God Can Make a Way

Russell McKinney

Mitchell County

One of the better-known stories from the Book of Acts involves an angel breaking Peter out of a Roman prison. The story is found in Acts 12:1-19. Herod Agrippa had Peter arrested to try him and execute him to gain favor with the Jewish religious leaders. However, lest he stir up the Jewish population to riot, Herod couldn’t carry out that trial and execution during the Jewish feast time of Passover and the following seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Consequently, Peter was left to languish in prison, awaiting his trial and certain execution, until the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread was completed.

Peter was kept in chains and guarded by four tetrads of Roman soldiers. Each tetrad consisted of four soldiers and the tetrads worked in rotating shifts. When Peter lay down to sleep at night, he slept in chains between two soldiers while two other soldiers guarded the prison door. His situation couldn’t have been more dire.

All that Peter had working in his favor were the constant prayers the church in Jerusalem was praying on his behalf. As things turned out, though, those prayers were enough as on the night before Peter’s trial and execution, God sent an angel to lead a jailbreak. While Peter was sleeping, the prison suddenly became filled with light as the angel appeared. The angel struck Peter on the side to awaken him, caused the chains to fall from his hands, told him to put on his garments, and then supernaturally walked him straight out of that prison without any guards seeing them. When Peter and the angel got to the iron gate that led out to the city of Jerusalem, the gate opened all by itself. The angel then accompanied Peter down the adjoining street before departing from him.

After the angel’s departure, Peter made his way to the nearby house of Mary (the mother of Mark) and knocked on the door. A group of Christians were gathered at Mary’s home to pray, and no doubt the top item on the prayer list that night was Peter’s scheduled trial and execution the next day. The way the story unfolds is somewhat humorous as it takes a while for Peter to convince those Christians that it’s really him and that they should open the door. They could believe that the man knocking on the door was Peter’s angel but they couldn’t believe it was actually Peter himself!

Several details are worth noting from this story. Here are four of them:

1: Peter was sleeping soundly on the eve of his trial and execution. The angel actually had to strike him to awaken him. Peter was at perfect peace either with living or dying. He must have had the same attitude that Paul would later express in Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

2: Even though Peter, along with the other apostles, had previously been broken out of prison by an angel (Acts 5:17-42), Peter wasn’t expecting a repeat jailbreak that night. As evidence of that, he didn’t initially think the angel was real or that what was happening was actually taking place. Instead, he thought he was experiencing a vision. He didn’t realize that his jailbreak had literally occurred until he was out on the street and the angel had departed.

3: The fact that those Christians had real trouble becoming convinced that it was actually Peter who was standing at their door proves that prayers prayed with imperfect faith can still produce the desired results if the requests are God’s will.

4: The next day, after Herod Agrippa I had thoroughly questioned the soldiers who had been assigned to guard Peter, he had them put to death. We aren’t told if the entire group of sixteen was put to death or if it was just the four who were on duty the night of the escape, but either way, it makes for an unpleasant part of the story. I can’t imagine that those Christians who prayed so earnestly for God to rescue Peter realized that their prayer request would lead to the deaths of at least four men. While I don’t mean to imply that those Christians were wrong to ask God to rescue Peter, all of us need to understand that our prayer requests if granted by God, might produce unintended consequences – sometimes unpleasant ones.

In the end, though, the main thought I’ll leave with you from this story is that God can make a way where there seems to be no way. If He chooses to do so, He can fix your situation by natural means or by supernatural means, and He can do it by using people or angels. Whatever problem you are facing right now, it’s probably not as potentially fatal as the one Peter faced as he lay there asleep in that prison that night. And yet, God made a way for him where there didn’t seem to be a way. So, don’t underestimate what God can do. Remember that He is still on the throne, His angels still walk among us, and He still responds to prayer.

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Russell Mckinney lives in the English Woods area of Spruce Pine and serves as the pastor of Roan Mountain Baptist Church in Bakersville.

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