Sermon for MHBC (4 April 2021). You can listen on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or our website. Live at 11:00am on Sundays.
The last year has been dreary. We couldn’t even meet together last Easter Sunday. I don’t know if you can recall all the fear and uncertainty of those days. Anxiety and fear were definitely amplified. And it seems to me they still are. The CDC has a page dedicated to mental health and COVID. According to the Wall Street Journal, “[T]he U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics found that more than 4 in 10 U.S. adults had developed symptoms of depression or anxiety by the end of 2020.”[1]
The destabilization of our lives produced something of a crisis. For many we might be asking bigger questions. Life is hard to make sense out of sometimes. Those core questions that humans have been asking for ages—where did we come from, where are we going, why are we here—are deeply perplexing and can be very troubling.
I experienced one of these crises not so long ago. And it really came down to a simple question. Is there any hope? Is there any way to make sense out of life? Or, is the best we have right now? The poet George Herbert captures this searching, restless feeling in his poem “Peace.” Listen to the first stanza:
Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave,
Let me once know.
I sought thee in a secret cave,
And ask’d, if Peace were there,
A hollow wind did seem to answer, No:
Go seek elsewhere.
This question about peace and hope is the question Easter answers. If you’re visiting with us this morning, our typical pattern is to work through sections or books of the Bible Sunday by Sunday. We are finishing a series on the first eight chapters of Acts this morning. In our passage, we meet a man who seems to be looking for peace, for hope.
If you have a Bible or a phone, join me in Acts 8:26. While you’re making your way there, I’ll remind you of what has happened in Acts. The early church has been forced to flee Jerusalem because of persecution. After Stephen is martyred, we are introduced to Philip, who is used by God to preach the gospel of Jesus in the surrounding regions of Judea and Samaria. Upon hearing the gospel of Jesus people believe because it’s unlike anything they’ve ever heard before.
And this emphasis on how God is using the scattering from the persecution to gather his scattered people from around the world continues in our passage. Look at v. 26 with me: Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place.
Now right here we are introduced to a different world than ours. We are told an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip. This is the direction of God’s Holy Spirit. But we don’t talk like this in our world and when we hear people talk like this, we are usually pretty skeptical. But if there’s a God, that means the system, the world as we know it, isn’t closed. In other words, God can intrude into that system. Something supernatural, out of the ordinary, can happen.
Philip receives direction. “Rise and go” the text says. You’ll find this language throughout the Bible. It is characteristic for God’s directions. Notice the move is out of Jerusalem and into the desert. Again, this isn’t normal. You don’t expect for big things to happen in deserts. But God is on the move.
Look at v. 27: And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship. So Philip obeys. And there in the desert, with virtually nothing around, is a man from Ethiopia. That’s in Egypt. So he’s not Jewish. We are told he is a eunuch. I’ll come back to that in just a moment. We are also told that he is a court official for the queen of Ethiopia. He has a good position. He enjoys luxury. Life probably isn’t too bad.
But here’s what’s interesting. He had come to Jerusalem to worship. He’s Ethiopian, but at some point he has been attracted to Judaism. And like faithful adherents, he has traveled to the temple in Jerusalem. But here’s what is unfortunate. As a eunuch and an Ethiopian, he could not have entered the temple proper nor participated in the temple services. Best case, he would have been allowed into the outermost court region. He was in a permanent state of ritual impurity according to the OT law. Furthermore, as a eunuch, he would have been socially ostracized, especially by religious leaders in Israel.
Nevertheless, he’s there. He’s a seeker. He’s searching. One scholar estimates that “the trip to Jerusalem would have taken anywhere from 48–60 days”[2] one way. It has cost him something to be there. And now he’s making the journey back. Verse 28: and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah.
Now why is he reading Isaiah? Well that’s an important book in the Hebrew scriptures, but Isaiah is also full of these glimmers of hope—these indications that God is going to do something new to remake this broken world. There are promises that one day the Lord will bring his scattered people together, even those in Egypt, like this Ethiopian. And in Isaiah 56, there’s even a word of comfort to socially ostracized eunuchs. The Lord himself promises to reward faithfulness. He says, “I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off” (Isa 56:5).
That might be one reason he’s reading Isaiah. He’s looking for hope. That might be you this morning. You are looking for some answers. You’re looking for peace. You’re looking for hope. You may have some personal struggles or relational struggles or career struggles. Or, everything might be fine, but there’s this hole inside. And if you are alone with it too long, fear and anxiety just swallow you up. And more than anything you would like some hope, some peace.
Look at the next two verses: And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” Again, Philip is obedient. And he hears him reading. Reading aloud was the common practice in the ancient world. It was weird to do otherwise. And Philip asks him a question. There’s actually four questions in this passage. This is the first. “Do you understand?” For some reason, I love the KJV rendering of this: “Understandest thou what thou readest?”
Why would he ask him that question? He’s not asking if he can make sense out of the words or the language. He’s asking if he understands the significance of what he’s reading.
Verse 31: And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Here’s the second question: How can I? Essentially, I need help. I need a guide. Everything is so confusing.
He said that then. We are absolutely swimming in information today. In fact, when I was working on this, I Googled “what is the meaning of life” and I got over one billion results in less than a second. There are a lot of ways people try to find truth. We can try to reason our way there, but we all know the mind isn’t entirely stable. We can feel our way to truth, but our feelings are fickle—they change constantly. We can go on tradition, what we’ve been taught or what we’ve heard. That may point us through the thicket, but it probably won’t see us down the road entirely. What Christians believe is that God has revealed himself in Scripture. The first confession of faith of this church puts it this way: “[T]he Holy Bible … is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction … and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.”[3]
That’s why Sunday after Sunday, we don’t listen to my clever thoughts, but we come to Scripture to be instructed. And Scripture tells a story that Philip is about to explain.
Verses 32–33: Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”
Then the eunuch asks the third question in the passage. Verse 34: And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
The question is “who is this about?” The deeper question behind that is “what does it mean?” Maybe the eunuch is concerned that the prophet’s good news all comes crashing down with these verses. The idea of being led like a lamb to slaughter isn’t exactly hopeful. But Philip is about to tell him, “There is hope.” He’s about to tell him what Isaiah is talking about. It turns out that Isaiah is talking about someone else. He’s talking about a king, but not a typical king—a king who would suffer to save his people.
Verse 35: Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. All of Scripture is about Jesus. Scripture opens with God bringing creation into existence. And the crown of that creation is humankind who are made in God’s image. But humankind rebels. Being made in God’s image isn’t enough. They want to be God. And there’s this evil being who is angelic. Genesis refers to him as a snake, but the Hebrew word would set off any good reader because it has connotations of more than a snake. This sinister figure entices humankind to rebel, and they take the bait.
But even in God’s judgment, he offers hope. He says, “One day, someone born of a woman is going to destroy this serpent.” Right there we know that he must be more than a man since man failed the temptation. But he will be fully man since he will be born of a woman. And the whole storyline from there is a back and forth about when this is going to happen, when the serpent will be defeated, when harmony and peace will be restored. Each king in Israel’s history is a letdown. The prophets start to say that God himself will be coming. Isaiah says suffering is going to be involved.
By the time we get to the NT, we meet Jesus. He meets all the criteria, except it’s almost unthinkable to think that God would come as a human. But the NT writers tell us that’s precisely what happened. And not only does he come as a human. He comes to suffer and die. Why? So that the rebellion might be rectified, to crush the head of the serpent, to put an end to evil and death. Scripture puts it this way, He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). Or Galatians 3:13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
But the story doesn’t end with suffering. If it did, that would be truly hopeless. Early on Sunday morning, the tomb is empty. This isn’t myth. The tomb was in fact empty. This fact caused the greatest stir the human race has ever known. It made men like Peter courageous. Before he was so afraid of death that he denied Christ three times on the night of his trial. Jesus’s resurrection was the deathblow to the serpent because death itself was undone. Now we should ask the question of significance like the Ethiopian eunuch. What does this mean? It means there is hope. Paul says it this way in Romans 4:25: [Christ] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Jesus’s resurrection ensures that there is hope. It tells us that God is making people surely righteous, that we don’t have to doubt our standing before him, that there is hope for life beyond the sorrows of this world.
But here’s the thing. You can’t be neutral on that message. The gospel message that Christ died for our sins requires a response. That response begins with baptism. Baptism is a way of publically identifying with Jesus’s death and resurrection. It is a way of saying, “I trust that Christ died for me and rose for me.” It is a way of saying, “I have been united to Christ in his death and resurrection.” You can’t be neutral on this. The gospel is always calling for a response. This takes us to the fourth question in our text. Verse 36: And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?”
Here is a man who is searching for hope. He’s got a great job. He’s wealthy. He’s educated. But he knows something is lacking. Life can’t just be a nice house in the suburbs, a couple of kids, nice cars, and a retirement account. There’s got to be more. And he hears the good news of Jesus. There is a king who suffered to put an end to an age old rebellion—a rebellion that’s in here and in all of creation. The gospel says you and I can be united to Christ. We can be restored to a holy God. We can experience what we were made for. But you won’t find it in Jerusalem. You won’t find it in a temple. You won’t find it in a list of rules. You won’t even find it in this building. What you’re looking for is a person and his name is Jesus. He is alive. He has defeated sin, Satan, and death, and he beckons you to join him by following him. Look what happens next. Verse 38: And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. The response to the gospel message is obedience to Jesus.
You were made to know God. And Christ offers you that. It’s not enlightenment or anything else. It is knowing the living God and seeing his glory in Christ. Only that will give you the peace and hope you are searching for. That’s exactly what we see in v. 39: And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.
Are you happy? Happy enough that this life could go up in flames and it would still be OK. That’s the offer on the table—that in Christ, there is boundless hope. I love the imagery of the fourth stanza in Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be.” I think it summarizes this passage perfectly:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth and followed Thee.
I don’t know the details of your situation, but I believe you are here for a reason. You may be a seeker or a believer. You may be here to pacify a relative. But I know that without Christ you feel hopeless. Don’t get me wrong. It may not be all the time. It may only be when you wake up in the middle of the night or when you pass a church or when you read a sad story. But if you’re honest with yourself you know what Wesley means. You feel imprisoned in despair.
Christ has done what you could never do for yourself. The question on this Easter morning is how will you respond to Christ?
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-pandemics-end-means-the-return-of-anxiety-11617299927
[2] Arnold, NIBBCNT, 2:285.
[3] New Hampshire Confession of Faith I.