Acts 12 - Introduction

Excursus. On the Deliverance of Peter by the Angel.

Grave indeed had been the danger which had threatened the Church of Christ in the year 44. The Christian community had enjoyed for a considerable period comparative peace and security. This quiet season had been a time of blessed work: the little Church now numbered its thousands; humanly speaking, however, it was yet in its infancy, and if it encountered any great shock, there was still danger that the faith of Jesus might be trampled out, before it had taken permanent root in the hearts and homes of men. Such a shock threatened the little community in the eleventh year of its life. A new state of things had come into existence in Jerusalem and in the Holy Land; instead of a stern, law-loving, but indifferent and scornful Roman governor, a prince of the great Herodian house, through the friendship of the reigning Cæsar, ruled with the title of king over a dominion comprising most of the old territories of the kings of Israel.

As we have already remarked, Herod Agrippa's policy led him in all ways to court the Jewish hierarchy. To please these men and the party in the state which followed their lead, King Herod arrested and scourged (for this is doubtless the meaning of Acts 12:1 of this chapter) certain nameless but prominent members of the Christian sect; he then, pleased with the popularity his cruel policy won him among that party whose affections he longed to conciliate, arrested and judicially murdered one of the most notorious leaders of the new sect, James the son of Zebedee, one of the famous three whom the great Master had chosen as His closest and dearest friends. This arrest and execution was followed by the imprisonment of Peter, whose death was also resolved upon.

Now Peter was the foremost leader of the Christians. Peter, the martyred James, and perhaps John (who, however, in these first years of Christian history is comparatively little spoken of), were the acknowledged leaders of the sect, as the chosen friends of the Lord; all the congregations seem to have recognised their authority. But James, the fiery and earnest preacher, with a martyr's patient suffering, had passed to his rest, and Peter lay in Herod's prison waiting death. When he was gone, to whom would the Church have looked for earthly guidance in this moment of extreme peril, when king and Sanhedrim had determined to trample out the name and memory of the Crucified?

John in those early days surely was unfit to undertake so grave a charge; he needed those long years of preparation, of study, and of thought which moulded him into the great master of the theology of Christendom. His retiring, contemplative nature would never have fitted him to be the bold, wise leader in those terrible hours when Herod and the Sanhedrim stretched forth their hands to vex the Church.

James, [1] who presided over the Jerusalem Church, was not one of the Twelve; and Stephen, whose great gifts seemed at first to mark him out as a prominent leader, years ago had ‘fallen asleep.' It was truly a time of awful peril for the little Church, a peril the congregations were well aware of; so night and day prayer was made without ceasing to God for the safety of their loved and honoured teacher. Had Peter died then, they would indeed have been sheep without a shepherd. And Peter, when the angel left him alone and free in the street of Jerusalem, at once recognised with loving gratitude whence came his great deliverance, the answer to those most earnest prayers: ‘Now I know that the Lord hath sent His angel.'

[1] The strong Judaistic tendencies besides of this saintly and ascetic (so called) ‘brother of the Lord,' were an effectual bar to his exercising any widespread influence in the rapidly-developing church.

Years after, when the old man Peter had done his work, when others had succeeded him in his office of guide and ruler of the Church, a beautiful ecclesiastical legend tells us how again the old man Peter lay in prison at Rome waiting a martyr's death, and how with merely human aid he escaped; then it relates: As he went along the way outside the walls of Rome, he met his Lord bearing a cross; Peter asked Him, ‘Domine, quo vadis? (‘Lord, whither goest Thou?') Jesus answered, ‘I go to Rome to be crucified afresh;' and the old man, we read, saw quickly the meaning of the Master's words. This time he would serve the cause of Jesus better by remaining in prison, and by bravely dying for His name. This most touching ‘memory' of Peter no doubt possesses a groundwork of truth, and, taken together with the account in the ‘Acts' of the miraculous escape from Herod's prison, teaches a lesson which many of God's true martyrs have not been slow to learn. How guarded must His servants be before they accept deliverance from any bitter suffering, or freedom from any hard and painful work which may glorify their Master!

Before they accept the deliverance or the freedom, they must be sure it is an angel's hand which withdraws from the lips the cup of suffering, the cup they should remember their Redeemer drank from without shrinking.

The details of this angel's visit are strangely circumstantial. Everything is told us, even Peter's feelings in the matter. At first, when he found himself in the street and free, it seemed to him as though he were dreaming, but as he stood and thought over each circumstance, how he was awakened by the touch of a bright-shining one; how the radiant visitor spoke to him calmly and without haste, and as it were handed to him his girdle, his sandals, and his cloak; how the chains which linked him to the two sleeping guards were snapped noiselessly asunder; how they passed through the corridors of the prison, through doors and gates which opened silently before them, till he found himself alone in the deep dawn of the cold spring morning in the silent streets of the sleeping city, then the conviction came upon him that all this was no dream, but that God had indeed sent His angel, and had delivered him from prison and from death.

All rationalistic explanations of the angel's visit are obliged to supply new matter, such as a flash of lightning, a sleeping draught given to the guards, etc., and with all these additions utterly fail to account for the miraculous occurrence. Renan (Les Apôtres, cap. xiv.), one of the latest of the writers of this cheerless and unhappy school, frankly tells us that the narrative of the ‘Acts' here (est tellement vif et juste) ‘is so lifelike and so just that it is difficult to find any place in it for legendary elaboration.'