Paul and Barnabas had another experience at Lystra which was very different from that of being taken for gods. Paul’s own people, the Jews, had begun to see now that he was not like them. He did not care for the things which were as important to them as life. His entire interest lay in telling not about Moses and his law but about Christ and the new life which men could live in His power. To the faithful Jews he seemed like a traitor. They did not want to hear him preach and they were determined to make him stop telling these new things to the people, if they possibly could.

The Jews got together from the cities which Paul and Barnabas had visited and they came in a body to Lystra and stirred up the fickle, changeable peasants and set them against the missionaries who had come to help them. They dragged them out of the city and stoned them until they thought they were dead. Paul must have thought of Stephen as the stones rained down upon him and he knew now how it felt to be stoned by the very people he wanted most to help. Fortunately the stones did not kill him. They only wounded him severely and when the mob had gone away he got up and came back into the city and preached again to his friends who had learned to love him and to believe in him. The next day he and Barnabas left Lystra and went to Derbe. Then they returned and revisited all the churches they had started in Galatia—in Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and Antioch of Pisidia, after which they went back to their home-church in great Antioch. It must have been a happy moment, as the two travellers sat in the midst of the group at Antioch and told of the wonderful events of their long and dangerous journey and as they related how in the far-away province of Galatia they had built up new and flourishing churches out of people who just before had been ignorant heathen. But the happiness and joy were not long undisturbed, for some members of the church in Jerusalem came to Antioch and told the Christians there that Paul was wrong in his ideas and in his teaching, that Barnabas was wrong and that the church there in Antioch was wrong. These men insisted that nobody except Jews could be Christians. If any Gentile wanted to be a Christian and come into the church, they said that he must first be circumcised and become a Jew and he must keep the whole law of Moses. Christ came only for Jews, they said. If anybody went about teaching that Greeks and barbarians and men of all races and all customs could be Christ’s followers, that man was wrong and was a dangerous teacher. What these people said struck right against everything Paul was doing. According to their views most of the people in the church at Antioch were not real Christians. They would have to change all their ways of living. They would need to accept the whole system of Moses and all the sacrifices set forth in the Old Testament before they could have any part in Christ and His “good news.”

Paul was determined not to yield to these men from Jerusalem and he saw that he must go to Jerusalem himself and prove to the whole church there that this idea that only Jews could be Christians was false. He must make them see that the new idea which he and the Christians at Antioch held was true and right; the idea that all men everywhere, of every race and of every colour and of every custom could follow Christ and come to God through Him and live by the power of His Spirit without becoming Jews at all.

Paul and Barnabas, with one of their new converts, Titus, who was a Greek and who had never become a Jew, went together to Jerusalem to have a council with the church there and to settle forever, if they could, this important and difficult question. Paul threw himself into the discussion with all the earnestness and fire that were in his nature. He brought in Titus, as a specimen and exhibit of the kind of Christians the Greeks made when they gave their lives to Christ. Paul refused to let Titus be circumcised. He declared that Titus was already a full Christian without doing anything to make himself a Jew. As Paul talked and showed what Christ meant to him and told of the wonderful things Christ had done through him the men in Jerusalem who had been disciples of Christ were convinced that he was right and they gave him their hands as a token of their faith in him and of their regard for him. But the other members of the church were not yet ready for the new teaching and the new ideas. They were old-fashioned people who could not change their habits. They listened to Paul and were impressed with his shining face and his glowing words, but when he was done speaking they thought just as they did before!

Soon after he had returned from the great conference in Jerusalem, when he thought he had convinced the church in Jerusalem that his position was the right one, he heard that men from Jerusalem had gone to the cities in Galatia and had told his new converts there—in Derbe and Lystra and Iconium and in Pisidia—that the two missionaries, who had recently visited them and had told them about Christ, were false teachers and had led them astray. These Jerusalem men worked upon the simple-minded Galatian people until they made them really believe that Paul and Barnabas were wrong. Their new visitors told the people in Galatia that they must go on now and become Jews. They must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses and they said that if they did that they could have the privilege of enjoying Christ. But if they did not do that, then they could have no part in Christ.

It was an unspeakable shock to Paul when this piece of news reached him about his Galatian friends. He saw how helpless they had been. He realised how hard it would be to answer their visitors and he knew that these simple peasants were not to blame for being confused. But he quickly saw that he must save them. He must not let them go astray. He must come to their help and he must write them a letter that would open their eyes and show them the full truth. I am inclined to think this letter was the first of all his wonderful epistles. We must turn and see how the great leader wrote to his beloved friends and young disciples in the hill country of Galatia.