James Nisbet Commentary - Acts 16:9 - 16:9

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James Nisbet Commentary - Acts 16:9 - 16:9


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

THE VISION AT TROAS

‘And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.’

Act_16:9

The three earliest missionaries of the Cross are standing on the western shores of Asia Minor. The setting sun was touching with points of gold the tops of the islands of the Gentiles. Shall they go east or west? Shall they go to India or to the great western world? That night St. Paul saw the vision and they crossed over to Europe.

I. Visions.—I think most people have had visions of some kind, they have dreamed that they should be rich or clever, or famous. I dare say many a golden ship has sailed to your door, many a golden pheasant has flown quite near. St. Paul had visions too; they were visions not of earthly riches or honour, but heavenly visions. Like the fisherman he might have said, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’ St. Paul worked for his living, for he had suffered the loss of all things for Christ’s sake. St. Paul’s trade was tent-making. We find that seven visions are recorded, visions which St. Paul saw. Here are the references: Act_9:5; Act_9:12; Act_16:8-10; Act_18:9-10; Act_23:11; Act_27:23-24; 2Co_12:2-4. In Acts 9 there is the first vision: the ‘Vision splendid’: the crowning vision that converts the soul. After a vision of Calvary we are never the same again. When by faith I see the ‘Sacred Head surrounded with crown of piercing thorn,’ the ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus which broke for love of me,’ the marks of the nails, the print of the spear, I say that is the crowning vision that transforms the soul.

II. Vision and duty must be joined together.—They were so joined in our text and in Act_26:16-18. ‘Come … and help.’ As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians—‘We are helpers of your joy.’ What charming words those are, so unselfish, so human. And how wonderful it seems that though St. Paul was poor, and had few friends and weak health, yet he seemed to be constantly thinking not who would help him and comfort him, but how he could help and comfort others. ‘Come … and help.’ There are more than we think, doubting, sorrowful, unhappy—they say, ‘Come … and help.’ ‘It was never giving that emptied the purse, nor loving that emptied the heart.’

Rev. F. Harper.

Illustration

‘Many years ago there was a terrible fire in New York which shows the worth of a cheer. The four lower storeys were in flames: the fire was mounting upwards; it was supposed that the inmates had all been rescued. Suddenly, at an open window in the fifth storey, the form of a child was seen, screaming for help. The longest ladder was instantly shot up to the window, and a brave fireman clambered up three storeys through smoke and heat, when flames belched forth from the fourth storey and enveloped the ladder. Pausing, he was questioning whether it were possible for him to proceed. The eyes of the multitude in the street were on him in an agony of suspense. One man, grasping the situation, shouted, “Cheer him! Cheer him!” A cheer that seemed to shake the walls rang out. Up through the flames the fireman shot, wrapped the child in an asbestos blanket, and, though with hair and beard mowed off by the flames, placed her in her mother’s arms.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

A CRY FOR HELP

Every one must have been struck with the beauty, and the tenderness, and the depth, which there is in that word ‘help.’ ‘Help us.’ It at once connects itself with such passages as these: ‘I have laid help upon One that is mighty.’ ‘The Lord is thy helper.’ ‘I will help thee.’ And it is a true and a blessed name for Christ and His truth, ‘Help, help.’

I. The innate desire for help.—It implies that there is, what I suppose there is in every living creature under heaven, a feeling, consciously or unconsciously, which looks out for ‘help.’ Every one has his aspirations; in every one there is a standard higher than he can reach; a sense of something beyond him, which he sees, and admires, and wishes to be, and cannot. It is the immortality of the man—it is the relict of the lost image—it is the cry of the void of a heart which once was filled. Weakness, miserable weakness, is the child of sin; and there are seasons when the hardest and the proudest feel it. You may assume it, every one who has not God sometimes has the thought, though it does not clothe itself in words, ‘Help us.’ It will be a blessed thing to you, if any one ever says to you in life, ‘You have been a help to my soul.’

II. The cry of the heathen.—If we, with all the assistance which we have about us, find it so very difficult to do what is right, and to act out the dictates of our better mind—what must the difficulty be to a heathen, who has none of these, but all the counteracting influences of evil about him? What shall a right-minded or even a pious heathen do? Is not the Gospel practically an essential to that man, to enable him to fulfil the condition, on which condition alone he can escape eternal punishment? Are we not to believe that in very many—why not in all?—the inhabitants of heathen countries, there are the goings out of ardent desire to a higher morality, and a better religion, and a truer happiness? Think you that they have not their sorrows, which yearn for a better comforting than all that is around them can give?

III. What they want is ‘help.’—And if you have ever known what it is utterly to fail of some good resolution, if you have felt the humiliation and the misery of being entirely unable to attain the point that you strove to reach, or rather, if ever you have proved the outstretched arm which stopped the fall, the well-timed word which just met the perplexity, the ordinance which supplied the wisdom, or the patience which the circumstances required, or the grace of God, but for which, then and there, you would have perished, then you may feel the power and the pathos which there is in that cry of heathenism, ‘Come over and help us.’

IV. We have the remedy; and that remedy is the simple truth as it is in Jesus. Before it, in Macedon, Lydia’s heart was opened, and the jailer’s iron-bound soul burst its fetters and was free. To that power the world owes its civilisation, man his true humanity, the Church her beauty, and we each our all. But if, having it, we dispense it not, then I see not how we can escape that ancient malediction, ‘Curse ye Meroz (said the angel of the Lord), curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.’

Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustrations

(1) ‘The passage of the Gospel from Asia to Europe is so marked an epoch in the early history of the propagation of Christianity, and the results of it have been, and are still, and will yet be, so very important to the Church and to the world, that we cannot wonder at the unusual solemnity which attaches to the incident. It was an occasion worthy of supernatural interposition; and hence probably the fact, that it is the only time, after St. Peter’s mission to Cornelius, when God introduced a miracle to guide the course of missions.’

(2) ‘The call to mission work is sometimes audible and direct, as in the cry from Macedonia; sometimes, and more often, unconscious, and therefore the more plaintive. When Mackenzie, fired by the appeals of Selwyn and of Livingstone, went forth to die in Africa, no Æthiopia had stretched out the hand beckoning him to her shores; he felt no instinctive overmastering spur to the work; only he thought some one must go; if no one else came forward, God might find a use even for him. When three Cambridge professors founded the Delhi Mission, no anxious pundits had expressed discontent with their own traditions or turned to us for truer light. Sixty years ago, when the Church was scarcely known to neglected thousands in London, the very last thing which the disheartened Bishop and sullen masses would have foreseen was that the boys of public schools and the athletes or students of our universities would haste to the rescue. Men were perishing for lack of knowledge, and knew not their need.’