The Futility of Pious Rebellion Text: Acts 23:12-15
Introduction: When Zeal Divorces Knowledge
We come now to a passage that lays bare the nature of man's rebellion against God. It is a snapshot of impotent rage, of a conspiracy fueled by a zeal that is entirely untethered from the knowledge of God. What we witness here is not the behavior of godless pagans in the streets of Ephesus. No, this is the religious establishment. These are the men who prided themselves on their devotion to the law of Moses. And yet, here they are, plotting a cold-blooded murder under the guise of religious purity.
This is what happens when men love their traditions, their institutions, and their sense of national pride more than they love God Himself. They become capable of anything. They can take a solemn oath, a curse, which is a profoundly religious act, and attach it to a wicked and murderous scheme. This is a form of spiritual insanity. It is the delusion that you can serve God by disobeying His most basic commands. "Thou shalt not murder" is not a suggestion. But when a heart is hardened by unbelief, it can twist the most sacred things into instruments of the most profane rebellion.
The world is full of conspiracies. Unbelievers are always conspiring, and they must. They are in rebellion against the King of the cosmos, and you cannot wage a rebellion of that magnitude without holding meetings, forming committees, and making plans. But the central lesson for the Christian is not to become fixated on the details of their doomed plots. The lesson is to see the utter futility of it all. As we are told in Psalm 2, the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed. And what is God's response? He who sits in the heavens laughs. He holds them in derision. Every conspiracy against the gospel is ultimately a joke, and God is the one who gets the punchline.
Here in Acts 23, we see a small-scale version of this cosmic comedy. More than forty men, with the connivance of the highest religious authorities in the land, conspire to kill one man. They have numbers, they have institutional power, and they have a fanatical devotion to their cause. What they do not have is the one thing that matters: the blessing of God. And so, for all their sound and fury, their plot is destined to signify nothing. It will unravel, as all such plots must, before the sovereign providence of the God they are trying so desperately to fight.
The Text
Now when it was day, the Jews formed a conspiracy and bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. And there were more than forty who formed this scheme. They came to the chief priests and the elders and said, "We have bound ourselves under a curse to taste nothing until we have killed Paul. So now you, along with the Sanhedrin, notify the commander to bring him down to you, as though you were going to determine his case more carefully; and we for our part are ready to slay him before he comes near."
(Acts 23:12-15 LSB)
The Unholy Oath (v. 12-13)
We begin with the formation of the conspiracy:
"Now when it was day, the Jews formed a conspiracy and bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. And there were more than forty who formed this scheme." (Acts 23:12-13)
Notice the timing. "When it was day." The darkness of their deed is contrasted with the light of day. They are not ashamed of their plot; they carry it out in the open, at least among themselves. This is a brazen act. The word for conspiracy here points to a hostile confederacy, a band of brothers united in a wicked cause. And they seal their pact with a curse, an anathema. This was a vow of self-destruction. They were essentially saying, "May God destroy us if we fail to carry this out." They were invoking the judgment of God upon themselves to guarantee the murder of God's apostle.
This is the very nature of false religion. It uses the forms of piety to advance the cause of wickedness. They are making a sacrament out of their sin. They will fast, not for repentance, but for murder. Their hunger is not for righteousness, but for blood. This is the kind of fast God detests, as Isaiah says, "a day for a person to humble himself... for strife and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness" (Isaiah 58:4-5). These men were striking with the fist of wickedness, all while believing they were the champions of God.
And there were more than forty of them. This was no small fringe group. This was a significant faction of zealots. Zeal is a good thing when it is according to knowledge (Romans 10:2). Paul himself had been a zealot, persecuting the church out of a sincere, but sincerely wrong, devotion. But zeal divorced from truth becomes a monstrous and destructive force. These forty men are a picture of sincere, passionate, committed, and hell-bent rebellion. Their sincerity does not commend them; it makes their sin all the more potent.
We should also note, as an aside, that these men were about to get very, very hungry. God, in His providence, has a way of making the curses of the wicked boomerang back upon their own heads. They bound themselves not to eat or drink, and God was about to ensure that Paul remained quite alive for quite some time. The Lord delights in frustrating the plans of the arrogant.
The Complicit Establishment (v. 14)
The conspiracy does not remain with the forty fanatics. They immediately seek institutional backing.
"They came to the chief priests and the elders and said, 'We have bound ourselves under a curse to taste nothing until we have killed Paul.'" (Acts 23:14 LSB)
Here we see the unholy alliance between street-level fanaticism and establishment corruption. The zealots go directly to the chief priests and elders, the very men who sat on the Sanhedrin, the ruling council. And they do not whisper their plot in a back room. They announce it plainly. "We have taken a sacred vow to murder your prisoner."
And what is the reaction of these esteemed religious leaders? Do they recoil in horror? Do they rebuke these men for their bloodlust? Do they call for their arrest? Not at all. The fact that the zealots came to them in the first place shows that they expected a sympathetic hearing. And they got one. The silence of the priests here is a deafening consent. They are accessories before the fact.
This is what happens when the salt loses its saltiness. The institutions that were designed by God to be guardians of justice and truth become the facilitators of injustice and lies. The Sanhedrin had already murdered the Messiah. Having crossed that line, the murder of one of His apostles was a small thing. When a church or a nation rejects its ultimate standard, which is the Word of God, it does not become neutral. It inevitably becomes a tool for lawlessness. The priests and elders were supposed to be shepherds of the people, but they had become wolves in shepherds' clothing.
The Deceitful Strategy (v. 15)
The plot is then laid out with cunning deceit.
"So now you, along with the Sanhedrin, notify the commander to bring him down to you, as though you were going to determine his case more carefully; and we for our part are ready to slay him before he comes near." (Acts 23:15 LSB)
The plan is to use the machinery of justice to set up an ambush. They will pretend to want a more thorough hearing. They will put on the masks of due process. "We just want to get to the bottom of this, to determine his case more carefully." It is a lie, wrapped in the language of legal propriety. The Sanhedrin is to be the bait, and the Roman commander, Claudius Lysias, is to be the unwitting delivery boy.
This is how the world operates. It uses the language of justice, fairness, and inquiry to conceal its true intentions. The enemies of the gospel rarely announce that they are shutting down a preacher because they hate Jesus. Instead, they will say he is a threat to public order, a purveyor of hate speech, or a violator of some newly invented community standard. They use the law to accomplish lawlessness. They use the pretense of careful determination to carry out a pre-determined execution.
The zealots, for their part, are ready. "We are ready to slay him before he comes near." They are poised for the ambush. The trap is set. From a human perspective, Paul's situation is impossible. He is a prisoner of Rome, but Rome is being manipulated by the Jewish authorities. And those authorities are in league with a death squad of more than forty men who have sworn a religious oath to kill him. Every earthly institution is aligned against him.
God's Ridiculous Providence
But this is where the story always turns. When the enemies of God have assembled all their forces, when their plan seems airtight, when all human hope is gone, that is precisely the moment when God loves to act. He does not just thwart the plans of the wicked; He delights in making their plans look utterly ridiculous.
This elaborate conspiracy, involving the highest council in the land and a band of forty assassins, is about to be completely undone by one of the most unlikely agents imaginable: Paul's nephew, a young boy who just happens to overhear the plot (Acts 23:16). God doesn't need an army to defeat an army. He doesn't need a counter-conspiracy to defeat a conspiracy. He can use the ears of a boy.
This is a profound comfort to the church in every age. We see the rulers of this world taking their counsel together. We see the media, the academy, and the state aligning against the truths of Scripture. Their plans seem so powerful, so sophisticated, so overwhelming. And we are tempted to fear. But we must not. As Isaiah tells us, "Do not say, 'A conspiracy,' concerning all that this people call a conspiracy, nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled. The Lord of hosts, Him you shall hallow; let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread" (Isaiah 8:12-13).
The men in our text feared the wrong thing. They feared Paul. They feared the gospel he preached. They ought to have feared God. Because they did not, their entire enterprise was doomed from the start. They were fighting against a man, but in doing so, they were fighting against the God who had commissioned that man. And that is a fight you can never, ever win.
The Lord Jesus promised to build His church, and He added that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). The gates of Hell are not just a defensive structure; they are where the elders of the city would sit to issue their decrees and plot their strategies. Jesus is telling us that all the strategic planning of Hell itself, all the conspiracies of the Sanhedrins of this world, all the unholy oaths of men who hate the gospel, will not prevail. They will come to nothing. God will laugh, He will have them in derision, and He will continue to build His church, right through the middle of their failed and futile plots.