Bible Study series: Acts 28:1-10. Great things happened on this island.
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. The translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. If you would like to see many other translations, 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 28:1-10
1 After we made it safely through, we found out that the island was called Malta. 2 The natives provided no ordinary kindness to us: They lit a bonfire and welcomed every one of us because the rain was falling and the cold. 3 After Paul gathering a bundle of brushwood, and while he placed it on the fire, a viper was driven out from the heat and fastened on his hand. 4 When the natives saw the creature dangling from his hand, they said to each other, “Clearly this man is a murderer! Though he was saved from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live!” 5 But he shook the creature off into the fire and suffered no harm. 6 They were expecting him to swell up shortly or suddenly to fall over dead. They were waiting a long time and observed nothing unusual happen to him. They changed their minds and began to say he was a god.
7 In those regions around that vicinity, there was an estate belonging to the first man of island, named Publius. He received us three days and hosted us very friendly. 8 It happened that Publius’s father was lying with bouts of a fever and dysentery. Paul came to them and prayed and laid his hands on him and healed him. 9 When this happened, the rest of people on the island having sicknesses also began to come and were healed. 10 They honored us with many honors. And when we were getting ready to sail, they loaded supplies for our needs. (Acts 28:1-10)
Comments:
1:
“made it safely through”: this comes from the one verb diasōzō, and it literally means “save through,” which in this case was the storm in the previous chapter. See 27:43-44 for the other uses of the verb. Its related to the verb sōzō is standard for “save,” as in people being saved through Christ. The verb and noun are very versatile.
2:
“natives”: I translated the noun barbaroi (pronounced bahr-bahr-oi, masculine plural) as natives. This word comes from the belief that anyone who did not speak Greek was speaking gibberish, as in bar-bar-bar. Our version of the word barbarians or foreigner would literally be blah-blah-bians. On Malta back then, they spoke a Phoenician dialect.
“no ordinary”: the phrasing is known as a litotes (pronounced lih-toh-tees), or an understatement that expresses the affirmative by a negative! Luke likes litotes: Acts 12:18; 14:17, 28; 15:2; 17:4, 12, 27; 19:11, 23; 20:12; 21:39; 26:19; 27:20; 28:2. Most translations just drop the litotes and have “extraordinary” or “unusual.”
“kindness”: it is where we get our word philanthropy (see Acts 27:3). It means the love for humanity. Apparently the Maltese were friendly—and a good thing, too, for the shipwrecked people.
3:
Paul was gathering brushwood (or sticks). This shows he was not afraid to do menial labor. Good lesson for all of us.
Various people have identified the viper, but nowadays there are no poisonous snakes on Malta, much like there are no more snakes in Ireland (or so I am told). Peterson notes that vipers tend to bite and release, rather than fasten on and not letting go. It must be a snake that resembles a viper and Luke is using the term loosely (comment on v. 3).
4:
“creature”: it comes from the noun that usually means “wild beast.” I almost translated it like that, but I thought of the wild beasts that attacked Christians in the Roman coliseum in the subsequent centuries. There is a difference between the contexts. In any case, in modern Greek it is a common word for snake.
“saved from”: this again comes from the one verb is diasōzō, and see v. 1 for a closer look. They were saying Paul was saved through the storm or rescued through the storm.
Justice is personified as a goddess. It is best to drop lightminded theology that says whenever bad things happen to you, God did that. Luke explains why the snake crawled out of the brush—the heat. God did not cause the snake to bite Paul, for it was following its “snaky nature.” God gave us enough sense to know what to do about it.
However, even though medical knowledge was strong back then, it was not as strong as ours is today. It is clear that Paul was sustained and inoculated by God and experienced a miracle. In Luke 10:19, Jesus told his missionary disciples that he gave them authority to trample on snakes, which in that context meant demons. And the longer ending in Mark’s Gospel (16:18) says disciples can pick up snakes, which won’t hurt them. The main point is that the early church had the belief that God can work miracles, and Acts is filled with them and assumes them. What about churches today?
5:
“But”: it should be translated “and so,” for shaking it off was the logical thing to do.
“creature”: it is the same word as that in v. 4.
“shook … off”: It is used only here and in Luke 9:5 in the NT. Normally, I don’t like to symbolize or spiritualize real things in a nonpoetic, nonsymbolic section of Scripture, but I’ll go it for this time, as I did for the storm in Acts 27 (the storms of life). When you are under attack from a snake of a spiritual kind (a spirit being called Satan or a demon), just shake it off. You can do that through Scripture in Jesus’s name. He quoted from Deuteronomy in this temptation struggle against Satan (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13; cf. Mark 1:12-13). If he quoted from Scripture, then so should we. He showed us the way. Why do we over-intellectualize things? Let’s follow him, instead. You can quote Eph. 6:16, which says to put up the shield of faith that quenches the fiery arrows of the enemy. You don’t need to spend half your mental life each day rebuking Satan. Just get the Word in you. Just pray, “Lord, according to Eph. 6:16, I raise up a shield of faith over my mind to quench the fiery darts of the enemy.” I do that almost every day. And it works. The attacks are less frequent and very minimal—no longer powerful at all now!
6:
“waiting … observing”: “waiting” is the same verb translated as “expecting” in the same verse. It is definitely a mental activity. The whole point is that they were waiting and watching him, expecting him to swell up or drop over dead. But nothing out of place or unusual (atopos in Greek) happened to him.
“changed their minds”: this phrase comes from the one verb metaballō (pronounced meh-tah-bahl-loh), and the word mind is implied. (We get our word metabolism from it.) The prefix meta– implies a movement from one state or condition to another one, like expecting one thing, but getting another thing, so you adjust your belief. Here, they switched rapidly, from falsely concluding that Paul was a murderer to a false conclusion that he was a god. Our beliefs can get wacky because our minds can get confused. We have to work extra-hard to ensure that our beliefs stay on the right path, and the best way to do that is to get into Scripture, daily. It can build and renew our minds (Rom. 12:2).
“began to say”: it is in the imperfect tense, and so it could be translated “they were saying,” because the imperfect tense means incomplete or unperfected action—they were saying it for a while. I wonder what they did to honor him as a god. Earlier in Paul’s ministry, the Lycaonian priest wanted to sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas, but then soon afterwards the people intended to kill them (Acts 14:11-19). So the Lycaonians went in the reverse direction from these islanders. Apparently nothing like that happened here, perhaps because Paul did not correct them: “No, Maltese people, no! I am not a god!” He did this in Lycaonia, which resulted in their belief being shattered. Then they overreacted and tried to kill Paul and Barnabas.
As for Paul’s remarkable and miraculous resistance to the poison, let’s remember that he prayed in the Spirit often—his prayer language, formerly and archaically called “tongues” (1 Cor. 14:18). We should have no doubt that he was exercising this gift a lot, especially right after the snake bite. No, he was not shouting in his prayer language, just as someone without this gift would not shout his prayers in his known, native language. He was praying under his breath—or so I like to believe. Luke assumes that we would read his charismatic Acts from this perspective.
Let’s explore his assumption more deeply.
In Acts, Luke omits some of these details, but that is how all four Gospels and Acts are presented to us: elliptical. But the entire context of Acts is Spirit-empowered and Spirit-filled and very charismatic. Luke expects us to fill in the ellipses with the power of the Spirit and manifested gifts, like prayer languages. After all, Paul had his prayer language, probably when Ananias prayed for him, but Luke did not announce it.
It is like the anointing of Jesus at his water baptism with the Holy Spirit descending on him like a dove (Luke 3:31-22; 4:18-19). From then on, Jesus worked miracles of nature and healing and demonic expulsion in the third Gospel, and Luke does not have to announce it every time Jesus did those things: “Remember when I wrote that Jesus was anointed with the Spirit? He worked that miracle based on those verses!” Rather, Luke expects us to fill in those omissions with the power of the Spirit. Likewise, in the many cases of Christian witness from town to town in Acts, Luke expects us to fill in the omissions with the same empowerment because of Acts 2:1-4. And so Luke-Acts is all very charismatic, which is normative for the church throughout its history. Spirit-filled empowerment and anointing continues.
This filling of the omissions is especially true for the next section, as follows. But first the discipleship questions.
7:
“first man”: it comes from the Greek adjective prōtos (pronounced proh-toss), and it means “first.” Greek inscriptions and literary references prove a “leading man” had lots of local power and showed it off by acts of generosity with his own money. He got their money from his landed estates. No doubt he occupied some political offices or wielded political power in some way, just like all the other leading men and women in the Greek East (Acts 13:50).
Please see my 2004 article Lifestyles of the Rich and Christian:
2004 Arlandson article Lifestyles of Rich and Christian
“friendly”: yes, the English word functions as both adjective and adverb, so it is in the right form. It means “kindly minded” and “friendly.” They had a good attitude.
8:
“fever”: Dr. Luke uses a technical term. See Luke 4:38 about the technical term for a fever attacking Peter’s mother-in-law, and Mark 1:30, which uses less technical language (// Matt. 8:14).
Jesus Rebukes the Fever Attacking Peter’s Mother-in-Law
“prayed”: But Christians took over the word and directed it towards the living God. I like to believe that Paul leaned in toward him and prayed, fully expecting an answer. It is not a mere wish or heartfelt payer to a pagan deity.
Prayer flows out of confidence before God that he will answer because we no longer have an uncondemned heart (1 John 3:19-24; Rom. 8:1); and we know him so intimately that we find out from him what is his will is and then we pray according to it (1 John 5:14-15); we pray with our Spirit-inspired languages and our native languages (1 Cor. 14:15-16). But that’s what all believers should do; however, too often theory outruns practice. Pray!
Here in this section, Paul knew what the will of God was—health.
“laid hands on”: Renewalists
Paul put his hands on people as he prayed. Renewalists believe that God’s power can be transmitted through the hands and that the healing power of God can flow out of a person. They can sense information in their body. Jesus was walking through another crowd, and when they touched him, healing came from him, and the people were healed (Luke 6:19). That is a remarkable phenomenon. Laying on of hands is often part of healing, as well. It offers the personal touch, literally. Legally, Jesus was not allowed to touch and unclean woman, but he did anyway.
Renewalists also believe that power can be transferred from one person to the another, as the Spirit wills (Luke 6:19; 8:41-48). The most remarkable example is when many people from all over Israel, and Tyre and Sidon, touched him. “And the entire multitude was trying to touch him because power came out of him and healed them” (6:19). Such a display of manifest power is stunning. He laid hands on other people too (Luke 4:40; 6:13).
9:
“were healed”: the verb means to “make whole, restore, heal, cure, care for.” It is in the passive mood, and it means that these healings were supernatural; they were not self-healings (though God has designed the body to heal itself, if we take care of it).
Once again, let’s note that Paul prayed in the Spirit often—his prayer language (1 Cor. 14:18). We should have no doubt he was exercising this gift a lot, especially during his ministry time healing the sick. But he was not shouting it, any more than you would in your first and native language. He may have been praying under his breath, as you do. Luke assumes that we would read his charismatic Acts from this perspective.
Further, though the verse does not say “signs and wonders,” this is what is meant here. Signs and wonders happening right before one’s eyes is awe-inspiring. It inspired everyone, to the point of bringing their diseased and sick friends and family members. Renewalists believe healings still happen today. See v. 6 for a discussion of the charismatic book of Acts and how Luke expects his readers to assume it.
What was flowing here was the gifts of healings which Paul listed as one of the nine gifts of the Spirit. Only Jesus in his ascended state by the power of the Spirit living in Paul healed all those people (Acts 3:12-16).
For a nearly complete list of miracles, signs and wonders in the New Testament and a theology of them, see the post
What Are Signs and Wonders and Miracles?
5. Gifts of the Spirit: Workings of Miracles
4. Gifts of the Spirit: Gifts of Healings
GrowApp for Acts 28:1-10
1. As soon as Paul was safely ashore, he was compelled to do menial work. A snake bit him. But God saved him again. How has Satan counterattacked you after you were saved through your own storm? How did God protect you?
2. Signs and wonders confirm that God is real and the gospel is true. What miracle have you experienced to know deeply that he is real in your life.
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 