Acts13chapter 13

Acts 13:1

The church at Antioch already has a plural, Spirit-recognized leadership by the time this scene opens: Barnabas the Cypriot Levite, Simeon called Niger, likely a dark-complexioned believer, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen, a foster-brother or close companion of Herod the tetrarch raised in the same household, and Saul. The list itself is a quiet witness to the Gentile mission's own roots, a Levite, an African, a man raised alongside Galilee's ruler, and a former persecutor of the church all named in the same breath as prophets and teachers of one congregation. Luke gives no rank among them here, the five standing together as the body that hears the Spirit's command in the next verse.

Acts 13:2-3

As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them, the Spirit's own voice initiating the first missionary sending the church's history records. The verb ministered is temple-service language applied to the church's worship, and the call to Barnabas and Saul comes out of that worship rather than out of a planning meeting. The church responds with fasting and prayer again before laying hands on them and sending them away, a second season of seeking confirmation before acting on what the Spirit had already settled.

Acts 13:4

So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia, Antioch's seaport, and sailed to Cyprus, Barnabas's own home island named already at 4:36. Luke's phrasing credits the Spirit rather than the church as the true sender, the laying on of hands in verse three recognizing a commission already given rather than creating one. The choice of Cyprus as a first field likely follows Barnabas's own connections there, the gospel advancing along the natural lines of the messengers' own history.

Acts 13:5

At Salamis they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews, the pattern Paul will keep at every stop of his travels, entering the synagogue first wherever one stood. They had also John to their minister, John Mark serving in an attendant's role, likely handling practical arrangements rather than preaching himself. The word rendered minister is used elsewhere of a synagogue attendant and of an officer's assistant, a supporting role that makes his departure at Perga in verse thirteen a larger disappointment than a reader might first weigh it.

Acts 13:6-8

Working through the isle to Paphos, the missionaries meet a very different kind of religious figure, found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew attached to the court of Sergius Paulus, the Roman deputy of Cyprus, a title an inscription found on the island confirms was the correct one for the office at exactly this period. Sergius Paulus himself is called a prudent man who desired to hear the word of God, a Roman official open to the gospel rather than hostile to it. The sorcerer, known by the Greek name Elymas, withstood them, seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith, setting magic and message against each other at the very point a ruler was ready to believe.

Acts 13:9-11

Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him: Luke marks the name change at exactly this point, the Roman name displacing the Hebrew one as the mission turns fully toward the Gentile world, though the two names likely coexisted from birth as a Roman citizen's dual identity. His rebuke, full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, is the sharpest personal denunciation Paul speaks in the book, matching the sharpness of Peter's word to Simon the sorcerer in chapter eight. The blindness pronounced, not seeing the sun for a season, falls immediately, a mist and a darkness closing on the very man who tried to darken Sergius Paulus's own sight of the truth.

Acts 13:12

The deputy, when he saw what was done, believed, being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord, the miracle serving the word rather than replacing it, since Luke is careful to say the doctrine, not merely the wonder, is what astonished him. Sergius Paulus stands as the first Roman official of rank the book names as a believer, a small but real fulfillment of the gospel's advance into the empire's own governing class. The scene closes the Cyprus mission on its highest note, a magician blinded and a governor converted in the same encounter.

Acts 13:13

Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia: Luke's own phrasing has quietly shifted from Barnabas and Saul to Paul and his company, marking the leadership Paul will carry for the rest of the book. John, departing from them, returned to Jerusalem, leaving the mission partway through for a reason Luke does not give here, though Paul's own later refusal to travel with him again in 15:38 calls it a departure rather than a release. The bench offers various explanations, homesickness, disagreement over the mission's Gentile direction, or the harder travel of the Anatolian interior, without the text settling which.

Acts 13:14-15

They came to Antioch in Pisidia, a different city from the Syrian Antioch that sent them, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day as their settled practice at every stop. After the reading of the law and the prophets, the standard synagogue liturgy of Torah and Haftarah portions, the rulers extend an open invitation any visiting teacher could expect, if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on. That invitation is the door Paul's whole sermon walks through, and Luke records it because the synagogue's own custom, not a special dispensation, is what gives Paul his platform.

Acts 13:16-17

Paul stood up, and beckoning with his hand, a gesture Luke also gives him at 21:40, addresses two groups at once, men of Israel, and ye that fear God, the second phrase naming the God-fearing Gentiles who attended synagogue worship without full proselyte conversion. His sermon opens where Stephen's did, with the fathers, but moves faster: the God of this people of Israel chose our fathers and exalted the people in Egypt before bringing them out with an high arm, the exodus language of Deuteronomy deliberately echoed. The address to both Israel and the God-fearers together anticipates the sermon's turn to the Gentiles at its close, the two audiences named from the first sentence.

Acts 13:18-19

About the time of forty years suffered he their manners in the wilderness renders a Greek verb that the oldest manuscripts and versions read two ways, bore with their manners or carried them as a nurse carries a child, a single letter's difference in the underlying text. Both readings draw on the same wilderness record and neither changes the sermon's argument, so the bench presents both without settling which the author wrote. Paul moves on to the conquest, destroying seven nations and dividing the land to Israel by lot, the same history Stephen's speech surveyed at greater length in chapter seven.

Acts 13:20-21

The four hundred and fifty years covering the judges period is Paul's own round figure for a span the Old Testament itself does not total explicitly, and harmonizing it with 1 Kings 6:1's four hundred and eighty years from the exodus to Solomon's temple has occupied commentators since antiquity without a settled consensus. Saul, the first king, is named by tribe, of Benjamin, and by length of reign, forty years, a figure the Old Testament narrative also does not state directly but which Josephus preserves independently. Paul's history lesson is moving quickly toward its real destination, David, named for the first time in the next verse.

Acts 13:22

When he had removed Saul, he raised up unto them David to be their king, and to him God gives the testimony Paul quotes, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will, a composite drawn from 1 Samuel 13:14 and Psalm 89:20. The phrase after mine own heart describes David's wholehearted devotion to the Lord across a flawed life, not a claim to sinlessness, and the bench is united that the sermon uses David here only to set up the greater son of David the next verses name. David functions in this sermon exactly as he does across the whole book's speeches, a promised king whose throne finds its true heir in Jesus.

Acts 13:23-25

Of this man's seed hath God according to his promise raised unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus: the promise Paul names is 2 Samuel 7's covenant with David, and the whole preceding recital of judges, king, and David exists to arrive at exactly this sentence. John's ministry is placed deliberately before Jesus's coming, John himself testifying he was not the Christ but one whose shoes he was not worthy to loose, the same self-effacing witness the Gospels record from his own mouth. Paul's summary of John matches the church's settled reading of his role across all four Gospels, a forerunner pointing away from himself.

Acts 13:26

Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and whosoever among you feareth God, to you is the word of this salvation sent repeats Paul's double address from verse sixteen, Israel by birth and the God-fearing Gentiles by attachment, now naming both as the sermon's intended recipients. The word of this salvation names what the whole recital of Israel's history has been building toward, and Paul states it as already sent to this specific congregation before he even narrates the crucifixion. The verse functions as a hinge, closing the historical survey and opening directly onto the gospel proper.

Acts 13:27-29

They that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath day, fulfilled them in condemning him, Paul locating the ignorance specifically in Jerusalem's rulers rather than charging the whole nation, the same distinction the standing ruling on this book asks the exposition to keep. Though they found no cause of death in him, a fact all four Gospels also record, they desired Pilate to have him slain, the Roman governor's own verdict of innocence not preventing the outcome the leaders wanted. When they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a sepulchre, Paul deliberately tying the crucifixion itself to the fulfillment of prophecy rather than treating it as prophecy's defeat.

Acts 13:30

But God raised him from the dead: But God raised him from the dead: a short clause answering the whole preceding sentence's catalogue of what men did to Jesus, and the turn from human rejection to divine reversal is the sermon's structural center. Every clause before this verse has told what Jerusalem's rulers did; every clause after it tells what God did, and Paul builds his entire argument for the resurrection on that deliberate contrast. The bench across the centuries reads this single verse as the pivot the whole sermon has been walking toward since verse sixteen.

Acts 13:31

He was seen many days of them which came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are his witnesses unto the people, Paul citing a body of eyewitnesses still living rather than asking Pisidian Antioch to take his word alone for an unverifiable claim. The many days recalls the forty between the resurrection and the ascension that Luke's own first volume and the opening of Acts both record. Paul was not himself among these Galilean witnesses, and his own separate encounter on the Damascus road will be the subject of his later defense speeches rather than this sermon's argument.

Acts 13:32-33

We declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise made unto the fathers God hath fulfilled unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again, Paul quoting Psalm 2:7, thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee, as fulfilled specifically in the resurrection. Two readings of that day sit side by side in the tradition: one takes it as marking the resurrection itself as a public installation into messianic kingship, the reading Paul's own sentence here favors; another reads it of the eternal generation of the Son, applied here only by way of application rather than the verse's original sense. Both readings honor the text Paul actually quotes without needing to settle the question against each other, since Paul's own point is narrower, that the resurrection is itself the fulfillment of a Davidic promise.

Acts 13:34-35

That he raised him up from the dead, now no more to return to corruption, Paul supports with two further Old Testament citations, Isaiah 55:3's the sure mercies of David and Psalm 16:10's thou shalt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption, reading the second as a promise that could not be fulfilled in David's own grave. The sure mercies of David, originally a promise of an everlasting covenant, Paul reads as guaranteed only by a Davidic heir who does not decay, tying Isaiah's covenant language directly to the resurrection. The same Psalm 16 argument appeared already in Peter's Pentecost sermon at 2:25-31, the two apostles independently reaching the same reading of the same text.

Acts 13:36-37

David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption, Paul stating plainly what any Jewish hearer already knew, that David's tomb, still shown in Jerusalem in this period, held his actual remains. But he, whom God raised again, saw no corruption, the contrast Paul needs to close his argument that Psalm 16 cannot be about David himself and must point beyond him. Peter had made the identical move at Pentecost, noting that the patriarch David is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.

Acts 13:38-39

the forgiveness of sins: Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins turns the sermon from argument to offer, the whole historical case now landing on a direct address to the congregation in front of Paul. By him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses, Paul stating in a synagogue sermon the same contrast between law and faith his letters will later develop at length. The verse does not argue against the law's own goodness, only its incapacity to justify, a distinction the bench is careful to preserve rather than reading Paul here as dismissing the law itself.

Acts 13:40-41

Beware therefore, lest that come upon you which is spoken of in the prophets closes the sermon with warning rather than promise alone, and Paul quotes Habakkuk 1:5, behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you. The original context in Habakkuk warns Judah of the Chaldean invasion as a work almost too astonishing to credit, and Paul applies the same principle, that God's present work can be too great for unbelief to accept, to the gospel now being declared in the synagogue. The citation follows the Septuagint's wording rather than the Hebrew text's own, a difference the bench notes without it altering the warning's force.

Acts 13:42

When the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath, the God-fearing Gentiles present responding to Paul's sermon with an eagerness the text sets against the departing congregation without yet saying that congregation rejected the message outright. Verse forty-three will show many Jews and proselytes did follow Paul and Barnabas that same day, so the picture here is a request for more time, not yet a verdict on the whole synagogue's response. The request itself becomes the occasion for the far larger crowd of verse forty-four.

Acts 13:43-44

When the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who persuaded them to continue in the grace of God, the response from within the synagogue itself running warmer here than the next sabbath's crowd will allow the leadership to tolerate. The next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God, a turnout Luke records as the natural result of a week's report spreading through Pisidian Antioch. The size of that second gathering is what precipitates the conflict the following verses narrate.

Acts 13:45-46

When the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming, the size of the Gentile crowd itself, not the content of Paul's message alone, triggering the reaction Luke names plainly as envy. Paul and Barnabas answer with the first of the book's three turning statements, it was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you, but seeing ye put it from you and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. The turning is local and situational, addressed to this synagogue's own rejection on this day, not a final verdict on Israel as a people, since Paul keeps the synagogue-first pattern at every next city he enters and will devote three whole chapters of Romans to God's continuing purpose for Israel.

Acts 13:47

For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth, Paul quoting Isaiah 49:6, a Servant-of-the-Lord passage, and applying its commission to the apostolic mission he and Barnabas now carry. The commanded us reads the church's mission as already spoken by God through the prophet centuries earlier, the missionaries stepping into a role Isaiah had already named rather than inventing a new one. The same servant passage stands behind Simeon's word over the infant Jesus in Luke 2:32, a light to lighten the Gentiles, tying this sermon back to the very beginning of Luke's two-volume work.

Acts 13:48-49

When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord, and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed, a sentence the tradition has long read two ways. One reading takes the word rendered ordained as God's own prior determination toward eternal life, the ground the believing then follows; another reads it of a settled disposition or readiness toward the life to come, the appointing describing an inclination rather than an unconditional decree, and both readings claim support from the word's use elsewhere in Greek. The exposition names both positions and their holders rather than settling the question the verse itself does not close, and the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region regardless of which reading a given reader holds.

Acts 13:50-52

The Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts, the socially prominent converts turned instruments of the opposition, likely through their husbands' civic standing in the colony. Paul and Barnabas shook off the dust of their feet against them, obeying the Lord's own instruction in Luke 9:5 and 10:11 for a town that refuses the gospel, and came to Iconium, the next stop rather than a retreat. The disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost, Luke's closing note on the whole chapter, joy standing directly against the persecution just narrated rather than after it has passed.