"Am I Saved?"

Acts 8:26-40

Dec. 31, 2000

Text Comment v.27

v.27 The ancient kingdom of Ethiopia corresponded not to what is Ethiopia today, but to Nubia, the southern part of Egypt and the northern part of the Sudan. The king of this kingdom was regarded as too sacred too deal with the secular functions of government and these were managed on his behalf by the queen-mother, who bore the title "Candace." The eunuch was probably a "god-fearer", that is, a person who was attracted to the monotheism and the ethical standards of Judaism, perhaps even participated in its prayers and in some of its rituals, but who had not gone so far as to become a Jew by circumcision. There is some question as to whether a eunuch could have become a full proselyte, because Deut. 23:1 excluded eunuchs from religious privileges, but Isa. 53:3-4 prophesied a removal of that ban. Perhaps this man had gone to Jerusalem for one of the three great pilgrimage feasts of the year. In any case, he was now making his way homeward - probably in some form of covered carriage; not a chariot as we typically think of such as would be used in a race or a battle - and was spending his time reading Isaiah in the Greek translation.

v.29 It was the "angel of the Lord" who had spoken to Philip in v. 26. Here it is the "Spirit of the Lord" who instructs him. It is not entirely clear what we are to think, but clearly the Holy Spirit lies behind the instruction given to Philip whether directly or through an angelic intermediary.

v.30 Ancient manuscripts were usually read aloud. The way they were printed required the words to be sounded out - remember, there was no break between words such as in modern printing. Augustine comments in his Confessions on the practice of Ambrose to read silently as if that were noteworthy.

v.33 This, of course, is a section of the great servant song of Isa. 53 which had recently found its fulfillment in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ.

v.34 Unbelieving scholarship, of course, has been asking the very same question about Isa. 53 ever since. But Philip has no difficulty answering the question. Once one sees Jesus Christ and learns what he did, the answer is obvious.

v.35 Of course, at this time none of the NT had been written. So Philip used other parts of what we call the OT and then gave an account of the Lord's life and work, his death and resurrection, his ascension and promise to come again. It must have included an account of baptism, such as the Lord Jesus had instituted the rite for his church before his ascension and such as had been practiced by the early Christians from the day of Pentecost. Apparently Philip told him that the appropriate response to such good news was faith, repentance, and baptism.

v.36 There is a Wadi north of Gaza that is traditionally identified as the spot.

v.38 As an aside, this verse is sometimes appealed to as evidence that baptism was performed by immersion in the apostolic practice. They went "into" the water and "came up out of the water." But that unduly presses the prepositions. It means simply that they went down to the stream and came up away from it after the baptism. It is highly unlikely that there was enough water to perform a baptism by immersion in any case, and, if one presses the point, whatever is said of the one is said of the other, which would mean that Philip immersed himself as well as the Ethiopian eunuch. Probably, they both stood in the shallow, running water and Philip poured or sprinkled water on the man's head. That is how baptism was performed according to the earliest pictures of it that have come down to us.

v.39 The second century church father, Irenaeus [Adv. Haer. III, 12, 8], tells us that this man became a preacher of the gospel, a missionary in Ethiopia, which is natural enough to imagine, though Irenaeus may have had no more specific information on that point than that he gathered from this text. In the unfolding drama of the Book of Acts, this is another great step forward in the gospel's progress into the Gentile world.

v.40 Azotus is 20 miles north of Gaza. Twenty years later, in Acts 21:8, we find Philip still in Caesarea with four prophesying daughters when Paul passes through at the end of his 3rd missionary journey.

On this New Year's eve, I want to speak to you about salvation, which is without question the most important thing in all the world. We would not want anyone in this church this morning or anyone who ever occupied a seat in this house of worship to think that we did not consider salvation, the eternal salvation of men and women, of boys and girls, to be the first thing, the chief thing in our mind.

You have heard me speak frequently and emphatically of the way in which, by the grace and goodness and faithfulness of God, children are regularly brought into saving fellowship with God at a very early age and by the instrumentality of the faithful nurture of Christian parents. But whether one comes to possess salvation so early and receives it so quietly, the issue remains precisely the same: is the person saved? However young or old, Christian family or not: is the person saved? It will be cold comfort to have been born and raised in a Christian home if one is not saved at the last!

We do not, after every sermon, invite folk to come to the front of the church if they wish to be saved. That is the habit in many churches - though in less than used to be the case - but it is not our custom. We have our reasons for not adopting this practice. But let no one think that for that reason we care less about whether a man or woman, boy or girl, is saved!

We want as forcefully as we possibly can to put to everyone of you this question: are you saved? Are your sins forgiven? Have you obtained eternal life? Do you have an inheritance in heaven when you die? It will not matter whether you are a Presbyterian, or Baptist, Lutheran or Catholic, nor something else, whether you have been long a member of a Christian church, whether you hail from a Christian family, whether you are known by others as a Christian. What matters is whether you are yourself saved. It does not finally matter whether you are successful in this life, well-to-do and comfortable, whether you enjoy to some eminent degree the pleasures of life in this world. Our Savior himself said this most solemnly. "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?"

And so, on this New Year's eve, when we are drawn by the passage of time to consider our lives and the rapid passing of our years, let me draw your attention to this wonderful piece of early Christian history, an account of a man being saved, a man finding salvation. It is a mirror in which we can look to see if we can find ourselves and, if we can find ourselves, where we find ourselves on this Ethiopian official's journey homeward.

I. The first thing that strikes us in this narrative is how profoundly personal a matter salvation is.

It is surely remarkable that the angel of the Lord gave the instructions to Philip that he did. For if we had read the previous paragraphs of chapter 8 we would have been reminded with what amazing success Philip had preached in the gospel in Samaria. Large numbers of people were being saved. The entire region was being stirred by what Philip was preaching about Jesus Christ and by the power of God that was manifest in Philip's power to perform miracles. The Spirit of God was everywhere opening hearts to his message. By any measurement of what was likely to be the most fruitful use of his time and labors, by any principle of church growth, Philip, we would have supposed, should have remained in Samaria and continued to reap that great harvest of souls. And we would have been only the more sure that he should have done so if we had known that Philip was leaving Samaria not for some other population center but for the empty and barren desert between Jerusalem and Gaza.

Now, it is possible, though the text does not say so, that one of the reasons why the Lord plucked Philip from Samaria and put him down next to that desert road, was that through this Ethiopian, now a Christian, the gospel would make its way by the quickest route to Nubia and, so, by reaching the eunuch Philip was in fact reaching many. That could be so, no one can say.

What we do know for sure is that all of that amazing activity in Samaria and all of those Samaritans coming to faith in Christ was of no use to this Ethiopian court official. If this man were to be saved, the good news had to be brought to him and he had to receive it with faith.

And it is the same today. There may be many genuine Christians around you. You may have Christian parents or Christian brothers and sisters; you may attend a genuinely Christian church full of saved people, but none of this will do you any good if you do not believe and if you are not saved yourself. In this most important of all matters you are alone before God. Your friends, your spouse, your children, your parents, your minister cannot take your place or believe on your behalf. You must stand before God yourself and you will, either saved or unsaved.

And here, then, is the first question posed by the history we have read: have I been saved as this Ethiopian eunuch was saved? He was not saved, and then he believed and was saved. Has my life been so met and mastered by the Spirit and the grace of God?

Or, put it this way. Is the Lord my shepherd, my rock, my Savior, my God? Is Jesus Christ my way, my truth, and my light? It is no use asking if the Lord Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light. He is, of course, and is to untold multitudes of people from every tongue, tribe, and nation on earth. But that is no comfort, no help, no salvation to you unless he is your way, truth, and light. Luther said, rightly, that many are lost because they cannot use, they never use the possessive pronouns. The first person singular is the pronoun of salvation.

"Lord I believe, help my unbelief."

"I have been crucified with Christ, yet nevertheless I live,

and the life I live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God

who loved me and gave himself for me."

Is that your language or not? Is it that personal conviction that fills your heart? It is a simple enough question. Salvation is not a small thing, it is the greatest thing of all - to know the living God, to have one's life transformed by the presence and power of God, to have one's sins forgiven, to have the sure hope of everlasting life. This is an intensely personal thing. Have you, yourself, been saved? Not is there such a thing as salvation, but do I have it? That is the question.

II. Then, in the second place, we note here the absolutely and unashamedly Christian character of this salvation.

There is an increasing need in our pluralist and relativist age to make this point repeatedly and emphatically. Salvation is found in Christ or it is not found at all. There is salvation in Christ but in no one else, no where else, by no other means. So when you are asked: are you saved? You are being asked whether you have put the issue of your eternal destiny into the hands of Jesus Christ. You are being asked if you are a Christian in fact and in truth - that you trust Jesus Christ alone to save you, that you acknowledge him as your Savior and your Master. Only a genuine, sincere, practicing Christian can correctly answer "Yes" to the question: "Are you saved?" On the day of Pentecost Peter urged a crowd of very religious people, moral people they would have said, "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation by believing in Jesus." Their religion couldn't save them. Only Jesus could.

That point is powerfully made here as it is made throughout the Book of Acts. The Ethiopian official was an earnest man, a religious man. Though a Gentile he had aligned himself with Judaism and not nominally only. He had taken the very considerable trouble to travel a great distance from his homeland to Jerusalem in order to worship there, probably at one of the great feasts. What is more, he did not leave his religion to the priests and the temple and the synagogue service. Here he was on a journey homeward poring over a scroll of the prophet Isaiah, trying to search out the meaning of that ancient text. He wanted to know the truth.

But, with all of this, he was not saved. He had not yet embraced the truth as it is in Jesus Christ. He had not received the forgiveness of his sins. He was not at peace with God. A great many today who do not have anything like the religious sincerity or zeal or interest of this man will not accept that they are not saved. But they should take heed. Here, a far better man than they, a far more sincere seeker after truth than they, was unsaved and would have remained so had God not brought the truth to him through Philip on that desert road.

Hard as that may be for many to accept in our relativist day, it is, anyone must admit, inevitably the case if what the Bible teaches is true. The very passage that the Ethiopian was reading, Isaiah 53, tells us that in dying upon the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was being punished in our place for our sins, satisfying the justice of God for our guilt. It should not be difficult for anyone to accept that if Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Maker of heaven and earth, and put on human nature precisely so that he might live and die in our place and satisfy on our behalf the requirements of God's holy justice, I say, if these things are true, then it would be nothing short of outrageous to believe that salvation could come in some other way than through Jesus Christ. And that is, in fact, what the Bible everywhere teaches, what Jesus himself plainly taught, and what his resurrection from the dead demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt. As we read earlier in Acts, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."

That is why throughout the NT we see people sharing this good news of eternal life in Jesus Christ with others, with as many others as they can. It was what people must know, what they must believe to be saved.

Here is the second question to pose to yourself from this history. Do you think and feel about Jesus the way Philip did and the way the Ethiopian official came to feel about him? Is his saving love and saving suffering and death the "good news" writ large over your life? Is Christ the mainspring of your life because of what he has done for you and given you when no one else could. Is the simple logic of Isaiah 53 fixed in the bedrock of your existence: either Christ bore God's wrath for me or I must bear it myself. Because Christ is the only Savior and commitment to him the only way of salvation, it is only to be expected that one of the simplest and surest ways for us to judge ourselves, to consider whether or not we are saved, is by taking stock of the place Jesus Christ occupies in our minds and hearts - how great is he to us. Insofar as our eternal life lies in his hands, he should be incomparably great!

III. Then, finally, in the third place, we note how salvation is the work of God.

No doubt, as we read this history, you noticed how perfectly orchestrated it all was. Philip was snatched out of Samaria and told to head toward a particularly barren stretch of desert road and, when he arrives there, who should come along but this Ethiopian man on his way home from Jerusalem. And what should this man be reading but Holy Scripture, and what text but that which probably more than any other makes clear precisely how Jesus became the Savior of the world. Obviously the Lord brought Philip to this man at precisely the most auspicious moment. I think of Augustine's eye falling on Romans 13:14 at the moment of his great spiritual crisis or William Cowper's on Romans 3:25-26. What if, instead their eyes had fallen on the genealogies in Numbers or Chronicles?

But we are only beginning. The divine hand shows itself in more ways than just those. Think, further, of the fact that at just the right time they come across water. Water is scarce in the desert. But in this way, at just the time the eunuch is ready to have his faith in Christ signified and sealed water is available for the purpose and the eunuch may be sent homeward with the full provision made for him as he leaves all other gospel influences behind. But there is still more.

Philip, who was certainly by no means a man of the substance or the authority or the stature of this court official riding, as his position warranted, in a covered carriage, nevertheless came right up to the carriage and, hearing him read aloud, asked him if he understood what he was reading.

Now great men do not ordinarily take kindly to lesser men asking them embarrassing questions. Try it sometime if you doubt me. Philip was as much as saying to this court official that it was clear that he needed Philip's help. We could imagine any number of reactions on the Ethiopian's part, from stinging rebuke to polite refusal. But this man, throwing his reputation to the desert wind, not only admits his confusion but invites this brash stranger up into his chariot and asks him to explain the passage he had been reading.

We must not mistake Luke's point or the Holy Spirit's point here. This man, this Ethiopian, didn't find Christ. Christ found him! The Lord sought him out and found him. He brought him the news without which he could not be saved; but many receive the news who have no ears to hear. And so he prepared this man's heart to believe what he heard about his own sin and guilt and about Christ taking it away by his death on the cross and about the absolute necessity of his trusting Christ and giving his life to Christ if he would be saved.

What we have here is just a flesh and blood way of saying what Luke will later say about Lydia on the banks of a river near Philippi: "the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message." It is simply an historical demonstration of the truth our Savior laid down as a bedrock principle of salvation: "No one can come to me unless the Father who is in heaven draws him." And it is only the fulfillment of the promise which he made during his ministry: "My sheep hear my voice and follow me. I have other sheep which are not of this sheep pen; I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice."

And there is here a great lesson all must understand about salvation. It depends not only on God's overruling the circumstances of our lives so that we hear the good news at a propitious time in our lives, but as well upon his mighty work changing us deep within, opening our hearts, bending our wills so that we might respond with true faith to the gospel when we hear it.

You must never allow yourself to think of salvation as an easy thing, a natural thing, a predictable thing. You must never slip into thinking that somehow salvation lies within your own power or control, or that you can obtain it at your whim. Oh no! That is a fatal error. It is the natural heresy of the unsaved human heart. It is the view of salvation you find in the other religions of the world and, indeed, as the basic conviction of all merely nominal Christians. They view salvation as something always near at hand, as something more difficult to lose than to gain. But the entire Scripture rises in protest against that way of thinking. Jesus himself condemned it repeatedly. He warned in the most solemn tones against the ease with which people misunderstand salvation at precisely this point.

For salvation we are utterly dependent upon God working for us and in us. He must work before ever we can. He must change our hearts or we will never respond positively to the gospel as did this Ethiopian eunuch. Multitudes of people heard Philip preach who never believed and were never saved, but this man had been prepared by the Holy Spirit to respond and did with all his heart.

Learn the lesson here. The only safe place for an unsaved man or woman is to be on his or her knees pleading with God for salvation. Never put off seeking as if you could leave this work to some other day. Your salvation lies in God's hands, not in yours, and if God is speaking to your heart then now is the time to answer. "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near." That is the way Isaiah put this lesson. How do you know that God will never come near you again? How do you know that a genuine concern for your salvation will ever again rise in your heart at a propitious moment?

Most people grow less interested in salvation and less willing to consider the real condition of their souls as the years pass. Most people who at one time or another were urged to call upon the Lord and who did not do so, in their later years hardly seem to think that they have a soul or that saving it is worth even a few moments of their time.

Where do you see yourself in this mirror? Are you the Ethiopian as he is leaving Jerusalem, troubled about his soul and uncertain? Or are you the same man inviting Philip up into his chariot, ready to be taught by anyone if only you might be sure that you are saved? Or are you that same man now going homeward rejoicing because he had found Christ and everlasting life?

There are, no doubt, many obstacles in your way if you are unsaved this morning. You live in a day so in love with itself, so hardened and accustomed to sin, so completely out of practice at reckoning with Almighty God or in considering his holy majesty and justice, that the entire idea that the Son of God had to be punished for your sins or you yourself would have to be doomed for them may well seem a very strange idea from an alien world. And, growing up in a world that lives completely for the present and the pleasures of this world, you may think it odd to consider basing your entire life on the expectation of what will be true after you are dead.

But I don't worry about those obstacles. For all of them will be forgotten in a moment if you hear the Lord speaking in your soul and if you find him opening your heart to embrace Christ and salvation through him.

So answer the Lord's question to you this morning. Do you understand what you have read here in Acts 8? Do you know what it means for you? Can you find yourself in this history? And, if so, where?

If you are not in this picture at all because you have not even been as interested in the matter of your own salvation as was this Ethiopian before he met Philip, then you must pray with all your heart that God would do for you what he did for this man: make him ready to believe and be saved.

And if, on the other hand, you are like this Ethiopian before he believed and was saved, then you must do what he did, exactly what he did. You must beg the Lord to help you understand the good news of Jesus Christ and, understanding, believe in him.

And if you do that, honestly, sincerely do that, then the rest of us here, who have before this believed in Christ and found our salvation in him, will have still another reason to go home rejoicing.