Saturday, September 1, 2018

Acts 8:26-40: Taking Lukas from Houston to Smithers.

Presented to Alberni Valley Corps of The Salvation Army, 02 September 2018 by Captain Michael Ramsay.

Verses 39 -40: And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord took away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing. 40 But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached in all the cities, till he came to Cæsarea.

The Spirit just picked Phillip up and transported him all of that distance. That would be a great way to travel. It certainly is a lot quicker than the time that I have spent on the road and in ferry line-ups recently.

I just arrived home at about 12:30am yesterday morning after beginning my travels at before 8am Friday morning.  That was 16.5 hours. This week I was helping with The Salvation Army’s fire relief efforts up north; so on Friday, we woke up in Smithers, drove 4 hours or so to the airport in Prince George (where our flight was out of) and then waited for my plane that was a number of hours late and then by the time I got to Vancouver my connecting flight had gone so I had to wait through many more delays until I finally got off the plane to Nanaimo where Susan had been waiting for me for 5 or 6 hours after I was scheduled to arrive. We then began the drive here to Port Alberni.
            
Going up to help with the fire relief program was something too. The day before my flight up north I was in Vancouver to see Susan and the girls final performance and bring them home from SPAC. We then stayed and watched a football game at BC Place (The Roughriders were playing and since we moved from Saskatchewan to Toronto, Sarah-Grace and I haven’t missed a Riders game and since they happened to be playing in Vancouver when we were on the mainland, we stayed for the game). Of course, by the time it ended, It was too late to catch a ferry so we got a hotel room,  slept for a couple of hours and then drove to catch the first ferry to drive to Port Alberni to drop off the car and my kids and then get a ride from Susan all the way back to Nanaimo to travel to Prince George. There was a lot of travel.

Too bad we didn’t have a travel plan like Phillip in our text today. Verse 39: “And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord took away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: ... [40] Philip was found at Azotus.” The Holy Spirit just picked him up and flew him 21 miles in an instant. It would be nice.

Here we have a really neat story in Acts 8: it may even be the first time that the Gospel is brought to the Gentiles. The Ethiopian here is not necessarily an ethic Judean. He may have been part of the diaspora but it says he is an Ethiopian.[i] He may however have been a proselyte.[ii] Do we know what is a proselyte? A proselyte is like a recent convert. They are someone who is new to a faith. And in ancient Israel in order for you to even become an Israelite you would have to first be a proselyte, convert to the worship of the LORD. And by the time of Jesus some people, especially some Pharisees were quite evangelistic and quite good at making proselytes. The problem with this is that he was a eunuch and the Jews didn't usually make eunuchs proselytes. He was definitely an outsider who was interested in God though, after all he is coming from Jerusalem and he is reading from the book of Isaiah.

The part of Isaiah that he is reading from is neat too. He is reading from Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 always reminds me of Bill, a friend of mine. I admit that I didn’t really listen to a lot of Christian music growing up but there was one very popular Christian band from the 1980s that my friend Bill listened to and had a number of their tapes. I think we may have even done an air band to one of their songs in the 1980s. The band’s name was Stryper and they got their name from Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53: 5: "By His stripes we are healed." And this band Stryper actually was able to bring the Gospel message now only to Christian fans but they actually got radio play on real (not just Christian) radio stations and they opened for big name bands in that time period like Ratt and Bon Jovi. God used them to bring the gospel of Isaiah 53 to people who weren’t already Christians. And today in our text God and an angel are using Isaiah 53 and Phillip as a messenger to bring the gospel to this person from Ethiopia and all of us who happen to read this account afterwards.

Isaiah 53 is neat because it is all about Jesus. Isaiah 53:5 talks about Jesus on the cross, "By His stripes we are healed". Isaiah 53:7-8, that God laid on the Ethiopian’s heart reads, is also speaking about Jesus. It says, as we read earlier:

He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished

Now in the last few weeks we had just finished going through this little tract in our Sunday sermon series and last week when Susan was preaching on Acts 26, she encouraged us to share the Gospel and our testimony. She encouraged us to be prepared to tell people about Jesus and I think she even gave us some papers or maybe even some homework to help us with that. And that is great for a couple of reasons:

  1. It is good to tell people about Jesus: He can help us through any situation both now and forever; our salvation comes through Christ alone and we would hate for anyone to miss the benefits of that as they face the troubles of this world and the prospect of the next.
  2. We never know when God is going to give us a situation, maybe just like this one, when we can share our faith.

Let me tell you a true story that happened just the other day. As you know, I have been helping with The Salvation Army’s forest fire relief program this last week. Myself and another person, Chris, were posted to Smithers BC, to give The Salvation Army ministry lead there a bit of a break. Our job was to support the staff, volunteers, evacuees, and the people who were at the reception centre. People who were evacuated needed to come there to register and we would offer them food and emotional and spiritual support as it was required.

We were staying at the Salvation Army Mountainview Camp between Houston and Smithers and we would drive in every day.  On this one particular day as we were driving back from a day’s work in Smithers we were so engaged in our conversation or something that we drove right past the camp and right into Houston before we realized what we had done. We thought it was an accident but the truth is that we had a divine appointment. Just like the Ethiopian picked up Phillip from the side of the road, Chris pulled over and we picked up a firefighter looking for a ride back to Smithers. And just like the Ethiopian was reading the Scriptures; so was Lukas, the fellow we picked up from the side of the road. He was reading from the book of Mark. And just like the Ethiopian asked Phillip to explain to him what Isaiah meant; Lucas, when he heard we  were providing spiritual care for people, hauled out a little New Testament Bible that he had just been reading by the side of the road and flipped through Mark, asking us to explain whatever we could from his gospel: what does it mean to hide your light under a bushel? How about the parable of the mustard seed? And what is the yeast of the Pharisees? Phillip explained Isaiah to the Ethiopian, building on whatever had happened before and then he stopped by the side of the road, baptized him and was on his way. We were blessed to explain excerpts from Mark, after he had had an initial conversation with some medics and picked up his Bible. As we reached Smithers we prayed with him as we let him out of the car and we continued on our way. I have had this passage in Acts 8 going through my head ever since. I don’t generally pick up hitchhikers and if I were to, I wouldn’t expect them to have a Bible in hand asking me to explain it to them. But this is the grace of God.

God loves us so much that He has saved us. He promises that He will be with us through tough times – like losing our homes in a fire or any other such trouble – or good times – like meeting new friends and praying with and for them. And we never know when God will give us a chance to do just that. So like Susan encouraged us last week to share our testimony, I encourage us to pray and read our Bible because who knows when God may send someone into your path like the Ethiopian or Lucas who just wants you to explain the love of God to them

Let us pray.
 More daily blogs at
More articles, sermons, and papers at


[1] Cf. Robert W. Wall, ‘Acts’ The New Interpreter’s Bible 10, (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2002),143
[2] Cf. Michael Ramsay, “Acts 10:1-16 Interpretation: The Intentional bringing of the Gospel to the Gentiles.” Presented to William and Catherine Booth College (Fall 2006). Available on-line: http://sheepspeak.com/NT_Michael_Ramsay.htm#Acts%2010:1-16
[3] Cf. N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone Part 1 (Louisville, Kentucky, USA: WJK, 2004),133.
[4] Edouard Kito Nsiku in Africa Bible Commentary, (Nairobi, Kenya: Word Alive Publishers, 2010), ‘Isaiah 52:13-55:12: The Suffering Servant’, 871.