'He brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? 31.
And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be
saved.'--ACTS xvi. 30, 31.
The keeper of a Macedonian jail was not likely to be a very nervous or
susceptible person. And so the extraordinary state of agitation and
panic into which this rough jailer was cast needs some kind of
explanation. There had been, as you will all remember, an earthquake of
a strange kind, for it not only opened the prison doors, but shook the
prisoner's chains off. The doors being opened, there was on the part of
the jailer, who probably ought not to have been asleep, a very natural
fear that his charge had escaped.
So he was ready, with that sad willingness for suicide which marked his
age, to cast himself on his sword, when Paul encouraged him.
That fear then was past; what was he afraid of now? He knew the
prisoners were all safe; why should he have come pale and trembling?
Perhaps we shall find an answer to the question in another one. Why
should he have gone to Paul and Silas, his two prisoners, for an
anodyne to his fears?
The answer to that may possibly be found in remembering that for many
days before this a singular thing had happened. Up and down the streets
of Philippi a woman possessed with 'a spirit of divination' had gone at
the heels of these two men, proclaiming in such a way as to disturb
them: 'These are the servants of the Most High God, which show unto us
the way of salvation.' It was a new word and a new idea in Philippi or
in Macedonia. This jailer had got it into his mind that these two men
had in their hands a good which he only dimly understood. The panic
caused by the earthquake deepened into a consciousness of some
supernatural atmosphere about him, and stirred in his rude nature
unwonted aspirations and terrors other than he had known, which cast
him at Paul's feet with this strange question.
Now do you think that the jailer's question was a piece of foolish
superstition? I daresay some of you do, or some of you may suppose too
that it was one very unnecessary for him or anybody to ask. So I wish
now, in a very few words, to deal with these three points--the question
that we should all ask, the answer that we may all take, the blessing
that we may all have.