Acts 28:30 House Arrest

Acts 28:30 For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him.

I must confess, I have never been under house arrest. I have never had to wear an ankle monitor 24/7. I have not had to call the monitor center to get permission to go to the doctor’s office, grocery store, or auto mechanic. Nobody, that I know of anyway, is keeping track of when I walk into my back yard. I am thankful for this.

But there are tens of thousands of people whose life sounds like this. Justly or unjustly, they are shackled with judicial intrusion while they wait for their day in court. And now, with the pandemic excuses, their day in court has been delayed by over a year, and even longer.

Paul was no stranger to judicial delay. He had already spent two years in Caesarea waiting for his day in court. Two years waiting for the political leader to do their job. It wasn’t until a new governor came into that position that his time came.

I think of the waste of judicial delay, and my heart breaks for victims who wait for justice, and for those not guilty whose lives get slowly eaten away during the process. I also feel for the guilty whose lives sin and stupidity have stolen.

Out text at the end of the book of Acts, tells us of another delay. He is forced to appeal to Caesar in order to prevent his murder by the Jewish leaders. It would be like us appealing to the Supreme Court of the United States in order to avoid a trial by the corrupt local judge, only you would skip the local trial and go straight to the highest court in the land. Not really an option in our cases, but that is the way Rome did it.

And as you can imagine, there was a backlog at Caesar’s court, or at least that is what it reads like. And I can easily seeing this happening, since any Roman citizen could appeal to Caesar, and the Roman empire covered a lot of territory during this time in history. Fortunately for Caesar, citizenship was hard to come by, so not everyone under the canopy of Rome’s rule was allowed to appeal to Caesar.

But Paul, being a natural born citizen, had the right to appeal. It seems as though Paul had quite a bit of freedom. He was able to stay in a rented house, implying some financial means to afford this level of freedom.

And Paul also had freedom of association. He was allowed to have visitors, welcoming them into this house and probably providing meals and lodging for his guests. This would have been a normal part of a welcome in those days.

But this isn’t the end of the story for Paul. He isn’t silenced. The final verse of the Book of Acts, the very next verse after our text, tells of Paul unhindered and unchanging proclamation of the Good News of Jesus. It reads as though Paul set up a small institute for the proclamation of the Gospel in his rented house.

Nothing stopped Paul from proclaiming. Is there anything that stops us from proclaiming? Here Paul is once again kept in a place not his won, by people not his own, on charges not of his doing, and he keeps telling people about the liberating power of the Cross. He is restrained, but he remains unrestrained in sharing.

We still have the ability to share freely, at least most of those who read this blog still do. But there are those around the world today who don’t have this freedom. We need to find ways to support them, just a Paul had supporters who provided for him financially. We may not be independently wealthy, but compared to our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, we are wealthy. Find a way to support them.