The Road to Rome

Acts 23:11

The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Once again, the moment of crisis becomes the moment of vision. . . . And the word this time is encouraging indeed, and provides a key turning-point in Luke’s plot. Paul is not, after all, to die in Jerusalem. His sense of vocation, to go to Rome, was genuine. He isn’t promised a comfortable ride. But he will get there, and must do there what he has done here: bear witness (170).

Aaron Orendorff

We can trace what Wright calls Paul’s “sense of vocation, to go to Rome” back to the apostle’s two-year stay in Ephesus during his third and final missionary journey. Acts 19:21 reports, “Now after these events Paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome.’” This same desire is expressed in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, most likely written from Corith just after he left Ephesus (Acts 20:2-3): “I always ask that somehow by God’s will I may at last succeed in coming to you” (Rom. 1:10).

There is a great, almost comical (were it not so painful), irony to way in which God provided for this desire. Bound by the tribune in Jerusalem, with his life in profound and increasing danger, God sets into motion a series of “lucky” events that will eventually end (as all roads do) in the great city. The encouragement in Acts 23:11 is aimed at fortifying Paul for the coming storms (both literally and figuratively) and to assure him that the resurrected Christ is also the reigning Christ whose will (in this case, Paul arriving in Rome alive and ready to preach) cannot be thwarted by opposition, whatever its shape or form, but will actually be propelled by it.