Acts 28:20-26

²⁰So I asked you to come here now. I want to meet you and tell you my story. You see, I believe in the man that we are all waiting for. He is the one that God promised to send to us Israel people. But our leaders of Israel didn’t agree with me, and that is why I’m a prisoner now, tied up with this chain.”

²¹Then the Jewish leaders said, “We didn’t get any letters about you from our Jewish friends in Judea country. And some people came here from Judea, but none of them said anything bad about you.

²²But we know that people in a lot of places don’t agree with the Christians, so we want to hear what you have to say.”

²³Then they talked together and agreed to come back on another day to hear Paul. When that day came a lot of Jews came to Paul’s house. He started talking with them in the morning, and he kept going until the sun went down. He told them about the way God wants to bring people into his family, and he showed them that God’s book says that Jesus is the man that God sent to save people. He talked to them about the words in God’s book that Moses wrote, and the words that God’s other men wrote. He showed them that they all told that message about Jesus.

²⁴Some of them believed Paul’s words, but others didn’t believe him.

²⁵So they started to argue with each other, and then they got up to go home. Then Paul told those that didn’t believe his message, “The Holy Spirit said a true word to your grand-fathers of long ago. He got his man, called Isaiah, to write it in God’s book. He wrote,

²⁶‘Go to these Jewish people and say, “You keep hearing God’s words with your ears, but you don’t understand them properly. It’s like your ears are going deaf. You keep looking with your eyes and you see God doing things, but you don’t understand it all. It’s like you closed your eyes. Your problem is that you don’t want to know God’s message. If you do understand God’s message properly you will turn around and come back to him, and then God will not say you are guilty for the bad things you did. But you mob don’t want to come back to God.” ’ That’s what Isaiah wrote.”