Paul has been arrested in Jerusalem. He appeals to Caesar and, as a Roman citizen, has the right to be sent to Rome for trial (even though he would have been released if he hadn't). So they load him on a boat and send him to Rome. On the trip, they encounter some rough weather (Acts 27:13ff). They're trapped in this storm for days and fear being sunk. Running out of food and hope, Paul finally stands up and gives them some good news.
"Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, and he said, 'Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.' So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on some island." (Acts 27:21-26)Wonderful news. God's emissary, Paul, has declared a word from God that all hands would survive this. Can't get much better than that, right?
Well, things don't actually get better; they get worse. After two weeks in this storm, they find they're on the verge of shipwreck. The smart ones -- the sailors -- prepare to secretly escape with a lifeboat. Paul warns the centurion, "Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved." (Acts 27:31)
Now ... wait a minute. How did that work? Did you see the anomaly? Paul got a promise from the mouth of God -- everyone would be saved. Then Paul tells them that if they don't stay with the ship they won't be saved. Which is it? Are there conditions on God's promises? If God says "X will happen", is there something that could change that? How does this work?
Now, as it turned out, the soldiers cut away the lifeboat and kept everyone aboard (Acts 27:32). The ship broke up (Acts 27:41) but everyone was saved (Acts 27:43-44). That is, God's original promise was fulfilled. So, no, God didn't promise "X" and something else happened. So what was going on here? Was Paul's warning irrational or unnecessary? How does that work?
We often tend to read Scripture too easily. Now, we don't generally make this kind of obvious mistake, but it can be like reading Jesus saying, "I am the door" and envisioning Jesus with hinges and doorknob. A passage like this one should be read carefully, the explicit interpreting the implicit (rather than the common error of reversing that), and figure out just what it means. Just how can we have an explicit statement from God to Paul that all hands would be saved followed by a warning from Paul that if they did a particular action the explicit statement from God would not happen? Can you make sense out of that? I'll let you mull that over without removing God's Omniscience or Omnipotence or Sovereignty. Give it a shot.
(Spoiler alert: It does make sense. You just have to think about it.)
5 comments:
One possibility is the God was going to save Paul, in order for Paul to fulfill a God’s plan, and He chose to protect the ship as the means to do so. If people left the ship, they lost His protection. I see it as an opportunity for God to demonstrate His sovereignty in a way they gives unbelievers an opportunity to see His power and to see that trust in Him is a rational option.
In your explanation, would it have been possible for God to be wrong in His original promise to Paul that no lives would be lost? (That is, if someone had left the ship, that life would have been lost, nullifying God's promise ... right?)
If I’m correct, that God’s protection of the ship and crew was contingent on Paul staying on the ship, then I don’t think it does. Essentially it becomes an issue of trust. The folks who wanted to bail were not willing to trust God for their safety.
It’s almost an allegory for the election/free will debate. Did God’s offer extend to everyone unconditionally, or was it contingent on staying on the ship.
It seems as if the point was to get Paul to Rome and the ship and crew were the beneficiaries of that bigger plan.
I also see a similarity to the man born blind, in that the bigger goal was the issue, not necessarily the man’s condition.
Is it necessary to believe that everything the angel told Paul was told to the crew or even fully recorded for us? There may have been additional instructions omitted from the text or the memory of the source of the story and only that was recorded. I'd expect there was a part of the original message delivered to Paul we don't have access to.
I guess I'd be ... disappointed if it turned out, "Yeah, there was some important and pertinent information God gave Paul that wasn't give to us in this story just so you'd never be able to figure it out." (By the way, the source of the story was Luke who was there.)
I think that Paul's two components -- the promise and the warning -- were both true and both complete and not contradictory. The promise occurs as an explicit statement about what God would do. The warning is offered as a caution about what could happen if a particular course of action was followed. In fact, the warning served as the means by which God (via Paul) insured that the promise did not fail.
"I will do A." "If you do X, A will not occur." The warning not to do X prevents them from doing X, so A did occur -- the promise was fulfilled.
And I think we see this in other places in Scripture and in our own lives.
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