Acts 12:1-25 | Sometimes It Looks Like God Is Failing

Scripture: Acts 12:1-4

Sometimes it seems like God is failing. 

How could this happen? The power of Christ and the presence of his kingdom were exploding. Think about what we’ve seen. 

• Jesus says he’d pour out his Spirit. And then he does! In the most dramatic of ways. Wind and fire and the power of God are poured on the disciples. The fire of God literally comes to rest on them. They speak in tongues. Peter goes from denying Christ to proclaiming Christ. Thousands respond (Acts 2). 
• By the power of Jesus, a paralyzed man is healed (Acts 3). 
• By the power of Jesus, the disciples boldly proclaim him and confront the authorities. They can’t be intimidated! They won’t back down. The very ground shakes (Acts 4). 
• Sin is confronted, exposed, and judged. The wrath of God, which often feels so theoretical, is witnessed in real-time (Acts 5). 
• By the end of Acts 5, so many miracles are happening that people even bring their sick loved ones into the street in the hopes that Peter’s shadow will pass over them and heal them! 
• Yes, there was suffering too. But even this seems redemptive. Stephen dies seeing God with forgiveness in his heart, almost as though he’s surrendering his own life rather than having it taken from him (Acts 6-8). 
• The church is persecuted, but it leads to the kingdom expanding and Samaritans responding. Even the persecutor, Saul, is laid flat by Christ and comes to proclaim him (Acts 8-9). 
• Gentiles are having visions (Acts 10). Gentile cities are responding (Acts 11). 
• Not to mention that the very dead are being raised (Acts 10). And in the face of suffering, those first Christians deploy to meet it head-on (Acts 11). 

It’s almost as if nothing could stop the kingdom of God. All that God promised seems to be coming true. 

And then James is killed. And Peter is imprisoned. What’s happening? It’s not supposed to be this way. 

How do you respond… 

• When bad things happen? 
• When prayers seem unanswered? 
• When all your efforts to do what’s right and honor Christ seem futile? 
• When evil seems to flourish? 
• When God’s promises don’t seem to be coming true? 

It can seem like God is failing. And questions deep inside may come whirling. 

• Is God able? 
• Is God strong enough? 
• Does God even care? 
• Am I doing something wrong? 
• Am I missing something? 
• Is God even real? 
• Is everything I dared to believe all made up? 

You’re not the first to face them. The disciples in Acts faced them too. In those moments you’ll have a choice. Will you hold onto God, or walk away? 

This plan is about those times when it seems like God is failing. It’s about what to do and how to respond in the face of it. This plan is about Acts 12, and the window it gives into those times when it seems like evil is winning, and into a different way of thinking that the early disciples shared. 

Today, just start by reading the beginning of the story in Acts 12 and put yourself in their shoes. Chances are, you’ve faced sets of circumstances that are similar.

Scriptures: Psalms 32, Psalms 46, Nehemiah 1:4-6

It’s fashionable to be angry with God. Not just among non-Christians, but with people who profess to be Christians too. I’ve even encouraged it, especially when people come to me who are struggling to admit it. I’ll tell them God is big enough for their anger. He can handle it. 

To be angry with God is actually very biblical. “Why don’t you do something!?”, “Where are you!?”, “Wake up!”, and “Listen!” fill the Psalms—and these were the worship songs of Israel! Reflecting the first word of the book, the Hebrew title for Lamentations is “eykah”— “how could it be?” Add to that the complaints of the prophets and you can almost sense the underlying anger filling these cries for help from places of despair. 

As Reed Lessing points out: “These prayers reject a fake and pretentious faith. They affirm that distress and setbacks are real.” Or as Federico Villaneuva will say: “We are most open with the people we are closest with. The more intimate the relationship, the greater the vulnerability and openness. This explains why people in the Bible know how to lament.” Or maybe, why people get angry with God. 

Anger with God is human. It is a natural response to the suffering in this world which is so horrible and the unchecked evil in this world which is so wrong. I suspect anger towards God wouldn’t be as prevalent if God’s promises in the Bible weren’t so absolute and big. We read about God’s overwhelming love. The Bible proclaims his overwhelming grace. We’re told about his overwhelming power, and how he knows all things. We read stories of miracles of God’s goodness invading the suffering in this world and overcoming it in the face of overwhelming odds. And the Bible declares that above all people, God hates what sin is doing and the grip of darkness it has us in. 

People’s anger can unintentionally be fed by dozens of well-meaning sermons and devotionals built on the back of a certain collection of promise texts, that due to time or space constraints, can’t give the whole picture. We hinge our faith on these passages, but by themselves, it can lead to a distorted picture of what God actually promises, and therefore what we think God is supposed to do, not to mention God’s whole schema for rescuing the world. 

Here are some other things God promises: 

• The world is a broken mess from God’s original intention and will be filled with all kinds of horror and hardship (Matt 24:4-8; Rom 8:18-25) 
• You will be persecuted (Matt 24:9) 
• You will be hated (Luke 21:16-17) 
• You will suffer (Rev 2:10) 
• You will die (Gen 3:17-19; Romans 6:23) 

And yet, it’s easy to be angry with God. “Pay attention to the good passages, Lord (and not the bad)!” When something bad happens, how often are we inclined to think it’s God’s fault—that God should have done something? 

But why should God do something? Does God owe us? Is he indebted to us? It’s almost as if we think God exists for the purpose of making our lives better and that he’s our servant here to solve whatever we face. We take the grace of God for granted and start to think of it as God’s obligation. If you step back from it, how odd that we should blame God. Perhaps we have a distorted idea of what God promises to do and what he’s supposed to provide. 

Romans 3 says, “Let God be true, and every person a liar.” Though I think we’re inclined to believe, “God, I’m in the right and you’re the liar.” 

I’ve found in times when we’re angry with God—whether justifiably or unjustifiably—that God makes a better ally than adversary. To trust him rather than doubt him. To turn to him rather than accuse him. To love him rather than hate him. 

In those moments of anger, it’s easy to blame God. But maybe it’s better to lean on him. Even if we don’t understand why this is happening.

Scriptures: Acts 12:5-17, Matthew 10:24-25, Colossians 1:24, Philippians 3:10-12, Romans 8:17-18

NT Wright brings up a fascinating perspective on Acts 12 that’s pertinent to those times when it seems like God is failing. He writes that he doesn’t think James’s mom would like Acts 12 very much. On the night before Peter is to be killed, the church is fervently praying and an angel miraculously springs him from jail. But not her son, James. James is already dead. You can imagine her asking: “How come Peter got out and my boy didn’t?” 

Here’s when Wright writes a curve ball: “I suspect the early Christians wouldn’t have asked that question; they took random persecution for granted” (The Challenge of Acts, p.55.) 

It’s ironic. These early Christians lived with far more day-to-day suffering. No vote. No voice. No bill of rights. No predictable police force that’s held accountable. No antibiotics, painkillers, or what we would call basic medical care. Simple infections could kill you. High infant mortality. High risk for mothers in childbearing. When you just expect that some of your children will die. Not to mention risk of death for yourself simply for following Jesus. And yet they didn’t seem to think that God was failing. 

And yet we, who have been so blessed when compared to the rest of human history, seem far more inclined to accuse God of failing when we face suffering. (To be sure, some of us face broken bodies. Others of us face disease. Some are wracked with pain. Others of us face the horror of persecution, war, and political corruption. And death still touches all of us. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare suffering. It’s simply to point out that by and far, people today generally have it better than they did.) 

Acts 12 anchors the whole event during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Strange, that this was the same time Jesus suffered and died—probably an intentional move by Herod Agrippa. His grandpa once tried to kill Jesus too. He failed, but his uncle, Herod Antipas, had a hand in crucifying Jesus. Like grandpa, like grandson. Like uncle, too. 

There’s something here. Jesus suffered and died. We should also expect to. Jesus promises it. Sometimes that suffering seems futile and meaningless, but God will always use it and redeem it. Acts even tells us the apostles found it an honor to be worthy to suffer for Christ’s name (Acts 5:41). 

Suffering is not good. But even out of the worst suffering, God will bring good. A woman in my church shared a quote with me: “God allows what HE hates in order to accomplish what HE loves.” The picture of Jesus on the cross comes to mind. 

The worst suffering imaginable became God’s most redeeming event. God does not promise to spare us from all suffering. But he knows what it’s like. We can turn to him. And when we suffer, he suffers with us. When God seems to be failing, he is often working in the most profound ways.

Scriptures: Acts 12:18-24, 1 Corinthians 1:18, Colossians 2:15, Matthew 16:13-18, Ephesians 6:10-12, Romans 8:31-39

The message Jesus proclaims in the Gospels is that he’s bringing the kingdom of God. That it’s near. That there’s no time to lose. That with it comes the promises and blessings of God. 

Acts continues the story of that message and work. Jesus, now on the throne, establishing his kingdom. And he won’t rest until Sin and all its effects are fully defeated and his kingdom reaches the ends of the earth. 

It can lead you to wonder why it hasn’t quite stuck yet. Why is there still so much that seems to stand against and still defeat the kingdom of God? Here’s how the whole thing works. 

Some believe the kingdom will continue to grow stronger and stronger. That the world is getting better as the presence of God’s kingdom continues to grow. 

Others believe this world is in the grips of the kingdom of Darkness. That things will get much worse as evil continues to proliferate until Christ comes again. 

Both are true. We live in tension between the two. 

The kingdom of God has come, but like an invasion. Jesus’s first coming—with all of its power and miracles, has broken into the kingdom of darkness. Acts continues the invasion story, and Christ’s kingdom is expanding. Paul will say in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus won’t stop until all the dominion of darkness is defeated and until Death and everything else that is an enemy to God’s goodness is swallowed up in victory. This will happen when Christ comes again. But that doesn’t mean we should only expect to see the kingdom of God. The kingdom of Darkness is fighting back. Hard. Which means what we should expect to experience in this life is war between the two. Worse, we should expect to be a part of it. And war comes with suffering. 

A classic analogy is to compare the kingdom of God to D-Day and VE-Day in WWII. When the Allied forces landed at Normandy on D-Day, it was a sure and certain sign that victory would be won. It was only a matter of time. But there was still a lot of horror that would be faced and fighting to be done. Jesus’s first coming is like D-Day. 

Christ’s second coming in like VE-Day (that’s Victory in Europe Day), the day when the Nazi regime finally surrendered, and the War (at least in this half of the world) was won. 

But between these two days, there was still a lot of fighting. Battles on both sides were won and lost. All the hopes of victory weren’t realized yet. Just think of the Battle of the Bulge, when Germany surged back. Or Hitler’s “final solution,” when so many lives were so horribly lost. 

Here’s why this matters. If you think that God is failing, you’re probably looking at things the wrong way. You’re thinking that Jesus’s kingdom is fully here and now and that we’re already at VE-Day. Jesus has a different perspective. Join me! Suffer. Die. Fight. There’s kingdom work to be done, and it’s not easy. The stakes are very real. You’re not up against human enemies. You’re up against the very forces of Sin and Hell. They will not give up the fight. 

All this is to say we shouldn’t be surprised when it looks like God’s promises are failing. That happens when we focus on the battle before us instead of the war. In times like this, we may never figure out why such-and-such is happening or why God’s kingdom is not advancing. But if we can pull back and see God’s whole master plan, things at least start to come into better perspective. 

Sometimes God pours out on us kingdom deliverance. Sometimes he asks us to participate in it. Jesus calls his disciples witnesses. From its Greek root, martyres, we derive our English word, “martyr.” Suffering and persecution are not God failing. They’re a sign we’re still in the fight. 

D-Days will come. Peter was freed. His captors were killed. And the blasphemous Herod was eaten by worms. But even when it doesn’t, VE-Day is still on the horizon. Until then, strive. Hope. Wait.

Scriptures: 1 Thessalonians 5:17, John 14:13-14, James 4:7-10, Revelation 3:7-11

Acts 12 tells us that when Peter was imprisoned, the whole church earnestly prayed for him. Certainly, these prayers were that God would strengthen Peter no matter his fate, but given how an angel frees him, it’s safe to assume they were also that God would deliver him. 

Don’t just resign yourself to the times when it seems like God is failing. Pray. 

In commenting on how the church prayed for Peter’s deliverance in light of James being killed, NT Wright once again shares some thoughts that are worth repeating in full, this time on prayer: 

“Now of course: prayer remains a mystery. We don’t understand why sometimes new things happen through prayer while often they seem not to. We don’t understand why the church prayed for James and Herod still killed him, and the church prayed for Peter and he got out of jail free. But Jesus himself and the early Christians urge us to persevere in prayer, and you only tell someone to persevere if you know it will sometimes be hard. The battle is on. We won’t see the whole picture; we have to hold our bit of the line. 

Sometimes, indeed, prayer seems dark and almost without reward… and one might be tempted to give up were it not for the occasional twitch of the curtain…. That’s a bit bleak, but that is often how it seems. Many great women and men of prayer have reported such times, and have often concluded that God was withdrawing in order to woo them closer in…. No doubt Peter, and indeed Cornelius, had said their prayers over and over… and then suddenly, the breakthrough. God’s fresh revelations appear out of the blue, but regularly that new light bursts in upon people who have long been praying in the dark…. You never know what new purposes and possibilities are waiting in the wings. But if you step out of the great river of prayer you may just never see them” (The Challenge of Acts, p. 62). 

Prayer might be a mystery, but God encourages us to persevere. It will be hard. The battle is on. We won’t see the whole picture. But prayer is about moving forward in faith until all things are accomplished by Christ. Trust God, not success. Trust God, not what you see.