Many of the books in the Bible have what we call hinge points or places where things change in a significant way and history takes a turn. In Genesis that was  the calling of Abraham to leave his home. In Exodus it would be the calling of Moses. In Luke it is that moment when Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem. In the ministry of Paul it is this chapter for a number of reasons.

It is the first missionary journey.

It is the first miracle of Saul.

It is where Saul becomes Paul.

It is our only account of a full sermon of Paul’s

Most importantly, it is the place where Paul first turns to the Gentiles as his primary audience.

How does the chapter begin? In chapter 11 the apostles hear the Gentiles had received the word of God and send Barnabas to Antioch to look into it. As soon as he realizes this is legitimate he travels to Tarsus looking for Saul where he had been since leaving Jerusalem after his conversion. He brings him back to Antioch where the two of them meet with the church and teach great numbers of them.

This is their preparation for their first missionary journey. There is no master plan or strategy. They are two men who have spent a whole year teaching and discipling a group of new believers. They do not have evangelistic tracts or brochures. They are teachers who have experience in bringing new believers to maturity.

Cyprus makes sense as there is already an existing relationship with men from Cyprus going to Antioch speaking to the Greeks and men from Antioch were going to Cyprus to speak only to Jews. As well, Cyprus was the home of Barnabas and he would already have credibility there given his reputation. And that is what they do. They started in the synagogue.

And this is Paul’s first exposure to a sorcerer – his name is Bar-Jesus or Elymas. Scripture is full of sorcerers and false prophets. Some are simply charlatans and showmen who have no real power. Others have genuine power to do more than magic or sleight of hand. You recall the ability of the sorcerers in Egypt to replicate some of the first signs of Moses. Saul was condemned for using a sorcerer to bring Samuel up from the dead. Simon the Sorcerer in Samaria convinced people that he embodied the Great Power and the whole city followed and was amazed by him.

One thing all sorcerers have in common is either they boast of themselves as great men or they attach themselves to powerful figures. Simon boasted of his greatness and Elymas had attached himself to the Roman governor of Cyprus – Sergios Paulus. They become confidantes and advisors. I watched the movie “Elvis” on the plane home and was reminded of the power Elvis Presley’s hairdresser, Larry Geller, had over him.  He became the man in whom Elvis confided in matters of the spirit and who was responsible for his dabbling in all sorts of other religions and philosophies. They do not empower people as much as they look to have power over them.

What is Paul’s immediate reaction to Elymas? “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right. You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord.”

Here is a man who has gained the ear of the head of government and Paul immediately calls him out. He is not only full of deceit and trickery but much worse. He perverts the right ways of the Lord. In other words, he turns vice into virtue. He may not even be an intelligent man but he has an ability to make seemingly intelligent men (like Sergio’s Paulus) believe in him. He normalizes vice and falsehood and has, as Paul says in Romans 1, exchanged the truth of God (or right ways) for a lie. He takes what is known to be true and twists it so out of shape that it is just the opposite of itself. That is what Paul means by perverting the right ways of the Lord. Not just one lie but a life defined by lies that infects a whole body of people. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”

Have you been following the crumbling of Gateway church in Southlake. The senior pastor lied to the congregation about his sexual abuse of a 12 year old girl but the lie was discovered and he was fired. Now, three other associate pastors have resigned or been fired for moral failures. The deceit of a leader infects the whole system.

It’s more than the ability to create what one employee of Steve Jobs called a reality distortion field and how Walter Isaacson described in his study of Elon Musk.

“A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there’s a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve.”

I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, uhe would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.

Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.”

It is what George Orwell in the book “1984” wrote: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” They turn intelligent people into tools to be used.

The early church had to deal with all sorts of deceit outside the church – like Herod’s allowing the people to shout, “This is the voice of a god, not a man” as well as the inside like Ananias and Sapphira. The results are death for all of them. God is sometimes dangerous and will only wait so long.

Elymas is lucky. He is only blinded for a time. Simon the Sorcerer is lucky as well. It is still, as Jonathan Edwards preached, an awful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God. As the writer of Deuteronomy says, “..their foot shall slide in due time, for the day of calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”

What follows is Paul’s first and only recorded sermon. It follows closely the sermon of Peter in the first chapter of Acts and the sermon of Stephen. That doesn’t mean Paul simply lifted Peter’s words and made them his own. It means everyone was on the same page about the nature of the gospel and the message of Stephen when he is martyred. Paul would have heard that sermon because he was there.

He is then asked by the synagogue rulers to give a message of encouragement. I have been asked by congregations in Africa and other places to do the same. They want to hear something that will strengthen their faith or give them hope for a difficult time or just to hear a report about what is going on in other churches around the world. It’s just that – a word of encouragement. They should have asked Barnabas and not Paul. They might as well have said, “Give us everything you’ve got.” He does. He traces the history of God and the Jews as a way of setting the context for what he has in mind. The origins of the gospel are in the Old Testament and the Law but the old system is finished if it ever worked and has been replaced by the new thing God is doing. “Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes in justified from everything your could not be justified from by the law of Moses.”

He could have sat down at that point but this is Paul. He anticipates their unwillingness to believe what he has just said so he adds, “Look, you scoffers, wonder and perish, for I am going to do something in your days that you would never believe, even if someone told you.”

Paul sometimes picks a fight even when he is supposed to be encouraging them. But, fortunately, they don’t want a fight. Instead, they want to hear more. They stay in Antioch and almost the whole city turns out to hear them speak But when the Jews saw that Paul and Barnabas had a bigger crowd they were filled with jealousy. They began to use abusive terms describing Paul and his message. They began a reaction against Paul that would soon turn into violence in other cities. Violence begins with words. It begins with jealousy over the success of others. It begins with stirring people up to think violence is not only an option but a necessity. It begins with preparing them with lies. As Voltaire said, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’

Of course, Paul does not shrink back or try to smooth their feathers. Just the opposite. “We had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you rejected it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.” He did not give them a way out, did he? In fact, we can see in Romans how jealousy becomes a strategy to reach them. He riled them up even further and then said he was done with them and would commit himself to those they considered to be lesser people. Even the best of the Gentiles were not chosen people. Sometimes it seems that everyone needs someone to look down on. Lyndon Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

What Paul experienced was what Peter Drucker called an “unexpected success.” Paul could have spent the rest of his days trying to convince the people he loved so desperately but he saw how that had become a dead end. We’ll talk about this more when we look at Chapter 15 and the Council of Jerusalem. Paul was an innovator and saw clearly the potential of taking the gospel to the Gentiles. Not everyone responds that way to the unexpected success. Some would rather fail with the intended market than succeed with a market they did not anticipate.

There are actually four points — I call them entrepreneurial pitfalls — where the new and growing business typically gets into trouble. All four are foreseeable and avoidable.

The first comes when the entrepreneur has to face the fact that the new product or service is not successful where he or she thought it would be but is successful in a totally different market. Many businesses disappear because the founder-entrepreneur insists that he or she knows better than the market.

Inc.: So, often the entrepreneur is actually succeeding but doesn’t realize it?

Drucker: No, it’s worse than that. He or she rejects success.

A man by the name of John Wesley Hyatt had invented the roller bearing. He made up his mind that it was just right for the axles of railroad freight cars. Railroads traditionally stuffed the wheels of their cars with rags soaked in oil to handle the friction. The railroads, however, were not ready for radical change; they liked their rags. And Mr. Hyatt went bankrupt trying to persuade them otherwise.

When Alfred Sloan, the man who later built GM, graduated from MIT at the head of his class in the mid-1890s, he asked his father to buy him Hyatt’s small bankrupt business. Unlike Hyatt, Sloan was willing to broaden his vision of the product. It turned out that the roller bearing was ideal for the automobile, which was just coming to market. In two years Sloan had a flourishing business; for 20 years Henry Ford was his biggest customer.

But look at who did have a problem with his success.

“The word of the Lord spread through the whole region. But the Jews incited the God-fearing women of high standing and the leading men of the day. They stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their region.”

It was those with the best reputations and positions of influence who allowed the jealous Jews to turn against this new thing. Of course, new things are not always appealing to the elite and those who have the most vested in keeping the old things because the old ways of doing things keep them in control. New things are unpredictable and not to be encouraged. It’s nothing personal, of course. It’s not even done out of anger but only out of the best of intentions to keep things as they are.

Machiavelli says it best:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the innovator has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”

But that does not mean Paul gives up entirely on those he loves most dearly. In the very next city – Iconium – he goes first into the synagogue and later in Thessaloniki, Berea, Corinth and Epbesus he goes first to the synagogues. He never gives up on them even though his real success and the future of Christianity is with the Gentiles. Read Romans 9 where he writes, “I speak the truth in Christ – I am not lying: my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit – I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel.”

Like Jeremiah and many of the prophets he never saw success with those he loved. He was never completely satisfied with just the spread of the gospel among the Gentiles for it was the Jews whose hearts were hardened against him he loved the most. It was those whom God had given “a spirit of stupor, eyes so that they could not see and ears so that they could not hear.”

And that is what the sorcerer and the spirit of sorcery does to God’s people – even those we love the most.