Acts 12: Your Life Is Kept Until Your Mission Is Done

Introduction

Luke wrote two books, the Gospel that bears his name and the Acts of the Apostles. As Charlie Skrine reminds us, the goal is to reach certainty about what the apostles taught, and Acts sets that certainty in motion: it draws us into the great project of bearing witness to the risen Jesus to the ends of the earth.

This sixth message in the "No Favourites" series, preached at All Souls Langham Place in London, is on Acts 12:1-19. It asks a simple question: "what kind of movie are we in?" In other words, what are the terms of the contract between God and us if we join this project?

The story reads like a prison-break movie: a powerful king, a chained apostle, an angel, an iron gate that opens by itself. But a single verse is enough for one member of Jesus' team to die. The preacher tells the story, then draws out three implications that Luke wants us to be sure of.

Outline of the message

1. What kind of movie are we in?

Many Christians seem to believe they are living in an episode of "The A-Team," a cheap TV series from the preacher's childhood: an elite commando unit convicted of a crime they did not commit, on the run, helping people nobody else can help.
That sounds like the story of Acts: misunderstandings, false accusations, fugitives serving people in need. And this week we even get a prison break and an underground resistance.
But in the series, despite the guns and the explosions every week, the preacher cannot remember anyone being hit by a bullet, not even the bad guys. When his mother came in with spaghetti on toast, you knew the four of them would climb back into their van, victorious, and drive off toward the horizon. They were shielded from any real consequences.
Jesus had his own elite team too: himself as the leader, then Peter, James and John, the inner circle of four, with their nicknames, the sons of thunder and the rock. There is something funny about the tone of Acts 12: God is mocking Herod, it is a prison-break movie, almost a heist movie.
And yet, in Acts 12:2, Herod puts James, the brother of John, to death with the sword. Not James the brother of Jesus, mentioned in verse 17, but James the son of Zebedee, one of the sons of thunder. He dies in a single sentence.
The preacher compares this chapter instead to the British series "Spooks," in which a young trainee who was not supposed to go on a mission dies in the second episode. Through the next 86 episodes and ten seasons, you never knew whether a character would make it to the end. Nothing was guaranteed.
Hence the question: what should we expect when we carry this message of forgiveness for all and life after death to the ends of the earth?

2. Herod Agrippa, the most powerful man in the region

With Herod, we leave the affairs of the local church and step into geopolitical conflict. There are many Herods in the Bible, but this one, Herod Agrippa I, is the greatest since Herod the Great. He rebuilt his grandfather's entire kingdom.
He is both the most Jewish and the most Roman of the Herods. He had convinced the priests, the temple and the Pharisees that he was a faithful defender of the law, and he was probably closer to Caesar than anyone else in the empire.
He grew up with the emperor's sons, drinking and playing with Caligula and Claudius. In 37, he is imprisoned for wishing aloud that the emperor would die so that Caligula could reign. Things turn in his favor when Caligula becomes emperor.
In 41, during a coup in Rome, the plan is to restore the republic. According to the historian Josephus, it is Herod who finds Claudius trembling behind a curtain, rallies the guard behind him, and negotiates with the Senate, under threat of arms, to give him the throne.
For this man, Christians are an opportunity. He tries it out: in verse 1, he arrests a few members of the church; in verse 2, he kills one of the leaders; in verse 3, seeing that it pleases the Jews, he has Peter arrested.
You cannot execute someone during the festival, which is very reminiscent of Jesus. So Herod prepares a show trial for the moment when all the pilgrims from the diaspora will be in the city. He wants to prove that he is the protector of his people.

3. Visitors from Antioch in Jerusalem

Other pilgrims are in Jerusalem. The previous week, the series had stopped at Acts 11:30: Barnabas and Saul, leaders of the new Gentile church in Antioch, had come to Jerusalem.
In Acts 12:25, they return to Antioch, having done nothing else, according to Luke, than deliver bags of money. They leave with a new friend, John, also called Mark, whose house we visit in verse 12 without meeting him.
Some commentators think Luke wants to reassure us: God has not forgotten Jerusalem or the Jewish people. The preacher does not think this idea ever crossed Luke's mind: throughout the book, right up to the last chapter, the proclamation of the gospel always begins with the Jews before the Gentiles.
His reading: Saul, Barnabas and Mark are there to understand what kind of movie they are in before they leave Antioch to carry the gospel throughout the empire, as far as India and Africa.
Before a journey that will take Saul all the way to the Praetorian Guard's prison in Rome, let us see how things turn out when the man who led that guard during the coup tries to persecute the church.

4. A prison break worthy of a movie

For James, things go badly: one sentence, and he is dead. We have a Gospel of John, but no Gospel of James.
Peter is in prison, and everything is doubled: four squads of four soldiers, two soldiers and two chains, two guard posts. Herod is taking no risks with this dangerous band of fishermen and their fish.
A Christian friend of the preacher, a film director, got his big break with a prison-break film, "Escape from Pretoria," starring Daniel Radcliffe, the former Harry Potter. It was meant to be a hit in March 2020, and it came out just as the Covid-19 pandemic began. The film tells of an escape under apartheid in South Africa.
In verse 6, as in that film, the camera slowly circles the watchtowers to show that escape is impossible. Then the escape scene begins. In the movies, it is hours of carpentry and lock-picking; here, an angel appears, and nothing is a problem anymore.
Darkness? A light shines. Chains? They fall off. Guards? They walk right past them. The iron gate of the city, in verse 10, opens by itself. An escape in the style of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Peter cannot believe it: in verse 9, he thinks he is seeing a vision, as if God were comforting him the night before his execution. Then he "came to himself" (verse 11) and "when he had considered this" (verse 12). The preacher pictures this big fisherman standing in the street while his mind catches up with reality. Dawn is coming, and the changing of the guard could happen at any moment.
"Now I truly know that the Lord has sent out his angel" (Acts 12:11). This is a book about certainty. The big trial will begin without its star.

5. A prayer meeting caught off guard by the answer

Peter decides to let the church know. He goes to Mary's house, perhaps the closest one to the prison, perhaps his usual group. He knows they will probably be praying all night.
He knocks from verse 13 to verse 16, because he cannot get anyone to let him in. The dilemma: knock loudly enough to be heard by people who are praying fervently, but not so loudly that the secret police are alerted. This is the life he now leads.
Rhoda, the servant girl, is so overjoyed that she forgets to open the door. Yet in a prison-break movie, opening the door is the most important thing. The preacher is sure that Peter and Rhoda told this story together many times.
Inside, nobody believes her (verse 15): either she is out of her mind, or it is some kind of angelic visit. Peter is in his cell and will die tomorrow: that is what they hold to be certain.
What were they asking for in their prayer? Perhaps their faith was weak. It is possible: you pray for something you do not really believe God will do, then he does it, and you are a little surprised.
More likely, they were praying the way the New Testament prays for prisoners, a prayer about standing firm far more than about escape. Someone suggested to the preacher that they may have remembered what had happened about ten years earlier: "Please, do not let Peter deny Jesus a second time."
When they finally open the door, their astonishment is loud, and at the wrong moment. Peter motions for them to be quiet, then leaves for the underground life of a persecuted church.
The final scenes are about Herod. In the morning, there is great commotion among the soldiers (verse 18), desperate searches and an interrogation (verse 19): how many guards, chains and doors? A fisherman walked right past all of you? The preacher senses that Herod, friend of the emperor and master of all Israel, cannot accept that things slipped out of his control. What if God was not on his side? Furious, he leaves for his Roman capital.

6. One Lord, an unstoppable mission

Barnabas and Saul bring three implications back to Antioch. If a church backs the great project of announcing the gospel to the ends of the earth, this is the kind of movie it will live in.
First implication: compare Herod and Jesus. It is a clash of two messiahs. Who is truly the king of the world? There is only one almighty Lord, even if Rome and Jerusalem unite against him.
According to the preacher, history records that one of Herod's advisers was named Gamaliel. And Gamaliel gave advice in chapter 5: if this work is of God, you will not be able to overthrow it, and you might even be found fighting against God (Acts 5:38-39). Whatever your power, the lesson of biblical history is the same: you do not want to find yourself fighting against God.
At the previous prayer meeting in Acts, the church had prayed Psalm 2 and spoken of Herod: Herod and Pontius Pilate gathered together with the nations and the peoples of Israel against Jesus, God's anointed, "to do whatever your hand and your counsel foreordained to happen" (Acts 4:27-28). Everything they did served God's plan: Jesus on the throne forever.
God can send his angel whenever he wants and bring Peter, or anyone, out of any prison, no matter how many doors and guards there are.
Second implication, which follows from the first: this is a mission that cannot be stopped. The big question of the book is whether this message will reach the ends of the earth and survive every attempt to kill it, intimidate it or block its path. There is no doubt.
Jesus said it at the beginning of the book: you will receive power, the Holy Spirit, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Jerusalem, done; Judea and Samaria, done; the ends of the earth, which has just begun in Antioch. This is the plan until Jesus returns.

7. James and Peter: your life is kept until your work is done

The first two implications are reassuring. But then how did James die? And why do our lives not look like those of the elite team? What is true of the whole chapter is that the mission cannot fail, and yet you can die.
Third implication, about people. Stephen was already dead, but he was not an apostle. This time it is one of the three closest to Jesus. Why did God deliver Peter and not James? And why Peter in the AD 40s, but not in the 60s, when he was executed in Rome?
The story of James and Peter is about saving your life forever. Peter shows that your life is completely protected: nothing can harm you until you have finished your work for the Lord. Peter still had work to do, so the number of guards did not matter. James had a job to do in the decisive decade after the resurrection, and that job was finished.
This has always been the contract. There are no hidden clauses with Jesus, no nasty surprises if you have listened to what he says. The day the disciples understood that Jesus himself had to die, he told them: "For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life for my sake, the same will save it" (Luke 9:24).
The contract was never to save your life now, in this world. If James's priority had been to avoid prison, avoid suffering and preserve his life, that would have been the way to lose it. The contract is to take up your cross and lose your life for Jesus; then you save it forever.
"That is what I mean by 'until'": Jesus will save your life again and again until you finish your work for him, then he will save it forever. So James did save his life. Today he shares the resurrection life with the Master he followed to death.
Jesus does not offer us what the 1980s TV shows offered, a cigar and a van speeding off to another part of Los Angeles. He offers something far better: an indestructible life with him on the other side of death, that great door that awaits every human being, including the Herods who have everything now.
It is even the contract that James asked for. The mother of the sons of Zebedee, "one of the best mothers in the Bible," had big plans for her sons: that they would be the most important in the coming kingdom. Jesus, who knew the day of Acts 12, answers her: "You don't know what you are asking" and "You will indeed drink my cup" (Matthew 20:22-23).
The king of a coming kingdom can give eternal security, but his servants are safe here only until their work is finished. James had a mother and a brother, probably a wife and children, plans, reasons to think he would still be useful to Jesus for years. The preacher thinks of the terrible pain of loss that those words foretold.
This is the report that Saul and Barnabas bring back to Antioch, a great, cosmopolitan trading city, the city of opportunity where fortunes are made. Antioch resembles All Souls in many ways. Do you want to be the starting point of this gospel's unstoppable advance? Antioch looks at the contract with open eyes, and in chapter 13, it will say yes. The question is the same for the church today.

Key takeaways

Luke writes so that we may have certainty: there is only one king, Jesus, and neither Herod nor Rome can stand against him.
The mission of witnessing to Jesus to the ends of the earth comes from God: nobody can stop it.
The Christian life is not an episode of "The A-Team": the mission cannot fail, and yet you can die.
Jesus keeps your life until your work is finished, then he saves it forever. There is no hidden clause in his contract.
Like Antioch, every church is called to look at the cost squarely and say yes.

Personal reflection

What kind of movie do you think your Christian life is: a series where nothing serious ever happens, or a mission where nothing is guaranteed here below?
When you pray for a brother or sister who is struggling, what do you ask for: that they be delivered, that they stand firm, or both?
Is there an area where you first try to save your life now, to avoid any price to pay, rather than follow Jesus?
How can the certainty that your life is kept until your work is done set you free from fear this week?
What might following Jesus cost you at work, in your family or in your neighborhood, and are you ready to say yes, as Antioch did?

Verses cited

Frequently asked questions

Why did God deliver Peter and not James in Acts 12?

For Charlie Skrine, the answer lies in the word "until." Jesus keeps the lives of his servants until their work is finished. Peter still had work to do, so the number of guards did not matter. James's work, on the other hand, was complete. He did not lose his life: he saved it forever, according to Jesus' words in Luke 9:24.

What was the church praying for when they prayed for Peter?

The text says the church was praying earnestly, yet nobody believes Rhoda when Peter knocks at the door. The preacher suggests their faith may have been weak, but thinks it more likely that they prayed the way the New Testament prays for prisoners: for steadfastness more than for escape. Perhaps they were asking that Peter would not deny Jesus a second time.

Who is King Herod in Acts 12?

He is Herod Agrippa I, the greatest Herod since Herod the Great according to Charlie Skrine. A childhood friend of the emperor's sons, he helped Claudius take the throne in 41. He seeks the favor of both Rome and the Jews, and sees the persecution of Christians as a chance to please the people.