Acts 16: What must I do to be saved?
 |
| Image credit: 0fjd125gk87 | Pixabay |
Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.’ She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned round and said to the spirit, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!’ At that moment the spirit left her.
When her owners realised that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, ‘These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practise.’
Acts 15:16-21
[As a consequence of this, Paul and Silas are put in prison. However, in the middle of the night the prison doors were miraculously opened and everyone's chains were broken. Read the whole passage here].
[The jailer] then brought [Paul and Silas] out and asked, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’
They replied, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved – you and your household.’
(Acts 16:30-31)
Here in Acts 16, bookending an arrest of Paul and Silas, we have two contrasting illustrations of what the English phrase 'believe in God' means.
First, we have the woman - a slave who had a spirit with whom she could predict the future. We are not told anything about the woman's motivations herself, such as how she responded to the teaching of the disciples once the spirit had left her, but we do know something: the supernatural spirit which took over her, who was not of God, was well aware of the truth. We see an echo of James' words when he wrote to the various churches: You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. (James 2:19).
The truth is fundamentally important, but it isn't enough on its own. Believing that God exists will not save us. The owners of the slave woman were confronted with the truth, but for them it was just another piece of knowledge from which to make money.
But when we come to the jailer, who has had his world turned upside down and probably fears execution for apparently failing in his duties keep the prisoners imprisoned (he is so fearful that he is about to kill himself before Paul and Silas intervene and show him that he is, in fact, not to blame), we see a different type of belief being called into question.
The jailer is not the first person to ask what must I do to be saved?, or a variation on that theme. He's not asking for a theology lesson, or for information just for interest. He wants to know what to do. This is about real consequences. Paul and Silas's answer is simple: Believe in the Lord Jesus. But this is not the same use of the word 'believe' as when we declare something to be true. I believe that the area of Great Britain is 80 820 square miles, because I've just looked it up and I'm reasonably confident that my search engine has no particular reason to lie. I also believe that the Covid-19 vaccine was our best hope of tempering the effects of the pandemic, but that belief was not just an abstract thought - it resulted in action: three times now I have gone and sat in a vaccination centre and had a needle stuck in my arm.
What's the difference between those two beliefs? One is just believing something to be true. The other is believing in something - which could also be expressed as trusting in something. Trusting in something or someone usually means accepting that we need it, and that (unless its ourselves we're trusting in) we cannot do what we need to do without it. We have to trust in aircraft because we cannot fly ourselves; we have to trust in vaccinations because we can't reliably achieve the level of immunity they provide through our own actions.
When it comes to the final judgement, which, given the huge injustices we see every day in the news and in our lives, is something that the world badly needs, we have a choice of what to believe in, what to trust in. We can choose to trust in ourselves, or we can choose to trust in Jesus Christ. We have that choice, but only one of those options is trustworthy.
To use yet another analogy, when the day of judgement comes we have no choice but to set off onto stormy waters to reach the other side. We have two options - a boat we've made ourselves, or one captained by Jesus. But it will be no good saying: 'I think the one captained by Jesus is stronger and will get to the other side' - we have to actually get on it! And that means leaving our own boat - possibly our pride and joy that we've spent our whole lives making - to be destroyed in the storm.
There is nothing else to do other than get on the boat. Jesus has done all the work. But are we humble enough to allow ourselves to be saved by him? That is what Paul and Silas meant when they said to the jailer: Believe in the Lord Jesus. We can only pray that he did that.
Previous: Acts 15: The council at Jerusalem
Comments
Post a Comment