Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

the apostles and saints for his personal piety and preaching ability, introduces and vouches for his
old friend, Saul; hence they receive and recognize him a bona fide apostle.
29. See how he now seeks to undo all the mischief he ever did the cause of Christ at Jerusalem.
He goes directly into those Hellenistic synagogues, i.e., where they used the Greek language, and
where Stephen had preached and suffered martyrdom, and there he espoused Stephen’s doctrine and
profession, in whose condemnation and martyrdom he had led the way (see Chapter 7). Oh, how the
laying down of their garments at Saul’s feet, when they stoned Stephen, signified his succession! So
it turned out, when Saul got back to Jerusalem, converted at Damascus and sanctified in Arabia, and
received his apostolical recognition, he immediately took up the gospel and testimony right where
Stephen laid it down under the stony shower. The same bigoted Jews who rejected and stoned
Stephen under the leadership of Saul, now reject him and plot to kill him. Hence, the brethren only
save his life by leading him away to Cæsarea and sending him home to Tarsus, where he drops out
of history several years; meanwhile, he is busy preaching the gospel in Cilicia, Galatia and Phœnicia,
of which we have no direct history, as Luke had not yet fallen in with him. Now we lose sight of
Saul, during this unknown period of his stay in his native land, until Barnabas goes and brings him
to Antioch, about a year preceding their first evangelistic tour.
PETER’S EVANGELISTIC TOURS.
31. The miraculous conversion of Saul stunned and paralyzed the aggressive persecutors of the
fallen ecclesiasticism, at the same time giving a great boom to the rising hopes of the gospel church.
“And the church was multiplied by the exhortation of the Holy Ghost,” i.e., by the exhortation
inspired and superinduced by the Holy Ghost. It is a significant fact, of which the popular church has
utterly lost sight, and to which the holiness movement is not half awake, that sinners are not
converted by the cultured sermonic preaching, but by the irregular, impromptu, spontaneous,
ejaculatory utterances and effusions of the Holy Ghost. I am an old revivalist, and have seen this
verified on a thousand battlefields. The preaching is for the revival, sanctification and enduement
of the church, who, thus flooded and inundated with the Spirit, all turn preachers, not in the modern
but the Apostolic sense (Acts 8:4), and literally encompass every sinner, pouring on him their red-hot
exhortations, electrified with sympathetic tears and dynamited with prevailing prayers. I have
actually witnessed revivals in which several hundred sinners, thus besieged by the irresistible
exhortations of Spirit-filled saints, surrendered unanimously, all crowding the altar and crying for
mercy. This beautiful and valuable passage is not translated correctly in E.V.; but such is its beauty
and force and its inspiring testimony to the miraculous efficiency of the Pentecostal gospel, that I
hope every reader will appropriate, utilize and proclaim it to others.
ÆNEAS IS HEALED.
Peter, in his rapid peregrinations throughout Palestine, inspiring the saints to grander conquests,
arrives at Lydda, down on the Mediterranean Sea near Joppa. There he finds Æneas, lying on a bed,
held fast with the paralysis of eight years. He says to him: “Æneas, Jesus Christ heals you: arise,
take up thy bed; and he arose immediately.” Of course, Peter had preached to him, praying for him
and expounding the plan of salvation, appertaining to both soul and body, and thus prepared him for
the sudden inspiration of his faith, which took hold of Jesus Christ for the healing of his body. “As