There is a pattern in the ministry of Paul and Barnabas that is similar to that of Jesus. They enter a town without a great deal of fanfare. This is not a crusade with an advance team that has been building support and awareness for months before they arrive. There are no posters or media blitz. No organizing committee. No stadiums reserved or churches organized to get out the crowds. Until Jesus enters Jerusalem to the praise of the crowds along the way there is very little notice of his coming and going. It is the same with Paul and Barnabas. They arrive on foot and unaccompanied. They check in with the local synagogue and, as they did in Antioch, are likely asked to bring a word of encouragement to the congregation. Here in Iconium, as in Antioch, they speak so effectively that people are not only interested in hearing more but a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed. So, “ Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to do miraculous signs and wonders.”

And, as often happens, this new message of grace, causes a division. It is not just between the Jews and the apostles but, as it was in Antioch, the leaders of the community are intimidated by the message of the gospel.

In every case, they stir up the crowds. Luke likes this word as he uses it eight times in the book of Acts.  It doesn’t mean whip up with no purpose. The literal meaning is actually to constrain and control. There was a method to the way they exploited madness, ignorance and frustration. They stirred up without losing control. They stirred up but knew how to control what they created. Think of it as the difference between a bullet and a bomb. The bullet is the product of a highly controlled explosion and it is directed at a target with great accuracy. That is what Luke is describing. Paul’s enemies were experts at creating an explosion and then controlling it for their purposes.  As Voltaire said and it is worth repeating from last week, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” That is what Jesus faced later in his ministry and Paul experienced from the very beginning.

Today, there is a science to drawing crowds and then stirring them up.  We have marketing, messaging, mass mailings, and sophisticated techniques for attracting people to an event. We have expert consultants who have studied the psychology of grievance and fear.  Millions are spent on advertising and special events designed to attract people who are looking for entertainment and distractions as well as permission to do things they would likely never do as individuals. They are looking to be part of a movement.  As the phrase says, “Sell the sizzle and not the steak.”

But there is something else about these techniques that play on the emotions of the crowd. They begin with plotting and scheming among a few. In the ministry of Jesus it begins with the Pharisees when Jesus does not rebuke his disciples for eating on the Sabbath. “But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.” Later, they begin to plot how they might find a way to discredit him and then even kill him. After he raises Lazarus from the dead in John we read, “Here is this man performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation..So from that day on they plotted to take his life.”

It begins with plotting and then moves to promoting lies and disinformation. What does it say in 14:2? But those who refused to believe stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. Later, it says that those same people won the crowd over. It’s sometimes a process and sometimes the work of a moment. Poisoning minds takes time but once people are prepared to accept the misinformation they can be easily won over by the manipulation of their emotions. People are won over for good, as Paul and Barnabas won them over to the Gospel in verse 21 or they can be won over for violence. We talked last week about the power of a constant stream of lies to influence people over time. That, of course, is the power of propaganda, isn’t it? What did Hitler’s Minister of Information, Joseph Goebbels say? If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Adolf Hitler said it more clearly in “Mein Kampf” or my struggle.

“..in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation….”

The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

Look at the stoning of Stephen in Acts 6. “So they stirred up the people and the elders and teachers of the law. They produced false witnesses, who testified, “This fellow never stops speaking against the holy place and against the law.” Then, of course, it moves to violence. First, they gnash their teeth. That’s a colorful phrase to illustrate how angry they are at what they have heard and how completely they reject what he has said. It’s an interesting side note that this same phrase “gnashing of teeth” is used to describe the final judgment and the fate of the unrighteous. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. In other words, Hell will be eternal complaining and violent anger. What a picture we have of that today with people who are practicing even now. They are full of grievances and anger that leads them to being deluded by those who are plotting, scheming and stirring them up.

Billy Graham would say that he preached with the Bible in one hand and Time magazine in the other. I would say the same about our lesson today. We have a situation that is similar to the one we found in Numbers with the rabble who stirred up the people of Israel against their leaders.

The rabble are a small group of outsiders…but outsiders who have a voice.  They were likely Egyptians who had attached themselves to the Hebrews when they left Egypt. Some say they were the descendants of those who had married Egyptians. I like the language of the old commentators: They were the mixed multitude who “fell a lusting after flesh.” The word comes from a Latin word to describe a rake which stirs up coals in a furnace.  But the Hebrew word means simply a group of people coming together.  So, this is a small group of people coming together to stir up another larger group.  How can that be?  How can a few outsiders stir up hundreds of thousands of people?

We have many examples of a small group of people – even outsiders – who have the power to leverage a larger group.

Change.org is a good example. In 2010, Change.org launched a petition platform; one of the first petitions was to stop the police in Boulder, Colorado from ticketing homeless individuals. After unexpectedly gathering 200 signatures, Boulder’s mayor ordered an end to the practice. A few petitions kept Howard Schulze, the CEO of Starbucks from speaking at WillowCreek Church. A similar petition had Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS shoes, apologizing for being on a radio program for Focus on the Family. This organization managed to sway the decisions of two large organizations by recruiting a few individuals to sign a petition.  They now organize hundreds of petition campaigns for people with a particular cause and even teach you how to create a successful petition. At last count, over 115 million users came to the U.S. platform creating almost 800,000 petitions and gathering 464 million signatures.

The principles for stirring people up have been the same for thousands of years. Here are those recommended by Change.org. This is exactly what the rabble did in this passage.

Express the emotional stakes – When people feel that something is wrong, they may be more willing to act and support a petition.

Stir up a sense of urgency – When people sense urgency, they are more likely to take part in the petition.

Help people take the next step – You can help people become more engaged in a cause by showing them how they can take part beyond signing a petition.

Make your goals clear – Online petitions are not all created equal. Vague goals or targets may be difficult to stand behind if they do not have a clear call to action. While they may raise awareness for a cause, their lack of direction may cause more harm than good.

Get community support – Causes worth sharing usually have the community’s support; this support can help highlight truly impactful causes versus those that may be more of a personal request.

Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” is the classic text for community organizing.  I cannot help but think he studied the “rabble” and their techniques in our text this morning and the account in Numbers.

“For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting whatever he believes to be wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it.  If people feel they don’t have the power to change a situation, they stop thinking about it.  According to Alinsky, the organizer, especially an outside organizer must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility.  Next, the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy.  This is necessary to get people to participate.  An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of a complacent community life where people have come to accept a situation.  Alinsky would say, “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”

Begin with their grievances and their sense of being wronged or overlooked and then make yourself their deliverer and the answer to their problem. You may have heard the following recently, “I am your voice. I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” This is classic rabble language.

But we have something even more current. You may have read or heard the news about the media company in Tennessee, Tenet, that has been commissioned and controlled by Russian funding for the last several years and is just the most recent example of an outsider stirring up Americans with disinformation.

In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media.

By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine — that were then promoted across the spectrum of social media, from YouTube to TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram and Rumble.

It was all, federal prosecutors now say, a covert Russian influence operation. On Wednesday, the Justice Department accused two Russians of helping orchestrate $10 million in payments to Tenet in a scheme to use those stars to spread Kremlin-friendly messages.

The disclosures reflect the growing sophistication of the Kremlin’s longstanding efforts to shape American public opinion and advance Russia’s geopolitical goals..“The Russians and other foreign actors have used it for decades to obscure the source of influence operations,” she went on. “In this case, they chose influencers who were already engaging in rage bait, exploiting the pre-existing fissures in our society for clicks.”

Flush with Russian cash, Tenet certainly compensated some its influencers well. It paid at least $8.7 million to the top three influencers, who were not named but who appear to be Mr. Rubin, Mr. Pool and Mr. Johnson based on details in the indictment, such as the number of followers on social media.

According to the indictment, Mr. Rubin received $400,000 a month, plus a $100,0000 signing bonus, to produce four videos a week on Tenet’s YouTube channel. Mr. Pool was paid $100,000 per video, which he produced weekly.

Martin J. Riedl, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies the spread of misinformation on social media, said the case of Tenet spotlighted gaping regulatory holes when it came to the American political system.

While the Federal Election Commission has strict disclosure rules for television and radio advertisements, it has no such restrictions for paid social media influencers.

The result is an enormous loophole — one that the Russians appeared to exploit.

“Influencers have been around for a while,” Mr. Riedl said, “but there are few rules around their communication, and political speech is not regulated at all.”

So, what are we to take from this? What are we to guard against today? What can we expect to happen when we resist the big lie and, instead, accept the task of strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith?

“We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”

There will be opposition, outside forces deluding the faithful and using those who benefit from perpetuating the lies. There will be those who gnash their teeth, are furious and even plot evil and violence against those who hold to the truth. There will be those who poison the minds of the crowds and even win them over. But what does God say to us in this?

“Do not be deceived: bad company corrupts good character.”

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

“Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.”

“Let no one deceive you with empty words.”

But Paul is right. We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God and we should continue to put our trust in God, strengthen and encourage each other to remain true to the faith