It was not the mere fact that he was speaking to a great crowd which impressed Paul with a sense of exhilaration. It was something else, an indefinable presence which seemed to be overshadowing him, waiting to exert power in some momentous fashion. True, this concourse in which the men and women of Lystra had been brought together in order to hear the message of Paul and Barnabas was a noteworthy thing in a city composed almost entirely of Lycaonians. These were neither Jews, Romans nor even Greeks, and they owned only scanty allegiance to the Roman Empire. As the Apostle looked down upon the upturned faces beneath him and observed the attention with which the people hung upon his words, and their apparent receptivity of the Gospel message, he must mentally have compared them with the cities he had already visited. At Antioch of Pisidia he and Barnabas, attending the synagogue services like all good Jews, had been invited to address the congregation of the faithful. He had received the close attention of his hearers, Jews of the Dispersion, and they were Hellenistic Jews for the most part. Warming to his subject, he had given them a rousing sermon which took them back to the birth of their nation at the coming out from Egypt and led to the time of their famous King David and the promises of God which centred in David and David's seed. From that it was a simple thing to tell them of the events which had taken place in Judea in their own day, of the coming of John the Baptist and then of Jesus of Nazareth, of His life and untimely death, of His innocence and unjust condemnation. Having thus gained their interest, in his own masterly fashion, Paul had connected the giving of the promise to David, that of his seed God would raise up to. Israel a Saviour, with the fulfilment of that promise in Jesus, whom God had raised from the dead in order that He might accomplish the salvation foretold. Then in his own inimitable fashion he had issued the ringing challenge "Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, to you is the word of this salvation sent". As, now, Paul's gaze roamed over the crowd at Lystra hanging on his words, his memory must have flickered back to Antioch and how he had laboured hard to present his message to his Jewish brethren. But he found that the Gentiles were the more receptive, asking for more of these words to be preached the next Sabbath, so that when the time came he found gathered "almost the whole city together to hear the word of God". Again he felt the surge of triumph which flooded his mind as Jews and Gentiles alike acknowledged their acceptance of the message and the call, professed their faith in Jesus the Saviour and came together in that spontaneous Christian fellowship which developed into the Church of Antioch at Pisidia. And gain he felt the bitter disappointment when the unbelieving Jews, determined to get rid of him, made representations to the civil authorities and had him, with Barnabas, expelled from the city.

Here at Lystra, speaking now to just such an attentive audience as he had first found at Antioch, he wondered if events were going to repeat themselves. Expelled from Antioch, he and Barnabas had trudged sixty miles along the high road to Iconium where again they went into the synagogue. Again they were invited to speak and again they found a great multitude of both Jews and Gentiles believing. But again there was a vicious opposition built up by those who did not believe, so that they were constrained to leave the newly formed Church of Iconium and take the high road still farther into the unknown. Was Lystra to repeat the heart breaking sequence and send them once more upon their way with yet another group of immature believers in Christ left to grow in the faith as best they could?

Once more Paul felt that quick stab of feeling, the certainty that this time there was a difference. The power of the Spirit was moving in a different direction; God was about to manifest Himself in a manner not yet experienced. Paul's mind was still upon his subject, the clarity of his exposition unimpaired and the word finding its way into hearts and minds. However, apart from a relatively few Jews this audience was composed of men of another race, and Paul could not be sure to what extent the fundamentals of his appeal were being understood. Was he talking to them in a language they could understand? Did the story of a dying and resurrected Saviour, the fulfilment of Divine promise and the embodiment of Divine purpose, mean as much to them as it had done to the Scripture-trained Jews and proselytes of Antioch and Iconium? That was the question that oppressed his mind as his glance swept over the throng. It was when that glance was intercepted and arrested by a gaze equally compelling, that Paul suddenly knew why and in what manner this day was going to be different.

The man lay there on a little strip of matting, twisted feet hunched up underneath an ungainly body, right in the front line of the crowd just as he had been dumped by his friends. The trouble was obvious; his feet and legs were hopelessly deformed and had evidently been so from birth. From babyhood to manhood he had never walked, never stood on his own two feet, always had to be carried from place to place or make his own way by laborious and painful crawling. But it was not his misshapen limbs which caught and held the Apostle's glance; it was his eyes, fixed upon the preacher with a burning, painful intensity which told more than any eloquent speech how much the spoken words meant to him. In that one moment of time a link was forged between the two men which excluded all else, a link which immediately became a channel for the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paul had stopped speaking ‑ abruptly broken off in mid-sentence. The crowd stood rigid with attention. Those eyes were fixed on him still, eyes mute with unspoken question and appeal and with something else. Paul could see it; faith reaching out towards the deliverance it already knew would surely come. Paul realised within himself that the time was at hand for a demonstration of the reality of that saving power inherent in the risen Christ about which he had been discoursing to these Lycaonians.

Slowly Paul raised his hand until he was pointing directly at the afflicted man. The onlookers watched, fascinated. He saw, first wonderment, then hope, last of all certainty flicker into those steadfast eyes. He saw an unconscious effort to move those useless limbs "Stand upright on thy feet!" The command rang out over the heads of the audience. The crowd at the back surged and jostled to see what was going on. Those near the crippled man gazed in fascinated attention. The man looked around at the curious faces, made a little movement of his hands, stretched his body — and got to his feet. For a moment he stood, uncertainly. Then, he took a few faltering steps: his confidence grew, he turned towards the crowd and in a surge of emotion leaped into the air. He wheeled back towards the watching Apostle and raised his hands high in the air in acknowledgment and gratitude. A hubbub of excited comment arose from the crowd. This man was healed because he had faith to be healed. So says Luke in his chronicle of the events. There were no Christians as yet in Lystra; this was the first impact of the Christian evangel on the city, so the faith this man manifested was not as yet an instructed faith in Christ. The pagan gods of Lystra could not and did not heal; it was not faith in them which effected the healing. The man must have been a Jew, a Jew of the Dispersion, and the faith he had must have been faith in the God of Israel. But there is more to it than that. The account says that Paul perceived "that he had faith to be healed". His faith told him that the power by which alone he could be healed was of God; but through the risen Christ whom this visitor to his city was preaching. It was not until the crippled man realised for himself and accepted for himself the fact that God was in Christ reaching out to the world of men for reconciliation and healing, whether of mind or body, that he felt the life-giving power energize his muscles and he was able to stand, and leap, and glorify God.

This was perhaps the first outward demonstration in Paul's career of the fundamental truth which he came to understand so well and that forms the basis of all his teaching. Life comes to man from God through Christ, who is the manifestation of God to man and the only channel through which life can come. There are so many occasions in the Book of Acts where the Apostles insist that there can be no life or salvation without faith in and acceptance of Christ. Jesus himself laid down the same principle. "He that hath the Son hath life, but he that hath not the Son shall not see life". One might ask why this apparently arbitrary dictum should be so stressed. Why must it be that "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus. and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved"? (Rom. 10.10). The answer is that all life comes in the first place from God, and all life is sustained by God. Jesus is the channel by which all that is of God comes to man, faith and belief is the only means by which that channel can be opened into the mind and heart and body of man. The degree of subnormal life which unregenerate men now possess is like that which the cripple had before his healing—defective, incapable of full expression and full use, forever restraining the man from attaining his full development. Later on Paul was to enshrine this principle in one of his grandest utterances. "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 6. 23).

The reaction of the people gave Paul his opportunity to drive home the deeper aspects of this truth. After the first moment of stunned silence, pandemonium broke loose. Never before had such happening occurred in their city. There could only be one explanation. "The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men." Paul's preaching had not as yet reconciled them to the falsity of their many gods. They jumped to the conclusion that Barnabas was Zeus, the principal god in the Greek pantheon, and Paul, because he did most of the speaking, was Hermes, the messenger of the gods. (These are the Greek names as given by Luke in the original; the A.V. has adopted the Latin equivalents, Jupiter and Mercurius). Without more ado the High Priest of Zeus set about acknowledging this signal honour conferred upon the city by collecting oxen and garlands and preparing to offer sacrifice. His enthusiasm was probably considerably increased by the fact that, according to the ancient historians, Zeus had once before, many ages previously, visited the district in the guise of an old man and had been treated rather unceremoniously by the citizens. Finding only one old couple who would give him hospitality Zeus took his revenge in the fashion quite normal with the proverbially short-tempered supreme god of Greece. The priests and people of Lystra were not going to be caught a second time, and so Paul and Barnabas found to their dismay that they were being accorded full divine honour. The sheer horror with which Paul and Barnabas must have realised this situation can perhaps be fully appreciated only by members of the Jewish race brought up, like Paul and Barnabas, to believe in the unity of God who alone is the object of all worship. To be adored as gods must have sent a wave of revulsion through every fibre of their being, and the instinctive reaction is immediately understandable and in full accord with what might be expected. Directly the Apostles realised what was happening they ran in among the people, crying out "Why do these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven and earth and the sea, and all things that are therein. Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways; nevertheless He left not himself without witness in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons filling our hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14.15-17). A wonderful sermon, that, and the more telling because of the circumstances under which it was delivered. Perhaps as a sermon it is as appropriate to the Twentieth Century as it was to the First. The God whom Paul preached was not as the gods of the Greeks, as Zeus and Kronos and Uranus and the rest of them, heedless of the welfare and happiness of mankind, capricious, unjust, lustful, cruel. The stories of Greek mythology show how far the pagans were from thinking of God as inherently good, benevolent, loving, planning and working for the welfare of mankind. But that was God as Paul saw Him and as he preached Him. Later on as his theology developed he was able to show, as he does in his Epistles, how that, in Christ and by means of Christ, the Father will reconcile to Himself every one who has any capacity whatsoever for right doing. To show too that the experiences of this present life are but one part of a mighty purpose that is being steadily worked out. It is the object of preparing and fitting for his designed place in God's creation, every one to whom God has given the blessing of life, and will elect to use that in God's way. He whom I preach, Paul might have said, has no pleasure in the death of him that dies but would that he turns from his evil ways and lives. He was made man for a definite purpose and to occupy a definite place in His creation and works to see that purpose accomplished.

So the little group of converts at Lystra entered into the joy and zeal of their new fellowship in the light of this revelation of the nature of God. It was not long before the revengeful Jews from Antioch and Iconium had traced Paul to Lystra and inflamed the people against him. Those who yesterday had been about to worship him as a god were now found stoning him and leaving him for dead. But Paul was not to be disposed of so easily. He was soon on his way to Derbe, twenty miles distant, where he preached again and waited until tempers had cooled. It was at Derbe that he first made the acquaintance of Gaius, who was probably converted at this visit and afterwards became one of the Apostle's travelling companions in Greece. Derbe was the end of the journey. The missionaries had been away from their home church for more than a year and probably Paul felt that it was time to report progress. They retraced their steps through Lystra, Iconium, Antioch in Pisidia and so to the seacoast, confirming the disciples in each city "and exhorting them to continue in the faith".

From the port of Attalia they took ship the two hundred and fifty miles back to Antioch in Syria, where their brethren eagerly awaited them. It had not been a long journey, as journeys go. About eleven hundred miles altogether — not much more than a trip say from London to Cardiff, thence to Glasgow and back to London. But it was the first missionary enterprise of Christian evangelists and it resulted in the establishment of at least half a dozen or more new centres from which the Christian faith would afterwards extend in turn. In later days Gaius of Derbe and Timothy of Lystra were to become well known in the Church as men who laboured abroad, in the work of the Gospel, co-workers with the great Apostle. Paul and Barnabas must have set foot in the familiar streets of Antioch again with a feeling that it had all been well worth while; they had tasted success and failure, acceptance and opposition, the joys of Christian fellowship and the hardships of persecution. They had sown the seed; now it must be left to God who gives the increase. That must surely have been their inmost thought as they rehearsed before the Church "all that God had done with them", and how in this first missionary journey He had "opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles".

AOH