Acts chapter 14

vs 1

What is a great number? Who knows. But Iconium isn't one of the churches we hear about often, so we don't know much about it.

vs 2

Seems like Jews have only two reactions to the gospel message - they either believe it, or they hate it passionately. Which makes sense, because it is fairly offensive to be told that even though you're a religious Jew, your own messiah's blood is on your hands.

vs 3

The negative work the unbelieving Jews were doing only strengthened the resolve of P & B, who hung around I assume to help and disciple those who had believed. And the miracles were what miracles always are - a confirmation of a message being given by messengers.

vs 4

Well, that's a turn up for the books. In modern society, it would be the Christians were on one side, the Jews another, and the majority of people in the city had no opinion because they couldn't care less.

vs 5

Which is quite nasty, really. Casual mistreatment through anger is one thing. But plotted mistreatment is cold.

vs 6-7

P & B don't stand for it, they run like hell. Good on them too. I mean, it's a shame for all the disciples who live in Iconium, who now have to go on without them, but that simply was the early life of Christians.

And it's not like they went home after that and packed it in - they just went to another town and preached the gospel there.

vs 8

I think, by now, we can see where this is going.

vs 9-10

Difficult verse. Firstly, how do you see faith? Secondly, how do you see that someone has faith to be healed? What does that mean? I know we say that you can't be healed without faith. Of course, we also say that you won't necessarily be healed, even with faith. In fact, we don't really believe that the gospel needs to be authenticated by miracles.

Well, in this case it did need to be. How do I know? Because it was.