The Parable of the Rich Fool

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Short Summary
The first missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas was significant as it set a precedent for future missions, fulfilled prophecy about Paul’s role, and established foundational churches, particularly in Antioch and Cyprus. Despite opposition and challenges, including confrontations with local religions and hostility from some Jewish leaders, their efforts successfully spread the gospel to both Jews and Gentiles, laying the groundwork for Paul’s subsequent journeys and much of the New Testament teachings.

Long Summary
Significance of the First Missionary Journey
– It was the first formal missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas, setting a precedent for future missionary work. Like George Washington setting the precedent for the presidency, this journey established the pattern and order for evangelistic missions.
– The journey fulfilled a prophecy given in Acts 9:13-16, where the Lord said to Ananias about Paul (Saul):
> “For he is a chosen instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel, for I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake.” (Acts

Transcript

Okay. One of the first reasons why the first missionary journey is important is because it was the first one. You know, any first in any series, I think is important because it sets precedence, it sets order. It’s kind of like on Monday we’re going to celebrate President’s Day, and one of the presidents we celebrate is George Washington.

He was the first president, and everything he did as president set a presidential precedent. It was an incredibly difficult job that he performed, and he did a pretty good job of it. So anyway, this first missionary journey was kind of like that. Where he went, how he got there, what he did, when he got there, it was all involved.

And the second reason is because it fulfilled this prophecy that’s recorded in the ninth chapter of Acts. When Paul was. Was converted, you’ll remember that he was on the way to Damascus and he lost his eyesight, and the Lord sent Ananias to him to give him a message and give him his eyesight. I’m going to read the 13th and 14th verses because I didn’t put them on this slide.

Ananias is not very happy. He’s very concerned about this mission that God has set him on, and he says, lord, I have heard many things about this man, how much harm he had done to your saints, Jerusalem, and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all the call on your name. So in the 15th verse, the Lord said to him, go.

For he is a chosen instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel, for I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake. All those things happen in the first journey and the second and the third. But that was the prophecy that was given when the Lord sent him out. Well, this journey, actually, the three journeys, they all begin at Antioch. This is Antioch, Syria.

There’s actually two Antiochs in this story. This is the first one.

Let’s see. I’ll go ahead and read the verse and then I’ll talk about Antioch just a little bit, and this study is pri. Is almost entirely from the 13th and the 14th chapter of Acts with some other things brought in to kind of lay context and detail. But in Acts, the 13th chapter, verse one, it says now there were at Antioch.

Actually, I’m going to skip down. Oh, no, I guess I could read that. Okay. Now that Antioch in the church there were prophets and teachers. Barnabas and Simeon, who was called Niger, and Lucis of Syria, Serene, Serene.

And Manon, who had been brought up in Herod the Tetriarch his household, and last but not least was Saul. He’s mentioned there, and while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, set apart for me, Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them, and then when they had fasted and prayed, they laid their hands on them and sent them out.

Notice that this wasn’t a class decision where they. Somebody makes a motion, and no, this didn’t work that way. This was the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit does this a lot in Acts.

In fact, you know, we think of Acts as being Acts of the Apostles, but there’s different references that says it should be called Acts of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is so active in the book of Acts. Antioch is an interesting city. It was recognized as being the third largest city in the Roman Empire behind Rome and Alexandria. It’s believed that over a hundred thousand people lived there. It’s about 300 miles north of Jerusalem, which 300 miles in those days was about a two week journey in each direction.

So the fact that a sizable and substantial church was formed that’s far from Jerusalem is noteworthy in itself.

So then moving on to the fifth verse, it says, and the statement found approval with the whole congregation and they. No, wait a minute. Okay, the reason why this verse is up here, I wanted to show where, where Antioch is first mentioned in the Scriptures, and it’s very early on.

It’s. It was when you remember when the, the church in Jerusalem picked some deacons to take some of the pressure off the apostles who are waiting on tables and things like that, and Stephen was chosen. But Stephen wasn’t the only one. One of them was Nicholas, who was a proselyte from Antioch.

So that shows that Antioch was a sizable and notable church right from the beginning.

Now after the death of Stephen in the 11th chapter. Well, yeah, I’ll read the verse. It says. So then those who were scattered because of the persecution that occurred in connection with Stephen made their way down to Antioch and spoke the word that no one to no one except the Jews alone. But while they were doing that, they started preaching to the Gentiles.

I’m going to kind of paraphrase here a little bit because I’m going to run out of time if I read all of this.

And the hand of the Lord was with him, and a large number who believed and turned to the Lord and the news about them reached the ears of the church in Jerusalem and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.

The church in Jerusalem is very excited about what’s going on in Antioch. In fact, Antioch becomes kind of the other hub of Christianity at this point in time, which is interesting. It’s 300 miles away. But. But it does.

Yeah, and Barnabas says he was a good man. He was full of the Holy Spirit. He wants to. He wants.

The hell. He wants some help. He wants somebody to help him with his work in Antioch, and so the one that he picks that he wants to help is Saul, and he goes up to Tarsus to retrieve him.

He knows that that’s where Saul is at that point in time. But I put that map in there to just kind of show Antioch. Will, here, can you see my cursor? Here’s Antioch, and so he’s got a. I didn’t mean to do that.

Okay. He’s got to travel all the way around the north part of the Mediterranean Sea to Tarsus to get solid about 150 miles. But he wants it. He wants Saul to help him with his work in Antioch. So that’s what he does.

What is the connection between Barnabas and, and Saul that actually is told us in the ninth chapter of Acts. I’m just going to paraphrase that. Essentially what happened was, is when Saul was converted, the church in Jerusalem was very dubious of him. He had been persecuting the church and they weren’t that sure about Saul.

The one who convinced them that he was all right and that he had turned to the Lord was Barnabas. Barnabas was the one that was kind of the go between here and that was kind of Bartimus’s role in the fourth chapter of Acts. It. It says that his name, which is interpreted the Son of Consolation, he was a Levite, and he was also from the. The country of Cyprus.

So all of that is important with this story. He’s. He’s a good go between. He under. When he.

When you have two different parties, he can understand both sides, and so he can. He can go back and forth and tell each side what. What it is that they have to hear. That’s going to be an important skill for him on this.

For. For Paul, this. To have somebody on his team that can do that effectively, and the other thing is, it says that he is from Cyprus, and that is important.

And the reason why is because the first place they go is Cyprus.

We already read the first and the second verse, I think. So Paul and Barnabas were sent by the Holy Spirit and they went down to the seaport of Cilicia and then sailed for the island of Cyprus there in the town of Salamis they went to the Jewish synagogues and preached the word of the Lord, and John, Mark was with them as an associate.

And so they go down to the. This, this slide of something I’m going to use quite a bit. I like this map because it distinguishes the regions by color. So you can see very, very well what the different regions are, and this first journey, he really doesn’t cover that much many miles compared to the second and the third.

But it’s very important because it kind of lays the groundwork.

Okay, we can go ahead now. This is a map of the island of Cyprus at the time of Paul. It’s pretty simple. He sails into Salamis and they traverse the whole length of the island to Papos, and he, he preaches at all those little towns along the way there.

But Luke doesn’t fill us in on any of the ones along the way until he gets to Papos. But when he gets there, you know, then, then it gets kind of interesting. Let’s go ahead and read this, and when. Well, let’s go down one.

And when they had gone through the whole island as far as Papos that he found a magician, a false. A Jewish false prophet whose name was Bar Jesus, who was with the pro council, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, a man whom Apollos and Saul. This man summoned Barnabas and Paul and sought to hear the word of God. It says he was an intelligent man because he wanted to hear what Paul and Silas know and Paul and Barnabas had to say so.

But Elus the magician, that’s, that’s. He’s. He kind of changes his name right there. I think it’s because this name actually means a magician. He was opposing them and seeking to turn the Pearl Council away from the faith.

But Saul, who was also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, fixes his gaze on him. I’m going to stop there, there for right a minute because what’s kind of interesting here, you notice it says Saul, whose name was Paul. Every reference I could find to this individual before this verse is referred to as Saul, and every reference I could find after this verse, he’s called Paul. It just changes right there.

And I don’t really know why. Paul was his Greek name, Saul was his Hebrew name. There was a theologian in the 4th century named Jerome who thought that it had something to do with this pro council. This pro council that he is converting here is his last or his second name or last name, whichever it is, is Paulus, and this theologian in the 4th century.

Thought that had something to do with Paul switching over to his Greek name, Paul, and it is interesting because if you look at the Greek words, it’s the same Greek word for Paulus, for this pro council and the apostle Paul. It’s the exact same Greek word, just kind of interesting.

Anyway, Paul looks at this guy, he has kind of won over this pro council, this governor, and he’s got. He kind of has him under his thumb and he doesn’t want to lose that. So he’s trying to convince him that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with this Paul guy. So Paul looks at him and says, you who are full of all deceit and fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease to make crooked the straight ways of the Lord? Now behold, the hand of the lord is upon you.

And you will be blind and not see the sun for a time, and immediately a mist and a darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking those who would lead him by the hand, and then the pro council believed when he saw what had happened, being amazed at the teaching of the Lord. So, you know, the Lord used some miracles back then to advance the word.

This was one of them. That pro council was really impressed, but that his. This guy, this guy who he had depended on for advice that was giving him bad advice, and what Paul did won him over. Of course, it wasn’t Paul, it was the Lord that did that.

Well, at this point, they actually leave Cyprus, but I. I don’t really quite want to leave Cyprus just yet. There’s a couple things that’s kind of interest here to this day. Cyprus is a very popular tourist destination. In fact, I found this. This is modern.

This is modern Cyprus, and what goes along with this is a travel brochure. I’ll just read a couple lines of it. It says, imagine an island of tranquility and outstanding beauty found founded by ancient heroes. Imagine a country where the sun shines 300 days a year with soaring mountains and dramatic coastlines and uncrowded sandy beaches stretch as far as the ice can see.

Anyway, it’s very popular nowadays. It was probably pretty popular then. I don’t know there were that many leisure tourists. There was probably some. But the other thing about Cyrus Cyprus that I found kind of interesting is they were kind of famous worshipers of.

Of the goddess Aphrodite. In fact, this is a statue of a. This is. That’s modern day. That statue is mounted on a rock by one of those beautiful sandy beaches.

Okay, so.

And this is an artist rendition or image or imagining of. Of what the. What is it called? The Sanctuary of Aphrodite Papas. In Paul’s day, she was the goddess.

Where is that? She was the goddess of love, fertility and sensuality and played a crucial role in the religious and cultural life of ancient Greeks, and as such, he was a very popular goddess. Still is.

This is Paul’s competition. Okay. When he goes into these areas and he’s teaching them about Christ, this is where they’re coming from. How does he compete with that? Well, he competes with that because he’s not going for the masses.

He’s going for the little flock. He’s going for those that will see that there’s something wrong here. Their whole religion is built on carnal instincts and fallen nature, and it might be fun and it might turn on a lot of people, but that can’t be right, and a lot of people that are of a good heart can see that there’s got to be more than that.

And so those were the people that Paul was going after, and I think it’s kind of interesting because in a way, we kind of face that today, you know, with the. With the prosperity gospel and all that. You know, that’s a lot of what we’re up against is meant for the masses. But the message that we have isn’t more, the Lord is calling a little flock to be administers in the kingdom age.

This is actually a picture of what the. That temple, that grand temple looks like now. It’s actually a very popular tourist destination to go in and see. But that’s not the only recognition that Aphrodite still gets on the island of Paphos. This is the.

The Papos, Aphrodite’s water park.

I just thought that was so funny. I just said. Anyway, they. They still. They still recognize her, you know, that’s just.

Well, anyway, that’s enough of that. Then we go from. From Cyprus. Well, let’s see. I don’t know if you can see my cursor, but we travel.

It’s. What is it, about 200 miles of open water. They cross to get up here to the mainland at this point.

Okay, we’ll. We’ll read this first. Essentially, it says that it’s. He and his companions. Companions are heading out and.

But going on from. Okay, so they. They go up to the mainland there, and they. They come to Perga, and they arrive at Persidian, Antioch. There’s the other Antioch we have.

That one is. I’ll Try to do this without pressing it. That’s clear up there. Okay. So they.

They land on the shore there, and they. They travel up to Persinian Antioch.

Okay, and they get there on a Sabbath, and they went into the synagogue and sat down, and after the reading of the law and the prophets, the synagogue officer sent to them saying, brethren, if you have any word that you want to exhort to the people, say it. Well, you can imagine Paul sitting there going, yeah. So he gets up and he gives a sermon.

And this. I was going to go through this in detail, but I don’t think we’re going to have enough time. But this. This was recognized for these guys that made this caption as Paul’s first recorded sermon here at this presiding in Antioch, and what’s interesting about it is Luke records it in a lot of detail.

And this was Paul’s message. It was likely the message he took everywhere he went, and I’ll just try to paraphrase it a little bit. Essentially, he goes through the history of Israel from the time they were captive in Egypt and until the time that they had Judges and King Saul and then they had King David. When he gets to King David, he kind of slows down here a little bit.

I think I’ll read this part, and after he had removed Saul, he raised up David to be their king, concerning whom he also testified, saying, I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart who would do my will from the descendants of this man. According to the promise, God has brought up a savior who is Jesus.

And that’s kind of part of this message. This servant that he had promised to bring up through the line of David has been, here he came. It was Jesus. It’s an important part of his message. Then he mentions John.

He said, after John had proclaimed, because before his coming, a baptism of repentance for all the people of Israel, and while John was completing his course, he kept saying, what do you suppose I am? I am not he. But behold, one is coming after me, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie. Brothers, sons of Abraham’s family, and those among you, fearing you, you Jews who are the Gentiles that fear God.

To us the mention of this salvation has been sent.

Then he goes on to describe how the leaders in Israel didn’t accept Jesus and how in verse 28, they found no legal reason to execute him, but they asked Pilate to have him killed anyway, and when they had done all that the prophets had said about him, they took him down from the cross and put him in a tomb. Course he’s referring to at least Isaiah 53 and other prophecies in the Old Testament about that. But then this was actually bigger than the first part. Verse 30 says, But God raised him from the dead.

That was a huge message for these outlying Jews and the believing Gentiles.

It was so important that it happened.

What he offers as proof that he’s been raised from the dead was that he wasn’t left in the tomb. You know, we kind of wonder sometimes we don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ, but we do know that his body wasn’t left in the tomb, and this is why. It’s because when you’re making this case, if there’s a body still in that tomb, it’s hard for people to believe in the resurrection of the dead. So he shows here that David’s body remained in the tomb and underwent decomposition, but Jesus body didn’t.

It was, it was taken, it was raised. He was, he was put to death in the flesh, but he was raised in the spirit.

Foreign.

I think I’ll read part of this 34th verse where it says, I will give you the holy and sure mercies of David. Therefore he also says in another psalm, you will not allow your holy one to see decay. But this holy, the. This sure mercies of David, that refers to when God promised David that he would have an heir sit on the throne perpetually, and of course skeptics will say, well, wait a minute, that didn’t happen.

But actually it, it will, because Jesus ultimately will be at, like we talk about at Christmas time, the king of king, lords of lords. That just hasn’t happened yet.

Paul goes in the 38th verse, he says, brothers, listen. You are. We are here to proclaim that through this man Jesus, there is forgiveness for your sins. Everyone who believes in him is right in God’s sight. Something that the law of Moses could never do.

That message is wonderful, and it’s a message that I’m sure that many in his audience were just excited about. But he also adds some caution here. In the 40th verse, he says, be careful. Don’t let the prophet’s words apply to you. For they said, look, you mockers, be amazed and die, for I am doing something in your day, something you won’t believe even if someone told you about it.

I think what he’s referring to here is the religious leaders. Every place he goes, once they find out who he is and what he’s talking about, they’re against them and he’s constantly fighting with it. They should be the first ones to accept this. They’re the ones that the oracles of God were delivered to in the Old Testament because they study it. But they can’t accept it because if they do well, they’ll lose their position and they don’t want to do that.

In the 42nd verse it says that as Paul and Barnas were going out, the people kept begging that these things might be spoken to them the next Sabbath. Now when the meeting of the synagogue had broken up, many of the Jews and the God fearing proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who speaking to them was urging them to continue in the grace of God, and the next Sabbath nearly the whole town assembled to hear the word of God. But when the Jews saw the crowd, they were filled with jealousy and began contradicting the things spoken by Paul, and we’re blaspheming.

And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said it was necessary that the Word of God be spoken to you first. But since you repudiate it and judge yourself unworthy of eternal life, behold we are turning to the Gentiles, for such was the Lord, such was the Lord has commanded us to have placed you as a light for the Gentiles that you might bring salvation to the ends of the world.

And when the Gentiles heard this, they became, began rejoicing and glorifying the Word of the Lord, and many of them were being applied, appointed to eternal life and believe, and the word of the Lord was being spread through the entire region.

Paul and Barnabas are having a big effect here. They’re winning a lot of people over to Christ, even, even against Aphrodite and all that. So I think that’s kind of interesting.

This Presidian Antioch is a military base, which means there would have been a lot of soldiers there. One of the prevalent religions of that time in the Roman Empire was to worship the emperor, and that was probably a compulsion in the military. They were probably expected to do that, but that doesn’t mean they did. In fact, I got a hunch that if, if they were told that the emperor was a God and they needed to worship him, that’d be a pretty strong reason to you.

You might say that you did just because you don’t want to get in trouble. But, but a lot of them probably didn’t, and so I think what Paul was saying to them had a lot more appeal because they could see that what they had been raised and, and working with up to that time was there was something wrong with it. It just simply wasn’t right.

And in verses 50 and 51, it says that they, and the women of the district rose up against them, and they. It goes to show, you know, women think that there was. They had no poll in those days.

They always have. It just.

They incited the people against Paul and Barnabas and essentially drove them out of the. Out of the district. But they shook the dust off of their shoes and protest and against them it went to Iconium, and the disciples continued filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit. I think that’s so cool.

You know, even all the opposition they had and all the problems that they had, they were filled with joy and they just loved what they were doing. Yeah, that’s knocking the dirt off their. Their feet. That came from Jesus himself in the tenth chapter of Matthew, and he sent the disciples out to witness in the different cities about.

That’s what he told them to do. So that’s where that comes from.

So here we start the 14th chapter. You know, we’re going through the 13th and the 14th chapters here. This is the first part of the 14th chapter. It says in Iconium they entered the synagogue of the Jews together and spoke in such a matter that a large number of people believe both Jews and Greeks. But the Jews who disbelieve stirred up the minds of the Gentiles, embittered them against the brethren, and therefore they spent a long time there speaking with boldness, with reliance upon the Lord, who was testifying to the word of his grace granting, with signs and wonders being done by their hands.

It says they were there for a long time. It doesn’t say how long, but I think that’s kind of interesting. They had a lot of opposition, but the Lord was helping them. So they were there for quite a long time before the pressure became too much and they had to move along.

Evidently the Lord felt like there were enough brethren there that even though they were facing opposition, they needed the instruction of Paul and Barnabas for a time, and so they stayed there anyway.

The fourth verse. But the people of the city were divided and some sided with the Jews and some sided with the apostles, and when the attempt was made by both the Gentiles and the Jews with their leaders to mistreat and stone them, they became aware of it and they fled to the cities of Fiona and lyia. But they, they continued to preach the gospel. So the.

The opposition eventually did get so great that they moved on. But in lyia, things get really Interesting. This is in the eighth verse and it said in lyia, a man was sitting who had no strength in his feet, lame from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. This man was listening to Paul as he spoke, who, when he had fixed his gaze on him and had seen what he that his faith, he had faith to be made. Well, with a loud voice he said to stand upright on your feet.

And he leaped up and began to walk. Well, this was a pretty incredible miracle. This man had never walked. His legs obviously would have been grossly malformed at that point in time. But all that changed.

Paul said, stand on your feet and walk, and boom, he was healed, and he got up and the crowd just went nuts.

Let’s see, in the 11th verse it says, and when the crowd saw what Paul had done, they raised their voice saying in the Iconian language, the gods have come. The. The gods have become like men and have come down to us, and they began calling Barnabas, Zeus and Paul Hermes because he was the chief speaker and the priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garments to the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds.

I’ll just advance to the next slide. This is the temple to Zeus there in just outside the city that they’re talking about. It’s kind of like the, the temple to Aphrodite. Very grand, incredible temple. The thing that’s kind of interesting, I, I found a legend that it said that these people believe that Zeus and, And Hermes had actually visited their town years before and that they went from door to door and the people didn’t let them in and give them provision.

But there was one elderly couple who did, and the gods later on bless that couple tremendously, and people heard that, that legend and evidently when this happened, they wanted to be that elderly couple that got this rich blessing. That’s why they got all excited. Anyway, that’s a, that’s a story I heard.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sounds, sounds pretty fun. So this is kind of a, a worst case scenario for, for Paul though. How we doing? Oh my goodness. Okay, let’s see.

How much do we have?

I’ll make this point and then we’ll move ahead pretty fast.

Paul is trying to convince these people that they need something better than their old pagan religions, and so this reaction by the crowd was a worst case scenario. They essentially were thinking that they played into their, their old fantasies about their old gods, and so he goes running out there and he told Them tells them, no, we are men of like nature as yourself, you know, we, we call on you to, to follow the living God and not these, these statues and all this, and they just barely convince them to, to not offer sacrifice to them.

But then what’s kind of strange is about that time the, the Jewish leaders from Antioch and Iconium show up and Paul had just told him that here they were just men like them, and the guys from out of town, they’re telling him that these are bad guys, and so they stone them, throw them out of the city. In fact, Paul, they thought Paul was dead. So this is one of the most dramatic downfalls in public opinion in recorded history where these two guys were, were identified as gods and then just a very short time later are stoned and thrown out of the city.

So, yeah, so anyway, they travel down the road to Derby and preachers, there’s not an awful lot happens there. They essentially backtrack all the way around and they, they, they wind up back in Antioch again and they spend a bunch of time in Antioch and that’s the first journey.

So what happened there? One thing that’s very important that they did there. Let’s see, what should I.

Okay, this white line there is the first journey. Okay, and the blue line and the gold line are the second and the third journey. See how small the first journey really was? But what was really important about it is because of Barnabas, they come out here and they go down the cypress and then they go up here.

But in the second and the third journey, Paul and Silas, in the second, they go over Mount Pass here and they’re right back in this valley where they had just been. It’s kind of a, it’s kind of like a launch pad for the second and the third journeys because they had brother in there, they had Ecclesiastes there. It gave them a little support both materially and emotionally for venturing out and these big journeys that they did. So. So yeah, that first journey was very important that way.

It established Paul’s message that he delivered to the different churches and it was instrumental in the Bible that we hold in our hand today. Because so much of our New Testament was written by Paul to these churches that he visited, even though most of them were visited after the, the first journey. That second and third journey would have been much harder without the first journey. So that’s the three reasons why this journey is so important. Much of our New Testament comes from it.

And I think we’ll call that good.

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