Friend to the end

Luke was perhaps the closest friend of the Apostle Paul’s, observes Jordan.

“Paul had a lot of friends but then you have some people who are just different than other kind of friends,” he says. “Luke turns out to be that kind of a person.

“Luke was the closest companion and the trusted confidant that Paul had in his life. Not just a friend who was a companion but one who was one as his own soul, who would faithfully work with him and who was so intimately involved in producing a historical record . . .

“Luke’s an important dude in Paul’s life and there’s things about Luke that you learn when you watch Paul’s life that you wouldn’t know any other way, and the only one of the four Gospels writers that I know how to identify who they are personally, is Luke, based upon his association with Paul.

“In Colossians 4:14, notice how Paul describes him: ‘Luke, the beloved physician.’ Paul used that term ‘beloved’ because there were people who were dear to him; people ‘in whom my soul is well-pleased.’ Someone where there’s a soul connection. Luke wasn’t just his doctor.

“II Timothy 4:11 says, ‘Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry.' There Paul is in the latter extremity of his life. This is the last thing he wrote (II Timothy was the end of the writing of the Bible) and here you’re at the end of Paul’s life. He says in verse 6, ‘For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.’

“He’s aware that he’s going to die and Luke is with him. He was a faithful friend all the way to the end and it’s an example of that thing in II Tim. 2:2: ‘And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.’

“The relationship between Paul and Luke is extremely interesting. Luke was a scholar and a person with great intellectual prowess. He was a ‘member of the academy’; he was an educated man.  A man who knew how to function in the realm of education and thought and science.

“Just look at the introduction of the Book of Luke and what he says there in essence is, ‘I have been an exacting, thorough historian.’ He approached his work as a scholar and someone interested in the pursuit of the exactness with regard to what he’s doing. He’s a medical man; he’s a historian. He knows how to research something.

“But you remember the Apostle Paul was that kind of a person too. Sometimes you forget that. We think of the Apostle Paul running around preaching all over everywhere and causing riots and storms and getting people angry and being a jailbird and all that kind of business, but Paul also was a man of equal intellectual capacity as Luke.

“Acts 22:22. Acts 5:34. Do you know if you went to a Jewish synagogue today and talked to a rabbinical scholar, they often quote Gamaliel? He’s an ancient rabbinical scholar that the Jews even in the 21^st Century hold in repute. Paul says I was educated at the feet of Gamaliel. Acts 22:3. He’s educated in the best academies of the day. He was taught the perfect manner of the law.

“Acts 26:1. When he’s in front of the Jews defending himself, he goes right to the front. Paul says, ‘Listen, all of you guys know who I am! I was a rabbinical scholar of the first order, graduated at the head of my class. I profited.

Acts 26:3. Again he’s in front of Agrippa. Verse 2. Notice Paul was somebody they all knew. He wasn’t a wallflower who came out of the closet back here; he was a prominent leader and scholar in Israel.

“I read all that so you see Paul in his temperament and his background, was a scholar. Luke was the same. These guys had a natural kind of affinity for one another.”

*****

“Back in the ’80s, I remember being on a car trip with an Ohio preacher who told me the first gospel he suggests Bible students read is Luke, not John . “He explained to me, ‘Luke is Vol. 1 and Acts is Vol. 2,’ and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s right!’ So if you’re going to read the Book of Acts, it would help you greatly to read the Book of Luke first.

“I began with that little kernel of wisdom and went home and read Luke and Acts and I was impressed. Since then I’ve read Luke hundreds and hundreds of time with Luke and Acts together. It’s fascinating how they work together. When you only read Acts and you didn’t read Luke, you miss a lot that is in Acts because Luke writes both these books together.

“Something to remember, in the Book of Acts you’re not being told everything that happens. You’re just being told the information that’s there to point to the purpose of the Book of Acts, which is to show you the fall of Israel and salvation going to the Gentiles. But who’s writing the Book of Acts? Luke’s there; he knows what’s going on. He selectively picked out the things that he put there and selectively left out things.

“Acts 16:10 says, ‘And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.’

“When he says ‘we’ and ‘us,’ what’s the writer doing? The writer is including himself in the story, and in the beginning here, you have what are called the ‘we’ sections of the Book of Acts.

“All the way down through Acts 16, Troas all the way up to Philippi, Luke is with Paul and you have the comments here about ‘we.’ Luke joins Paul at Troas and proceeds with Paul to the city of Philippi.

“The Lord says to Paul, ‘You can’t go into Asia anymore; now you’ve got to go over to Europe,’ and Luke comes along and is joined with Paul here. He connects up with Paul’s ministry here and it’s a fascinating thing because what you find is down through 16, Luke is with Paul but then if you look at chapter 17, Luke isn’t with him. When Paul leaves Philippi and then goes to Thessalonica, then Berea, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus and Macedonia, Luke doesn’t go with him.

“When you talk about Paul being shipwrecked, hanging on night and day in the deep, you know who’s hanging on that board with him? Luke’s in the shipwreck with him! You understand why he calls him ‘beloved’?! Here’s a guy who stuck with him and committed to being with him.

“Acts 28:7. He accompanies Paul and is with him in the imprisonment! I think of that thing in Acts 16, Paul sees this Macedonian vision: ‘Come over to help!’ You ever sing that song about the Macedonian Call? The ‘man from Macedonia’ turns out to be a bunch of women by the riverside. Luke’s with him when he does that.

“There’s Lydia and those women whom the Lord opens their heart to the gospel and they get saved, and the little church at Philippi is born around that group of women converts. Paul begins to preach there and you remember that story about the woman who’s got the demon in her and she gets saved and there’s a glorious revival that takes places.

“The city’s taken over by the gospel there and the magistrates come out and they sic the law on Paul and they beat him and put him in jail. This is the time they beat him with 49 stripes save one and there’s Luke, the physician. You know he’s ministering to him. He’s with him in all that. He saw the hopes and the ministry and the excitement dashed and destroyed.

“When Paul is writing his Acts epistles Luke isn’t there, then Luke comes back and joins him again. And when he joins him at Philippi in Acts 20, he stays with Paul all through Greece, over into Palestine, when he’s imprisoned in Caesaria, when he has these voyages with the shipwrecks and all that kind of stuff, all the way to the prison in Rome.

*****

“What you begin to find when you read the Book of Acts, and you read Luke’s portrayal of Paul’s ministry in Acts, is Luke picks up terminology that reaches back into the Book of Luke and he’ll take things Jesus said in His earthly ministry and use the same terminology and ideas and concepts to show you Jesus working in the ministry of Paul. It’s a little more subtle, but it’s there. The more you read the two books over and over the more you see it.

“There’s stuff in Luke and Acts that demonstrate that they were written by a Gentile who had a Gentile perspective about Israel’s program and he has some up-front, first-hand knowledge about Paul’s ministry being a Gentile ministry and the only one of those companions of Paul’s over there at the end who would qualify to have been the author would be Luke.

“Luke’s gospel, when he wrote it, would have been thoroughly familiar to Paul. It would have been the gospel Paul was most familiar with. You remember he says in II Cor. 5, ‘Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.’

“Paul never met Jesus that we know of. Don’t you know that all of that time when Luke was doing all of that historical research, talking to all those eyewitnesses (Luke had a bedside manner to ingratiate himself), Paul was hungry to know about his Lord? I would have been.

“In Acts 20, he says, ‘Like Jesus said, it’s more blessed to give than to receive.’ You don’t read that in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Where’d he learn that? He’s got a bonafied scholar who specialized in the life of Jesus with him everywhere he went. Hanging out on that raft out there in the sea, bobbing up and down in the shipwreck. Paul was thoroughly familiar with the Book of Luke and could quote it.

“II Timothy 4:11.  At the end of the road with Paul, and Luke is there with him, look at what Paul’s interested in. Verse says, ‘The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.’

‘Troas is Luke’s home. Paul was involved in a literary interest (‘Send me the parchments—I got stuff to write!’) and Luke is with Paul when he’s involved in those things and I say, ‘Wow, here’s a guy who’s with him through all these things.’

“I think about that and I wonder, ‘Who influences who the most?’ Especially when he’s the one who’s with Paul when he paints that portrait of Israel’s Messiah being not just Israel’s Messiah, but Israel’s Messiah so God’s promise could go to the nations.”