This post will be a completion of my previous post on Acts 8:28-40. It would probably be helpful to open it up and read it one time through before reading this post (reading it through won't take more than five minutes, anyways.
"And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah."
Of the many different interesting things about the Ethiopian eunuch, I find it extremely interesting that he was returning from worshiping. This eunuch wasn't a heathen, a pagan, a persecutor of the church, but he was a man who desired to worship the only true God! He wasn't a man who needed to be reminded to go to church on Sunday or to study the Word. God had already placed in his heart a desire to seek Him and to worship Him. And yet he still didn't understand what he read. Many times in our churches and fellowships, we forget that often times, those who are the most lost and are in need of guidance are those who already come to worship! We often assume that just because people come to worship, they know who Jesus is and have a personal relationship with him. This wasn't true for the eunuch, and it certainly isn't true for our churches today, so let's not forget to be reaching out to those already under the roof of the church who may not yet know Jesus.
"And the Spirit said to Philip, 'Go over and join this chariot.' So Philip ran to him..."
This is the first explicit mention of the Spirit that we find in the passage (recall that it was an angel of the Lord that had first told Philip to rise and go). So we can imagine Philip just "chillin" in the desert, walking around, trying to see what God wants him to do, and he sees a chariot and is then prompted by the Spirit to join it. What is Philip's response? Philip runs to the chariot! He doesn't complain, he doesn't ask "God, is this really your will?", he doesn't walk - he runs! We should learn to imitate Philip's eagerness to obey the prompting of the Spirit and run with joy to the tasks that he sets out for us.
[As sort of an aside, I recall from my childhood picture Bibles and Christian videos that supposedly the chariot was actually going full speed and God have Philip the supernatural foot speed (as he had given Elijah) to catch up with a chariot going full speed. I really could be wrong, but this doesn't seem like the most likely scenario to me because of the following verbal exchanges that he has with the eunuch. Philip asks the eunuch if he understands what he's reading, and the eunuch says that he doesn't. It is only after this interaction does the eunuch finally ask Philip to join him in the chariot. To me, it wouldn't really make sense for the eunuch to see a man running full speed next to the chariot without slowing down to converse. But either way, the eagerness of Philip to obey God should be imitated.]
"...and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?'"
Not only is Philip's eagerness to be imitated, but also his method of evangelism. We see in this simple sentence that Philip did two things - he heard and he asked. In Philip's eagerness to run to the chariot, he didn't get on his metaphorical soapbox and start spewing out the Four Spiritual Laws or the bridge diagram, but he heard the Ethiopian. I am probably the most guilty of speaking before listening, but how much easier it was for Philip to minister to the eunuch because he simply listened! He was able to meet the eunuch in his place of confusion and to address the eunuch's needs instead of imposing his own evangelism strategy on him. Philip listened, and that's something that I need to learn to do. After he listened, Philip asked. Last year, I attended MAC (Ministering Across Cultures) for the second time, and one of my biggest takeaways from the training event is how effective asking questions is to opening a person up and understanding a person. By asking the eunuch a basic question, Philip was allowing the eunuch to express his own thoughts and desires, which in turn made it easier for Philip to minister to him. Many times (for me, at least), our ministry tactic is a "speak and answer questions" sort of approach instead of Philip's "hear and ask" approach. There's definitely a place for both kinds of ministry (can you imagine Pastor Chuck simply "hearing and asking" on stage on Sunday morning? That would be horrible!), but Philip's example is a good reminder for me to be more open to gauging someone else's needs.
"And he said, 'How can I, unless someone guides me?' And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him."
To me, this question that the eunuch asks is the central point of the entire passage. In my previous readings of this passage, I had always thought that the person the eunuch needed was Philip to explain the Scripture to him. While this is true, I think that God is pointing us to something much deeper than that - "the inward illumination of the Spirit of God [is] necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word. [WCF]" It is the Holy Spirit, not Philip, who is ultimately the guide of the Ethiopian! The easy takeaway from this passage that we've been taught since we were children is that we need to be like Philip and explain the Bible to those who don't understand it. We fail to realize that we ourselves cannot understand the Scripture without the guidance of the Holy Spirit! It is only through God that we ourselves can understand the Word of God and have any hope of explaining it to anyone else!
This post is really sufficiently long, so I'm just going to skip a bit of the passage and get to a few last thoughts I had on the passage.
"Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus."
This "opened his mouth" phrase seems to be used only one other time in this book, and that is in Acts 10:34, when Peter is preaching to the centurion's family. To me, it is a reminder that when we speak, we are merely using our mouths as an instrument of God, and it is really the "Spirit of our Father speaking through [us]". I may be imagining things, but I also see somewhat of a parallel between this passage and Luke 24, where Jesus explains to the two clueless fellows how all of Scripture is really about him. Obviously, Luke and Acts are both written by Luke, and it's cool to see how Luke comes back to a man explaining how all of Scripture is about Jesus.
"And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing."
I'm not sure if you've realized this, but Philip was straight up teleported away. The passage says that "Philip found himself at Azotus." Imagine that. Philip was in the water baptizing the eunuch and an instant later, was in a random town. How strange that must have been! And the eunuch also just got the most awesome baptism in the entire world. Again, this might be over-speculation, but I really think that the eunuch probably got a small feeling of the Spirit of the Lord carrying him out of the water. All of us who've been dunked know that when you're brought down into the water, you need the pastor to bring you back up, because there's really no other way you can get up out of the water from a prostrate position. Now, if Philip was teleported away as they came up out of the water, who would be there to help the eunuch completely up? I very well could be wrong, but to me, the passage seems to imply that the eunuch never saw Philip once he got out of the water, and it isn't a wild possibility to me that it was the Spirit Himself who helped the eunuch onto his feet after the baptism. That would be an awesome baptism - being baptized by God himself! But of course, that's all speculation.
To conclude this post, I really feel like this understanding that the Spirit is the guide is the central theme of the passage. The Spirit is the one who guides Philip to the chariot, the Spirit is the one who gives both Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch understanding of the Scripture, and it is the Spirit who again leads both the eunuch and Philip on their separate paths after their encounter. As Christians, we should allow the Spirit to guide us in all things - be it direction of life or our Scripture readings - and to obey quickly and eagerly when He calls.
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