44    Two Weeks in the Storm

Scripture: Acts 27:21-38

 Desperate state of affairs

The crew of the ship in which Paul was being carried as a prisoner to Rome had done all that could be done in the interest of averting disaster. Their undergirding of the ship’s hull (Acts 27:17) would help the vessel to withstand the violence of the seas. Their throwing the ship’s tackling overboard (27:19) would lighten the vessel and thus lessen the impact of the waves by which she continued to be tossed. Their lowering of the main sail and use of the small storm sails would help keep the vessel on a northwesterly course, away from the dreaded sandbars of the African coast.

Day after day, however, the gale winds continued unabated, and the crew no doubt had to labor continuously at the pumps in order to keep the vessel from filling with water as the waves beat over it. We can well imagine therefore that the crew must have suffered from fatigue—even as all aboard the ship suffered from the “benumbing effect of the cold and wet” (Smith). There must also have been a terror that gripped the hearts of all the men on board that ship (with a couple of notable exceptions), for, de­spairing as they were of ever reaching safety (27:20), they must have thought of death as staring them right in the face. Many of them, too, were no doubt just plain sick. Writes Bruce, “. . . anyone who has suffered from seasickness on board a well-appointed passen­ger liner of the present day can imagine something of what its horrors must have been in that storm-tossed vessel.”

Given all of that, it is likely that there was little interest in eating. Even if there had been an interest in food, however, preparation of it under those conditions would have been difficult at best. Besides, as Bruce points out, “a good part of their supplies must have been spoiled by the seawater.” At any rate, Luke informs us that, for whatever the reason, there was “long abstinence” (27:21)—and we understand that the Greek word here is one for abstinence from food, or “foodlessness.” The idea is not, of course, that the men ate nothing, but rather that for a long time they gave no thought at all to regular meals, con­tenting themselves with eating a bite now and then. Apparently they were giving in to despair; and the result was that their weakened, exhausted con­dition was only made the worse by their neglecting necessary nourishment. “This (i.e., the reference to the abstinence) completes Luke’s picture of the desperate condition of vessel, crew, and passengers” (Lenski).

Paul’s quiet confidence

The attitude of the apostle Paul and his companions must have stood out in marked contrast to the despair that prevailed on board that ship. Their unshakable faith in God must have been a wonder to the others, who had all but abandoned hope of survival. Paul was, of course, confident that, no matter how dark the way, he personally would not fail to reach Italy. The Lord Himself, after all, had assured him while he was yet in Jerusalem that he must “bear witness also in Rome” (see 23:11). Paul did not, however, know how that would be realized. Three times before, you will recall, he had suffered shipwreck, and on one occasion had even spent a night and a day afloat in the sea (II Cor. 11:25), probably clinging to “a spar from the wreck, until he was picked up or washed ashore” (Bruce). Would that happen again? Would the ship go down and many lives be lost? Paul did not know.

Message of hope

That is, he did not know until one night an angel of the Lord stood by him and said, “Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought before Caesar: and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee” (Acts 27:24).

“God hath given thee . . . .” The implication seems to be that, while the storm was raging and the crew was struggling desperately to save the ship, Paul was fervent in prayer, “not only for himself, but for the others, that God would snatch them all out of shipwreck” (Calvin). If that were indeed the case, the message of the angel must have been most gratifying to the apostle. Certain it is that he wasted little time in communicating the welcome news to the rest of the people on the ship. Up until that time, perhaps, Paul “had made no special move” (Lenski), for he knew not what lay in store either for the ship or for the passengers. With the appearance of the angel, however, that was all changed. At the first opportune moment, therefore, Paul addressed those despairing men. “This night,” he said, “there stood by me . . . the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve” (27:23).

Already before this time these pagans had had reason to observe Paul; and from his bearing during this terrible storm, from the words that he spoke, from the high regard in which he was held by the centurion, from all these things and more, they noted that he was somehow different. Perhaps al­ready they were somewhat awed by this prisoner. They were therefore prepared to give him audience. And they found that their attention was directed at once by Paul to the God whom he served. For Paul made it perfectly clear that the assurance of safety that he was happy to give them came by nothing less than divine revelation. He reminded them, too, of the previous advice he had given them, before the ship left the safety of the harbor at Fair Havens (27:21), in order that they might be “taught from what actually happened, that they ought to trust him” (Calvin).

His advice this time is that they “be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship” (27:22). That the ship would be lost in such a storm was easy to believe. But how could the vessel go down and its passengers, every one, survive? That must have seemed quite incredible. Yet, at least as far as the record is concerned, no one scoffed at Paul’s prediction. Paul assured them of his own absolute confidence “that it shall be even as it was told me” (27:25); and apparently that confidence inspired in his fellow passengers new hope that they would escape with their lives. Paul then informed them also that they “must be cast upon a certain island” (27:26), a detail that he added in order that, when they would at length reach the safety of solid ground, it could not “appear to happen by chance” (Calvin).

Land ahead

Lenski reckons that Paul spoke thus to the men on the morning before the fourteenth night. If that were so, and we are inclined to believe that it was, the men did not have long to wait before the events foretold by Paul began to unfold. For we read that, “when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and down in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country” (27:27).

Adria was a name applied to the central part of the Mediterranean Sea (“the coasts of Sicily, Italy, Greece, and Africa for its boundaries”—Smith); and the Greek word for “up and down” could better be translated “through,” since, as Lenski points out, “they held their course in the same direction.”

The land to which they were approaching was the island of Melita (see 28:1), called Malta today. It would have been impossible, of course, in the dead of night, during this storm, for the mariners to see the island. Very likely it was the “peculiar sound of the breakers, as on a rocky coast” (Jamie­son), that led them to surmise that they were nearing some land. For confirmation the sailors at once dropped the sounding lead in order to determine the depth of the sea at that place. They found it to be twenty fathoms (27:28). At six feet per fathom, that figures to be a depth of 120 feet. According to Bruce it has been calculated that they must have waited for another half hour before they “sounded again, and found it fifteen fathoms” (27:28). The decrease they found in depth removed any doubt there may have been that what they heard was actually the sound of breakers.

It was a welcome sound, in a way, for there was nothing that those men wanted more than to plant their feet on firm ground. But at the same time it was a frightening sound too, for, to the practiced ear of a sailor, the roar of those breakers could mean but one thing, and that was that there were rocks ahead. Immediately therefore the sailors cast four anchors from the stern, in the hope that the four would hold the ship till daybreak, at which time they would be able to see what they were up against as far as the coast was concerned. Lenski suggests, and verse 40 seems to confirm, that at this same time they must have raised the rudders (oar-like paddles, “one on each side of the stern”) and secured them to the sides of the ship, and also lowered the top foresail. With that, there was nothing left to do but to wish for the day (27:29).

Sailors conspire to abandon the ship

The sailors, however, were most uneasy about their prospects of reach­ing land safely. The anchors, they thought, might not hold in this gale, or the ship might go down at her anchors. And, if they did manage to survive the night, they might learn at daylight that there would be no way to beach a large ship on that shore. Discussing all these possibilities among themselves, the ship’s crew decided “to flee out of the ship” (27:30), thus making more “sure of their own safety at the expense of the others on board” (Bruce). Their flight, had they succeeded in the attempt, would certainly have been to the peril of the lives of all who remained on board, for skilled hands were indispensable to the bringing of that ship ashore, as would become clear the next morning. But the thoughts of the sailors were first of all for themselves, and they figured that they had a much better chance of reaching shore alive by means of the lifeboat than in the ship.

Their plan, according to verse 30, was to get into the lifeboat under the pretense of lowering additional anchors from the prow of the ship. “By means of the boat,” says Lenski, “the anchors of the prow would be carried as far back as possible on each side of the ship so that, if the four stern anchors began to slip, these others would grip, and all of the anchors together would hold.” Lenski supposes too, by the way, that the ship’s officers (that is, the captain and the owner of the ship, mentioned in verse 11) must have been party to the scheme, since they alone could give orders to do that which the sailors had already begun.

Paul reveals the conspiracy

How plausible was the pretext is open to some question. It may be that an alert observer could see that the casting of additional anchors in that way, in those circumstances, was either unwise or unnecessary, and that he would therefore have suspected that the sailors had ulterior motives. Whatever the case, Paul somehow became aware of the treachery. And he saw at once that the desertion of the crew would mean disaster for all who remained. Paul therefore hurried directly to the centurion and the soldiers and warned them that, “except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved” (27:31).

“Except these abide . . . .” Earlier that same day Paul had confidently announced that “there shall be no loss of any man’s life.” Is he perhaps, in this latest development, suggesting that God’s promise might come to nothing because of the duplicity of men? Is he saying that the word of God is dependent for its fulfillment on the work of men? Paul knew, of course, that, as Calvin put it, the hand of God is not “tied to means and aids.” But he understood also that the Lord, in the ordinary working out of things, does use means. It would be to their own de­struction, therefore, if men, on receiving God’s promise of deliverance, would “give themselves up to laziness and inactivity, with contempt for intervening means, or rashly rush into danger, when there is a definite reason for taking care” (Calvin). The fact is that God ordains not only the end but the means to it. God had, in other words, determined to use Paul to uncover the plot, the centurion to stop it, and then the sailors to bring the ship to shore, so that, in the end, there would be “no loss of any man’s life.”

The sailors were evidently already lowering the lifeboat into the water when Paul reached the centurion to warn him of the conspiracy. The centurion must by this time have been prepared to accept Paul’s advice with­out question, for it seems that he acted upon it immediately. Determined to make escape impossible, he ordered his soldiers to go and “cut off the ropes of the boat” (27:32). The boat thus fell empty into the water, and as it was swept away into the darkness the sailors realized that their only hope of survival now was to stay with the ship and do all in their power to bring it to land.

Paul rallies the ship’s passengers

The storm meanwhile still howled around them. The ship, being tossed yet by the waves in this wild sea, strained as it were at the ropes that were attached to the four anchors that alone kept them from shipwreck on the rocks. Fear and despair persisted, and, along with that, physical weakness and fatigue. “We may take it,” writes Lenski, “that little food had been served during these two weeks. Few had cared to eat beyond snatching a bite now and then, many of those who were not sailors had been seasick and had given up entirely.” He adds that “it was no small task to rally them.” But Paul managed. He surmised, correctly, that strenuous effort lay ahead for them, were they all to reach land safely from a sinking ship. Taking some food, therefore, was exactly what they needed for renewal of physical strength and energy. Paul understood why it was that they had not bothered, during the past two weeks, to take in a regular meal. Men who are in deep trouble, who are in great fear for their very lives, have little appetite for food. Paul therefore once more assured them of the certainty of survival. In fact, he said, “there shall not an hair fall from the head of any of you” (27:34). Not only would they escape with their lives, in other words, but they would escape without sustaining a single bodily injury. No reason did they have for being anxious. He urged them to take food, for that “is for your health” (27:34).

Paul’s witness before pagans

Having said this, Paul encouraged them by his own example. We read that “he took bread, and gave thanks to God in presence of them all; and when he had broken it, he began to eat” (27:35). Thus he not only encouraged them to eat, but he “showed all of them how to eat, namely with thanksgiving to God” (Lenski). Paul stood before a group that was almost entirely pagan, but he does not use that as an excuse for dispensing with devotions. “Praying before eating was no formality with him,” Lenski continues, “one that might be omitted at a time such as this.” Paul prayed “in presence of them all.” All the men on board that ship “saw a man of God acting like one even under dire circumstances.” Paul’s prayer, therefore, although it surely was “grace before meat,” was more than that; it was “the confession of the true God before pagans, it was preaching this God to all of them as the fount of every blessing, as their one Deliverer in their frightful danger. So simple and yet so significant an act!”

We cannot help but wonder what positive fruit there may have been on this preaching, and whether perhaps one of God’s purposes in this shipwreck was to bring these men under this preaching for three additional months on the island of Melita, in order that some, or many, of them might be brought thereby to repentance and conversion. The Lord, we know, works in mysterious ways.

Contagious confidence

The confidence, the faith, the courage of Paul was contagious to this extent that the rest also took food, till “they had eaten enough” (27:36, 38). They ate, in other words, their fill—for the first time in two weeks. With renewed energy and revived spirits they then went to work casting out the wheat into the sea, in order further to lighten the ship. The higher the ship rode, of course, the more likely it would be that they could run her into a small, shallow harbor, and the farther up on the shore the ship could be driven, in the likely event that they would have to run the ship aground. All that remained now was to wait for the day.
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