A direct order again. I think I mentioned to you the last time that Luke is writing this in such a way to show that this evolution, if you want to put it that way, of the preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles was not something that was humanly engineered. All along the way, God was pulling the strings and it becomes very obvious that the apostles up until the time of the preaching of the gospel to Cornelius, were very reluctant to do anything outside of the area of Jerusalem and anything to the Gentiles at all. So now we have Philip who is going to be sent here to one single individual. And as I mentioned before, there is a greater possibility that this man was non-Israelitish than that he was an Israelite.
So God sent him then down toward Gaza. Gaza was the southernmost city of the Philistines and it was in the same area that we know of today as the Gaza Strip, right along the coastline, the extreme southeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. And even in those days, it was a wilderness area. So here is this lonely road leading seemingly out into the middle of nowhere and Philip finds himself walking along.
