One of the problems that we have as Christians is getting the world to hear what we have to say.
Obviously, Paul had the same problem when he stood before this Jewish Sanhedrin.
It is the nature of man to reject, ignore and hate any revelation of the one True and Living God.
But there are differences between the problems that Paul faced and what we face today.
Many modern people just can’t bring themselves to think that anything that old is still relevant.
Most modern Americans think that even the days of George Washington and James Madison are too far back to concern them.
But it is interesting to learn that in the days when Americans were fighting for national and religious liberty,
in exactly the same way that Paul was suffering before this Jewish council.
First, because I would like to draw your attention to this scripture.
that doesn’t mean that it will not happen sometime in the next few years.
And I can see them being physically slapped across the face for defending God’s Word.
And the truth is: no matter what verse of the Bible we are studying, there are always ways in which every chapter and every verse apply to you.
No matter how poorly developed, how poorly explained, how poorly worded my message is this morning, you need the revelation that these verses, and every other scripture verse, contain.
This morning, I’d like you to see the lessons that these verses teach about the use and misuse of the law.
As I suggested last Wednesday, there are a lot of Christians who don’t like this statement.
They correctly understand Paul to be talking about his entire lifetime, not just about his Christian life.
They hear him say, “As I look back on my life, my conscience is clean.”
But every Bible student knows Paul had been a hater of Christ, a persecutor of the saints and a murderer.
How could he have a clear conscience about those things?
The answer is clarified when we see to whom Paul was speaking and what he was trying to accomplish.
I believe that what Paul wanted to tell his former bosses and the leaders of his nation was that:
he was being consistent with it even on that day.
He believe that Christ would be born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth, just as Micah had predicted.
And he believed that He would drive out the Romans and establish a pure and perfect kingdom.
He had condemned many of the practices of the nation; He had condemned even the priests.
Paul had been convinced by his teachers and by his corrupted understanding that Jesus was not the Christ – the Messiah.
Paul felt totally justified in silencing those lying heretics, even if it meant blood.
So before the leaders of his nation, Paul could say that his conscience was clean,
BUT – before God, and before his new brethren in Christ, Paul did NOT have that kind of confidence.
It was on tear-stained paper that he wrote to the Galatians “that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it.”
And he told the Corinthians, “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
And to Timothy, his son in the ministry, he wrote:
And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”
Either he is a fool and doesn’t realize that the omniscient God knows all his sins.
He knows every act, every lie, and every lust.
We might add, “Who can say, when looking into the face of the holy God, my conscience is clear?”
Or that person might say, “My conscience is clean through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
In the prophecy of Isaiah the Lord has said, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.”
And “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins.”
The Apostle John wrote: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
And Peter could preach: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.”
When God says that our sins are cast into the depths of the sea, it means that we don’t need to drag them up again; they are gone.
But getting back to the subject of a man’s conscience and the law:
Just because a man’s conscience doesn’t convict him of his sin, that does not mean that he is sinless.
The Bible says that the average conscience is seared and defiled; it is corrupt and as hard as rock.
Generally speaking, the conscience is no more interested in telling our hearts the truth than the Devil is.
The first lesson here is that a “good” conscience doesn’t mean that person is not guilty before God.
I don’t know about you, but I find this command to smite Paul completely incomprehensible.
Was there more said and done than what Holy Spirit recorded for us?
Paul’s words can be uttered in less than 4 seconds.
What so provoked Ananias to attack him in this way – after such a short time?
Maybe it was Paul’s confidence.
Even if the High Priest disagreed with Paul’s assessment of himself, a slap on the face was not the proper response.
Ananias commanded more than one of the bailiffs to smite him; Luke used the word “them.”
Secondly, the word “smite” isn’t necessarily confined to a slap with the hand.
But in this case, a slap does appear to make the most sense.
We are only told that a command was issued, but not that it was obeyed.
From what Paul goes on to say, it is apparent that this order to smite the prisoner was unlawful.
It wasn’t that there was never a cause to slap or beat a person, but it has to be proven that it is deserved.
Paul may have been referring to Deuteronomy 25:2 which says,
and to be beaten before his face, according to his fault, by a certain number.”
But the Jews, which had directly received their laws from the Lord, behaved like lawless barbarians.
But it might be really interesting to compare the thousands of laws of our Federal and State governments with the laws that we find in Deuteronomy.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that if we eliminated all our laws which didn’t approximate divine laws,
not only would our nation function just fine, but our society would actually prosper.
Everyone’s personalities are different, and the way in which we do things are often different.
For example, when I talk about homosexuals, I will call them “homosexuals.”
and I never call them “gays” because that is a nickname which puts them in an unjustified good light.
So if I had been in Paul’s shoes I would not have called the man who order his beating “a whited wall.”
I would have simply called him an “hypocrite.”
But I’m not going to say that Paul was wrong in his choice of words.
He simply was doing things in a different manner than I would.
And the fact is, he was using a fairly common proverbial statement, and one which even our Saviour used. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”
When Paul called his attacker a “whited wall,” he was saying that he was an “hypocrite.”
Among the many regulations governing the worship of the Jews, there was one which said that when someone had touched a dead body or a grave, he became unclean and unfit to worship.
Sometime during the centuries since Moses, the Jews had established a tradition that a month before the Passover, people would go out to the tombs around the country and paint them with a whitewash made up of lime dust.
That way there would be time enough for the painters to be ceremonially cleansed and prepared for the Passover, and there would be warning for the thousands of travelers to avoid the graves of the local people.
But obviously, no matter how beautiful the outside of those tombs were made to appear, inside were the decaying remains of the dead.
The Lord Jesus called the Pharisees “whited sepulchres” as nickname for hypocrites, and that is exactly what Paul meant by this phrase.
It reminds us that no matter how well we paint and decorate the exterior of our lives, the Lord knows what is on the inside.
Apparently there are a lot of people enjoying the confirmation hearings of Judge Roberts,
because they seem to be broadcast and rebroadcast on a variety of radio and TV channel.
as I see people like Diane Finstein, and Edward Kennedy ask John Roberts about moral issues.
“The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.”
As “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
And as wise Solomon said in his heart, “God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.”
Cover your sins as best you can before the eyes of man, you shall be judged by God as you are, not as you appear.
And remember: “The wages of sin is death.”
And that points us toward item four:
According to Josephus, this High Priest, Ananias was the son Nedebaeus, and he was appointed to this office by one of the Herods.
By any man’s standard, Ananias was a wicked man.
Claudius acquitted him and he returned to his office prior to this meeting with Paul.
And for this he was assassinated by Jewish zealots.
In other words, he was a Jew who cared very little for God or the Word of God.
Nevertheless, he WAS the Jewish ruler of Israel, and Paul had publically reviled him.
Ignoring the hypocrisy on the Jewish side, the remonstrance against Paul was justified.
Just because he may have been unjustly beaten at the order of this wicked man, that didn’t give Paul the right to break the law in return.
As I pointed out last week, we live in a world which has been corrupted by the ideas of RELATIVISM.
Most people today do not believe in absolutes.
Not only is nobody perfect, there is no God who is perfect either.
What is true today, may not be true tomorrow.
And what is true for you, may not be the truth for me.
Everything is relative and it has meaning only as it relates to me.”
There is a God, and He has a single standard by which He will judge all men equally.
But here is this High Priest ordering a beating contrary to God’s law. Is he guiltless?
And here is Paul breaking what may be considered a less important law, and yet he was guilty as well.
Imagine a man who agrees to work for a certain company at a certain wage.
After a couple of years, he is given a small increase in salary, but he believes that he deserves more,
Does the company’s sin against him, justify his sin against the company?
In fact that man stopped going to church anywhere.
Did the sins of the church mean that the man’s sins against God weren’t sins at all?
Paul, if God said, “Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of they people,” then it doesn’t matter what that man had previously done to you, you now deserve to be smitten.
“Wist” – “I wist not” is the past tense of the very old word “wit” which refers to “knowledge.”
Paul explained his hasty words by saying that he didn’t know that the man who ordered him to be smitten was the High Priest.
There are some professed Bible scholars who say that Paul DID know that he was the High Priest.
It seems to me that to hold to that idea, someone has to deny what the Bible says and to call Paul a liar.
So then how do we explain the fact that Paul didn’t know him?
Then Ananias may not have been in his official dress.
With Paul’s probably poor eyesight, he may not have seen who issued the order.
Or he may have reacted so quickly that he didn’t take time to look.
Literally, Exodus 22:28 says forbids “cursing” the ruler, but obviously by this time it referred the tone of the voice, the charges and the names that someone called their ruler.
It makes me smile just a little to notice that even though Paul confessed to his “crime,” he didn’t apologize or withdraw the charges.
What he said was absolutely true, although he perhaps should have used a different manner and tone.
But the lesson to be learned by you and me here is this:
Just because there may be ignorance involved in our sin, that ignorance doesn’t remove our guilt.
In this case the ignorance was in Paul’s lack of recognition of the High Priest.
Far more common, however, is ignorance of the law itself.
You may think in your sincerity that the christening that you received in your infancy made you a Christian, but your lack of understanding doesn’t change the fact that you are still in your sins.
And you may think that believing in the historical Jesus makes you a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t.
You may think that being sorry that you were caught shop-lifting as a teenager was the same thing as repentance before God, but you are wrong.
You may believe that by going to a good Baptist church, you are guaranteed of entrance into Heaven, but such is not the case.
It doesn’t matter what you think or believe to be God’s laws, rules and salvation.
What matters is what the Lord Himself has said, and that by His rules you shall be judged.
You may say, “But no one ever told me that I had to humble myself before Christ, repent of my sin and trust in His merits and mercy.”
But whether anyone actually made you to understand that or not, the responsibility is yours, and you will not be pardoned because of your ignorance or lack of education.
God’s eternal law says that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
It further says that “the wages of sin is death,” speaking about eternal death and separation from God in the Lake of Fire.
But God Word has added: “but the gift of God is eternal life.”
God commands you to repent and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you fail to do that it is proof that you have not received God’s gift of grace.
As Paul preached to the ignorant intellectuals of Athens:
Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.”