acts 28:31 — no man forbidding

The very last verse of the Book of Acts is an incredible testimony that we would do well to consider. This adverbial clause literally and effectively sums up two entire years of the Apostle Paul’s ministry, a ministry that, humanly speaking, SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.

You see, the Apostle was under house arrest, waiting to make appeal before Casear. He was under police guard, and his freedom was restricted. On the third day of this setup, he called the Jewish leaders of the neighborhood together and preached to them the SAME PLAIN TRUTH that had literally incensed Jewish leaders of other places and had thrown entire cities into an uproar (Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, etc.) He even rightly cast the prophesied judgment of Isaiah 6 into their midst and followed up with the exact same words that got him expelled from Antioch in Pisidia (Acts 13) and that incited a riot in the Roman military barracks in Jerusalem (Acts 22). One would think such bold preaching while under house arrest would have shut Paul down completely. But unlike those other places, “the Jews departed, and had great reasoning among themselves” (Acts 28:29).

And from that point on, for two entire years, Paul had liberty to preach to the lost, to teach the Word of God to the disciples, and to do so boldly. And when many should have put an end to it, when many should have accused him of violating the law and the terms of his arrest, when many in places of power could have slammed the door shut, when the Jewish community should have stirred up all the people . . .  we instead encounter four amazing little words that fittingly close out the Acts of the Apostles altogether:  NO MAN FORBIDDING HIM.

Back in 2015, when we took our first Team Yeshua to Ladakh, we set up shop in a very dark place with lots of restrictions, lots of devils, lots of enemies of the Gospel, a Jewish Chabad house (i.e. anti-missionary society), a long history of Christian persecution at the hands of Tibetan Buddhists, and a large military presence, the same military presence right now in a standoff with the Chinese on the disputed border not far from where we lived that summer. Our objective was to sow seeds of the Gospel with the Israeli backpacker first and also with the Gentiles in our path. At the beginning of the summer, God gave us this verse; and we claimed it, praying that by summer’s end we could look back and say: “This, too, was our testimony in a place where, humanly speaking, it should not have happened.”  When that summer came to and end, we looked back praising the Lord, for we had been able to freely preach the Gospel to the lost. We had been able to freely teach one another and local believers the Word of God. We had done so with boldness, and NO MAN FORBIDDING. Our very last night in Leh, it was a dark night, I sent the team out with the last of our stash of local-language Scripture-portion cards. They were instructed to saturate the town under cover of darkness. It was so, NO MAN FORBIDDING. With the rising of the sun, we were off down the dirt road in a van and climbing back over the Himalayas. By summer’s end, 25 Hebrew New Testaments had gone into the hands of lost sheep from the House of Israel, and Gentiles from 36 different nations had been confronted with the Gospel. A local family was also baptized in the Indus River.

This morning, I stumbled upon this same verse, Acts 28:31, and it had me instantly reflecting upon the last two months. As it summarized the last two years of Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome, so, by God’s grace, it summarizes my last two months in North Carolina amidst pandemic restrictions, hypochondriac paranoia, unconstitutional and tyrannical prohibitions, and unrest in the streets. When this all started, our local church decided to keep preaching the kingdom of God to the lost, to keep teaching one another the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ (i.e. something you have to assemble to do), and to do so boldly. I determined the same thing for my local martial arts dojo that serves as a platform for these very things. We simply kept doing what we were accustomed to doing in spite of being told we shouldn’t, and we did so under a governor’s “house arrest.” And, as in Rome, as in Ladakh . . . NO MAN FORBIDDING. These past two months, it’s been a pleasure to sows seeds of the Gospel with the lost in my community, to preach in the streets, to sit and be nourished in my local church under some of the best preaching and teaching I have ever heard, to watch God call a young man to the Gospel ministry, to see the Lord save someone’s marriage, and to strengthen relationships with local law enforcement to the point that officers will personally contact me to ask for prayers.

Christian, when they say you can’t, when they say you shouldn’t, when all manmade reasoning concludes that it won’t work or will not be allowed, just keep:  “Preaching the kingdom of God (i.e. to the lost, both Jew and Gentile), teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ (i.e. to the believer), with all confidence . . . “  And like Paul, you very well may able to look back and say: “Hey, that was our testimony, and no man stopped us.”

There is another important lesson we learn in this last chapter of Acts from the Apostle to the Gentiles and the greatest missionary the New Testament church has ever known, second only to Jesus Christ. Who did Paul preach to first when he finally, after all the many years of longing, arrived in Rome? It was the JEWS. And, based upon all his previous experience, who was the most likely to make big problems for him in terms of his appeal to Caesar? It was the JEWS. Yet, he, the Apostle to the Gentiles (Romans 11:13), called them together first, preached first to those who weren’t even the “people group” to which he was called.  My friends, a local church’s missions ministry that does not in some way invest in the Jewish people is not modeled after the Gentile missions ministry of the greatest Christian missionary the world has ever seen! Investing something in Jewish missions, even a little something, brings a local church’s Great Commission vision into balance. It’s right, and it’s good, and it follows in the footsteps of one who kept doing that he was doing, even under house arrest.