S. S. Times Acts 26:19-23 Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision:… It is difficult for us to realise what Paul's message to the Gentiles — "That they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance" — actually meant to the world that lay between Rome and Asia Minor. (Apol. 12-15) gives a picture of that ancient world and its religion, which may not be repeated here. Suffice it to say, that the heathen gods were conceived of by their worshippers as guilty of the most shameful crimes; and while the philosopher scoffed at the popular religion, the crowd eagerly followed it, and the vicious and degraded pleaded the examples of the gods as an excuse for their own excesses. Divine worship was in many cases an exhibition of the most shocking immorality. The dishonest man prayed at the shrine of Mercury for a blessing on his dishonesty; the debauchee, at those of Bacchus and Venus. "Men generally," says Canon Rawlinson, describing the period, "looked to this life as alone worthy of their concern or care, and did not deem it necessary to provide for a future, the coming of which was uncertain...Death, ever drawing nearer, ever snatching away the precious moments of life, leaving men's stores perpetually less and less, and sure to come at last and claim them bodily for its victims, made life, except in the moments of high-wrought excitement, a continual misery. Hence the greatness and intensity of the heathen vices; hence the enormous ambition, the fierce vengeance, the extreme luxury, the strange shapes of profligacy; hence the madness of their revels, the savageness of their sports, the perfection of their sensualism; hence Apician feasts, and Capuan retirements, and Neronic cruelties, and Vitellian gormandism; they before whose eyes the pale spectre ever stood, waving them onward with his skeleton hand to the black gulf of annihilation, fled to these and similar excesses, to escape, if it might be for a few short hours, the thought which haunted them, the Terror which dogged their steps." It was into this world where religion was divorced from morality that Paul carried his proclamation of a God who punished all sin, and to whom men should turn, bringing forth fruits meet for repentance. (S. S. Times.) Parallel Verses KJV: Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision:WEB: "Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, |
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