I am breaking this chapter into two pieces, and today we see Paul and Barnabas being sent off by the church there in Antioch, to go out on their first (of 3) missionary journeys.  We also see here that John Mark, the same Mark of the Gospel of Mark, was with them - this is part of the reason Mark’s testimony is great, because he was front-and-center to the action with Paul, which is a unique claim for his version of the Gospel.  We also see Paul actually named Paul instead of Saul.  Saul was his Hebrew name, and now that he is going out among the Gentiles, he will go by his Roman name Paul.  As they get going with their ministry, their first encounter is with this false prophet named Bar-Jesus, also called Elymas in this section.

In today’s reading - two main ideas jumped out at me.

The first is just a subtle thing that I tend to notice periodically, and that is the amount of people, place, and time references that are found in the text.  If you read these 12 verses and you have an Atlas and a history book (apart from the Bible), it is very easy to place these events onto the map and onto the timeline of history.  I point this out because it just provides more evidence that this stuff isn’t just being made up for the sake of stories.  This isn’t Luke sitting down writing a fairy tale that starts with ‘Once upon a time’.  If this was a fairy tale, this would have been called out as such WAY before we got our hands on this material.

The second thing that I got to thinking about while reading this relates to our motivations and our intentions as we approach our faith and our spirituality.  The Jewish Leaders, from everything we read between the first pages of Matthew’s Gospel to here in chapter 13 of Acts, really didn’t ever give themselves a chance to hear the Gospel.  They couldn’t hear it because they weren’t really looking for the truth, they were just looking to maintain their power.  That is readily apparent when reading the New Testament.  It wasn’t an intelligence issue.  It wasn’t that they were inherently bad people.  It wasn’t that God was keeping them from hearing it (or, at least I don’t believe that).  It was just that they couldn’t hear it because they had an agenda.  Here, we see Bar-Jesus suffering from the same issue - he is up close with the Proconsul, which was like the top guy in this Roman province, and he didn’t want his power or his counsel to be diminished by Paul’s teaching and preaching.  He stood in opposition to Paul because he had something to lose, and he saw that something to lose as more important than examining whether or not there might be something to gain in Paul’s teaching.

I do the same thing sometimes.  Sometimes I feel like God is calling me to do something, and all I can think about is what I will/might lose; I fail to think about what I might gain.  I fail to recognize that God doesn’t have a track record in my life of calling me into loss, but a track record of calling me towards gain...and often times, I don’t see or understand the gain until later.  I have to be careful here to say clarify that I am NOT preaching a prosperity Gospel here, that if, for example, I give 10% of my income to the church that God will increase my income as a result.  What I am saying is that in doing as God says, I will begin to see as God sees, and I will start to realize that God is asking me to do things for my own benefit, whether it is a direct or indirect benefit.  God has my best interest in mind.  So, today, I would pray that I would see how God is calling me, and that I would respond in courage as well as be blessed enough to get a sense as to why I am being called in that way.  I guess this is the old Irish Proverbial Prayer - “God, please grant me the wisdom to know what to do, and the courage to do it.”