-Glad you guys got to meet my friend Johnnie last week! Now that you’ve met him, I’ve got a video to share with you. This was on the second day of the hike, and the hardest one for me! We got rained on, walked through fog and wind half the day, and then finally landed in this beautiful valley so I HAD to get a video of it! And it quickly became my kids’ favorite video, so for the longest time they called John “the flossing guy” because he ruined my super cool video, and this is the picture of that same valley at sunrise the next morning:
-One of the great things about the EFCA is how many pastors we have that love the Bible and love the church. It was a joy to be at Elmwood last week, just to prove I was there, here’s the picture I sent to John after he sent me a selfie of himself standing in here. After he got my picture, he told Micah he wished he’s thought to do the same thing!
-Last week we saw the final Pentecost in this book where the Holy Spirit continues pouring Himself out on new groups of people. Started back in chpt. 2with the Jewish Pentecost, then the Samaritans had a similar experience in chpt. 8, and then the Spirit even spread to the Gentiles, which is great because that includes you and me!
-Today’s text serves as a bridge from what John preached on last week to the rest of the book. We’ve seen Peter & John as the leaders of the Jerusalem church, but this week’s text will show Peter fading away from the scene and leadership of the church pivoting to Saul.
READ/PRAY (pg. 978)
- Persecution (1-5)
-We pick up back in Jerusalem, which had been the center of the church up to this point, and just because we’d seen God turn the primary persecutor into the new witness doesn’t mean the persecution is done.
-King Herod begins attacking Christians, now this is not the Christmas one, that was his grandpa. But same lineage, what’s today referred to as the “Herodian dynasty,” this one is Herod Agrippa (you can look him up in other places if you want!)
-James and John (not the one we read about later in vs. 17), this James is one of the 12 apostles – this is where we see the transition of church leadership from the 12 to something new (elders are mentioned at the end of the last chapter, hold on to that)
-Think back to Acts 1, the last time one of the 12 died, they replaced him (Judas). This time there’s no replacement. The apostles will fade from the focus of this story, but this is the reason why we don’t believe in either popes or apostles today. There isn’t an “apostolic succession,” we trace our beliefs back to the apostles, but there’s been development since then.
-Since Herod was chasing fame, he arrests Peter, and this is meant to parallel the events leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion, which also took place during Passover week.
-4 squads sounds like a lot, but it’s only 16 people (4 people per squad) who would share shifts, 3 hours on, 9 hours off.
-But notice how the church responds to Peter’s arrest: praying. It’s important to note that it doesn’t say what their prayer requests were, they might not have even been praying for his release from prison! They easily could have been praying for him to remain faithful under persecution (as we’ll see in the next section)
-Friends, don’t miss that the church’s first instinct when something happens to them is to pray! Is that your first instinct when something happens to you?
- Prison (6-17)
-In this next section, we learn about Peter’s imprisonment, and the last day Peter was left in prison before he was supposed to be brought out for his trial, something happens. Notice how securely he was guarded, he’s chained with 2 soldiers sleeping next to him, and 2 more soldiers standing in front of the doors (that’s a whole squad). But do you think that’s going to stop God from saving him?
-“Suddenly an angel” (normal night until then!) appears and even though he’s shining with a light, he has to hit Peter to get him to wake up. Peter’s sleeping the sleep of the dead! This is where we start to see that this is different than Jesus’s Passover experience. This starts to sound more like the Exodus, where the people are released from the chains of slavery, and led into the wilderness.
-They were told to dress quickly to get out of Egypt, just like Peter is here. But Peter thought he was having a really vivid dream where God was meeting him to encourage and give him strength. Peter’s chain’s can’t bind him anymore, locked doors open by themselves in front of them. Then just as suddenly as the angel appeared to wake Peter up, he disappears, and Peter realizes he’s not sleepwalking. He’s been awake this whole time, AND he’s not in prison anymore.
-so he goes to a house that either he knows people are at, or he expects people will be at. And we’re back at this theme of houses through this book, where God’s presence isn’t stuck in the temple anymore, His presence is wherever His people are.
-Once he gets to the house he starts knocking on the front gate, and a servant girl named Rhoda hears the knocking and goes out to the door
-This is where we see that this house seemed to be a typical meeting place for this group, because even this servant girl knew Peter. But in what has to be such a letdown for Peter, she runs away to tell everyone else, leaving Peter stuck outside continuing to knock.
-Just think about that, Peter has just been miraculously released from prison, I’m sure he wants nothing more than to get to safe place inside, and all it would have taken is for this girl to open the door, but there he stands continuing to knock.
-The rest of the group doesn’t believe Rhoda, they tell her she’s crazy. What’s incredible is this puts Rhoda in great company, because there’s only 3 people in the NT are called “insane”: Rhoda, Jesus (John 10:19), and Paul (Acts 26:25), all of whom are witnesses to a resurrection.
-We tend to view this negatively, but this isn’t meant to belittle Rhoda, one of Luke’s themes in his writing is lifting up and bringing attention to the marginalized. Here Rhoda is shown as believing that God can answer prayer while the rest of the disciples refused to believe, even though they’ve seen bigger miracles than this. Peter was just raised from a figurative death, and as I learned in the newest Spider-Man, that’s small potatoes. Jesus was raised from literal death! That’s huge potatoes!
-Rhoda wouldn’t give up, and neither would Peter! I wonder how long he stood there knocking. And once again, the disciples are described as amazed, almost as if they didn’t expect God to answer their prayer or at least answer it this way!
-It struck me this week how much we tend to jump to comfort as our prayer requests today, when I realized we don’t see any evidence in this text that the church (or Peter) were praying for him to be released. James had just been killed, they’re probably expecting the same thing to happen to Peter. But instead of praying for him to be released, they’re likely praying for God to give Peter strength, which seemed to work if he was able to sleep that hard in a prison cell, chained to 2 other guards! But in this case, God’s not done with Peter, and he not only comforts him, but releases him from prison.
-Peter calms everyone down and then serves as a witness to God’s redemption in his life. And he specifically calls out “James and the brothers,” which some believe means this is the official transfer of leadership in the church. Peter fades into the background in this book and Paul (Saul) emerges as the focus moving forward, but not before we deal with Herod:
- “Peace” (18-23)
-Peace is intentionally in scare quotes because it’s the illusion of peace, but it’s not real peace. It’s peace the way the world tries to offer it: through bribery or power, not the kind of peace Jesus offers.
-Herod finds out that the 4 squads of soldiers couldn’t keep Peter locked up, so Herod is livid, and after interrogating them he goes the Roman way and kills them, then goes to Caesarea, along the coast.
-Meanwhile, there was mutual disdain between Herod and a couple other cities along the coast, the problem was those cities depended on the exports of Herod’s territory to live, so they sent an envoy to meet Herod because they had an “in” through Blastus. What’s ironic is while Herod thinks he’s smart enough and powerful enough to enforce peace, the church is the place where peace exists, but it’s not through power or intelligence.
-The day for this meeting came, and 1st century Jewish historian named Josephus actually records this event which gives us some more context to how Herod was dressed:
-Just as Josephus records, Luke tells us that they were giving divine blessing to Herod, and he loved it! But God didn’t. So this Jewish “king” was killed without bringing any peace to his realm. While Peter prospered, Herod perished, which shows exactly whose side God is on here.
- Prosperity (24-25)
-In contrast to Herod, who passes from the scene, look at the outcome of this persecution that he brought about:
-The word of God could almost be seen as one of the primary characters in the story. At each pivotal point in this story of the early church, the word of God continues spreading out and multiplying, while Herod couldn’t even get a grip on 1 person.
-This is one of the things I love about Christianity: it’s too big to be constrained by 1 place or 1 culture, it both critiques every culture and honors every culture, because each culture has something that reflects God in it. And what we see these early witnesses doing is going into every culture with the Word of God, and then seeing the Word transform that culture into something brand new, but it has to start in the church and then move out from there. That’s what we’re seeing take place here: establish churches, train up disciples, then watch them transform the communities where they live. It sounds so basic and ordinary, and it’s the exact way God has worked throughout history! But it requires people like you and me taking and speaking that word of God to others. Talk about it at home, talk about it at work, talk about it while you play, talk about it while you drive. Everywhere we go, we’re supposed to be marked by God’s Word!
-And some characters that we’d seen previously move into center stage on the story. One of the parts of Acts 11 that John didn’t get to last week was the way benevolence funds worked in the early church. So at the end of that chapter, we read:
-Here we see another one of the unique things about the early church: radical generosity. People willingly giving up from their resources to serve others who don’t have enough. And what did they do? They didn’t have banks or Venmo to send money, they pooled their money and gave it to Barnabas and Saul, who delivered it to “the elders.” Here we see that new office leading the church, it’s no longer the 12 apostles leading, it’s been delegated.
-This chapter concludes telling us that the relief work was done, so Saul & Barnabas go back to Jerusalem with John Mark, who came up earlier in the text as the house Peter went to after prison. John Mark will travel with Saul and Barnabas for a season, but that’s for future weeks!
-What do we do with this story today? We’ve seen that we need to be speaking the word, which requires knowing the Word. I saw a funny article a couple weeks ago that was titled, “Don’t just study the Bible, read it!” One of my concerns today is too many of us spend too much time in Bible studies that it takes away from the reading of the Word itself. Don’t take this to the other extreme where you say, “Pastor Mike said not to study the Bible,” that’s NOT what I’m saying! But sometimes we get so far into the weeds of our study that we forget that we’re supposed to read the Bible itself and then go on to live as if what we read is real and true. This Word will last forever, every Bible study in the world (no matter how good it is) is going to fade away. Now if you’re an astute Bible student, you might be jumping to the noble Bereans of Acts 17, hold that thought for 3 more weeks, because I don’t think it means what people today interpret it to mean, which means you’ll also need to keep coming back until we get there!
-But I think there are 2 other key things that we need to work to apply to our lives. The first is that we don’t see how God works until it’s already in the past. Peter had no clue what God was doing in his release from prison. He just kept faithfully following the angel, putting 1 foot in front of the other, and it wasn’t until the angel left that he suddenly realized he was walking in a miracle!
-The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said:
-This is why we need to know God’s Word. If we don’t know God’s Word, we’ll be tempted to miss the ways God is working around us to bring us to exactly where we need to be today so that we can be faithful followers of Him. It’s also the reason that one of the repeated commands throughout the Bible is “remember,” remember what God has previously done, and because He’s previously worked in our lives, we can trust that He’s going to continue working in our lives in the future!
-The other, I think bigger issue for us today is what do you do when life isn’t fair? Why was Peter rescued from prison, while James was killed? It’s really easy to look around at other people near you and compare yourself to them. Why do they get the fun toys, why do they get the exciting vacation, why do they have the nice house when it feels like your life just can’t compare? Or even beyond that, why were we born in a place where we have access to food, & clean water, while millions are born in places like Laos without indoor plumbing. How do you make sense of what feels completely random?
-We need to trust that God’s faithfulness extends even to the events of our time and lives. In a few chapters, we’ll read about Saul standing up to give a defense about God, and he explicitly says: which means that history has an author, someone who remains involved in what’s taking place here. Cara has our kids trained to describe time as “after I was born, and back when I was in God’s mind.”
-The Bible exists to help us understand that God is in control, and we can trust Him, even if, or maybe especially when things don’t feel “fair,” or like they make sense. But we also don’t know everything that God knows. I’ve shared this reality before: we have a mystery card when we talk about God. We’ll never be able to fully understand Him, which gets us back to the need to know God as He’s revealed Himself to us, and where has He revealed Himself to us? In His Word! We read the Bible to know, understand, and worship the God who reigns over everything, and then we do exactly what we see the early church doing: we pray to Him about the things we don’t understand. So when life doesn’t feel fair, when you’re struggling to trust Him, pray! And trust that God will answer! That’s exactly what happened to Peter in this story. And you can tell that they didn’t expect Peter to be released! God answered their prayers and they couldn’t even admit it!
-In his book on prayer, Tim Keller says this: We don’t know everything God’s doing, but we can trust Him. Someday, we’ll get to talk with both Peter and James about this event, and I can guarantee that neither of them would have regrets about the events of their lives. God used them both to accomplish His good plans, even when we (as Paul says in 1 Cor) only see life through a foggy mirror, God’s view is perfect, so trust in Him and pray to Him for the strength to persevere through it.
