Acts 22:23-29 (NIV)
As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air, the commander ordered Paul to be taken into the barracks. He directed that he be flogged and questioned in order to find out why the people were shouting at him like this. As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?”
When the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and reported it. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “This man is a Roman citizen.”
The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”
“Yes, I am,” he answered.
Then the commander said, “I had to pay a big price for my citizenship.”
“But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied.
Those who were about to question him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.
The commander was instantly alarmed by the crowd’s reaction to Paul’s speech. His Aramaic was limited, so he had no idea what Paul was saying to them. He only saw them listening in rapt silence as he spoke, and then they suddenly they exploded in violent rage. For all he knew, Paul had just called for the people to rise up against Rome, although the anger seemed to be directed at Paul himself.
In any case, the commander decided on the spot that Paul was a dangerous character, dangerous to himself, dangerous to Rome, and most definitely dangerous to the peace and civility of the city. Standard procedure was to interrogate the instigator under threat of physical pain, using the whip only as strongly as necessary to satisfy the inquisitors that they had heard the truth. They stripped the person and stretched them out in advance so that the “encouragement” of the whip could be applied immediately when it was deemed appropriate.
As Paul was being prepared for questioning, he spoke up. The Roman empire had a two-tiered system of justice, where those who were full citizens were afforded a much higher level of rights than the so-called barbarians who inhabited the rest of the empire. For example, it was not legal to bind or whip a citizen unless they had been formally tried and convicted of a crime. Paul, a Jew in Jerusalem, was assumed to be outside of those who were citizens.
Paul’s claim to be a Roman citizen had an immediate effect. All preparations for interrogating him stopped, and the question of what to do was immediately brought to the commander. The commander vaguely recalled Paul saying something about being a citizen when he had expressed surprise at Paul’s obvious ease in speaking Greek (Acts 21:39), but it hadn’t really registered in the heat of the moment.
Citizenship could be purchased in Roman society (as the commander indicated, often for a considerable sum), but you could also be born a citizen if your father was a citizen himself. These two classes were ultimately equal in rank and rights, but when Paul declared that he had been born a citizen, it told the commander and all the soldiers in the room that not only was Paul a citizen, but his family were too, and that could mean trouble.
This revelation stopped everything. There was nothing to prevent Paul being held while the commander got to the bottom of things, but Paul was no longer in danger of being whipped to accomplish the fact-finding.
Father, Paul hadn’t always spoken up about his citizenship before the punishment was meted out to him (Acts 16:22-24, 37), but he did this time. The only reason I can see for the difference was Your guidance. In the case of Philippi, Paul and Silas’ beating and imprisonment opened the way for the jailor and his family to be saved. Here, apparently, nothing like that was in the cards. So, Paul spoke up and the plan moved forward without his having to go through a beating (more than the crowd had already given him, at least). Help me, Lord, to always keep my ears and eyes open, so that if I do go through negative stuff, it will only be the negative stuff that is absolutely necessary to move Your agenda forward. Amen.
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