The Beginning of Perils for Paul
P.C. Barker Acts 9:25 Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down by the wall in a basket. To this beginning of "perils" Paul will often in later days of life have looked back. He did not live to any prolonged period, but if he had, there is not a length of life so long nor charged with changes so violent as to be able to cut off from us the effects of the touching comparisons and the telling contrasts of beginning and ending. Many a broken portion of life offers us such effects; but how much more moving those of life itself! Long was the list of perils and sufferings, varied and sharp the discipline of them; but when the rehearsal of them comes (2 Corinthians 11:16-33), it speaks a perseverance unbroken, a courage unquenched, a heart, fidelity, love, stronger and more determined than ever. That rehearsal somewhat remarkably closes with the mention of the first peril of Paul, as here given us, as though his memory, deliberately traveling backward, reached last that which life brought to him first. The opportunity may be seized for considering at least one side of the great service of suffering. It must be a ministry full of expression, full of meaning, full of deep feeling, and, if not made full of use also, it must be of all loss "most miserable." In the present connection let us observe that - I. IT TESTS A CAUSE, OF WHAT SORT IT IS. With rare exceptions, it may be said that the cause which bears the test of suffering, and of much suffering, will be a cause alike great and good. Human hearts, strong though they be, are not strong enough to bear gratuitously a vast amount of suffering. The vast amount of the worst sort of suffering that sin entails, that comes inevitably in its wake, is of course not in the place for a test, and cannot operate as such. The abundant presence of it, therefore, where it is, does not invalidate the position. The cause that asks suffering to espouse it, to sustain it, to carry it to completion, is self-hedged around as with some sovereign safeguard. The frivolous will not come near it, and the great multitude will pay no court to it. But: 1. If it arrest the attention, kindle the enthusiasm, win the practical confidence of a few, and those, perhaps, the thoughtful, the useful, the unselfish, it is a considerable augury of something substantial and substantial good in it. 2. Enthusiasm can do very great things for an hour. It will encounter and even court any amount of suffering. We cannot, therefore, consider taking service in a cause that imposes suffering any decisive test. The test, however, becomes much more decisive when that service is persevered in, still entailing suffering, year after year, and on to the maturity of life. 3. The highest kind of human test is reached when the cause is one persevered in to the very end of life, through suffering all the way and almost every step. The enterprise that can secure this allegiance says as much for itself as any enterprise on earth can, and the best. And this is abundantly the case with Christianity. When Saul embraced it, it meant peril, and labor, and privation, and much direct suffering. But, "being persuaded of it, he embraced it," and was faithful to it through the succeeding periods and phases of his own earthly career, and up to the very last. Then in old age, beaten and weather-beaten, in prison and in chains and bonds, he does not dream of repenting or of recanting, but says, "I am not ashamed," and bids others follow in his steps (2 Timothy 1:12). If it had been a flowery path and an easy career, Paul's perseverance would have been no argument for it. But because it was a suffering career, his perseverance spoke, not his praise alone, but that of his Master's cause yet more. How many a cause will waken enthusiasm! how few will sustain it! How many will beg it! how few reward it! There is the difference of a world, ay, of two worlds, between the two. II. SUFFERING TESTS A MAN, OF WHAT SORT HE IS. If any one persevere in fighting a suffering battle, it is certainly so far forth an argument for the object of the battle. But if he do not fight the battle, or beginning do not carry out to the end the struggle, it by no means condemns the cause. The question will have to be settled whether blame lie with the cause or whether it do not rather lie with the person. 1. Suffering for the individual tries high moral quality and improves it. 2. Suffering tries many individual virtues and graces - those of faith, of hope, of perseverance, of love that fires cannot burn away nor death destroy. And it unfailingly improves them. 3. Suffering certainly tends to fix and give clear "evidence" to an unearthly type of character. 4. Suffering lends distinctness to conviction, to purpose, to achievement. It is a disinfectant, an alterative, and a tonic all in one. Pleasure and indulgence enfeeble, that is, they tend to enfeeble and to enervate, once past a very moderate amount. Suffering, short of an excessive amount of it, makes keen the faculty, the sight, the soul itself! Wonderful is its bracing effect on body and mind, on heart and life. III. SUFFERING BECOMES SOMETIMES THE OCCASION OF A GREAT MORAL DISPLAY IN THE WORLD. Beside the uses of suffering in the good fruits it produces on individual character; and beside its use as a test, whether of worth in an enterprise or of strength in a person, it cannot be denied that it lends itself to special moral service, often on a large scale and in a wide theatre. Against it all nature rebels. For that very reason, when it is voluntarily encountered, patiently borne, and embraced even to the cross, to stoning, to torture, and the stake, the world has no help for it but to notice what is transpiring. An unwilling world is put into the dilemma that it is either convinced or convicted. The confession is wrested from all beholders that there is something present which begs and deserves close scrutiny and respectful attention, or that they are in any given instance deserting precedents that in all others they have observed. When the testimony of suffering is shown forth in one, the force of it will partly depend on the notoriety that his conduct may win, and it may undoubtedly be weakened by the suspicion of individual eccentricity until this again be rebutted. But when the testimony is borne by many and for a length of time, it is equivalent to the presence of a new and very real moral force among mankind, many of the grandest and most impressive triumphs of Christianity have been owing to this, and many of its most significant impulses have been due to it. Men and suffering have calmly faced one another, have measured the force of one another; neither have shrunk from the wager - men have not fled and suffering has not yielded up its sting. And yet they have made common cause, and have made also most wonderfully effective fight. Something in man, given him from without and from above, has made him fearless of what all nature made him to fear. It is an exhibition in the arena of the world; it never fails of having witnesses; it always leaves its traces. And the Paul of perils and sufferings ever stands one of the clearest and noblest illustrations of a great and effectual moral display. - B. Parallel Verses KJV: Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down by the wall in a basket. WEB: but his disciples took him by night, and let him down through the wall, lowering him in a basket.