Acts 28:4

"Undoubtedly this man is. murderer, and though he has been saved from the sea, justice has not allowed him to live" Notice that these non-Christian natives are not inherently depraved. First they treated the shipwrecked victims with extraordinary kindness and secondly they had. sense of divine justice. "These barbarians reasoned from great original principles... that there was. God of justice, and that the guilty (eventually) will be punished" (Reese p. 923). One mistake they did make was to assume that all calamities are directly related to. specific sin in the life of the one suffering (see John 9:1). Some feel that by the term justice these natives mean. goddess who was called justice, the daughter of Jupiter; and it was her duty to take vengeance and to inflict punishment for crimes. "This man is. murderer" Why they thought he was. murderer is not revealed. It might be that murder was one of the most terrible crimes that one could commit and they simply assumed he had done something really bad. It might be that they assumed that justice would punish one in like manner as the type of crime they had committed. Or, seeing that murder is often committed with the hand, and as the viper had fastened to the hand, "they inferred that he was guilty of taking. life (with that very hand). It was supposed by the ancients that persons were often punished in the part of the body which had been the instrument of the sin" (Reese p. 923). "Allowed" They considered Paul as good as dead.