When I blogged about the life of Paul last week, for some reason it did not even occur to me to include the incident with the Philippian jailer. Paul and Silas went to Thessalonica to preach the gospel, and some people stirred up trouble for them, had them beaten and thrown in jail. Not exactly good hospitality, but that sort of thing happened often to the members of the early church.
So these two men of God are in jail; not just the jail, but the inner part of the prison. I suppose that they could have thrown a pity party, after all, they knew that they didn’t belong there; they knew that what they were doing was right, and that the people of
They could have gotten mad at God. What kind of God would send his servants to another country, only to be beaten, humiliated, and thrown into jail? Why would He do that to them? Weren’t they faithful men of God? Shouldn’t He have protected them from harm? Shouldn’t He have rewarded them for their faithfulness?
They could have done a lot of things, and most of those things wouldn’t have really mattered, being stuck in jail as they were. What they actually did, though, was to praise God. They were in the inner part of the prison, singing worship songs, and, sometime after midnight, there was an earthquake, and the chains fell off their wrists and ankles, and the cell doors opened, and the outer prison doors opened… It was almost as if God was giving them an engraved invitation, or perhaps the world’s first “get out of jail free” card, but then, the jailer awoke. He, having been asleep, had no idea what had happened, or even, how long ago it had happened. His first immediate thought was that the prisoners had escaped. He was responsible, and would be held accountable if he were still alive in the morning. He drew his sword and would have run himself through with it, but Paul stopped him. “Do thyself no harm, for we are all here.” The jailer grabbed a torch, and walked into the cell, and, sure enough, all of the prisoners were still there.
Now our jailer has to consider. Even if they didn’t have time to escape before he woke up, they could have simply let him kill himself and then walk away, but they didn’t. The jailer’s life meant more to these men than their own freedom, even knowing that they could end up being executed. These are not the sort of criminals that he was used to dealing with. He knew that they had been brought in on charges that they were teaching some new religion, that a lot of Philippians considered heresy, and yet, the gods, or more correctly, their God, had opened the doors and loosed the chains. The jailer knew at this point that he was in the presence of greatness.
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas preached unto him Jesus. The jailer took them to his own home, washed their stripes, bandaged their wounds, and he and his family sat and listened to what Paul and Silas had to say. Everyone in the jailer’s household was baptized that very night. And then they went back to the jail, and he locked the prisoners up again. In the morning, the powers that be decided that they had overreacted, and that Paul and Silas shouldn’t have been beaten or imprisoned. Because of their faithfulness, a family was brought into the church. Who knows how many others were saved as a result of the faithfulness of that one family? I spoke before of God rewarding Paul and Silas for their faithfulness; I hope you can see know that is exactly what God did.
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