We Are All Here

It is past midnight in a Roman jail in Philippi, and the men locked in the stocks are the ones singing. Paul and Silas, beaten with rods and shoved into the inner cell, are “praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25). The one man not singing is the man who holds the keys.

Then the ground heaves — “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). The jailer wakes, sees the open doors, and draws his sword: under Roman law a keeper paid for an escape with his own life. He is the free man here, and the only one in that prison about to die.

“But Paul cried with a loud voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here’” (Acts 16:28). No one had run. The men whose chains had just dropped off stayed in the dark for the man who had locked them in. Then, trembling, he asks a question that has nothing to do with earthquakes: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30).

It is the oldest question we carry, and we nearly always ask it his way — what must I do. The answer lifts the doing out of his hands: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31). Not mend ourselves and then be received; be received, and the mending will come.

Being received cost someone else everything. There would be a second earthquake and a second sealed door: “there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone” (Matthew 28:2). That door opened from the inside of death, by One who walked into the last prison so its bars would never hold us. He did not slip the sentence; he served it, and we walked out.

By dawn the keeper is washing his prisoners’ wounds and setting a table in his own house, “rejoicing along with his entire household that he had believed in God” (Acts 16:33–34). The doors had been open the whole time. He only needed to be told whose house he was free to walk into.