Book for September, 2016 – Philippians
Dummelow's One Volume Bible Commentary has given me the
clue that I must go to Acts for the prelude to the book of Philippians. This is
where the founding of the church at Philippi is recorded, in Chapter 16. It is
one of the great adventure stories in the Bible.
Paul and Silas had been
forbidden to 'preach the word in Asia.' Then 'the Spirit suffered them not' to
go to Bithynia. They came to Troas where Paul had a vision whereby a man of
Macedonia beseeched him to come to Macedonia and help them. Immediately they
set out to go there – Troas to Samothracia to Neapolis to Philippi which was
the main city. They sat down by the river and spoke with the women who came
there to pray. (Dummelow says, “Where the Jews were too few to build a
synagogue, they were wont to assemble in open-air places for prayer by the
seaside, or on a river's bank, for convenience of purification.) They met up
with Lydia who was receptive to Paul's preaching and was baptized, and her
household with her. She 'constrained' them to stay at her house.
Then we have the story of
the fortune-telling damsel controlled by her masters. The erroneous spirit was
cast out of her and the masters saw to it that they were beaten and cast into
prison.
Remember the next part of
the story? The release of Paul and Silas, who had prayed and sang praises to
God at midnight, was brought about by an earthquake which loosed all the
prisoners' bands. The keeper of the prison was converted. Paul had the last
word with the magistrates who he convinced that being Romans they should not
have been imprisoned. We leave Paul and Silas back at Lydia's house. “And when
they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and departed.”
So we go back to Paul's
letter to the Philippians, convinced that Lydia and the women had done sterling
work in the ten intervening years.
Joyce Voysey
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