Sermon Tone Analysis

Recused from the hands of Herod

Recused from the hand of Herod…

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.”

Let us pray…

Throughout the universe, war rages on every front, God, the holy angels, and elect men and women battle Satan, his demonic hosts, and fallen followers.

Although the outcome of our war is not in doubt, for our God is victorious, our battles with Satan are no less real.

They are battles that test and purify our faith, they are battles that bring concern and build character and they are battles the builds us up in faith and battles that bring us down to our knees because we have faith.

This war began on an angelic level a long time ago when Lucifer, the highest of all created beings, rebelled against his Creator.

, “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!

How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!

You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’

But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.”

O Day Star, son of Dawn!

How you are cut down to the ground,

you who laid the nations low!

You said in your heart,

‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

I will make myself like the Most High.’

But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.”

Using rich poetic imagery, the king of Babylon is addressed with sarcastic irony.

From the great heights of his pride, from the citadel of his arrogance, and from the depth of his rebellion against God, Lucifer’s downfall brings him to the depths of Sheol.

Some have seen here a poetic allusion in which the fallen king of Babylon is likened to a fallen Satan.

At the minimum, the extravagant pretensions of the king of Babylon are graphically and poetically portrayed, from the heights of God-defying arrogance (“I will make myself like the Most High”) to the depths of destruction in the far reaches of the pit, this was the plight of Lucifer.

Lucifer, more commonly known as Satan (“adversary”), was cast from heaven, taking with him one-third of the angels.

From that moment until the present, war has raged between Satan and God, engulfing angels and men.

On the human front, the battle began when Adam and Eve rebelled against God in Eden.

When they sampled the forbidden fruit (at the instigation of Satan) the war of the ages spread to human realm.

Through the centuries since them, mankind has shaken its fist in defiance at God.

And though the folly of fighting Him is self-evident, that does not stop each succeeding generation from trying.

They pit their impotence against His omnipotence, shattering themselves live raw eggs through against granite.

Solomon well expressed the hopelessness of fighting the plans of God when he wrote,

“No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord” ().

History is littered with the wreckage of the broken lives of those foolish enough to fight God.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche despised Christianity as the religion of weaklings.

Fighting God eventually pushed him over the brink, and he spent the last several years of his life in an institution for the insane.

Fighting against God cost him his mind and proving that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than man.

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Nobel-Prize- winning author, Ernest Hemingway, considered himself living proof that a person could successfully fight God.

He boasted of fighting in revolutions, tumbling women, and leading a life of sin without repentance or apparent consequences.

His sins eventually found him out, for the wages of sin is death, and he put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

Fighting against God cost him his life and proved that “…God is not mock for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.

For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” ().

In biblical times, just as in our own times, there are those who tried and who are still trying to vainly fight against the plans of God.

In ancient times many of them were kings or other rulers, whose immense earthy power deceived them into thinking they could successfully oppose heaven.

In reality, they and their kingdoms “are like a drop from a bucket, and are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales; behold, God lifts up the islands like fine dust.

All the nations are as nothing before Him, they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless.

In the New Testament there is one family of rulers that reins high above all the other in that battle against the plans of God.

The Herod’s, this family headed by the patriarch known as Herod the Great, ruled Judea from 47 BC to 37 BC.

Herod the Great was a particularly bloodthirsty ruler; Antony Octavius called him the King of the Jews.

He executed one of his wives.

Mariamene, her mother, and three of his sons

(the last one five days before his own death).

You remember the most barbaric of all his slaughters; it was when he slaughters all the innocent young male children near Bethlehem.

He slaughtered as he sought vainly to kill the true King of the Jews, Jesus Christ, who was safely in Egypt with his parents.

Here in chapter 12 we are dealing with Herod Agrippa I, who reigned from A.D. 37 to A.D. 44.

He was the grandson of Herod the Great, who had murdered his father, (Air/ Rist/ Stop/ Bow/ Less) Aristobulus.

The apostle Paul would one day stand trial before his son, Herod Agrippa II.

Despite being raised and educated in Rome, Agrippa I was always on shaky ground with the Romans.

He ran up numerous debts in Rome, and then fled to Palestine, leaving angry creditors behind him.

He made unwise comments, which got back to the Roman emperor Tiberius who promptly imprisoned him.

Released from prison following Tiberius’s death, he was made ruler of northern Palestine, to which Judea and Samaria were eventually added in A.D. 41.

He ruled the largest territory of Palestine since Herod the Great nearly fifty years earlier.

Because of his tenuous relationship with Rome, it was imperative that he maintains the loyalty of his Jewish subjects.

In ; we see Herod laid violent hands of James and Peter.

Recused from the violent hands of Herod

, “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.

One way to win favor with the resident Jewish authorities was to persecute the hated sect of the Christians, especially the apostles by laying violent hands upon them.

Accordingly, about the time of the famine mentioned in chapter 11, Agrippa laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them.

One of those was the beloved apostle James the brother of John, whom Agrippa ordered put to death with a sword.

James became the first of the apostles for suffer martyrdom.