Acts 12

STUDY SIXTEEN: HEROD – ACTS 12:1 – 25

A. ACTS 12:1 - 19
Around the same time as the famine King Herod began a persecution against the church.

This Herod (Herod Agrippa I, 37 – 44AD) was the grandson of Herod the Great (37 – 4BC) who had planned to kill the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:1 – 19). He was the nephew of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee (4BC – 39AD), who ridiculed and mocked Jesus (Luke 23:6 – 12). He was given the title ‘King’ by the Roman emperor, Gaius (Caligula), firstly over territories to the northeast of Palestine, and eventually over Galilee, Judea and Samaria. Through his grandmother, he was related to the Hasmonaeans – the family of the ‘Maccabees’ who had delivered Judea from Greek rule in 165BC. This family connection made him acceptable to the Jews.

Read Acts 12. Answer these questions:
What was Herod’s intention towards the church?

What pleased the Jews?

How did the Jews’ approval impact Herod?

Suggest why Herod ordered a strong guard over Peter?

How did the church respond to Peter’s imprisonment?

How did God get Peter out of jail?

Once Peter realised he was free, how did he describe his release? (verse 11)

What was the immediate reaction of those praying for Peter, when Rhoda told them he was at the door?

Suggest why they wouldn’t believe her.

Suggest why Peter went ‘to another place’ rather than staying with the believers?

Although the believers were scattered by the persecution that broke out after the stoning of Stephen (8:1), the apostles themselves seem to have been left alone by the Jewish leaders, following the advice of Gamaliel (Acts 5:33ff). But now, for some reason, Herod decided to persecute the church (12:1), including the apostles. When he saw how his execution of the apostle James pleased the Jews, he arrested and imprisoned Peter. The New Bible Dictionary comments: ‘His attack on the apostles was perhaps more popular than it would have been previously, because of their recent fraternization with Gentiles.’ Reports had been coming into Jerusalem of the Samaritans, and, more disturbing to the Jews, the Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus Christ. If this disturbed the Jewish Christians, as we saw in chapter 11, how much more disturbing it would have been to the Jews who hated the name of Jesus.

A.1 What we can learn from Acts 12:1 – 19
About God’s sovereignty: Here in this report, we see that God delivered Peter, but not James. It is clear that Herod intended to kill Peter, since James’ execution had so greatly pleased the Jews. God could have sent an angel to deliver James, but he didn’t. He could have sent angels to deliver Stephen, but he didn’t. And as we will see later in Acts, there was a time when God rescued Paul from prison and times when he didn’t. We are challenged here to remember the words of Jesus about his arrest and crucifixion:

To Peter, who attempted to protect Jesus with his sword: ‘Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?’ – Matthew 26:53.

To Pilate: ‘You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above’ – John 19:11.

Jesus’ later words to Peter are also instructive. Jesus had just given Peter some insight into the kind of death by which he would glorify God (John 21:18, 19), and Peter, seeing John, had asked Jesus ‘Lord, what about him?’ Jesus replied:

‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me’ – John 21:22.

Our future, our life and our death, is in the hands of the Sovereign Lord: not the Christ-hating crowds, not the crowd-pleasing kings of the earth. For each of us there is a different story.

About prayer:
Luke tells us that ‘the church was earnestly praying to God’ for Peter. Did they remember a previous occasion when the apostles were imprisoned and rescued during the night (Acts 5:17 – 26)? It’s highly likely that they did remember. If they did, they certainly knew that God could rescue Peter. Whether or not he would was another question – a question that involved his sovereign purpose.

But when he turned up at the door, they told Rhoda, who had gone to the door, ‘You are out of your mind’, and even when she kept insisting that Peter was at the door, they concluded ‘It must be his angel.’ They didn’t believe it was actually Peter.

We pray to God because he is the Sovereign Lord – he is ‘our Father in heaven’. If he were anything less than sovereign, then prayer would be meaningless. Only he who is sovereign over all has both the ability and authority to intervene in human lives and in the natural laws of the universe; there is no value and no rationality in praying to a God who is not Lord of all. But because he is Lord of all, prayer also includes of necessity ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matthew 6:10), and ‘not as I will, but as you will …may your will be done’ (Matthew 26:39, 42), and ‘if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us’ (1John 4:14).

The servant girl, Rhoda, ‘was overjoyed’ when she saw Peter at the door; those praying for his release ‘were astonished’ (12:14, 16) – the word means something like ‘besides themselves’ or ‘struck out of their wits’; it has an element of excitement. God, the sovereign Lord, not only could, but did, answer their prayer.

About godly wisdom:
Previously, when imprisoned by the Sanhedrin, the apostles when rescued by the angel had gone straight back to the temple and taught publicly at the angel’s command (Acts 5:17 – 26). This time, with no instruction from the angel, Peter seems to have gone into hiding – ‘he left for another place’, so that the search made for him in the morning failed (12:18). He removed himself from the threatening danger. We have already seen this with Saul, and we will see it again later. This same kind of wisdom, of alignment with the purpose of God was evident in Jesus, who deliberately avoided arrest and death until ‘the hour had come’ for him to give himself up for us in his sacrificial death – for example, John 7:30; 8:20, 59; 12:36.

B. ACTS 12:20 – 25

Luke reports Herod’s idolatrous pride and his death. Luke also reports, in contrast, that ‘the word of God continued to increase and spread.’ Herod had tried to stop it, but God had stopped Herod, not because of his opposition to the believers, but because he had failed to give praise to God.

Luke’s comment about Barnabas and Saul refers back to 11:29, 30, where the church in Antioch sent them to Judea with a gift to help the brothers there.