Dennis Tuuri

Acts 28:7-10

In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius, who received us and lodged us three days courteously. And it came to pass that the father of Publius lay sick of a fever and of a bloody flux, to whom Paul entered in and prayed and laid his hands on him and healed him. So when this was done, others also which had diseases in the island came and were healed, who also honored us with many honors. And when we departed, they laid us up with such things as were necessary.

Let’s pray. Father, we pray you would illuminate this text to our understanding, that our joy this day and for the rest of our lives might be increased by a further knowledge of our Savior, the depths of our sin and misery, and the greatness and the wondrous way in which you have relieved us from those sins and misery and brought us into eternal life and salvation and given us as ambassadors to this world. Help us, Lord God, to understand this text. Give us your Spirit that we might apply it to our lives. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

This is, I think, the 95th sermon from the book of Acts that I’ve done. I probably won’t get out of this until we hit over a hundred. I don’t know. Maybe I should apologize for spending so much time in these last few chapters, but I find them absolutely fascinating—the way these texts are laid out and this story is no different.

You know, what’s going on is they found refuge in the island of Malta, which means refuge. And it has a tremendous, long, detailed account of this storm at sea—thanksgiving aboard the sinking ship and all that stuff that’s happened. And they’ve hit this island exhausted, barely saving their flesh and what little clothes they had on their back. And immediately a storm comes up, driving wind and such. They build a fire. They’re kindly treated by the natives. And then Paul’s gathering these bundles of sticks up and gets bit by a snake. We talked about that last week—the tremendous picture it is of our deliverance effected by the coming of our Savior, this time of year that we remember.

And then we have this story here. We have the chief man of the island, the governor of Malta, Publius by name, and he shows these people kindness as well. He lodges us three days courteously. And when it says lodges, it doesn’t just mean he gave them shelter. It means he showed the absolute utmost degree of hospitality—that’s what it means there in its fullest sense.

And this man, the governor of the island, the head, the political power, the titular head of the island itself, named Publius—first name only is given—lodges us courteously. All right.

And then Paul repays this favor, so to speak. I think one of the commentaries sees Paul’s echo here of the kindness shown to him in the healing of Publius’s father. And then after that happens, the natives from the country say, “Well, we better go and get all our sicknesses healed from Paul.” And they do. They come and gather to Paul and then Paul heals all the disease in the island.

The picture that is portrayed for us here: remember last week we said that the Catholic legend was that there were no more viperous snakes, going back to that throwing off of the snake into the fire by Paul. We don’t know that’s true—probably wasn’t true—but certainly that was the picture. And the picture here is that all disease is conquered by the coming of Paul to this island.

And then finally in verse 10, before they ship out from the island, so to speak, the people honored them with many honors. A double statement here of the great way that the islanders honored Paul and the men. And when we departed, they laid us up with such things as were necessary. They gave them a bunch of stuff. They came absolutely destitute because of the storm. They leave laden with gifts.

And the word honored with honors—that word has its basic meaning in scripture. It doesn’t always mean this, but the basic meaning of the word honor is money, value, gold, weightiness, okay? And they gave him weight. They gave him glory. They gave him lots of possessions. They honored Paul and these men.

Now, you say, “Well, that’s not so fascinating to me, Dennis.” Well, if you think about the way Paul was treated, remember how we recounted the first three missionary journeys and where he went. And remember, this story brings to mind, for instance, Lystra, where they thought at first Paul was a god. Then he says, “We’re not a god.” He preaches the gospel to them and they kill him—they stone him to death. And here they think at first Paul’s a murderer. Of course, he is, in a technical sense, redeemed by the blood of the Savior. And then he’s saved and they say, “Well, he’s a god.”

Now, let’s remember—the text doesn’t tell us what Paul said about that. But let’s remember who Paul is. When you’re reading a book of algebra, you don’t work the multiplication tables or certainly not the addition tables in preparation for each lesson anymore. Those simple things, the things that are obviously used in the context of algebra, you know—they’re not taught to you every lesson.

Well, here we know this: the book has already told us what Paul’s response is to men who would call him divine. We know that from Lystra. We know that from lots of places in the scriptures. We know Paul’s response. We know what he told these people when they said that he was a god. He said, “No, I’m not,” and that he preached to them the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is who Paul is.

And these people still kindly entreat him. They’re still hospitable to him. What’s going on here? Unless we just think that Paul is working completely out of character and just performed these miracles and kept his mouth shut, unless we think that, then what’s obviously happening here is that the people are responding to the grace of God given to them in hearing of the gospel.

And I think that what we have here at the end of an incredible, difficult journey is a picture of what the coming of the ambassador, the Lord Jesus Christ, means to the world—it means to where he goes. It means universal salvation.

Oh boy, you better watch it, Dennis. Universalism.

There was quite a discussion—not a few involved. I get these Fox Ring postings. It’s a group of 200 to 300 reformed guys, conservative reformed guys, a lot of them, you know, very much like us. And this last week, one of them, actually a man who I know, David Coasterman, who I met in Chicago at the confessional conference, posted an inquiry of what people thought about Isaac Watts’s “Joy to the World.” He said he’d been pondering that, and you know, it seems to be universalistic, like that song we just sang, “Good Christian Men Rejoice.” He comes, you know, to save the earth and he calls us, calls us all to join his everlasting hall. And Isaac Watts’s “Joy to the World,” which we’ll sing at the end of the service, you know, has a tinge of universalism to it because it talks about all people.

Well, the scriptures talk about how Jesus came to save the world. And the Psalms talk about God calling the earth and how the earth praises God in its totality, all the created order.

Now, what can we make of that? Well, we can either deny other portions of God’s truth and see that all men are saved, which is certainly not true. God ordains the elect to salvation, then ordains the unelect to damnation. That’s the way it works. That’s the way it is. The scriptures clearly teach that.

So how can we understand this? I think the only way to properly understand the texts that appear universalistic or stories like this that seem to be universalistic is that the flow of history is the positive results of the preaching of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the conversion of men and nations.

Jesus said to go into all the world, you know, this text at the end of the gospel. Turn to the Gospel of Mark. And actually, let’s look at a couple of texts. I’ll look at the beginning of the gospel and the end of the gospel. Both things, I think, come to mind if we know the scriptures well and we read this text we just read from the book of Acts.

Both the beginning and end of the Gospel of Mark come to mind. In Mark chapter 1, the beginning days, as Mark records, of the ministry of our Savior. He calls the four fishermen in verse 16. Verse 21, a man with an unclean spirit is healed. And then verse 29 of Mark chapter 1:

“For with them they were come out of the synagogue, they entered into the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. But Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick of a fever.”

Fever. Again, that’s what Publius’s father had—fevers. Or you know, we say that his father had a fever. That’s the way our language works. The Greek is different. The Greek says the fever had Publius’s father. And you know, if you think about it—if you’ve had this—this time of year is a good flu season, and I know that some years have gone by our families had the flu this time of year and you don’t feel like you’ve got the flu. You feel like the flu has you. And the Greek text is that way—the fever has a hold of Publius’s father—and dysentery. That’s what bloody flux means there—it’s dysentery, which could be fatal, by the way.

This apparently was related to the milk of goats on the island of Malta. For some reason they would get infected and this would be the result in people’s lives, and this was a fatal disease that Publius’s father had. He had fevers, plural. They’d come upon him, go away, come upon him, go away. You know what that feels like if you’ve had the flu. Dysentery in his bowels—he couldn’t absorb. You’d end up with dehydration and death was very common. And so this was not a small little thing.

Well, back in Mark here, chapter 1, Jesus, as he leaves the synagogue, goes to Simon’s house and his mother-in-law lays sick of a fever. And they tell him of her, and he came and took her by the hand, and lifted her up, and immediately the fever left her, and she ministered unto them.

And then what happens, verse 32? “And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased and them that were possessed with devils. And all the city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many that were sick of diverse diseases and cast out many devils and suffered not the devils to speak because they knew him.”

And then verse 35: “In the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went and departed into a solitary place and prayed.”

And then they go on and he departs on the preaching tour. Verse 39: “He preaches in the synagogues throughout all Galilee, casts out devils.”

Well, this is what Paul’s doing. Paul heals Publius’s father as Jesus healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. Fever in both cases. And the response of the area then is just as in Jesus here in Simon’s village. So all of Malta comes out to Paul. Paul’s a prisoner. Paul’s not at liberty to go where he wants on the island. But that’s no problem for God. God brings the island to him.

All the nations will come up to the mountain of the Lord. And they come up to Paul to receive healing. And you know, they’re going to get more than just healing of their physical infirmities. They’re going to get healing of their sinful souls is what God’s going to do through Paul.

And so as the people came to Jesus, all the men from Malta come up to Paul. Everybody gets healed. And of course then Paul leaves for the preaching tour to Rome, as Jesus left and preached in all the synagogues of Galilee. And so there’s this correlation.

This correlation is also at the end of the book of Mark. We always read the Great Commission from Matthew, but the end of Mark also speaks of the conversion of the nations. Mark chapter 16, beginning at verse 14:

“And afterwards, Jesus appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. And he said unto them, ‘Go ye into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. And he that believeth not shall be damned.’”

A particular redemption here. God’s selection of some, him giving sovereignly the ability to believe. All men cannot believe in and of themselves. We’re all deaf.

“And these signs shall follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils. They shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents. And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick. And they shall recover.”

See, this is the Apostle Paul. He’s taken up serpents. I mean, it doesn’t mean to go out and deliberately take up serpents. The Apostle Paul took up a serpent on his hand, so to speak, and that poison that he drank, so to speak, from the bite of that asp did not hurt him. And he moves on from there to laying hands upon the sick and healing them.

And so there’s this verification. This is one of Jesus’s sent ones that he sovereignly calls to belief in him is who the Apostle Paul is.

And then verse 19: “So that after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven and sat on the right hand of God. And they went forth and preached everywhere. The Lord working with them and confirming the word with signs following.”

And that’s what we have here with the Apostle Paul. Jesus is confirming the word with signs following them. And so the picture for us here is a miraculous one. It’s a remarkable one. It’s different from Lystra completely.

And I think it is a proper balance for us to remember what being Christian is all about. And it’s not all about—all the time—persecutions and sufferings and shipwrecks and trials. Because here’s the other side of it. The flow of history as we move ahead into the future is the flow of the successful preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And God says that Jesus came to save the world. And that means the world increasingly, as time goes on over the centuries and millennia, will manifest the successful preaching of the gospel until the world itself and all the nations are discipled by those who go in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now, it’s a long process, and Advent is about patience, and we must be very patient. I heard, in a way, a horrific and yet just an amazing tape by Gary North last week on J. Gresham Machen’s life. He’s putting out a book. It’s now typed. He’s doing the indexing on it now. And that is an amazing story of the liberal manipulation of the Presbyterian Church and the elimination of Machen and the small group of faithful men and their control—the plotting that they did.

And I mean, it’s an amazing story in terms of Machen eventually going to the mat, so to speak, for the fundamentalist associations he had, which were non-Presbyterian but conservative, and an independent mission board. And then six months after he’s defrocked for that by the Presbyterian Church, the fundamentalists think he’s too hot to handle and too conservative for their liking and they boot him off that independent mission board. And that’s what breaks Machen. And North believes that’s what leads to his death. He dies of pneumonia not too long after that on a trip there. His spirit had been broken.

That’s the story of J. Gresham Machen—a great man that we read of and read his writings. But a man whose life terminated in that shipwreck and didn’t get him personally onto Malta. But that’s where the church is going. And the men who built upon Machen’s work, Van Til and others, they moved on into Malta, and the preaching of the gospel is successful.

God’s line is always the long line. And the long line is success and blessing for the people of God. The short line, the line in which we sometimes may find ourselves, is that short line of great problems and trials and tribulations. And your whole life, your life may be filled with that, but the life of the church moves on to Malta and moves on to the conversion of men and nations.

I want to talk a little bit, as you think about this story and the implications of it. Where do you find yourself? You know, you read a piece of story, a scriptural story, a historical account, and you sort of want to—what does this mean to me? How do I fit into this story?

And you can sort of look at Paul here and you can say, well, you know, we go at the preaching of the gospel and we should be very observant for possibilities that occur to us to preach the gospel in the context of—and when men show us hospitality, we should try then to minister to their spiritual needs. And we should always have occasion to present a defense of the faith that’s in us. And so we should look for acts of kindness with it.

Publius showed acts of kindness to Paul and Paul responded by the healing of his father with undoubtedly the preaching of the gospel. And we should be like that. And we’re certainly a picture—all of us—Paul’s a picture, of course, of the actions of Christ, as the parallel to Mark chapter 1 shows. And we’re in Christ the Savior. And so we can see ourselves moving ahead to further places onto Rome, wherever we go, always preaching the gospel and looking for that interaction.

We could see ourselves as Publius. I mean, we are the ones who, in the providence of God, show hospitality and invite in—you know what I mean by that. I hope—not in an Arminian sense—but are moved by the Spirit of God to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and so we receive him.

Now we know that all of Israel received not the Savior. He came to his own and they didn’t receive him. It’s not of us that we receive the Savior. It’s of God’s sovereign election and calling. We’re dead in trespasses and sins and we can’t see the lights when they turn on, even in ourselves. We’re deaf. We’re dumb. We’re blind. We’re dead. We’re walking dead men.

But God sovereignly calls us to receive the Lord Jesus Christ in the context of his gospel. And Publius was called to receive the Apostle Paul. The end result of that was Publius’s household was healed. And we’re healed by God.

And you know, if you don’t come to the Savior today knowing that you’re deadly ill in and of yourselves and in your sins, that you’re in rebellion to him, and you don’t know the greatness of your salvation—if you realize what God has revealed to us, all that is, that we are dead in trespasses and sins. We have that dysentery, which is a messy, ugly thing to think about—life-threatening.

We have that. We cannot drink water. We cannot receive food and get nourishment from it in the deadness of our sins. It takes the sovereign act of God to heal us. And so he does through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re laid hold of by fevers which make you mad. You’re insane apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. But he has sovereignly called you out of all those things—the advent of the Savior in our world 2,000 years ago by his coming to you through the Holy Spirit and salvation.

So we can identify with Publius and we can see the responsibility we and all the other sick men of Malta had, on the basis of him healing us, to give homage to him and to honor him and to give him gifts. You know that people didn’t send up gifts to Jesus in heaven. They gave gifts to the ones who represented him. And we can see our responsibility to bring gifts to the body of Christ and to give gifts to each other.

And so Christmas, with its gift-giving, is a perfect picture of what our lives should be filled with—the kind of attitude we should have of desiring to assist and help other people, to pour out our lives as the Apostle Paul did, of hospitality and honoring of others. So we can see ourselves identified with that.

We can also see, I think—and this is a little bit different, but in a way, it’s in my way of thinking—it somehow seems so very important and seems so beautiful when you think about it that Publius’s father is the one who gets healed here of this deadly disease. I mean, Publius by implication, by covenantal association, we can see all that. But it’s his father—it’s the one who gives generation to the men that Paul is in the context of—who really is the one who’s pictured as dead and dying and unable to receive nourishment.

And I cannot help but think of Adam. That great old English carol: “Adam lay ybound, bounden with a bond. Four thousand winters he thought not too long.”

And then the carol goes on to say how, because of that apple and because of the implication of God’s righteous judgments against Adam, we see the great manifestations of the grace of God in our day and age. Adam lay abound, bonded with a bond for four thousand winters—nice pictorial way to think of that, four thousand years, four thousand winters came and went before the Savior’s advent.

To Adam came and healed, as it were, the generation of men—healed covenantally Adam and men. And as I said, the scriptures, I think, declare that over time Adam’s race again comes to health and salvation through the work of the Savior. Mankind is what Jesus came to save—not every last person, but over the flow of history, the great majority will be those who sing forth the praises of God.

And so we can certainly identify with this—with the father of Publius and with Adam, our first father in our regeneration and our calling to salvation and our second Adam.

And I want to sort of bring this to a close by looking at all of this together, not just identification with Paul or Publius or the father, but with the community of what appears here to be a picture of the church of Jesus Christ. I can’t say that with certainty. I can tell you the scriptures say that these men at Malta became converted. But I can tell you that they show all the marks of the converted.

And I can tell you that what we have pictured here at the end of the 28 chapters of the book of Acts as we move to Paul’s final preaching tour in Rome is a picture of the community of faith that the church is to represent—with the presence of Jesus Christ at the center, that brings health and salvation, the honoring and welfare and hospitality shown to each other in the context of that community.

And I think we have a picture here of the community of the church which eventually becomes the community of the whole world. And it is a community that is filled with deeds of kindness, filled with a deep sense of appreciation for our healing from our deadly disease and a desire to honor those and to honor the Lord Jesus Christ by honoring those who are in the person and work of the Savior, by honoring his ambassadors, so to speak, and by providing deeds of kindness, hospitality, honor, and help, and salvation flowing amongst all the people of God as well.

And I think if there’s nothing else, we can leave this in the providence of God—our Christmas story for this year, for 1995—with it is a call to exercise Christian community by bringing words, prayers, as Paul brought to the dying father, laying on of hands, a commissioning of one another, a praying for one another, a showing of hospitality one to another, and a showing of kindness and honor to the Lord Jesus Christ above all through the kindness and deeds we perform one to the other.

I watched a version of the Christmas Carol this last week on PBS, which I thought was really quite good. And I don’t know—Dickens—I don’t know if what he perceived as the great sins of men in England at the time of the writing of the Christmas Carol were historically accurate or not. You know, he wrote that, and he called it his sledgehammer. It was a political work, really, not political. It was aimed to obviously loosen men up from their bowels of tightness and stinginess, to give to one another.

And he had experienced the poor houses apparently, the debtor’s prison his father had been in, in youth working in very dangerous situations in workhouses, etc. I don’t know the historical accuracy of all that, but I know the mind of man, and I know the heart of man, and in his fallen estate he’s not always liberal. In his fallen estate he can be conservative. And if all we do right now politically in this country is to move from liberal humanism to conservative humanism—to move from a bleeding heart, sort of help-everybody indiscriminately (you’re not helping the Lord Jesus; you’re just helping men)—to move to the way we help everybody else is through the pure exercises of self-interest. And if anybody else can’t, you know, make a million bucks a week on the radio, well, too bad for them.

I know that non-Christian man works back and forth between those two extremes. I guess what I’m trying to say is that as we approach this coming year and our continuing voyage on stormy seas in this country and move toward our Malta, we must do so not simply with political directions but with a change of men’s hearts.

If we move from Clinton to Gingrich and don’t move the country from man’s interest to Jesus Christ’s interest, we’ll go back to at least what Dickens portrayed, if not true nonetheless, the portrayal of it in the personal work of Scrooge. I don’t know these men. I don’t know who’s regenerate and who’s not. But I know that the public policy issues—those are the two things presented before us.

Why is it that philanthropy waits for the elimination of the civil state’s role in these things? Oh, we can say practically speaking, people aren’t ready to receive gifts of kindness and service until Pharaoh gets rid of all his involvement. But maybe too, what’s happened yet is—and I think this is far more likely—this country is still awaiting revival and reformation. And when revival and reformation occurs, it brings with it always a revival and reformation of benevolences, Christian hospitality, the sort of thing we see practiced here on the island of Malta.

And so it will be with our reformation. And so it should be with us. If nothing else, this Christmas should find us with a great appreciation for that personal salvation we’ve already sung about today, a great sense of hope for the future as we sing about how the world will become increasingly the nations of our Christ and of the King, disciples of him, and accompanied with that—the way that happens is pictured for us here on Malta is through hospitality, kindness, benevolences, healing, and Christian community exercised in the context of wherever we take ourselves.

This morning as we were coming to church, one of my boys, for whatever reason, had his dress pants have a little hole in the knee, and he was pretty distressed about that. You know, you try to look your best for Christmas, you know, try to look your best for the Lord’s day. It’s a picture of remembering the righteousness of Christ given to us. And that little hole in the knee was a picture of our inability. We always have holes of some type in our clothes. We always have fallen, and we always have sinfulness in the context of our lives. Our best efforts are marked by holes in these.

But this same boy, by the providence of God, had gone out of his way this morning to help his younger sister. And I told him, “That’s what God sees as patching that hole underneath. It’s that deed of kindness for your sister done, not because of anything for yourself, because you’re thinking of her.”

Let’s do that today. Many of us are going to be getting together and fellowshipping. Let’s work real hard at demonstrating those acts of kindness—not because we think that man is so great, but because we know what Christ has brought us out of. And we want to demonstrate our love and our honoring of the Lord Jesus Christ by loving and honoring those pictures, those images of God that we come across every day in the context of our culture.

I believe that indeed this text shows us a picture of the past with the father and the picture of Adam laying abound. It shows us a picture of the present—the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the terms of the island of Malta and the salvation of it. And it shows us the future. Publius, legend has it, became the first bishop of Malta. And surely as Paul leaves that island, the picture of the future of the acts of the saints and what they will bring in mankind’s history does not end with shipwreck. It doesn’t end with the rapture out of all these problems. It ends with the successful proclamation of the gospel and God’s calling a whole island of men to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and the representatives of Christ pictured through Paul and his company.

And so it shows us the past. It shows us the present, and it shows us the future. And that future shines out there as a great hope for us. But that future is reached through the twofold ministry that our Savior showed us back in the beginning portions of the book of Mark and shows us again in the Acts of the Apostles with acts of health and salvation and hospitality in the context of the world accompanied by the preaching of the gospel.

And that’s what drives the future forward to that great hope that shines in front of us. And may that be what drives us forward to deeds of love and kindness in the name of the Savior in the context of this Christmas season and on into the rest of the world. May our future be dictated by understanding of the present and the great things that God has brought us out of in our personal paths and the past of our country as well.

And may he then move us on to be that great Christian nation that we once were in many ways and will be again in a more self-conscious way in the future years to come. And may we now as we bring forward our offerings and sing these two songs that are a picture of the present reign of the Lord Jesus Christ—and then this child who came as a child of hope to us—may we understand that hope manifests itself through the acts of God’s people.

The book of Acts is called the book of Acts, not the book of ideas, not the book of concepts—acts of God’s people. The incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ in the very real sense, the incarnation of his redeemed humanity in us as we perform the acts of the Savior—those acts of kindness and health and healing, hospitality, and preaching the gospel that brings men to salvation into that community of Christ.

Let’s pray. Father, help us as we come forward to make our offerings yet once more this Lord’s day to do so with a tremendous sense of our deliverance as pictured in Publius’s father. Help us, Lord God, to have hearts filled with a desire to love and to esteem and honor the Lord Jesus Christ for the great blessings he has brought to us. Let us, Lord God, not let our hearts become hardened to our fellow Christians, but rather see them as the very opportunity you’ve given us to patch up the holes in our garments, so to speak, and not to make up righteousness.

We know that our righteousness is totally a result of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, outside of us. But we also know, Lord God, that your book in Revelation talks about the righteousness of the saints being our clothing as well. Help us, Father, as we come forward, confess sin in our hearts if we need to, and acts of unkindness one toward the other. And help us to re-pledge ourselves anew to honoring our Savior by honoring his people.

In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.