Acts 20:22-23 And now I am bound by the spirit to go to Jerusalem. I don’t know what awaits me, except that the Holy Spirit tells me in city after city that jail and suffering lie ahead.
Acts 21:4 We went ashore, found the local believers, and stayed with them a week. These believers prophesied through the Holy Spirit that Paul should not go on to Jerusalem.
Acts 21:10-11 Several days later a man named Agabus, who also had the gift of prophecy, arrived from Judea. He came over, took Paul’s belt, and bound his own feet and hands with it. Then he said, “The Holy Spirit declarers, ‘So shall the owner of this belt be bound by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and turned over to the Gentiles.’”
It is interesting that I am reading these passages around the same time that my church morning devotions online have been going through the same passages. My church pastors interpreted this as the Holy Spirit compelling Paul to go to Jerusalem, which then brings up the problem that in the next chapter, the Holy Spirit sends several people to warn Paul not to go to Jerusalem.
My pastors follow the interpretation that the Holy Spirit may have informed those Christians that Paul would suffer if he goes to Jerusalem, but they jumped the gun and assumed that this was to tell Paul not to go.
However, I agree more with the interpretation that Paul was so burdened by the lostness of the majority of his fellow Jews that he felt compelled by his own spirit to go to Jerusalem, against the advice of the Holy Spirit. Especially since Acts 20:22 is Paul himself saying that he was bound by the spirit to go to Jerusalem, not that the Holy Spirit was actually binding him to go to Jerusalem, and Acts 21:4 says that the Holy Spirit was telling the Syrian Christians to tell Paul not to go to Jerusalem. (For a detailed explanation of this view, see http://www.jrtalks.com/acts/acts21v1to21.html)
God still permitted Paul to be pigheaded and go to Jerusalem, and indeed God still used what happened for the furtherance of the Gospel -- though, not as Paul had hoped, for the Jews of Judea, but for the Gentiles elsewhere, even as his prison epistles were written as a result.
Paul had a diffferent interpretation than Agabus, Luke, and the Syrian Christians. I have a different interpretation than my pastors. But both are still following the Lord, and still united in Christ.
So, regardless of either interpretation, God is in charge, and His plans are not thwarted by human misunderstanding or desires. So we can trust in Him for that.
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