Clough Acts Lesson 21

Example of Divine Guidance – Acts 8:26-40

By way of review, remember that Acts is a transitional book, one of the key features of this book and you just don’t go plowing in here at fifty miles an hour and take one little verse out of context and use it to build a whole system of theology. Acts was written to show the transition from when the kingdom was being proclaimed to Israel over to the epistles where the Church is now revealed. Moving from the kingdom to the Church and that’s the theme of Acts and during that process there are thing that happen in Acts that just simply are not repeated in the rest of the Church Age, they were never intended by God to be repeated in the Church Age. And the problem is with people who insist on taking Acts and using it as normative, for all the 19 centuries of church history. You can no more do that than you can take Kings or Samuel or Chronicles and use those historical books as normative for the Church Age. You cannot use historical literature of Scripture as your norm and your standard. You use what is called didactic literature or teaching literature. In the New Testament it is the epistles and these epistles must be used to control what you’re doing with Acts, just like in the Old Testament you have to use the Torah or Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and use all of that legal legislation to control your interpretation of what’s going on in Kings, Samuel and Chronicles. Didactic literature always interprets historic literature and therefore you cannot make the error of using Acts as a norm.

We said that Acts has inherently an outline given in Acts 1:8 that “You shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the world.” The whole point of Acts is moving from the imperative mood to the indicative mood. The imperative mood is the mood of command; God gives the command to the Church that they will do certain things. By the time the Holy Spirit finishes his work in the book of Acts the Church is in fact doing those certain things. That’s the story of Acts; Acts moves the Church from the command to the obedience of the command and therefore the application to the Christian life over and over and over and over again is the principle of divine guidance, and the Holy Spirit, in the sanctifying work does this in the lives of believers throughout Acts when they’re unconscious of what’s happening.

We’ve seen this, for example, in Acts 2-6 where you have the emphasis on Jerusalem. And the last chapter in this section, Acts 7, is when Stephen develops his great doctrinal passage. All of this started in Jerusalem but it didn’t stay in Jerusalem. The witnessing left Jerusalem and moved out and broke out in Judea and Samaria because of one thing—a widow’s dispute. Of all the unlikely things for the Holy Spirit to use to guide the church, a widow’s dispute. But nevertheless, that was precisely the means by which the Holy Spirit guided Christians; the Christians were unconscious of this. The first missions did not arise because the Christians got together and asked themselves, how can we best evangelize the world? The first missions arose instead quite “by accident,” (end quote) when the Holy Spirit forcibly dispersed the Church, caused a situation to arise in which people were brought into church leadership positions who had a vision for what was going on outside the city walls of Jerusalem, the Hellenists Jews of Acts 6 and so on.

So in Acts 8 and 9 we move to the second phase of the book of Acts where we deal with the gospel in Samaria and Judea. Again, remember it is due to the Holy Spirit; this is grace operating, not men’s works. You do not add to God’s works at all, I do not add to God’s works; God has done it all in the person of Christ and our job is to respond to it, not add to it. And so in the first 23 verses of Acts 8, when this second phase of Acts begins, we have a repeat of Pentecost. Now there are going to be three and perhaps four Pentecosts in the book of Acts and it’s these passages that are then used by the neo-charismatic movement as norms and standards for the rest of the Church era. The Samaritan Pentecost was due to the Holy Spirit’s confirming to the Church that indeed the gospel was to be open to all races, all cultures, no segregation within the kingdom of God.

At this point we have to be careful we don’t Monday morning quarterback the thing and try to say well, that’s very obvious to me that in Acts 8 the Church Age is going on and so on. It wasn’t obvious to the people who were really there at the time. All they saw was the Holy Spirit doing this, doing this, doing this, doing something else and apparently what the Holy Spirit was doing was the people were being won t Christ from many weird places. And for a Jew, for Samaritans to respond to the gospel, was weird. And therefore to confirm the fact that they weren’t just seeing things but it was real the Holy Spirit put on the fireworks show in Acts 8 that He did in Acts 2, except in Acts 8 it was mediated through the laying on of hands of the apostle, that to show the close identification with Jerusalem and that in the Samaritan religious dispute that was going on at that time it was the Jewish side of the controversy that was correct, not the Samaritan side.

The Samaritan Pentecost, then, in Acts 8 cannot be used as a standard which is being done in charismatic circles, where it is argued that after you have trusted Christ, that isn’t enough, what you need is an extra shot of juice and you have to go through some experience. And this extra post-salvation experience is what really gives you the gas to last the rest of your Christian life. That’s not true at all; this is a unique situation encountered at that time. On my recent trip to California I discovered that one of the central places for the charismatic movement in the L.A. area is a place called Melodyland and I find, as you travel, that God the Holy Spirit has some very interesting parts to His humor, where he locates things. For example, I found in Israel that of all the hills in the city of Jerusalem the one hill which tradition says was the hill on which Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, it was that hill that the United Nations picked for its headquarters and so in the L.A. area where is Melodyland located? Across the street from Disneyland. So as one man who is a Christian pastor in the area said, you can choose your world of fantasy, if you get tired of Disneyland cross the street and go over to Melodyland, it’s just too versions of the same thing. There are no Melodylands and fantasies and make-believe in Acts.

So we come to Acts 8:26, the last part of this chapter, after the Samaritan Pentecost, we come to the work, the strange work with Philip. So far we’ve seen in Acts 8 and 9 two of those seven deacons, Stephen who was killed, he was the theoretician; Stephen was the man who outlined the doctrine that would enable the Church to live and to move on outside of Jewish circles. Standing at the feet and arguing with Stephen very vehemently was a young rabbinical student by the name of Saul. In Acts 9 we’re going to watch what happened to this young seminary student as he is almost forcibly converted to Christ on the Damascus Road. But Stephen was the doctrine man, Stephen was the man who came first, he was the thinker. Philip was the activist.

So now we come to the second man, one of those seven men who were great, great individuals, Philip. Philip is a Hellenist and like Stephen, therefore is open to the cultures round about, he’s aware of Gentile cities, and before this chapter is finished you’ll see Philip using his Hellenist background to take the Word of God into new areas. In verse 26 we have the first strange experience of Philip. Philip, of all the men in the book of Acts, is closest to that strange person out of the pages of the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah. Things happened to Philip that happened to no one else, and in fact are recorded to have happened to no one else except Elijah. An angel comes, Acts 8:26, “And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip,” now here we have a second form of divine guidance. So far we have seen in Acts 8 an unconscious type of divine guidance through providential circumstances. This is when God arranges this situation, this situation, this situation and so He kind of steers you through various areas. Now you have to be careful because as a Christian you cannot rely on circumstances completely. Circumstances are part of the system of divine guidance but not all of it and if you are a sucker for circumstances you will be very sadly misled at point after point in your Christian life. We have people… to site an extreme, that say well I got out doors this morning and I had a flat tire on my car and that’s just the circumstances that says God doesn’t me to study the Word today; this kind of stuff that’s just ridiculous. Circumstances have to be interpreted in the light of Scripture and circumstances are one bona fide system of guidance when correctly analyzed within Scriptural categories.

But a second system of divine guidance is this strange on we see with the angel of the Lord speaking to Philip. This is very rare but it can still happen in the world today and that is that angels who are immaterial beings can temporarily materialize. That is, they can.. .if one of them walked in here and sat down he’d be wearing clothes like you are and look like you, he might even be wearing glasses, so don’t think of them as having to kind of duck to get their wings through the door or something because angels don’t do that. When they materialize they show up as normal, every day being. That’s what happened to Sarah and Abraham, they entertained two angels and Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form, they had supper for Him and so on, sat there, nobody got spooked out because a couple of angels showed up on the scene, just normal people. They always are in Scripture directed to the believer’s physical need, never his spiritual need. It’s very interesting how that works. Angels do not minister to your spiritual needs. Angels minister to your physical protection; that is their ministry. Every, in every case in the Scriptures of the hundreds of times that angels appear they always are directed to our physical welfare, never our spiritual welfare.

In this case there’s no exception, this angel is not going to do the witnessing for Philip; he could theoretically, with the speed of light get him to this highway that’s shortly going to be in view and discuss the gospel with this Ethiopian Eunuch, but he doesn’t. Instead the angel goes through all of this rigmarole and working in this situation and that situation to bring a believer, who was trained, up to this unbeliever to evangelize. Now notice this, it occurs again and again in the book of Acts. Angels, though capable of evangelization never actually do the evangelizing; they always go to the extreme to get a prepared trained believer into a position where he can do this. And the story that we’re about to see as it unfolds is the story of divine guidance by all sorts of weird ways to get one unbeliever down at a certain place at a certain time with certain preparation to talk to a certain unbeliever. All of this, and obviously the Holy Spirit must be telling us through this account that He is concerned that believers do the witnessing. Angelic beings are not in the evangelization business. And so we come to what the angel says, he says go to this road that comes down south, the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, which is desert. [“And an angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that goes down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert.”

To show the accuracy of Scripture here, we want to pause and orient ourselves to a map of the area and also a little bit about history in the area, hopefully, for some of you maybe, it will encourage you to believe a little more than you do in the accuracy of Scripture. [He shows slides] Here’s a map of the terrain, we have the highland area, the Judean hills here, the hills of Ephraim to the north. Jerusalem is here and the Samaritan revival, the Samaritan Pentecost has occurred up here at Mount Ebal and Gerizim in the Samaritan foothills. So the gospel now has spilled northward into the mountainous areas, and now there’s one more area, according to Acts 1:8, that ought to be evangelized and that is Judea and Samaria, so Judea has to be touched. And so the Holy Spirit now is going to take Philip, who is apparently active in administrating the evangelization of Samaria, for no apparent reason, and he’s going to take him, hey, you go down to this highway, and I want you to get right about Gaza; I want you to stop there and I want you to evangelize.

Looking at spot on the map here is Gaza. Today it is an awful place of slums but just to the southeast of that point is an old Gaza. There are two Gazas, the new Gaza and the old Gaza. The Old Gaza is the Old Testament Gaza, it was destroyed by the Hasmoneans, and the New Testament Gaza was built by the Romans in 57 AD and the interesting thing is in the book of Acts you’ll carefully see it said, “Go to Gaza,” and in the King James it says, “which is desert.” And that’s this Gaza here. As the old road goes down through here, put in modern vernacular it was the last service station for a hundred miles. So everybody stopped at Gaza to get water and supplies and the usual tinkle stop or something and this was the last place. So as they left Gaza they were going into a whole new area and therefore it was very critical; it was on the major highway; this is no little desert stop, this is on a major highway in that time; it was the interstate of that day.

So the angel tells him to go down to this area, Acts 8:27, “And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship,” now this man of Ethiopia is obviously black and he represents the first black to inaugurated in the body of Christ, showing there is no racial boundaries within the body of Christ. He also appears to be partly Jewish for reasons I’ll explain in a moment but let’s see what he is first. He “had charge of all her treasure,” by the way, Candace is the title of the queen, it’s not the queen’s name. The reason for this was that at this point in history the Ethiopian dynasty had this principle that the men who ruled the throne were too uppity to get their feet wet in the actual day to day situation, so the queen mother would take over and so mama, while her son was living the life of playboy, would run the show. It’s a tremendous matriarchal society here and the queen mothers always reigned by the title of Candace, so this is not a particular queen, it’s just like Pharaoh is, that’s the way we would translate it.

So this man, we’re not told under what queen, but he was a high up official in the treasury department of this queen’s administration. He was Jewish, apparently, we can’t be dogmatic but apparently he was because of this reason. When Gentiles are first won to Christ, there’s a big hassle about in Acts 10, which comes after Acts 8, so if this man was a Gentile there ought to have been that hassle recorded in Acts 10 and 11 here, so since there isn’t we deduce that this man must have had some Jewish character so that that issue wouldn’t be raised. But there were two issues that were raised beside the Gentile issue, and that was the issue of his being a eunuch, and the significance of the fact that he’s an Ethiopian.

Now remember, Luke is writing Acts to people who knew the Old Testament and he presumes that you do, but we don’t, so we’re going to take two Old Testament passages to show you what is significant about this particular man being a eunuch and being from Ethiopia. First, Deuteronomy 23:1, if some of you are prissy, just forget about turning to this particular passage, it’s talking about castration. “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath is privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD. [2] A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD, even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD.” This is talking about infertile males. Why, under the Old Testament dispensation were infertile males forbidden from fellowship? The reason is that the main source of prosperity under the Old Testament ecomomy was through the family unit, and if a man was infertile he obviously couldn’t have children and this pictured production in God’s sight, and therefore since Israel had a typological ministry to fulfill, as for example her diet and so on, infertile males were just simply eliminated from the system.

It also may have a religious significance because castration was done in some of the religious cults of the time, mutilation; the Old Testament, as firm as it is on law and legislation, it has very, very little mutilation in it. In fact, I know of only two regulations in the Old Testament that deal with physical mutilation of the body and because of this there’s a concern for the human body that was just absent in the ancient world. So this man would have been excluded under the Old Testament dispensation of the Law from having fellowship with the nation; though he could come, he would have to go outside of the temple. He would be always the second class member.

Now the Old Testament looked forward to the millennial kingdom of the Messiah and when it did it had something to say about eunuchs. Turn to Isaiah 56:3, you’ll see that all is not going to be the same for the eunuchs forever. Males who were infertile would eventually be brought into the kingdom of God. By the way, it didn’t mean that infertile males in the Old Testament couldn’t be saved, couldn’t have a relationship with Jehovah; it just meant that physically they couldn’t be part of the community in number one status. Isaiah 56:3, here’s God reaching out in the future kingdom. “Neither let the son of the stranger, that has joined himself to Yahweh, speak, saying, The LORD has utterly separated me from His people; neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry,” of fruitless, “tree. [4] For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep My Sabbaths, and choose the things that please Me, and take hold of My covenant, [5] Even to them will I give in Mine house and within My walls a place and a name better than of sons and daughters,” by the way, that phrase in verse 5, “a name better than sons and daughters” shows you one reason that they’re thinking about a male who couldn’t have children, that his name depended on the third divine institution of the family; his progeny in history were part of him and so therefore he would be productionless without children. But here God promises that when the millennial kingdom come, that when Messiah comes, these people will be admitted to fellowship.

All right, now you know Deuteronomy 13 and Isaiah 57 and you would have responded the way thousands of Jews would have responded when they heard of this conversion of the eunuch; what? a eunuch being converted? A eunuch being accepted in this new fellowship or whatever it is that’s starting since Acts 2, because remember it wasn’t totally clear that this is the Church yet. So this opened up a whole new area that’d never been seen before. In Psalm 68:31, this is the other of the two significant things about this Ethiopian eunuch. Again, a prophecy about the coming kingdom; again looking forward to the reign of the Messiah, and what does it say? “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. [32] Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; oh, sing praises unto the Lord.” It’s a psalm and it’s celebrating this far off future incorporation of race after race after race after race into the universal kingdom of God. So that’s the second thing that’s significant. The guy as a eunuch would have been excluded by the Torah from fellowship. He is perfectly admitted, he is baptized, he is brought into this community. The second thing is he’s an Ethiopian, he’s of an utterly different country and still integrated into the system. So this is the significance of Acts 8, it’s lost if you don’t realize its Old Testament background.

Now we’ll continue with the situation in Acts 8. The point here in Acts 8 as verse 28 begins is how the Holy Spirit sets up circumstances for personal evangelism. Now don’t walk out of here thinking that every time you have an opportunity to evangelize it’s going to be like this because it’s not. This is the ideal situation; the ideal, not the usual. In most cases it will be far less favorable than this and therefore you’ve got to watch yourself, particularly if you have my weakness which is to assume that somebody knows what they don’t in fact know, and you go charging in at 60 miles an hour and forget that they just haven’t been exposed to this before so what are you talking about this when they don’t even know the basic stuff. So you’ve got to go slower than what you think and that means that if you’re in a conversation and you only have five minutes you don’t start off on some big thing that’s going to take you five hours to explain adequately. All you can do in a short time is tantalize, show people that you’ve got answers, show them that they don’t have answers and then leave it for a situation in the future when you can work with it and have time to sit down and explain things.

While I was on the trip I had a situation where I sat down with a person who was in a women’s lib type discussion about the role of women and it came up, well, we don’t allow women here in the pulpit. Well why don’t you allow women in the pulpit. I wasn’t about to start in with Genesis 2 and go through this, to somebody who doesn’t even know what Genesis is. So you’ve got to start wherever they are and if you don’t have time to do that then you’re just to have to postpone it for another day. So just relax and don’t try to come along and here’s some poor person you’re just going to cram it down their throat as fast as you can while you’ve got the chance; just back off and relax and this is what Philip is doing here.

Philip has got a tremendous situation; four things the Holy Spirit has done for Philip here that conspire to cause an excellent set of situation. First, the man is prepared; this eunuch is ready. When was the last time you were walking along the street and somebody is reading Isaiah 53 and says can you tell me who this is about? Obviously that doesn’t happen. Sometimes a person will be studying a passage of Scripture, say for an assignment or something and it might happen but generally speaking it obviously doesn’t. So in this case Philip doesn’t have to go into any extended discussion. I’m building up to a point here about baptism in a moment so that’s why this is important. This person is prepared, he has studied the Old Testament, he knows Isaiah 53, he’s studying Messianic passages, he doesn’t have a problem with the authority of Scripture. Even Christians have problems with the authority of Scripture. One of the great battles of our day is over the inerrancy of the text of Scripture.

Down through the Church Age there have been these great battles. During the first three or four hundred yeas of the Church it was who is Christ, is He true deity, is He undiminished deity or true humanity, how is this all united in one person without mixture, and so on. That was the big battle in those years. And then along came Anselm in the early Middle Ages when the battle was what did Christ do on the cross? Did Christ pay a ransom to Satan or did Christ propitiate the wrath of God. How does the work of Christ liberate people from sin; that was the great issue and Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo, Why the God-man and that was the solution at that time. Then came the Reformation and in the Reformation era the problem was all right, we understand who Christ is, He’s the God-man Savior, we understand He died on the cross, now how do we appropriate it? Do we appropriate it through the intermediate theory of sacraments in the Church or is it in a direct by faith acceptance of the apostolic dogma of the New Testament. And this was the issue; justification by faith and by faith alone, that made Luther so famous.

And then in the 19^th century came the discussions of eschatology or the problems of prophecy, how do we interpret prophetic passages of Scripture. Do we take an allegorical approach and just kind of mush it all together and come out with a amillennialism or do we come up with a literal consistent of interpretation that interprets all the passages in the same consistent fashion in which case you’re forced to take a premillennial position. And now in the 20^th the century the great debate breaking out all over the place over the inerrancy, the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy. If some of you want a good book on this, and you ought to be informed, it’s The Battle For the Bible, by Harold Lindsell. That book is causing more problems all over the country and it’s tremendous. It was written by the former Vice President of Fuller Seminary and he goes into the battle of inerrancy that touches the Southern Baptist Convention as an appeal to the Missouri Synod discussions, as it deals with Fuller Seminary on the west coast, an excellent documentation.

That’s the big argument today so you can never be sure that one with whom you’re discussing is really authoritative. That question has to be discussed because if a person does not believe in inerrancy they have to believe in the inerrancy of human reason. You see, in order to get truth you have to rest you case some place, I don’t care who you are, you’re going to rest your case somewhere so don’t come on me because I’m resting my case on an inerrant text of Scripture. You’re resting your case some place, you’ve got to if you believe in truth, so you must be holding to some sort of an inerrancy of human perception, or some autonomy of human reason and that’s where you’re resting yourself. But I don’t chose to rest myself there and orthodox Christians have not chosen to rest themselves there. We don’t rest ourselves in an errant reason, we rest ourselves on an inerrant revelation, and we further add that you can’t say anything about anything unless you do that. Now the inerrancy battle is very, very critical today, that when God speaks He doesn’t say ooh, ah, urr, I meant to say ugh, but God speaks inerrantly. He didn’t, after He issued the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, say oh, I’m sorry, what I meant to say was…. God speaks clearly and He speaks inerrantly. Can you conceive of a God who invented language that can’t use language to communicate; it’s ridiculous. The hostility to an inerrant Bible today is basically because men have rejected creation; they don’t really understand what language is and how it can be used truthfully.

So when we come to this stage this man is prepared. Philip doesn’t have paw all through the problem of the authority of Scripture and the problem of language and whether God speaks or whether He mumbles and this kind of thing. All that’s gone, the man is prepared. So that’s the first thing that’s in tremendous favor in this witness situation. And very rarely indeed will be the time when you’ll ever see anyone this prepared. Very, very rarely.

A second thing that the Holy Spirit has done, He has geographically separated this person. What do I mean by that? Philip is intercepting on the road away from Jerusalem out in the desert. That’s great; do you know why? Because if he was going from the desert into Jerusalem Philip sits there, he leads him to Christ, he tells him this, he tells him that, what’s going to happen when the guy hits Jerusalem. He gets wrapped up with the Pharisees; he’s going to get torn apart. Philip doesn’t need to follow this man up because he’s going away from religion, not toward it. So Philip’s behavior pattern of no follow up is not a normal thing either. When someone is led to Christ today they need to be integrated into some mature believer’s fellowship and they need to be taught, over and over and over. None of this business about somebody trotting down an aisle and signing a card and that’s the last we ever see of them. Geographical separation!

A third little piece of preparation for the Holy Spirit is that he is a VIP, a very important person in the administration of the Ethiopian government. That’s significant because Christianity at an early stage is influencing culture at the highest levels. Remember Luke wrote Acts and Luke was writing to a Roman audience and one of the questions that Luke hammers away and hammers and hammers away is see you Roman officials, who are trying Paul for treason, understand that wherever Christianity has gone it has touched society all the way up to the top people and if you’re going to condemn Paul, the apostle, you’d better be prepared to condemn some of your own high officials. So Acts is a testament; constantly through Acts people are led to Christ high up in the administration of the government, Caesar’s own household, and this is a theme, it’s an important one.

Now caution: this third point does not mean that you do like some parachurch organizations do when they pick up the campus directory and they say oh yeah, here’s John Snodgrass, he’s head of his dormitory, or here’s Betty Somebody, she’s the President of her sorority, and here’s somebody else, we’ll just go witness to those people and if you’re a low class character on the totem pole you just don’t rate; sorry, we’ve got bigger business. The idea is to get some big name on campus and then after this person supposedly trusts the Lord we parade them around to give their glowing testimony from one Christian meeting to another; don’t feed him the word, don’t get him into doctrine but just let him go on being kind of your sales pitch deal. This is where American human viewpoint character comes in because we’re natural business promoters and it kind of leaks over when we start dealing with spiritual things; you have to stop that, that’s not the point of this VIP thing. The point was the Holy Spirit picked him out and Philip just walked into the situation. Philip didn’t sit there as the chariots were going down the road, let’s see, is this a VIP? No, he’s got the wrong license plate, and then he picks out the guy with the right license plate and ah, that’s the one. No, that’s not the way it happened; the Holy Spirit led and it turned out in this situation the guy was a VIP but that wasn’t Philip’ motive.

Finally, a fourth thing, he’s got an open because he’s right in the text of Isaiah 53, couldn’t be in a better place. So all four of those things, there’s the ideal situation. So if you are frustrated in your witnessing situation read Acts 8 and drool. Let’s look now at what happened.

Acts 8:28, he “Was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Isaiah the prophet. [29] Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.” That word “this” shows you that Philip had been standing there by the road; Philip was not handing out tracts and witnessing to every chariot that dropped by. “This” chariot came by and the Holy Spirit, which is the third system of divine guidance we’ve seen: circumstances, the angel, and now this kind of almost intuitive leading that the Holy Spirit can give that this is the time, this is the person, this is the place, and the Holy Spirit led him to do this.

Acts 8:30, “And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Isaiah, and said,” you’d say well how could a guy run along side a chariot? It’s easy because the chariots are going slow; they couldn’t go at high speed across the Sinai Peninsula, very slowly, it was kind of like a jogging pace and Philip joined in and jogged, which by the way reminds you again of Elijah; Elisha was the one who used to jog by Ahab’s chariot. In fact he ran about 35 miles, outdid the Boston Marathon, a fantastic individual. Philip is doing the same thing, he’s running and the interesting point he hears him read; it doesn’t say he sees him reading; he hears him reading, and there’s a point about reading out loud that I think some of you, because it was never mentioned to you when you learned to read in school that you ought to be aware of, that nobody in the ancient world never read silently; that’s just an invention of modern American education.

Everybody in the ancient world read out loud and they did so for two reasons, basically. One of which is that they did not have Gutenberg’s printing press and so they couldn’t… the letters weren’t distinct. If you look at an ancient manuscript the letters were all jammed together. Well, if you look at this it’s like a crossword puzzle with the letters all stuck together; the only way you could do it was test, does this letter go with this or what. And the reason they jammed the letters together was because they had such a shortage of parchment, they couldn’t leave those spaces. So because of that, that was one reason the people would sit and they’d think and they’re read. But the real reason they read out loud was something we’ve lost; concentration. You try it some time, take a book that’s very difficult for you, and you ought to have at least 4 or 5 books in your house that are a little above your level to drive you to understand something. Don’t pick up the newspaper, that’ll pull you down. Pick up something that is good, get one of the great classics on the Christian faith, get Luther’s works, Calvin’s Institute, Augustine’s City of God, get something worthwhile and every once in a while just try to start through it. You say well I never went to college; fine, you’re ahead of the game in most cases.

You should drill yourself, discipline yourself to read this stuff and pull yourself up to a higher proficiency. And the way you can do it is if it’s a hard text is just put it in front of yourself and read it out loud so you can hear yourself and this adds to your ability to concentrate because you’re using your mouth, you’re employing much more of your body in the reading process than you are when you’re just sitting there reading silently. In fact, it’s interesting that Augustine comments that in his day he read out loud. Now if silent reading is so great it seems that these men were quite great in their own right and they never read silently. Augustine says you know, Ambrose, at one point in his writing, he says you know this guy Ambrose, he’s really something, he reads silently, which shows you obviously very few people in the ancient world never read silently. They read out loud because they could concentrate and this man is reading out loud because he’s trying to understand something that’s hard for him. And some of you have trouble with this. Sometimes you’d do a lot better when you read, when you’re doing your Sunday School, when you’re doing C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories, if there’s something that gives you a problem just sit, and don’t be embarrassed, read it out loud. Go some place where you have some peace and quiet to read it out loud and can concentrate. That’s how you read difficult literature. And the other footnote on reading difficult literature is write out what you’ve read after you’ve red it; write the essence of the thought out.

So he reads Isaiah 53 and as he does such Philip comes up and starts in with a little pun in the language. It says in the King James, “Do you understand what you read.” Well, that’s a good question but Philip has more on his mind than just asking that question. The word “understand” in the Greek is ginosko, and the word to read is anaginosko, which by the way shows you how the Greek mind thought of reading; ana means bit by bit; ginosko means to understand, and so the very Greek word to read means to know bit by bit, or sentence by sentence. So he says, “Do you ginosko what you anaginosko?” And this is just a catch word, just to catch his attention, because here he is jogging along side this chariot and this guy is kind of looking down and sitting there reading and so he’s got to do something to break open the conversation and he does so this way.

All right, classic response in verse 31, “And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me?” Now there’s the concept of the need for a teacher; obviously God recognizes that we all need teachers, that’s why He has provided them as a spiritual gift in the Church, this is why the pastor-teacher is to function this way. I once did a study of the word “pastor” and the word “teacher” in the New Testament text, just because every once in a while you get this static, even in Dallas Seminary about well, the pastor isn’t supposed to teach, we’ve got to cut everything down to 20 minutes so we can have sermonettes for Christianettes. And then we get on to the other things and the “other things” are our church basketball team and our church this and our church that. Well, some of these things may be fine but they’re not the heart of the mission. The mission is to train believers, the mission isn’t even to have evangelistic invitations; the local church exists as one training camp, basically. You say I thought it was for worship. Worship can’t occur without training. Worship will occur in a training environment, it’s just an automatic byproduct of it. So the major mission of the local church is training; we cannot get enough training, over and over and over. Everyone needs daily training in the Word of God. I don’t know about you but I’ve found if I do not read the Scripture or think about it for more than 48 hours I’m just out of it.

So you have got to be in the text of Scripture constantly, either through tapes, reading yourself or some way, and the point is, you need a teacher. Everyone needs a teacher; pastor-teachers need teachers, from the men generations that have gone before.

So he says I need a man who should guide me. So Philip sits up with him. [31b, “And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him.”] And [32] “the place of the scripture which he read was this, [and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth].” Now the language in verse 32 indicates he had been reading the chapter verse by verse, verse by verse, down through, and he had gotten to this place, “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter;” the verb “read” that you see just before the quote is in the imperfect tense which means the place of the Scripture which he was right then that moment reading was, and this is it. So what do you have in Acts 8; tremendous juxtaposition of circumstances. You’ve got the eunuch, you’ve got him in the right place, going toward the desert, you’ve got Philip there who was a prepared man. You’ve got the guy reading and his eyeball is just right on the right part of the right verse at the right time. So this is the beautiful situation. And notice again that the Holy Spirit and the angel do not tell Philip what to tell him. All the Holy Spirit and the angel do is to arrange the circumstances; Philip has to interpret Isaiah 53. Now where did Philip get that training? He got it from the men who trained him who got it from the Lord Jesus Christ. Which again shows you something; you do not walk into a witnessing situation stumbling around; you have got to know something because the Holy Spirit may arrange a situation but the Holy Spirit is not going to make up for your laziness, for your lack of training, for your lack of stick-to-it-iveness, for your lack of exposure to the Word of God. The Holy Spirit can do many things and He could do that but He won’t do that because He wants you to do it; He wants me to do it; we are the members of the body of Christ and we are to do the work of the body of Christ and the angels are not part of the body of Christ and therefore they do not do this work. They only help us. [33, “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth.”]

Acts 8:34, “And the eunuch answered Philip, and said, I pray thee, of whom speak the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?” Interesting, isn’t it, that in the 20^th century liberal scholarship has said that Isaiah 53 speaks of Isaiah, that he speaks of himself here, and isn’t it interesting that the eunuch 19 centuries before modern liberals, he anticipated this possible interpretation and it was rejected by Philip.

Verse 35, “Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus.” Please notice the sequence of events very carefully; Philip begins to preach to the man out of the Old Testament; he does not start in with Jesus stories. He starts back with the basic categories of what God is like, what man is like, what sin is like, what atonement is like, and then he comes and he discusses Jesus Christ. You cannot, as I have said time and time again, you cannot win someone to Christ by telling them immediately about Jesus Christ. You’ve got to prepare them, prepare them, prepare them by going into the basic categories. While I was at the conference the other man who was teaching with me was discussing the matter of the charismatic movement and I could watch the reaction. The first night these two girls sat in front of me, she was real riled up, boy, he really puts down women, doesn’t he, talking to this other girl. There was another girl who had a brother in the charismatic movement and it was obviously clear from Scripture that this wasn’t too kosher and she was stressed by this, and later on we got in a group discussion and it turned out that what really was bothering her, which shows you again you can’t go too fast, it wasn’t the charismatic movement at all that was bothering her; what was bothering her is that she had a basic notion that language and speaking were not the highest forms of communication. She had the idea that to be really in tune with God you had to have some sort of a feeling, when that’s exactly the reverse of Scripture. The whole battle of our generation is over the battle of language; is language an adequate system for communication. How do you know somebody; you can be infatuated with somebody; that’s because you’ve got an image up here that doesn’t fit what they really are like. The only way you get to know somebody is talk to them, communication. That’s how you get to know.

Same thing with God. The only way we get to know God is by communication; if God really doesn’t communicate like modern theology says He doesn’t, then we really are in a mess because all God does is He kind on pantomimes, He kind of silently plays this game of Charades with us all down through history. So language is a key thing here, behind all this. Now this man is completely open, he doesn’t have any of these hang-ups and Philip can go on and Philip starts with the Old Testament. He starts where the man is; the man is in the Old Testament, Philip starts with the Old Testament. You just don’t ram, cram and jam it. You have to learn to just relax and take things slowly. Philip began to do this, and we don’t know how long it took, some process of time obviously. And the process of time is most interesting because by the end of verse 35, before verse 36, this eunuch had believed; he’d been born again, he became a Christian. [36] “And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? [37] And Philip said, If thou believe with all thine heart, thou may. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. [38] And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.”

This little episode on baptism shows us some things; first of all, it shows you that baptism does not save. See, the eunuch had trusted Christ somewhere along while they were in the chariot. They were out where? Driving across the Great Lakes? No, they were driving across the desert. Now obviously if you go across the desert you have an oasis here and an oasis here, now if baptism is the only thing that saves you, you’d better not be trapped between two oases. What you going to do, wait to be saved to you reach the nearest oasis? It’s ridiculous. Obviously this person trusted in Christ and they were driving in the chariot until they came to an oasis or a wadi that had some water left in it, and then they went down to this dirty place, not clean water at all in that areas, just a dirty old wadi, and that’s where he was baptized.

And so when he got to the place he asked a funny question; you’d think he would have asked well, Philip, can I be baptized now; but he asked the question in kind of an odd way, he says “what is it that hinders me from being baptized,” the emphasis on something hindering him. Now it turns out since we know Luke wrote this that what we have here preserved for us is Luke pointing back to his readers how baptism was done back in those days; those early days of the Church. Baptism was done very close to salvation in this situation. Here is the point where the guy trusted in Christ, he’s driving down the road, he comes to this oasis and he’s baptized here. Maybe this took an hour, so for an hour, it was an hour between the time he trusted in Christ and the time he was baptized. Now during this hour obviously if he died and got in a chariot accident or something what would have happened if baptism saved? But baptism doesn’t save; baptism is an outer testament to salvation that occurred back here.

But there’s something else here, we have to admit, if we’re honest, that water baptism and the act of salvation come this close in the early days of the Church; very, very close. This is why it’s so difficult to argue with someone from Acts that water baptism doesn’t, in fact, have something to do with salvation because it’s obviously so close to salvation. But there’s an answer for this… there’s an answer and the answer is very, very simple. The reason that water baptism were so close in the early days of the Church is because the people that were being won to Christ were so mature in the Word. Look at how much doctrine this guy knew; this guy could be trust in Christ and be baptized like that because he knew so much. It was like having a can of gasoline and you just drop the match in and poof, that’s what happens. But today what happens? Somebody just gets kind of dragged into the kingdom and then we have to sit there and teach doctrine, doctrine, doctrine, before they get stabilized, and then water baptism. So in our time water baptism and the point of salvation have diverged due to the need for follow up teaching.

Now this follow up teaching was done in a very early stage and those of you with modern translations will note that verse 37 either is not in your text or it will have a footnote or a cross reference saying that it should be omitted. Verse 37 only occurs in a very small number of manuscripts that were written later, and therefore we do not consider verse 37 original. The original; the original text goes from verse 36 to 38, “And he commanded the chariot to stand still; and they went down into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.” But does that mean verse 37 isn’t important? Verse 37 is very important because verse 37 was put in there about the third or fourth century. What does it tell us? Just think a minute; some guy when he was writing the manuscript of this portion slipped verse 37 in there by way of explanation to his readers as to how baptism was conducted. Now what does verse 37 tell you? Verse 37 tells you that as late as the third and fourth century they were still baptizing on the basis of personal faith in Christ. It was still believer’s baptism. Verse 37 shows you that apparently at that time the Church interrogated, they would ask the candidate, do you believe with all your heart that Jesus is the Christ, and the candidate would answer: I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that is the affirmation of faith, and before that occurred no baptism could be administered. Baptism had to follow this confession of faith in Christ. So verse 37, though not in the original text, is an interesting point about early Christian practice.

Now after the baptism a weird thing happens to Philip. Acts 8:39, “And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing. [40] But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached in all the cities, till he came to Caesarea.”

Turn to 2 Kings 2:16, we’re going to interpret that strange word, “the Spirit of the Lord caught up Philip.” Some people say well, it just means the Spirit of the Lord guided Philip, you know, Philip was there, he had this intuition he ought to go north. Huh-un, that’s not the interpretation. The interpretation goes back to a picture out of the Old Testament. This is a discussion with Elisha. “And they said unto him, Behold, now, there are with thy servants fifty strong men; let them go, we pray thee, and seek thy master, lest perhaps the Spirit of the LORD has caught him up, and cast him upon some mountain, or into some valley.” Now look at that, that’s geographical displacement from point A to point B by some supernatural system of transportation. What it was we do not know. All we know is that in the Old Testament Elijah and Elisha both experienced this strange, what we want to call translation horizontally, horizontal translation from point A to point B. How, why it happened no one knows; all we know is that it occurred and Philip experienced this. And the strange thing about this man Philip is he later had four daughters who had the gift of prophecy, much like the people who surrounded Elisha. So Philip is one of these strange individuals.

And finally, where does Philip wind up after it’s all over? After this translation experience he winds up in Caesarea and we want to look at a few more slides to show you the long-range result of this entire episode of Acts 8. [He shows slides] After all this divine guidance and arranging circumstances and all the rest of it, something very interesting had happened. I’m sure Philip never thought of this while it was happening; this happened afterwards, but along the coast of the Mediterranean there’s a seaport, a very ancient seaport; Caesarea (not Caesarea Philippi but Caesarea). Caesarea, named obviously after the Caesars, was the main base for the Roman army landing their troops here and then going up the road toward Jerusalem. It was a logistics base, a military base, landing troops, supplies, and also a commercial center. So it was a very metropolitan type area. Now isn’t it interesting that after Philip, through the Holy Spirit, begins to move out in Judea, and he witnesses to the eunuch, he comes up along the coast road to Caesarea, and stops in Caesarea, and according to Acts 21:6 he spends the rest of his life there because Paul and the apostles meet in the home of Philip the evangelist and his four daughters there in the city of Caesarea.

So what do we have established now at the end of Acts 8? The base at which Gentiles will trust in Christ, because in Acts 10, when the last phase of Acts starts the gospel has gone from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and now to the uttermost parts of the world; what better place from the gospel to hop off from that a seaport, from which roots to the uttermost parts of the world. See how the Holy Spirit guides. Philip couldn’t have planned it, Peter couldn’t have planned it, it was all planned by God. What does Caesarea look like. To the north is an aqueduct and that aqueduct was rebuilt a little bit during the Turkish period but basically is the Roman style which was there during the time of Acts 8. It shows you when the Romans built something they expected it to last; they didn’t have a short warranty on their product. Here’s the entertainment area of Caesarea, modern coliseum, modern stadium. That was there in Philip’s day. Here’s the ancient wharf, ships could come in there and dock; today the modern wharf is out further. It gives you an idea of the seaport nature of Caesarea; we’ll encounter it several times in this Acts series and as we do so from time to time I’ll show these slides to kind of put in your minds a picture so you’ll get an idea of what life was like then.

One further interesting item at Caesarea, a sort of footnote to what we’re saying, maybe this will help with some of you who are having trouble with the accuracy of Scripture, it was always thought that Pilate was a fictitious character, that he was made up by the Christian writers of the New Testament, certainly there never was a historic person called Pontius Pilate. And there was no Roman evidence of it; archeology has failed to uncover anything about Pilate, that is, until one day they began to dig in Caesarea, and on this stone you can see the wore “Pilate,” P-i-l-a-t-us. Evidently Pilate did not know he wasn’t supposed to exist and so he went on existing anyway.

Let’s tie it together, the principle of divine guidance in the book of Acts and see what we’ve been exposed to so far. We’ve seen three systems of divine guidance that God uses. I will add a fourth system; this is not by any means a complete dissertation on divine guidance but it’s just to summarize, kind of pull together what we’ve seen.

One way which God guides obviously is through providential circumstances. This is to be distinguished from the modern idea that everything is just chance, sheer accident, just happened. Huh-un, no accidents in the Christian life. The only problem you’ve got as a Christian is discerning what God wants you to do in the situation; you know the situation has meaning, the question is what. So providential circumstances, illustration Acts 6; Acts 8, the first part of it.

Second way in which God guides is through what I would call practical intuition; the Holy Spirit at times will just give you a sensation that you ought to be here, that this person has a particular need, that you ought to be over there or somebody is in trouble. There’ll never be new doctrine; that alone comes from here, the text; there’ll never be added revelation either. There’ll never be some hyper-spiritual experience but the Holy Spirit does operate with a flexibility that often times can give you intuitive sensation that something ought to be done here.

A third system of divine guidance is this angelic being thing; the materialization of angels. That really sounds weird for the 20^th century person but angelic beings do protect believers and do operate today; most of the time it’s in the places where the Church is being persecuted or on the missionary field. The event that sticks in my mind that I heard most recently was what happened during the Vietnamese War to a group of Montagnards. The Montagnards had been heavily evangelized and therefore were some of the greatest fighters for freedom in South Vietnam and obviously when the VC went into an area the first place they want to hit and wipe out and destroy would be the Montagnard homes in the community. And so the story goes that this particular Montagnard village was under VC attack, and the chief had lost some of his warriors in the village because they had gone off to battle and they weren’t there so he had a lot of women, children and some older men and they obviously couldn’t protect themselves against a full scale assault so he did the only thing that a Christian could do in that kind of a situation when surrounded, the VC had thrown up this perimeter around and was just starting to lob in mortars, and he heard ping, ping, he heard two of them, and the Christians gathered together into their meeting hall and began to pray that God would protect them and their village. The strange thing was that the assault begin, they heard two mortars go off and that’s all, then silence. And they never heard anything else, until about two or three days later when one of the VC was captured from the band that had been attacking the village before he began to relate the strange story of the fact that they did, in fact, have the perimeter established and they were in fact beginning the barrage and they were going to start the next part, they were going to start the mortar attack and then they were going to go in with small arms for a charge. And he said when we started to set up to deploy for our advance with small arms fire we got to looking and on the roofs of all your buildings were these people, these soldiers standing there with weapons. Well, there were no soldiers in the village at the time.

So one can only say that angels must have ripped off the army of some uniforms real quick and somehow showed up, materialized temporarily, that’s all, and then they’re gone, and that stopped and protected that Christian village. Now that’s an isolated situation but if you read church history carefully it’s not isolated at all; that has been a consistent thing, here, there, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t In Acts you see it happen several times, that angels temporarily materialize. So that’s a third system of divine guidance, rare but possible.

A fourth system, far more normative which is not treated directly in Acts 8 but one which we all use 90% of the time and that’s the simple wisdom principle that you will take the wisdom concept of Scripture, particularly the divine institution doctrines, and you apply them to the situation the best you can and you roll from there.

To pull together the theme of divine guidance we’re going to sing in our closing hymn….