Night reading · Acts 12:6
Sleeping between two soldiers
Peter in prison · Acts 12
Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains.
Acts 12:6 · King James Version
It is the last night.
James is already dead — killed with the sword, and it went down well with the crowd, so Herod has arrested Peter too. In the morning he will be brought out and executed in front of the city. Everyone knows it. Peter knows it.
They are taking no chances with this one. Four squads of soldiers. Two chains. A guard on either side of him, and more at the door, and an iron gate beyond that.
And Peter is asleep.
Not dozing. Asleep — so deeply that when the angel comes into the cell and the whole room fills with light, the angel has to strike him on the side to wake him up.
A man sleeps like that for one of two reasons. Either he does not understand what is happening in the morning, or he has already handed the morning over.
Peter understood. He had watched them do it to James.
He had also heard, on a beach, from the mouth of the risen Christ, roughly how his own life would end — and it was not tonight. So he lay down between two soldiers in the dark with iron on both wrists, and he slept the way a man sleeps in his own bed.
Meanwhile, across the city, the church is awake. Prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him. All night. In a house. In the dark. For a man who was, at that moment, sleeping better than any of them.
That is a picture worth keeping. Sometimes you are Peter, and you can sleep. Sometimes you are the church in the house, and you cannot, and you pray instead. Both are faith. Neither is failure.
Then the chains fall off. That is the sentence: his chains fell off from his hands. No explanation. He is told to get dressed, put his sandals on, wrap his coat around him, follow.
And he goes out past the first guard, and the second, and to the great iron gate that leads into the city —
which opened to them of his own accord.
Of its own accord. Nobody pushed it. Nobody picked it. The gate that had no reason to open, opened.
Peter thinks he is dreaming the whole way. He does not realise it is real until he is standing alone in a street with the cold on his face and the gate shut behind him.
So here is tonight.
The thing you are chained to is not stronger than the hand that takes chains off. The gate you cannot get through is not locked from the inside of heaven. And the morning you are dreading may not go the way you have rehearsed it forty times tonight.
You are allowed to sleep between the soldiers.
Somewhere, someone is praying for you. And even if nobody is — He is not asleep.
Put your head down.
And the iron gate opened to them of his own accord.