THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR 

We are continuing in the narrative of Silas now becoming Paul’s partner instead of Barnabas as Paul goes on his second missionary journey back to Lystra and Iconium 

We now read in Acts Chapter sixteen and verse one that Paul and Silas go to Lystra where they meet a new Christian named Timothy, who had a Jewish Christian mother and a Greek father. Paul was so impressed with Timothy that he asked him to join them on their journey.
They set off together and tried to go into Asia Minor but the Holy Spirit told them not to, so they travelled through Galatia deciding to head north for the province of Bithynia, but again the Holy Spirit said no. Paul then had a vision in a dream where he saw a man over in Macedonia in Greece, pleading with him, ‘Come over here and help us’, and it became clear to Paul then that God was sending them to preach the Gospel in Philippi, a Roman colony just inside the Macedonian border. When they got there, they preached to some women by a riverbank where they would come to pray and worship God each Sabbath. One of the women was named Lydia from Thyatira, who was a purple cloth merchant and who opened her heart to all that Paul was saying. She became baptized along with all her household and asked Paul and the others to stay at her house as her guests. 

Then one day as Paul and all the others were heading down to have prayer beside the river, they met a demon-possessed slave girl, who was a fortune-teller that earned a lot of money for her managers, and she followed along behind Paul shouting, “These men are servants of God, and they have come to tell you how to have your sins forgiven”. She did this for a few days until Paul became so distressed with this that he turned and commanded a religious spirit to come out of her, and when it left, her managers realized that their hopes of wealth were now shattered. These influential managers grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the judges at the marketplace for upsetting the Roman peace. The judges ordered them to be stripped and beaten with whips, then thrown into prison, and the jailer was threatened with death if they escaped, so he put them into the inner dungeon with their feet shackled to the ground. 

Just before midnight, Paul and Silas decided to sing praises to the Lord, and the other prisoners were listening, and suddenly at the midnight hour there was a great earthquake; the prison was shaken to its foundations, all the doors flew open, and the chains of every prisoner fell off! The jailer woke up to see the prison doors wide open, and assuming that his prisoners had escaped, he drew his sword to kill himself. But Paul yelled to him, “Don’t do it! We are all here!” Trembling with fear, the jailer called for lamps and ran to the dungeon and fell down before Paul and Silas. He brought them out and begged them, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

They replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, and your entire household.” Then the jailer took them to his home quarters and cleaned up their whiplashed backs. Paul then told him and all his household the truth of the Gospel and the jailer believed - and he and all his family were baptized. He provided a meal for all of them, and they joyfully praised God together as believers that very night. 
The next morning the judges sent police officers over to the jail to order the jailer to let them go, so the jailer told Paul they were free to leave, but Paul would have nothing of it. He explained that if they had been publicly beaten and jailed without trial as Roman citizens there was no way they were going to leave secretly, so he demanded that the judges come themselves and release them. The police officers reported this to the judges, who feared for their lives when they heard Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, so they came to the jail and begged them to go and brought them out publicly, pleading with them to leave the city. Paul and Silas then returned to the home of Lydia, where they met with the believers and preached to them once more before leaving town, knowing that this would have made the local Christians feel more secure after they had left the city.

There is a lesson of faith we can learn from this account of Paul and Silas as they were in chains in the prison cell at the midnight hour. The way they acted teaches us about how to respond when we are in circumstances that are beyond our control. It is about expecting the unexpected by trusting God that he is supernaturally at work for us. Paul had firmly set his heart on doing the best that he could to fulfill what God wanted him to do on this journey and he had been guided by the Holy Spirit as he went forward. Twice he had decided to go in a certain direction, and he was told by the Holy Spirit in some special way not to go that way. He was even given the dream of the man from Macedonia, and all this would have given Paul great reassurance. 

So it would have been logical for Paul to think that by going to Philippi as he was directed by the Holy Spirit that everything would fall into place when he got there and that there would be a move of God for the salvation of the people. But God had a number of unexpected surprises waiting for him. This is the first lesson that we can learn – we cannot presume that God will give us a magic carpet ride into seeing his supernatural work in action – there will be trials of faith and patience.

For example, the way this worked out for Paul was that things went pleasingly well for a while as Lydia gets saved and baptized and then more people get touched by God and then suddenly everything starts to go shockingly bad. It couldn’t have gone worse for Paul and Silas to end up being arrested and whipped and imprisoned and shackled in chains against a wall, and perhaps awaiting a death sentence.

Then after learning about trials of faith we can learn another lesson from Paul and Silas. For us it would be like everything going so bad that the midnight hour arrives where things could not become any darker, and where grimly ask ourselves ‘what do I do now? - there seems to be no hope’ But the lesson to learn here is that that this is when we should have the most hope. This is when there’s nothing we can do but be still and see the salvation of our God. This is where we move away from being conscious of what the world is doing to us and move towards being conscious of what God is doing for us. This shift of our thinking is vital for any faith transformation of our soul. 

If Silas would have asked Paul that question – ‘what do we do now?’ he would have heard only one answer. Paul would have said ‘There’s only one thing to do Silas – we start praising the Lord because only he can do the supernatural work to get us out of this – so let’s just praise the Lord with all of our hearts – Hallelujah!’
Paul knew that God wanted to show them his sovereign rule over everything that was happening and to show them his mighty acts in their midnight hour. Paul would have been reminded of Moses at the Red sea and Joshua at the walls of Jericho, and David telling his soul to magnify the Lord in his fear and distress.  
And finally, there are a number of Scriptures that mention the midnight hour and its end time significance about the darkest hour having to come before a new dawn can break. 
We will look at three of these Scriptures (among a number of others) where the the midnight hour Scriptures always fall into one of these these three contexts, which are a)Times of judgement between good and evil, b) a bride being prepared for her bridegroom and c) times of shakings where prisoners get set free from darkness and find salvation.

The first example of a midnight hour situation is in Exodus chapter twelve when God pronounces judgement and says that at the midnight hour he would pass through the land of Egypt and strike all the firstborn in the land and execute judgment against all the gods of Egypt.

The second example of a midnight hour situation is about the time when some bridesmaids go to sleep while the bridegroom is being delayed, and at midnight a cry is heard: 'Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!' Some of the bridesmaids have no oil in their lamps and can’t go out to meet him but the wise ones do – speaking of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. (Matthew 25:6)

The third example of a midnight hour situation is the one that we have just read about in the book of Acts with Paul and Silas where God supernaturally sets people free from bondage and where they can sing ‘my chains fell off I’ve been set free I once was blind but now I see’.

We do not know the times and the seasons of God but there are certain times in history when the times are the darkest and God gives the world its warnings, and he gives his Church his message of hope for setting people free. We are certainly in a dark time of history and God is bringing many things of the world into the light for them to be seen and judged for what they are. He is also encouraging his church to become more pure of heart and prepared as a bride for his Son. He is also bringing light into the darkness for the blind to see and he is shaking all things and opening prison doors for spiritual chains to fall off people so that they can be set free.