People-Watching
Scripture Reading: Acts 21:27-30
People-watching is something of a hobby of mine. I find people - their habits and quirks - interesting. When I read the Bible, particularly the narrative portions, I do some people-watching there as well. While it isn’t usually the main point of the text, we can glean some insight from the details about how people act and react in various situations. This text is one where I find that to be true. I do this because I am fascinated by human behavior, but also because seeing the good and bad in others helps me to get a better understanding of my behavioral tendencies.
This narrative is about Paul’s arrest in the Temple. Paul had taken a vow on advice from some respected Jewish Christians. He had been going to the Temple regularly for several days with some other men to keep his vow. The purpose of this was to demonstrate that much of the criticism against Paul wasn’t true and that he wasn’t teaching some form of antinomianism.
Somewhere toward the end of the seven-day period of which Paul was under this vow, a group of Jews from Asia saw him in the Temple. They immediately stirred up the crowd against Paul. One of the charges they made against him was that he was bringing Greeks into areas of the Temple in which they were not allowed. They based this charge, not on actual evidence, but on assumptions they made because of having seen Paul in Jerusalem with Trophimus, who was an Ephesian Greek.
They were wrong about this, of course. I think they believed they were being truthful. The problem is, they were making their judgment of Paul, not based on what he had actually done, but on what they believed someone like him would do. In other words, they had a predetermined view of what kind of person Paul was and whatever they imagined they saw had to fit within that narrative. They took little bits of information and filtered them through their hatred of Paul and came to the worst possible conclusions about him.
This happens a lot more than we would like to think. People tend to assume the worst about people they already dislike, and the best about people they idolize or admire. We want to be able to say, “See, I told you so,” about others. Instead, we must learn to judge others on their actions, not our assumptions. This doesn’t mean we have to agree with them politically, morally, religiously, or about anything else. It just means we shouldn’t be guilty of falsely accusing someone of something just because we have those areas of difference.
