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Our days often go on without much adventure. Sometimes, time just moves slowly with not much going on. Other times, we’re so busy, we just go from one thing to another and barely have time to think.
In this passage, God shows us how to really open up our lives to something exciting. He shows us the life of the serenity, creativity, and adventure that He wants all of us to have. It’s really quite simple, and it’s available to each one of us.
This is the lesson that God teaches us through the life of a man named Philip.
Philip
We meet Philip as a man “filled with the Spirit” in Acts 6. The Apostles chose him along with six other men to serve as the first deacons. These were men who oversaw the distribution of money to the widows there so that the Apostles could focus on the Word of God and prayer.
One of those deacons, Stephen, was the first martyr. He was put to death under the leadership of a religious leader named Saul. Saul would later bitterly regret this, because he himself became a follower of Jesus. Saul went over all the world preaching and teaching the good news about Jesus. We know him as the Apostle Paul.
One result of the martyrdom of Stephen was that the church in Jerusalem scattered. This was one way that God used the evil actions of men to accomplish His purpose to send out witnesses into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
In this next stage of global evangelization, Philip played a significant role. We find him preaching to people in Samaria about Jesus. Many people accepted Philip’s messages and became followers of Jesus. Peter and John took notice, and they came down from Jerusalem to minister to the new believers.
Later in that passage, God told Philip through an angel to move on. “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza” (Acts 8:26). The phrase we read afterwards is literally, “And he arose and went.” I like what Dr. Lloyd John Ogilvie says about this phrase, there is Christianity. God commands. We move. That’s what it’s all about. Dr. Ogilvie says, “Think of the opportunities we have never experienced because we were immobilized on some dead center waiting for the ‘big picture’ before we could do the Lord’s work” (Drumbeat o Love, 114). We need to arise and go!
Once Philip arrived there, there was a court official from Ethiopia in a chariot (we’ll hear more about him in a minute), and the Spirit told him, “Go to that chariot and stay near it” (Acts 8:29).
I’ve often felt like the Lord was leading me to go up and speak to a certain person. The most memorable for me was a time when I came to the end of the greenway in Spearfish, SD. This greenway led to the mouth of Spearfish Canyon and a large parking lot. On the other side of the parking lot, there was a man sitting on a motorcycle who looked like he was trying to figure something out. Watching him, I felt strongly that I should go up to him.
It turns out that he was a man from the community that I knew, and his life was in a crisis. His wife had left for rehab in another state. I was able to allow him to share his burden, and we developed a friendship afterwards and spoke often about the Gospel.
Now, you may ask, how do we know it’s God leading us? Well, what’s really the downside? If we feel like God is leading us to reach out to someone, and it’s not really God, what’s the worst case scenario? We meet someone new? They don’t like us? It’s a pretty low risk assumption to assume God’s leading when we feel compelled to reach out to someone.
The Eunuch
The person Philip reached out to was a Eunuch, a court official in the court of the Queen of Ethiopia, Candace. He was most likely a Jewish proselyte. He had gone up to the temple and was a follower of the Scriptures of the Old Testament. He was reading the book of the prophet Isaiah as he returned home. There were actually many people like him in the world at that time who sought out the God of Israel.
In the book of Isaiah, God had given particular encouragement to eunuchs that they would experience acceptance in God’s house. In Isaiah 56:4–5, God says, “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:4–5).
It is this same passage and many like it in Isaiah 56 that also gives encouragement to Gentiles. It is the passage Jesus cited when he cleared the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple, “for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7).
The Encounter
When Philip heard that the Ethiopian Eunuch was reading from the scroll of Isaiah, he asked him, “Do you understand what you are reading?”
The Eunuch replied that he needed some help. Here was the passage he was reading: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth” (Acts 8:32–33).
This is a portion of Isaiah 53. This passage is one of the clearest statements of the substitutionary atoning death of Jesus in the entire Bible. It takes the sacrificial language of the Old Testament and says that the coming Messiah, the future King of Israel will give himself up like a sacrifice for the sins of His people. He can do this because He is, as it were, a spotless lamb, a sinless sacrifice.
This prophecy, given 700 years before Jesus was born, is so clearly about Jesus that people hearing it have thought that it was in the New Testament! They have thought it was written after Jesus died rather than 700 years before. The Reformer Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich said about it, “What now follows affords so plain a testimony concerning Christ, that I do not know whether anything more definite can be found in the Scriptures, or even whether a more explicit passage could be framed.”
After reading this passage, the Ethiopian Eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” (Acts 8:34). What an opening! It’s not surprising what we read in the following words, “Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35).
God used those words to open the heart of the Ethiopian Eunuch. “As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?'” (Acts 8:36). Then, he got down and was baptized. In baptism, he publicly committed himself to faith in Jesus and received the visible confirmation that God accepted him as a child, giving him a name better than sons and daughters.
And then God took Philip away, and the Ethiopian Eunuch went happily on his way.
Conclusion & Application
What an amazing day! It was a day of excitement and adventure for Philip as God used him in a powerful way to serve both His glory and the Eunuch’s good.
And that’s what God can do for us, too. There is a rather simple formula here: be open to God and open to people. Be open each day to what God wants to do in your life, and be open to the people around you. The Spirit will show the way and lead you to an exciting and adventurous life like you never knew before.
That’s not to say it will be easy. An adventure is an adventure in part because there are setbacks, challenges, and obstacles. People we have worked with will abandon us. They will make mistakes and mess up, sometimes again and again. They will hurt us. They will do things that make us cringe. It’s a challenge.
But we will also see triumphs. We will see people accept Christ. We will see people turn from their sin. We’ll see people put destructive things behind them. We’ll see them beginning to build godly habits. We’ll see them use their gifts. We’ll see them grow strong. We’ll see them launch into new adventures of their own, experience falls, and get back up again. We’ll see them lead, and we’ll see God do significant and wonderful things through them.
All this is available, if we, like Philip, are open to God and to people. Amen.
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Photo by Doran Erickson on Unsplash