Clough Acts Lesson 30

Major Collision between Church and State – Acts 12:1-25

…Luke’s account of the early Christian church and how the Holy Spirit is leading that church irrespective of the capabilities of the Christians. One of the great things about the Word of God is that it shows God has a sense of humor and shows that He can work with any clod imaginable and today you will see in this text how cloddy Christians can be and yet have the Holy Spirit work very effectively and very sovereignly through them. We’ve seen so far in Acts 6 how the widow’s dispute was engineered by the Holy Spirit to eventually culminate in the rise of Stephen as the first deacon, a man who would straighten out the doctrine of the Church and lay the groundwork for the great commission to all nations. We saw the persecution of Saul, how the people in Acts 8 and 9, how Saul spread them across Judea. And finally, leading to chapters 9 and 10 when we have the breakthrough to the Gentile world.

So from chapters 11-15 we are now studying the section of the rise of world missions. For those who are new with us, understand this is the first time, basically, since I’ve been pastor that we have studied missions and missionary strategy and the book of Acts does deal with this point. In verses 19-26 in the last part of chapter 11 we saw how missions worked by teaching; they did not evangelize the world by sending some young believer, unqualified and untrained out into a sea of wolves and without any doctrine. Paul taught sometimes 12 hours a week, minimum. And this went on week after week after week after week after week and shows you why the early church could do what it does. Most local churches if somebody has to sit through a Bible lesson more than once a week that’s straining the brain and that’s simply because we live in a generation that is largely stupid, a generation that is largely stupid, a generation that cannot pay attention and has a very short time span and has very poor roots, actually, on the many great doctrines or Scripture. Bartenders in the 19^th century knew more doctrine than Christians in the 20^th. So it’s true that we’ve come a long way but it’s been down in the area of concentration on doctrine. But Paul didn’t do that, he taught and he taught and he taught and he taught and he had success.

And then we concluded chapter 11 by showing the last thing there was their famine relief program. Now in chapter 12 today, the entire chapter 12 has to be taken as a unit. We are studying the collision of Church and state. There’s really two stories, one large story and one minor story inside the major story. The major story in Acts 12 is the collision of Church and state, how the fourth divine institution under Caesar and his representative, Agrippa in Palestine, stuck their nose into the church’s business. The state, once it becomes god, must superintend every sphere of life, including that of the Christian church. So therefore we have the state intruding and every time the state intrudes upon the domain of the Church the state is asking for trouble. And Acts 12 is a passage that shows you what happens when the state interferes with the realm of the Church. God is jealous to protect His own and no matter how powerful the government may be, that government brings judgment upon itself for tampering with the body of Christ.

Let’s look at Acts 12:1 for some of the background. I’ll read verses 1-5 by way of introduction. “Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. [2] And he killed James the brother of John with the sword. [3] And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.) [4] And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people. [5 Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.”

Now the story of Herod is a very, very detailed story, so detailed we can’t get into all of it today but Herod, the one that you meet here, is a grandson of the great man back here, Herod the Great. Herod the Great was the one who built all of the great temples; if you go to Palestine today and study archeology, the Herodian masonry is a key point that you look for in excavations; it’s very easily seen it’s a mark, it’s a hallmark all over the place. Herod engaged in vast building programs. The reason was that he was largely insecure politically with the people. You see, Herod the Great was an Idumaean by birth, he was a non-Jew, he was a Gentile. He married into the Jewish family by his wife, Miriamne, and the two descended the throne and became rulers. Herod was, actually toward the end of his life, became a candidate for the funny farm. He was an extremely cruel individual, so cruel that even Caesar said it’s better to be Herod’s hus than his huios, and the Greek word hus means pig and huios means son, so it shows you that Herod was a very vicious individual. It was Herod who ordered the massacre of all the babies two years and under at Bethlehem. This was just S.O.P. for Herod, the reason it’s not recorded in history as a particularly outstanding event is that it went on all the time; that was just Herod’s cruelty, an extremely cruel man.

Herod had a son and from that son came several men, one of whom we meet today as Herod Agrippa. Now Herod Agrippa stands in the tradition of his father or his grandfather and that tradition is outlined in one of the great commandments, one of the Ten Commandments. There’s a clause in one of the Ten Commandments that rubs people the wrong way when you mention it, but yet it’s a very, very serious clause. God says: I am the God who visits the iniquity of the fathers onto the son of the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. But I also visit My mercy upon the thousands of generations of them that love Me. Now what is God saying there, that you pick on somebody just because your grandfather made a mistake. No. What He’s saying is under the third divine institution which is the institution of family, which is the basic structure of society, God has created it that way, God has a self-destruct mechanism built into families. It still operates because when God gave the Ten Commandments He said I am the God that does this, meaning that this isn’t a principle that applies just to Jews; this applies today; if you could trace your family tree using the principle of Exodus 20:5-6 I think you’d find some very interesting things. God will allow a family to go on in history until something happens.

And let’s see this “what happens:” When the grandfather goes on negative volition toward the Word of God as in Herod the Great’s case, and has a son, and that son follows in his father’s footsteps, which is very easy to do, he learns how to rebel from his father and the only difference is he does it better and then he has sons, and they go on negative volition to the Word of God. By the time you’ve got to the second and third generation you’ve got a walloping amount of rebelliousness ingrained in that family unit. How is God going to control history and keep things under control? Sounds cruel but what God does with the third and fourth generation, He just simply eliminates the family. He has several means of doing this; sometimes… people see this all the time in our society but they just don’t’ think anything of it. For example, somebody winds up an old maid and never marries. We’re not saying that all people that never marry are in the third and fourth generation curse, but we are saying that the point is, this is one way God does, in fact, eliminate families from history. Another way He does it is simply produce childlessness in a couple. Again, not to say that every childless couple is under a third and fourth generation curse; these are just mechanism; other times complete families get wiped out in accidents. Sometimes they get wiped out in war, through disease, all sorts of means, but families who are in rebellion against God’s Word in a profound and deep way are physically ejected from history. That’s just the only way God can maintain control in society.

Herod’s family was one of these; they all died miserable deaths, they were all rejecters of the Word of God, and in Acts 12 you see Herod’s family finally eliminated from history. The Acts 12 story, the collision of Church and state, has as one of its sub themes the execution of the third generation curse upon the family of Herod. It said in verse 1, he began “to vex certain ones of the church.” This starts in the great persecution. You notice how things have escalated, very slowly, but I think when we write them out you’ll see. In Acts 4 and 5 it was mere political threats being made against the Church, but in Acts 4 and 5 the Church had great popularity and so therefore the pragmatic politicians did not think it wise, politically, to make their move. It was just too much sympathy publicly for Christians. By Acts chapter 6 and 7 you begin to have murder and the first person murdered is a deacon. Now in Acts 12 you have murder of an apostle. So Satan begins his attack against the Church and the contest of the ages start. Christ said the gates of hell shall not prevail against My Church. Satan says the gates of hell shall prevail against Your Church and the battle is on, and it intensifies. Can the force of almighty Rome through Herod’s king wipe out the Church by destroying the apostolic leadership. That’s the case here.

Verse 2 the first apostle dies, James. “And he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.” Turn to Matthew 20:20-23 you’ll see that event this was prophesied, even this was no accident, completely within the sovereign will of God. It goes back to a family discussion about James, James and John. James and John had a very ambitious mother and the mother wanted to intervene with the Lord Jesus Christ and so in verse 20, “Then came to Him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons, worshiping Him, and desiring a certain of Him. [21] And He said unto her, What do you want? And she said unto Him, Grant that these, my two sons, may sit, the one on Thy right hand, and the other on the left, in Thy kingdom. [22] But Jesus answered and said, You don’t know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say, we’re able. [23] And He said unto them, You shall drink indeed of My cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with, but to sit on My right hand, and on my left, is not Mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared by my Father.”

What Jesus is doing there, He’s predicting the violent deaths of James and his brother John; the violent death, James will be the first apostle to die, and John the last apostle to die. The baptism wherewith Jesus was baptized was the violence of the cross and Christ said you men too will suffer physical violence. So in Acts 12:2 when he killed James with the sword he unconsciously is fulfilling prophecy, prophecy that James would share in the baptism of Christ. But the intriguing thing about this passage is the background it gives us on the character of Herod Agrippa. Now one of the neat things, sort of the fringe benefits, of studying the Bible is that it gives you, after a while, a great deal of common sense, and one of the things that the Bible is always insistent upon is that the most satanic of people are the pragmatists. The most satanic of people are not the people that deliberately plot and scheme evil; the people that do the most destruction are the people who are swayed by the masses at the moment, who are always those that follow the tyranny of the 51%. If 51% of the people say it’s right, by definition it must be right. Pilate was one of those, the pragmatist who thought it was politically expedient to get away with knocking off Jesus; Caiaphas, the great pragmatist who thought it was politically expedient, with more votes by the non-Christian than the Christian, and so therefore it was right to eliminate the Christian minority.

And so here in verse 3 we find Herod Agrippa having the same character. “Because he saw it pleased the majority,” that is the Jews, “he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.)” Now if you just read that passage you think, my, my, my, Herod Agrippa is a cruel old man, he’s like his grandfather. Nothing could be further from the truth. Herod Agrippa was a nice individual; on the surface he was a towering community giant, always concerned with the good of the community. For example, once a year he would read Deuteronomy 17, that great passage in the Jewish Torah describing the king, and I have here the Mishnah, this is the Jewish Mishnah which is a compilation of the oral tradition used in the Pharisaic circles around the time of Christ and other kinds of tradition, and it describes one day when this king went into an assembly, and here’s what it says:

“The minister of the synagogue used to take a scroll of the Law and give it to the chief of the synagogue, and the chief of the synagogue gave it to the prefect, and the prefect gave it to the high priest, and the high priest gave it to the king, and the king would usually receive it standing and then sit down to read it. But King Agrippa received it standing and then read it standing and for this the sages praised him.” Now I told you one of the things about the Agrippa family was it had Idumaean blood in it, it wasn’t fully a Jewish family. So when he reached Deuteronomy 17:15, ‘Thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee, which is not thy brother, his eyes flowed with tears, but they all shouted to him, ‘Our brother art thou, our brother art thou, our brother art thou,’ and he read from the beginning and went through the curse.” In other words, he was very, very politically sensitive, to Jewish taste.

Now Josephus also describes the character of this Herod and we want to read a little bit of Josephus so that we understand that this man wasn’t some boogey man that crawled around in a red suit with two horns and a pitchfork. He was a very suave individual. “The king was by nature,” says Josephus, “very beneficent and liberal in his gifts; very ambitions to oblige people with such large donations and he made himself very illustrious by the many chargeable presents he made them. He took delight in giving and rejoiced in living with good reputation. He was not at all like that Herod who reigned before him, for that Herod was ill-natured and severe in his punishments.” And he goes on to describe, “Agrippa’s temper was mild, equally liberal to all men. He was humane to foreigners, he made them sensible of his liberality. He was in like manner rather of a gentle and compassionate temper. Accordingly he loved to live continually at Jerusalem though he had a summer home in Caesarea.”

Now that’s interesting because that’s exactly the portrait given of Antiochus Epiphanies who was the man who was the forerunner of the antichrist in history. Isn’t the Holy Spirit telling us something here? In passage after passage after passage after passage He outlines the particular device or the particular agent of Satan as men who are not (quote) “evil,” so much as they’re just pragmatists, they just buy what the 51% want. So the application is your greatest enemies will be the majority rule people. Your greatest enemies will not be your die-hard radical revolutionaries, they’re dangerous but they’re clearly dangerous. The 51% type person is subtle and therefore he can put his knife in your back very quickly.

Notice at the end of verse 3, he “takes Peter also,” because those “were the days of the unleavened bread.” Now why do you suppose he took Peter during the days of unleavened bread? One very simple thing, we find it today. You don’t have a riot unless you have a TV camera present. Who wants to go to all the trouble of having a riot if it’s not going to be on television. So we wait until the television camera comes before we have our demonstration. Now what is the television camera doing? Playing viewers. Now what is verse 3 saying? During the feast of unleavened bread you had every Jewish family there in the city of Jerusalem represented. He had an audience to play with politically, he had many viewers present, now would be the time to pull it off and to gain favor with the 51%. And not only that, but of all the apostles he takes who does he pick but Peter. Can anyone think of what Peter did very recently that might provide him with a little ammunition to the Jewish population. Of course, Peter was the one that led the Gentile breakthrough. Peter was the one who had gone in and violated Jewish dietary standard; of course, want to get some more votes from the majority? Pick on the minority a little bit more, let’s kill Peter, that would be very good to do, help my political image said King Agrippa.

And so [4] “he apprehended him, and he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers,” and that was a little notice by Luke to show and to set the scene for what’s about to happen. God is going to show that He is omnipotent and He protects His Church; He will not permit the enemies of the Church to triumph; “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Here’s the situation: inside the prison there was the gates of the cell and inside the cell was Peter. A quaternion of soldiers means that Peter was chained to one man on his left, he was chained to one man on his right, and he had two Roman soldiers sitting outside the gate. So needless to say, we could say in modern parlance, this was maximum security. Probably it was in the fortress of Antonia, under Roman command, and therefore if there was anything unlikely it would be an escape from this place, of all places. Surely the Church was now going to suffer the death of Peter like the death of James.

So we shift now into the minor story, it begins in verse 5 and runs through verse 17, the minor story of the escape of Peter from prison. Again, set it in the major story which is the confrontation of Church and state. As we go through this you’re going to see some rather amusing things, but before you laugh too hard at these things that go on, just understand that it’s a refreshing portrait to show that Christians in the first century were just as screwed up as you are, just as unbelieving as we are, just as disorganized as we are, just as unthinking as we are, and yet God protected them. The Great Shepherd protects His sheep. You see, He knows we’re sheep, He knows we’re stupid, He knows we’re always doing some idiot thing that would bring our downfall if it were allowed to pass. But God is always gracious and here you have grace; grace upon grace! Let’s watch it.

Acts 12:5, “Peter, therefore, was kept in prison; but prayer was made without ceasing by the church unto God for him.” Obviously Peter is in prison in the sense that he’s beyond help from the Church and it forces the Church then to do what it never does until it’s in a jam—pray. Pray! Yeah, let’s use a little bit of prayer, somewhere somebody keeps a little of that around here, let’s bring it out to face the crisis. So faced with the crisis now, now we go to prayer; couldn’t have done it in verse 2 when poor James was sitting there, and poor James got the axe, literally, because no one prayed. All right in verse 5 it says that they prayed “without ceasing.” Now since the man was in prison all during the feast of unleavened bread, verse 3, and you can compare verse 3 with verse 6, when he was released, it shows that the praying without ceasing went on for some six or seven days, day and night, night long prayer meetings.

Verse 6, “And when Herod would have brought him forth,” and here’s timing again, for six days nothing happened, people prayed, nothing happened, people prayed some more, nothing happened, people prayed some more, still nothing happened. It wasn’t until 4:00 a.m. the morning that Peter was going to be led forth to his execution that God finally acted. See God is never in a hurry, He’s always right there, even though we panic, we’re on Alka Seltzer because we’re so upset about the situation, what’s God going to do now? Just stand back and watch what He’s going to do now, let’s watch, be first line spectators. So as he did this, “the same night Peter was sleeping” now Peter was relaxed, nothing else you can do with one guy chained to one arm and one guy chained on the other so you might as well relax; apparently the soldiers were too. But Peter had more than just relaxation in mind. He had a promise given to him before Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, John 21:18 which said that Peter, you will live to be an old man. So Peter knew that whatever was going to happen to him, since this happened in 44 AD and he was not yet an old man, Peter had a promise; so what did Peter do? Just sat back and relaxed, what else can you do. But he trusted the Lord with all this, the tremendous picture of a believer relaxing in the promises of God under extreme pressure.

So “Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, having been bound with two chains, [and the keepers before the door kept the prison].” Again verse 6 shows you the deployment of the maximum security. Now verse 7, “And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison; and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands. [8] And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals. And so he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me.”

I’ve always been amused at verse 7, sometimes when I’m translating it’s very interesting in preparation because you read a passage and you see God’s sense of humor, and here’s one of those things. The verb that is used to “smote” Peter on the side is a verb that is used in the Greek, sometimes to kill someone; it means to punch and slug. So here’s Peter sitting back, nice and relaxed, chained down and this angel goes WHACK!!!, like this, it’s not Peter, would you wake up; it’s nothing like that. This is a strong punch. Now the question is why did the angel do this? Why didn’t he just say hey Peter, wake up? He could have. For this reason, throughout this entire episode Peter still has reservations whether this is a vision or the real thing. What better way to show someone than to put a bruise on them, it’s the real thing. So the angel comes in and hits Peter. Now some have suggested, myself included, that one of the reasons may be that the angel didn’t know his own strength, we don’t know but the verb here is a very strong word to hit, he really got slugged and needless to say, at 4:00 a.m. in the morning if someone comes along and punches you full blast in the ribs you kind of wake up in a daze.

And that’s what all the rest of verse 7-8 is about; it looks like Peter is wandering around like a 3 year old because what does the angel say? “Get up, quick. And the chains fell from his hands.” Now Peter, “Gird yourself,” this is the first item of clothing, he was sitting there, just had a loin cloth on, and this is waking up at 4:00 a.m. in his underwear. Well, the first thing you’d think of if you got woken up at 4:00 a.m. and you’re going to go outside is to get clothes on. But Peter is so stunned and again this is a picture of a believer just kind of wandering around in dream world, he is so stunned the angel has to sit there, now Peter, put on your belt, put on your sandals, and so he did. Now put your outer garment around thee. Now follow me. Do you see what the angel is doing? It’s a sarcasm here; the angel refuses to do for Peter what Peter can do. On the other hand, the angel has to tell him to put his clothes on. You don’t have to tell a kid that.

But look at the behavior of believers in this story and it’ll give you great volumes of encouragement of what God can do in your life and all of our lives collectively. Acts 12:9, “And he went out, and followed him;” but verse 9 tells us that all this time Peter still can’t figure it out, he did not know that it was true, he still thinks he’s seeing a vision [“and knew not that it was true which was done by the angel; but thought he saw a vision”]. We’ll come back to that point in a moment.

So, 10, “When they were past the first and the second ward,” this is parts of the prison, and then they come to this great iron gate and in the Greek it reads, “and it opened automatically, the same word from which we get the word “automatic.” [“… they came unto the iron gate that leads unto the city; which opened to them of his own accord.”] You can imagine this tremendous iron gate, tons; Peter walks up to it and he’s probably saying to himself boy, I want to see this, this guy may be impressive knocking the chains off but what’s he going to do with this gate. So they walk up to the gate, eighteen inches away from the gate it starts opening by itself. So he goes out, and in some of the texts, the western texts of the New Testament say that they came down some stairs, which suggest that this is the fortress of Antonia, “and they went out, and passed on through one street;” it’s interesting, the angel gets him steered right, gets him through one street and then the angel departs [“and forthwith the angel departed from him.”] It isn’t the word that the angel just walked up the street, it’s that the angel is standing and suddenly he’s not there any more.

It’s the picture that has been seen time and time again in history. If you’re read the recent Wycliffe missionary report, In Other Words, recall the case of the missionaries last year in the Himalayan Mountains who were trapped and they had to go across this ridge line and so they started walking and they had to get across this ridge line but they had no way of travestying these great crevasses and so as they prayed, on the basis of Psalm 37, Lord, guide our steps, one of them got to looking ahead of them and he saw literal footprints in the snow, couldn’t figure out who this was, and so all day long, mile after mile after mile, they followed these footprints that were in the snow and they couldn’t see who was making the footprints, just footprint after footprint after footprint. They followed it up over the ridge, came back down, right on the path, perfect navigation. And they get down to the freezing level and the snow is starting to melt and it goes into a muddy path where you can see footprints and it’s very clear; the footprints stop. Just like this, the angel guides the believers physically.

Dr. F. F. Bruce in his commentary on the book of Acts recounts another very fascinating angelic delivery. Again we show this to show you that angels are still in the business, they aren’t in a depression and they haven’t stopped. This involves a man by the name of Sundar Singhar [?] . Sundar Singhar was one of the most famous evangelical Christians on the continent of India. And that is an extremely difficult mission field because Oriental religion is so absorptive of doctrine, but Singhar had tremendous testimony of preaching, here’s what happened: “By order of the chief Lama of a certain Tibetan community he was thrown into a dry well, the lid of which was securely locked. There he was left to die like many others before him, whose bones and rotting flesh lay at the bottom of the well. On the third night when he had been drying to God in prayer, he heard someone unlocking the lid of the well and removing it, and then a voice spoke telling him to get hold of a rope that was being lowered. He did so, and he was glad to find a loop at the bottom of the rope in which he could place his foot, for his right arm had been injured before he was thrown down. He was then drawn up, the lid was replaced and locked, but when he looked round to thank his rescuer no one could find him; he had disappeared. The fresh air revived him and his injured arm fell whole again. When morning came he returned to the city where he had been arrested and resumed preaching. News was brought to the Lama that the man who had been thrown into the execution well for preaching had been liberated and was preaching again. Sundar Singhar was brought again before the Lama in question and told the story of his release, and the Lama declared that someone must have gotten hold of the key and let him out. But when the search was made for the key, it was found attached to the Lama’s own suit.” And so interesting, isn’t it, how angels intervene in history; after all, if we believe in a supernatural universe why not.

So Acts 12:11 is not reporting something that’s unusual; angels still guard and protect Christians on certain occasions. There are the James who will die and then there are the Peters who will be saved because it’s not their time to die yet. [11, “And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a surety, that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.”]

So in verse 12, while he was considering the thing, by the way, the verb “consider” in verse 12 is the word from which we get conscience, which shows some of you who are interested in philosophic things, it shows you the epistemological role of the conscience, “And when he had conscienced the thing, [considered the thing],” and ascertained that it was real and not image, “he came to the house of Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark; [where many were gathered together praying.]” now this is a particular wealthy place in the city of Jerusalem and we want to look at Dr. Avi Yonah’s model and get an idea of where this took place. Something’s going to happen at the front door that we want to be prepared for so let’s look at this house, what it must have looked like.

[He shows slides]. If Peter were arrested and the angel got him out of that prison he had to walk at 4:00 a.m. in the morning through the dark streets of Jerusalem all the way down to the south part of the city to the wealthy section; these are the wealthy homes and one of the people that own these homes was the mother of John Mark, the man who wrote the second Gospel of the New Testament. Whether he had a dad we don’t know if she’s a widow or not but his dad is not named in the incident but his mother had wealth; she was related to Barnabas who also had wealth. The thing to notice about those homes is that if you look at the front door they border on the street; they’re Romanesque style and the courtyard is on the inside, not on the street; the sidewalk was on the inside of the house because of criminals and burglars. That’s how the architecture reflected anti-crime design. So the house on the outside had the door directly facing the street and that particular door, when it faced the street, was indented. We have something like this, here’s the street, here’s the gate, and then you have an entrance way and you have doors and then you have the inner area which you saw in those wealthy homes. That’s the set up for what’s about to happen here in the text so keep that in mind and read verse 12.

Acts 12:12, “…he came to the house of John Mark’s mother, where many had gathered together praying.” It’s perfect tense, means they had gathered together for some time, it means that this was an all night prayer meeting. It means, therefore, that they have been praying, particularly for this very petition, that Peter be released, and had done so for hours. [13] And as Peter knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to hearken, named Rhoda. [14] And when she knew Peter’s voice, she opened not the gate for gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate.

[15] And they said unto her, You’re crazy, [Thou art mad]. But she constantly affirmed that it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel. [16] But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door, and saw him, they were astonished.”

Now the interesting thing was that Peter came up to this gate, keep in mind now, check the humor too, you’ve got to understand one thing, that this all happened before the sun rises. See, the sun doesn’t rise until verse 18, and so all of it’s still dark in the wee hours of the morning. And the whole point is that the police may be out after Peter, he doesn’t know what happened, all he knows is he’s busted loose and they’re going to be for him any moment. So the least that Peter wants to do is start a noise in the wealthy section of town in a very obvious main street at 4:30 in the morning, because this just simply attracts attention. The whole thing is Peter’s trying to be cool and get out of the city before the police find him. Now faced with that situation watch what happens; just comedy of errors. This reads like the Keystone Cops and it’s a just a profile of Christian sheep running around not knowing what’s going on.

So he shows up at the door, and he knocks, and they had the hat check girl who came to the door. She peeks through the inner door, she doesn’t come to the gate, he’s out here in the street, she comes to that inner door and she opens it… oh, Peter, and then she takes off. Now women are known to do things for joy, they cry because they’re happy which is not too understandable to men, but this woman is the kind that just forgets what she’s doing, she can’t open the door when she’s happy, so she takes off and leaves poor Peter standing out in the street at 4:30 in the morning trying to be low profile, knocking, with the neighbors wondering what’s all this commotion going on over there; he doesn’t want witnesses to see him.

So she goes in, verse 15, and the verb, “constantly affirm” is in the imperfect tense, which means it took her some time to convince all the men of the group. By the way, gentlemen, this is another thing, there are more embarrassing incidents in Scripture of where the women first saw the truth and the men don’t listen to the women. It’s almost like we’ve over compensated for Eve but nevertheless this goes on and here’s one of the incidents. The girl is true, but she has to argue with them, and they call her crazy. Then they come up with a genius hypothesis. This one’s a ripper. They say, oh, it’s his angel out there. See it was a Jewish idea at this time of a guardian angel, who when you died, the guardian angel would show up like you and announce that you’d died to your closest friends, and so when it says his angel, what they’ve said is oh, Peter’s dead and we’re going to get the announcement of the funeral. But if it had been me sitting in the room I still would like to have gone out and see what the angel looked like. But even that doesn’t seem to motive them, that’s just his angel, you know, it happens every day at the front door.

So then, while this is going on, imperfect tense in verse 15, the simultaneous verb is knocking. Verse 16, the King James tries to translate it this way, “continued knocking,” so you’ve got two simultaneous actions. Rhoda is running around like a chicken with her head cut off inside trying to get somebody to come out there and open the door and Peter’s outside, knocking, come on Rhoda, move it, my knuckles are getting sore, trying not to make noise at 4:30 in the morning. So you’d think ah, finally the Christians would have sense, after all, you know it’s a prayer meeting, they’ve just been praying for this but when it happens, you know, prayer is not supposed to be answered like that. So they come waltzing up to the door waltzing up to the door and instead of inviting Peter in they still don’t invite him in, they come crashing out in the street, big mob forms out here in the street at 4:30 in the morning when Peter wants quiet.

So this is why he says in verse 17, “But he, beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace,” he’s telling them, would you please shut up, I don’t want the whole city to know I’ve escaped, I’ve come to tell you but just cool it. So they wander around come out, Peter’s here, Peter’s here, Peter’s here, and in verse 17 he finally calms them down and tells them, “…[declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he said,] Go show these things unto James,” now this is a different James than the one we saw killed in verse 2, obviously, this is the James who is Jesus’ brother and the author of the epistle of James. By this point that James has become a Christian. Remember, Jesus’ sisters and brothers never believed on Him while He was living. That should encourage some of you who say well, if I properly lived in the life in my home everybody would be a believer; nonsense. Jesus didn’t properly live the life? He surely did! And His brother James later became a Christian and by this time had risen through the ranks of the Church and by chapter 15 he becomes basically the head man in Jerusalem. So it’s that James. So Peter wants James to know, James, you’re it babe, you know I’m long gone, I’m on exile now, I switch the rank to you, so he tells it “to the brethren. And he departed, and went into another place.”

From this point on Peter becomes an exile and is a wandering apostle to the non-Gentiles, to the Jews of the Diaspora. He says in 1 Corinthians 9:5, I Peter 1:1, that he becomes the apostle to the circumcision as Paul was the apostle to the non-circumcision. Here’s the rise of missions; notice verse 17 is the rise of another mission. The Holy Spirit ejects Peter from the Jerusalem scene.

Now one of the great classic sentence of all of God’s Word in the roaring thunder of the King James, [18] “Now as soon as it was day, there was no small stir among the soldiers, what was become of Peter.” Well now quite obviously there was, in a maximum security cell, four guys chained to the guy, how can you lose a prisoner in that kind of a situation? Herod wonder that, and so Herod in verse 19 conducts an investigation, what is going on with you guys. “And when Herod had sought for him, and found him not, he examined the keepers, and commanded that they should be put to death.” A very somber note in verse 19, those soldiers were following orders but they were following orders of an apostate government and they died following those orders, which shows you that the soldiers ultimate loyalty cannot be to the government, it must be to the Word of God. And those men paid a very tragic price with their lives for executing an order that touched the body of Christ. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church of Jesus Christ. And so this is what happens when the state decides to butt in to Church business. “And he went down from Judea to Caesarea, and there abode.”

Now we have the last scene, verses 19-25 close out the story, they pick up the major story, we’ve seen the minor story now of Peter’s escape; we’ve seen that in that minor story, obviously the Christians didn’t execute it, they didn’t pull it off, good night, when it happened they didn’t even know what was going on. In fact, have you notice, Peter, when he was led out by the angel can’t believe it’s real and when he comes knocking on the door the people who were praying can’t believe it’s real. So if it’s left up to Christians and the resources we have we could never pull it off. That’s the theme of this small story. But now the bigger story. The bigger story can’t conclude without one last detail. Herod must be taken care of. The curse must fall on the home to the third and fourth generation.

And so we read in Acts 12:20, “And Herod was highly displeased with them of Tyre and Sidon: but they came with one accord to him, and, having made Blastus the king’s chamberlain their friend, desired peace; because their country was nourished by the king’s country. [21] And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. [22] And the people gave a shout, saying, it is the voice of a god, and not of a man. [23] And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost. [24] But the word of God grew and multiplied.”

Now this tragic scene of Herod was set in the middle of an economic war. Caesarea is one of the great ports on the Mediterranean, built by the Romans as an eastern cargo place. Out from Palestine came things like dates, wine, grain. This was the production; that production had to go to Europe, to Italy, to Greece and there were two ports of exit. One port was Caesarea and the other one is up here, what is now Lebanon, Tyre. They both shared business of the exports of the Levant, but what had happened is that Tyre business firms all invested their money in transportation and not in agriculture and they got in cross purpose with Herod and so what he did, he just cut off the produce and he was waging an economic war against the city of Tyre and their businessmen. So they send up, as always, in verse 20 they have a little bribery going on, Blastus, the chamberlain.

Now there’s nothing wrong, we startled some of you, there’s nothing wrong in Scripture with offering a bribe; that is never stated to be a sin. What is stated to be a sin in Scripture is the accepting of a bribe. You say that may be quibbling; no it isn’t. The Church is given the freedom in times of persecution to bribe the officials to look the other way and we can do so without sinning. That is a built in control, a degree of freedom that Christ has given His Church. It’s being used today in communist lands, we are regularly involved in missionary activities that are bribing each German guard while Bibles are being smuggled through; it goes on, thousands of Christian dollars today are being used to buy off communist guards and it’s being done as unto the Lord. Offering bribes is not wrong; accepting bribes is wrong. So at this particular point Herod arrays himself and he demands deification, or he allows it to happen. And this is why we say that when statism gets to its ultimate degree, the implicit tendency to idolize the state now becomes vocal. Now the mob admits what it had been doing all along, you are god. That’s always the cry of the non-Christian humanist, it’s always the government that has to solve a problem. This is why we have government interference in business. Well, if we didn’t have government interference in business who would take care of us? Adam Smith’s invisible hand would take care of us. God’s providence would take care of us, we don’t trust God’s providence, we’ve got to get pouring in there with all our omniscience to solve the problem.

Now that’s the signal of the deification of the state; when the state will not let problems solve themselves, but always has to butt in. And so here we have the deification of the state as Herod accepts it. Now you may say that’s a nice interesting story, but fortunately for us as Christians somebody else was there in the stadium that day; his name was Josephus. He saw the same thing. Here’s the report from his eyes of what we read in Acts 13. “On the second day of the festivities, he put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of a contexture truly wonderful. He came into the theater early that morning, at which time the silver of his garment being illuminated by the fresh reflection of the sun’s rays upon it, shown out after a surprising manner and was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon him. And presently his flatterers cried out, one from one place and another from another, though not for his own good, that he was a god, he was a god, he was a god, he was a god, and they added, ‘be thou merciful to us, for although we have hitherto reverenced thee only as a man, yet shall we henceforth own thee as superior to mortal nature.’ Upon this the king did not rebuke them nor rejected their impious flattery. But as he presently afterwards looked up he saw an owl sitting on a certain rope over his head and immediately understood that the bird was a messenger of ill tidings, as it had once been the messenger of good tidings to him, and fell into the deepest sorrow. A severe pain arose in his belly and began in a most violent manner. He therefore looked upon his friends and said, ‘I, whom you call a god, am commanded presently to depart this life.’” And it goes on to describe that within five days the man died, his body being eaten while he was dying, of worms.

A perfect confirmation of Luke’s account. Now we have to, as Christians, when we read something like verse 23, we wonder, it sounds almost like the Word of God relishes… look at that, all the guts… why is the Word of God relish in the violent deaths of people like Herod. For he’s already been by this once; do you remember in the early chapters of Acts whose violent death is rejoiced in? Judas. Remember how he fell down, his abdomen broke and his intestines popped out and it’s described in all the… you could run a movie film of the thing the way it’s described in the book of Acts. Now why is this blood and gore present in Scripture? Because it’s part of an imprecatory spirit against Satan’s move; all those that lay a hand on the Church will wind up that way; that’s what it’s saying. It’s an adumbration of the fierce wrath of God against Satan. It happened to Arius, the great heretical theologian of the second and third century, in Alexandria, Egypt. You know the story, he walked into a latrine and he dropped dead there. And so Christians said a deserving place for such a man in such a theology. So Christians down through the years have rejoiced in the violent deaths of the persecutors of the Church.

Some of you who don’t quite understand the framework of Scripture, I’m sure you respond to something like verse 23 and you say oh, that’s just too first century. No it isn’t, it’s justice. The Christian must be assured that justice is being done, and he must have that. So therefore thank God for the violent death of Judas, it’s a lesson to us. Thank God for the violent execution of Herod by the angel of the Lord.

But the last verse, Acts 12:24 is the major theme of all of Acts, “But the word of God grew and multiplied.” The Lord God is omnipotent and He triumphs over every attempt to undo His Church. The only thing that results from all of the efforts is five men die horrible deaths, but not Christians; the non-Christians die, and the Word of God goes on. Shall we stand and sing 214..

[25 “And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem, when they had fulfilled their ministry, and took with them John, whose surname was Mark.”]