Acts 14:8-13 - The gods have come down to us

14:8-10

We now come to another incident that has similarities to things encountered in the gospels. A man crippled from birth. There is no doubt here that this man could not walk, and this was no temporary aberration. The man heard Paul speaking, Paul was apparently speaking in the market place, in the open. Paul was looking at the man, something, maybe the Holy Spirit, drew his attention to the man. And Paul saw that the man had faith to be healed. This must have been spiritual insight.

We see here that the man’s faith was important in his healing, and having faith to be healed was a good thing. There is much rubbish that goes around with healing in the church in general, and there are charlatans around, but this must not blind us to the reality of healing and the Biblical teaching on the matter. Scripture does not always say that the person being healed has faith, sometimes they are completely passive, but on many occasions the person receiving healing is said to have faith, and Jesus sometimes commends that person for their faith. So what did the man hear that stimulated his faith? We are not told, we can only surmise that he had heard of the things that Paul had done, and now he heard Paul preaching about Jesus.

Seeing the faith, Paul commanded the man to “stand up straight and walk”, which he did and began to leap and walk. And Paul said this in a loud voice.

14:11-13

Lystra was a fairly Romanised colony and there would be three languages in operation. One would be Latin, from the Roman influence, another would be Greek, the almost universal language of the day, and then there would be the local language, in this case the Lycaonian language. The people were amazed at what had happened and began to equate Barnabas and Paul with Zeus and Hermes. In the mythology of the day Zeus was the king of the gods and Hermes the messenger of the gods. There was a legend that Zeus and Hermes and visited the area but found little welcome and so had flooded the area. This may explain why they lauded Barnabas and Paul as Zeus and Hermes, not wanting to repeat the “mistake”! The local Zeus priest brought our oxen and garlands, intending to honour the “gods” who were among them. Paul and Barnabas had obviously made an impression.