{"id":14724,"date":"2025-11-07T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/?p=14724"},"modified":"2025-11-07T23:53:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T15:53:33","slug":"trying-to-control-a-mob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/2025\/11\/07\/trying-to-control-a-mob\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying to Control a Mob"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acts 21:30-36 30<\/sup>And the whole city was aroused, and the people ran together, and after seizing Paul, they dragged him out of the temple, and immediately, the gates were shut. <\/em>31<\/sup>And as they were seeking to kill him, news reached the tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion. 32<\/sup>And at once taking soldiers and centurions, he ran down to them, and when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul. 33<\/sup>Then the tribune came up and arrested him and ordered him to be bound with two chains, and he inquired who he was and what he had done. 34<\/sup>Some in the crowd were shouting one thing and some another. But since he could not find out with certainty because of the commotion, he ordered him to be brought into the barracks. 35<\/sup>And when he came to the steps, it happened that he was carried by the soldiers because of the violence of the crowd, 36<\/sup>for the mob of the people followed, crying out, \u201cAway with him!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Asian agitators got the “whole city” riled up, and the people dragged Paul out of the temple and shut the gate. The Asian Jews were good at stirring up crowds, like what happened in Ephesus. The Holy Spirit’s warning had come true about what would happen to Paul in Jerusalem. Most likely, from this point to the end of his life, Paul would be in some type of captivity. But seeds had been planted through his personal ministry, and many more would be planted through his letter writing.<\/p>\n

The crowd got so intense, they wanted to kill Paul and were beating him up. Roman soldiers kept an eye on the Jews in case of such an uprising like this. The Romans were always prepared, with the volatile tinder that could explode into a roaring inferno at any moment. The tribune was the leader of a cohort of a thousand soldiers. His name is given later in 23:26 as\u00a0Claudius Lysias. When he heard about the growing riot, he mobilized his soldiers. His contingent was substantial, comprising several centurions, each of whom commanded a hundred soldiers. In their eyes, it was critical to maintain peace and control of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

The crowd quieted down when the soldiers arrived. The people were not fighting the Romans but beating up one man, trying to kill him. The tribune thought Paul was the problem, to which all the evidence seemed to point. The crowd was in such an uproar that the tribune could not make sense of the situation. He had probably been trained in crowd control and policing, and determined that the best course of action was to remove Paul from the chaos to determine the problem. Paul was bound with two chains, likely his hands and feet, as Agabus had predicted (21:11).<\/p>\n

The soldiers took Paul to the barracks, which served as a form of prison. There, Claudius Lysias could interrogate Paul and find out what the problem was. The soldiers had some sense of protection of their prisoner because they carried Paul away from the crowd. Paul may have been so severely beaten by the crowd that he could not walk well, especially if there were steps and a riotous crowd. The people were still upset, despite the presence of so many soldiers. Everything seemed to be in chaos.<\/p>\n

The people shouted the same thing they did to Jesus, Away with him<\/em> (Luke 23:18). The Jews had rejected their Messiah and urged the Romans to crucify him. Now, they were rejecting the Messiah’s servant, calling for a similar fate. The events of that day are a powerful representation of the blindness of many of the Jews of that time. They had missed out on the “day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:1-2) and turned their backs on the good news of salvation God offered them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Acts 21:30-36 30And the whole city was aroused, and the people ran together, and after seizing Paul, they dragged him out of the temple, and immediately, the gates were shut. 31And as they were seeking to kill him, news reached the tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion. 32And at once taking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devotions","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14728,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14724\/revisions\/14728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/acky4.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}