Today, I am reading and commenting on  Acts 14-16.

I want to start out by looking at the way in which “the crowd” in Lystra shifted from wanting to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas as gods to stoning Paul.  While “the crowd” which stoned Paul was almost certainly not the same group of people as the one which acclaimed Paul and Barnabas as gods, the shift does serve as a warning about the fickleness of crowds.  In both cases the crowd followed their emotions rather than careful thought.  And in both cases the crowd was encouraged in their emotional response by those who stood to benefit from their incorrect reaction to circumstances.  I take two lessons from these events.  We should not follow the crowds when emotions are running high, and we should not stoke those emotions in order to gain advantage for ourselves.

On the subject of emotion getting the best of us, I want to look at the disagreement between Paul and Barnabas about taking John Mark with them on a second journey.  Paul approached Barnabas about going back to visit the places they had preached the Word on their previous trip.  Barnabas thought that was a good idea and wanted to take the young man, John Mark (who we know primarily as Mark) with them.  Paul resisted that idea because Mark had left them early on the previous journey.  Barnabas insisted that they give Mark a second chance and Paul refused.  Leading the two men to go their separate ways.  Luke’s wording in saying the Mark had deserted them on the first journey suggests that he thought that Paul had a valid point.  However, I also think that Luke recognized at the time of writing that Barnabas was right to give Mark a second chance (based partly on the fact that in his account of Mark leaving them on the first trip he downplays it).  We cannot know how things would have worked out if Paul and Barnabas had resolved their differences and travelled together this time, but we do know that God used their separation to enrich the Church.  Mark travelled with Barnabas and became a pillar of the next generation of Church leaders, writing one of the four Gospels which we have to this day (and being such assistance to Paul later that Paul refers to him in his letters).  On the other side, Paul took Timothy under his wing on his travels and Timothy also became a pillar of the next generation of Church leaders.  It seems unlikely that if Mark had been travelling with Paul that Paul would have recruited Timothy to travel with them.  So, the dispute between Paul and Barnabas led them to each train a young man for leadership in the Church.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.