“The Puzzling Ways of God” – FBC Morning Light (11/22/2024)

The Persecution and Deliverance in Acts 12

Well good Friday morning to you. We're coming up on the weekend before Thanksgiving, and I hope you're looking forward to a good weekend, and you're going to especially make a priority to be in God's house on the Lord's Day for worshiping the Lord together, hearing from his word, learning of him, finding out what he's like and what he likes, as we often say at Faith Baptist.

So I do trust that's going to be your priority this weekend. Well today in our Bible reading, we're reading in Acts again chapters 9 through 12, and I want to focus on chapter 12, and particularly this what seems to be a rather enigmatic work of God.

Here's what I mean, you know, something that is an enigma. We can't quite figure it out. It's a puzzle to us, and here's the puzzle. In verse 1 of chapter 12 it says, Herod the king stretched out his hand to harass some from the church.

All right, well, persecution is to be expected, the harassing, the unpopularity of the church in society, you know, you can expect some harassment, okay, get that. But then verse 2 it says that Herod killed James, the brother of John, with a sword.

Well again, you know, you kind of knew from the statements of Jesus that this wasn't going to be easy to be a follower, some would be martyred, okay. So Herod takes James, kills him with a sword. Then it says, he saw that it pleased the Jews, so he's doing this for political expedience, he proceeded to seize Peter also.

So now you got these leaders in the church, James, brother of John, Peter. James is killed, Peter's taken, and he's put into prison. And his intention is, in verse 4, after he arrested him to put him in prison, he intended to bring him before the people after Passover.

So, you know, Herod's gonna play the popularity thing, he's gonna honor the Jewish holiday, he's not going to execute Peter on the holiday and allow the holiday to distract him from the kudos he could get for eliminating Peter, too.

So he keeps him in prison until after Passover, and then he's gonna bring Peter out to have him executed. Well, the Lord intervenes. The Lord intervenes, and one night, as he's kept in prison, the church is gathered together to pray for Peter, and then the Lord sends an angel to open up the prison doors, lead Peter out, and Peter was sound asleep when that was going on.

Could you imagine that? Would you have been able to sleep soundly? So soundly that when, you know, the angel is pulling him out, it takes him a while to wake up enough to realize, hey, this is really happening, this isn't just a dream.

Anyway, Peter gets out, and then he makes his way to where the prayer meeting was being held at the house of Mary, the mother of John, and eventually he tells the people what happened, and he leaves. Now, here's the thing, here's the enigma of it all.

The Inscrutable Ways of God

Why did God not spare James, delivering him from Herod's cruelty, and allow Peter to escape? He did. He brought Peter out of the prison miraculously. He did that for Peter. Why didn't he do that for James?

What this points out is the inscrutable ways of our God, his ways are not our ways, and they are beyond our understanding, our comprehension, and we have to ask ourselves, what is God doing? What is God doing?

Allowing James to be martyred, but yet getting Peter out of prison? How come he doesn't treat everybody the same way? Well, you're gonna pull your hair out if you try to come to an answer to that, but what we do have to come to is the conclusion that God knows what he's doing, and he's accomplishing his purposes here.

Now, by the way, before we look at that purpose, let me just mention this about this prayer meeting. It's often been said that these people who are gathered for this prayer meeting, praying for Peter, really didn't have much faith, because when Peter showed up at the door, he knocked on the door, Rhoda looks through the peephole and realizes it's Peter, and instead of opening the door, she runs back into the crowd and says, Peter's out there, Peter's out there, and everybody says, you're nuts, there's no way Peter's not out there, it's not Peter, you're dreaming.

She says, no, and then Peter keeps knocking on the door, and finally they open the door, and sure enough, it's Peter, and they're like, whoa, it's Peter, what are you doing here? What happened? And so it's been said that they really didn't have much faith, because they were praying all night that God would deliver him from prison, and then when God answered the prayer, they couldn't believe that God answered their prayer.

Well, maybe, but maybe their prayer request was something different. Remember back in Acts chapter 4, when persecution first started, and Peter had been captured and put in hold for a while, and then when he's brought out, they warn him, the authorities warn him, don't you preach in his name anymore, they say, well, we're gonna do it.

And then they go back to Peter, it goes back to the assembled crowd, and he says, this is what happened to me, but here, let's pray. And they prayed not that such persecution would never come again, they prayed that in the face of it, they would be bold to proclaim the gospel, and they would be faithful to the Lord.

So perhaps, taking that lead in this prayer meeting, the people were not praying necessarily for Peter to be delivered from prison, but for Peter to be faithful to the Lord to the end, to proclaim the gospel to the end, to be true to the Lord to the end, to sustain his faith to the end, whatever that end may be.

What were they praying? We don't know exactly for sure, but I just wanted to throw that out there, to let us see that there could have been some other reason why they were totally shocked when Peter showed up at the door.

The Growth of the Church Through Persecution

Now, going back to the question of what is God's purpose in all of that? Well, you know, why he does what he does with whom he does it. We're not going to be able to answer those details, but what is given at the end of this account of James being executed, Herod harassing the people of God, and Peter being delivered from prison, and eventually Herod dying at the hand of God because he didn't give God the glory, and so forth.

You read that in the intervening verses. You come to verse 24, and it says, but the Word of God grew and multiplied. It's often been said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, and this is what's happened here.

We don't understand why, we don't understand how it all works, and the dynamics of it all, but what happened is that God so used the persecution of his people to grow and multiply the Church. The inscrutable ways of our God.

So however he chooses to work or not work, our task, our responsibility, just be faithful to him, be loyal to him, and be trusting in him that his purposes are being accomplished, and indeed, they shall be.

Let's thank him for it. Our Father and our God, help us to be faithful, help us to be true, help us to be loyal, regardless of the day-to-day circumstances that come our way. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, have a great rest of your Friday, a wonderful weekend, and again, gather with God's people. Lord bless.