The journey to Rome proved difficult for Paul and his companions. Sailing along the Mediterranean coast was never easy, especially in winter. In a crisis, the intuition of someone who senses the breath of the Kingdom with their whole being...
The journey to Rome proved difficult for Paul and his companions. Sailing along the Mediterranean coast was never easy, especially in winter. In a crisis, the intuition of someone who senses the breath of the Kingdom with their whole being often diverges from human experience and common sense. Experience and common sense suggest one thing, intuition another, sometimes its direct opposite. This is what happened on that voyage: Paul's advice often contradicted the advice of experienced sailors. And the apostle usually proved right.
Does this mean that someone living a full spiritual life, the life of the Kingdom, knows even what they have never studied or done? Of course not. Paul does not pretend to be a sailor. He does not undertake work about which he understands little or nothing. But neither does he disregard his intuition. He knows that if God reveals something to him, he must share that revelation with others and bear witness to it.
In the end, Paul's advice does indeed help everyone survive and escape death where it seemed almost impossible to do so. But it is not only that intuition linked to revelation enables Paul to understand how to act in situations where conclusions based on logic and common sense do not work. There is also the inner certainty that one's actions are right, without which a person is powerless. Here, intuition grounded in revelation truly stands beyond comparison with logic, experience, and common sense. Logic cannot always give an unambiguous answer, and experience and common sense often prove powerless in a crisis.
More precisely, it is the person relying on them who becomes inwardly powerless. Intuition grounded in revelation, however, proves a thoroughly reliable support. Of course, it is not directly linked to logic or experience: Paul would hardly have been able to explain, for example, his advice against sailing with an apparently favorable wind. But he knew with complete certainty that they should not sail. This certainty proved entirely justified, though he could not explain to experienced sailors why they should not put to sea with a following wind.
Yet when the storm broke and all their experience proved useless, the apostle's confidence in his actions, based on that same intuition, effectively put him in command. It was he who gave the crew and passengers the instructions that ultimately helped everyone survive. There is nothing surprising in this: Paul knows that God is leading him to Rome. Therefore, He will not let him perish on the way. Paul's companions, too, can thus be relatively calm: they are not in danger of vanishing without a trace at sea.
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27:27 The fourteenth night - Since they left Crete, Act 27:18-19. In the Adriatic sea - So the ancients called all that part of the Mediterranean, which lay south of Italy.
27:30 The sailors were attempting to flee out of the ship - Supposing the boat would go more safely over the shallows.
27:31 Unless these mariners abide in the ship - Without them ye know not how to manage her, ye cannot be saved - He does not say we.That they would not have regarded. The soldiers were not careful for the lives of the prisoners: nor was Paul careful for his own. We may learn hence, to use the most proper means for securityand success, even while we depend on Divine Providence, and wait for the accomplishment of God's own promise. He never designed any promise should encourage rational creatures to act in an irrational manner; or to remain inactive, when he has given them natural capacities of doing something, at least, for their own benefit. To expect the accomplishment of any promise, without exerting these, is at best vain and dangerous presumption, if all pretence of relying upon it be not profane hypocrisy.
27:33 Ye continue fasting, having taken nothing - No regular meal, through a deep sense of their extreme danger. Let us not wonder then, if men who have a deep sense of their extreme danger of everlasting death, for a time forget even to eat their bread, or to attend to their worldly affairs. Much less let us censure that as madness, which may be the beginning of true wisdom.
27:34 This is for your preservation - That ye may be the better able to swim to shore.
27:36 Then they were all encouraged - By his example, as well as words.
27:38 Casting out the wheat - So firmly did they now depend on what St. Paul had said.
27:39 They did not know the land - Which they saw near them: having a level shore.
27:40 Loosing the rudder bands - Their ships had frequently two rudders, one on each side. were fastened while they let the ship drive; but were now loosened, when they had need of them to steer her into the creek.
27:41 A place where two seas met - Probably by reason of a sand bank running parallel with the shore.
27:42 The counsel - Cruel, unjust, ungrateful.
27:44 They all escaped safe to land - And some of them doubtless received the apostle as a teacher sent from God. These would find their deliverance from the fury of the sea, but an earnest of an infinitely greater deliverance, and are long ere this lodged with him in a more peaceful harbour than Malta, or than the earth could afford.