5 But the Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd.
Have you ever noticed that people often don’t want to do dirty work! Very few of us volunteer to do the toilets or scrub the garbage cans. If the septic tank overflows we don’t give a loud cheer and grab the shovel. Unless we live on a pig farm and make our money from that work we don’t spend our weekends shoveling and cleaning up after them. The TV show Dirty Jobs lets us see some of the dirtiest jobs around. There aren’t many of those jobs that I would want to do. Sometimes it takes extra people to accomplish a dirty job. That is what happens with some people in our text. They are upset with the teaching of Paul and Silas. They don’t have enough pull in the city by themselves, so they gather a crowd and stir them into a frenzy. They gather people who aren’t doing anything productive and get them involved, but they still are not being productive. Activity is not productivity. This sounds like some of the political rallies of our current times. I mean, who can give up a day of work to be at a rally? Who can afford to take off from productive labor in order to waste time standing around with signs? Most of us have to work in order to eat. I can’t afford to give up work to be at a noontime political rally, can you? So who are all these people who show up at these political rallies? Sounds like an army of professional rally-attendees. They follow the cameras and then grab a few locals who aren’t doing anything productive to fill out the crowd. Just my guess. But Paul and Silas could not be found. They needed someone to be the object of their mob anger, so they grab Jason at whose house Paul and Silas had been staying. They get the mob to do the dirty job, and they can’t even get that job done correctly. Are there any difficult tasks that you are putting off, that you wish someone else would do? My encouragement to you today is to just do it yourself. Don’t drag someone else in to do your dirty work. Talk directly to that person. Don’t wait!
The Arnold Journey 