Chains Fell Off

Chains Fell Off

Acts 16:16-40

If you’ve seen films or documentaries of the second world war, you’ve probably seen scenes of troops landing on beaches, gradually progressing, bringing liberation from the enemy as the armies advance, as people have re-enacted D-day and landing on the beaches of Normandy.

That’s the kind of picture we could have in mind as we read this section of Acts, an invasion and battle to bring liberation.

We saw last week, Paul and Silas landing in Europe, God had called them across into Macedonia.  They’d landed in Greece.  Might have been a nicer beach to land on than Normandy but they land and as they progress, they bring a message of liberation.

As with D-day, such liberation doesn’t come without a fight.

Although from last week, it does seem pretty successful at first.  They came to Philippi in v13, they found this place of prayer, they began to speak to people.  Lydia and others were converted.

Terrific.  Very straight forward, but it isn’t going to continue in such a straightforward way.

Do you think Satan is going to give up his territory without a battle?

This section we’ve just read focusses on that battle, as it progresses in the town of Philippi.

It tells us a little bit about what this battle looks like and perhaps the sort of battle that we might engage in, and we will face.  It tells us how Paul and the others responded to it, and how we should respond to it.

So v16, they were going [back] to the place of prayer.  That’s where they’d meet Lydia and so on.  Seemed like a good place to go, but they were interrupted on the way – the battle begins.

We were met, v16, by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling.

This girl follows Paul, and the others around, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.”

Now, does that strike you as odd?

You might think this is good publicity.  “Yeah.  We are.  We are servants of God.  And we are telling you the way to be saved.”

We don’t know why this spirit decides to speak through this girl in this way.  We don’t know why Paul didn’t command the spirit to leave earlier.

Apart from the fact that he became greatly annoyed.  It seems like it was something he was prepared to tolerate for a while but then finally he felt he needed to do something about it.

It is odd because it might have seemed like good advertising.  You can picture the headlines – fortune-teller endorses missionaries.  Great.

However, although it is a true statement, it’s a form of opposition.

Think of it like endorsing a product.  Who you get to endorse your product affects how people think about it, no matter what they might say.

God doesn’t go for endorsements from evil spirits.  If you should believe the evil spirit on this, what else should you believe they say?

You can’t give credence or authority to something that is ultimately anti-God.

Which is why, as a church, we can’t be united to people or an organisation who in the end are not Christian, or who maybe are just on a completely different page to us.

So I take it, that’s why Paul finally thinks, we can’t be allied to this person anymore.  It’s starting to look like we’re in this together, like she’s our publicity person.

So this is Satan subtly undermining the authority of the gospel, even through true statements.

Paul simply commands the spirit, v18, “in the name of Jesus Christ … come out of her.”  And it came out that very hour.

It reminds us that Jesus is more powerful than any evil spirit.

Silencing the evil spirit, but also freeing, liberating the slave girl.

Satan tries to undermine the message, what happens?  The slave girl is liberated.

However, the opposition doesn’t stop there.

When Paul exorcised the spirit that possessed this young girl, he also, incidentally, exorcised the source of her owners’ income and they don’t like it.

As the gospel spreads and lives are changed, not everyone is going to be happy about it.

You will notice that they are seized in v19; they are dragged …into the marketplace; they are then put face-to-face with the authorities; they bring out the magistrates; and the owners seek, very skilfully, to disguise what their real concern was.

What was it that made these men angry?

It was the fact that their profit base had been completely dismantled.  That up to this point, they had been making a killing as a result of this girl being able to, at least supposedly, tell the future but now, this Paul has wrecked all that.

They’re ticked off (annoyed) and so they come to the magistrates, and they come very skilfully, with the accusation that these men were causing a riot and they were introducing unlawful practices.

Now, the fact was that neither Paul nor Silas were doing either.  They were not inducing a riot, nor were they actually introducing something that was unlawful.

However, the charges were significant enough for the magistrates to come, to assemble in the place, and for them to hear the case.  I don’t think there’s any question in v20, 21 that they are seeking to cash in on an inherent anti-Semitism, which would be part of the Roman mind, and also to stir up the notion of racial pride.

Why do I say that?  You will notice the sentence that begins at the end of v20: “These men are Jews …” and then notice, “not lawful for us Romans.”  “These guys are Jews, and this is not the kind of thing that we Romans want to have to deal with, is it magistrates?”  All the time disguising what it was that really concerned them.

We see that in different ways today – a misrepresenting slander.  Anybody who says homosexual practice is wrong will then usually be portrayed as homophobic no matter what efforts they make to show that isn’t the case.

Anyone who says Jesus is the only way to be saved, and other religions aren’t, will very quickly be represented as racist and intolerant, despite efforts they might make to say that isn’t the case.

There was an article in an English newspaper speaking about the spread of conservative evangelicalism in Britain.  It made reference to one of the reformed evangelical theological colleges and made the analogy with a Taliban training camp.

It was basically saying that this college was a Christian, fundamentalist version of that and the whole country should be really worried about the people who come out of there.

Just a ridiculous smear campaign.

Or you might have read on the front of last week’s leaflet how the Victorian Government intends to pass a law very soon that may see ordinary citizens imprisoned if they speak up against the chemical, psychological and physical mutilation of confused adolescents.  Speaking about transgenderism.

Now it skilfully comes under the guise of the wellbeing of children, but that’s not the real agenda.  The real agenda is silencing Christians.

That’s what we should expect when the gospel impacts on people’s lives, and it cuts somewhere they don’t want it to cut.

Imagine if there was bad press about Trinity Church.  “That’s where they believe Muslims go to hell.”

Would you feel like mentioning it to your friends next week?

We’d feel the sting of such words.

Satan loves to throw mud and the crowd in v22 certainly buy it (accept it).

As a result of having brought them to this place, they are then given a severe flogging.  They are thrown into prison.  The jailer is commanded to guard them carefully, and, in order that he might do as good a job as he can possibly do, we’re told that he put them in the inner cell and he fastened their feet in the stocks.

It looks like that’s it.  That’s the end of the spread of the gospel in Philippi.

After the conversion of Lydia, it looked like 1-0 to God.  Suddenly there’s a comeback from the other team and it ends up being a 2-1 defeat with Paul and Silas in prison.

The jailer must have said, “Well, that will be them for the night [brush hands].  They’re not going anywhere now.”

Of course, he didn’t realise what was about to take place that night.  Some people are about to be released from bondage.

Now, having received what would have been a dreadful beating, (I think this may be one of the occasions that Paul refers to later on when he says that on three separate occasions, he was flogged dreadfully).  The idea of them having a little bit of a reprimand and being sent to some cosy establishment may appeal to us because of what we find them doing; but when we look at the record carefully, we discover that there is no reason for us to believe anything other than the fact that they were treated most despicably and that they were imprisoned quite dreadfully.

They’re not in a situation here where they can say, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ let us go.”

What do they say?

Luke tells us, v25, at about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

Well, it’s hardly a surprise, is it, that they were listening to them?

If you think about the fact of what these prisoners were used to experiencing when others were added to the company, it certainly didn’t have to do with hymn singing.

If you imagine the kind of curses and oaths and expletives that would emerge from the people as they were dragged forcibly into containment, and all of the things that the prisoners were used to doing—even when you see contemporary pictures of prison life, you realize the brutality and inhumanity of it all.  You have fixed in your minds the noise of them taking those metal cups and rattling them on the bars and making noises as the people are brought in and finally incarcerated along with them.

There’s no sense of them saying, “Oh hello, Silas.  How are you?  Welcome to the jail in Philippi.  We’ve been having a wonderful time here, and I hope you’re going to enjoy yourself as well.  Where are they putting you?  Oh, a nice spot.  I was there once.”

Nothing of that at all.  Therefore every expectation that what they would experience would just be the curses and groanings as these individuals responded to their bleeding backs and to the stress and strain of the previous evening, so they listened, because Paul and Silas were doing what was almost inexplicable … praying and singing hymns to God.

It doesn’t mean they were dancing around saying, “Yippee!” but it does mean they were praising God.

This idea that somehow or another we would want to dumb down our expressions of praise or to marginalise them or to accommodate them to friends and neighbours who would walk in from our communities so that in coming in they may say, “Oh, this is very familiar, and this is very comfortable,” means we’re losing one of our greatest evangelistic tools.

Paul and Silas could have done a number of things when they hit the jail floor, couldn’t they?

They could have spent the evening preparing a statement on civil rights as Roman citizens. “What we need to do, Silas, is get a piece of parchment here, if we can.  Let’s get on to this immediately.  This is a violation of our civil rights. Let’s take care of this.”

Or they could have argued.  “I told you Paul to just leave that girl alone, but no, off you had to go ‘in the name of Jesus’.

Or they could have sat sulking, in silence, doubting that the hand of God was on them for good.  “So much for that Macedonian vision.”

Or they might have complained about the cruel way in which the jailer had thrown them into the prison and had clamped their feet so unmercifully into the stocks.

Actually their reaction to their circumstances is very different from any of these and that’s the challenge, at least to me.  At midnight they were “praying and singing.”

They were singing.  Why?

It was because they recognized that God was even in their incarceration, that God had given them the ability to speak as they’d spoken to Lydia, that God had given them the ability to see the exorcism of the slave girl, and that God, as a result of that, had determined that they be put into this position.  God was still God in the jail in the same way as he was out of the jail, so they said, “Well, let’s just praise him.”

Which is why doctrine matters.

Some people will say, “Why worry about doctrine?  Let’s just sing praises and be happy.”

The reason they could sing and pray was because they had good doctrine.

Unless you’ve got a big, sovereign God, a Jesus whose name is exclusively supreme, you’ll never be able to sing in the midst of suffering.

Which, incidentally, is why when it comes to picking songs to sign at Trinity the first question is not, “How do they sound?”, but, “Do they have sound theology?”

No point singing and praying to a small, weak God who isn’t in control of even the bad things.

Paul and Silas are not pretending.  This is not “ignore reality” stuff.

Paul and Silas weren’t praising God, I don’t believe, because they were feeling good.  Do you?

They got their backs torn open.  They got their posteriors put into an unfortunate position.  They got their feet manacled into the stocks.  All because they’d been unfairly, publicly maligned.

Do you think they looked at one another and said, “Well, how do you feel, Paul?  Feel like a little praise time?”

Paul said, “I feel as bad as I have ever felt in all my life.”

Silas says, “Well, you know, is God still God, Paul?”  “Yes, he is.”  “Is he still worthy of our praise, Paul?”  “Yes, he is.”  “Didn’t you write to one of the churches and tell them that they ought to be thankful in all circumstances?”  “Yes, I did.”  “Well, don’t you think then, that irrespective of how we’re feeling, we ought to give ourselves wholeheartedly to worshipping him?”

Paul said, “Yeah, okay.”   Silas gives the note, and the two of them launch into it, “and the other prisoners were listening to them.”

Singing in the midst of suffering speaks loudly.

Which is why the prosperity gospel is so dreadful.  When God gives you material things that everyone else in the world craves, that says nothing.

When there’s praise to God in the midst of pain, not just pleasure, when there’s devotion to Jesus even when things are difficult, not just delightful, then there’s great testimony.

When things don’t go how we’d planned, or how we wanted but we can still say God is good, Jesus doesn’t make mistakes, he is worthy of our trust – confidence in him is a great testimony.

In this case, God does the miraculous.

In v26 suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken.  And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened.

The jailer presumes that everyone would have fled.  That basically means he’s in for the chop himself, and so he’s about to fall on his sword, v27, but Paul shouts, v28, “Don’t harm yourself, for we are all still here.”

He comes running in, v30, and says, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

We don’t know what he may have heard from them already.  Whatever he’s heard, he knows he needs to be saved.

In v31, they replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

There’s the message in a nutshell.  There’s the good news of liberation.

It’s not about religious hoops.  It’s not about doing certain things, adhering to certain rules or rituals.  It’s about believing.  That’s it in a nutshell.

Now there’s more to say than that of course.

Believe what about Jesus?  Saved in what way?

So we’re told in v32, they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.

They explained it.  They went through it.  And they believed.

You can see the wonderful transformation the gospel brings.  V33, the jailer now washes the wounds of the prisoners.  What!?  That would never happen.

The entire household is baptised, testifying to their new allegiance.

He brings them into his house, sets a meal before them.  He’s united now with his enemy.  He takes them out of their cell and into his lounge room.

There’s rejoicing all round because he’s come to believe in the Lord Jesus.

So let me ask.  Who is it that’s been freed here?

Paul and Silas?  Or this jailer and his family?

If it takes seeing the greatness and grace of Jesus to sing in the midst of suffering, I suppose the question is, do we actually have a big God who rules wonderfully even over suffering?

The big twist in this passage is that in the midst of the opposition and the disruptions, God is in fact using those very things for his word to go forward.

The very girl who was used to disrupt is in fact freed from the evil spirit.

The very person who is entrusted with keeping them away from telling people, now asks to hear the message himself, and is told, and believes.

Those who publicly humiliated them and organised their beating and imprisonment end up with the egg on their faces, vv35-39.

The point is not, if you just sing and pray enough God will free you from your troubles.

The point is, we have a God who’s worth singing about, even in our troubles.

We live in a time where it’s easy to bemoan lost opportunities to speak the gospel because of opposition but it may just be that because of opposition, there are new and better ways to witness to Jesus.

New church facilities… more opportunities?  More opposition?

Maybe the two will go together?