Acts 12:2–3 “Herod had James, the brother of John, put to death by the sword. When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened doing the season of Unleavened Bread.”
The peace of 9:31 is over and Herod is back on the church scene (not in a good way!). It’s about one year after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and therefore the “peace” that’s mentioned in chapter 9 has been fleeting, perhaps lasting only a month or two.
This chapter is filled with surprises. James is killed; Peter is arrested; An angel knocks Peter up-side-of-the-head (12:7); Rhoda the servant girl can’t get the prayer group to believe that Peter’s at the door; and then … and here is my “intriguing moment” … Peter tells the group to go tell “James and the others” about this. And then he promptly goes into hiding.
The intriguing part for me was me realization that James the apostle, the one who personally mentored by Jesus to be the future leader of the church (along with Peter and John), he was not the leader of the church even one year following Jesus’ earthly departure. Instead, James the brother of Jesus had become the key leader of the Jerusalem church.
The reality is that this chapter and event marks the demise of the Jerusalem church’s influence. Peter is mentioned only one more time in chapter 15 and James only twice (ch 15 & 21). From here on out, the Acts chronicles Paul’s missionary work across Asia-Minor and Europe.
I’m not sure there is a huge spiritual takeaway here, perhaps other than prayer works and (once again) that the Jerusalem church’s demise was preceded by faithlessness in mission. But you’ve already read that repeatedly over the last few chapters. The demise of a church isn’t typically the result of a cataclysmic failing of a leader. Most of the time the demise comes from the systematic shift of a church’s focus from reaching out as missionaries to the slow and steady stranglehold of personal preferences, comfort, and status quo. That, unfortunately, seems to have been the fate of First Church of Jerusalem.
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