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About Jesus Steve Sweetman This Section - Chapters 12 Previous Section - Chapters 13
Peter’s Miraculous Escape From Prison (ch. 12:1 - 19) Luke
begins chapter 12 by saying, “it was about this time…”, meaning, the
time when Agabus gave his prophecy. During
this time, King Herod arrested many in the church.
Herod was in fact King over all of Herod
died in the middle of 44 AD. The
famine prophesied by Agabus took place in the last half of 44 and first
half of 45 AD. Herod
had actually had James, the brother of John, not James the brother of
Jesus, killed. Herod most
likely wanted to persecute the church and kill Christians in order to cut
down the problems between Jews
and Christians. Any problem in
his province would not be looked on with much favour in the eyes of the
emperor. Some of these kings
lost jobs over mismanagement of their province, and Herod would not want
that. In
verse 3 Luke notes that when Herod saw that his actions pleased the Jews,
he had Peter arrested as well. Arresting
Peter, one of the main leaders would really impress the Sanhedrin. The
Jews had always been a potential source of problems, and if Herod could
keep the Jews happy by imprisoning Christians, he would do that.
Christians were a new group on the scene, so they had not been a
traditional problem like the Jews. This
all happened during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, meaning the Passover.
The plan was that Peter was to be put in prison, then after the
Passover, put on trial for all to see. Verse
7 says that while Peter was in prison, “the church earnestly prayed for
him”. You will note that the
early church was a group of people who did a lot of praying.
Of course, they needed all the help they could get from the Lord.
They were always under pressure. That
was one reason why they were strong. Luke
says that the night before Peter’s trial, he was in prison, chained
between two guards, with guards standing at the prison door.
He was well guarded, and well secured in prison. Sometimes
we view problems as being out of the will of God.
That's not always true. It
wasn't true in this case. Suddenly,
in the middle of the night an angel appeared to Peter and “struck him on
his side and woke him up”. The
angel told Peter to “get up”, while the chains fell off Peter’s
wrists. This
angel told Peter to get dressed. Once
Peter was ready, the angel led him out of the jail cell, past 2 sets of
guards to a large iron gate that led to a street.
This iron gate opened for them and they left the premise and began
walking down the city street. Shortly
after this, the angel disappeared. This
event tells us something about angels.
Angels aren't just spirit beings floating around in heaven.
When you see angels in Scripture, they're always doing something in
relation to the earth. As
the first chapter of Hebrews says, angels are ministering spirits, sent
from heaven to earth to perform some kind of task.
Peter
was somewhat beside himself at the appearance of this angel.
Luke records that he was not sure if he was seeing another vision,
or this was the real thing. Once
finding himself free and on the city streets, he realized that another
miracle from God had taken place in his life. When
this realization came to Peter he said, “Now I know (something we’ve
heard Peter say before) without a doubt that the Lord has sent His angel
and rescued me from the Herod’s clutches and everything the Jewish
people were anticipating”. What were the Jews anticipating?
They were waiting for the trial and an execution of Peter. Verse
12 tells us that once Peter understood what was happening to him, he went
to the house of one called Mary, the mother of John. The John spoken of
here is John Mark, the writer of the Gospel of Mark.
We see him later in verse 25 as well as in other parts of Acts.
Peter calls John Mark his son, as in spiritual son. (1 Pet. 5:13)
Mark was also a cousin to Barnabas and the Mary spoken of here was
his mother. (see Col. 4:10) Because
Peter calls Mark his son, Peter might well have led him to Jesus. Inside
Mary’s home were “many people” who had gathered to pray.
Peter knocks on the door and a servant girl named Rhoda attends at
the door. This tells us that
most likely Mary was financially secure because she had a servant. She
was most likely a widow, since the house was her’s, and not her
husband’s. Rhoda
was so excited when hearing Peter’s voice that she immediately ran back
to tell the others inside the house and failed to open the door for Peter.
The
people told Rhoda that she was out of her mind, but after persisting, they
said that what she heard must have been Peter's angel, or spirit.
These people apparently thought that Peter was already dead and
that he had come back in spirit form.
Some Jewish tradition has it, (some Christian tradition also) that
each of us has a “guardian angel”.
Some believe that this is what the people in the room were talking
about. The idea of a guardian angel is not easily proven in Scripture. Peter
kept on knocking. Some people finally came to the door, and as Luke puts
it, “were astonished” to see Peter standing there.
It
must have been quite a noisy affair because Peter had to “motion with
his hands” to tell them to be quiet.
Even Peter could not raise his voice sufficiently to speak over the
noise. He then proceeded to
“tell them how the Lord had brought him out of prison”. (ch. 12:17) Peter
specifically tells these people to relate this event to “James and the
brothers”. Who is “James
and the other brothers”? James
is the brother of Jesus. The
“other brothers” could have been the elders of the church in After
Stephen was killed, you remember that most of the Christians fled It
therefore appears that apostolic authority in the One
thing to note hear is that the idea of a lead elder among elders is not
what Paul taught to the Gentile churches, but appears to be what was
happening in the Jewish church in At
this point we can sum up the evolution of the church to date.
In Acts 2 we see the 120, with the 12 in charge.
The church grows to 3000 on the day of Pentecost, and continues to
grow. In Acts 6 we have the
addition of the 7 administrators, who some call deacons.
Then at some point, at least in the If
this was truly a natural progression, we can then ask ourselves, as we
have before, is the church still naturally evolving, or was there a
certain time in New Testament history when the church became what it was
meant to be? If so, we should
be modeling our church after that church.
If not, we are free to model our church in a way that best fits our
generation, with certain Scriptural limitations. For example, we would not
be free to have a homosexual church
as some are contending today. I
think concerning the Getting
back to our text we see Peter “leaving for another place”.
Where Peter went we don’t know.
We do know what had happened to the guards that were watching him.
Roman law made guards responsible and liable for their prisoners.
Thus Herod had to kill
these men. The
death of these guards is interesting.
Because the Lord caused Peter’s escape, resulting in men being
killed. You might conclude
that innocent lives were lost
because of a miracle Jesus had performed.
Why would Jesus allow people to be killed because of something good
He had done? The
answer to this question might merely be speculation.
People often say, “if there is a good God, why are people dying
for no good reason?” You
could ask a similar question here. If
Jesus is so good, why would He do anything that would cause the death of
innocent men? The only answer
that I see at the moment is that when it comes to the gospel, the
spreading of the gospel is more important than the lives of men. If this
is true, then there is a great burden for the church to spread the good
news of Jesus throughout the world. There
might be something else to think about here.
I can't see Peter being in prison and not preaching the gospel to
these guards. They might well
have become Christian. If that
was the case, then their death is not a tragedy, at least in the eyes of
God. If they did not become
Christian, but did in fact hear the gospel, then they had a chance to get
saved, but refused. That
would take away the question of a good God doing not a not so good thing.
God would have given them the chance to be saved.
Herod’s Death (ch. 12:19 - 25) Luke
records how King Herod passed away, most likely because of the nature of
his death, and also because he had just been talking about him.
Herod
had gone to This
event in history is an event where God intervened in the affairs of
ordinary men, not Christian men and women.
We have seen the Lord involved miraculously in his people, but here
He was miraculously involved in the life of a sinner.
People who are “Deist” believe that God created all things,
then stepped back and let all things carry on in their own power.
They don’t believe that God interferes in the affairs of men and
nature. He only got the
“ball rolling”, so to speak. Yet
this event tells a different story. If
you believe this story to be true, then you cannot be a Deist, because God
definitely stepped into the affairs of man. It
doesn’t appear that God has stepped into the political affairs of other
men and done something so drastic as He did with Herod.
Why He has not been so drastic with other, I can’t say. It may be
that He has been more subtle in His approach to national leaders.
Maybe He has caused the fall of leaders in ways that cannot be
easily attributed to Himself. Nevertheless,
if God felt so strongly in the case of Herod, we can certainly conclude
that He could feel as strong with any other leader in history, including
those of today. I
do strongly believe that God does intervene in the affairs of men,
leaders, and nations today. That
can be seen in In
verse 24 Luke says, “but the Word of God continued to increase and
spread”. To me, Luke is
saying that even though there is still great pressure against the church,
the message had not been constrained.
The gospel was still being spread more rapidly than ever.
And such is the case. The
gospel has always been most active and successful in times of persecution.
The persecution itself brings more attention to the good news,
resulting in people seeing that it must be worth something if people
believe it is worth dying for. I
think the western church as gotten slack in these days because we haven't
experienced the pressure as Peter did here in this chapter.
This is changing and will continue to change.
Yet, because of the freedom we've had, and I'd say it is because of
the influence of the gospel on society, we have turned this freedom into a
license to be worldly. We are
now beginning to pay for this. This
chapter closes with Luke telling us that Saul and Barnabas “completed
their mission”, that is the delivery of funds to the Jewish Christians.
They returned to
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