The Prison Perspective

I am reading in the book of Acts in my devotions. As usual I came across a story that is familiar to me, yet comes back to me with new perspective. I was reading about Peter’s miraculous escape from prison and noticed some things about it that I never considered before.

For background information, the church was starting, but undergoing fierce opposition from the religious leaders and other Jews. Now the church was being threatened by a new authority: the monarchy. The church caught the attention of Herod Agrippa I, the king of Judea.

The Herod Dynasty already held a bad reputation of oppression and persecution among the Jews and Christians. His grandfather, Herod the Great, was the king who slaughtered the male infants of Bethlehem in a vain attempt to prevent the prophecy of the Messiah. His uncle, Herod Antipas, was the king who imprisoned John the Baptist for speaking out against the immoral marriage between him and Herodias, his brother’s wife, and later beheaded him at the request of Herodias’s daughter.

Now Agrippa began his own attack on the newfound movement of Christ. He started by killing James, one of the original Twelve Apostles. As it turned out he saw that this won him favor with the Jewish leaders. So he decided to arrest and kill Peter, who seemed to have become the leader of the movement.

I don’t know what was going through Peter’s mind that night while he was in a jail cell waiting for his sentencing the next day, but I imagine that he spent it in prayer to prepare for whatever would happen to him. I think that he saw this as his end and was ready to die the death of the martyrs before him. And maybe he was encouraged knowing that not too far away members of the church were praying for him.

Then something happened that he was not prepared for. The doors from the cell were opened, Peter’s chains were removed, and an angel escorted him out of the prison past a legion of sleeping guards. It says that Peter thought he was dreaming when all of this was happening and he did not realize that this was really happening until he was out. He must have gone through a revival that night. Here he was thinking that he was about to die like Stephen, James and several other martyrs like them. Instead God rescued him and basically told him, “I’m not done with you yet. Keep doing what you are doing.” God was still going to use him to be an impact in the spreading of the Gospel around the world.

Even the church did not expect this to happen. Perhaps when they were praying they were hoping that Peter would be met with mercy the next day or maybe that the church would thrive after he would be killed. But they didn’t expect him to show up at the door that very night. It was so unbelievable that church members did not believe Rhoda, the young lady who answered the door after Peter knocked (only to humorously delay letting him inside), that Peter was at the door. They got more than what they expected through the power of prayer.

What I took from this scripture was that there are times when you are at a place that seem hopeless and uncertain, but God will never cease to amaze you. Like Peter we might see things from a one-sided point of view and be prepared for the worst when faced with it. We ask God to be with us during a certain situation, but we don’t count on Him to completely reverse it. We are blinded by the circumstance in front of us that we forget the power that God displays in our lives. Even Peter, the guy who walked with Jesus on the water, who saw Him calm to storms and even provide an abnormally large catch of fish, was surprised at what God had done. That is why it is important to let God take control of our situations, because it is He who sees the big picture.