The actions of King Herod in Acts chapter 12, who persecuted the early church by killing James and imprisoning Peter, highlighting the severe threat to the nascent Christian movement. It contrasts Herod's violent actions with God's intervention, leading to Peter's miraculous escape and Herod's subsequent divine judgment and death for not giving glory to God. The message then delves into the complex Herod dynasty, tracing four generations of rulers and their parallel roles in significant New Testament events, emphasizing the family's corruption and the historical context in which Christianity emerged. The sermon concludes by noting the transition of leadership within the early church from the martyred James to James, the brother of the Lord, illustrating that God's work continues despite the loss of His servants.
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that they'll miss out on. So we'll continue tonight along the lines of the continuity we've been following. But this twelfth chapter is one that I had on my heart to speak about even before I came to the conference. I had hoped to be able to include it. And it's an interesting chapter. I'm going to approach it a little differently than... Probably you had it approached before. I'm not going to talk about Rhoda, the little maid that heard the knock on the door. Peter was there and she was so astounded that instead of opening the door to let him in, she went in to tell the folks that were having the prayer meeting that Peter was standing at the door and they had been inside with a special, urgent prayer meeting that God would get him out of prison or keep him from being killed.
And when she went in to tell them that Peter was at the door, they couldn't believe it. It was impossible. It must be his angel. They said, you're mad in verse fifteen. And she kept affirming that it was so. And they said, it's his angel. We're supposed to watch and pray. And sometimes you have a prayer meeting. And when the answer comes, it's too much of a shock to believe that it really happened. It's a very fascinating story. But we'll pass over the central part of the chapter. We start off by paying a little attention to King Herod. Verse one, about that time, Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James, the brother of John, with a sword.
And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. Verse four. And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, delivered him to the four quaternions of soldiers to keep him. intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people. Now what has Herod the King done here? He has devastated the inner circle of the Apostles. You'll remember that it was Peter and James and John that were the Lord's inner circle from the very beginning. The Mount of Transfiguration, the Garden of Gethsemane, these three men were the heart of leadership. And Herod the King...
has gone right into the inner circle. He has killed James with a sword, had him murdered, fascinated. John would be terribly upset because this was his own brother. John is not captured, but Peter is now taken and put in prison, and it looks like he is going to be destroyed as well. And there is an immediate threat here to the very existence of the Christian faith. it would almost seem that Herod has gone to the very top of the thing and he's going to wipe out the top leadership and that's going to be the end of it. And so it is an extremely serious threat, far more serious than the murder of Stephen, the first martyr, who was not all that significant in the early church as far as leadership goes.
He was a godly spiritual man, but not the head of things. So James is dead. Peter is in prison and probably will be dead very shortly. John is still free, but probably very upset by the murder of his brother. And Herod the king is doing this. Now, this is the only chapter in the Bible where this particular king Herod is mentioned. I think there is a reference in some other place to Herod's judgment hall, where Paul was kept in Herod's judgment hall. But other than this chapter... Herod is not mentioned, this King Herod. He is mentioned here in verse one, again in verse six, again in verse eleven, nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one.
At the beginning of the chapter, he's putting the people of God to death. At the end of the chapter, God is dealing with him. The central portion of the chapter deals with the release of Peter from prison, the miraculous release of Peter from prison. And Herod will pass over that. When Herod sought for him and found him not, he examined the jailers and commanded they should be put to death. Now, they were relatively, of course, they were just doing their job. He had ordered Peter put in prison. And an angel had come and released Peter and struck these men with darkness or blindness or sleep or something like that.
And Peter had just walked out and the gates had swung open before him and the angel had escorted them out and these poor fellows didn't have a chance. They were the victims of this thing and Herod just said to execute them and they were put to death. And then Herod in his evident frustration here at the end of verse nineteen he goes down from Judea to Caesarea remember we had Caesarea the other last night Judea Jerusalem up here there it is Caesarea down on the sea coast the one of the Roman cities down there named after Caesar and he goes down there and stays there and I it doesn't say here at the end of verse nineteen but it certainly would seem to be that the man is pouting that he's frustrated and pouting because he lost his prisoner and He just goes somewhere else.
But when he gets down there, he takes out his anger on the Phoenicians, the people of Lebanon, Tyre and Sidon. And they come to him and offer some peace. They're very unhappy. They depend on the Roman government, and they don't want to be at odds with the ruler. And so they come and make a special appeal to him. And so Herod, in one day, verse twenty-one, he sits in royal apparel on his throne, and he makes an oration, a speech. And the people give a shout, and they say, it's the voice of God, not of man. And he accepts this, and the Lord smites him because he doesn't give God the glory, and he is eaten of worms, and he dies. Now there's the end of here.
The beginning of the chapter, he's destroying the people, the leaders of God's church, and at the end of the chapter, God's destroying him. I borrowed from Mrs. Willie a copy of the... works of Josephus here with the Antiquities of the Jews. And he goes into, Josephus goes into great detail about the death of Herod. And I think to make this a little more vivid, really how terrible his death was, I'd like to just read what Josephus says about him. He calls him by his other name, Agrippa, and this is not to be confused with the Agrippa that Paul stood before.
Now when Agrippa had reigned three years over all Judea, he came to the city Caesarea, which was formerly called Stratos Tower, and there he exhibited shows in honor of Caesar upon his being informed that there was a certain festival celebrated to make vows for his safety. At which festival a great multitude was gotten together of the principal persons, and such as were of dignity through the province, on the second day of which shows he put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of a contexture truly wonderful, and came into the theater early in the morning, at which time the silver of his garment being illuminated by the fresh reflection of the sun's rays upon it, shone out after a surprising manner, and was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon him.
And presently his flatterers cried out, one from one place and another from another, though not for his good. that he was a God. And they added, Be thou merciful to us, for although we have hitherto reverently only as a man, yet shall we henceforth only as superior to mortal nature. Upon this the king did neither rebuke him nor reject their impious flattery. But as he presently afterward looked up he saw an owl sitting on a certain rope over his head, and immediately understood that this bird was the messenger of ill tidings. as it had once been the messenger of good tidings to him, and fell into the deepest sorrow.
A severe pain also arose in his belly and began in a most violent manner. He therefore looked upon his friends and said, I whom you call a God am commanded presently to depart this life. While providence thus reproves the lying words you just now said to me, and I who was by you called immortal am immediately to be hurried away by death. But I am bound to accept what providence allot, as it pleases God, for we have by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner. When he said this, his pain was becoming violent. Accordingly he was carried into the palace, and the ruler went abroad everywhere that he would certainly die in a little time.
But the multitude presently sat in sackcloth, with their wives and children, after the law of their country, and besought God to the king's recovery. All places were also full of mourning and lamentation. Now the king rested in a high chamber, and as he saw them below, lying prostrate on the ground, he could not himself forbear weeping. And when he had been quite worn out by the pain in his belly for five days, he departed this life, being in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and in the seventh year, of his reign. Now that's Josephus, a much more detailed account of what the Bible simply says God smote him and he wouldn't give God the glory and he was eaten the worms and died.
Maybe that reading from Josephus, the historian of old times, will make it a little more vivid what happened here. The lesson, of course, by the fact that these two things are laid out at the beginning and end of the chapter, is that God has a way of dealing with those who oppose his people. Lay your hand on the people of God, and someday God's hand gets laid on you. And so here's bold and arrogant Herod at the beginning of the chapter, and by the end of the chapter, God has smitten him, and he's dead. Now, you are well aware, of course, that there is more than one king in the Bible named Herod.
just how well aware of how many kings there are named Herod is another question. And if I were to tell you, if I were to ask you to name the various kings named Herod and their relationship to each other, you'd probably get a little confused. This is the kind of stuff that preachers don't usually preach because it's more like a lecture type of thing and it doesn't make good preaching. I worked this out, I think, well, it was fourteen years ago. I spent hours figuring all this out about these kings, and I think I preached on it once, and that was enough, and I never preached on it since. I'll try it again now, knowing it's a little bit risky because it just isn't the type of thing that preaches well.
However, it can be beneficial if you'll bear with me and listen closely so that you don't get lost at the beginning. If you really get the flow of it, never mind all the details, you won't be able to remember the details. That's not important. If you'll get the overall picture, I think you'll find that your New Testament reading will be more interesting whenever you come across one of these people. Because the Herod family was a large family. And if I said to you, just take a piece of paper and write down the names of the related family members in the royal line, In the days of the Lord Jesus and the Apostles, you'd put down, well, there was Herod the Great, and then there was that Herod Agrippa, Herod whatever his name was that killed John the Baptist, and then there was this fella in the book of Acts twelve, and you probably wouldn't recognize that Agrippa, that Paul stood before, was another one of them.
And you might come up with, well, you might come up with the names of four or five of them. You'd assume that this Herodias... that was the wife of Herod. Well, you might call her, she's an in-law, so you'd count her, not realizing she's also a blood relative, and maybe you'd get a half a dozen names. And if I said, do you know that there are twelve members of this family in the New Testament? Twelve, there would be a surprise. It is a surprise, isn't it? Eleven of them by blood, only one that's unrelated, strictly a marriage relationship. Twelve of them by, eleven by blood and one in-law, Eleven of these twelve people are named in the New Testament.
Now that's a big family. So over here I've got a family tree. I've put something across the front of it, mostly to hold it from falling apart on me, from twisting up because I had a hard job mounting it up here. I'm going to go over them. And the first thing I want to point out is that there's a succession here of four rulers. They didn't all rule in Jerusalem. They didn't all have exactly the same territory, but nevertheless, there's four generations. There is Herod the Great. There is Herod Antipas, who was the man who killed John the Baptist. There was Herod Agrippa the first, the man we just read about in Acts twelve. And there's Herod Agrippa the second.
This is the one that Paul stood before. And they are definitely generations. Herod Antipas, the son of Herod, the Great here. And then Herod Agrippa was the grandson, not through this Herod, but down through another son. See the line coming down there. He's a third generation, our Herod of Acts twelve. And then Herod Agrippa, who said to Paul, almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian, Agrippa was the son of the Herod we have just read about. One, two, three, four generations. I'm getting a little ring here. I wonder if you turn that down just a little bit. Now notice also, that these four rulers parallel four phases of the New Testament story.
Herod the Great, the birth of Christ, you see over on the far part of the chart there, the birth of Christ, Herod Antipas, the ministry of Christ, the years of his ministry and his trial and death, Herod Agrippa the first, the early church, Acts twelve, and Herod Agrippa the second, Paul's trial. Now, if you've brought any notepaper along and you want to write some of the names down, I think perhaps the most important thing to write down would be the four generations. These four names are the kings. And if you want to catch some of the others, you can do that. But parallel them with the four phases, two in the Gospels, the birth of Christ and the life of Christ. And that would be thirty years apart, of course.
And then two in the book of Acts, the early church and the later days of Paul's life. Or ministry is recorded in the book of Acts. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about the family of the Herod as a whole. A little description of it. The Herodian family was the prominent ruling family of the land of Israel in the last days of its nationhood before it was destroyed by the Roman government in AD. The Herod family was the ruling family from the beginnings of the Roman conquest in the days of Pompeii. when he took over, the Roman Empire was extended into the Middle East to the final suppression of Israel in AD.
The family was a highly talented family. It had some elements of greatness. And now I'm going to quote a couple of passages from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. They're worth quoting. It had some elements of greatness, quote, in every case dimmed by the insufferable egotism which disfigure the family root and branch, unquote. And quote again, of nearly all the kings of the house of Herod, it may truly be said that at their death they went without being desired, unmissed, unmorned. The entire family history is one of incessant brawl, suspicion, intrigue, and shocking immorality.
I think we've all known perhaps families that do have characteristics. It's sort of rare, but I can remember in my own experience in the Lord's work, running across families that were characterized by constant brawling and fighting. And I think sometimes even by shooting and killing in their own midst, I can remember one family or a couple of families that have had real trials in their own midst over the years. Some families seem to be characterized by that, and this was one of those families, now a very corrupt family. And then one more quote from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. In the baleful and waning light of the rule of the Herodians, Christ lived and died, and under it the foundations of the Christian church were laid.
This is the atmosphere in which God started his And we sometimes think that we're living in terrible days, but maybe we're a lot better in our days. And with all our problems of government, we're probably, we have a lot better government than they did in those days, a lot less corrupt, despite all the difficulties we've been going through. Where did this Herodian family come from? Well, there were different reports. Herod the Great, who was the real, he wasn't the first one, there were a couple before him, but he was the most prominent, I suppose. He circulated the legend that the family descent was from an illustrious Babylonian Jew. That's what he said.
Our family descended from a very important Jew in Babylon. But his enemy said, no, the family is descended from one of twelve slaves that were captured with their Philistine master and raised by the Edomites. That's not a very good heritage for kings, is it? The truth seems to be somewhere in between. Probably this family were descended from the Edomites, the Edomians. The Edomites came from Esau. And these were the people, or they lived down here in this area somewhere on the east side of the Dead Sea, as I remember. And they were Jewish in religion because they'd been forced to become Jewish in religion.
But the racial hatred against the Jews was always there. And so an Edomite or Herod was Edomite in race, Jewish in religion, and utterly pagan in life. Now we'll talk about Herod the Great, the first of these four generations. And we know a great deal about him because Josephus has extensive treatment about the man, and he's found in other records of ancient history as well. He became the... Ruler of Galilee first, I think it was. And, no wait, but here's what I want to say.
He went to Rome at one point, and he was made king of Judea in Rome by the emperor, and that was thirty-seven BC. And then he came back to the Holy Land, and he fought his way into power, taking the city of Jerusalem that same year. That's interesting. If you remember a parable the Lord Jesus told about himself, In Matthew, what's it, twenty-two, I'm not sure of the chapter now, about a certain king that went into a far country to receive a kingdom and to return. Now see, we would, that parable doesn't fit our thinking. You don't think of a king going into a far country to receive a kingdom and to return.
But the Jews understood that because that's the way their kings got their kingdom. They went to Rome and they were made king of the Holy Land in Rome by the emperor and then they came back. And in Herod's case, he had to come back and conquer the kingdom to get it. He'd been crowned king of Judea, but he had to bring an army in and take the city of Jerusalem from his rivals. And so the Lord Jesus, in order to become king of this earth, he's gone back to heaven where God gives him the kingdom and he will come back at his second coming and he will take his kingdom by force. There's an interesting parallel there. in that respect. That's about the only one, of course, with this type of a man. So Herod became king of the Holy Land, and he extended his kingdom.
It was quite large. He was extremely cruel and extremely jealous of power. His rivals were the descendants of the old Maccabees. They're called the Asmoneans or the Hasmoneans. and they were the rivals that he had sort of usurped. They had been ruling the Holy Land ever since the days of the Maccabines, about a hundred and sixty-eight years before Christ. And so they were always a threat to him. But he married one of them. He had altogether ten wives, and one of them was a woman named Miriam. And she appears to be the only woman that he ever really loved.
Of all his ten wives and who knows what else he had, probably she was the only person that he ever really loved. And in order now to wipe out any threat from these Hasmoneans, he had her murdered, killed his own wife, and also her two sons, Aristobulus and Alexander. They're not mentioned in the Bible, but there's a little stroke line through them, meaning that they were assassinated at the king's command. Aristobulus died in seven BC and his brother at the same time. But for some reason, rather, Herod didn't kill Aristobulus' children. And they're down here in this third generation, the Herod that we started off with, who was smitten of worms, and Herod's sister, Herodias, and another Herod, the king of Chalcis.
So they lived on, even though their father was assassinated at the king's order. The emperor Augustus, in Rome said of Herod the Great, I would rather be Herod Hogg than his son. That's not quite much of a testimony to have your boss say about you, is it? Herod emulated the Romans. He introduced Roman sports into the Holy Land, which is quite an offense to the Jews. He built heathen temples in his dominion, and he was continually offending the Jews. And there were a party of Jews that followed him, that thought that just the whirliness was a wonderful thing.
And they were called the Herodians, the Herodian party. Now, when you read your New Testament, you find the Lord Jesus talking about the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of the Sadducees, but he also speaks of the leaven of Herod. And you might pass that by. You might overlook that. It's Mark eight, fifteen. you might think of in terms of the two groups of enemies of the Lord Jesus being the Pharisees and the Sadducees and then you say but when it came to crucifying him they joined together well there were really three groups of enemies the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians the group that wanted to bring in all the Roman worldliness into the Jewish religious and social structure and when it came to the crucifixion of Christ all these three groups joined together against him the Herodian party were those who were Jews in outward religious forms, but Gentiles in their dress and in their whole view of life.
They were a bitter offense to the rest of the nation. Herod tried in vain to win the favor of the Jews. In times of famine, he was abundant with charity. He often yielded to their demands. But they never accepted it. He was an Edelite. He was not one of them, and they never accepted it. They made continual plots against his life. His reign was characterized by endless court intrigues, conspiracies, and bittered his last days. He had a loathsome, incurable disease that made his life the more miserable, and he was a very irritable man. One of his last acts, he died in four BC, and he died, of course, after the birth of Christ.
So this dates the birth of Christ as being four BC or earlier. One of his last acts was the murder of his son, Antipater. I've got him over here. Perhaps he's the oldest. I'm not sure whether he's the oldest son, maybe the one in line for the throne. And he had him put to death, fourteen children altogether, and there's at least three of them that he had murdered. Now you can understand why a man who was jealous enough as an old man close to death, very close to death, dying within a year, if he was jealous enough of his throne to have his own son murdered that year, It's no small wonder that he sent out soldiers to kill all the babies born in Bethlehem at the time of the birth of Christ.
He just could take no threat to his throne. He couldn't possibly have lived long enough to have a little baby born in Bethlehem be a threat to him. But that's the character of the man. Kill the babies born in Bethlehem. Kill my own son. The Bible tells us a little bit about him, not very much really. By the way, he's the one who built the temple. He rebuilt Zerubbabel's temple, and this marvelous temple that the Lord Jesus went into, more magnificent even than Solomon's temple, was one of Herod's ways of trying to appease the Jews. It ranked among the world's wonders. He built three towers in Jerusalem that survived the attack of AD seventy.
The only Bible references to him are Luke one five, you are putting any of this down, he can just give you a reference or two, but you hardly need them, you could look them up. Luke one five, that there was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, and so forth, that describes the birth of John the Baptist. Matthew two, the story of the wise men, they came to him, went back another way, and then he ordered the children killed, and March eight, fifteen. Now that's Herod the Great. Now we move on to the ministry of Christ. Herod's kingdom, when he died, was divided up into four parts called tetrarchy.
And three of his sons ruled these tetrarchies. Herod Antipod in Galilee, we'll just call him Herod now for the next few minutes, the way the Bible does. Archelaus in Judea and Philip had the portion east of Jordan over here on this map. Galilee is up here, around the Sea of Galilee. That was the tetrarchy that Herod had. Philip ruled this part over here, east of the Jordan River, Philip the tetrarch. And Archelaus, down here, he had Judea. And there was somebody else had the fourth one. I don't know who, but not one of his sons. And then Herod himself had another son also named Philip.
And it's very unclear what he ruled. It wasn't one of these four tetrarchies. Now, Archelaus is mentioned in the Bible, of course. And the passage is in Matthew two-twenty-two. It's the only reference to him. I suppose we can look at a couple of these passages briefly to spot these men. We won't spend a great deal of time with them. Matthew two-twenty-two. You're all familiar with this because it's the Christmas story. When he, Joseph, had heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea in the place of his father, Herod, he was afraid to go there. Remember, Joseph had left and taken the baby Jesus down to Egypt, and when he came back, he heard that Archelaus was on the throne, and he was afraid to go back to Judea, so he went back to Nazareth where they had come from in the first place.
Archelaus ruled half of the kingdom, really, even though it was called a Tetrarchy. He had Judea, Samaria. He was a man of violent temper, educated in Rome. He ruled with a hard hand, putting down one rebellion after another. I'm sorry, putting down one rebellion in which three thousand people were slain. His rule was so hard that Samaria and Judea joined hands to protest his rule in Rome. And he was deposed and banished, and the rule of Judea was taken away from kings and put in the hand of Roman procurators, of whom Pilate was the seventh. Now that's why Jerusalem was not ruled by a king in the days of Jesus' death.
Herod the king was up here, one of the descendants of Herod the Great, up in Galilee. But down in Jerusalem, Archelaus had been dethroned, no successor was put on his throne, and the Roman Empire emperor sent governors in there, procurators, and the seventh one of those was Pilate, Pontius Pilate, who put the Lord Jesus on trial. Now, next we look at the brother, another brother here, Herod Philip. The only mention of him is Luke three, one. I don't think we need to turn to that at all. He ruled east of Jordan. And then there is, of course, Herod the king in Galilee, whom we know well.
And another Philip over here, these four brothers, are the only ones that were alive when Herod the Great died. And they're all mentioned in the Bible. And this Herod is mentioned in Luke three, nineteen. So we turn to that. Luke three nineteen now we're going to get a little insight into the moral corruption of the family verse nineteen but Herod the Tetrarch that's the man who ruled in Galilee that put John the Baptist to death being reproved by him by John the Baptist for Herodias his brother Philip's wife Now here we have two of them, you see.
Here is his brother Philip. This man out here, not one of the four rulers. Philip had married Herodias, who was his niece, Aristobulus' daughter. And this marriage, they had a child who was mentioned in the Bible, but not by name, Salome. She's the girl who danced before Herod. So Philip had married Herodias, and they'd had a daughter, Salome. Now what had happened was, that Herod the Tetra, this man over here, had gone to Rome. He'd been educated in Rome. He had married a daughter of a king of Arabia. Later he sent her back to her father, Petra, and he met and seduced Herodias in Rome, his brother Philip's wife.
She was his niece as well as his sister-in-law, and it was an adulterous marriage as well as being a a marriage of one of his own relatives. His life was corrupt and demoralizing. He followed his father's steps in erecting buildings and beautifying cities. And eventually he was exiled through the schemings of our Herod of chapter twelve. One of his nephews finally got him deposed in thirty-nine AD and Herod of Acts twelve took over the rule of Galilee in thirty-nine and later extended it to Judea and east of Jordan. So by the time we get to the Herod that we started with in Acts twelve, he's ruling just about as much territory as his grandfather Herod the great ruled.
By now you ought to be getting good and confused. I hope you're getting the overall picture though. This man of course is the best known in the Bible. And there are two very strong incidents regarding him. And if you put them together, you have quite a story. The first one is that he took John the Baptist prisoner. And because John had rebuked him for marrying his brother's wife for adultery, and he put him in prison, later on when Salome danced before him, he offered whatever she wanted, and her mother told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist And Herod, who really evidently liked John the Baptist, gave in, caved in, and had John beheaded.
Now, what happened when the Lord Jesus went on trial is very significant. He is standing before Pilate. He will talk to Pilate. Pilate will talk to him. He'll answer Pilate's questions. And then Pilate hears that Herod is in town. See, this was down in Jerusalem, the trials. and Herod was the ruler up here in Galilee, but Jesus came from Galilee. So Pilate hears that Herod is in town. He says, I'll solve this problem. I'll send them over to Herod. He belongs in Herod's jurisdiction anyway. I'll send them over there. And so Jesus was sent over to Herod, and you remember that when he got before Herod, he would not say a word to it. The Bible tells us that Jesus on trial before him asked, he asked him questions.
Let's turn to Luke twenty-three. And it's verses seven to fifteen, approximately, that this comes. Luke chapter twenty-three, verse six. When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked whether the man were a Galilean. As soon as he knew that he belonged under Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, who himself also was at Jerusalem at that time. That's why Herod had no rule over Jerusalem. And the only reason Pilate sent him was because Jesus was a Galilean. Pilot probably thought he could get off the hook this way and get out of the trial. Verse eight, when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceedingly glad. Now that's interesting, isn't it?
You'd say to yourself, well, now a person sees Jesus and they're very glad about it. They're going to have a real offer of salvation. Anybody sees Jesus and is glad about it and really wants to see him is going to hear the gospel. It says he was desirous to see him for a long time because he heard many things of him. and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him. Then he questioned him in many words, but he answered him nothing. I think this is one of the most terrifying passages in the Bible. Jesus didn't treat Pilate like that. He answered Pilate's question. But when he stood before Herod, there was no answer, many questions, and no answer. The Lord would not talk to the man who had killed John the Baptist.
That man, I believe, had closed the door on his possibility of salvation forever by killing God's servant. And the Lord honors his servants. And when you reject the servants of Christ, you reject Christ. And he had rejected and killed John the Baptist, and he had no word from Christ. And that's very conspicuous in this verse when you study the trial of Christ. and realized that he didn't treat Pilate that way at all. He was rather courteous with Pilate. He answered his questions and talked things over with him, even though Pilate, of course, was still ordering the crucifixion. Okay, so that's so much for Herod of Galilee. Now, what have we covered so far?
How many have we found? One, Herod the Great. Two, Herod the Tetrarch. Three, Archelaus. Four, Philip, the Tetrarch. Five, the other Philip, who married Erotius. Six, Herodias, his niece and his wife, seven, Salome, Herodias' daughter, who's in the Bible but not named, eight, Herod Agrippa I, the ruler in Acts chapter twelve. Now, we only have four to go here. I said there were twelve altogether, and they're all down here in the last line. So we move on to Herod Agrippa's son, Herod Agrippa II, who was found only in Acts twenty-five and twenty-six.
He's mentioned twelve times in those chapters, and this is the fourth generation of the Herod family that parallels the ministry of Christ and the birth of the church. Acts twenty-five, and I don't need to go over this passage at all, except to point out just a few things. Of course, the most famous verse here is the The twenty-eighth verse of chapter twenty-six. Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. But he didn't come to Christ, though he had every opportunity. Paul was very courteous to this man. These last two, by the way, these two Agrippas, you see, they are descendants of Herod the Great.
That makes them Edomites, Edomians. But they are also descendants of Miriam. and Miriam was in the line of the Maccabees, the Jews, not the Edomites. So these men are half-Jew, very definitely Jews, and they were more Jewish than the other Herod, and they had a very different attitude toward the Jewish people, and they weren't hated by the Jews the way the first two were, because they were themselves Jews, and they handled the Jews with great tact and care. And of course, it's because they were so much closer to the Jews that they turned against the Christians, that they persecuted the Christian church because they were friends of the Jewish people rather than being enemies of the Jewish people.
No. Herod Agrippa II has a sister named Bernice. She appears in chapter twenty-five, verse thirteen. As you read this in the Bible, you'd almost get the impression she was his wife. It doesn't say what she is. It just says that after certain days, King Agrippa and Bernice came unto Caesarea to greet Festus. By the way, well, we come to Festus later here. And then she's mentioned again in verse twenty-three, on the next day when Agrippa was come, and Bernice. And then Bernice is mentioned once more in chapter twenty-six, verse thirty, when he thus spoke, and the king rose up, and the governor, and Bernice, and they sat with him.
Here she is sitting on the throne with him, as if she were his wife. She's not his wife. She's his sister. Her first husband was her own uncle, Herod King of Chalcis. She married her uncle over here. And after he died, she consorted with her brother Agrippa. Apparently this seems to be an immoral relationship here. For a while, she married the King of King Ptolemy of Sicily, but she left him and returned to Agrippa. And other shame follows in their history. When their kingdom finally fell in AD seventy, when the Roman government conquered the Jewish kingdom, she went to Rome with Agrippa II.
And then we have only to mention now the last one that has been covered, Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa and Bernice, and she's mentioned in Acts twenty-four, twenty-four. After certain days when Felix came with his wife, Drusilla, who was a Jewish. We're not told the relationship there. But she is the sister of Agrippa and Bernice. And she married Felix, so he's the only in-law in the picture. The Felix before whom Paul stood was the brother-in-law of Agrippa. So we see a little bit of the close relationship of all these people.
And we have a little bit of the utter corruption of the family. And maybe this helps to... give the picture of Bible days a little better to realize these four generations of the Herodian family, eleven of them, blood relatives, mentioned in the Bible, and a twelfth in-law, Felix, in the picture there. Now going back to chapter twelve of the book of Acts, or just a concluding note, now we've talked about Herod and how he begins the chapter and ends the chapter. He killed James, and in the end of the chapter he dies. Now I want to make a little personal application from James in verse two.
You kill James, the brother of John with a sword. I don't know whether you've ever stopped to think about that. Here's a sentence in the Bible, just a sentence. You read it over. It's a sort of factual history. It means nothing to you really. It doesn't shake you up. until you stop and you think back through the Gospels. You meditate a little bit on what this means. James, the brother of John, is killed. And you go back over the history. You remember how John was with John the Baptist and John sent him to Jesus. A year later, the Lord Jesus came by and called James and John out of their fishing boats. Come and follow me. I'm going to make you fishers of men. And they followed him. You find them again with Peter, of course, the three of them together.
You find them in Peter's house. when his mother-in-law was healed. The summer of that year, Jesus goes up onto a mountain, and before giving the sermon on the mountain, he names twelve apostles. And the four men, that is these three men, and James and John and Peter and the fourth one, Andrew, I think it is, are the first four named in every list of the apostles. He gives James and John new names. He calls them the sons of thunder. I bet they were pretty powerful preachers to get a name like that. And then you come to the raising of Jairus' daughter when the Lord comes to that house and he goes into this inner room where this little people are mocking him because the girl's already dead.
And he takes Peter and James and John in with him and nobody else. Then he goes up on the Mount of Transfiguration and Peter and James and John go with him. And then it was Peter and James and John and Andrew that questioned Jesus on the Mount of Olives and heard the Olivet discourse. And then they go to the Garden of Gethsemane, and he leaves the apostles out so far, and he takes with him Peter and James and John, and he goes deeper into the Garden, and then he goes a little farther. And after the resurrection, it was Peter and James and John and four others in the fishing trip in Galilee who saw the Lord on the shore. Now here are a little knot of men that have been very close together and have gone through the death and resurrection of Christ and all the turmoil, and now one of them is snapped out.
And it's a break in the family. And the only way I can describe that to you is to say to you that supposing there's three or four of you in your family and your mother and dad are gone, and you've been knit together all these years. You may be separated by many miles, but there's you and your brother and your sister and so forth. And then one of the family is taken. And for the first time in many years, there's a break in the family. And that's what's happened here. There's a break in the innermost family of the Lord's disciples. James has been killed, and it's a terribly emotional thing when you look at it in that light. Now you go on a little bit in the chapter, and Herod... puts Peter in prison, and Peter walks out of prison, escorted by an angel.
He knocks at the door. Rhoda doesn't, as she answers, who is it, Peter? She goes inside. She says, Peter's there, and they don't believe it, and so forth. And finally they go, and they open the door, and they let him in, and they're astonished. And verse seventeen. But he, beckoning unto them with their hand to hold their peace, declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. He told them how he got out. And then, what does Peter do? He says, go and show these things unto James. Who's James? James is dead. Who is this James, who is evidently... of all the people that are left, Peter considers him the leader.
He's the one he names. Be sure James knows that I'm out of prison. When you get to Acts fifteen, the chapter we looked at at the close last night, it was James who seemed to be the real leader of the church in Jerusalem, not Peter. Peter made his speech and Paul and Barnabas made their speech and then it was James who summed it all up and he said, now my conclusion is this is what we should do about this problem. And James becomes This James is the effective leader of the church in Jerusalem. Let me give you a verse in the book of Galatians, chapter, what is it, chapter one in Galatians, one-nineteen, I think it is. We have him identified.
When Paul went up to Jerusalem in one-eighteenth, he saw Peter, and he spent fifteen days there, verse eighteen, and other of the apostles saw, and none except James, the Lord's brother. So here is a new James. He's the brother of the Lord. In the lifetime of Christ, he was an unbeliever, but he'd gotten converted. He is one to whom the Lord appeared after the resurrection. Paul specifically mentions him in I Corinthians fifteen. As one, he appeared to James also, and it would be this James. And so in verse nine of chapter two, when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me.
They gave to me in Barnabas the right hands of fellowship. Now here are three leaders in the church in Jerusalem. James, who's mentioned first, and Cephas, who is Peter, and John. Now that's exactly the same combination of names that were the closest to the Lord Jesus, Peter, James, and John, the three in the Mount of Transfiguration, the three in the Garden of Gethsemane, James, Peter, and John. Put them in what order you want. But this is a different James, isn't it, who's taken the place of the other one in the leadership of the church. Now go back to Acts twelve and we close with this note. In the beginning of the chapter, You have Herod killing the servants of God.
In the end of the chapter, you have God dealing with Herod. In the beginning of the chapter, you have James, one of those three men in the innermost circle being put to death. Halfway through the chapter, there's another James taking the leadership of the church, another James who's not been mentioned before in the book of Acts. Go show these things to James. And I don't know how better to summarize this little truth that lies here than by quoting, what was that man who was a pastor in the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas for many years? True it. I believe it was. The predecessor of Dr. Criswell was there now.
He says, God buries his workmen, but the work goes on. And it's certainly here, isn't it? God buries his workmen, but the work of the Lord goes on. May the Lord bless his word to us. Shall we bow in prayer? Father, we thank thee for the time to study the word of God. A little detail, some of this study has been confusing with all the details, but still, Father, we see your hand through it all. That in the days of these wicked kings, the very time you chose to start out the church and to bring the Lord Jesus in the fullness of time you sent your son. So, Father, you also raised up those to stand in the place of those who fell along the way, and your work will go on.
Despite the death, despite the kings, despite the enemies,