In the last newsletter that article focused on the sovereign hand of God and how He worked in the circumstances that surrounded the jailer. In this article we will focus on the message that was spoken to the jailer. The jailer had arrived at the point in thinking that he was going to die and so was going to do it himself. But Paul called out to him and told him that all the inmates were still there and that he should not harm himself. The circumstances were clearly of God. An earthquake had occurred and the doors to the jail opened and the chains of all the inmates were unfastened. It was reasonable for the jailer to expect that the prisoners had escaped. When Paul announced that they were all still there, the jailer would have realized that this was a Divine action.
22 The crowd rose up together against them, and the chief magistrates tore their robes off them and proceeded to order them to be beaten with rods. 23 When they had struck them with many blows, they threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to guard them securely; 24 and he, having received such a command, threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. 25 But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; 26 and suddenly there came a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison house were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. 27 When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors opened, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!” 29 And he called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas, 30 and after he brought them out, he said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 And they spoke the word of the Lord to him together with all who were in his house. 33 And he took them that very hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized, he and all his household. 34 And he brought them into his house and set food before them, and rejoiced greatly, having believed in God with his whole household (Acts 16).
When Paul cried out to the jailer that all the prisoners were still there, he called for lights and rushed in. The jailer did not just saunter in, but he rushed in. He not only rushed in, but he was trembling for fear and fell down before Paul and Silas. It is probably safe to say that this does not happen a lot in our day. Not many ministers have people rushing in and falling before them trembling with fear asking what they must do to be saved. But this jailer did. His heart had been prepared by God. But we must also remember that while we don’t know a lot about the religious background of the man, we do know that Paul and Silas spent their time doing more than complaining about their circumstances. They prayed and sing hymns to midnight, so we can be sure that Paul had been preaching as well. The jailer had probably heard why Paul and Silas were thrown into jail and then he heard their message. His heart was then opened to the message by all of the events that were the sure mark of the sovereign hand of God.
The message to this heart prepared by God was very simple and not like the message Paul preached in Acts 17. However, we don’t know what Paul had preached while in the jail. We also don’t know how long Paul instructed the man and his household before the man believed and was baptized. What we do know is that the jailer had been exposed to the preaching, praying, and singing of Paul and Silas. He was exposed to God’s hand in the earthquake. He was then exposed to more of the teaching of Paul. He was not saved out of the blue and by a simple intellectual act, but he had heard a lot of the Gospel. The time is not set out with clarity, but he took Paul and Silas into his house and was instructed there. This was not a five minute “Gospel presentation.”
The very heart of Paul and Silas’s message was the words “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” Now, what a person thinks of belief or faith determines how this passage is viewed. If one thinks of faith as an intellectual belief or an act of the will, then one simply thinks of Paul telling the man to make an act of the will or to have an intellectual belief and he would be saved. But if one thinks of belief or faith as coming from a new heart and is an act of a renewed soul, then that is a determining factor of what a person thinks of this passage. While it is very true that a person that truly believes on the Lord Jesus Christ is saved, we need the rest of what the Bible teaches about what belief or faith really is in order to know what Paul intended in this text. It is the basic way of interpreting the Bible to understand Acts as a historical book. The theology must come from the books that teach theology. Acts teaches that one must believe, other books teach us what it means to believe.
Whatever Paul meant by believing in the Lord Jesus it took him quite a while to explain it because “they spoke the word of the Lord to him together with all who were in his house.” The biblical concept of belief unto salvation is not the same thing as what the everyday usage of the word “believe” means. In fact, what the English translates as “believing” is really the word for faith. It is rather hard to translate a sentence in which one is “faithing.” A person that comes to Christ is one that has faith and is not just one that has an intellectual belief about Christ. A person that is saved is not just one that has made some commitment to Jesus in some way. Indeed people must be told that they must have faith in Christ, but they must be told what that means and what that will require. A true and saving faith requires a complete renovation of the creature so that the person becomes a new creation in Christ (II Cor 5:17). The believer is not the same person that has believed some facts, but the true believer is one that is a new creation on the inside and is now the very temple of the living God. This is a person that is “faithing” in Christ which is to say that this person is now united to Christ and lives by what faith brings. Faith is the receiving aspect of the soul and faith receives Christ Himself and grace. When we say a person was saved by faith alone that is the same thing as saying that the person was saved by grace alone.
When Paul told the jailer that he was to believe in Christ and be saved, he did not tell him to do a work of belief. If faith or belief is a work a person can come up with in his or her own strength, then salvation is not a work of grace because one work makes grace to be something else (Rom 11:6). A justification that has a work mixed with it is no longer salvation by grace alone. So the Gospel that went to the jailer that night was not one that told the jailer to work up a faith or belief from his own power as that is not a Gospel of grace alone. The Paul who wrote Ephesians 2:1-10 would have instructed that man just how dead he was and how he needed God to have mercy on his soul and to raise him from the dead. He would have told him in accordance with Ephesians 2:8 that it was not his faith that saved him, but that salvation came by grace and grace alone. Perhaps we have been instructed to tell people to believe on Christ and be saved, but we also need to learn what faith really means. The whole concept of faith is to turn a person away from anything that s/he can do in his or her own power to be saved. As Romans 4:16 puts it, “For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace.” Paul, who also wrote that, would instruct people in that way as well. To put it bluntly, if we do not explain the nature of faith and its relation to grace when we tell people to believe on Christ we are leading them away from the biblical concept of the Gospel.
The jailer was converted that night and not just saved from a future hell. He was baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He knew what it meant to believe these things as Paul and Silas were in jail for truly believing and preaching them. He knew that he might lose his job over it. But he took the name of Christ in baptism and in that day it was a much better sign of whether a person was a new creature in Christ or not. He was instructed by Paul himself in these things and so knew what they meant. He was not a believer in the Lord Jesus and so he turned from being lord to himself to submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. He also took Paul and Silas into his house and fed them. That would have taken a truly converted soul.
Just a quick note on the jailer’s household. Paul and Silas spoke the word of the Lord to all who were in the jailer’s house. The jailer and his household were also baptized. Many see in this a reason to baptize infants. But the text itself (v. 34) tells us that the jailor had believed in God “with his whole household.” In other words, the whole household was baptized because the whole household believed. There is no easy believism in this text and no basis for infant baptism. What we have is the grace of God being received by faith and people being truly converted.
If we look at Acts as the historical words given to us by the Spirit and the theology of what happened explained by Paul himself in his writings to churches, we have a clear picture of what happened. The jailer was brought to some sense of terror by the acts of God in nature and his conscience told him something of his sin. But we also have Paul and Silas preaching, praying, and singing earlier. The man was terrified at the thought of being in the presence of a holy God with his sin and so he trembled and fell at the feet of Paul and Silas. They told the man to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but they went on to instruct the man and his household. If they told the man to believe in Christ in his own power, then that would have contradicted Paul’s clear message in his writings that faith is a gift of God. This man needed more than a bare forgiveness; he needed to become a new creature and be reconciled to God. He needed to turn from living for self and die to self to have Christ as his life. He needed to be declared just in the sight of a holy God. He needed the wrath of God to be removed from him. He needed to have someone give him a free gift of righteousness by grace alone. He needed to be taught what it meant to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
God Loves... Himself 