I do not like getting woke up in the middle of the night. My wife still laughs at how emotionally taxed I was when our children were very young and would wake us up in the middle of the night. I don’t think I modeled Jesus in those moments. So I have to confess that I don’t know what my response would have been if a real shiny fella woke me up after finally falling asleep in a prison cell.
“He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly.’”
Okay, it’s one thing to have somebody wake you up. It’s quite another to have somebody strike you and tell you to get up quickly. I’m really surprised that the Bible has Peter only in a stupor and not in a raged stupor. Or even a bedraggled Peter fighting the angel and refusing to away from his slumber.
This poke has the ability to infuriate the sleeping disciple. But it’s the means to his rescue.
Scroll down a few more verses and you see another angelic poke. The same word is used in Acts 12:23 that was used in 12:7. The angel (was it the same one?) struck down Herod for his pride. One poke killed while the other redeemed.
In our slumber we can mistake the two. We can think that the angelic strike is meant to to enrage us, to do us harm, to destroy us. When you’re awakened by a strike and a loud “get up” you can feel as if God isn’t being good to you. You can feel as if His call is coming at an incredibly inconvenient time. I mean, couldn’t the angel have waited until Peter wasn’t sleeping? Why wait until he is clearly in his REM cycle to strike him and get him going? God could have pulled a Philip and teleported Peter out of prison. Why does it require an angelic blow?
But redemption isn’t convenient. God had to wake up Peter to get him out of prison. And he likely is going to have to strike you and wake you up to work redemption in your life. This isn’t the stuff of rainbows and cupcakes and unicorns. This is the stuff of angelic power that can move iron bars and slip a convict through a host of guards. But it’s also the type of power that can kill a man, ask Herod.
And so when we are face to face with this redemptive power we can feel as if God’s redemption isn’t sweet but deadly. And it is. It takes power to remove chains. But God will stop at nothing to put Peter back in the house of John Mark and set back upon His mission. James experienced the sword. His work was done. But Peter’s work wasn’t finished and so he was invincible. But being invincible doesn’t mean that you won’t get struck by an angel.
I would likely word a few things differently and his struggle is not my own. But I’ve learned a ton about sanctification interacting with Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting. Consider this:
British theologian John Webster speaks of “the church facing the resistance of the gospel,” meaning that if the gospel brings comfort, it also necessarily brings affliction. The gospel resists the fallen inclinations of Christian believers. When we engage with God in Christ and take seriously the commands for purity that flow from the gospel, we always find our sinful dreams and desires challenged and confronted. When we homosexual Christians bring our sexuality before God, we begin or continue a long, costly process of having it transformed. From God’s perspective, our homoerotic inclinations are like “the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst” (to borrow Fredric Buechner’s phrase). Yet when God begins to try to change the craving and give us the living water that will ultimately quench our thirst, we scream in pain, protesting that we were made for salt. The change hurts.
If you’re in Christ every strike is meant to awaken you and bring you into conformity to Jesus. And this is our greatest good. It’s not meant to deal a death blow as it was to Herod. Every thing he does is for your good. We’ve got to preach this truth to ourselves in our waking and sane hours so that we’re just in a stupor when the Spirit strikes us in our slumber. Otherwise we’ll respond to His redemption with rage.
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