Songs in the Night

Two men with their backs torn open, feet locked in stocks in the innermost cell of a Roman jail, singing at midnight loud enough for the other prisoners to hear. That is the picture. What follows, an earthquake, a jailer with a sword at his own throat, and a question asked in the dark, is the story of how the church in Philippi began, the church Paul would later tell to rejoice always. He was not speaking theoretically.

A girl and her owners

Paul had come to Philippi because of a dream, a man of Macedonia saying "Come over into Macedonia, and help us" (Acts 16:9). The first convert in Europe was a businesswoman at a riverside prayer meeting, Lydia, "whose heart the Lord opened" (16:14). Then the trouble. "a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying" (16:16). A slave girl, and a spirit in her that made money for the men who owned her. For days she follows Paul through the streets shouting, "These men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation" (16:17). True, every word, and Paul is grieved by it, because the truth in that mouth was an advertisement, not a confession. He turns and casts the spirit out, "And he came out the same hour" (16:18).

"And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone" (16:19). That is the whole motive, and Luke states it flat. A girl was freed and her owners lost their income, so they dragged the men who did it to the magistrates with a charge about Jewish customs, and the crowd rose, and "the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them. And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison" (16:22-23). No trial. Roman rods on bare backs, many stripes, and then "the inner prison" with their "feet fast in the stocks" (16:24), which forced the legs apart so a man could not shift his weight off his wounds.

Midnight

Not at dawn, when things look better. At midnight, the worst of it, with the blood dried on them and no way to lie down. And not muttering. Singing, and the prisoners heard them. Luke does not say what they sang. Psalms, most likely, since those were the only hymnbook they had; and there are psalms that fit a night like that, "Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the night" (Job 35:10). Every other man in that jail was listening to two beaten prisoners praise God in the dark. Whatever else the earthquake did, it interrupted a congregation.

Chrysostom was preaching to a city terrified of the emperor's punishment when he said that. The prisoner took the jailer prisoner. That is the story in one line, and he had not even got to the earthquake yet.

We are all here

"And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed" (16:26). Every one's. Not just Paul's. Whatever God did that night, He did it for the whole jail. And the jailer, who has been asleep through the singing, wakes to open doors, and knows what Rome does to a guard who loses his prisoners. "he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled" (16:27).

"But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here" (16:28). Read that again. The doors are open. The chains are off. The man who beat them and locked them in the dark is about to die by his own hand, and no one in the world would blame Paul for walking out and letting him. Instead he shouts, from the dark, to save the jailer's life, and he speaks for all of them: we are all here. Not one prisoner had run. The singing had done something to that jail before the earthquake did.

"Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" (16:29-30). He does not mean from the magistrates; the prisoners are all accounted for. He has just been spared by the men he flogged, and he has heard them sing, and he is asking the only question left. And the answer is the shortest gospel in the Bible: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" (16:31).

The same hour of the night

Look at the order of what happens next, because it is the whole thing. "And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway" (16:32-33). He washed their stripes. The jailer, with water, in the middle of the night, cleaning the wounds his own prison put on their backs, and then, with the same water, being washed himself. Then a meal. "he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house" (16:34). Rejoiced. It is not yet morning, he is still a Roman jailer with a wrecked jail to explain, and he is at his own table with two bleeding Jews, rejoicing.

In the morning the magistrates, having slept on it, send word to let them go quietly, and Paul, who has been silent about it all night, finally mentions that he and Silas are Roman citizens, beaten without trial, and that the magistrates can come and walk them out themselves (16:37). They do. He never used the citizenship to avoid the beating. He used it afterward, so that the little church he was leaving behind, Lydia and the jailer and their households, would not be easy to touch.

Where this lands

Ten years later Paul wrote to that church from another prison, and the letter is the most joyful thing he ever put on paper. "the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel; So that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace" (Philippians 1:12-13). And "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice" (4:4). The people who first read that sentence included a jailer who had watched him do it, at midnight, in stocks, and a woman whose river meeting had become a church. They knew he meant it because they had heard it.

The story is not that God gets you out of the jail. Paul and Silas did not leave when the doors opened; they stayed for the jailer. The story is that two men could sing in the dark with their backs open, not because the pain was small but because the One they sang to was there in the inner prison with them, and the singing reached a man who was about to fall on his sword, and turned into a question, and the question into a household washed and fed and rejoicing before sunrise. "unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake" (1:29). Given. He calls the suffering a gift, to the people who saw what it was for. Whatever midnight you are in, the doors are His business. The song is yours. And somebody is listening.

Related: Rest, Baptism, Faith Is a Verb, and The Second Fire. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.