Nobody Walked Out

A locked door swings open in the middle of the night. The chains drop off your wrists. The guard is asleep.

You stay.

That is the strangest thing in this story, and it is not the earthquake.

Here is the setting. About twenty years after Jesus was executed and rose from the dead, a travelling Jewish teacher named Paul reached Philippi, a Roman colony in what is now northern Greece — a town run under Roman law and proud of it. Paul told people everywhere he went that Jesus was God's Son and was alive. Silas travelled with him, and a writer named Luke recorded the trip in Acts.

In the street they met a slave girl — property, owned the way a person owns a tool. She told fortunes, and her owners sold it. For days she trailed Paul, shouting that these men served the Most High God and were announcing the way of salvation (Acts 16:17). Every word was true, and still not help — a street act turning a message into noise. Paul turned round and ordered the spirit driving her to come out. It did.

But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers.

Acts 16:19

Notice what the owners were upset about. Not God. Not religion. Money. The girl had been their income. The officials had both men stripped, beaten in public with rods, and locked in the inner cell with their feet in stocks — a wooden frame that clamps the ankles apart, so a man cannot lie down.

1. The song came before the earthquake

Nothing had improved yet.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

Acts 16:25

A hymn is a song sung to God. Their backs were open and their feet pinned. Two beaten men sang in the dark, and the other prisoners — men with no reason to care — lay there and listened. They sang while it was still bad.

An old line in Job names it. Job lost everything and argued with God for forty chapters. One speech says people in trouble cry out but forget a question:

Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night?

Job 35:10

A song in the night is not about the night being over. It is what God hands someone while it is still dark.

But you cannot force this on anybody. When Israel was marched off to the empire of Babylon, their captors asked them to perform their worship songs as entertainment:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept... How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?

Psalm 137:1-4

They refused, and hung their instruments in the trees. God does not scold them for it. The rule is not that a faithful person always sings. It is that sometimes a song arrives before the rescue — and other people are listening.

2. The doors opened and nobody left

Then the ground moved.

And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's bonds were unfastened.

Acts 16:26

Every door. Every chain. Not only Paul's and Silas's. This is where the story usually gets preached as a rescue, and it is about to stop being one.

A Roman jailer who lost his prisoners was put to death in their place. He woke, saw the doors open, assumed the cells were empty, and drew his sword.

But Paul cried with a loud voice, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here."

Acts 16:28

Read that slowly. We are all here. Not just the two of them. Every prisoner had an open door and loose chains, and not one used them. Paul's freedom was real. He spent it on the man holding the keys.

Jesus did the same on the worst night of his life. Soldiers came to arrest him and a friend drew a sword:

Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?

Matthew 26:53

A legion was about five thousand soldiers. He could end this in a second and does not — leaving would cost the people he came to get. Paul is doing a small copy of it.

Paul later wrote the principle out:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

Galatians 5:13

"The flesh" there means whatever you selfishly want. So freedom is not mainly permission to go. It is the power to stay for someone else's sake.

And yet the Bible will not let this harden into a law. Earlier in Acts, God sends an angel to get Peter, one of Jesus' closest friends, out of prison:

And the chains fell off his hands.

Acts 12:7

Peter walks straight into the street, and nobody calls him a coward. Staying is not automatically holy; leaving is not automatically selfish. Same God, same problem, opposite answers. What Paul settled at midnight was not a rule but a question: who else is stuck in here?

3. The man with the keys asked how to be saved

The jailer called for lights, ran in, and fell down shaking.

"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" And they said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household."

Acts 16:30-31

He means his own skin; he has just come one sword stroke from dying. Paul answers the bigger question hiding inside the small one. Saved means rescued — here, from being finally cut off from God, by trusting what Jesus has done instead of cleaning yourself up first. Then the detail that gives the night away:

And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family.

Acts 16:33

He washed cuts he had walked past hours earlier, after clamping two bleeding men into stocks and going to bed. Then he was baptized — dipped in water, the public sign that a person belongs to Jesus. Jailer and prisoners had swapped places without anyone leaving the building.

That is the pattern the Christian message runs on:

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son...

Romans 5:10

Reconciled means the fight is called off and the relationship repaired. God moved first, toward people against him. Paul only did to the jailer what had been done to Paul.

One honest difficulty. The slave girl is never mentioned again. She is free of the spirit; Luke never says she is free of her owners. And Paul's letters do not tell Christians to walk off the job:

Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.

1 Corinthians 7:21

A bondservant is a slave. That verse sits uncomfortably, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Instead the first Christians seated owners and slaves, jailers and prisoners, at one table as family — which is what finally made slavery indefensible.

4. In the morning, Paul refused to go quietly

At daybreak the officials sent word: let those men go. Paul said no.

They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.

Acts 16:37

Roman citizenship made it illegal to beat a man before trying him. Paul held that protection all along and never used it to save himself. He uses it now, when it can do nothing for his injuries — because a small new church is staying behind here, and he wants it on record that its founders were innocent. Making officials keep their own rules is not revenge.

Still, Jesus said something that pulls against this:

Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Matthew 5:39

Paul took the beating in silence at night and filed a complaint in the morning. The difference is who each protects. Swallowing an insult aimed at you is one thing. Letting an injustice stand that will land on people after you is another.

Years later Paul wrote back to this city from a different prison:

My imprisonment is for Christ... and most of the brothers... are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

Philippians 1:13-14

There is a letter to Philippi in the Bible because two men stayed in a cell they could have walked out of.

What to do with this

The centre of that night is a man who had the power to leave and used it to keep someone else alive. He was copying someone:

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant.

Philippians 2:6-7

"In the form of God" means he was God and did not clutch at it. He put that power down and took a servant's place. Jesus had every door open and stayed, and it cost him his life. Paul, bleeding in the dark, had learned it from him.

So this week, when something goes your way, look behind you before you enjoy it. If you get let off and somebody else takes the blame, say so out loud before the day ends. If a rule bends for you and not for the person next in line, ask why, where the person in charge can hear you.

The open door is not the good news in this chapter. What Paul did with the open door is.