Sent Out and Mistaken for Gods

Not long after Peter walked out of his prison, King Herod died, and the news about Jesus kept spreading anyway. In Antioch, the church had five teachers who loved to pray. Barnabas and Saul were two of them. Another had grown up in a royal palace as the playmate of a prince.

One day, while they were worshiping and fasting (going without food so they could give God their whole attention), the Holy Spirit spoke.

"Set apart Barnabas and Saul for me, for the work I have called them to do."

So the church prayed, laid their hands on the two men, and sent them off. They sailed to Cyprus and crossed the mountains, telling about Jesus in town after town. Along the way Saul started using his other name, Paul.

In a town called Lystra, a man sat in the street whose feet had never worked, not from the day he was born. He listened hard while Paul talked about Jesus, and Paul could see the man believed Jesus could make him well.

"Stand up on your feet!" Paul called out.

The man sprang up and walked. (For years people had stepped around him in that street. Now they had to get out of his way.)

The crowd went wild. "The gods have come down to us, looking like men!" they shouted in their own language. They decided Barnabas must be Zeus, the king of their gods, and Paul must be Hermes, the gods' messenger, because Paul did most of the talking. (Anyone who knew Paul could have guessed that.)

Paul and Barnabas could not understand a word of it until the priest of Zeus came to the city gates leading bulls with flower wreaths around their necks, ready to sacrifice them to the two visitors.

The two men tore their clothes, which is what people did back then when something was terribly wrong, and ran into the crowd.

"Friends, why are you doing this?" they shouted. "We are only men, just like you! We came with good news. Turn from these empty things to the living God, who made the sky and the earth and the sea. He sends you rain and harvests, and he fills your hearts with joy."

Even so, they could hardly stop the sacrifice.

Then enemies of Paul arrived from two towns where he had preached and turned the crowd against him. The same people who had wanted to worship Paul threw stones at him. They dragged him out through the gate and left him in the dirt, sure he was dead.

Jesus' followers gathered around him. Then Paul got up. He walked straight back into the city, and the next morning he and Barnabas set off for Derbe.

The crowd at Lystra was wrong about the two men, and closer to the truth than they knew. Paul could point to God, but he could not be the God he pointed to. His bruises showed that.

God had come down once, though, as a real man. He told men who could not walk to get up, and they did. When a man he had healed fell at his feet and worshiped him, he did not tear his clothes or say, "I am only a man." He let him, because Jesus is God, the one who made the sky and the sea. A crowd cheered him into Jerusalem, and days later a crowd shouted for him to die. They killed him, and on the third day he got up.

Paul carried that news, bruised and dusty, on to Derbe, where many more people believed.