The World Turned Upside Down

Acts 17.

If you've got a Bible or an app open there, we're gonna go verse by verse through this mug.

I was tired, so I just developed a very simple three-point sermon.

That's what we're gonna work through today, and we're gonna see how Jesus is the King who turns the world upside down.

So let me ask this.

When we think about what does it take to turn the world upside down, right?

This this giant statement, uh there's a big part of us that will automatically start thinking about uh armies full of power and resources uh to be able to accomplish such a task, right?

We might think of government systems and political offices that have power and authority with inside civilizations.

We may think of this radical ideology that sweeps through and overwhelms us.

And the reality is we often picture someone or something with this great expressed power to be able to turn the world upside down.

Acts 17 gives us a very different answer.

Acts 17 shows us a king who suffers and dies, a king who delivers his people by himself being delivered up, a king who turns the world upside down through a message of grace and peace and reconciliation for all of mankind to know the Father.

You see, Paul and Silas, they've just been asked to leave this city called Philippi, where they were ministering the gospel of Jesus, and they were unlawfully beaten and imprisoned there in this city.

And as they continue on their missionary journey, they follow the main Roman road to Thessalonica.

Thessalonica is the capital city of Macedonia.

It's a harbor city, so it's got a great, prosperous economy.

But there's something else we must know that helps us understand this passage.

It was a free city.

So they had a lot of autonomy, yet they found themselves still under the rule and reign of Caesar.

So while they had freedom, they had caution.

And that caution was toward Caesar and the throne that he sat upon.

Paul and Silas, as they enter into Thessalonica, they have no army behind them.

They have no office of which they hold, they have no possessions of substantial resources, but what they do have is the scriptures that has been delivered to them by the prophets.

They have the gospel which Jesus himself imparted into them.

And they have this bold passion to see the kingdom of God continue to advance.

And not long after arriving in Thessalonica, we find this mob coming to drag them before the city, dragging their host, Jason, in front of the authorities, and they shout this.

You see, the mob meant this as some type of accusation of revolt, of rebellion.

But Luke, I really love his writing because he kind of just records it and lets us wrestle with it.

There's a truth and an honesty in that statement that this mob doesn't understand or yet see.

That there really is a world being turned upside down by a king who is not of it.

Well, we'll see in this passage is how some missionaries with a message could earn that charge against them rightfully.

What kind of king actually stands behind such a claim and what it means for the little kingdoms of this world?

And so what we need to grasp in all of this is this the kingship of Jesus turns the world upside down.

Let's dive in.

Verses one through three.

The king turns our expectations upside down.

That's what we see in the first part of this passage.

The king turns our expectations upside down.

Paul arrives in Thessalonica with his back still raw from the beating that he took in Philippi.

He's traveled about a hundred miles down what's called the Ignatian Way.

It's an actual stone-paved highway that the Romans constructed.

It takes them through Amphipolis and Apollonia, and they come to Thessalonica where there's this established synagogue.

If we remember about Philippi, there was not a synagogue.

They went down to the river, which was a consecrated place to pray for those who feared God and worshiped him.

Here in Thessalonica, we have an actual synagogue.

And so Paul goes there first.

Now we can honestly ask, why might Paul be so urgent to go into a synagogue in the first place?

Well, it's the one place in that city that people were waiting for something.

People were waiting for a Savior King to arrive.

And so he goes where there's the most pregnancy of expectation.

That they are longing for this Christ, Messiah, deliverer, to come and rescue them.

And so he goes in to proclaim.

You see, these people have heard the promises of this coming Messiah, read to them every single Sabbath.

They believe that the Messiah's coming, and many of them have a very particular picture of what he will look like.

Not necessarily physical feature, but just his presence, what he will accomplish, how he will deliver them, what he will deliver them from.

Right?

They have fabricated a messiah after their own desires and longing.

And we know that picture.

You and I, because we do the exact same thing.

When we come to Jesus, we often come to him with this precept, presupposition, right, of what he will deliver us from.

What is our greatest enemy?

How he will deliver us, what kind of God and savior that he will be for us.

And when he doesn't come through on the expectations we've established, somehow we question his faithfulness.

Somehow we question who he really is, his kingship.

But Jesus is the deliverer we need, not the deliverer we want.

And it's only by the power of the Spirit to change our affections do we actually start to see Jesus as both the deliverer we need and the deliverer we want.

But that's a work of God.

It's a work of God in our life.

So Paul goes in, verse 2 says, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures.

That word reason, it means the sustained argument.

So you can imagine over this three-week period, Paul is just laboring to show them, to make an argument for Jesus truly being the Messiah who they have been waiting for.

Paul's faithfully opening the scriptures, right?

These are scriptures that they had received, these are scriptures that they have trusted in.

And so Paul's not using some outside source to try and prove his point.

He's trying to show them how this has always been the plan of God.

Jesus is the king that they've been waiting for.

And how does he make an argument?

Well, Luke gives us the substance.

It's the suffering king.

It's the suffering king.

Look at Acts 17, 3.

Explaining and proving that it was what?

Necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead.

Necessary.

Must suffer.

You see, the suffering of Christ is the revelation of Scripture.

That if we were going to look for someone to actually deliver us in the ways that we need to be delivered, we would look for the one who looks like one who has been defeated, not one who has power and strength to deliver us.

It would look weak.

It would look to man pathetic.

The suffering of the Christ was written into the sovereign plan of redemption.

This is what Paul is trying to help them understand.

He's not the king you expected.

And so for a room expecting a Savior King that acted more like a conqueror, that would liberate them from the oppression of Rome, that statement that he was a suffering king would flip tables in regard.

Because a suffering and crucified Messiah looks like defeat, not deliverance.

And it's an image that looks completely upside down from their own expectations.

But Paul's claim is that the scriptures had always revealed this as God's plan and means of saving his people.

Pastor and commentary writer John Stott, he suggests that what Paul was actually doing in that synagogue was actually showing them and preaching through many of the passages that we've already seen them preach in the town square and to the peoples throughout the book of Acts.

This isn't new.

Passages like Psalm 16 that talks about the resurrection of the suffering one.

Or Isaiah 52 and 3, the suffering servant whom we despised and rejected.

Deuteronomy 21, the man who hangs on a tree is cursed.

And so what Paul's helping them understand, and if we can understand rightly, if we rightly read the Old Testament, what we will see is that the path of suffering was the road that led to the throne.

The prophet Isaiah says this about the one who would come, Isaiah 53, 5, but he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

This was always the plan of God.

And church, this is the sum of our faith.

This is the sum of our faith that the king we need was one who suffered and died so that you and I might be delivered from the bondage of our sin.

That is the faith we confess and hold to.

You see, the deliverer, Jesus, he gets to define the kingdom.

We don't get that freedom.

We don't get the freedom and privilege to apply our own expectations upon him.

No, the king turns our expectations upside down.

The people in the synagogue, they wanted a king on their own terms, one who would deliver them from the hands that they have determined is their greatest enemy.

We do the exact same thing.

We define our oppressor and we expect God to deliver us from their hand.

And all the while we don't come honestly and humbly before him, enslaved by the sin that binds us, and say, Deliver me from this.

Deliver me from this.

And Paul spends three Sabbaths in Thessalonica taking that presumption out of the hands of those in the synagogue, and he does also take them out of ours.

Now if we look at verse 3, the second half, look at the word Luke uses for explaining.

Explaining.

If we read that literally, it's opening.

Opening.

So look at what the first work that Jesus does in his resurrected state is to help his followers understand that this was always the plan of God for the redemption of his people.

But Luke records something interesting about that exchange.

You see, his disciples couldn't understand it.

They couldn't wrap their minds around it.

How in the world would we be delivered by a king who suffered and died?

And so Luke 24, 45 says this.

Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures.

You see, it took the hand of God to bring understanding to the men in that room.

It took the hand of God to work a miracle that they may grasp the mystery of the gospel of Jesus.

Paul's not working alone.

And I don't mean, yeah, duh, Silas is with him.

No, I mean the risen, resurrected Lord is in the room.

He is opening their mind to be able to understand.

We'll see the influence of that here in just a moment.

But what we see in this moment is the risen Christ is still doing what he did on that Emmaus road, opening the scriptures to reveal God's truth, opening the minds of those in the synagogue, this time through Paul's proclamation of the gospel.

And so the one who suffered and rose is the very one explaining to them why he had to.

And here's the point Paul keeps coming back to this Jesus, whom I proclaimed to you, is the Christ.

He is the Christ.

Now, Paul uses an argument called a syllogism here.

And here's how we understand this rightly.

Syllogisms consist of two things that we receive as correct and right, and it forces a third conclusion that we have to submit ourselves to, or at least wrestle with.

This is how Paul reasoned with these men.

And the king doesn't leave that room unaffected or unchanged when his word is open, his truth is exposed.

Here's what people have to do: people have to determine where their allegiance lies.

Am I going to stay committed to the kingdom of self that I have created in my own heart, or am I going to submit myself to another king?

And verses four through five shows us that the king turns our allegiances upside down.

Turns our allegiances upside down.

Now, Luke shows us what the fruit is of these three weeks reasoning in the synagogue on the Sabbath.

Let's read verse four together.

Acts 17, 4.

He says this.

And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks, and not a few of the leading women.

If we look at that verse alone, there's two verbs that we discover: persuaded and joined.

Those verbs are passive in nature.

So here's what the scriptures are trying to communicate to us.

No one in that room argued themselves into submission to Jesus.

Nobody in that room talked themselves into agreement with what Paul was putting forward.

The deliverer was in that room to hand them the deliverance that they needed.

You see, what we'll discover here is that there's two groups of people emerge.

Those whose allegiance now falls with Jesus.

They have been persuaded and have joined him in being a part of his church.

And then there's this other group of the room that gets so angry and filled with jealousy that they form a mob to be able to try and seize Paul and Silas and bring them before the authorities.

Two groups of people emerge from the same synagogue, from the same opening of the scriptures, from the same argument that's being presented.

Why?

Is it because this side of the room was a lot smarter?

They had a better moral compass.

Their ability to understand complexity was greater.

Was it because of something inherent within them?

And what about this side of the room?

Are they just thick skullled and stubborn?

Not you guys, but were they more wicked and rebellious?

No.

No.

The risen Lord opened the minds of some to receive with joy and gladness the truth of who he was.

Their allegiance was delivered to them.

Because Christ, the deliverer, was present with them.

And then verse 5 shows us what that allegiance would cost.

Their profession of faith and the gospel provoked their own suffering, right?

It's a sharing in Christ's suffering.

And so what we see actually is later in Acts, two of these men are named.

Two of these men in the synagogue at Thessalonica.

One of them Aristarchus and the other Secundus.

They'd go on to travel with Paul in their missionary journeys.

And then Aristarchus himself is actually named in Paul's letter to the church in Colossae that he shares in his imprisonment.

And so think about where these men are coming from.

They have been so persuaded, they've been so captivated by the very presence and power of God that they're now willing to abandon everything that they have known to pledge their allegiance to the true and risen king, and they will suffer at any cost for it.

Aristarchus himself finding him chained and bound and imprisoned because of the gospel of grace.

That isn't a work of man, it's a work of God.

When we come to verse 5, what we see is the Jews were jealous.

The Jews were jealous.

So we have some were persuaded, some were filled with jealousy.

Now notice what Luke never records.

He never records someone standing up and trying to bring forward a convincing and compelling counter-argument to Paul's.

Nobody stands up to persuade the others in the room.

Instead, they head to the marketplace, and the scriptures say that they take some wicked men of the rabble and build a mob.

This men of rabble, it's speaking of idle and lazy men who don't work, don't contribute to society.

You can just find them lounging in the town square.

And they're there ready to disrupt things.

Their very presence is disruptive in nature.

And so it is no difficulty to persuade them to come and join this gentleman.

Ellisfield mob to try and hunt down Paul and Silas.

And so the respectable leaders of the synagogue and the bums on the street end up on the same side.

They come from different places of society for sure, but they want the exact same thing.

And what they want is to decide how this upside-down situation ends.

They want control.

What happens when we feel out of control?

We get angry, don't we?

We try to reach for control in very harmful, destructive ways.

These men didn't have an argument, so they resorted to anger.

And we're seeing the fruit of that in this story.

And Luke has shown us this kind of jealousy before.

This isn't new to the apostles or those who now follow the way.

No, we see in Antioch and Acts 13 that the crowds who came to hear Paul were being persuaded to trust in Jesus as the Messiah, and the Jewish leaders, they could not stand it.

It says that they reviled him because they were filled with jealousy.

You see, they're losing people, power, influence, control.

And so they reach for whatever will put the outcome back into their hands.

So if we look at verse 4, we see the work given to the Lord.

All of the credit, all of the merit given to Jesus Himself.

If we look at verse 5, we see what it looks like when we try to take control back ourselves.

Because in the heart of man is reality that we would rather control the outcome than be submitted to the king.

In verse 5, the second half, it says that the mob set the city in an uproar and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them, Paul and Silas, out to the crowd.

Poor Jason.

All this dude did was open his home to try and be nice.

And the mob comes to him looking for Paul and Silas.

They can't find Paul and Silas, so what do they do?

They drag Jason and some brothers out into the town square to persecute them.

Luke doesn't record a single word from Jason.

It's not like he was out there making his own arguments or preaching.

No, it's just his hospitality.

And it's enough to make him a target in this situation.

And look where they want Paul and Silas taken.

To the crowd.

To the crowd.

Now the crowd most likely included this citizens' assembly.

So if you remember, we said Thessalonica was a free state.

And so the plan was to take these messengers in front of the people and allow them to be able to deliver a verdict of guilt.

So here we find this great irony where the people sit as judge and the gospel stands in judgment.

The world is upside down.

That's where our guarding of outcomes ends up.

In an upside down state.

We take our seat as judges over the word of God that was meant to judge us as his image bearers.

Final point, verses six through nine.

The king turns our kingdoms upside down.

The king turns our kingdoms upside down.

Verse six opens with this big miss, right?

They couldn't find them.

So they go to Jason's house, trying to find Paul and Silas, can't find them.

So the mob grabs the next person within reach.

Jason and some of the brothers get dragged before the city authorities, it says.

And the accusations start being hurled.

And we read this at the opening of the sermon, verse six.

These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.

Now, one commentator points out that that word for world is actually a word that the Roman Emperor Claudius used when he was warning the Alexandrian Jews against stirring up trouble.

So here's what we're trying to understand.

And so when they would use that language, world, they're borrowing language from Caesar to make their accusation more weighty.

Because ultimately they want to ascribe treason to them.

The mob uses the same language as the emperor because they want the weight felt.

And here is the heart of the charge in verse 7.

They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.

How wrong they are and how right they are at the exact same time.

Jesus is king.

He doesn't care about their world, the world that they've constructed.

They've built for their own glory and power and prominence.

He doesn't care about Caesar.

But Jesus is king.

And he is making a world that will eternally bless his people because they eternally exist under his kingship.

But look at what the mob's accusing them of: treason.

Treason.

Now, historically, even the suggestion of such a crime would be enough to put you to death.

And so a free city like Thessalonica kept its freedom by keeping Caesar happy.

And Caesar's whole kingdom rests on one claim.

I am king, there is no other.

You see, unknowingly, Caesar established his throne as a rival to Christ.

The mob thought they were making an accusation, but Luke could almost be accused of recording it as a confession.

Caesar, there is another king.

And his name is Jesus.

You see, the true the charge is truer than the mob was able to even realize.

There is another king.

He allows no rivals.

And we as his people must submit fully to him.

And so there's this tension that we find ourselves in as foreign residents, while we ourselves are citizens of an eternal kingdom.

And that becomes complicated a lot of the time.

We have to keep in our minds the reality that our kingdom is with Christ, our king, that we are citizens, and that we submit fully to him because his glory is the ultimate good of his people.

But we find ourselves inhabiting a physical space of a world as foreigners, residents in a land that is not our home.

And I think that John Stopp frames this tension really well.

Here's what he says to help us.

We are called to be conscientious and law-abiding citizens, not revolutionaries.

On the other hand, the kingship of Jesus has unavoidable political implications, since, as his loyal subjects, we must refuse to give to any ruler or ideology the supreme homage and total obedience which are due to him alone.

What John is saying is that we have no king but Jesus.

But what the scriptures over and over again call us to is to live a peaceable and quiet life, to honor those in power.

We're not trying to stir up trouble through our own rebellious action.

If the world gets turned upside down, it's simply because we proclaim a gospel of grace and we refuse to bow to another king.

That in and of itself is revolutionary in nature.

Now, what's fascinating is that Luke himself, he's actually heard and recorded this accusation of treason before, that there is another king who sets himself up against Caesar.

When they brought Jesus before Pilate on the night of his crucifixion, Luke actually records this for us in 23 verse 2.

He says, The mob was saying, We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a king.

Same old trick, same trumped-up charges, now being applied to his apostles rather than to himself.

The charge in Thessalonica is a charge that the king has already carried in himself.

You see, Jesus stood as the perceived rival to Caesar's throne once before.

And he took the sentence that belonged to the real treacherous rebels.

He was condemned as a king so that rebels like us could be pardoned.

He carried our treason to the cross.

And three days later he walked out of the grave.

And now he reigns from the right hand of the Father.

And what's beautiful about that is his throne is not in a place where a mob can reach it.

It's not in a place where an authority can unseat him as all things are placed beneath him.

Now look what the authorities do.

Verse 8 says, the people in the city authorities were disturbed.

They were disturbed.

Why were they disturbed?

Well, they were stuck.

They couldn't prove treason.

They couldn't dismiss the situation.

They had to do something.

So, in a very governmental way, they took Jason's money.

Verse 9 says they took money as security from Jason and the rest, and they let them go.

Now that word for security, it means like a bond or a legal guarantee.

And what they wanted confidence in is that these missionaries would keep the peace and they'd caught stop causing such a disturbance.

So Jason puts up this payment, this bond, so that he and the brothers can walk free.

But that small picture of Jason paying that points us to a bigger one.

You see, the author of Hebrews calls Jesus the guarantor, the bond, the payment of a better covenant.

You see, Jesus posted a security for us.

And the security that he posted was himself.

The price was his own blood, paid in full, and there is no balance left against treacherous rebels like us when we put our trust in him.

So what the mob never understood about the king that they feared was that he doesn't win by conquering in this exertion of power in the way that we understand it as human beings.

No, he wins by being condemned.

He wins by suffering and serving.

He wins by becoming low and humble.

And then by rising.

And his rule doesn't need the systems of this world to sustain it.

He's not interested in Caesar.

He's not interested in the White House.

He's not interested in the government power and authority that we try to put and find and discover our hope in.

He's not interested.

Because he has no throne who rivals him.

You see, they thought Paul and Silas had flipped the world upside down.

Their problem was they thought the world was standing upright.

The world hasn't been standing upright since Adam.

Everything has been flipped on its head since our rebellion in the garden.

Every throne that has been erected, whether it has been in palaces or within our chests, has been a rival throne to him.

Jesus is the King who sets it right.

Taking treacherous rebels in one at a time and putting himself on the throne of their heart.

Here we have in Acts 17 three Sabbaths of the scriptures being opened and reasoned from.

A church that was still standing in Thessalonica the morning after persecution.

Look at what the king did in nine verses.

In nine verses, he he turned our expectations upside down.

Because the deliverer that we wanted would have never suffered and been crucified, but that's the one we needed.

The one scripture promised.

Unmerited favor that the deliverer delivered to you exactly what you needed.

And he turns our kingdoms upside down.

Because every throne that you and I have sought to build stands as a rival to his.

But the good news is this church, the mob couldn't stop it.

The authorities couldn't hold it.

That church was young, had no power, resources on earth.

But nothing could undo what Christ had done himself.

And so that same king reigns now.

He's still opening his word.

He's still persuading hearts.

He doesn't need us to manage the outcome.

By his spirit, he fills ordinary people with an allegiance that this world has no comprehension of or compartment for.

And he gathers them into churches, in cities, in nations where there are still Caesars who are trying to demand our allegiance.

But we find ourselves here in the family of God.

Set free.

Liberated from such oppression.

Liberated from trying to find our hope and promise in someone or something that will always fail us.

We're free.