Intro
I love testimonies. I love hearing stories about how people came to trust in Jesus, and what God has done in their lives through it. They bolster the faith of Christians, reminding us of what Jesus promises to do for those who put their faith in him. They encourage us to share the good news with others, because we see what can happen. And these stories are compelling for those who are searching. They can make what seem like big, intimidating theological ideas relatable and real. Our story is a huge component in our job as witnesses, which is what Jesus has saved us to be. In Acts 1:8, the big thematic verse in the book of Acts, Jesus tells the disciples that they will receive power from the Holy Spirit and be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samara, and the ends of the earth.
Last week, in the first part of Acts 8, we saw how God allowed persecution to break out against the church in Jerusalem. Why? So that what Jesus said in Acts 1:8 would take place. So that his followers would be his witnesses everywhere they go. Disciples were scattered from Jerusalem, and one of them, a man named Philip, traveled to Samaria. That’s one of the places Jesus mentions in Acts 1. Philip proclaims the good news and many believe. When Peter and John arrive, the Samaritans receive the Spirit. Also, a sorcerer is knocked down about 24 pegs, gets everything wrong, tries to buy the Holy Spirit, and receives a good old fashioned verbal whooping from Peter. This week, we’re continuing to follow Philip, who I think is one of the more underrated and unrecognized of the individuals in Acts, as he continues to break new ground through the power of the Holy Spirit.
26 Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit toldPhilip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.” 30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. 31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.” 34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus. 36 As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” [37] 38 And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.40 Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.
Acts 8:26-40
1. The process: the eunuch
What I want to do this morning is look at a process: the process of how a seeker becomes a believer. I think this is going to be helpful for everyone. If you’re not a believer but you’re here, it’s probably because at least part of you is seeking to know who God is. What we’re looking at will help you understand what some next steps might be. If you are a believer, you’re probably wanting to be used by Jesus to help others know Him too. This is going to help with that as well. So let’s start by looking at the process from the perspective of the Ethiopian eunuch.
1. Far off
The first thing we can say is this: on the face of it, this guy was as far off as could possibly be. That’s almost literally true if you’re talking about geography. He was from Ethiopia, which was the ancient term for the land south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan- not Ethiopia. Not that it makes a huge difference to us, it’s just a fun fact you can break out when you’re at the playground with your kids and talking to other parents: did you know what ancient Ethiopia is actually modern Sudan? The bottom line is that he was a foreigner. He did not grow up hearing about Yahweh, the God of Israel. He did not grow up going to the temple. Jews were not his people. Nothing about Judaism was remotely “natural” to him.
Then there’s the title of “eunuch” that is given to him. The most basic, fundamental meaning here is that he was a man who had been castrated. He was sexually impotent. This might have happened on purpose, whether by himself or by others. It might have been an accident. It may have been his reality from birth, which is what Jesus says in Matthew 19. In the ancient world, that status meant that someone could be trusted in the presence of a queen. Along with your ability to procreate went your desire to. It meant they could be trusted with a number of things, since without any possibility of a family line and legacy, personal ambition was seriously restrained. This is why a lot of them, like this man in Acts 8, ended up in positions of responsibility in royal courts.
But then you ask, what does his status as a eunuch have to do with anything with how far off from God he was starting? Here’s what we read in Deuteronomy 23:1: “no one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.” That passage also goes on to rule out certain foreigners from being part of the assembly of the Lord as well. Which means that some foreigners, and all castrated men, have no place in ancient Israel. They’re out.
And then, the natural question if you’re tracking with me, is why? Why does God make a command like that in Deuteronomy 23? Here’s one thought: that the ceremonial laws we find in the Old Testament, like this one, all make a theological point. They are intended to shape the Israelites’ thinking in certain ways and directions. One good suggestion is that the eunuchs are not allowed in the assembly because the Israelites were to understand that sex and procreation were good gifts given by God to be enjoyed in their proper context, but not to be destroyed. Once that point is made, there is a change of view on eunuchs later on in Scripture. More on that below.
For now, though, it’s clear that the Ethiopian eunuch has all kinds of strikes against him. Because he is a foreigner, and because he is a eunuch, he is one of the least likely people you would expect to read the conversion story of. He’s beginning this journey of seeking from a very significant distance. You might be able to relate. None of this church stuff was natural to you, you didn’t grow up with it, you never considered in a thousand years that you might become a Jesus follower. Two books I’ve read recently illustrate this. One was about the movement of hippies in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s who binged on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Many youth of those years lived wild lives in blatant and eager rebellion against the dry institutionalism of the church at the time. And yet, as they became disillusioned with their failed utopian project, they began to come to Christ in droves. Thousands of teens being baptized in the Pacific Ocean, eagerly telling everyone they met about the love of God. The other book was about a gay man named Becket Cook who was living the life in Hollywood in the fashion industry, partying with celebrities, fully embracing the liberal progressive worldview around him. Until suddenly, about 10 years ago, he found himself invited to church. He took up that invitation out of sheer curiosity, experienced the presence of God that morning, and found in Christ a love he had never known before. It’s like God delights in this. He delights in saying, oh, you thought this kind of person was beyond my love, my redemption? Watch what I’m about to do. No matter who you are or what you’ve done, you are not beyond the ability and desire of Jesus to redeem you, to save you, to reconcile you to God and make you new.
2. Hears about the God of Israel
So the eunuch starts a long way off. But somewhere along the way, he heard about the God of Israel. What exactly this looked like or how it happened is speculation. The text doesn’t say. We also don’t know exactly what his religious convictions would have been like growing up. But almost without exception, the nations around Israel were polytheistic. They held to a number of gods and these gods were not exactly solid role models. Although it’s a different culture, if you grew up reading about Greek mythology, you know what I mean. These gods cheated on each other, lied to each other, fought against each other. Their knowledge and power were limited and they seemed to need humans just about as much as humans needed them. You get the picture? There was a lot about ancient religion that was uninspiring.
Maybe you read the Old Testament and think the same thing about the way God is portrayed there. Maybe that’s partly due to misunderstanding. Maybe it’s partly because you grew up in a culture that had already been shaped by Christian faith and the clarity about God’s character that comes in Christ. But for a pagan in the first century, the revelation of God in what we call the Old Testament would have been revolutionary. Here you have a God is all powerful, all knowing, separate from creation and yet present everywhere. Here you have a God who is truly holy and righteous. Here you have a God who creates the world in order to bless it. You have a God who creates humans in His image, not as his slaves to handle the messy work so he can sip lemonades and relax in his heavenly hammock. Good brand name for a hammock, right? I call 10% commission of you trademark it. Here you have a God who reveals His will to His people rather than leaving them to guess what he wants from them. It’s not hard to see why this would have been appealing to someone like the eunuch of Acts 8.
This is going to be true today as well. There are people who identify the divine with the universe. They think the universe set this up or did that thing. It’s an impersonal force that may or may not care about you. We can say, here is a God who made you, knows you, cares about you, has every hair of your head numbered. There are people whose worldview is driven by woke social justice, where there is no forgiveness and no redemption available to you if you have a certain skin color or status, where you are in constant danger of being canceled if you express the wrong idea (which may have been the right opinion five minutes ago, but things changed, didn’t you get the memo?). We can say, here is a God who forgives even the worst of sinners, a God who actually came in the person of Jesus and paid the price you deserved for your sin so you could be set free from shame and guilt. There are people who despair because they don’t believe there is a God, who think there is no purpose or meaning to life. We can say, here is a God who is able to work all things for the good, a God who is on the throne of the universe and will make all things new.
3. Made some moves
Somewhere along the way, this eunuch, so far off from God in a natural, cultural sense, had heard about the God of Israel and was intrigued. As we just said, likely because of how different and compelling this God was compared to what he had heard in his upbringing. So he did something about it. He made some moves.
What were those moves? Well, first of all, he traveled to Jerusalem. And this wasn’t for a business trip. Acts 8 tells us he went to worship. His ability to worship would have been limited. As a foreigner, as a eunuch, he could have only entered the very outer court of the temple, if that. But that was good enough for him to make the trip. He wanted to get as close as he could. He wanted to soak up as much as he could of this God and His presence.
And second of all, he got a hold of a scroll of Isaiah. You need to understand that things were different in the ancient world. You didn’t just go into a church, ask for a Bible, and expect one to be handed to you. You didn’t walk into a thrift store and buy one for a couple of bucks. Here are some rough calculations, but it will give you a picture. I’ve read that a scroll the length of Isaiah might have cost about 10 denarii, though quite possibly more. One denarius was the average day’s wage for a laborer in Israel. If an average day’s wage in Canada is about $200 a day, then a copy of one book in the Bible would cost about $2000 in modern Canadian terms. Again, really rough calculations, but you get the point: purchasing a copy of even a part of the Scriptures for your personal use was rare, difficult, and extremely expensive. Which means that this man was not just seeking a greater knowledge of God half-heartedly. He was all in. He was willing to invest his time and his wallet (or the Queen of Ethiopia’s wallet, not sure if he kept the receipt for reimbursement). He was committed to the search.
Can I suggest to you that if you are seeking- that if you have a sense within you that there has to be more to life than this, a conviction that there might be a God after all and you’d like to know what He’s like, a desire to understand why Christians are always talking about the good news- that you genuinely, authentically commit yourself to that search. Don’t do it in a meandering, half-hearted manner. This is the most important thing to settle in your life. And here’s God’s promise to you, if you follow the Ethiopian eunuch’s lead. He says in Jeremiah 29:13, “you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” The Jewish king Asa promises in 2 Chronicles 15:2 that “if you seek him, he will be found by you.” Jesus says in Matthew 7, “seek and you will find.”
That was about to happen to the Ethiopian eunuch. He had been about as far off as you could be. Somewhere along the line, he heard about the God of Israel and knew that there was something in this that he needed. And so he sought with all his heart, investing time and money in the pursuit of knowing who this God was.
2. The process: Philip
And now it’s Philip’s turn, because there are two partners in this little dance. Actually, there are three, and this is absolutely, so totally crucial. The very first thing we read is this: “now an angel of the Lord said to Philip”. And then in verse 29 we read “the Spirit told Philip”. And then in verse 39 we read “the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away”. Behind all of this- and we will see this repeatedly with other “conversion” stories in Acts- is the work of the Lord God, through His Holy Spirit. He is responding to the seeking of the eunuch by sending Philip. And you could push it further and say that in the end, in the final analysis, it is not the eunuch who was seeking God, but God who was seeking the eunuch. You might remember some of the parables Jesus told. Like the one about a shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to search out the one that’s lost. Or the woman who sweeps the house looking for one lost coin. He is a God who pursues us, calls to us. In Revelation 3, Jesus says that he stands at the door and knocks. If you are here today, you need to know that. He desires you to know Him. You might have erected barriers you don’t even know about. But He wants you to know Him.
If you want to be used by God to turn seekers into believers, you need to understand that God is the ultimate seeker who desires people to know His salvation.
An angel tells Philip to head south. Philip had just come from one of the more successful evangelistic campaigns you can imagine. A group of Samaritans who had never heard the Gospel responded eagerly. The Spirit was poured out. There was great joy. People were being set free and restored. It is a happening place. It must have felt like heaven had come down to earth! And then God tells him to leave that and go to…well, let’s be honest. You’d think He’d send Philip to another place packed with people thirsty to hear the good news. Nope. Sends him to a desert road. Can you imagine? You’re at Rogers Centre, preaching to thousands, until one day an angel of the Lord says, “your next assignment, starting immediately, is to hang out on the side of a desolate highway in northern BC.” You’d think you were being punished! Exiled! You might be tempted to ask God if He needed a refresher course on strategic missions, right? But hey, maybe moose and elk need to hear the good news too!
If you want to be used by God to turn seekers into believers, you need to be willing to be obedient to the Lord’s leading, even when it doesn’t make sense to you.
So Philip is hanging out on this desert road and he sees a chariot. On this chariot is the Ethiopian eunuch. And he hears the Spirit speak to him. I wish the Bible would just lay out in a crystal clear way what this looks like and how you know when it’s the Spirit, but there’s some discernment needed. Philip hears the Holy Spirit say to him, go to that chariot. This is what people call a “divine appointment”. It is a meeting between two people that is divinely ordained and arranged. Some of you have stories like this. I’ve struck up conversations with people after being nudged by the Spirit to do so, and some of those have been interesting conversations about faith, even if it didn’t result in that person immediately trusting in Jesus.
If you want to be used by God to turn seekers into believers, you need to be sensitive to the Lord’s leading. You may need to make yourself available to Him and say, Lord send me where you want me. Put the people in my path you want me to speak to. Open up the doors you want me to walk through.
Philip sidles up to the chariot and hears the man reading from the prophet Isaiah. And he asks a simple question: do you understand what you are reading? You might think that if you are coming alongside people to introduce them to Jesus, your job is to explain. And it will likely involve that at some point. But it will most likely start with a question. It will start with you asking what they are reading, what they are watching, how they are seeing the world. Someone at The Bridge who is one of the most evangelistic people I know has shared this with me. One of the best entrances into conversations about deeper things is simply asking, how are you doing with everything going on in the world right now? How are you making sense of it all? Is there anything that’s giving you hope?
If you want to be used by God to turn seekers into believers, you will want to know how to ask questions.
The passage the eunuch is reading from is Isaiah 53:7-8. It’s from a larger section, from the end of Isaiah 52 all the way to the end of Isaiah 53, that is all about a figure often called the “suffering servant”. Isaiah talks about an individual, it seems, who will somehow suffer for the sins of the people of Israel. He will be righteous and innocent, and yet will be despised and will suffer greatly. According to these verses right here, this servant of the Lord will do it without making a huge fuss. He will react to this ultimate injustice and humiliation with humility. In fact, his life will be taken from him and still, he will willingly accept this fate.
Who could that be? If you’re reading Isaiah 52-53 and you don’t know Jesus, how does it make any sense? As the eunuch says, who is the prophet talking about? Himself? There were Jewish interpreters who made that case. Is it talking about the nation as a whole? Other interpreters made that case. Maybe some other historical figure? But nobody really fits. It was a passage shrouded in mystery and the eunuch is justifiably baffled. He goes, do I understand this? How could I? I’m lost here, I need someone to explain it to me!
Well, let me tell you, Philip was the man for the job! Because for the early Christians, Jewish men and women who had grown up hearing these words of Isaiah and never being quite sure what to do with them, everything had become clearer. A couple of months ago, we noticed Natalie squinting a lot. We brought her to Tony Wong, the North Shore’s finest optometrist and we got her glasses. The moment she put them on, the world opened up for her in a new way. Things became clearer and sharper. That’s a glimpse of what it was like for these disciples. The prophets became clearer. The words of the Scriptures found their fulfillment. And Philip no longer wondered who Isaiah 53 referred to. Jesus was the faithful, righteous, innocent servant of the Lord who had suffered in Israel’s place. And not only for Israel but all of humanity. Jesus had paid the price, he had done it willingly, he had given his life as a sacrifice for sin. He had become the lamb of God. And so Philip begins with that passage of Scripture and tells the eunuch all about Jesus.
If you want to be used by God to turn seekers into believers, understand this: the Holy Spirit uses the word of God to convict, enlighten, and transform. The word of God, according to Paul, is the sword of the Spirit. Do not rely on your clever arguments or your charismatic personality to show someone the truth of the Gospel. You may have those and God may use them. But most fundamental is the God-inspired Scriptures. Know them. Understand how they all point to Jesus. Show them to people.
This is what the eunuch has been waiting for. The fulfillment of his thirst. What was vague now had become clear. He knew right there that Jesus is not just good news for the Jews, he is good news for a foreigner and a eunuch. I wonder if Philip showed him Isaiah 56, just a few chapters after the section the eunuch was reading. In that chapter we read this:
“Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say, ‘the Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’ And let no eunuch complain, ‘I am only a dry tree.’ For this is what the Lord says: ‘to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever…these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.”
Isaiah 56:3-5, 7
The eunuch and the foreigner will have a place. They will be blessed. They will know God’s salvation. And it is the events of Isaiah 53, the suffering servant, that lead to the events of Isaiah 56, a foreigner and a eunuch being welcomed into the family of God. A eunuch filled with joy, free to enter into the presence of God. Are you kidding me? Come on! Tell me you don’t have shivers running down your spine right now! What this man was searching for, he had found in Jesus, and he would never, never be the same again!
This is for you. This is for me. No matter how far off, no matter how unlikely you may think yourself to be, Jesus has come to deliver you, save you, draw you to himself.
So what do you think he did? He got baptized, obviously! Right then and there. Because he was all in. In that moment of trust, he had become a new creation. That old self had died and he had a new identity. Not a eunuch. Not a foreigner. Instead, a child of God through the grace of Jesus. That’s what baptism is. It is the proclamation that you are, in Christ, a new creation. Baptism is the response of faith, it is your saying yes to the yes that Jesus has spoken over you. And you know what the man did after this? I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that he went back to Ethiopia and told anyone and everyone that the same thing was available to them in Jesus.
Conclusion
So today, there are two invitations. One is to the seekers. Seek the Lord with all your heart, and you will find that Jesus is the one your heart longs for. In him your sins are forgiven, you are restored to relationship with God, you are given the Holy Spirit and called into a life of joyful service. Put your trust in him this morning.
The second is to the believers. You have not been saved merely for your benefit, but for the sake of the world, that they would know the love of God in Christ Jesus. The invitation is to make yourself available to him. Offer yourself to him. Say to him, use me. Speak through me. Direct my paths. I yield to you.
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