul's encounter with this magician, somebody who practiced evil magic arts. All this stuff was always very sinister. It was very demonic in practice.

Magic was assisted by demonic powers. There was a lot of paganism in the stuff that this guy would have done. Some of the things that you think of as being associated with voodoo, like voodoo dolls, little figurines, and things like that, that would have been used by these particular magicians.

And we know this not just from what we read about in antiquity, but even ancient literature like plenty in his natural history. He talks about some of these things that the magicians would do, the ability to tell of the future, how they would make and create and sell potions.

And they would constantly use different apotropaics or these magical objects like amulets or these bowls in which they would mix their potions. They'd have these little figurines that would either bring good luck or they would use them like voodoo dolls.

So that's what this guy did. And we see this connection that he has with the proconsul, verse 7. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paullus, a man of intelligence who summoned Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God.

So here, while in this Greek city, the Greeks valued new philosophy. And since Paul and Barnabas are going out with this new teaching, well, this particularly interests Sergius, where it says a man of intelligence.

It basically means that he's a man who's interested in philosophy. He wants to hear about the latest teachings, the hip thing that is on the street. What are people talking about? What's catching the public's attention?

And so he summons Barnabas and Saul and wants to hear about this message that they are preaching. He sought to hear the word of God. That's what it says there in verse 7. So now in verse 8, but Elimas the magician, that's bar Jesus, opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith.

Now, it's likely that Elimas may have had some sort of demonic hold on the proconsul. You think of the relationship that Wormtongue had with Theoden of Rohan, the king in J .R .R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the second book, which was The Two Towers.

If you've seen the film, you know the guy that was dressed in black, Wormtongue, who had that hold on Theoden until Gandalf came and kind of released this powerful hold that Wormtongue had on him. It was also a power that Saruman had on the king.

So it might have been something like that. He was like Wormtongue to this proconsul, and he did not want to lose that influence that he had, not just on the proconsul, but even the fear that the public had of Elimas because of the magical powers that he had, all of this being demonically influenced.

He wanted to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, who was also called Paul, by the way, that was his Greek name. Saul was his Hebrew name. Paul was his Greek name. And now as he's going out to the Gentiles, he's going to use a Greek name, lest it become a stumbling block to Gentiles to hear about this guy with a Jewish name, and they don't want to listen to him.

Saul was a Roman citizen, and being from Tarsus on top of that, so he had some influence in some Roman areas more so than the other apostles would have had who were noticeably from Galilee. We know they're noticeably from Galilee because people would look at them and go, these men of Galilee.

So Paul, being a Roman citizen, is going to go by his Greek name, and it's not that his name was changed because of his conversion. His name's still Saul, but in Greek it's Paul. So his name was Saul, but was also called Paul.

He was filled with the Holy Spirit. He looked intently at this magician and says, You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?

And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time. And immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand.

Then the proconsul believed when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord. The teaching of God, the word that was given to the apostles by Christ himself, has the power to transform a person from death to life.

And this certainly happened for the proconsul. Paul was able also to curse Wormtongue, or rather, Elimus the magician, who opposed the proconsul because of the power of the Holy Spirit that was upon him.

And just like we would see with Peter, Paul has performed a kind of miracle here before the proconsul, and the proconsul comes to believe the message that was preached. And so that's been the pattern that we've seen throughout Acts.

But then we're also going to see opposition that will rise up to this message. And that's what will come next as we continue our study of Acts 13, and we look at the next section tomorrow. We'll hear a more robust message from the apostle Paul, which we have yet to have heard.

So far, we've just heard him speak twice, at least in regards to his newly found faith by the calling of the Holy Spirit. In chapter 9, verse 20, Paul's sermon was simply this, Jesus is the Son of God.

And the next time that we have Paul speak up is here in Acts chapter 13 in this curse that he gives upon Elimas the magician. But we'll hear a more robust sermon from Paul coming up a little bit later on here in Acts 13.

Prayer for Bold Gospel Proclamation

Let us conclude with prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we have read today, and I pray that we understand what we read in Scripture is the Word of God. We're not looking for some fancy prophecy or esoteric thing that exists outside of Scripture.

We've got the Bible right here in front of us, and we hear the Word of God spoken to us, the power to transform a man from being a dead sinner to a living saint, walking in the ways of truth delivered to us by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Help us to live according to these things today, and with boldness, proclaim the gospel to others, as we see being demonstrated by the apostles even here in this particular book. We have opportunity in front of us to share the gospel with others, so let us seize those opportunities that others may know the gospel and turn from sin and live.

And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Closing Thanks and Tomorrow’s Bible Study

Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com, and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.