When God asks the unexpected

Has God Ever told you to do something you didn’t understand that made you uncomfortable? “God, Why on earth would you tell me to do that?” Maybe God asks you to talk to somebody. Maybe God asks you to give something to somebody and you don’t know why. 

Beth Moore tells a story about how once she was waiting at the gate for a flight when a dishevelled-looking man in a wheelchair was wheeled up beside her. She prayed, “Please God, don’t ask me to witness to the man!” But God said, “I want you to ask to brush his hair.” She says she told God she didn’t have a hairbrush with her. It was in her checked bag. Eventually, she said to him, “Sir, could I have the honour of brushing your hair? But I don’t have a hairbrush.” It turns out the man had one in his carry-on bag. She went to work brushing his hair, which was matted. When she got it all brushed out, she asked him if he knew Jesus. And the guy says, “Yeah, actually I do. When I was a young man, my wife wouldn’t marry me because I wasn’t a Christian. And so I found Jesus. And I’ve been a Christian for my whole life. Actually, I’m flying back to see her now. I haven’t seen her for a long time. I’ve been in the hospital. And just now, before you came out to talk to me, I was thinking about how awful I must look because there was no one to, help me cut or comb my hair while I was in the hospital.”

So she was assuming that God just wanted her to share the good news about Jesus. She couldn’t understand why this guy would need his hair styled. And what she was doing was answering this guy’s sort of unspoken prayer that somebody could help him get ready to meet his wife. 

God is at work, but he doesn’t always tell us how he’s at work. He wants to involve us in his work, but he doesn’t always give us the big picture, so we may need to learn to trust that if we step out in faith, we can do amazing things for God. There’s a story in Acts 8 where God asks Phillip to do something like this:

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,

    and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,

    so he did not open his mouth.

In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.

    Who can speak of his descendants?

    For his life was taken from the earth.”

The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:26-39 (NIV).

There’s a lot Luke doesn’t tell us that his original readers would have known, so let’s unpack the story a bit.

Unpacking the Story

Monotheism

Monotheism is common in the world today, but the Jews of antiquity were peculiar for their monotheistic beliefs. Most people believed in pagan, pantheistic religions. But when the Jews were exiled all over the Mediterranean World, they brought this unusual set of beliefs with them. As Jewish diaspora communities formed synagogues, some of their pagan neighbours were drawn to this God and his ethical code. So many gentiles started to spend time in synagogues. Some of them became full Jewish converts. This involved circumcision (for the men), baptism and offering of sacrifices. Others liked the Jewish God but weren’t eager to get the surgery. These people are sometimes called “God-fearers”. The Eunuch in this story seems to be a God-fearer.

Eunuchs

Eunuchs were men who had been emasculated. Kings with large harems wanted people to look after their wives, and emasculated men could be trusted to not fool around with their wives. Often, though, eunuchs would rise through the ranks at court and could have high-ranking government positions.

The particular eunuch in this story was the equivalent of the finance minister of a kingdom in Ethiopia. Ethiopia to Luke’s audience is Africa south of Egypt. The reference to Kandakē leads most scholars to conclude that he would have been from Meroё in modern Sudan. The Kings in Meroё were religious figures, who didn’t concern themselves with day-to-day affairs, so their mothers typically did the administration, and they took the title Kandakē. If this eunuch comes from Meroё, his pilgrimage to Jerusalem up the Nile River would have been over 3000 km each way. He must have encountered Judaism in his homeland and been so captivated by this god that he would take months away from his life to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, knowing that he wouldn’t be let into the temple beyond the outermost courtyard. In Deuteronomy, eunuchs are expressly forbidden from worshiping in the assembly: “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:1, NIV). But perhaps he had hope. He owns an Isaiah scroll. If he’s read it before, no doubt a later passage would have grabbed his attention:

Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,

    “The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.”

And let no eunuch complain,

    “I am only a dry tree.”

For this is what the Lord says:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,

    who choose what pleases me

    and hold fast to my covenant—

to them I will give within my temple and its walls

    a memorial and a name

    better than sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

    that will endure forever (Isaiah 56:3-5, NIV).

Sadly, there is no indication that this passage led to a lifting of the ban on eunuchs being allowed to worship. So this man would have been turned away without being allowed to offer sacrifices. 

Phillip

Phillip is one of the seven deacons chosen by the church to look after the distribution of food. He’s based in Jerusalem, but when persecution breaks out following Stephen’s stoning, he finds himself north of Jerusalem in Samaria. Jews hate Samaritans, considering them to be half-breed heretics, but Phillip finds surprising opportunities to share the message of Jesus with them. Many Samaritans convert to Christianity, so Simon is probably confused when the Spirit directs him to go South, to a deserted road between Jerusalem and Gaza. Old Gaza had been sacked by Alexander the Great and rebuilt on a different spot. The road God tells him to go on would have taken him to the ruins of the old city. He must have wondered why God would ask him to take that road.

On the way, he sees the Eunuch’s chariot. Don’t think of Ben-Hur racing chariots. This would have been more like a stagecoach. Something a wealthy person could use to ride in comfort (the ancient equivalent of a private jet, only much slower). Phillip is instructed to run up to it and he hears the man reading from Isaiah. Only a small section is quoted directly, but a larger quotation will help us see what’s going on:

Who has believed our message

    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

    and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

    each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,

    yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

    so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

    Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

    for the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

    and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

    nor was any deceit in his mouth. (Isaiah 53:1-9, NIV)

The Jews of Jesus’ time had no satisfying answer for who Isaiah was talking about, but Phillip knows it is about Jesus. What are the odds that Phillip would overhear the man reading this text? God was obviously at work. So, starting from that passage Phillip explains the gospel to him. 

This man travelled over 3,000 kilometres to Jerusalem with no reasonable hope of joining the assembly of God’s people, but Phillip tells him how Jesus has made a way for him, as an outsider, to be let in. The eunuch understands a good offer when he sees one and jumps at the opportunity. When they see water, he requests baptism. “If what you say is true, then there is no reason why I can’t become a member of God’s people? Let’s do it now then!”. So Phillip baptizes the man (and promptly disappears). That man goes happily on his way back to his homeland. Church tradition tells us that he brought the good news to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian church still flourishes today.

What Can We Learn?

It seems obvious that God was at work behind the scenes to orchestrate this meeting. He instructs Philip to go on the Gaza road. Though the eunuch would not have understood it this way. At the time, he had drawn the eunuch to Jerusalem so that he could have this encounter with Philip. So God is at work preparing the way for his people’s mission. 

The scope of our mission can be daunting. Jesus tells us to go and make disciples of all Nations. We can feel overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task, but we need to remember that it’s not our task to do alone. God is at work, preparing the hearts of people ahead of us. We’re not called to carry out God’s mission, rather we are care called to join God as he carries out his mission. He invites us to help, but we need to be obedient when that invitation comes. 

How often have I felt the nudge of the Holy Spirit and ignored it? Maybe I felt like God was telling me that I should talk to somebody and I resisted because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. Maybe God tells me to offer help to someone, and I feel self-conscious and don’t carry through, rationalizing that this is probably just my own imagination and not the Holy Spirit. Spirit. When Philip obeys the command of the spirit, a whole nation is changed. What might God have accomplished through me if I had been obedient to him? We need to pay attention to the Spirit’s leading and obey even when we don’t understand why

God has plans for an epic party like the universe has never witnessed. He has invited all sorts of people, and he has tasked us with handing out the invitations. But are we faithful delivery people? When Jesus ascends into heaven, he commissions the apostles to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth. The apostles got the first part right and then got stuck in Jerusalem. Who can blame them? After all, the preaching Ministry they undertake has phenomenal results. The apostles likely believe that Jerusalem is the best place for them to minister. To use a fishing metaphor, this is a stocked pond. The people are all believing Jews, and most of them are desperately hoping for a messiah. It seems like the people are primed and ready to receive the message. And so the disciples can find themselves fishing in this one pond. But then persecution breaks out and the church is scattered. When they bring that message to new ponds, they find out that the fishing is just as good there. Philip ends up in Samaria. Most Jews hated Samaritans, but it turns out that many Samaritans were just as ready to receive the message about Jesus as the Jews were. Later on, Paul will show that many Gentiles with no prior understanding of Israel’s monotheistic faith were also ready to receive the message of God’s kingdom. There were a lot more ponds where there was good fishing than the apostles believed. 

What ponds do we neglect? Do we instinctively reach out to the people who look like us? The people who have similar life experiences to us? Have we resisted fishing in other ponds? Because we’ve assumed that there won’t be good fishing there? In our community. We have a growing population of Indians. Are we willing to share the message of God’s kingdom with them, or have we just assumed that they’ll have their own religion (Hinduism, Sikhism or Islam) And, therefore, would not be interested? It’s possible they wouldn’t be interested, and we certainly don’t want to try to force Jesus down anyone’s throat. But, we don’t know that they wouldn’t be interested unless we first try. What other people might we exclude from the church because we assume they wouldn’t be interested? Are we willing to share the message of Jesus with the poor, knowing that they can’t make a meaningful contribution towards the operating budget of our church? Perhaps it’s the addicted or the mentally ill whom we haven’t invited. Maybe we think these people would make Church Life too difficult. But we need to remember that God invites all people to the party, and he’s especially keen that the people at the bottom get an invitation. We need to remember that we are spiritual outsiders ourselves. We have been given an invitation to the party because of God’s grace, not because we’ve earned it. And so we can’t claim any greater right than any other person to be at the table. So when God instructs us to hand out invitations, who are we to stand in God’s way?

When the outsider is brought in, we show the world around us that we’re a different sort of people, with a different kind of King. Just as Jewish exile aroused people’s curiosity about God, so our peculiar way of living faithfully to the message of Jesus can also have that same effect, drawing in the outsider. God wants them at the party, so let’s not neglect handing out those invitations.