This post by christinecoltman was originally published at GRACE PLACE
A Different Trajectory
Acts 16:6-34
Have you ever started out doing something with good intentions, thinking you were doing the right thing, for the door to slam shut in your face? Or have you ever set out to do something your way, thinking it was the right way, only to look back afterwards and see that you ended up doing something entirely different or in a different way than you had planned? That is what happened to Paul in the passage we will be looking at today; he had a plan, a good plan!, but God had a different idea and completely changed the trajectory of Paul’s travels for HIS purposes in a way that Paul could have never foreseen. In fact, the word trajectory has been THE word I’ve felt God has emblazoned in my mind as I’ve studied and prepared for today. Not just in how Paul’s ministry plans were turned upside down and shaken, but also in how God by his Spirit changed the trajectory of the hearts of those who heard Paul’s message in Philippi!
Recap
We have been following the growth of the very first churches after Jesus’ death and resurrection, as his followers, now filled with the Holy Spirit, share the good news of salvation and freedom. And although Jesus first came as the Messiah for God’s chosen people, the Jews, this message is now reaching further and further, even to Gentiles in far flung places; fulfilling that great commission that Jesus gave the disciples right before he went back to be with his Father; “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
We’ve already seen so much happening. Paul himself had a life-changing encounter with the risen Jesus, completely transforming his hatred of Christians into a passion for growing God’s kingdom for Jesus. In the past couple of months, we have covered a lot of ground, as Paul and his companion Barnabas have completed a missionary journey (Paul’s first of three) taking the gospel further and further from Jerusalem; living out the ‘ends of the earth’ part of the commission. Last month, Hollie took us through a brilliant recap of how the Holy Spirit was tearing down walls between the Jewish and Gentile believers, bringing about the beginning of unity within a very diverse group of people in the early church.
In chapter 15, Paul decided he wanted to go back to all the places they’d been setting up churches, to follow up on these new believers and offer support and encouragement. After a big bust up with Barnabas, Paul chooses Silas to go with him instead, and they set off, retracing Paul’s steps. Along the way, they pick up young Timothy. So this little group begins what we now call Paul’s second missionary journey. And they’re doing pretty well (16:4-5); the churches they visit are growing in size and in faith. But they’re about to hit some road blocks as we’ll see…
Read Acts 16:6-12
A change in direction
When Paul finished checking in on the churches in Derbe and Lystra (where he’d picked up Timothy), he naturally looked to the border of Asia (a different Asia to the one we know; a small province); there was a major Roman road that led that way, and Paul’s desire was to continue sharing the gospel of Jesus in cities he had not been to before. Maybe he thought Ephesus would be a good place to go? Cities in this region had not yet been visited by any of the disciples; surely a good direction? But no, for reasons Paul doesn’t yet know, and by means we aren’t told, they are ‘kept’ or ‘forbidden’ from going there by the Holy Spirit.
So with the south-westerly route blocked, they decide to try and head north up towards Bithynia; perhaps to the cities on the edge of the Black Sea. But once again, the “Spirit of Jesus would not allow them” to continue in that direction. How perplexing must this have been? Two potential roads leading to cities and people that had not yet heard the gospel, and yet the doors were well and truly shut. We aren’t talking short distances here; AI tells me we are talking about 220 miles from Lystra through Phrygia and up to the Bithynian border; that doesn’t even include any miles headed towards Asia! This would have taken weeks, if not months of walking, sleeping at the roadside and no comforts, just hard hard travel. In that situation, I think I’d also not only have been scratching my head wondering why, but also pretty frustrated.
I wondered two things here – how did they know the doors were closed? And why did God in his sovereignty close the doors, when the motivation was right and the gospel needed to be preached in these places?
How did they know?
Clearly we are not told, but we know there is this sense of being ‘kept’ or ‘not allowed’. They were restrained. These are examples to us of how the Spirit can lead through negative direction; not just ‘I want you to go here’, but very specifically ‘I don’t want you to go here’. Maybe it was a lack of peace that all three men felt. It could have been some kind of external circumstance that we are not told of; maybe reports of dangerous bandits on the route? Quite a few commentators suggest that it was potentially illness within the group that stopped them, with the sudden emergence of Doctor Luke on the scene from verse 10.
Why did God shut the doors?
Didn’t they set out to do the LORD’s work? Hadn’t they just been following Jesus’ command to share the good news everywhere? Back in Jerusalem they undoubtedly had their brothers in Christ lay hands on them and pray for them as they set off, so why now all the barriers? These are very real and challenging questions.
There is some suggestion that Paul was kept from evangelising in Asia and Bithynia because Peter was the man God intended to witness to these places a short while later (Peter writes to them in his letter in 1 Peter). But when we (with the benefit of hindsight) see the whole of the chapter together, we can see that it was God’s ultimate plan and his timing that was the key to all the shut doors. And in many senses, perhaps he was also interested in what he was doing in their hearts on this journey, just as much as the outcome.
Isn’t that often the way with us too? Paul later can say when he writes to his beloved Philippian church “now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel” (Phil 1:12); at that point, Paul could see how the LORD had been leading and guiding in all the circumstances he’d faced. He also wrote to the church in Corinth about being ‘perplexed, but not in despair’ (2 Cor 4:8) – I wonder if he was thinking about this perplexing time? In it all, Paul demonstrates a deep trust in God’s sovereignty and leading that can encourage us.
The vision and calling
So having come from the east and found road blocks to the west (Asia) and then north (Bithynia), the only road left open to the group of weary travellers was north-west, through Mysia. They must have arrived utterly exhausted in the port city of Troas; the gateway through which the gospel would be shared with the wider world. Two significant things happen in Troas; Paul has the first ‘open door’ in months as he has a vision of a man calling him to come over to Macedonia to help there. (slide – characters) Secondly, Luke joins the group – notice the use of ‘we’ starts here; Luke is now an eye witness of the events narrated from here on.
I wonder if there was a collective sigh of relief when Paul recounted his vision to the others! NOW we know where we are supposed to go! Finally an open door! And they waste no time getting ready to head on out – they ‘got ready at once’ (v10), showing obedience to the calling. But before we skip on to Philippi and all that happened there, just take a closer look at the word ‘concluded’; the word used here is symbibazo which means ‘to bring together’ the evidence. The use of ‘we’ again shows that Paul, Silas, Luke and Timothy considered together this vision; in the light of all that had happened before, they put the ‘pieces’ together and concluded as one, that God had called them to preach to the Macedonians.
The group’s experiences in these first few verses of the chapter give us some helpful principles to understanding God’s guidance. We see them follow godly desires. We see God leads them in His timing both by restraining (stopped by closed doors) and constraining (being channelled through open doors). We see God speaking directly to one person through a vision, but also we see the immense value of sharing and discerning with wise godly counsel. We see a yielding and obedience to God’s plans and a faithful walk along the LORD’s trajectory. Is that us too? When faced with perplexing situations, or big decisions where doors appear to be closed, what is our response? Frustration? Despair? We can be praying, sharing with our brothers and sisters in Christ, listening to godly advice, and being able in all of it, to fix our eyes on Jesus.
What happens next? The travellers hop onto a boat and enjoy smooth sailing to the shores of Macedonia (what we know as northern Greece) and they walk from the port of Neapolis for 8ish miles along the Via Egnatia; an amazing Roman road that is there to this day. They arrive in Philippi; a very significant city in the area. Due to its history, it had been made into a Roman colony, a kind of mini-Rome, where Roman soldiers were encouraged to retire and citizens were exempt from provincial taxes. The people living there would have either been Latin-speaking elite veterans worshipping Roman gods and the emperor, or Greek-speaking locals who were holding on to polytheistic beliefs. They would have been proud of their systems and beliefs, and highly suspicious of those who believed in only one God, as we’ll soon see.
Let’s now turn our attention to the characters Paul met and how their lives were transformed by the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Read Acts 16:13-15
In every city Paul preached, he tended to go first to the local synagogue; a familiar and ‘easy access’ start to ministry in a new location. But here in Philippi there was no synagogue! According to Jewish tradition, there needed to be at least ten male heads of households before a synagogue could be formed. If these requirements could not be met, faithful believers were called to meet under the open sky near a river or the sea (probably for ceremonial washing). So that is why we see Paul and his companions head to the only river in the area looking for fellow Jews, ‘outside the city gate’, which was about a mile away.
Lydia
There they find a group of women, who had gathered to study the law and perhaps recite the Shema together. Here we meet the first recorded convert in Europe; and yes it was a woman! What do we know about her? She was called Lydia, or perhaps she was known as Lydia because that was the name of the ancient kingdom in the area of Asia she was from. The city of Thyatira had been famous for centuries for its production of purple dye and textile manufacture. As a dealer of purple cloth, Lydia would have been wealthy. She was likely a widow or was unmarried, given that a husband is never mentioned (which would have been the case in this culture). To sum her up, she’s a cosmopolitan influential business owner; in today’s terms she’d probably own an expensive high-end fashion boutique in Mayfair!
What I love about this is how she comes to Jesus. There are no fireworks, there is no drama. She was already seeking the one true God; going against the tide of both the culture she’d come from and the foreign culture she now found herself in. She was a Gentile who saw truth in the God of the Jews and wanted to worship him. But as Tim Keller says, in trying to leave the emptiness of the pagan Greco-Roman beliefs, where the culture just said ‘live for yourself / don’t get too attached to anyone or anything’ etc, Lydia would have found herself instead shackled by the Jewish law – the heavy burden of realising the weight of her sin and the impossibility of salvation through doing the right thing.
So when Paul speaks to Lydia, she’s like a ripe peach ready for picking! He must have said something like “I want to tell you about Jesus Christ; he was the only man to live a perfect life according to the law in obedience to God. Then he went to the cross and took our place, dying for our sins, and in doing that, he took the curse that our sin deserved (our disobedience to the law), but he also gave US the blessing that he received for his obedience; his righteousness and free access to the Father”. What an exchange! What freedom to hear of for Lydia! This is neither the emptiness of living for yourself or the heavy religion of following rules.
And crucially? It was not Paul’s eloquent words that drew her in. It was not a moving emotional backing track of music. The Bible says it was the Spirit who opened her eyes; it was the LORD who opened her heart. She had been divinely prepared for this encounter with the gospel, and she gave her life to Christ.
What was the impact on her? We could say she was already an amazing woman; a God-fearer, a successful business woman. But essentially she was ‘religious’; trying and trying to do the right thing but with no peace or assurance. She would have known something was missing. Tim Keller talks about the difference between ‘religion’ and a relationship with Jesus. He says religion is ‘outside in’; where if I obey the law, then I hope God will bless me. But following Jesus is ‘inside out’; God by his Spirit does all the work in my heart, and I therefore respond.
Lydia did that. She responded. From that Holy Spirit-ordained moment, the trajectory of her life changed. We might say there was no observable difference in her. But I’m sure she knew the difference. Can you imagine? No more burden! No more crushing weight of sin, of trying and failing. No more emptiness. She was different. She showed it by being baptised, probably then and there, along with ‘other members of her household’; perhaps some of the other women who were there who may have been her family or servants. No time was wasted in following this calling.
I love the way Lydia persuaded Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke to use her home as their mission HQ; her heart change meant she wanted to use her wealth and resources for kingdom purposes. And so she became the spearhead for the generous church in Philippi that Paul treasured so much. He later said about them when he wrote to them “I thank my God every time I remember you” (Phil 1:3) and “As you Philippians know, … when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, only you” (Phil 4:15). What a legacy! Lydia became an amazing example of generosity and hospitality that would echo through the millennia. Does that challenge our hearts today? Has the beauty of what Christ has done for us so captivated us, like Lydia’s heart was captivated, and produced in us the fruit of generosity and hospitality?
Let’s look at the next two converts Luke writes about in this account; these two tie together so we will read the whole passage.
Read Acts 16:16-34
Slave girl
Now we find Paul meeting someone very different to Lydia; quite the opposite in terms of financial and social position, but also morally – she was not seeking God. This slave girl was possessed twice over; she was possessed in real terms by her owners and spiritually possessed by a demon. Poor girl! It is likely she’d have been sold by her family to these ‘masters’ who made money by her clairvoyant abilities. Scripture tells us in some versions that she had a ‘python spirit’. Ancient readers of Luke’s writing would have known immediately what this was; it was a very familiar term describing someone who had fortune-telling skills that were deemed to be rooted in Greek mythology.
As we read this account, it does seem crazy to us that Satan seems to be doing God’s work here – she’s telling the truth! Right?! We can wonder at demons telling the truth, but it happened before. Luke himself wrote two accounts in his gospel (4:33-34 and 8:27-28) where evil spirits recognised Jesus. The book of James tells us even the demons believe and tremble, so it should be no surprise to us that this was possible. And the motive of the enemy may well have been to discredit the work Paul was doing; I mean it doesn’t look good if your loudest spokesperson has an association with the occult! Either way, Paul puts up with it for a while but becomes so perturbed by her hassling that he commands the spirit out of her.
What a moment for this girl! She was restored to her right mind. We do not know whether she received Christ from the text, but all commentators seem to think it would have been likely that she would have been then abandoned by her owners because of her loss of financial potential, and probably cared for by Lydia and the women in her home and come to saving faith, joining the early church there in Philippi.
Lydia’s trajectory was quietly changed due to a rational conversation by the riverside, meeting her at her point of need. This slave girl’s trajectory was explosively changed by a powerful encounter with God, again, meeting her at her point of need.
Jailer
So what about the jailer? There is so much that could be said, but once again God meets this man at his point of need.
Because of the debacle with the slave girl, Paul and Silas find themselves the subject of vastly unfair and degrading treatment; they were singled out because of their Jewishness (notice Luke and Timothy don’t get the same treatment as Gentiles) then they were falsely accused of things they hadn’t done, stripped and beaten to a pulp. And here we get our first glimpse of the jailer. This guy would have been a real tough-nut, as he was highly likely to have been a retired-Roman soldier – when soldiers retired they were given civil service jobs. He’d have seen war, blood and violence. There isn’t an inch of compassion shown as he follows orders to make sure these new prisoners don’t stand a chance of escaping; even though they likely had broken ribs and multiple lacerations, he puts them in stocks and in the innermost part of the jail.
It is hard for us to imagine what that would have been like for Paul and Silas; unbearable pain, they can’t move and total darkness. And yet, what did the jailer and fellow prisoners hear in the darkest hours of the night? Singing! And praying! What?! I could have written a whole sermon on this amazing part of Acts alone; how the Spirit enables Paul and Silas to continue focussing on Jesus despite their circumstances, but we are looking at the jailer here. I have the feeling he’d have heard them singing and been confused. Weren’t these guys horrendously beaten? Didn’t I just put them in a very painful position in stocks? Aren’t they in the pitch black darkness? He’d never heard people SING in jail, he was used to cursing and yelling! That’s just mind-boggle no.1!…
Then we have the amazing earthquake. The jailer thinks it is all over; he knows if any of his prisoners have escaped, he will face a trial and certain death. It is part of his job and he knows it. So seeing the extent of the damage to the jail – no doors! – he rushes to take his own life with his sword rather than face that degrading end. But Paul stops him. This compassion stops the jailer in his tracks; he rushes to Paul and falls on his knees, shaking!
His question in verse 30 is not so much about being ‘saved’ as we think of it, rather ‘how can I be safe from the wrath of this God who is SO powerful he commands even nature’? He’s terrified. The answer must have befuddled him even further. (slide – text) “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31)… Where are all the hoops I need to jump through? The sacrifices, the payments, the temple worship? Notice in his question, he uses the word ‘do’, “what must I do?”. He is a man of action! But the answer is simple! It reminds me of Naaman (2 Kings 5); the guy who wanted to know how to be saved from his skin disease and Elisha’s answer was so simple! There was an innate need from these men to earn that salvation; but the salvation offered by Jesus is FREE! Belief in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus is a great leveller isn’t it? It doesn’t matter who you are, what you have done. It is like the bronze serpent God instructed Moses to make and place on a pole, high above the Israelites when they’d been bitten by snakes. To be saved, what did they have to do? Look. Just look! Look and live.
The jailer wasn’t someone like Lydia, a seeker who needed words of truth. He wasn’t someone like the slave girl who needed a powerful release from oppression. He needed to see a demonstration of the way the gospel changes people, and that is what he had from Paul and Silas. He saw their peace and joy in the face of awful suffering. And he saw their forgiveness and kindness in the face of his own cruelty to them. He’d never seen anything like this before. He saw the different trajectory that their lives were on compared to his, and he wanted that.
What was the outcome? What do we see in response to his belief? We see the beginnings of the trajectory of his life changing. Firstly we see compassion – this tough guy, who before thought nothing of bringing in severely wounded men and putting them in stocks, actually does what he could have done before. He washes their wounds. He gets them a meal. He also sorts his priorities out – we see an allegiance shift from fear of his employers (he was going to kill himself if they escaped the jail!) to reverence for God first (he brings them out of the prison and into his house!). And we see joy. He shares his new faith with his whole household, who believe with him and are all baptised and they ‘all rejoiced’. What a change! Only the Holy Spirit can do this!
Paul’s changed heart
As we rejoice over the changed lives of these three founding members of the Philippian church, we can also marvel again at the transformation of the apostle Paul. As Saul-the-Pharisee, he’d have prayed this traditional identity-related prayer every morning; “Thank you LORD that I am not a Gentile, a slave or a woman”. Isn’t it amazing then that the first three converts to this new church are precisely those three?! Paul has had such a significant heart transformation. With the Spirit’s opening of his eyes, he now sees the unifying power of Jesus; whether different socially, ethnically, politically, financially, Paul sees what we see – our identity is now found in Christ FIRST, as he dwells within us; all different people, the same one Spirit. These people that he previously sought to persecute are now his family. The Holy Spirit brings people together into unity.
What have we learned from this passage?
We have seen how the LORD directed Paul and his companions to where he needed them to be, both through closed doors and open doors. He changed their physical trajectory. They may have wondered at the time, but clarity came later when they saw God’s beautiful plan coming alive in Philippi as people turned to him and the church began to grow. We’ve also seen the transformative power of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of those who turn to Jesus, finding their salvation in him. Lydia, the slave girl and the jailer are changed forever as they ‘look and live’. We also see once again the change in Paul and his open attitude to those so very different to him becoming part of God’s family.
As is so often the case when we prepare to speak, we find ourselves having to ‘live out’ what we’re reading and learning about in God’s word. In the past two months I’ve definitely been challenged again! During this time, I’ve found myself at a cross roads with regards to my work; my job contract ended last month and I’m at a loss what to do next. There are possibilities in the pipeline that mean I am not sure what avenue to try, and financially things are not easy if I don’t find work soon. I am also in a very strange stage personally with my own sense of ‘self’… This stage in life is looking like body shape changes, insomnia, brain fog and not knowing who I feel like any more! I often feel overwhelmed by circumstances. This passage has been such a good reminder to me that I can trust God with the direction he’s leading me in. Whether that will be through closed doors or open ones, I’m grateful He will lead me where he wants me to be. But more than that, I am challenged by Paul’s words, when he said ‘we are perplexed but not despairing’, encouraging us centuries later, who have the ‘same Spirit of faith’ (2 Cor 4:13) to have our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus. I’d value your prayers that the trajectory of my life, even in this season, would draw people to the beauty of Jesus and I will be praying that for you too. We can also pray the world would be attracted by our unity despite our differences, as the Spirit draws us together as one body under his headship.