How Did the Apostles Break Out of Jail?

Tom: In this our Understanding the Scriptures segment, we are in the Book of Acts 5, and Dave, we left off at verse 18, but we’ll back up to 16 just to get a little background here. Verse 16: “There came also a multitude out of the cities round about unto Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed every one.”

Dave: Every one!

Tom: Every one. “Then the high priest rose up, and all they that were with him, (which is the sect of the Sadducees,) and were filled with indignation…” Why would that be? Well, before you answer that, let’s see what they did. Verse 18: “…and laid their hands on the apostles, and put them in the common prison.” Dave, why would these priests – this is the religious, you know, those who are supposedly…as we found in Jeremiah, these were the priests, the pastors, those who were to have the responsibility for the care of the sheep, as it were?

Dave: Tom, because they’ve done what you know the Catholic priesthood has done: they’ve taken a position that is not biblical, where they do the thinking for the people, and they’re indignant because, “My gracious, they can’t heal people like this! God is not working through them! Wait a minute, you can’t be doing that! You’ve got to go through us! You can’t just…” Well, the pope who recently died, who is praised by evangelicals, he said, “You can’t go directly to God, you have to come through the Catholic priesthood. You can’t confess your sins to God; that’s not allowed.”

So the Catholic Church, they’ve been very indignant down through history at people who said, “Wait a minute, we don’t have to go through you guys! You don’t have some special power or special position. Every one of us is a priest who is a true Christian, and we have access through the blood of Christ.” I think he sainted…the pope sainted more people than almost all the popes in the last, what – 417 years while they were keeping records – 283 or something like that. Now, Tom, that’s not biblical. The Bible is written to saints: the saints at Ephesus, the saints at Corinth, and so forth. So any Christian who knows Christ, who has been born again of the Spirit of God, is a saint. That simply means, “sanctified, set apart for God.” Well, they get indignant, too. “How dare you go to God without coming to us!” Now these guys are losing control.

Tom: Mm-hmm. And, Dave, you can see how they retaliate – they put them in prison. But the Lord has something to say about this. Verse 19: “But the angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, and brought them forth and said, Go, stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.” Verse 21: “And when they heard that, they entered into the temple early in the morning and taught. But the high priest came, and they that were with him, and called the council together, and all the senate of the children of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought. But when the officers came, and found them not in the prison, they returned, and told, Saying, The prison truly found we shut with all safety, and the keepers standing without before the doors; but when we had opened, we found no man within. Now when the high priest and the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these things, they doubted of them whereunto this would grow. Then came one and told them, saying, Behold, the men whom ye put in prison are standing in the temple, and teaching the people.”

Dave: Tom, this was rather a big shock, wasn’t it, to them? I mean, the prison is locked, it’s secure, and the prisoners aren’t there! What could possibly have happened? Now, you know, in the case of Peter when that happened, they killed the guards; that was the penalty. But they’re not killing them because they know the guys are still there! They haven’t run away; they haven’t escaped. They’re back to the temple where we first got them and arrested them, and there they are, preaching this Jesus once again.

Tom, there are dear people today and have been down, you know, through history, I guess, not going back too far, who think, “Well, I ought to be able to get out of prison, or I ought to be able to vanish from here and appear somewhere else. And this was the case with the early church; now we’re going to really work at this.” So many people trying to reproduce the early church. Well, you could ask yourself, “How many times did this happen?” Eventually there was a time when these men were imprisoned, the apostles, Peter included, and God did not work this miracle. He did not release them. So you can’t make a law out of it. You remember Pastor Buck? Angels have set up their command post on his lawn. Even his dog sees them. I forget…some of the other people have got a giant angel running along holding up an airplane, you know.

Tom: The angels have an encampment right there at his place to take him to heaven.

Dave: Right. So angels on assignment I think was the… Gloria Copeland says you can command your angel, and all this. No, it doesn’t happen very often. It happened to Paul once. Paul said, “The Lord, whose I am and whom I serve, sent His angel.” That was when the ship was about to be wrecked. So you try to make a rule out of this…well, I guess we ought to have angels all of the time. Benny Hinn, of course – Wow! For one year the angels were clustered around him, gathering in his room. I don’t know why.

Tom: Or so he says.

Dave: He must have been doing something fantastic that they thought was, you know, really absorbing, amazing! No, that’s not true. It’s a lie. I’m sorry, the angels were not gathering in Benny Hinn’s room every night just to watch him, what a great man of God he was. And I don’t think he even imagined it, I think he just…

Tom: Made it up.

Dave: …made it up. Yeah. But there is a danger thinking, “Well, now look, we ought to have miracles like this happening all the time! The Lord spoke to this person, well, then I ought to have Him speaking to me all the time.” So then we develop techniques how we can get this to happen. Or sometimes they lay a guilt trip on someone who is, say, dying in the hospital. And I know of people who have come and prayed, a prayer team from a church, and have said, “Well, if you don’t have the faith to believe, it’s your fault.” Now Peter when – we just read it a week or two ago – if his shadow even passed over someone, they were healed; it didn’t matter about their faith. You can’t make rules out of these things.

Tom: Folks, just go through the Book of Mark. You find so many different ways that Jesus healed. Sometimes He spit on the ground and made a little paste out of the mud, or sometimes He just spoke the Word. You can’t – again, I think the reason for all those different examples is so that we don’t try to make a methodology out of it.

Dave: Well, the final analysis: God is not going to deliver us from every problem and every persecution and every disease. Every person who was ever taught that is either dead or dying. But it’s wonderful to read of what God did for His own purposes in His own way [in] His own timing during the early church.

Tom: And, Dave, the interesting thing about this – let me just interject this – they didn’t just run off… “Oh, we’re out! Now let’s go hide! Let’s not let this happen again.” By the power of the Spirit and the boldness they go right into the same place and continue to teach and proclaim the Word of God.