Day 8 - You Want me to do What??

The good news is that I’m on track with my reading.  The bad news is that I’m behind on my journaling by about 5 days.  So I’m picking up where I left off with my journaling (Day 8) and I’m going back through my Bible, looking at the notes I made in the margins and writing my journal entries to get caught up.  To keep consistent, I’m going to write my journal for each individual day.  I didn’t actually make many notes for Day 8’s reading, so it should be fairly short.  Anways, here we go, Day 8…

You Want me to do What??

In today’s reading we see the dispute between members of the church on whether the Gentiles need to be circumcised or not.  We see the church come to an agreement that they do not need to be circumcised and they send a letter with Paul to the believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia to state as such.

Paul meets Timothy and wants to bring him along on their journeys, so he circumcises Timothy.  It says he did this “…because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.”  I know that the decision by the church was that they didn’t HAVE to be circumcised, not that they couldn’t be if they wanted to be, but I’m trying to understand why Paul would have wanted Timothy to go through this.

I looked into this a little on-line and found the same explanation at a few different sites.  This one site called gracethrufaith.com most succinctly put it like this:

“In 1 Cor. 9:19-22 Paul said that when he was among Jews he acted  like a Jew and when among gentiles he was like them.  He said he was all things to all men so as to save some. Since Timothy was a young man whose mother was Jewish, and since they were going among the Jews, he circumcised him to help him be accepted by the Jews.”

I wonder if Timothy was like, “You want to do what? I thought you just told me we didn’t have to do that!”

Pronoun Confusion 

Between Acts 16:8 and 16:10, the wording of the writing changes from “they” to “we”.  Then we don’t see the story teller referring to  “we” again in Chapter 16, or in any of the rest of the days reading, after verse 16:16.  I was able to fairly quickly find a great resource on-line that cleared up my confusion.  Here is what the site preceptaustin.org has to say on the matter:

“The first use here of we in the narrative, instead of "they," seems to indicate that Luke, the author of the book of Acts, joined the missionary party at Troas.  Then after Paul and Silas and Timothy left Philippi, Luke changed the pronoun from we to they in Acts 17:1, which suggests that he remained behind in Philippi to watch over the infant church after Paul left.

God wanted Paul and his team to go to Troas and pick up a doctor named Luke. If God wouldn't have said "no" to Paul two times, we might not have a gospel and a Book of Acts written by Luke!

It was some six to seven years later when Luke  rejoined Paul...

But these had gone on ahead and were waiting for us at Troas. (Acts 20:5 )

Finally, in the third we section, Luke is with Paul has they sail for Italy ...

And when it was decided that we should sail for Italy, they proceeded to deliver Paul and some other prisoners to a centurion of the Augustan cohort named Julius. (Acts 27:1)"

So that all makes sense.  It's just weird that Luke doesn't specify when he joins them, he just changes the pronouns used to show that he was there.

Wrapping it Up

That’s pretty much it for Day 8.  One more day of reading Acts and then we dive into and complete 1 & 2 Thessalonians in ONE DAY!