Today’s reading: Proverbs 24; Acts 28
I don’t really have anything interesting to say about Acts 28 this morning, but I am really curious what was going through the soldiers’ heads as their prisoner healed everyone who was sick on island…
Other than an angel showing up to him while they’re caught in the storm, Luke doesn’t record any miracles from Paul during their time with the soldiers, and anybody can claim an angel appeared to them. But then, when they get to the island, first Paul gets bitten by a snake and is just fine (causing the locals to think he’s a god), and then Paul doesn’t just heal one man, which could maybe be written off as a fluke, but instead heals every sick and diseased person on the island!
I just wonder if there’s a crisis of conscience somewhere in there where you’re thinking, “Clearly we shouldn’t be holding this guy.” Did they think about just letting him go and agreeing to tell people he drowned in the ship wreck? That’s obviously complete speculation, but I just can’t imagine being one of those guards and being unaffected by it. They would have seen how Paul lived and operated during the trip so far, I’m sure they would have heard his message spoken to them many times along the way, and then here he is validated in a huge way by a display of supernatural power.
These kinds of things just always leave me wondering what kind of impact they had on the people looking on…
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