Acts 20:22 - And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there:
The word bound is what is called the Perfect Tense in Greek. It would literally read "And behold, I go having been bound."
Acts 20:24 - But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.
It says, "But none of these things move me."
I'll give it to you literally. This is literally what it says in the Greek. "I do not make an account of any one of these things."
The word account has to do with a ledger. He says I don't sit down and make a list of pros and cons, the good and the bad. He says I don't even think about what's going to happen. If God wants me to go, He wants me to go! But none of these things move me.
He says, "Neither do I count my life dear to myself." The word dear is the word valuable. So now I find out what my problem is whenever I am in rebellion to Christ, it's because I think I am valuable to me.
Paul says I don't value my life, to hold onto it like it's something you have to hold on to. I don't take any of these things into account. "Hey, you know if you go to Jerusalem, they might even kill you!" Yea, they might!
Please don't let this confuse you. This all has a reason. So therefore, the conscience is an information gathering device in the mind.
Secondly, this information forms standards of right and wrong. Now here's something we need to understand. I always thought that if a person does things against the law, or they do something wrong, it's because their conscience doesn't bother them. It's like everybody is born with a conscience from God, and that if you do something wrong against God, you're going to be convicted, like it is an automatic thing. But it isn't!
The conscience is formed by the information or data that it is given. That's why in our prison systems, we have people who have grown up in neighborhoods where it is nothing but gangs, and when one young man is asked why he killed the other gang member, he responds that if you do us wrong, we kill you!
That is his standard of right and wrong. He doesn't know anything more than that. His conscience, so to speak, is skewed but yet it is still developed out of the data and the information that he receives. He's not taught any differently.
To him, right and wrong is different than what it would be for you and I. The conscience will judge right and wrong based on the data it receives. Not everybody's conscience is programed the same.
Paul says in Verse 1, that he lived in all good conscience until now. The word good is the word AGATHOS. It's a word that is associated with spiritual things in the bible. It's not KALOS, a good conscience, meaning good and right in a human way, but spiritually, he is saying that his conscience is good with God.
Next it says, in all good conscience before God until this day. A very special word. The word until is the word ACHRI, and it means up to this very moment right now. All the time up to this very moment that I am standing before you, I have a good conscience towards God. He grew up in Judaism. How is his conscience programmed? Under Gamaliel!
Amen! We do not have the capacity in our fleshly bodies to produce anything Spiritual. The only thing we can produce is flesh. It is God's Spirit in us who produces the things of the Spirit.
"The conscience is an information gathering device in the mind.
The conscience is formed by the information or data that it is given"
The word good is the word AGATHOS. It's a word that is associated with spiritual things in the bible. It's not KALOS, a good conscience, meaning good and right in a human way!
This conscience is contributed to a new birth!
We're being made new by what we take in (However Christ spirit has to be in you to manifest such conscience.)
Your posts are helpful, I understand how long it would be on this site with 2000 characters to go verse by verse, but what you do should inspire us to study all the verses around what you post. The conscience: I understand what you are saying but I understand it a little differently. I understand our conscience which is sometimes called our heart, Proverbs 4:23, is a gift God gave us to help us overcome the curse that we received when Adam and Eve ate that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
The law and sacrifices could not cleanse our conscience, and we have been told to guard our conscience. When we repent and are born again our conscience is cleaned Hebrews 9:13-14, Hebrews 10:22 and when we slip, we are given confidence if we repent it is cleaned by the blood of Christ, 1 John 1:9. Our conscience and our mind are separate, Titus 1:15.
Our subconscious mind learns from experiences without us being aware of it. It processes information and makes connections effortlessly. We operate 80 to 90 percent with this part of our mind. This kind of learning affects our actions and choices without us consciously realizing it. My thoughts, this is the part of us that is attracted by the world, the part of our flesh that is tempted.
Our conscience can be weak and defiled 1 Corinthians 8:7 and seared like in 1 Timothy 4:1-2 and our minds can become so corrupt 2 Timothy 3:8, that God can turn us over to a reprobate mind Romans 1:28. I feel people can get to a point where their conscience is dead, and they live on the instinct of their subconscious mind for just survival in this earthly world. But there is always hope, I have seen where people have been restored and their conscience cleansed and made alive again, Jesus's blood can wash away all sins.
This is just me, but I believe our conscience is the spirit of man, Zechariah 12:11 Corinthians 2:11.
Acts 23:1 - And Paul, earnestly beholding the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.
Paul, earnestly beholding the council, and it means that he was intently staring at them. So, he's not like some guy cowering. He was staring right at them. He said, Men and brothers, because they are Jewish, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.
I don't know if you know the implications of that? It means everything that that council believes about Paul for the last 25 to 30 years, everything that they know about Paul, Paul is saying, "My conscience is clear before God and I have done everything right in the sight of God." And they want to kill him!
I want to take this apart carefully because there is some good teaching here. He says, ""I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day"
It is very important to understand from a Greek concept what a conscience is. Conscience is made up of two Greek words. The first word is SUNE and it's a preposition that means with. And the second word is OIDA. OIDA means to perceive from knowledge.
The word SUNE, with the word OIDA, means to perceive from knowledge.
Taking OIDA a step further:
GNOSKO is the Greek word for knowledge. GNOSKO is the verb that means I know, that is, I know knowledge! When you are in school, that's what you are learning, GNOSIS, knowledge! OIDA comes from GNOSKO, and it means to perceive from the knowledge. Hopefully this makes sense. You gain the knowledge first, and then you perceive from out of that knowledge.
You can use the term recognize. If you were given a description of someone before you met them, and they gave you information about what they look like and how you would know them from out of the crowd, you would have the knowledge. But as soon as you saw them, it would be perceiving that that person is the person based on the knowledge.
Acts 22:15 - For thou shalt be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard.
This is a great verse as a definition for the word witness. We don't get this by reading our English text. In the Greek text, the word witness is MARTOUS, which is where we get our word Martyr from. It also is a judicial term like some of the other terms Paul uses.
A witness is somebody who can share "What thou hast seen and heard." In Romans 15:18, Paul says "I will not speak except those things which Christ has worked out in me."
You're not a witness unless you know it to be real. Also, the reason why MARTOUS, or martyr is used for witness is because in biblical times, your death, your martyrdom is the testimony that Jesus Christ is real. No one is going to give up their life for a religious system that's not real.
Acts 22:16 - And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.
Some people use this verse to prove that this is the order or process of salvation. It says arise and be baptized so they say you have to be water baptized first. Secondly, and wash away thy sins, they say that's what baptism is for. And then thirdly, calling on the name of the Lord. The problem with that theory is that the term calling on the name of the Lord is an Aorist Participle.
Here's how it literally reads:
Be baptized for the washing away of your sins, AFTER having called upon the name of the Lord. Which means calling upon the name of the Lord happens first, and then you go out and be baptized to display and express the washing away of your sins.
Baptism is an external testimony of the internal work of the Spirit of God. So, when I submit to believer's baptism (water baptism), it is a testimony. It is an external, outward testimony of what God's Spirit has done internally when He saved me.
Acts 21:40 - And when he had given him licence, Paul stood on the stairs, and beckoned with the hand unto the people. And when there was made a great silence, he spake unto them in the Hebrew tongue, saying,
Paul stood there and waved his hand for everyone to be quiet. But there was a great silence, and he spoke unto them in the Hebrew tongue, and the word tongue is the word DIALEKTOS.
So, he spoke in the Hebrew dialect, saying,
How do you like that for an end of a chapter? Saying, to be continued!
Acts 22:1 - Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defence which I make now unto you.
Hear ye my defence. That's the Greek word for apology, APOLOGIA, which I make now unto you.
Acts 22:5 - As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished.
Here is a piece of information that is overlooked a lot, "To bring them who HAD BEEN bound." It is in the Perfect Tense in the Greek. In other words, Christians had already been rounded up and they were already in chains waiting for Paul to come in and pick them up and to lead them back to Jerusalem for them to be punished.
So, Paul was a persecutor. He spent his life trying to catch these Christians who they considered to be a cult and an enemy of Judaism.
Acts 22:13 - Came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight. And the same hour I looked up upon him.
Came unto me, and stood, literally in the Greek text, stood over me.
So, Paul obviously was sitting down or lying down. But Ananias came in and stood over him, and said unto me, Brother Saul, and here's a command, receive thy sight. This had nothing to do with Paul and his faith or anything else. He commanded him, receive your sight!
Acts 20:32 - And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified.
And now, brethren, I commend you to God. The word commend is a banking term. It is the word used for when you go make a deposit at the bank. This is a very, very important word. Paul laid down his life for his brothers.
But there came a time when he had to deposit those converts into the hands of God and physically, he would see them no more.
There comes a time that we can no longer be there for one another. And there might be some people that we would have to just pray with them and commend them to God. I'm not going to see you anymore.
Acts 21:1 - And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them, and had launched, we came with a straight course unto Coos, and the day following unto Rhodes, and from thence unto Patara:
And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them. The King James reads "gotten." They are trying to make emphasis. This is a special Greek word emphasizing very difficult to part.
It's almost like they had to be forced apart from these people because of how difficult it was. They did not want to let Paul go. In fact, the Greek word actually means to tear apart.
Acts 21:20 - And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord, and said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law:
And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord. The word glorified is in the Imperfect Tense which means that they were continually glorifying the Lord in their expressions about what Paul was saying.
(Acts Part 46):
Acts 20:22 - And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there:
The word bound is what is called the Perfect Tense in Greek. It would literally read "And behold, I go having been bound."
Acts 20:24 - But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.
It says, "But none of these things move me."
I'll give it to you literally. This is literally what it says in the Greek. "I do not make an account of any one of these things."
The word account has to do with a ledger. He says I don't sit down and make a list of pros and cons, the good and the bad. He says I don't even think about what's going to happen. If God wants me to go, He wants me to go! But none of these things move me.
He says, "Neither do I count my life dear to myself." The word dear is the word valuable. So now I find out what my problem is whenever I am in rebellion to Christ, it's because I think I am valuable to me.
Paul says I don't value my life, to hold onto it like it's something you have to hold on to. I don't take any of these things into account. "Hey, you know if you go to Jerusalem, they might even kill you!" Yea, they might!
Please don't let this confuse you. This all has a reason. So therefore, the conscience is an information gathering device in the mind.
Secondly, this information forms standards of right and wrong. Now here's something we need to understand. I always thought that if a person does things against the law, or they do something wrong, it's because their conscience doesn't bother them. It's like everybody is born with a conscience from God, and that if you do something wrong against God, you're going to be convicted, like it is an automatic thing. But it isn't!
The conscience is formed by the information or data that it is given. That's why in our prison systems, we have people who have grown up in neighborhoods where it is nothing but gangs, and when one young man is asked why he killed the other gang member, he responds that if you do us wrong, we kill you!
That is his standard of right and wrong. He doesn't know anything more than that. His conscience, so to speak, is skewed but yet it is still developed out of the data and the information that he receives. He's not taught any differently.
To him, right and wrong is different than what it would be for you and I. The conscience will judge right and wrong based on the data it receives. Not everybody's conscience is programed the same.
Paul says in Verse 1, that he lived in all good conscience until now. The word good is the word AGATHOS. It's a word that is associated with spiritual things in the bible. It's not KALOS, a good conscience, meaning good and right in a human way, but spiritually, he is saying that his conscience is good with God.
Next it says, in all good conscience before God until this day. A very special word. The word until is the word ACHRI, and it means up to this very moment right now. All the time up to this very moment that I am standing before you, I have a good conscience towards God. He grew up in Judaism. How is his conscience programmed? Under Gamaliel!
Blessings
Amen! We do not have the capacity in our fleshly bodies to produce anything Spiritual. The only thing we can produce is flesh. It is God's Spirit in us who produces the things of the Spirit.
God Bless!!!
It can be easily missed.
"The conscience is an information gathering device in the mind.
The conscience is formed by the information or data that it is given"
The word good is the word AGATHOS. It's a word that is associated with spiritual things in the bible. It's not KALOS, a good conscience, meaning good and right in a human way!
This conscience is contributed to a new birth!
We're being made new by what we take in (However Christ spirit has to be in you to manifest such conscience.)
Blessings
I hope you don't mind brother.
Your posts are helpful, I understand how long it would be on this site with 2000 characters to go verse by verse, but what you do should inspire us to study all the verses around what you post. The conscience: I understand what you are saying but I understand it a little differently. I understand our conscience which is sometimes called our heart, Proverbs 4:23, is a gift God gave us to help us overcome the curse that we received when Adam and Eve ate that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
The law and sacrifices could not cleanse our conscience, and we have been told to guard our conscience. When we repent and are born again our conscience is cleaned Hebrews 9:13-14, Hebrews 10:22 and when we slip, we are given confidence if we repent it is cleaned by the blood of Christ, 1 John 1:9. Our conscience and our mind are separate, Titus 1:15.
Our subconscious mind learns from experiences without us being aware of it. It processes information and makes connections effortlessly. We operate 80 to 90 percent with this part of our mind. This kind of learning affects our actions and choices without us consciously realizing it. My thoughts, this is the part of us that is attracted by the world, the part of our flesh that is tempted.
Our conscience can be weak and defiled 1 Corinthians 8:7 and seared like in 1 Timothy 4:1-2 and our minds can become so corrupt 2 Timothy 3:8, that God can turn us over to a reprobate mind Romans 1:28. I feel people can get to a point where their conscience is dead, and they live on the instinct of their subconscious mind for just survival in this earthly world. But there is always hope, I have seen where people have been restored and their conscience cleansed and made alive again, Jesus's blood can wash away all sins.
This is just me, but I believe our conscience is the spirit of man, Zechariah 12:1 1 Corinthians 2:11.
Keep up the good work and God bless,
RLW
I don't mind at all. And thank you for sharing your thoughts on the human conscience. Also, thanks again for your kind and encouraging words!
Blessings in Christ!
Acts 23:1 - And Paul, earnestly beholding the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.
Paul, earnestly beholding the council, and it means that he was intently staring at them. So, he's not like some guy cowering. He was staring right at them. He said, Men and brothers, because they are Jewish, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.
I don't know if you know the implications of that? It means everything that that council believes about Paul for the last 25 to 30 years, everything that they know about Paul, Paul is saying, "My conscience is clear before God and I have done everything right in the sight of God." And they want to kill him!
I want to take this apart carefully because there is some good teaching here. He says, ""I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day"
It is very important to understand from a Greek concept what a conscience is. Conscience is made up of two Greek words. The first word is SUNE and it's a preposition that means with. And the second word is OIDA. OIDA means to perceive from knowledge.
The word SUNE, with the word OIDA, means to perceive from knowledge.
Taking OIDA a step further:
GNOSKO is the Greek word for knowledge. GNOSKO is the verb that means I know, that is, I know knowledge! When you are in school, that's what you are learning, GNOSIS, knowledge! OIDA comes from GNOSKO, and it means to perceive from the knowledge. Hopefully this makes sense. You gain the knowledge first, and then you perceive from out of that knowledge.
You can use the term recognize. If you were given a description of someone before you met them, and they gave you information about what they look like and how you would know them from out of the crowd, you would have the knowledge. But as soon as you saw them, it would be perceiving that that person is the person based on the knowledge.
Acts 22:15 - For thou shalt be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard.
This is a great verse as a definition for the word witness. We don't get this by reading our English text. In the Greek text, the word witness is MARTOUS, which is where we get our word Martyr from. It also is a judicial term like some of the other terms Paul uses.
A witness is somebody who can share "What thou hast seen and heard." In Romans 15:18, Paul says "I will not speak except those things which Christ has worked out in me."
You're not a witness unless you know it to be real. Also, the reason why MARTOUS, or martyr is used for witness is because in biblical times, your death, your martyrdom is the testimony that Jesus Christ is real. No one is going to give up their life for a religious system that's not real.
Acts 22:16 - And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.
Some people use this verse to prove that this is the order or process of salvation. It says arise and be baptized so they say you have to be water baptized first. Secondly, and wash away thy sins, they say that's what baptism is for. And then thirdly, calling on the name of the Lord. The problem with that theory is that the term calling on the name of the Lord is an Aorist Participle.
Here's how it literally reads:
Be baptized for the washing away of your sins, AFTER having called upon the name of the Lord. Which means calling upon the name of the Lord happens first, and then you go out and be baptized to display and express the washing away of your sins.
Baptism is an external testimony of the internal work of the Spirit of God. So, when I submit to believer's baptism (water baptism), it is a testimony. It is an external, outward testimony of what God's Spirit has done internally when He saved me.
Acts 21:40 - And when he had given him licence, Paul stood on the stairs, and beckoned with the hand unto the people. And when there was made a great silence, he spake unto them in the Hebrew tongue, saying,
Paul stood there and waved his hand for everyone to be quiet. But there was a great silence, and he spoke unto them in the Hebrew tongue, and the word tongue is the word DIALEKTOS.
So, he spoke in the Hebrew dialect, saying,
How do you like that for an end of a chapter? Saying, to be continued!
Acts 22:1 - Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defence which I make now unto you.
Hear ye my defence. That's the Greek word for apology, APOLOGIA, which I make now unto you.
Acts 22:5 - As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished.
Here is a piece of information that is overlooked a lot, "To bring them who HAD BEEN bound." It is in the Perfect Tense in the Greek. In other words, Christians had already been rounded up and they were already in chains waiting for Paul to come in and pick them up and to lead them back to Jerusalem for them to be punished.
So, Paul was a persecutor. He spent his life trying to catch these Christians who they considered to be a cult and an enemy of Judaism.
Acts 22:13 - Came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight. And the same hour I looked up upon him.
Came unto me, and stood, literally in the Greek text, stood over me.
So, Paul obviously was sitting down or lying down. But Ananias came in and stood over him, and said unto me, Brother Saul, and here's a command, receive thy sight. This had nothing to do with Paul and his faith or anything else. He commanded him, receive your sight!
Acts 20:32 - And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified.
And now, brethren, I commend you to God. The word commend is a banking term. It is the word used for when you go make a deposit at the bank. This is a very, very important word. Paul laid down his life for his brothers.
But there came a time when he had to deposit those converts into the hands of God and physically, he would see them no more.
There comes a time that we can no longer be there for one another. And there might be some people that we would have to just pray with them and commend them to God. I'm not going to see you anymore.
Acts 21:1 - And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them, and had launched, we came with a straight course unto Coos, and the day following unto Rhodes, and from thence unto Patara:
And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them. The King James reads "gotten." They are trying to make emphasis. This is a special Greek word emphasizing very difficult to part.
It's almost like they had to be forced apart from these people because of how difficult it was. They did not want to let Paul go. In fact, the Greek word actually means to tear apart.
Acts 21:20 - And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord, and said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law:
And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord. The word glorified is in the Imperfect Tense which means that they were continually glorifying the Lord in their expressions about what Paul was saying.
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