Bible Study series: Acts 13:4-12. Cyprus was Barnabas’s home island. Begin at home.
Friendly greetings and a warm welcome to this Bible study! I write to learn. Let’s learn together and apply these truths to our lives.
I also translate to learn. The translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. If you would like to see many others, please click on this link:
At the link to the original post, next, I write more commentary and dig a little deeper into the Greek. I also offer a section titled Observations for Discipleship at the end. Check it out!
In this post, links are provided in the commentary section for further study.
Let’s begin.
Scripture: Acts 13:4-12
4 And so after they were sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus 5 and arrived at Salamis and announced the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. They had John as their assistant.
6 They went through the whole island until Paphos and found a man, a certain Jewish magician and false prophet named Barjesus. 7 He was in the entourage of the proconsul Sergius Paulus, a man of good sense. Summoning Barnabas and Saul, he desired to hear the word of God. 8 Elymas the magician (for that’s how his name is translated) opposed them, by trying to turn the proconsul away from the faith. 9 Saul (also Paul) was filled with the Holy Spirit and stared him down 10 and said, “You are full of all deceit and all trickery, son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness! Will you never stop twisting the straight paths of the Lord? 11 And now, look! The hand of the Lord is against you, and you shall be blind and not see the sun until a certain time!” Instantly misty dimness and darkness fell upon him. And he sought to be hand-led around. 12 When the proconsul saw what happened, he believed because he was amazed at the teaching of the Lord. (Acts 13:4-12)
Comments:
4:
Luke did not have to mention the Holy Spirit, when the previous verse was clear about the third person of the Trinity. However, he intends his entire book of Acts to be very charismatic and Spirit-empowered and Spirit-filled, so he repeats this here in v. 4.
“Cyprus”: they landed on Barnabas’s home island (Acts 4:36). No doubt he had a great time introducing Saul to his family. John Mark and he were cousins (Col. 4:10), so Mark must have met some of his relatives here.
5:
“synagogues”: this noun is in the plural, so Salamis had several synagogues in the area with elders or leaders, representing a large Jewish community. No doubt Paul used this model to found churches in an area: several smaller churches with elders in each one.
“announced”: “Preaching or spreading or announcing the good news” is traditional and better, however.
“word of God”: It comes from the phrase logos tou theou (pronounced loh-gohss too theh-oo), but in the accusative (logon tou theou). Logos is a rich and full noun. It always has built into it rationality and reason. It has spawned all sorts of English words that end in –log-, like theology or biology, or have the log– stem in them, like logic.
“synagogues of the Jews”: no doubt they preached in Barnabas’s home synagogue, and as they crossed the island overland, they must have preached in other synagogues. Did they preach to Gentiles? This is another omission in Acts. Let’s hope so.
“assistant”: it properly means “under-rower.” Picture the three-tiered Greek triremes, and the rowers in the bottom tiers. Let’s not forget that John Mark heard Peter preach in his mother’s house in Jerusalem, so John Mark possibly was brought along to tell these stories and educate Barnabas and Saul about them (cf. Luke 1:2, which uses this Greek word). Luke said he interviewed these kinds of servants of the word. Bruce refers to old-school commentators (1890 and 1897) and more recent ones (1965 and 1982) who explored the possibility that Mark was an authorized teacher (a “catechist”) and supplied reminiscences about Jesus’s ministry that neither Paul nor Barnabas could supply (comments on v. 5, note 16). Wow. If true, then Mark had real and substantial contributions to make to Paul and Barnabas. He did not just carry the luggage, so to speak, but he was not the leader, either. He “rowed” under Barnabas and Saul. Did he like this subservient position? He is about to leave them, once they get back to the mainland (v. 13). Why? Did he want to find Peter, whom he knew when he had lived in Jerusalem and the church which had met in Mark’s mother Mary’s house? (Peter will remerge there in Acts 15.)
6:
“They went through the whole island”: they crossed overland the length of the island, east to west. This was Barnabas’s old stomping grounds. No doubt they prayed in the Spirit—their Spirit-inspired languages—and sang hymns, both in their native language and in the Spirit, as they walked along. After all, Paul said he did this (1 Cor. 14:15). And he said the he prayed in the Spirit very often (1 Cor, 14:18). It is inconceivable that Barnabas did not have his prayer language, even though the book of Acts does not openly state it. Luke expects us to fill in these gaps with the entire context of the charismatic book of Acts. And Paul said he wanted everyone to speak in their prayer languages (1 Cor. 14:5). The same had to hold true for Barnabas, who was also full of the Spirit (Acts 11:24).
Salamis, where they landed (v. 5), was on the eastern side of the island (it is not the island off of Athens), and Paphos was on the western side. They walked a long way across the long island!
“Jewish magician and false prophet”: he still remained within the Old Covenant, so he is about to be punished by Old Covenant standards and with an Old Covenant punishment. Barjesus means “son of Jesus / Joshua.” Barjesus is about to find out about the power of the risen Jesus.
7:
“proconsul”: this was very high up in the Roman ranks. He stood in for (pro-) the consul, and apparently the island of Cyprus came under the jurisdiction and care of the upper levels in Rome.
“a man of good sense”: it means “intelligent, wise, with good sense” (Mark 11:25; Luke 10:21; Acts 13:7; 1 Cor. 1:19). It is odd that an intelligent man like the proconsul would listen to a false prophet, unless Bar-Joshua had some really impressive demonic power backing him up.
There is a warning here. Satan through false messiahs and prophets can deceive people, even believers (Matt. 7:15; 24:11). To distinguish the false ones from the true ones, use your Spirit-filled anointing (1 John 1:20, 27). Ask leaders at the church to help you discern truth from falsehood.
“Summoning”: the reputation of Barnabas and Saul (Paul) preceded them and the proconsul was hungry for the Word of the God.
“word of God”: it is logos, and see v. 5 for a close look. No doubt Saul and Barnabas deployed good old-fashioned, reasonable, and Bible-based argumentation to impress an intelligent man like the proconsul.
8:
“Elymas”: specialist scholars cannot figure out the name change, unless it comes from a local language and a little Hebrew. One scholar says it comes from the Arabic root alim (sage), or the name is derived from Aramaic haloma (interpreter of dreams) (Bock, comment on v. 8).
In any case, if someone turns people away from the faith that is rooted in the word of God, he is a false teacher and prophet. Stay clear of him. This is why Paul was about to take action against him. “He was a magos in the more popular sense. Luke calls him a false prophet, not (probably) in the sense that he foretold things which did not come to pass, but in the sense that he claimed falsely to be a medium of divine revelation. Elymas, the alternative name which Luke gives him, is probably a Semitic word with a similar meaning to magos; it cannot be an interpretation of “Barjesus” (Bruce, comment on vv. 6-8).
Stay away from supernatural magic and fortunetelling.
Magic, Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Fortunetelling
“faith”: We must have saving faith by trusting in Jesus and his finished work on the cross.
Remember this true acronym:
F-A-I-T-H
=
Forsaking All, I Trust Him
Word Study on Faith and Faithfulness
9-10:
“Saul (also Paul)”: In a Gentile context, he must have felt his Roman name was better, and maybe the proconsul Sergius Paullus reminded him of this; that is, Saul may have introduced himself as a Roman citizen and gave the proconsul his full Roman name. Since he was a Roman citizen, he had a praenomen, nomen (tribal or family), and cognomen. Paulus / Paullus was his cognomen. F. F. Bruce says no one knows what his praenomen and nomen name were (comment in vv. 9-11 and note 25). Recall that Barnabas’s name was Joseph (Acts 4:36), which is a Hebrew name. Usually, Jews took a Greek or Latin name, but if Joseph Barnabas did, then Luke never mentions it.
“was filled”: It is in the aorist tense, indicating it just happened at a point in time. Paul was instantly re/filled with the Spirit, to do this difficult assignment to pronounce judgment on Barjesus / Elymas. He had already been filled around his conversion (Acts 9:17).
Renewalists believe that the filling of the Spirit can happen often in a believer’s life, when he asks or has immediate need of empowerment. Ask, seek, knock. Be expectant.
For a deeper look, please click on this post:
Baptized, Filled, and Full of the Spirit: What Does It All Mean?
“stared … down”: it means “stare intently or intensely” or “fix one’s gaze.” Luke is fond of it: Luke 4:20; 22:56; Acts 1:10; 3:4; 3:12; 6:15; 7:55; 10:4; 11:6; 13:9; 14:9; 23:1. Then Paul uses it twice: 2 Cor. 3:7, 13. You know you have God’s authority when you can stare at satanic attacks right in the face (so to speak). If you cannot, please pray for the inner strength and grace and anointing to be able to stand and not to fold or flag during satanic and broken human attacks (I pray this almost every day). In the power of the Spirit (not soul power), stare down this kind of opposition. Don’t flinch.
Polhill is on target:
Like Peter with Simon Magus (8:20–23), Paul turned on Elymas with a vengeance. Luke clarified that it was ultimately not Paul but the Spirit of God whom Elymas had taken on. Paul was “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Looking at him with a withering gaze, Paul began to denounce Elymas, “You are a child of the devil.” No one familiar with Aramaic (as Elymas probably would have been) could have missed the pun. His name, Bar-Jesus (in Aramaic Bar-Jeshua), meant etymologically son of the Savior. He was no son of the Savior; quite the opposite, he was son of the devil. (comment on vv. 8-10)
In v. 10, those are extra-strong words. Please don’t use them in other contexts, such as in your family or at the job or at public service locations (e.g. coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores)! I have heard of extra-enthusiastic revivalists pronouncing judgment on people, but nothing happened. They were filled with arrogance. Paul was an apostle; extra-enthusiastic revivalists are not.
11:
Now judgment is pronounced.
“son of the devil”: correlates with his name Barjesus or “son of Jesus / Joshua”! He really was not the son of Jesus, but the son of the devil! Clever. A little irony does not hurt, once in a while.
Occasionally I hear a report that a fiery evangelist pronounces this kind of judgment, say, on a journalist who criticizes a meeting the journalist considers wild (and it possibly is, even by God’s standards [1 Cor. 14:33, 40]). Nothing happened to the journalist as it did to Elymas, but the evangelist does get laughed at.
What went wrong? Please understand that Barjesus (a Jewish name) lived in the Old Covenant, and he got an Old Covenant punishment. Barjesus was controlled by a demonic spirit. On the other hand, the journalist may not live in the Old Covenant or be under the dominion of a demonic spirit to the extent that he does magical signs and speaks false prophecies. He may simply be skeptical that your wild meeting is on the level. Paul was filled with the Spirit; the fiery evangelist may be merely filled with anger and arrogance and soul power. Now at this point someone will say that he actually saw the same thing done to a witch doctor in Africa or to someone somewhere else. That may be true (or not), but use caution and be sure you are not filled with soul power, as I concluded when I heard of this in an American context. The evangelist had to humble himself and confess that he stepped out of line. Embarrassing.
Please click on the next link:
Why Did Ananias and Sapphira Drop Dead?
“Elymas is where Saul was years earlier, and the difference is obvious. Paul is now full of the truth and Spirit whereas Elymas is full of deceit and villainy. … As the magician is led away, one can imagine Paul recalling that he himself was led away after seeing the Lord and being rendered temporarily blind. This judgment also teaches the rejection of any form of syncretism [mixture], some Elymas’s vocation reflects” (Bock, comment on vv. 9-11).
Ten Big Differences between Christianity and Other Religions
12:
This was a miraculous sign, and it impressed the proconsul. Such signs and wonders are designed to draw people to the Lord, and the people must be reinforced by the teaching about God.
“believed”: Believing (verb) and faith (noun) is very important to God. It is the language of heaven. We live on earth and by faith see the invisible world where God is. We must believe he exists; then we must exercise our faith to believe he loves us and intends to save us. We must have saving faith by trusting in Jesus and his finished work on the cross.
Here it is connected to “saved.” See v. 8 for more comments.
So the proconsul got saved—converted. If he was not stated as baptized, then Luke omitted this data point; in fact no one is stated as being baptized throughout this missionary journey. Recall that I have nicknamed Luke “the Omitter” or “Condenser.” It is a sure thing that each new convert was water-baptized.
“teaching”: it comes from the Greek noun didachē (pronounced dee-dah-khay). It also means “instruction.” It indicates that Paul and Barnabas stayed a while to teach Sergius Paullus, because he was influential. If the two missionaries converted him and could keep him in the kingdom by sound teaching (Matt. 18:23), then he in turn could influence many. Never be afraid of influential people—they need the gospel too.
I like how Schnabel reminds us about missionary activity is authenticated by the Holy Spirit. “The primary cause of the missionary work of Paul and Barnabas and the primary cause of the effectiveness of the proclamation of the gospel is the Holy Spirit as the transforming power of God’s powerful presence”. Then the commentator says that missionary work involves confronting the forces of evil. “At the same time the miracle [about Elymas’s punishment] to a decision concerning their own reaction to the message of the gospel; the governor Sergius Paulus is converted after he sees the effect that Paul’s words have on Elymas” (p. 561). Only the Holy Spirit can empower missionaries—even you and I in our sphere of influence—to bring the gospel to people and see them set free from evil spirit beings.
See my posts about Satan in the area of systematic theology:
Bible Basics about Satan and Demons and Victory Over Them
Bible Basics about Deliverance
GrowApp for Acts 13:4-12
1. Have you ever had to confront an evil, Satan-inspired person? How did you deal with the situation?
2. To rebuke the fortune-teller, Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit. God can anoint you too. Do you depend on the Spirit to confront evil?
RELATED
The Historical Reliability of the Book of Acts
Book of Acts and Paul’s Epistles: Match Made in Heaven?
SOURCES
For the bibliography, please click on this link and scroll down to the very bottom:
Dr. Jim's Essential Bible Teaching 