Every character in a story works toward the eventual ending or against it. Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring want to destroy the One Ring, but Sauron and all the hordes of evil are working against that plan. The Boy Who Lived just wants to survive his school year, but He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named would prefer he didn’t. Iron Man wants to save the universe, but Thanos wants to end it … or at least half of it.
The story you are living out is a page in God’s great story. You do not get any say in the fact that God is the author and this story is his own, winding inexorably toward his designed ending. Like Daniel, you will “go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of days” (Daniel 12:13). We all get where we are going. The choice you do have is whether your page will tell of one who participated in the mission of God or one who stubbornly worked against it.
A perfect example of this is in three stories beginning in Acts 8.
To set up this chapter, let me remind you what's going on in Acts. The story of Acts begins with Jesus’ ascension, the Spirit coming down, and the Gospel going out. Almost from the start, people in power feel threatened by the popularity of the Christian story. The leadership of the Jewish people in particular correctly realized that Christianity was not telling the same story they were and that changing the story would change everything. Their response is opposition. It starts mild, in the form of verbal reprimands. Then it escalates to arrests and even physical abuse. And then in Acts 7, a threshold is crossed with the martyrdom of Stephen. Stephen preaches a scathing sermon where he retells the Old Testament story, but rather than comparing his audience to the heroes, he compares them to all of the story’s villains. It's the kind of sermon that gets you killed which is exactly what happened to Stephen.
And so the Christians now are reeling. They have to figure out what they would do now, and what is the next page in this story. The legal and physical abuse of Christian people begins in full swing in Acts 8 to the extent that people have to leave their homes and their communities in Jerusalem and go out to other places to seek refuge. And out of this chaos comes three new pages in the story, subplots in the larger whole.
The first story is already underway: the story of Saul of Tarsus. Saul participated in the death of Stephen. He believes that the violent opposition to Christianity is overdue. In Acts 8:3, Saul is “ravaging the church and entering house after house.” Saul is a passionate, zealous believer in the story that he's telling himself, and in his version of the story, Christians are a problem that must be stopped at any cost.
Saul’s story picks up again in Acts 9:1: “And Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” Not only is Saul supporting the violent opposition of Christianity, but he believes that even his co-conspirators aren't going fast enough. Having already gone house to house in Jerusalem, he wants to go down the road to the next community and continue. He wants to round up men and women, not just leaders but their families as well.
When Paul describes himself later in his writings, he describes his story as a story of “zeal.” For example, in Galatians 1:14, “And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.” Likewise, in Philippians 3:6, he describes himself “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church.” Saul (known to us as Paul) lives out a story of zeal, likely modeled after an Old Testament figure named Phinehas. In Numbers 25, when the Hebrews were unfaithful to God, Phinehas took action. God describes him: “He was zealous with my zeal” (Numbers 25:11, some translations will say “jealous” instead). What did he do that was zealous? He took up a spear, entered someone’s tent, and executed them for their sins without further delay (Numbers 25:7-8). Saul even mentions this exact story in his letter to the Corinthians as a reminder not to engage in sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 10:8).
Saul believed in a story of zeal. For him, that meant violent action to preserve the traditions of his fathers. As if he was living a story out of Numbers, he wanted to go house to house to bring judgment to those threatening the traditions he loved. In that moment, Saul is so passionate about his people’s traditions that it causes him to oppose God. He is so passionate about who his people had been in the past that it puts him in opposition to what God was making them in the present tense. What we learn from Saul is that if you're only reading the pages from the past, you might miss the page that's being written right now. If you pick your favorite book, and you only read the first five chapters over and over, you don't know what happens next. Paul was just rereading that story and living it out over and over again.
As a result, he ended up opposing God's mission in the world. This is what Jesus himself says to Paul on that road to Damascus in Acts 9:4-5: “‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus whom you're persecuting.’” In his zeal, Saul had been acting against both the Author of the story and its main character. Thanks be to God that Jesus rewrote the story of Saul. Saul would become the man we know as Paul, a man who turned his zeal toward proclaiming the Gospel. Still, the lesson remains clear. Like Saul, we can be so busy writing our page, only to find we are working against the plot. And what a sad turn of the page that would be.
The second story in Acts 8 is about a man named Simon - not Simon Peter - but Simon the Sorcerer. Simon had “practiced magic” in one of the cities of Samaria. In the process, he made a name for himself as “somebody great” (Acts 8:9). Simon had written a pretty good story for himself. People respected and revered him. But in Acts 8, everything changes when a Christian named Philip comes to town and works wonders that make Simon look small by comparison (8:6-7). People start listening instead to Philip, and even Simon is persuaded by the power of Philip’s preaching and miracles. “Even Simon himself believed, and after being baptized he continued with Philip. And seeing signs and great miracles performed, he was amazed” (Acts 8:13). For a moment, Simon displays powerful honesty, and he takes up the Christian story as his own.
Sadly, while Simon wants to live the Christian story, he can’t forget about his own, the one where he was the main character. When the apostles arrive in town, Simon sees that they have not only the power of Philip but also the power to bestow it on others. He sees an opportunity to regain a little notoriety he had given up to follow Christ. “Now, when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me this power also so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 8:18-19). Simon might have believed in Jesus, but he had never stopped believing in himself. He wanted to be part of the Jesus’ story, but he also wanted to be the main character. Simon's story, though different from Saul's, is equally misguided. His story is about himself. As a result, he becomes an obstacle to the plot rather than a participant. Peter explains, “You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God” (8:21). Simon had chosen the path of self. When the self tries to add itself to Jesus’ story, there is no possible ending but “the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity” (8:23). We hope that Simon is sincere in his remorse in the following verse and that God could rewrite his story as successfully as he did for Saul.
Finally, our last story from Acts 8 concerns this man named Philip. Philip faces the same circumstances as everyone else, but his response is different. He sees the persecution of the church as one page in a longer story. “Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ” (8:5). A twist in the plot did not change the trajectory of the story. Philip was a believer before the persecution, and he remained one after. He went from sharing the Gospel in Jerusalem to sharing it in different places. He simply turned the page—same song, different verse.
The result of staying in Jesus’ story is an outpouring of God’s glory. The sick are healed, the Gospel is preached, and the crowds believe in Jesus' name. In Acts 8, we see Philip particpate in God’s story rather than writing his own, and good things are on the next page. “So there was much joy in that city” (8:8). It turns out that the Holy Spirit - the story’s glorious penman - was already at work on that next page, and the story told there would be one of grace, glory, and gospel! Not only did the story live on, it got bigger and grander as the Apostles got in on the act (8:14-17).
The death of Stephen launched three stories in Acts 8 and 9. One man’s story was about the past, and Saul could not be any more than a villain in God’s story until he saw what God was writing in the present. Simon’s story was about himself, serving as a cautionary tale for those who don’t recognize Jesus as the main character. But Philip’s story was all about Jesus, and because of that he became a blessing to others. God used him on the next page to reach the people of Samaria and even Ethiopia (8:26-29). After that, Philip reached other towns on the way to Caesarea (8:40). He continued his work in Caesarea, even playing host to a reformed Saul of Tarsus, a preacher of the Gospel he once persecuted. Philip’s daughters continue the story, prophesying in Caesarea (21:8). By making himself smaller, Philip became a very large part of the story.
Saul would eventually learn this lesson in his own life, and I hope we all learn it as well as he did. “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8).
No story you could write for yourself compares to the story God is writing for you and with you in His Son, Jesus Christ.
Dr. Benjamin Williams is the Senior Minister at the Central Church of Christ in Ada, Oklahoma and a regular writer at So We Speak. Check out his books The Faith of John’s Gospel and Why We Stayed or follow him on Twitter, @Benpreachin.