Intro
I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me recently. On an afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I hung out at JJ Bean just down the street at Dollar Village. When I left the coffeeshop, I headed right to my white Hyundai Accent, which was parked nearby. When I put the key into the door, it stuck a bit. “That’s weird,” I thought, “but sometimes it does that”. I put a little bit of force into it, and the door opened. I sat down in the driver seat and was just about to put the key into the ignition when I noticed that the contents of the inside of the car were not what I was expecting. There was kleenex everywhere, a CD hanging out by the console, that kind of thing. And I realized…this is not my car. I have accidentally broken into someone’s vehicle. I quickly exited the vehicle and saw that my white Hyundai Accent was actually two spots over, with one car in between. But as soon as I entered my car, I saw a very worried woman rushing over to her vehicle, examining it and looking at me very suspiciously. Now, I could have just driven away, but I wanted to put her at ease. So I got out and told her what had happened. It’s the craziest thing! I have a Hyundai Accent, and apparently my key opens up other Hyundai Accents! She didn’t seem to be at ease. She seemed more worried than before. So I replied- and I don’t know why I thought this would help- “you’ve got to watch out! You never know who could break into your car!” or something like that. For all I know, there are wanted posters of me all over Dollar Village. Also, I hope nobody listening to this is a car thief, because apparently, it is extraordinarily easy to steal a 2008 Hyundai Accent.
Maybe this is stretching it a bit, maybe I’m just trying to justify telling you that story, but I think there’s something there about the human condition. Through our sinful choices, we routinely get ourselves into situations where we go, “how did this happen? This isn’t right. This isn’t what I was made for!” Can you relate to that? It’s as if as humans we have broken in to the condition of bondage and enslavement. That’s what we do. But what God does is break us out. It’s one of His specialities. He delivers us. He opens our eyes, looses the chains, opens the door and urges us to follow Him out.
That’s what we’re going to see today. Last year, from September to April, I taught from the book of Acts and made it to chapter 11. Today, and through this coming year, we’re picking it up again. This is probably my favorite book in the Bible. It’s a book that gives us the history of the early church and what God did in and through it. As we said often last year, the purpose of these stories is not just to tell us what happened, though of course that’s important. It’s also to shape our vision for what God can do now, for what God wants to do now. These stories tell us about His character, which is unchanging through the ages. And again, what we’ll see today is that God is the God of the breakout.
It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. 2 He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. 3 When he saw that this met with approval among the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened during the Festival of Unleavened Bread. 4 After arresting him, he put him in prison, handing him over to be guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring him out for public trial after the Passover. 5 So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him. 6 The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. 7 Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. “Quick, get up!” he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists. 8 Then the angel said to him, “Put on your clothes and sandals.” And Peter did so. “Wrap your cloak around you and follow me,” the angel told him.9 Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.10 They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself, and they went through it. When they had walked the length of one street, suddenly the angel left him. 11 Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I know without a doubt that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s clutches and from everything the Jewish people were hoping would happen.” 12 When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. 13 Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. 14 When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!” 15 “You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.” 16 But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished. 17 Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison. “Tell James and the other brothers and sisters about this,” he said, and then he left for another place. 18 In the morning, there was no small commotion among the soldiers as to what had become of Peter. 19 After Herod had a thorough search made for him and did not find him, he cross-examined the guards and ordered that they be executed.
Acts 12:1-19
2. Aspects of the breakout
What I’m going to do today is walk through this story again, taking note of a number of things that illustrate what God’s deliverance is all about. I know some of you are in situations right now where you’re desperate for deliverance. Others of you will be thinking about people you know. Some of you are wrestling with questions about how God worked or didn’t seem to work in your past. I believe God’s Word has something to say in all of those situations. Let’s get into it.
a. Intentions
Luke tells us in verse 1 about Herod’s intentions, but first, a quick note about Herod: there are a few different Herods mentioned in the New Testament. Herod the Great was the ruler when Jesus was born. He was the bloodthirsty king who had all the infant boys of Bethlehem killed when he found out that a supposed future king had been born there. Herod Antipas was one of his sons, and he was the bloodthirsty king who had John the Baptist’s head brought to him on a plate, which we read about in the Gospels. This is Herod Agrippa, one of Herod the Great’s grandsons. He’s the bloodthirsty king who’s throwing Jesus-followers into prison. Got it? Herods are bloodthirsty. Don’t name your child Herod.
Luke tells us that Herod had begun arresting some of the followers of Jesus and throwing them into prison. Verse 3 tells us that he saw that this pleased the Jewish people, which motivated him to do even more of it. Herod was like that classroom pest who makes fun of another kid, sees that it makes his friends laugh, and gleefully ups his jerk-game even more. That’s part of the equation. The other part is that Herod seems to have genuinely believed that Christians were a theological threat that needed to be stamped out. His intention, according to Acts 12, was to persecute the church.
While there are certainly exceptions, the powers that be in the world are generally not in the business of promoting the welfare of disciples of Jesus. That’s why you see persecution ramping up in places like China. It’s even why even here in Canada, you’ll have our taxpayer-funded news outlet, the CBC, gleefully reporting on a misguided exorcism at a Bible camp. If you’re familiar with that story, it definitely seems to have been theologically misguided, resulting in some degree of trauma for the boys that witnessed it. However, CBC News was making it the featured story on its homepage a month and a half after it happened, after having already reported on it. Was there really nothing more consequential going on in the world that week? Or are we witnessing some measure of pleasure in tearing down Christian faith in the public eye? I quoted John 15 last week, where Jesus warns his disciples that the world will hate them. I don’t mean to be doomsday about this or instil fear in you. I intend the opposite. It is to be expected. It has been experienced often throughout history. Don’t fear or grow anxious.
You see, the thing about the intentions of worldly powers is that God is absolutely not anxious or fearful. There may be people or forces that intend on destroying you, undermining you, discouraging you, and causing you to despair. That’s their intent. But if you humble yourself and seek the Lord and are faithful to Him, He will thwart those intentions. I was just reading in the Old Testament book of Nehemiah the other day. Nehemiah recalls the story of Balaam, a prophet-type figure who was paid by a foreign king to curse the Israelites as they traveled through the wilderness. Nehemiah says that “our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing” (13:2). This is what God does. He subverts the intentions of the powers that be. He can turn them upside down and do something incredible. That’s what He’ll do in Acts 12.
b. Providence
But before we get to that, we do need to wrestle with something else. In 12:2, we see that Herod is a repeat offender. Peter’s not the first disciple of Jesus Herod’s targeted. In fact, at some point in the recent past, he had James killed with the sword. By the way, just like Herod, there are a couple of James’ in the New Testament. This James who was martyred was the brother of John and one of Jesus’ closest disciples. The James we’ll read about later in Acts, the one who wrote one of the books of the New Testament and became the leader of the church in Jerusalem, was the half-brother of Jesus. James the brother of John is the one who is killed by Herod.
Here’s the question, though: why does God break Peter out of prison but allow James to be killed? Of course, you can substitute any number of situations for Peter and James. You might be applying that question to your own life right now. Why did ____ get healed but not my child? Why was I fired from my job and not that other person? Why did the car accident take another life but the drunk driver got off without a scratch? It all seems so random. Where is God in this?
I wish I had a neat and tidy answer to that. Obviously I don’t. What I can say is that evil exists in the world. There are forces, human and otherwise, that seek to kill, steal, and destroy. I can also say that our lives in the world are fleeting, no matter what. We know that death is inevitable, but that there is eternity beyond this life. Ultimately- and I know this isn’t easy for some who have endured tragedy, but I believe it’s true- what’s more important than when someone died is the nature of their life before they died. What evil intends to do is not simply to inflict physical pain, but to destroy relationships, especially the relationship between God and people. I can’t explain why God will deliver some from earthly circumstances like unjust imprisonment and not others. We can speculate about His purposes. What I do know, as I just said, is that He will thwart the purposes of evil if people will seek Him in the midst of it. He will deliver His people from despair, from the temptation towards unfaithfulness and bitterness, as they seek.
c. Prayer
What does it mean to seek Him? One really big way is through prayer. That’s what we see in verse 5. We read that the church was earnestly praying to God for Peter. In verse 12, we get a bit more insight into this prayer, where we read that it was at the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where people had gathered and were praying.
A few things from this: they were praying together. Again and again we see this in the New Testament. The early church was continually praying together. They were devoted to praying together. Let me put it this way. We think of prayer as primarily an individual sport, like tennis. The early church seems to have seen it primarily as a team sport, like basketball. That doesn’t mean individuals didn’t pray on their own. Of course they did. However, the corporate aspect to their faith was far more dominant for them than it is for us in Western Christianity. The together-ness, the extent to which they lived out their faith as a community was central in a way it isn’t for us. I have no doubt that this was to their benefit and our detriment.
The church prayed together, and not just when it was convenient, especially not in a time of crisis like this. It’s in the middle of the night when Peter is awakened by the angel. He’s sleeping and so are the guards. Everyone’s asleep. Except the church. Many believers in Jerusalem have come together in this hour of need, regardless of the hour. That’s their commitment.
They were praying together, in the middle of the night, for someone else. Maybe it’s significant, maybe it’s not, but again notice that Peter himself is sleeping. The prayers are done on his behalf by people who are not themselves in prison. It’s not really for their own sake that they pray in this way- it’s driven by love. It’s prayer fired by love.
They were praying together, in the middle of the night, driven by love, and they were doing it earnestly. The Greek word here is only used one time in the Gospels. “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” You know who that’s about? Cue the Sunday School answer- Jesus! And you know where it was? The Garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus was facing his death, the most important death in the history of humanity, the death that provides for the forgiveness of sins, he prayed earnestly. This was his prayer: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) He did not want to die that death. In that moment, Jesus was weakened by the thought of it. It was prayer- fervent, deep, earnest, soul-rending, heart-wrenching, persistent, desperate prayer- that enabled him to bear the cross. That’s the kind of prayer that Luke compares the prayer of the church in Acts 12 to. This isn’t “let’s say a few words for Peter before we eat our supper” prayer. This is prayer that keeps you up at night with fellow believers who can’t sleep because of the desperate need for God’s power.
Have you prayed in this way? When you or someone close to you have been in need of deliverance, have you prayed in this way? Have you prayed in this way with others? I’ve experienced it, but I’ll admit that it’s been rare in my life. I want more of it. I want to know the heart of God in prayer. I want my heart to break for the things that He cares about. And I want more of that kind of prayer corporately, together with you. It’s the kind of prayer- not polite, flowery prayers, but earnest, impassioned prayer- that changes history and cities and families and individual lives. I believe we’re a church that values prayer. We emphasized it this past week. Many of you spent time praying for our church during our 24/7 prayer week, including in the middle of the night! I love doing that, I love seeing so many different people join in and to see what they prayed about. We worshiped and prayed together in a beautiful time on Thursday. Some of us are able to get together and pray every Monday at noon. But can you imagine if we became a praying church in the way that the Jerusalem church in Acts 12 was? I wonder what God would do in us and through us if we did?
d. Timing
Another thing that’s striking about their prayer is the timing of it. The believers hadn’t given up, despite the fact that it was the night before Herod was to bring him to trial, according to verse 6. This was when God acted to set Peter free: at almost the last possible moment. He could have done it days before. He could have warned Peter about the soldiers and had him escape before the arrest ever happened. That would have been a lot easier for Peter than having this squadron of Roman goonies watching his every move. But in His providence, God waited and acted at the last minute, perhaps because of the persistent prayers of the church.
Jesus tells this parable in the Gospels about a widow who is seeking justice with an adversary who is determined to destroy her. The judge resists, doesn’t want to help her, but she bothers him so much that finally he gives in. Fine, I’ll do it, just stop bugging me! And Jesus says, if that’s how an earthly, corrupt judge is, what about God who loves His people and wants to bring about justice for them? Luke, the same Luke who writes the book of Acts, adds this editorial: Jesus told them this parable “to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” (Luke 18:1) Always pray and don’t give up when you’re seeking the Lord’s intervention in your life or someone else’s life. Don’t give up even when it seems too late from a human perspective. You don’t know the Lord’s timing.
e. Striking
That night, the night before Herod intended on bringing Peter before a sham trial, as Peter and the guards slept and the church fervently prayed, God intervened. An angel showed up in the cell. Luke says something interesting in the midst of this very interesting story. He says that the angel “struck” Peter on the side. The word that’s used there is almost always a violent and aggressive word. For example, in the Gospels, when Peter himself lops off the ear of one of the guys who’s come to arrest Jesus, the word is the same. He strikes the guy’s ear (Luke 22:50). So it’s not like the angel nudges Peter, “hey psst, wake up. Come on man, we gotta go”. It’s more like “bam! Get up!”
But here’s the really interesting part. Later on in Acts 12, in a story we’ll look at next week, this same Herod pridefully accepts claims that he himself is divine. As a result, an angel of the Lord strikes him and he dies. Same word. One of the only other times Luke uses it. Both Peter and Herod are struck by an angel. One claims glory for himself and dies from the strike, the other gives glory to God and is freed by the strike. You see, God is not a tame God. He is gracious and compassionate, but He is not afraid of shocking our senses every now and then. He is not afraid to strike us. But the outcome of that strike, the result of it, varies greatly depending on your heart. On your posture toward him.
I don’t know if it’s an exact parallel, but in the summer I read most of the Chronicles of Narnia books to our kids. One of my favorite scenes is in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where a boy named Eustace is an absolute brat. He’s just the worst. The crew lands on this seemingly uninhabited island, and Eustace stumbles upon a dragon’s cave, filled with treasure. As he sleeps that night, the combination of the treasure and his dragonish heart results in his transformation into a literal dragon. However, as he realizes his predicament and that this bondage is a reflection of his heart, he experiences something like repentance. He has sorrow for his way of life. Soon, Aslan, the Great Lion of Narnia and a clear Christ-figure, comes along. Aslan tells Eustace it is time to undress, but as Eustace sheds layer after layer of dragon skin, no progress is made. Then Aslan approaches Eustace with his claws out and tears into the dragon skin, a searing pain unlike any other Eustace has experienced. However, it is this “strike” that removes the dragon skin and restores Eustace to the boy he was, except now with a different heart and mindset.
God never promised life would be easy or without its bumps and bruises. He allows those to come our way. What we see in the Bible is that sometimes He directly and intentionally brings them our way. The question is if those bumps, or strikes, will destroy us or actually lead to our freedom, to our “breakout”. Again, it all depends on our heart’s posture toward God.
f. Response
The angel strikes Peter and wakes him up. What follows is an account of his deliverance from prison. And here’s what hit me when I was reading through this: there were aspects of Peter’s deliverance that only God could accomplish. I mean, chains falling off his wrists? Pretty sure Peter didn’t have Hulk-level strength to just snap those off. Gates opening by themselves as they walked through the prison and out into the street? No record of Peter as a Jedi apprentice, just swishing his fingers at doors to slide them open. The guards didn’t even notice, just slept through the whole thing. It wasn’t like Peter fought them all off like Shang-Chi in the Marvel Universe. Peter didn’t have to have a blueprint of the prison tattooed all over his body like in Prison Break. Four media references in one point, boom. Clearly, these were things only God could do. Peter was helpless to bring about this escape. All the cunning planning in the world couldn’t have accomplished this. It was the power of God.
However, there were also aspects that required Peter’s response and obedience. He needed to do what the angel said and get dressed. He had to follow the angel out of the prison. You could imagine a situation where someone might say, I’m afraid of leaving this cell. I’m afraid that the guards will pursue me. I don’t believe this is real. In fact, that is apparently something like what Peter thought: this wasn’t real, it was just a vision, just a dream- like Inception. Last movie reference, I promise. You could see it, though, right? That someone would refuse to leave the cell because of fear or doubt or whatever else?
The truth is, and I’ll come to this more in a moment, that in Christ Jesus, God has provided for the ultimate deliverance of anyone who trusts in Jesus. He delivers from eternal death. I believe the death of Jesus was sufficient to cover over all sin. However, many people, even after hearing this news, remain in the cell. They don’t respond. They don’t follow Jesus out of the cell. Deliverance can only be accomplished by God, but it must be responded to in obedience. We do have a role to play if we are to walk in freedom. We are active participants in this way.
g. More than they asked
I’ll make two more points. First, we have this comedic scene when Peter arrives at John Mark’s mother’s door. He knocks, a servant girl recognizes his voice, and without opening the door rushes to tell the group that is praying there. Meanwhile, Peter is just hanging out by the door. Twiddling his thumbs. Hoping that no Roman soldier is doing a nighttime patrol. Rhoda, the servant girl, is having the worst time trying to convince everyone that Peter is at the door. They’re insisting that it might just be his angel- nobody’s quite sure what they mean by this, but there’s evidence that first century Jews believed in something like a personal guardian angel assigned to God’s people. In any case, as a reader, you’re thinking, there’s a pretty easy way to find out if Peter’s at the door or not. Just open it!
Here’s my question, though: the believers are praying earnestly together for Peter, right? At the same time, they have such a hard time believing that Peter is at the door, free of his imprisonment. But isn’t that what they were praying for? Why would they be surprised? It reminds me of another story in the Bible, in John 11, where a friend of Jesus named Lazarus has died. One of Lazarus’ sisters, Martha, tells Jesus she knows God will do whatever Jesus asks. A few moments later, though, when Jesus orders the stone to be removed from the tomb, Martha is horrified. It’s going to smell bad! I want to ask Martha, when you said that God would do anything Jesus asked, weren’t you thinking about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead? Why would you be surprised if he wants the stone rolled away?
See, I don’t think this is evidence of inconsistency in the Bible. I think it’s evidence of the inconsistency of humanity. We say we believe, but then are surprised when God acts. Or we pray for God to act, but we simply can’t anticipate how He’s going to act. And maybe it’s also a lesson about how we ourselves are to pray in situations like this. Maybe the reason the believers were surprised was also because they weren’t praying for release. Maybe, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, they were simply but fervently praying for God’s will to be done and not theirs. Maybe that’s a wise course of action. In any case, it is evident that God routinely surprises us with the answer to our prayers!
h. Cruciform
And here’s the final point I want to make about this story. Right at the beginning of the story, Luke gives us the detail that Herod arrested Peter “during the Festival of Unleavened Bread”. Why does that matter? Why include a detail like that?
Well, here’s one possibility. Luke may make reference to that because it was also during the Festival of Unleavened Bread, also known as Passover, when Jesus was arrested. There was a Herod then as well who participated in the sham trial and persecution of Jesus, leading to his death- a detail about Jesus’ crucifixion that only Luke among the Gospels records. There are also similarities at the end of the story to the resurrection of Jesus. In verses 16 and 17, we find the believers in Jerusalem behind locked doors, thinking at first that the appearance of their beloved leader is a paranormal being (here an angel), rejecting an initial report by a woman, in this case Rhoda. In Luke 24, you have a number of woman, including Mary Magdalene, who report that Jesus has been raised from the dead, but this report is disbelieved by the disciples. Then you have the disciples behind locked doors, and Jesus appears to them, but they think he’s a paranormal being of some kind (a ghost). In both stories, the disciples are eventually persuaded and overjoyed about what God has done.
Why does Luke draw out those parallels? What does that say to us? I believe it is a reminder to us of two things. First, it is a reminder that when we follow Jesus, our lives are to be “cruciform”. Our lives are to imitate his. Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me”. We have died to ourselves through the cross of Jesus and have been raised to new life through his resurrection. We identify with him. We find our meaning and purpose and identity in him. Paul says to the Corinthians that “we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:10-11). The story of Peter’s deliverance and the similarities with the death and resurrection of Jesus teaches us what is to be true of all of us. We are living out the death and resurrection of Jesus in our own lives when we follow him, dying to ourselves, dying to sin, dying to our will, and living for him.
The second thing it reminds us of is that every act of divine deliverance is a sign that points us to that ultimate deliverance that Jesus provided at the cross. That’s what Peter’s liberation was about. Even the mention of the Passover, the celebration of how God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, is ultimately a foreshadowing, pointing to the cross. This is something we’ve seen often in Acts. Some people experience miraculous healing from sickness, others don’t. The miracle itself isn’t the point, because it’s always just a temporary delay of death. The miracle points to the ultimate healing that comes through reconciliation with God. It points to the eternal life we have through Jesus. Every act of divine deliverance, whether from some hopeless situation, or an unjust imprisonment, or from an individual set on taking us down, or some bodily ailment, is a sign pointing us back to our ultimate deliverance. It points us to that deliverance from eternal death and the consequences of our sin that comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Conclusion
So this morning, if you or someone you know is desperate for deliverance, seek the Lord. He will undermine the intentions of evil. He is the God of the breakout, the God of deliverance, the God of freedom. He does this in all kinds of small ways, and He’s done it on the largest scale possible through Jesus. Seek Him, trust Him, obey Him, right to the end, and you will see Him set you free.
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