Let’s turn back in our Bibles to Acts chapter 8. We’ll pick up where we left off a couple of weeks ago with verse 26; page 917 in the Bibles located in the pew racks in front of you. Acts chapter 8, verse 26.
You’ve heard the saying before that “No news is good news.” Maybe it’s a family member on a trip or starting something new and you’re a little nervous about it and you haven’t heard something for a while and you say, “Well, I guess no news is good news.” Well there’s another saying that is similar to that, but it’s not as familiar, and it’s this. It’s, “Good news is no news. Good news is no news.” You may not have heard that one before, but you know what it’s talking about. It’s talking about how good news rarely gets mentioned in the news, because what do we see? Things that get all of the coverage, all of the attention on the news – it’s the scandals, the crimes and the controversies and the disasters. In other words, it’s bad news, because good news is no news.
Well Acts chapter 8 is all about good news. And five times the word for “preaching good news” is found in Acts chapter 8. We’ve already seen some of them in the passage we read last time. The people, the church was scattered because of persecution, and as they were scattered, they went about preaching good news or “the Word” in verse 1. Philip, he went out, he preached good news about the kingdom of God to the people of God in Samaria in verse 12, and then when we left off last time in verse 25, the apostles were returning to Jerusalem. And what were they doing? They were preaching the Gospel. They were preaching the good news to many of the villages of the Samaritans. It’s the Greek word, “euangelidzo.” It’s where we get the English words, “evangelism,” or “evangelical.” And it’s the Gospel. It means “good news.” And we’ll find that word two more times in our passage tonight. And one of the things that the book of Acts is making clear to us as we follow this story is that for good news to be good news, it has to be good news for everyone, for all people. And so what we find in this book is that the Gospel is going out and those who are hearing and receiving the good news, that circle is expanding from Hebraic Jews, to Hellenistic Jews, to Samaritans. And now in Acts chapter 8 verses 26 to 40, we find that the good news goes all the way even to an Ethiopian eunuch.
So let’s give our attention to God’s Word and to this account of God’s good news. Before we do, let’s pray and ask for His help.
Father, our prayer on our lips tonight as we approach Your Word is the same as the psalmist in Psalm 119 that we heard this morning. Help us. Help us. Help us to understand Your Word. Help us to see our need of good news. Help us to see that we are recipients of good news, that the good news is for us. And would You use that to transform our lives and our families and our workplaces and our neighborhoods, and that You would use us to spread Your glory just as it was being spread in the book of Acts. We pray that You would do all of this for Your glory, and we pray it in Jesus’ name, amen.
Acts chapter 8, starting in verse 26:
“Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ This is a desert place. And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over and join this chariot.’ So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ And he said, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this:
‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.’
And the eunuch said to Philip, ‘About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’ Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?’ And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.”
Amen. The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
I want us to look at this passage along three lines tonight. We’ll see first a dry place, a dry tree, and then thirdly, water. A dry place, a dry tree, and water.
You know it almost seems like a throw away line, like a passing comment that really doesn’t matter that much. Why put it in there? Why include it at all? And yet the more I think about it, it may be the key to the whole passage. And it’s what we find right there in verse 26. “This is a desert place.” That’s where these things are happening. They’re taking place in a desert place. They’re taking place in a place that was desolate, it was uninhabited, it was remote. In other words, it was taking place somewhere that Philip had no business going, because up to this point we have read about Philip and he has been preaching the good news, he has been in Jerusalem. Philip was in Jerusalem taking care of the Hellenist widows. Philip was in Samaria. He told the people about Jesus as he cast out the unclean spirits and he healed the sick and the lame. These were established cities. There were thousands of people in Jerusalem and Samaria and up to this point in the book of Acts, that’s where the Gospel has been going. That’s where the message of Jesus has been going. It’s been going to the crowds and the people who have been hearing and receiving the message about salvation are the multitudes. And yet now, here in this part of Acts chapter 8, Philip is told by this angel to rise and to go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. He was told to rise and to go to a desert place.
Now this route from Jerusalem to Gaza, it has the attention of the whole world right now, doesn’t it? In fact, on the other hand, this is the only time in the New Testament that we find the word “Gaza” and we might have been tempted to read right past that word and think nothing of it if it were not for the conflict that’s going on in the Middle East right now. But if you remember the news reports from just a few weeks ago, we learn that the attacks from Hamas against Israel was taking place near the border of Israel and Gaza. And the first reports were these descriptions of these attacks that took place at a festival, a music festival, and about how the crowds there had gone out into the desert to hear this concert. And in fact, that was one of the things that made it so horrific – out there in the desert there was nowhere for them to run or for them to hide. They were exposed right out there in the open.
Well that location is probably not that far from what we read about here in this route that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. It was a desert place, verse 26 tells us. This was a part of the route that connected Judea and the surrounding areas down into the Sinai desert and down on into Egypt. It was, as some have called it, “the outpost of Africa.” It was the door of Asia. In fact, this may have been the route that Joseph was taken on when he was sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelite caravan and taken down into Egypt to slavery. This may have been the route that Jesus was taken on in his early days as he was taken by Joseph and Mary to the same place, to Egypt, to flee from the danger that Herod presented to Him.
There were plenty of reasons you might have traveled on this route. It could have been for trading; it may have been for exploring. Maybe it was for military campaigning. But none of those were reasons that Philip was there on this day. None of those were the reasons that Philip was told to go down to this desert place, to the route, the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. He went for one reason. Philip went for one reason, and it was to meet up with an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official from the queen of the Ethiopians who had come from Jerusalem to worship. Just think about that description again. An Ethiopian eunuch who was a court official of the queen of Ethiopia who had come from Jerusalem to worship. Can we just say it? That’s weird! That’s a strange thing to read! That’s unexpected. We don’t expect to hear something like that as we are reading our Bibles. There is so much there that doesn’t seem to make sense.
And as I was looking into some of the details of this passage, I actually found out about something studying this passage that I wasn’t aware of before now. It is that there are actually a group of Ethiopian Jews that reside in Ethiopia today. There is this group of black Africans in Ethiopia who keep laws of purity that you find in the Hebrew Bible, they keep Shabat or Sabbath, and even on the fourteenth day of the Heberw month of Nisan, they sacrifice as part of the Passover celebration. No one knows exactly where they came from, how they came out. No one knows when they originated, but it could have happened 2,000 years ago or more. And that may not be exactly who this Ethiopian eunuch was, but it does say something to us about the spread of the Hebrew faith down into parts of Africa where we find this man coming from.
Now when we talk about Ethiopia in the Bible, it was actually a part that was a little bit further north in Egypt than we think about our current Ethiopia on the map today. But there had been this spread and this man knew something of the faith of the Hebrews. And what we have here in this passage is this encounter between a Hellenistic Jew who was a follower of Jesus on the one hand, that’s Philip, and then on the other hand here we have this likely black Ethiopian eunuch who observes the faith of the Jews and we don’t know his name. This is an unlikely encounter. This is an unlikely meeting.
It reminds me of something I read about once of a man in the times of the Revolutionary War in America. His name was Alexander McGillivray. And McGillivray was from Scottish and French ancestors, but he was also partly Native American. And because of that, he became a chief of the Creek people. And as a chief of the Creeks, he actually initiated an alliance, a treaty with the Spanish government in Pensacola. And so here you have this figure in history – he is a Scottish, Native American chief, interacting with the Spanish army in Pensacola. That doesn’t make sense! What are the chances of those things happening?
And we have to ask the same thing of our passage tonight. What are the changes of Philip meeting up with this Ethiopian eunuch in this desert place? There is almost no chance of this encounter happening. Philip was not in the area, and in the ESV translation you’ll notice that there is a footnote and it says that it could be about at noon – “Go at about noon.” And so the Greek word for “south,” it could also be translated “noon,” so there is a chance in which Philip was being instructed to go into the desert at noon. Again, an unlikely place to go down into the desert. And this is all he goes for. You notice in verse 39 and 40, he’s gone as soon as his interaction with this Ethiopian is over. Thirty-nine and 40 say that “the Spirit of the Lord carried him away,” and he “found himself at Azotus.” You see, the only reason Philip was there was to come across and to meet up with this Ethiopian eunuch.
And this Ethiopian eunuch, he was an outsider. He was a way outsider. He was what could be called a dry tree. So you have in this dry place, a dry tree. Do you know that part in Pilgrim’s Progress where Christian loses his burden at the foot of the cross? And he is given three things. He’s given a change of clothes, a mark on his forehead, and a roll or a scroll with a seal on it. And this roll, this scroll is a title. It’s for him to gain access into the Celestial City. And along the way, along his journey, he looks at that roll. Whenever there is difficulty, whenever he is discouraged, he looks at it, he pulls it out, and he reads it to find comfort and assurance. He treasured it. He kept it secure by him all the time until one time, in a moment of sluggishness, he fell off to sleep and that roll fell away from him and he lost it and it devastated him. And he would not rest until he retraced his steps and went back and found that roll and he kept it to himself. Bunyan says, “But who can tell how joyful this man was when he had gotten his roll again, for this roll was the assurance of his life and acceptance at the desired haven.” And so Christian went on his way, holding close to that roll, and looking at it, treasuring it, until he found his acceptance in the Celestial City.
Now I don’t know if this is exactly what’s going on here with this Ethiopian eunuch, but I want you to think about a few things, what we find him reading in Acts chapter 8. When Philip meets him, he is reading from the scroll of Isaiah the prophet and he is reading from one of the servant songs; one of the songs about the suffering servant. It’s what we would call Isaiah 53. “Like a sheep who was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearers is silent, so he opens not his mouth.” And maybe this eunuch has the whole scroll of Isaiah with him as he rides along in his chariot from Jerusalem, from worship, but I wonder, I wonder if maybe he just has a copy of a certain part of that scroll of Isaiah and a certain portion that he would go to regularly, trying to put it all together, trying to make it all make sense because this part of the scroll of Isaiah was especially significant and special to him. And here’s why. Because he is reading Isaiah 53 and just a few lines down in that scroll we come to Isaiah 56. And here’s what Isaiah 56 says. It says, “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people,” – and hear this – “and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’”
F.W. Boreham, in a series of books on significant figures in church history, and he ties their story together to a particular Scripture, to one particular Bible verse. So he talks about Martin Luther’s text – Romans 1:17. He talks about John Knox’s text – John 17:3. Well Isaiah 56:3 is the Ethiopian eunuch’s text – “Let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’” Because you see, everything about this eunuch would have felt like he was a dry tree, like he was a foreigner, like he was someone who was cut off separate from God’s people, because the eunuch didn’t fit anywhere. He just didn’t fit. Because a eunuch, as you may well know, was someone who had been castrated, emasculated. And they usually would have been someone who would have been in charge of the king’s concubines because they were someone that the king could trust them with. And his whole identity would have been tied to his job, to his position as a servant in service of the crown. And this eunuch, he would have had no chance of a relationship. There was no chance for him to have a family, no chance for him to have offspring. Someone has said that eunuch’s were both prized and demonized. They were demonized because of their sexual ambiguity. They were prized because of their trustworthiness.
And according to places in the Bible like Leviticus 21 and Deuteronomy 23, they were considered unclean and kept out of temple worship. And so here is this man, he is coming back from worship in Jerusalem; most likely he was kept somewhat at a distance and not able to enter in to some of the inner parts of worship of the people in Jerusalem. And that’s not to mention that when he was in Jerusalem, when he was in Judea, he would have stood out as someone who was very different ethnically from the people of the Jews. And he had traveled a long way to get there. Some say it was perhaps a five month journey to Jerusalem. And yes, he may have been a court official, maybe he had some sense of wealth, but really what did this man count for anything? Who was he? Where did he fit? He didn’t fit anywhere.
Reading about this Ethiopian eunuch I can’t help but think about listening to my mom’s record of the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” when I was growing up. “He was a nowhere man. Nowhere man, he was a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” That’s the Ethiopian eunuch. But, but he is reading the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and he is reading about this figure who was led like a sheep to the slaughter. And he reads about his humiliation and he reads about having no descendents. There is no generation. His life is taken away from the earth. Who is this man? Who is this man who Isaiah is talking about and what dos it have to do with what comes next in Isaiah’s prophecy? What comes next about the barren one singing for joy and what comes next about the afflicted one being released from oppression, about the one who thirsts being given water to drink, about what it says about the eunuch not saying, “I am a dry tree,” but being given a name and being given a place and being given God’s blessing.
What does the servant have to do with those things? Isaiah 56:7 says, “These I will bring into my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer.” “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch says, “No. How can I, unless someone guides me?” So Philip begins with this passage from Isaiah 53 and he told him the good news about Jesus. He told him about how Jesus is the suffering servant from Isaiah’s prophecy and he told him about how Jesus is the one who didn’t fit and about how he was cast out and Jesus was rejected. He was treated like less than a man and he was publicly shamed and humiliated at the cross. Jesus is the one who took all of that pain, but he took it for a purpose. He took it all for a reason and it was for this. It was so that he could overcome the pain. It was so that he could overcome the shame and the misery of sin and death by His resurrection. It was so he could make right all of those who were alienated and estranged. It was so that he could bring them near and wash them clean and draw them in and make them new and to pour out on them every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. That’s what Philip would have said to the Ethiopian eunuch. In a word, it was to save them. It was for salvation. And that’s exactly what the Ethiopian eunuch was searching for. That’s exactly what the Ethiopian eunuch needed to hear. He needed to hear good news. He needed to hear good news for all people. He needed to hear good news even for someone like himself.
And so we have in this dry place, this dry tree, and along with Philip, they come upon water. Verse 36 says, “As they were going along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water. What prevents me from being baptized?’” And you’ll notice verse 37 is omitted from the ESV translation; that verse is not found in a number of ancient manuscripts and so scholars feel that it may have been added later. The ESV has another footnote that says this is what verse 37 says, “And Philip said, ‘If you believe with all your heart you may,’ and he replied, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’” Now whether that’s original or not, the point is the same, isn’t it? Because the eunuch believed. The eunuch believed the good news about Jesus. And like we have seen throughout the book of Acts, when people believe the good news about Jesus, what do they do? They’re baptized. And he was baptized into the name of Jesus Christ. He was marked out, set apart as a part of God’s people forever. He was given the sign, that this sign that all of those things that he read about in the prophecy of Isaiah were now his inheritance. They were his by faith in Jesus Christ. And what did he do? What does verse 39 say? “He went on his way, rejoicing.” He went away ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.
You see, that’s grace. This is grace. And this passage is a monument to the pursuing grace of God to the most unlikely people. And isn’t that a comfort, an encouragement to all of us? Isn’t that a comfort and an encouragement to you who are lonely and suffering and broken and burdened of your sin – that God’s grace goes all the way this far to pursue you and to bring you in. And isn’t that an encouragement because if the grace of God has found you, it wasn’t because you were so well-positioned to received His grace or because you were so deserving of it. No, you see, nothing in this story was conducive to a work of grace or salvation taking place. Nothing looked like a life-changing event would happen in this desert place, but God sent Philip all this way to this out of the way place and to this outside of the box individual like the eunuch just to tell him the good news about Jesus and to bring him into the family of God. And if God’s grace is wide enough to include an Ethiopian eunuch, it’s wide enough for every one of you. And if it’s wide enough for every one of you, if God’s grace is this good to pursue us this far, do you think that God’s grace will ever let you go, that He will ever stop showing that grace to you? No, absolutely not. He is not going to let you go.
Notice, see from this passage just how good the grace of God is. It goes this far. It goes this wide. And it goes after the one; it goes after the one who could easily be overlooked. It goes after the one who might not seem very significant in the world’s eyes. So if God’s grace is that wide and that big and that great, it’s big enough for you. God’s love is such that He comes after you. He pursues you. He pursues you by His grace. He comes after you with His message of love and forgiveness and belonging and joy for everyone who believes in Jesus. That’s the beauty of the Gospel. That’s the beauty of this passage, the beauty of the good news.
But you know what else? That’s also the danger of it. That’s the danger of the good news. And maybe it would be safer, a lot less edgy not to even mention it, but we are talking about an Ethiopian eunuch in this passage and we can’t deny that we live in a time of gender confusion. It has come, gender confusion has come to the DMV. I was there last week and had to mark what my gender was at birth and what my identity was now. We live in a time of confusion and yet here in Acts chapter 8 it is uncomfortably relevant to that because this eunuch was called by some in that time, by Philo, a Jewish philosopher, “as neither male nor female.” And the Gospel went to him as well. And it doesn’t mean there is no talk of sin and repentance and new life; there is. That’s what baptism is about. But this is good news. This is good news about Jesus and it’s good news for all people and don’t those in our gender confused culture need to hear that good news, that this good news can be even for them? And for that good news to go out in a way that does not demonize the outsider as the eunuch might have been in his culture. This is good news, and it’s good news of great joy for all people. And we need to remember how good it is and how wide it is because it’s good enough for every one of us as well. And it will track you down.
Francis Thompson. Francis Thompson was a medical student in England sometime in the 1870s and he suffered from a number of health issues. His health was fragile. He became addicted to opium. He found himself living on the streets; he found himself homeless and living along the Thames River. But it was in that context – homeless and addicted – that he heard the good news about Jesus. And he believed. And in his own story of coming to faith in Jesus and finding hope and joy and life in Him, He wrote a poem. And that poem was called “The Hound of Heaven.” This is what he writes in “The Hound of Heaven.” He said, “I fled him. I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years. I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind. In the midst of tears I hid from him and under running laughter.”
He fled. He ran from the grace of God. “But still with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy came on the following feet and a voice above there beat.” You see, the hound of heaven came after him and the hound of heaven tracked him down and found him. And it was in finding him and receiving the grace of God that Francis Thompson found relief. And that’s the grace of God. That’s the grace of God that is on display in Acts chapter 8. It’s good news. It’s good news about Jesus. It’s good news for all people. It’s good news for you, and it is joy. It is joy for all those who put their trust in Christ.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we pray that You would give us this faith of the Ethiopian eunuch, that we would receive the good news about Jesus today. If there are some here who have never received that grace, would You help them to see that they’re not here by accident, they’re not hearing the good news of new life and forgiveness and hope and joy in Jesus by coincidence, but that you are on their trail, tracking them down. And would You show us how good that grace is so that all of us may be overwhelmed and astounded again by the depth of Your grace and love for us, that You will never let us go, and You who came after us will not release us but that You will pour out on us all the privileges and blessings of our inheritance in Jesus. Thank You for that good news. Would You help us to put the amazing back into grace as we go out from here and live for Your glory and that we would do so with joy. I pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.