Peter’s Arrest Mirrors Jesus’s—with 1 Key Difference (Acts 12 Commentary)
In Acts 12, Peter is arrested by King Herod during the Passover holiday. After the holiday is over, Herod plans to present Peter to an angry Jewish mob and have him executed.
This story has an eerie resemblance to the story of Jesus’s arrest in Gethsemane. Both stories:
take place during Passover
have a main character who gets arrested
have an angry mob of Jews wanting to kill the main character
But there’s one obvious difference: Jesus dies while Peter lives. And when I say that “Peter lives,” I don’t just mean that the mob decided to let him off the hook. No, God did a full-on miracle straight out of a Mission Impossible movie for Peter. An angel poofed into Peter’s prison cell, unlocked his chains, and led him straight out of the jail (past 16 guards)!
So why did God go through the trouble of lining up these two stories so similarly? What’s the message He’s trying to send to us?
I think the message He’s trying to communicate through these two stories is that the all-powerful Jehovah really does live inside of His people now.
In Jesus’s story, Jesus brought His disciples to the garden and asked them to pray… yet they fell asleep. (That took place before God filled them with the Holy Spirit in Acts.) But Peter’s story takes place after God filled His people with the Holy Spirit, and Acts 12:5 says that the church members “prayed constantly” for Peter after his arrest.
So the two stories line up perfectly, except that Peter’s story has a bunch of God-filled people calling for an intervention, whereas Jesus’s story did not.
My takeaway is that the miracle-working Jehovah really does inhabit His people, filling them with His power. Wow.
