Rev Harry Newton preaches on Acts 12:1–19 at SumRed Church, exploring the question of why God allows suffering
A Sunday sermon by Rev Harry Newton on the miraculous escape of Peter from prison, and the harder question of why James was executed while Peter was freed.
Summary
Rev Harry Newton delivers a sermon at SumRed Church based on Acts 12:1–19, which recounts King Herod Agrippa's arrest and execution of James, and the miraculous escape of Peter from prison. Newton opens with historical context on Herod Agrippa — his lineage, his political relationships with future Roman emperors, and why both Romans and Jews found him acceptable — before walking through the passage verse by verse. The central question Newton raises is not whether the miracle happened, but why God intervened for Peter and not for James. He draws on personal pastoral experience, the book of Job, and the theology of the cross to argue that suffering is neither divine punishment nor evidence against God's existence, but a reality of a broken world that God entered through Jesus. Newton concludes that the cross demonstrates God does not abandon people in suffering, and that Christian hope rests on a future return of Jesus that will bring an end to grief, death, and evil.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Series Context
Rev Harry Newton: Welcome to church. My name's Harry. Today we have this reading from Acts, which is really cool. We're going to delve into it. But next week we're back into our series going through the Gospel of Luke. We're coming into the final bit of the Gospel of Luke, one of four accounts of Jesus' life, death, and ministry. Part of the reason I love the Gospel of Luke is because my granddad, when he was captured by the Nazis and put in a Nazi war camp, was given Gideon's Bibles of the Gospel of Luke and tobacco — with no papers. So he smoked his way through the Gospel of Luke, but thought it was rude to smoke the Bible. He decided he'd read it first, and he became a lifelong committed Christian while smoking his way through the Bible. Anyway, we're going to restart that series next week, and we have a couple of guest speakers over the next couple of weeks, so that's going to be really fun too.
Also, if you've got the church app, you can open it up and go to the journal section and you'll see there's a sermon outline of today's message, as well as a section where you can fill in your own notes and questions for later.
Who Was King Herod Agrippa?
Let's crack into it, because today's reading is a bit strange at one level. Verse 1: King Herod. Who the heck is King Herod? This is the first time he's actually introduced, and he's introduced in a manner which Luke, the author, assumes we will know who he is. He's called Herod Agrippa. There are lots of Herods. He is the grandson of Herod the Great. Does anyone remember in the Jesus Christmas story how Herod tried to kill the baby Jesus? He tries to kill him — it's a whole thing. It ends up in a mini genocide. It's pretty horrific. That was Herod the Great, the grandfather of the Herod in today's story.
Herod the Great was a psychopath. He was cruel and paranoid. He had his wife executed and three of his children murdered. He actually drowned one of his own sons, Aristobulus IV, because he thought he might be plotting against him — he probably was, but still pretty harsh. They went swimming together in their palace swimming pool, and while he was there, he held his head under until he drowned. The wife of Aristobulus took their son and fled to Rome, where she later returned to Israel.
The reason we mention that is that Herod Agrippa then grows up in the Roman court alongside Gaius and Claudius. Who are they? They go on to become the next two subsequent Roman emperors. And between them there's no power struggle — one dies, the next one comes in. You don't have the two of them vying to be Caesar over the other. Why is that important? Because Agrippa was good friends with both of these men, and so both of them promoted Herod Agrippa up the food chain to the point where he became king of this region. This is a very short version of a very long history.
What this meant was that the Romans liked him because they found him predictable and trustworthy, unlike all the other Herods, who were mostly psychopaths and very unpredictable. It sounds like there was probably a high level of incest in the Herod line, and as a result there were quite serious mental health issues as well as psychopathy. So it genuinely was an issue in their line.
The Jews, meanwhile, really liked Herod Agrippa too. They didn't like his granddad, but they liked him — and they liked him because of whose grandmother he had. While granddad was a nutcase off to the side murdering his own kids, grandma was a Hasmonean queen. Has anyone heard of the Hasmoneans? If you haven't, don't worry — super quick. They were a Jewish ruling family who rose to prominence. In Jewish history, you have Israel splitting in two, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. The Romans come and take over. Before the Romans, the Israelites paid money to Babylon to be a Babylonian vassal state. The Babylonians go to war with Egypt. Israel thinks they can get away with not paying the tithe. Babylon wins against Egypt, comes back and lays waste to them — horrific, a massive massacre. Then, over a couple of hundred years, the Romans sweep through and take control.
In the midst of all this, the Hasmoneans said, "We are appointed by God to be in charge. We are the royal priestly family. We are the new kings." And for about 130 to 140 years they ruled in that region with a high level of independence and peace, until finally they fell.
Why does this matter? The Hasmoneans were really well respected amongst the Jewish people, particularly amongst the Zealots — these sort of independence movement types. And Agrippa's grandmother was their queen. So the Jews liked him, the Romans liked him, everyone liked this guy, unlike his predecessors.
The Arrest of James and Peter
Now, that's who verse 1 is talking about. Across verses 1 and 2, we hear how Herod starts to single out members of the church and has them arrested. It seems like this is the beginning of a really significant shift in attitude within Jerusalem itself towards the early church.
Who's heard of Stephen, who got martyred? If you haven't heard of Stephen — poor guy, young fella, probably a late teenager, gets stoned to death. Saul, later Paul, who becomes an early church leader, we're told approves of it, and then goes from town to town, city to city, taking people from their homes and having them arrested and murdered or tortured for being Christians. But he doesn't go to Jerusalem. The church in Jerusalem is comparatively safe. There's a period of persecution, but the church in Jerusalem is left alone. Why?
Jesus has a half-brother called James. James is really well respected, and he's hyper-Jewish. Peter, in our story — who gets arrested, we'll come to him in a minute — for those of you who remember your Bible, Peter spends a lot of time with Gentiles, us, non-Jews, saying that they can become Christians. James and the others back in Jerusalem said no — they had to become Jews first before they become Christians. And that's where the big argument comes from.
Now, Peter at this point is in Jerusalem because he's come back to have a big meeting. There's been a major confab about a chapter prior. The local Jews who don't like Christians can kind of put up with James and the others. He's called James the Just — because it's James the Tall, James the Small, and James the Just in the middle, and that's Jesus' brother. James the Just is kind of the bulwark, the guy who keeps them safe. But Peter and the others are considered fair game.
So what happens is Herod Agrippa figures out that arresting and executing certain Christian leaders is, quote, "acceptable to the Jews." In other words, the Jewish leadership approves of it. And it increases his popularity even more among them. So we're told in verse 2 that Agrippa laid hostile hands on some members of the church. He beheaded James, the brother of John — a different James. He's one of Jesus' twelve disciples, and he's the first of the twelve to be martyred for his faith.
And that brings us into verse 3, where we're told Agrippa proceeded to seize Peter also — Peter being the guy who's been advocating that Gentiles, non-Jews, most of us in this room, can become Christians without first becoming Jewish. And this happened during the Festival of Unleavened Bread. Why do you care about the Unleavened Bread Festival? That's a weird thing to mention. No, it's not. The festival is seven days long. As a general rule of thumb, Jewish authorities did not execute people during festivals because it ran the risk of causing civil unrest, and they were also scared it might upset God — because if they happened to execute someone who was actually innocent, they spilled innocent blood on a holy day. So as a general rule of thumb, they tried to keep executions clear of sacred days. If you know your Jesus story, you know that doesn't always ring true, because they killed Jesus on a holy day. But as a general rule, they tried.
So Herod is keen to build favour with the Jews. He figures out it's building favour with some, doesn't want to annoy the others, and he knows he's going to kill Peter anyway. So he has him arrested, thrown in jail for seven days, with the idea being he's going to kill him at the end of the festival.
Peter in Prison
So Peter's kept in prison, and Agrippa's stated intention is to bring him to trial and then execute him — lob his head off — on the day after the Festival of Unleavened Bread. And we're told that while Peter's in prison, he's guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. That's a lot of troops. One on each side, chained to him. Two at the door, and the others at the next door beyond that. Not exactly an over-elaborate, easily-escapable setup from a James Bond movie, is it?
Now, Peter is pretty much stuffed. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine what it was like for him. That must have been pretty horrible — chained to two soldiers twenty-four hours a day, having to eat and sleep next to them, knowing he's going to be executed. Those of us who know Sandy and Graham from our church who lead Voice of the Martyrs — they're currently overseas supporting Christians for whom this is a reality today. This is a horrific thing that people still face. I don't know what it must be like. We were explaining to our kids last night about how in a democracy we have rights, and trying to explain that in some countries you don't have rights. My son was like, "But that doesn't make any sense," because we're so used to it. Peter's experience here is completely beyond our ability, I think, to fully comprehend.
The Miraculous Escape
But we're told the church was earnestly praying to God for him. And it says this: the night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, sentries standing guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. "Quick, get up," he said. The chains fell off Peter's wrists. The angel said, "Put on your clothes and your sandals." Peter did. "Wrap your cloak around you and follow me," the angel told him. And Peter followed him out of the prison. They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself and they went through it. When they had walked the length of one street, suddenly the angel left him. And Peter came to himself and said, "Now I know without a doubt that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from Herod's clutches."
Great story, hey? I think it's a great story. As a kid, I always thought, that's cool.
There are lots of people who contend this was an inside job — that Peter was able to walk past the guards because he was disguised as a servant with a cloak wrapped around him. Which is probably what Herod Agrippa concluded too. Which is why we hear a few verses later that after talking to the guards, he had them executed. Why? Because he thought they'd probably helped Peter escape. Because it makes no sense otherwise — you slept through that? Come on.
And Peter, who at the very beginning admits that he thought he was dreaming, goes on to become adamant that something genuinely extraordinary happened that night. There was some sort of divine intervention. And actually, that phrase — "suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone" — is something that Luke, the author, is repeating out of the Old Testament scriptures, out of the Jewish scriptures. It's what's called a Septuagint phrase, meaning it comes from the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures. It's a phrase that authors use, with hindsight, whenever they think that God was present either physically or in the form of an angel. So this is Luke, the author, trying to emphasize that this really was a supernatural event. It wasn't just Peter having a bit of a weird dream.
Now, it is up to you whether you choose to believe this or not. I'm going to put it out there: I don't think the Christian faith rests on whether you believe this or not. I personally think there's probably a good chance it is true, because the whole Christian faith is based on the premise of miracles. However, if you choose not to believe it, I totally get you. Or if you struggle with it, that's fine. Basic faith rests on the resurrection of Jesus.
The Question of Why
But regardless of where your opinion sits on that, I'm sure you'll agree with me on this: it was unfair on James, wasn't it? James dies, and Peter miraculously escapes. And this made me think about how — I've been ordained for almost thirteen years — as a minister, I've spent a lot of time with people over the years who have asked the question: why? Why did God let this happen? Why did God heal you and not my loved one? How come I did everything right and I still got blamed, and that person got away with it? Why is God letting my child suffer?
Amy and I had a good mate from uni days contact us yesterday. When his boy died, he rang me up and said, "Why?" How do you answer that question? They're awful questions because there is no easy answer to them. I said to him, "Bro, I don't know."
They echo, I think, the question that James' friends and family were thinking as well. As happy as they were that Peter managed to escape, I imagine they still wondered: why? Why did God let this happen? Great, Peter's there — okay, but why not James?
Amy, I'm sure you won't mind me sharing this, but yesterday she was watching The Chosen and she got a little bit teary. I walked in the room and said, "Why are you crying?" And she said, "It's so sad." It was the story of how John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, died. And the reason it was so tearful is it showed that he was someone who was loved and who loved others. These people we read about in the stories — they're not just characters on a piece of paper. They were people who had mums and dads, brothers and sisters, and in some cases wives and husbands. And they went through all of this. So it's not just, "Oh yes, James died, great, but Peter's okay." James dying carries with it a whole set of grief. This question of why. And that's a hard question, with no easy answer.
Why Rejecting God Doesn't Solve the Problem
But here's the thing. As I've sat with heartbroken people over the years who have asked that question, I've heard others give all sorts of answers. Sometimes they're great answers. Often they're frankly inadequate.
One of the most common responses I hear when tragedy hits is: "Well, I suppose that just shows that God isn't real after all." But it doesn't really solve the issue at hand. If anything, it actually makes things worse.
Who's heard of Nietzsche? If you haven't, he was an influential philosopher from the 1800s. After a volcanic eruption in Java, Indonesia, Nietzsche wrote to a friend saying, "200,000 people wiped out at a stroke. How magnificent." Now, he wasn't just being a psycho — or maybe he was a bit — but his point was that if there is no higher moral order, if there is no God, then horrific events become spectacles, not tragedies. Because if there is no God, then your moral outrage is nothing more than your opinion.
My point is that when we experience tragedy and we want to know with all our being, "Why? Why, God? Why did this happen?" — walking away from God does not take the pain away. It simply leaves you without a framework through which you can name and recognize evil for what it is. The new atheist movement under Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — when they see evil, they essentially say it's not really evil. That's why Christopher Hitchens said it would be fine to nuke the Middle East and kill every Arab, because he thought there's no moral outrage about that — they're an existential threat, so just eliminate them. You can see how they get there, right?
So that's the first problem with saying there's no God as a response to suffering. Because it leaves us without a framework through which we can actually recognize and deal with evil in the first place.
Suffering Is Not Punishment
Then the next common answer I often hear is something along the lines of: you deserved it. That suffering is a kind of punishment. This is quite a common view, particularly in some cultures. My wife and I grew up in Eastern cultures, and this idea is often quite prominent there. In some proudly self-proclaimed evangelical Christian circles, this is something that gets said as well: "You didn't get healed because you didn't pray enough. Your husband died because you didn't do X, Y, and Z. You deserve it."
Now, caveat: in Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, occasionally someone does have something terrible happen to them by God to cause a particular outcome — think the plagues of Egypt. But as a general rule of thumb, good things don't just happen to good people and bad things don't just happen to bad people. We all know that to be true. It isn't true, and it's not biblical.
For example, in today's reading, there is nothing to suggest that James was in some way a worse person than Peter. If anything, Peter was a bit of a twit, to put it mildly, if you know the story. But also, beyond them — what about Jesus? Jesus suffers, not just on the cross, but through his whole life. His family disowns him. He's treated with disrespect and dishonour. He goes hungry. He's cold. He's tired. All these terrible things happen to him all the time. If suffering can't happen to good people, then why did it happen to him, God's only son? It doesn't make sense.
The Book of Job
The Bible speaks to this idea — that suffering only happens to bad people and not good people — in a number of places, but most notably in the book of Job. Have you heard of the book of Job? If you haven't, it's a very interesting book. It tells the story of a good man who loses everything: his family, his health, his wealth. He loses everything, and yet he clings to his faith. And what the story reveals is how God's love surpasses human understanding, even in the midst of profound suffering.
As the story progresses, Job finds himself asking that same perennial question: why? Why did God let this happen? Now, if you know the story, you know that as he wrestles with this question, three of his mates rock up. And at first they're very sympathetic — "Oh, bro, it's so sad. Oh, mate, stink." You know, the way people console each other when something terrible happens. Until they get a bit sick of him being down. And then they start saying, "Well, get over it." And when he doesn't, they say, "Well, maybe it's your own fault. Maybe you deserve it." They end up working on the assumption that they have good fortune because God favours them — because they're good people. And Job has bad fortune because he's a bad person. He's done something to deserve it.
Now, if you know the story, you might remember that God is livid with them. We're told that God goes as far as to say, "I am angry with you. Why? Because you have not spoken the truth about me." That's Job 42:7. And the reason God was so angry is because that is not how the world works. The world is too broken, too tangled up in its own mess to run on some clean formula of good things happening to good people and bad things happening to bad people. And trying to explain or rationalize suffering like that only adds blame to pain. Try saying to someone who's facing a horrific situation, "Well, essentially it's kind of your fault." They're probably going to slap you. And fair enough, too.
The World Is Broken — But God Entered It
The world is not meant to be this way, is it? Now, the world is awesome at one level. I saw the sunrise the other morning — oh, my goodness, so good. This morning I was driving along down to St Andrews and I saw the waves coming in around Shag Rock and the light glistening off them. Stunning. Last night my daughter came and gave me a cuddle in front of the fire. Life is good. The point is, life is good, but it's also not perfect. It's not just the news of terrible things happening out there. It's not just Sandy and Graham dealing with awful things overseas. It's here in our own lives too — the stuff we deal with when we face these terrible things.
The world is not meant to be this way, and you know this to be true. That's why Nietzsche comes across as so wrong — because you know that there's fundamentally something wrong with that perspective. The world is not supposed to be this way. But the reason it's this way is because we broke it. We made ourselves the centre, and we let this thing called sin unravel what God has made good.
But here's the good news. When we broke it, God did not give up on us. Instead, in Jesus, God entered our pain. He touched the untouchable, grieved for the grieving, and he suffered injustice at the hands of others when he didn't deserve it. And then he did something that no one saw coming. He died — not as a martyr, not as some working-class hero as some people try to make him out to be, but as a substitute. He took on himself all our messiness and sin. He died on our behalf so we might be forgiven.
Forgiven — why? God is holy. And if you don't believe any of this, that's absolutely fine, but just so you're all on the same page: Christian and Jewish belief, and even Islamic belief, is that God is holy. God is perfect. He's pure. Imagine a sphere of pure white. That means if God turns a blind eye to imperfection, sin, and messiness — no matter how small — it impinges upon his purity, and therefore he ceases to be God. So God can't turn a blind eye to sin, to badness, to evil, to messiness. Something needed to allow us to be reconciled to God. I won't get caught up in something called substitutionary atonement theory today, but suffice to say — what happens when Jesus dies is that he becomes a substitute in this mysterious way, and allows us to be acceptable to God despite our own mess. He died for us so we could be forgiven and redeemed — not because we deserve it, but because he loves us dearly.
What Makes Christianity Different
That is part of what makes Christianity so different. It doesn't sugarcoat suffering. It doesn't demonize those who suffer. I grew up in a Muslim country, and in Islam the idea is that if you are blessed, it's because you're good, and if things go badly for you, it's because you deserve it. But that's not the case in Christianity. Christianity names suffering for what it is, and then shows us a God who through Jesus takes on our sin, our shame, our suffering, and our sorrow.
At the cross, Jesus didn't just die to forgive our sins. He died to show us that suffering is not abandonment. That pain is not divine silence. That evil does not get to have the final word. And the death and resurrection of Jesus — the cross — proves this to be true. Because the cross shows us that God does not run from suffering. He doesn't ask us to carry pain he hasn't carried himself. And that's why we can trust him, even when we don't understand the why behind our circumstances.
Just like how James' family didn't understand when they saw Peter walk free while they buried their brother, their son, their friend — we can trust in the goodness of God despite our suffering. Because the cross tells us that James did not die because God didn't care, and God didn't forget James. James suffered and died because we live in a broken world that God through Jesus came to redeem. It doesn't solve the issue of suffering, but it shows us that in the midst of suffering, God is with us.
Hope for the Future
And even though suffering, grief, and death are something we all know too well, the day is coming when Jesus will return and it will all come to an end. In the Jewish scriptures, and you see this echoed in the Christian scriptures, there is this idea of the kingdom of God. Jesus said he came to herald in the kingdom of God. And then one day he will come again to bring it in fullness. So it's here, but it's not really fully here yet. This in-between stage is what Christian belief describes.
When he comes back, God's presence will come to be on earth fully. God's shalom will come to be fully present. And what is God's shalom characterized by? An end of grief, an end of suffering, an end of death, an end of sorrow, an end of evil. To put it the way Tolkien put it: the undoing of all things that are sad.
The day is coming when Jesus will return and suffering, death, and grief will be no more. And we can trust that this is true because of the cross. Trust and hope in the future is simply trust — we can trust in God because of what he has done in the past and what he is going to do in the future.
So when you suffer bad things, it's okay to ask that question: why? It's completely normal. It's okay to have your faith rocked if you have a faith. If you don't have a faith, it's also legitimate to question whether faith could be legitimate. But to say that you can't believe in God because something bad happened doesn't make sense. And to say that someone must deserve their suffering for whatever reason also doesn't make sense. Suffering is a reality of life, sadly. But the promise of Jesus is that he is with us in that suffering, and that one day we can genuinely look forward to a future where suffering is no more.