If you would turn with me to Acts chapter 12, we’re picking back up in our Sunday evening sermon series on this book of Acts and we’re in Acts 12 this evening. It’s found on page 920 in the Bibles located in the pew in front of you.
I think the most surprising case that I’ve heard recently for regular, faithful, sustained church commitment came from a Jewish atheist who is an evolutionary psychologist. It’s a surprising person to hear that from, but Jonathan Haidt is the author of a forthcoming book called, The Anxious Generation, and it’s about the rise of anxiety and other mental health conditions that have really come about since the early 2010s. And Haidt attributes much of that to the introduction of smartphones and the influence of social media. He says that there is now a generation that is struggling with loneliness, depression, and social detachment. And in an interview that I heard with him recently, he made several practical suggestions about how parents can protect their children from what he calls a “phone-based childhood.” He makes recommendations like no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free school from kindergarten to twelfth grade. He says that we would be living in a very different world and our kids’ brains would be much less scrambled if those things were put in place.
But he also talked about the role of community, of a church community. And he says that there are benefits to the community and to individuals that he found in his research that he could not deny. And what he found is that technology had swept away so many children, so many kids away from each other, away from their parents, away from their community and from tradition, he says that they have been swept away into this bizarre, virtual world of terrible short videos and influencers and craziness and social comparison, but do you know who didn’t get as swept away? They were the children who were raised in a Christian, churchgoing home. Kids who were part of a community, who came to church Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. There’s a difference that the data shows. There’s a difference in the way that Christian kids are raised than those in a secular environment. He couldn’t deny it. There’s community, there’s truth, there’s wisdom, there’s tradition that grounds us not being swept away by the immediate and the urgent.
Now obviously there’s more than that, there’s more than that to be said about being a faithful member of a church, but in an age of de-churching and deconstructing and religious-nones, we sometimes want to ask the question, “What can the church do? What can the church do to keep up? What can the church do to hang on?” Well what Acts chapter 12 shows us is something that is simply remarkable. It’s the simply remarkable work of God. But it also shows us something else, and it’s the remarkably simple work of the church together. And so that will be our outline as we look to these verses tonight. It’s the simply remarkable and then the remarkably simple. Before we read God’s Word, let’s pray and ask His help and blessing on it.
Father, we thank You for bringing us here together again this evening to close the Lord’s Day as Your people, as brothers and sisters in Christ, to hear Your Word. We pray that You would bless what we do tonight, that as we do this remarkably simple activity and give our attention to the preaching and reading of Your Word, that You would do something simply remarkable in all of our lives and maybe in a life for the first time, that You would bring about redemption, salvation, forgiveness, hope and joy. And we give You thanks and we ask that You would do all these things by the power of the Holy Spirit and for the glory of the name of Jesus. And we pray it in His name, amen.
Acts chapter 12, verse 1:
“About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword, and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. This was during the days of Unleavened Bread. And when he had seized him, he put him in prison, delivering him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. So Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church.
Now when Herod was about to bring him out, on that very night, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly.’ And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, ‘Dress yourself and put on your sandals.’ And he did so. And he said to him, ‘Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.’ And he went out and followed him. He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they had passed the first and the second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city. It opened for them of its own accord, and they went out and went along one street, and immediately the angel left him. When Peter came to himself, he said, ‘Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.’
When he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. And when he knocked at the door of the gateway, a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter’s voice, in her joy she did not open the gate but ran in and reported that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, ‘You are out of your mind.’ But she kept insisting that it was so, and they kept saying, ‘It is his angel!’ But Peter continued knocking, and when they opened, they saw him and were amazed. But motioning to them with his hand to be silent, he described to them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he said, ‘Tell these things to James and to the brothers.’ Then he departed and went to another place.
Now when day came, there was no little disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter. And after Herod searched for him and did not find him, he examined the sentries and ordered that they should be put to death. Then he went down from Judea to Caesarea and spent time there.
Now Herod was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon, and they came to him with one accord, and having persuaded Blastus, the king’s chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country depended on the king’s country for food. On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to them. And the people were shouting, ‘The voice of a god, and not of a man!’ Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.
But the word of God increased and multiplied.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
There are two people who stand out in this chapter. There’s Peter and there’s Herod. Now Peter was the rock. He was a pillar. He was one of the apostles. And the church historian Philip Schaff has this to say about Peter. He says that, “No character in the New Testament is brought before us in such lifelike colors, with all of his virtues and faults, as that of Peter.” And that Peter was, he was the strongest, but he was also the weakest of the twelve. And he was kindhearted, quick, ardent, hopeful, impulsive, changeable, and apt to run from one extreme to another. That’s Peter. And yet for all of his weakness, Peter was of the greatest service to the church. And in these first twelve chapters of the book of Acts that we have been studying, Peter has been in the forefront. He has been in the forefront of everything that has to do with the spread of the Gospel and the growth of the church. He preached with boldness and with power. He performs signs and wonders. He received visions from heaven, and the message about Jesus and the resurrection advanced from Jerusalem to Judea and into Samaria. It even reached the Gentiles, Cornelius, the Roman centurion, in many ways because of the work and ministry of Peter. It was the power of God that supplied and sustained and upheld Peter throughout these opening chapters of the book of Acts.
And now, now as Peter is effectively fading from the scene in this book of Acts, it’s no different. We see the same thing happening. It’s the power of God that once again delivered Peter from the hands of those who are in authority. This is the third time that we have seen this happen with Peter. You remember in the early chapters of Acts, how the religious authorities had bound Peter and put him in prison, they charged him and threatened him not to teach any more in the name of Jesus. And yet he would not listen to man but he would obey God and he continued to preach and he continued to teach and he was again put into prison a second time and this time he was released by an angel. And again, the same thing – they charged him, they beat him, and they said, “Do not teach any more the message about Jesus.” And now this is the third time. This third time, and it’s not the religious authorities; this time it’s different. This time it is the political authorities and it is Herod the king.
Now Herod was the king not in the same way that Caligula or Augustus or Claudius were kings, or caesars of the Roman Empire, but Herod was the king of Judea. This was Herod Agrippa I. He was the grandson of Herod the Great and he had attained a level of prominence and prosperity and his area of prominence had expanded to a level that had not been matched by the generation before him. In fact, he attained to a level of prominence similar to that of Herod the Great. And we’re told by some historians that Herod the Great perhaps was the wealthiest man in the world at the time. And we’re told something about Herod’s character, his attitude, by the historian Josephus. It’s said that he had a good reputation. “Herod Agrippa was not like his grandfather Herod the Great who was ill-mannered and severe in his punishments. No, he was rather mild and humane.” And Josephus says he was “a manner rather of a gentle and compassionate temper.”
And yet, if you read the story that Josephus tells, he talks about his good reputation, his mild manneredness, and then not a paragraph later he talks about the violence that erupted in the city of Beirut, the modern-day city of Beirut, where Herod Agrippa loved the gladiator games. And in one gladiator game in particular he brought 700 men against 700 others and put them at battle against one another so that he eliminated all of the malefactors or the wrongdoers in that area. And Josephus makes this comment. He says that, “No fewer than 700 men fought against 700 other men that both might receive their punishment and that this operation of war might be a recreation of peace.” Did you get that? It’s chilling, isn’t it? “That this operation of war might be a recreation of peace.”
That’s the side of Herod Agrippa that we find in Acts chapter 12 where he lays these violent hands on those who belonged to the church. Verse 2 says that “he killed James the brother of John with the sword, and because it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.” And he arrested Peter because he intended to do the same thing that he had done to James the brother of John. He was going to kill him also after the days of Unleavened Bread. And so the Herod that we find in Acts chapter 12 is a man who was erratic. He was prideful. He was violent. He was self-seeking. And it says that when he went to Caesarea and he put on his royal robes, he sat on his throne, he gave a great oration to the people and the people cried out, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” The voice of a god, and not of a man. You see, that’s Peter and Herod. Peter and Herod are the main characters in Acts chapter 12. Peter is the oppressed and Herod is the oppressor.
But God is in control. And for all of Peter’s boldness, for all of Peter’s leadership, for all of his gifts that are on display in the early chapters of the book of Acts, it’s God’s power that is at work. It’s God’s power that is at work in him and through him and for him. And for all of Herod’s authority, for all of his pomp and splendor, for all of his efforts to get rid of the church, it could only go so far. And the power of the king is in the hand of God, and we see the hand of God throughout this passage in the work of this angel of the Lord on two different occasions. On two different occasions, the angel of the Lord is at work. First it was when Peter was thrown in prison, and it’s an angel of the Lord who brought him out. You notice there that there is this, almost this pace that happens throughout this chapter – that the angel is dictating the action. He struck Peter on the side and the chains fell off. The angel said, “Get dressed,” and Peter got dressed. The angel said, “Follow me,” and Peter followed him. And Peter thought it was all a vision until he made it past the first and second guard and to the iron gate leading into the city and he came to himself and he said, “Now I know, now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod.” You see, it was the hand of the Lord that overruled and overpowered the hand of King Herod. And when Herod, the second time we see the angel of the Lord at work, it was when Herod was in Caesarea and he received the praise of the people. And it says that, verse 23, it was “an angel of the Lord who struck him down because he did not give God the glory.”
Johnny Cash has a song called, “Belshazzar.” Belshazzar is, of course, the king of Babylon in the book of Daniel. And in that song, Johnny Cash, the first verse he says, “The Bible tells us about a man who ruled Babylon and all its land. Around the city he built a wall and declared that Babylon would never fall. He had concubines and wives he called his Babylon paradise. On his throne he drank and ate, but for Belshazzar, it was getting late. For Belshazzar, it was getting late. He was weighed in the balances and found wanting.” Well here in this chapter, when the crowd says, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” for Herod Agrippa, it was getting late and his days were done. He was weighed in the balances and found wanting. Verse 23 says, “He was eaten by worms and breathed his last.” The word of Herod, when it had been at his greatest, the word of Herod stopped. The word of Herod stopped, “But the Word of God increased and multiplied,” verse 24 says.
You see, these are remarkable events. These are supernatural acts of God in protecting and promoting His church against all opposition. But you know what? That doesn’t mean that hard things don’t come and that doesn’t mean that we aren’t left with hard questions from this chapter and from these events. Things like, “Why did God deliver Peter from prison while James the brother of John was left to be killed by the sword?” And why are we told – if you think back to Acts chapter 7 – why are we told so much about Stephen being martyred and yet James just gets this brief little mention about giving his life for his faith. And why does Peter basically fade out of the story? Where does he go? What does he do? He’s done so much to this point, and why does he fade away? And why was Herod, why was Herod stuck down for his bride but he was not struck down for harassing and killing the saints? Why do those things happen like this? What’s God up to in the way that these events unfold?
We don’t know. We don’t know what God is up to. But what we can say is this. It’s that when opposition comes, and opposition will come, because you don’t proclaim Jesus as Lord and King of a kingdom that is above and beyond all the other kingdoms of this earth, and you don’t proclaim Jesus as the only way to forgiveness and salvation and the way to God over and above and against all other religions and philosophies, you don’t say those things without meeting opposition from time to time – but this is what we see in this chapter – that opposition is never unchecked; that opposition is never haphazard, it’s never arbitrary. In fact, what we can say is that God allows it and God uses it for His own purposes. And from the beginning, God has supernaturally been at work to build and to prosper His church. Isn’t that what Jesus had said? Jesus told His disciples that He would build His church and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
And that’s what we find here in this chapter. You notice that it’s the angel of whom? It’s the angel of the Lord that frees Peter and strikes down Herod. Peter says in verse 11 that he was sure that “the Lord had freed him from prison.” Verse 17 he says he described to them how “the Lord had brought him out.” It wasn’t so much the angel; it was the Lord who had delivered Peter. And Jesus is building His church. He is building His church in remarkable ways in Acts chapter 12. And you know what? He still does it. He still does that. He does it not necessarily through impressive and influential people, but He’s also not limited by impressive and influential and powerful people. And He doesn’t do it through the newest and the brightest strategies and techniques, but He actually builds His church through something remarkably simple.
So we’ve seen the simply remarkable in this passage. What about the remarkably simple? Well in verse 13, we’re told about a servant girl named Rhoda. And Rhoda was at the house of Mary. Mary was the mother of John, or Mark, and she was there when Peter came knocking at the door of the gateway. Now of those names that I just mentioned – Rhoda, John or Mark, or Mary – we really don’t know much of anything about them. We know the most about John, called Mark. He is the one who is attributed with writing the gospel of Mark. He was the one who went along with Barnabas and Paul on their first missionary journey. But do you remember he was the one who deserted them and he left halfway through and went back to Jerusalem. Paul, that struck Paul in such a way that he didn’t feel comfortable taking Mark along with him from that point on, and there became such a sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas that they actually split and went their separate ways. It seemed like Paul had written Mark off. Now that wasn’t the case; we find later on in Paul’s last letter, his second letter to Timothy, he asks for Mark and says that he is very useful to him in ministry. And so Mark found his place eventually, but you see, he wasn’t without his setbacks. He wasn’t without his bumps in the road. He wasn’t without his lettering other people down. And really when we read about him in this chapter, he’s really just a reference point. He’s a reference point so we can know who his mother is, but we don’t know much about her either.
We don’t know much about this Mary in Acts 12. Most likely she was a widow. She was probably a widow that had some level of means. She had the gift of hospitality. We see her with a gift of hospitality in this passage because she is welcoming in this large group of people and she had the means to have a house that could hold that many people. And she had a servant.
And that brings us back to Rhoda, this servant girl. This humble servant girl. She was probably not from Jerusalem. She has a name that was a Greek name. And all that she was doing here in this passage was being simply faithful to her job description. And she was carrying out the household duties that had been given to her. And sadly, even among those in the church, she’s not taken as seriously as she should have been and they are dismissive of her. In other words, these are ordinary people. These are ordinarily people that we meet in Acts chapter 12. And if we want to know what the church was like in those early days, this is it. There were servants and widows and outsiders. There were the rich and the poor. There were the anonymous and the overlooked. There were people with weak and faltering resolve and faith. We don’t know much about them. We don’t find them leading multitudes of people to faith in Christ. We don’t find them being miraculously delivered from oppression and opposition. But what did they do? What do we find them doing here in these early days?
Well, verse 12 tells us. Verse 12 says that they “were gathered together and they were praying.” Here was this group of people that had heard the message about Jesus, that in Jesus there is forgiveness, there is salvation, there is hope and there is freedom, and they had believed. They trusted in Him. They came together as His people. And verse 12, it’s right in the middle of this passage; it’s like the hinge of this entire story. We have all of this commotion, all of this turmoil, we have the swords and the soldiers in the middle of the night escape and there’s the pageantry and the sudden fall of this great king, and at the heart of all of it is this little verse that Peter went to the house of Mary, verse 12, “the mother of John, whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying.” That’s what the church was all about. It says it also in verse 5 where it tells us that Peter was kept in prison but “earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church.” That’s what most of the church was doing at this time. And with everything else that was going on, with so much that was against them and opposing them, the priority, the priority of the church was to gather together and to pray.
And that still is the priority. Hebrews chapter 10 – “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some. And remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.” You know there are over 365 million Christians around the world who live in situations of persecution in which the price of following Jesus is extremely high. There are a couple of different booklets around the church, you may see them in the back or in the greeting courtyard or elsewhere, there are a couple of different booklets that I think illustrate or highlight this case. And one, you have the Open Doors Watch List for 2024. It’s the top 50 countries, the top 50 countries where persecution of Christians is the highest. But then we also have our missions booklet. Maybe you’ve picked one of those up in the last week or so. This mission booklet with the list of our missionaries supported and sent out by our congregation.
And what you find, if you look at those two books, is that there is an overlap between them. And you have missionaries to places like India where John is serving, in a state where just in the last few years there have been Christians that have been subjected to a mob of radical Hindu nationalists who attacked them and ran them out of their homes. And they used wooden clubs and sharp stones to ransack their homes and to cast them out. And there’s Ricky who lives in Oacha, Mexico. A couple of years ago, evangelicals faced jail, looting and exile for not participating in some of the pagan rituals of that community. Churches have been burned. Property has been confiscated. And we heard from Teal in Myanmar. In a recent story he talked about a woman and her child who were kicked out of their home, kicked out of their family because they left their Buddhist background to follow Jesus. So they were exposed not only to great hardship but also to the shame of being females alone in the Myanmar culture.
You hear all of those things, and there are other stories as well, and that’s why we are going to set aside time on Wednesday night, 6 o’clock, we are going to gather together here in the sanctuary to pray for people like that in situations like that who are being persecuted and who suffer greatly because of their faith, like Peter did, like the early church did. So I want to invite all of you to come here, 6 o’clock on Wednesday evening, as we gather together for earnest prayer for those who are suffering for their faith to lift up our brothers and sisters in Christ because we are part of the body with them.
But you know what, let’s not forget our own community also in our own country. And we hear about those things like the rise of the religious-nones and we hear about people leaving the church, but what do we find here in this passage? What do we find the church doing? Well we find something that is really simple. It’s people like us – fathers and mothers, widows and singles, students and retired – gathering together to pray. And don’t forget what verse 24 says, that “the Word of God increased and multiplied.” They were praying and spreading the Word. We’re not called to appeal to, to market ourselves, we’ve not called to appeal to the current trends. What we are called to do is to do something remarkably simple – fellowship, prayer and Word. And the Lord builds His church. And that’s the message that we come with tonight – that the Lord builds His church.
And maybe you’re not a part of the church and maybe you haven’t received that message about grace and salvation in Christ Jesus. But it’s yours if you would simply receive it. And Jesus builds His church, He loved His church, He gave His life to build His church. That’s how important this is. He gave His life in order to bring you in. Will you come in and see that growth happening, even tonight, that we would see something remarkably simple – the preaching, the reading, the praying of God’s Word, so that God might do something simply remarkable and bring new life, forgiveness of sins and eternal life in Jesus Christ? Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for Your great power and Your glory. We thank You for our great Savior, and we ask that You would help us to persevere and walk by faith, to do these simple things of gathering together, bringing our prayers before You, and proclaiming the name of Jesus. We ask that You would bring the lost to Yourself, that You would protect our brothers and sisters around the world who are persecuted, who suffer for their faith. That You would protect them, give them perseverance, give them strength to stand firm that they would be a witness, and that even through that opposition You would use it to build Your church and to work Your Word and Your plan in those places. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.