GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
ACTS 17:10-12
10 Right away that night, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. When they arrived, they went to the Jewish synagogue. 11 Now the Bereans were more noble than the Thessalonians. They received the message with great eagerness, and they examined the Scriptures every day to see: Were these things really true? 12 Many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and not a few Greek men.
Somehow Paul and Silas had missed the angry outburst that got Jason dragged into court and paying a fine. The brothers of the Christian church got the missionaries out of the city right away, that night (the Greek adverb eutheos means “immediately”). But the men went as usual into the Jewish synagogue– we don’t need to assume that it was that night! Berea was more than forty miles away. The journey, begun at night, would have taken more than a day on foot. But the mission work always had its beginning with the Jews, and then they went to the Gentiles.
The Jews of Berea were ready for the Gospel, and they were ready to do some real Bible study. They listened “with great eagerness,” the way we would hope Christians always do. But many of us have been in a class, even a Bible class, with people yawning (adults or teens) and a humdrum teacher who does not seem either excited or confident about his subject. But then there are those moments when an instructor can capture his class’s attention even with a genealogy, or a single verse of a Proverb, or a moment of Bible history caught in a broken fragment of pottery (such as the fourth ostracon from Lachish, which was written during the very moment described in Jeremiah 34:7), and we hope that the class will never end. “Diligently study the Scriptures,” Jesus said. “These are the Scriptures that testify about me” (John 5:39).
It is most often with a doctrine of the Bible that classes become the most interesting; the most exciting. Our children’s message this weekend came from Psalm 25:7, where David asks God not to remember the sins of his youth, and the answer in Jeremiah 31:34, when God actually promises not to remember our sins because of our faith in Christ. Even though this was presented in just about four sentences, children and parents came up after church to say more about that than about the sermon. Why? It’s such an exciting truth! Such an amazing doctrine of God’s holy word!
The Bereans wanted to investigate everything Paul said. In their synagogue, they had access to a complete copy of the Old Testament, Moses, Prophets and Poetry. They could read it, too, and they did read it. Perhaps they also a Greek translation, like the (then) new Greek Septuagint.
It’s exciting when members of our church do the same thing the Bereans did, coming back to tell me about other things they’ve learned; other truths they’ve uncovered and discovered on their own. The thrill of God’s word unfolding as we hold it in our hands is unmatched in the human experience. God speaks from the page directly into the human heart.
A curious turn of phrase comes from Luke here as he deftly finds new ways to describe the way that the numbers of Christians grew from city to city. He uses the phrase “not a few” for the second time in just eight verses. Back in verse 4, in Thessalonica, he told us that “not a few” prominent women believed. Now he says that another group of prominent women believed, and also “not a few” Greek men. He uses similar words in an expanded order to show that more Bereans came to faith than in the previous city. As they were searching the Scriptures, they were talking about what they learned at home, and the impression we get is that whole Jewish households were turning to Christ in Berea.
May God bless our households today, and may not a few of the people we love who do not yet know Christ be turned by his word to eternal life.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: www.wlchapel.org/connect-grow/ministries/adults/daily-devotions/gwfy-archive/2020
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Acts 17:10-12 Bereans