It's a thin line between stoning and sacrifice

Acts 14 finds Paul on two sides of the extreme: One side that wants to kill him, the other that sees him as a God.

Paul taken to his stoning in Lystra.

If you ever wonder what Aaron should have said to the children of Israel, when they asked him to build a golden calf, Paul and Barnabas show the way in Acts 14.

Paul had just healed a crippled man in Lystra. The miracle was impressive to the townspeople.

“The gods have come down to us in human form!” the people said.

The appreciation is to be expected. When it veered into worship, it became idolatrous and Satanic.

Being a god in human form is the first temptation presented to humanity in the Bible. It’s what the Serpent offered Eve in Genesis 3.

“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” — The Serpent in Genesis 3:4-5.

If the idolatry weren’t clear from the words, the deeds would leave no doubt.

A pagan priest “brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them,” Paul and Barnabas, per Acts 14:13.

The pagan priest was the Aaron of his time. Aaron crafted the gold calf. The priest facilitated a sacrifice to humans.

Paul and Barnabas reject all of this. The talk of “gods in human form.” The sacrifice in their names. All of it.

“Men, why are you doing this?” Paul and Barnabus ask the town in Acts 14:15. “We too are only men, human like you. We are bringing you the good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them.”

But as Acts 14:18 tells us: “Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them.”

Then things take a turn for the worse.

“Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over,” Acts 14:19 reads. “They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead.”

After the disciples gather around Paul, “he got up and went back into the city,” and the next day he and Barnabas left Lystra for Derbe.

Acts 14:4 to 14:20 presents a tale of two Lystras. One where the spiritual void was so deep that Paul and Barnabas were seen as gods themselves. The apostles had to actively stop the crowd from sacrificing animals to them.

And the other where the powerful were as willing to kill off the name of Jesus as the apostles were to die for it.

Notice Paul’s behavior in the two stories.

When humans try to deify him, Paul rejected it. He told them to “turn from worthless things to the living God.” The bulk of the story is Paul and Barnabas arguing against their preferential treatment.

When it comes time to be punished in Jesus’s name, Paul accepts it. The story of the stoning is brief, only two verses.

At no point does Paul defend himself. At no point does Paul try to rally a crowd that thinks he’s a God into stopping his capture or preventing his stoning.

In the mindset of the apostle, if you’re not being persecuted, you’re not going hard enough. Paul was honored to be “counted worthy” of the stones he took.

“We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” Paul and Barnabas say in Acts 14:22.