There are many different kinds of Christian book that get published. One of them is the missionary biography: stories that tell how someone of a previous generation took the good news of Jesus Christ to a part of the world where he had never been heard of. Frequently, these stories include some dramatic accounts of God intervening to help. There are many difficulties encountered — someone perhaps about to run out of money, and they prayed, and providentially the next ship from London carried everything that they needed. Somebody else, perhaps travelling by boat as they had to, caught in some horrendous storm — the ship was going to go down, but they prayed, and a passing ship came at just the right moment, and they safely reached the country to which they were going.
Now, I don't doubt that these stories are written to encourage me as a Christian — that God is at work in the world — but I have to admit that I frequently find them profoundly discouraging, because my life doesn't always play out the way that it does in the missionary biographies.
One friend of mine, a few years older than me but also middle-aged, has observed how, as the years pass, he needs to buy trousers with an ever-increasing waist size — until one day he stood up to deliver a talk, a little bit like this, and as he got to his feet his trouser button popped right off. As he looked back on this incident and tells the story, he reflected to himself, "This never happens in missionary biographies."
I find myself looking at life and seeing that God does not always miraculously step in and fix my problems, and I wonder what's going on. Why does he do it for them, but not for me? Is there something wrong with me? Why does their God not seem to step in and help me the way he does them?
Enter Acts chapter 27 — a chapter of vivid, first-hand account of a shipwreck, but a chapter that begs all kinds of questions. Why was the Apostle Paul caught in a storm in the first place? Why was the storm not calmed?
You might compare to similar stories elsewhere in the Bible. The Lord Jesus, remember, was caught in a storm — he simply stood up, commanded the waves to be still, the wind to turn off, and everything was completely calm. Why did that not happen here?
Or Jonah. Jonah was caught in a storm, but the reason Jonah was caught in the storm was that he was running away from his call to take the good news of God's mercy to Gentile nations. But Paul wasn't running away — he was discharging that duty with great faithfulness. He was a faithful servant of Jesus. So why a storm for him?
And to make matters worse — we could say, to rub salt into the wound — in chapter 28, verses 8 and 9, Paul is deliberately described as doing miracles that parallel those done by the Lord Jesus in Capernaum, in Luke chapter 4. Remember: in Capernaum, Simon Peter's mother-in-law is sick in bed with a fever. Jesus comes and lays his hands on her, and she's healed, and then the whole town brought their sick to be healed.
Well, here it's Publius's father — sick in bed with a fever. Paul lays his hands on him — he's healed, and everyone on the island who is sick is brought to Paul's door for healing. It's a deliberate parallel. But if Paul can do the Capernaum miracles, why can't he calm the storm?
Well, Luke tells this story extremely carefully, with a lot of attention to detail, and he tells it not to entertain us — good tale though it is, far better than Moby Dick — but to teach us. So I wanted to draw out the three main lessons that I believe Luke is teaching us from this passage.
Turn to Paul’s rescuer
Number one — and on this we will spend most of our time — turn to Paul's rescuer. Turn to Paul's rescuer. Be under no illusion: this is a great miracle that God does to rescue Paul here. Let me just show you three little details in the passage that show you what a miracle this is.
So it started in verse 26, where Paul says, "Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island." So God has told Paul that they will be rescued, but here's how it will happen. But there's this little detail — the ship will run aground not on the mainland, but on an island. God gives Paul the details in advance, so that when things happen as described, everyone knows that this was God's doing — not just a coincidence.
Or there's the fact that they landed on the island of Malta — "some island". Malta is in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. To the north, you have Sicily — the "boot" at the bottom of Italy. To the south, you have Libya on the North African coast. At this point, the Mediterranean is 260 miles across, from Sicily to Libya. Malta is a little island, just 12 miles across — and there's this ship being blown like a cork from east to west, and it just happens to hit Malta.
And then there's the fact that all 276 made it safely to shore. When you have that number of people, most of whom could not swim, thrown into the water in the midst of a storm — people thrashing around, utter chaos — that every single last one got to the shore is nothing less than a miracle.
The message is clear: God rescued Paul, and he can be trusted to rescue us. But we need to look carefully at the details of the story to make sure we learn the right lessons.
Here are four details of the rescue that God does for Paul for us to pay attention to.
Not all difficulties come from persecution
Number one: not all difficulties come from persecution.
Not all difficulties come from persecution. As we've read these chapters of Acts, we've met lots of persecution — difficulties that have come Paul's way because people don't like what he's saying. But a storm at sea is very different — this is the force of nature opposing Paul. So for us, the hardships, the things that threaten the spread of the gospel — with us or with our church — may come from persecution, but they may not. It could be illness. It could be unemployment. It could be a storm doing damage to the roof of your house. Perhaps a church is trying to buy a new building they can meet in, but every time they bid for a building, someone outbids them — time and time again. Not all difficulties come from persecution.
Paul was not rescued from the storm, but through the storm
Secondly: Paul was not rescued from the storm, but through the storm.
You see, ask the question: why did God not just turn the wind off? And the answer is: because God delivered Jesus through the storm rather than from the storm — and God treats Jesus’s followers in the same way.
These chapters of the book of Acts very closely parallel the closing chapters of the Gospel of Luke. They were written by the same person — this is volume two; Luke is volume one. And there's a parallel at the structure. So in both cases, the main hero of the story begins a journey with great resolve — Jesus to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51), and Paul to Rome. Both of them are then arrested, and both go through a series of exactly five trials before, first, the Jewish religious and then the Roman authorities — which means that Paul being thrown into the sea is a kind of death, and Paul being beached on Malta is a kind of resurrection.
So Jesus had to go through the cross before he could know the joy and rescue of the resurrection — and so the Apostle Paul had to go through the death of a shipwreck before he could enjoy God's rescue on the beach.
We are not being called to trust God to deliver us from all difficulties. If Christians promise you that God will do that for you, it is a lie. That he has not promised. But God will — absolutely will — deliver you safely through any difficulties. And even if the difficulties should kill us, God will bring us to a new shore, to a place of utter safety where there is no danger anymore.
Paul is not rescued from the storm, but through the storm. So we can apply, I think, the lessons from this storm to the various trials and hardships of our life.
But hear me rightly — I'm not just kind of spiritualising the storm and saying that your hardships in life are our little storms. No — what I'm saying is, Luke, I think, is deliberately showing us that hardships come our way that are not caused by persecution, and that God will not instantly fix with a magic wand. And therefore, when we find similar things in our lives, then we ought to learn the lessons from this storm.
God's protection does not excuse unnecessary risks
Third detail: God's protection does not excuse unnecessary risks.
God's protection does not excuse unnecessary risks.
So, verse 10 in chapter 27 — Paul says, "Men, I can see that our voyage is going to be disastrous and bring great loss to ship and cargo, and to our own lives also." And later, he gets to say, "I told you so." It would be foolish, he says, to set sail at this time of year. The Mediterranean Sea was closed to all shipping between November and February — not because the tax authorities forbade it, but because you'd be an idiot to get in a boat at that time of year.
God had promised that he would get Paul to Rome — but that does not mean he can set out in any weather and expect a calm crossing.
Ten days or so ago, I went round the castle headland from North Bay around to South Bay, and we'd had those really strong 40 mile-an-hour winds over the several days before that, and the state the sea was in — still heaving — you had to kind of watch where you're walking because you'd get the breakers coming over and drenching you if you're not careful.
So I don't know how big those waves are — the surfers amongst you can tell me later — but there was one lone surfer on a board, kind of paddling out, trying to get out to the bigger swell. And the waves looked substantially bigger than they were, so I would guess six to ten foot, but I don't know.
Either way, there they were. You get round to South Bay and there are all these signs nailed to the railings offering people who will take you on a boat trip to Whitby, to see the coast from the sea. Now, if you come in the summer months, often there'll be huge queues trying to get on those boats, because they only go every hour or two, and you want to make sure you get a place.
On this particular day, there was not one person looking to sail to see the coastline between here and Whitby — and I don't need to explain to you why not.
Sometimes we need a sermon from the front that encourages us to take more risks. Sometimes we need to say to you, "Trust God — go out in faith. Don't wait until everything is certain before you do something a little bit risky."
Let me tell you — no church plant would ever start if the church planter waited until all the details were sorted before they started.
However, this is the other side of the coin. Sometimes wisdom says a particular course of action would be reckless — and to press on regardless at that point would not be stepping out in faith; it would be folly. God would still deliver you through the consequences of your actions if you did that — but there would be consequences, and he does not promise to protect you from them.
So God's protection does not excuse unnecessary risks.
Live by God's word
Fourth: Live by God's word
The God who rescues has also spoken to tell us the path to safety. And structurally, with this story, the key—the turning point, believe it or not—is verses 27 to 32. You can trace, from that middle of the story, a symmetrical structure of growing chaos up to that point and growing resolution from that point.
This is the bit when the sailors decide they want to abandon ship and save themselves, and Paul says to the soldiers, "If they go, you won't be saved." So soldiers cut the lifeboat off and scotch the plan. You see, God had said to Paul how this would be saved. He had said, "Every life on this boat will be saved." So if those sailors fled to look after themselves and not regard anybody else, that's not the plan. The plan is: we all get saved together.
And if you disregard what God says, the plan doesn't work. If you take your future into your own hands and you ignore how God has said you can be safe, then there is no promise of safety for you.
So here is John chapter 6, verse 40. This tells you how to find eternal safety: "My Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day."
If you want eternal safety, you trust Jesus, who died and who rose again. All of which means: if you are going through a storm in life, I can promise you that God will get you through the storm. If you trust him and hold on to Jesus, he will get you through. But the safe shore he promises is the new heavens and the new earth, where there is no longer any sea.
So that's the first big lesson from this chapter: turn to Paul's rescuer.
Trust Paul's authority
Trust Paul's authority. One theme that's come up again and again in these chapters of Acts has been that Paul is the Lord Jesus's apostle, his representative and his messenger, and we should recognise that and trust his authority. It's been in almost every chapter we've looked at. We've not drawn attention to it every time, because it would get repetitive, but it's always been there—and it's really clear here.
We've already seen, have we not, that this is a great miracle that God does, bringing all 276 people safely onto the beach, exactly on Malta. But why does God save Paul?
Well, chapter 23, verse 11 says: "Take courage, Paul. As you've testified to me in Jerusalem, so you must do so in Rome." And then that's followed up here in 27, verse 24: "Don't be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar, and God has graciously given you the lives of all who sail with you."
That's why God saves Paul. He's his messenger. He wants him in Rome. And out of his kindness, the other 275 get saved as well.
But that's not the only miracle here. Later, he gets bitten by a poisonous snake and survives. Now, the islanders are a bit over-superstitious—they read a little too much into that—but nevertheless, if he had died, they would be right, perhaps, in their conclusions to say maybe this man was a serious criminal and he wasn't allowed to live, even though he survived the storm. But the converse is also true: he survived. So we're being shown that this man is under God's protection. Snakes in the Bible are a symbol of evil, and evil does not touch Paul.
And as we've seen, Paul does miracles at the end of chapter—passage—28:8–9, that deliberately reflect the Lord Jesus in Capernaum. The message is clear: Paul is God's man. God wants Paul to get to Rome. And so we should trust him. And if you want to know the gospel—the good news—as God wants you to know it, you will listen to Paul.
Picture someone from the first century, perhaps, who had a superficial familiarity with Paul and his story. They knew enough to know that this shipwreck could happen, but not the details. They would conclude that Paul is just a frail, mortal man like anybody else—nothing special about him. Don't believe the hype that says he's anything amazing.
Luke tells the story with great attention to detail to show us again and again that that is not true—that Paul is under God's protection and God's guiding hand.
The author C. S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia and many other Christian books as well, wrote an introduction to a new translation of the New Testament that was published in 1947. And in that introduction, here is part of what he had to say:
"A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of Saint Paul. It is to this effect: that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion found in the Gospels, and that Saint Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion found in the Epistles. This is really quite untenable. All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of Our Lord; all the texts on which we convey such warrants as we have for hoping that all men might be saved come from Saint Paul. If it could be proved that Saint Paul altered the teaching of his Master in any way, he altered it in the opposite direction to that which is popularly supposed.
Nor is the course far to seek. In the earlier history of every rebellion there is a stage in which you do not yet attack the king in person. You say, 'The king is all right—it is his ministers who are wrong. They misrepresent him and corrupt all his plans, which I'm sure are good plans if only the ministers would let them take effect.' And the first victory consists in beheading a few ministers. Only at a later stage do you go on and behead the king himself.
In the same way, the 19th-century attack on Saint Paul was really one stage in the revolt against Christ. Men were not ready in large numbers to attack Christ himself. They made the normal first move—that of attacking one of his principal ministers. Everything they disliked in Christianity was therefore attributed to Saint Paul. It is unfortunate that their case could not impress anyone who had really read the Gospels and the Epistles with attention. But apparently, few people had. And so the first victory was won. Saint Paul was impeached and banished, and the world went on to the next step—the attack on the King himself."
Trust Paul's authority.
Take Paul's opportunities
Number Three: Take Paul's opportunities
Take Paul's opportunities. Here's the other reason why God allows this storm to continue: because there is ministry for Paul to be done because of what he goes through. But there's a surprise here. Why is Paul not at any point reported to be preaching the gospel? He spends two weeks stranded on a ship, three months on an island, and never does he mention anything about the Lord Jesus—his death or his resurrection.
Whenever he arrived anywhere else, the first thing he would do is seek out the believers where he was. Were there no believers on Malta? And if there were—well, his long desire, according to Romans 15, verse 20, was to find a place where they'd never heard of Jesus and start a church on brand new ground. So why did he not do it here?
Even Jonah, who was trying to avoid converting Gentiles to God, ended up converting the sailors on the boat he was travelling on—Jonah chapter 1, verse 16. So why not Paul?
Now, the answer, I think, is that Paul did all these things. He doesn't construct an argument from silence. Luke regularly chooses not to repeat himself—he just assumes that what he's described before happens the same again, unless he tells us otherwise. He's shown us that Paul consistently talked about Jesus at every opportunity, and so he did so here. But he doesn't mention it here because this is not his focus.
His focus is anticipating the end of Acts, chapter 28, verse 28, where Paul says, "Therefore I want you to know that God's salvation has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will listen." And so that's what we see happening here. The Gentiles Paul spends time with listen to him, and they respect him.
So Paul stands up in the boat—verse 21—in the middle of the storm, and tells them God is in control. Paul tells the soldiers that the sailors must stay with the boat—and they listen to him. Paul then, when no one's eaten for two weeks, thanks God for the food and sets an example by eating some—and the others follow. The centurion saves the lives of everyone on board because he respects Paul, and is put up by the governor of Malta at his own expense because he was so impressed by this snakebite incident.
So God is in control. And so Paul is calm. And so Paul leads others to act in ways that will see them saving their own lives. And so Paul's calm spreads to others.
God may deliver you through the storm—not from the storm—but God is in control. And you can know that God is your loving heavenly Father. And so, as well as telling your friends the gospel, you can let them into your heart at the moment when life feels like it's utterly falling apart, and let them see what a difference it makes that you trust and know God. And that then speaks a powerful word to them that corroborates the other things you will say to them explicitly about the Lord Jesus, who died and rose again.
I can think of three Christian leaders in recent years who have been diagnosed with cancer from which they would never recover, but chose to let others into what that felt like. And as a result, people have become Christians—not because that message alone converts someone to Christ, but because it doesn't half back up what they said explicitly about the gospel.
Two of those people are now with the Lord—the cancer finished them off. The third is still living with incurable cancer to this day. Their names: Mark Ashton, Melvin Tinker, and Jeremy Marshall.
Conclusion
See, I don't know what your storms will be. But it's not just a matter of lashing yourself to the mast and hanging on for dear life. Opportunities arise for ministry in these hard times—including testifying to how your knowledge of God has sustained you.
God allowed Paul to go through this mess because he had things to teach us. There may be episodes in your life when you wonder why God does not just wave a magic wand and make all the mess go away. And maybe some of you are going through one of those seasons right now.
Let me say this: if you are one of God's people, God is with you always. He is faithful. He is in the storm with you. God may deliver you from it—or he may not—or he may, but not in the way you hope, or not as quickly as you hope. But, short time or long, he will bring you safely to shore.
In the meantime, turn to him. Trust Paul's authority—the Bible will be your reliable guide in dark times. And take every opportunity that you're given.