rescue

(part 5 of 5 on the book of Acts)

“When Peter came to himself, he said, ‘Now I know for certain that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from everything the Jewish people were expecting to happen.” — Acts 12:11

Something in us loves the idea of rescue. As children, we dream of being grown ups who protect and save others—firefighters, knights, nurses, vets. We flock to movies about superheroes who save innocent victims from evil plots to destroy the world. We hold our breath as news anchors tell of stranded hikers and sinking ships and miners trapped far underground.

It’s no wonder, really, that our hearts and minds never stray far from the notion of rescue. After all, we need rescuing. Ever since we tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden, we’ve been a people in peril. We’ve been sucked into a pit of miry clay, and we can’t save ourselves from sinking.

The Apostle Peter was no stranger to that sinking feeling. He surely felt it when he denied Jesus for the third time and the Lord turned and looked right at him (Luke 22:61). And it is not hard to imagine how he must have longed for rescue after Stephen was stoned and the great persecution of the church began (Acts 8). Then, in Acts 12, Peter finds himself in jail—the same jail where the Apostle James had just been beheaded. Unless a rescuer can overcome 16 guards to stage a miraculous prison break, Peter will likely meet the same fate.

But the church—the entire church!—was “earnestly praying to God for him” (Acts 12:5). So it’s not at all surprising that rescue did come to Peter in the form of a light-shining, chain-busting angel of the Lord. Peter realized on that day that God is our great rescuer. Over and over, God does for us what we have no hope of ever doing for ourselves.

When the Israelites were suffering hopelessly in Egypt, God told Moses, “I have come down to rescue them…” (Exodus 3:8). When God delivered David from his enemies, David sang, “He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me” (Psalm 18:17).

And when Jesus stepped down into our fallen and sin-burdened world to accept a punishment that should have been ours, he staged the greatest rescue of all. As Paul so passionately writes in Colossians 1:13-14, “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

When Peter realized that God had freed him from prison, he immediately went to tell others how the Lord had rescued him from certain death. Similarly, when a passerby pulls a child from a burning building, we praise that hero publicly for his selfless and lifesaving actions. How, then, could we as believers ever keep quiet about our own rescue from sin and death?

Thank you, Jesus, for rescuing me. Thank you for your heroic sacrifice on the cross that freed me once and for all from the bondage of sin. May I be more like Peter, who couldn’t wait to tell others the story of how you rescued him and redeemed his life from the pit. Amen.