Acts 12

Acts 12:1-25

Subdivision 6. (Acts 12:1-25.)Israel in full unbelief under their apostate king; but with God’s hand over it.

1. While the Church is thus being enlarged, unhappy Israel becomes only more hostile to the followers of Him whom they have crucified, and a new king (Herod Agrippa I.) rises up to give their enmity effect. Though we may be little able to interpret the details, yet the circumstances undoubtedly suggest an anticipation of the last days, when the lawless king will exalt himself against God, assuming for himself divine honors. We have here, also, in effect, the slain and the spared remnant represented in the opposite lot of James and Peter: the one given up, as it might seem, so strangely, his service but begun, to a violent death, while for the other an angel must be sent from heaven, to rescue him in a wonderful manner “from all the expectation of the people of the Jews,” about to glut their evil desire with the death of another apostle of Jesus. Yet James was one of the three specially in the Lord’s confidence, along with John and Peter. His life is to us a blank, and his day went down at noon!

How little can we see of the divine ways! and, if we judge a course merely by its results, how surely shall we misjudge! In the events to which we seem to be looking forward here, those that are martyred under the beast have their part in the first resurrection (Revelation 20:4-6); while the spared remnant has but its portion on earth: and thus will eternity reverse our present apprehension of how many things! The story of Peter’s deliverance is told vividly and in detail; but while it yields much food for meditation, it scarcely requires an interpreter. It may appear even too far out of the usual course of God’s ways to find ready application to our common lives; yet it is the same God with whom we have to do; and, if we had but skill to trace His ways with us more; we might find more reason to wonder at the essential resemblances than to be perplexed at the apparent differences. The veil is over His governmental dealings, for it is a dispensation of faith and not of sight; but it is yet the part of faith to take away the veil, and through all disguises to recognize the well-known features of the Love that seeks to be apprehended by those who are the objects of it; and that before the veil is drawn away, as soon it shall be, and we shall know, even as we are known. The angels too are still “ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to those who shall inherit salvation;” and we easily remember how in Elisha’s day the eyes that God opened could see the “chariots and horses of fire” round about the man who to common sight looked absolutely unprotected. Did we seek with more longing that intercourse with the unseen which surely we may attain, how would our spiritual vision gain in clearness, what recompense should we have from Him, who still as of old, “satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness”! There are other prison-doors, and better guarded than these that could not hold Peter, which may need to be loosed for us, that we may go forth into the great spiritual world around us! and the prison perhaps is one out of which, in reality, we have hardly been, or not been, -then most secure, of course, when we scarcely recognize that we are shut in at all, or, therefore, think of deliverance! Perhaps the gates would open to us of their own accord, if we on our part were not so well satisfied to have them shut.*
2. Israel, as we see; is going onward to doom; yet they have a king under whom now the whole land is once more united. They will in fact have a political revival at the end, when all will seem to be theirs except the life from God without which all is death still, and only worse corruption. The picture of the wilful king is, no doubt, here; as has already been remarked, though it may be slightly drawn. Solemn it is to see, that whether faintly or plainly to be seen, wherever Christ is rejected Antichrist appears. So it ever is: “I have come in My Father’s Name; and ye receive Me not; if another come in his own name, him ye will receive.” In every individual case; such is the spiritual law: and there is nothing arbitrary or strange about it; in it men are but a law to themselves, in fact: there are but these two alternatives; not to choose the one is in itself to choose the other. Of all this one can say little; however, as to its bearing upon what is before us in the Acts. It is easy to see that we have in this part the divergence of two roads that never can meet. Israel and the Church here part. Save for a moment to reaffirm the freedom of the Gentile from the legal yoke; the history returns no more to Jerusalem, until the last sad days of Paul’s arrest and imprisonment from which he escapes only by the appeal to Caesar, which carries him eventually to Rome itself. Jerusalem and Rome are alike the prisons of the gospel, however much it be true nevertheless, that “the word of God is not bound.” But this lies yet a good way before us. 3. This portion does not close with the death of Herod, but with the increase and multiplication of the word of God; which in fact is now not merely to have large fruit among the Gentiles, but to expand into a glorious revelation of things hitherto kept secret -the manifold wisdom and the marvelous love of God, which is to make the Church for all eternity the temple of His praise. It is Paul, as we know, who is to be in this respect the “completer” of the word of God (Colossians 1:25); and it is Paul whose course we are now especially to follow, himself the most perfect display of grace towards the “chief of sinners,” and now to proclaim that grace in an unequalled manner, the record of which we have in his fourteen epistles. The Acts does not give us indeed, in any sufficient manner, the doctrine of Paul. It presents us rather with the character of his work, as we shall see; together with the reception given it by the legalist and by the world, -a lesson for the days since then, by which we must seek to profit, as God may give. From Jerusalem Barnabas and Saul now return. The ministers of Gentile love to their brethren of the circumcision, the opposition that we shall but too soon see springing up comes from no failure upon the part of him who once wished himself accursed from Christ for his kindred according to the flesh (Romans 9:3). That they would not receive his testimony he had been already warned (Acts 22:18); yet his heart could not be kept back in its overflowing affection for them. We are to see how it was repaid, -alas! and yet no wonder; was it not Christ, and Him crucified, whom Paul proclaimed? and to the people who had crucified Him? Such is man! and in the sovereign grace of the God of grace alone is there hope for any. The mention of Mark as accompanying the return to Antioch has a moral with it, which develops later. He was sister’s son to Barnabas (Colossians 4:10); and this touch of nature prevails in the end to separate the two zealous laborers with whom he is for the present united. And yet Mark -here the failing servant -is by and by the one who records the Lord’s own unfailing service in the second Gospel; and of whom the untiring Paul will one day say, “He is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). How will grace triumph at the last over all our failures!