Go, Stand, and Speak
Acts 5:17-42
But the high priest rose up, and all who were with him (that is, the party of the Sadducees), and filled with jealousy they arrested the apostles and put them in the public prison. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.” And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach.
Now when the high priest came, and those who were with him, they called together the council, all the senate of the people of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought. But when the officers came, they did not find them in the prison, so they returned and reported, “We found the prison securely locked and the guards standing at the doors, but when we opened them we found no one inside.” Now when the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these words, they were greatly perplexed about them, wondering what this would come to. And someone came and told them, “Look! The men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people.” Then the captain with the officers went and brought them, but not by force, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people.
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.”
When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus.
But the high priest rose up, and all who were with him (that is, the party of the Sadducees), and filled with jealousy they arrested the apostles and put them in the public prison. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.” And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach.
Now when the high priest came, and those who were with him, they called together the council, all the senate of the people of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought. But when the officers came, they did not find them in the prison, so they returned and reported, “We found the prison securely locked and the guards standing at the doors, but when we opened them we found no one inside.” Now when the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these words, they were greatly perplexed about them, wondering what this would come to. And someone came and told them, “Look! The men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people.” Then the captain with the officers went and brought them, but not by force, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people.
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.”
When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus.
The Jerusalem authorities had a problem. The apostles were filling the city with their teaching about a risen Jesus, and every tool of suppression the establishment deployed kept failing. Acts 5:17-42 is the account of that failure, and it tells us something essential about the nature of the gospel and the power of God behind it.
By the time we reach Acts 5, Luke has already established a pattern. The apostles proclaim the resurrection. The authorities push back. God intervenes. The mission continues. This passage represents the second arrest of the apostles, and it's a significant escalation from the first. The first time, only Peter and John were detained and released with a warning. This time, all the apostles are thrown into public prison. The full Sanhedrin convenes. There's a formal trial, a beating, and an explicit command to stop preaching. The establishment is done issuing warnings. They want this movement shut down.
Luke tells us the high priest and his associates "were filled with jealousy" (v. 17). The verb Luke uses for "filled" here is the same one he uses elsewhere for being filled with the Holy Spirit. That parallel is not accidental. Two competing forces are driving the narrative: the Spirit fills the apostles with boldness, and jealousy fills the authorities with rage. The Sadducees, who controlled the temple apparatus and rejected the resurrection, had the most to lose from a movement proclaiming that a crucified man had risen from the dead. Their opposition wasn't principled theological disagreement. It was territorial. It was about power.
So they arrested the apostles and locked them in a public jail. The public setting was deliberate, an act of humiliation meant to discredit the movement. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought the apostles out, and gave them a command: "Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life" (v. 20). Three imperatives in that sentence. Go. Stand. Speak. The angel didn't tell them to lie low, regroup, or develop a subtler strategy. He told them to go back to the exact place that got them arrested and do the exact thing that got them arrested. And at daybreak, that's exactly what they did.
The scene that follows is rich with irony. The full Sanhedrin assembles with great ceremony (Luke specifies "the full assembly of the elders of Israel"), sends officers to the jail to retrieve the prisoners, and discovers the cell is empty. The doors are locked. The guards are standing at their posts. Everything looks right. But there's no one inside. Luke draws this out with almost cinematic detail, and the resonance with the empty tomb is hard to miss. As with the resurrection, human barriers proved no match for what God intended to accomplish. The authorities who were supposed to have all the answers were, as Luke puts it, "much perplexed" (v. 24), wondering what this would come to.
When the apostles are finally brought before the council (without force, because the officers feared the people, another quiet inversion of power), the high priest's frustration is palpable. "We strictly charged you not to teach in this name," he says, "yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching" (v. 28). He doesn't realize what he's confessing. The city is full of the gospel. What the council calls a problem, the reader recognizes as the mission succeeding. And notice that the high priest won't even say Jesus' name. "This name. This man's blood." The avoidance is telling.
Peter's response is the theological center of the passage: "We must obey God rather than men" (v. 29). The word "must" carries the force of necessity in the original language. This isn't Peter expressing a preference. It's a statement about the way reality works. When God commissions something, no human authority can override it. Peter doesn't stop at defiance, though. He immediately preaches the gospel in compressed form: God raised Jesus from the dead. God exalted Him to His right hand as Prince and Savior. God offers repentance and forgiveness of sins through Him. Peter's courage isn't rooted in personal toughness. It's rooted in the reality of the resurrection. He can't stop speaking because what he's witnessed is true. "We are witnesses to these things," he says, "and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him" (v. 32). Two testimonies, apostolic and the Spirit's, standing together.
The council's response is fury. Luke's word for their rage literally means "sawn through." They wanted to kill the apostles on the spot. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a respected teacher of the law (and later Paul's mentor), intervened with a pragmatic argument. He cited two failed revolutionary movements led by Theudas and Judas the Galilean. Both leaders died, both movements scattered. His counsel was simple: if this movement is of human origin, it will collapse on its own. If it is from God, you won't be able to stop it, and you'll find yourselves fighting against God (v. 39). That phrase, "fighting against God," comes from a tradition where opposing God is the ultimate act of futile arrogance.
Gamaliel's logic is sound as far as it goes, but Luke doesn't present him as a model of faith. He's a providential instrument, a moderating voice that buys the church time. His argument falls short of what Peter has already proclaimed: this movement isn't awaiting verification. It is from God. The resurrection settled that question.
Still, even Gamaliel's restraining influence only went so far. The council ordered the apostles flogged before releasing them. This was likely the "forty lashes minus one," a severe and humiliating punishment designed to break the will. It was physical brutality, not a formality.
And here we reach the most remarkable verse in the passage. "They left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name" (v. 41). The phrase underneath the English is vivid: "considered worthy to be dishonored." The paradox is the whole point. What the council intended as humiliation, the apostles received as an honor. The punishment meant to silence them became, in their understanding, confirmation that they were walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Notice too that Luke simply says "the Name," without specifying Jesus. The Name the council refused to say had become so central to the apostles' identity that it needed no elaboration. Everyone knew whose Name they meant.
Then comes verse 42, the capstone of the entire account: "And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus." The language is blunt. They did not stop. After arrest, imprisonment, a formal trial before the highest court in the land, and a brutal flogging, there was no pause. No strategic retreat. No period of recovery and reassessment. The very next thing the apostles did was the very thing they had been beaten for doing. And they did it every day, in public and in private, with the same message: Jesus is the Christ.
This is what makes the gospel unstoppable. It isn't the strength or resilience of its messengers, though the apostles' courage is genuinely remarkable. It's the authority behind the message. God opened the prison doors. God confused the council. God provided a restraining voice at the moment of greatest danger. And God so transformed the hearts of ordinary men that they counted a flogging as a privilege. The mission advanced not because of favorable circumstances but through hostile ones.
The pattern Luke establishes here runs through the rest of Acts. Persecution scatters the church, and the scattering spreads the gospel (Acts 8). Imprisonment gives Paul a platform to witness to guards and governors. Every attempt to contain the message ends up amplifying it. The authorities threw everything they had at the early church, and when the dust settled, the apostles were still preaching.
We tend to measure faithfulness by outcomes we can see, by comfort, by open doors, by the absence of resistance. The apostles operated with a different framework entirely. They measured faithfulness by obedience. Opposition didn't signal they were on the wrong path. It confirmed they were on the right one. The unstoppable life, as Acts 5 presents it, is not the life free from suffering. It's the life that keeps going when suffering comes, carried forward by a joy the world can't explain and an obedience no authority can silence. God's purposes will advance. The only question is whether we'll be the kind of people who advance with them.
By the time we reach Acts 5, Luke has already established a pattern. The apostles proclaim the resurrection. The authorities push back. God intervenes. The mission continues. This passage represents the second arrest of the apostles, and it's a significant escalation from the first. The first time, only Peter and John were detained and released with a warning. This time, all the apostles are thrown into public prison. The full Sanhedrin convenes. There's a formal trial, a beating, and an explicit command to stop preaching. The establishment is done issuing warnings. They want this movement shut down.
Luke tells us the high priest and his associates "were filled with jealousy" (v. 17). The verb Luke uses for "filled" here is the same one he uses elsewhere for being filled with the Holy Spirit. That parallel is not accidental. Two competing forces are driving the narrative: the Spirit fills the apostles with boldness, and jealousy fills the authorities with rage. The Sadducees, who controlled the temple apparatus and rejected the resurrection, had the most to lose from a movement proclaiming that a crucified man had risen from the dead. Their opposition wasn't principled theological disagreement. It was territorial. It was about power.
So they arrested the apostles and locked them in a public jail. The public setting was deliberate, an act of humiliation meant to discredit the movement. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought the apostles out, and gave them a command: "Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life" (v. 20). Three imperatives in that sentence. Go. Stand. Speak. The angel didn't tell them to lie low, regroup, or develop a subtler strategy. He told them to go back to the exact place that got them arrested and do the exact thing that got them arrested. And at daybreak, that's exactly what they did.
The scene that follows is rich with irony. The full Sanhedrin assembles with great ceremony (Luke specifies "the full assembly of the elders of Israel"), sends officers to the jail to retrieve the prisoners, and discovers the cell is empty. The doors are locked. The guards are standing at their posts. Everything looks right. But there's no one inside. Luke draws this out with almost cinematic detail, and the resonance with the empty tomb is hard to miss. As with the resurrection, human barriers proved no match for what God intended to accomplish. The authorities who were supposed to have all the answers were, as Luke puts it, "much perplexed" (v. 24), wondering what this would come to.
When the apostles are finally brought before the council (without force, because the officers feared the people, another quiet inversion of power), the high priest's frustration is palpable. "We strictly charged you not to teach in this name," he says, "yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching" (v. 28). He doesn't realize what he's confessing. The city is full of the gospel. What the council calls a problem, the reader recognizes as the mission succeeding. And notice that the high priest won't even say Jesus' name. "This name. This man's blood." The avoidance is telling.
Peter's response is the theological center of the passage: "We must obey God rather than men" (v. 29). The word "must" carries the force of necessity in the original language. This isn't Peter expressing a preference. It's a statement about the way reality works. When God commissions something, no human authority can override it. Peter doesn't stop at defiance, though. He immediately preaches the gospel in compressed form: God raised Jesus from the dead. God exalted Him to His right hand as Prince and Savior. God offers repentance and forgiveness of sins through Him. Peter's courage isn't rooted in personal toughness. It's rooted in the reality of the resurrection. He can't stop speaking because what he's witnessed is true. "We are witnesses to these things," he says, "and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him" (v. 32). Two testimonies, apostolic and the Spirit's, standing together.
The council's response is fury. Luke's word for their rage literally means "sawn through." They wanted to kill the apostles on the spot. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a respected teacher of the law (and later Paul's mentor), intervened with a pragmatic argument. He cited two failed revolutionary movements led by Theudas and Judas the Galilean. Both leaders died, both movements scattered. His counsel was simple: if this movement is of human origin, it will collapse on its own. If it is from God, you won't be able to stop it, and you'll find yourselves fighting against God (v. 39). That phrase, "fighting against God," comes from a tradition where opposing God is the ultimate act of futile arrogance.
Gamaliel's logic is sound as far as it goes, but Luke doesn't present him as a model of faith. He's a providential instrument, a moderating voice that buys the church time. His argument falls short of what Peter has already proclaimed: this movement isn't awaiting verification. It is from God. The resurrection settled that question.
Still, even Gamaliel's restraining influence only went so far. The council ordered the apostles flogged before releasing them. This was likely the "forty lashes minus one," a severe and humiliating punishment designed to break the will. It was physical brutality, not a formality.
And here we reach the most remarkable verse in the passage. "They left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name" (v. 41). The phrase underneath the English is vivid: "considered worthy to be dishonored." The paradox is the whole point. What the council intended as humiliation, the apostles received as an honor. The punishment meant to silence them became, in their understanding, confirmation that they were walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Notice too that Luke simply says "the Name," without specifying Jesus. The Name the council refused to say had become so central to the apostles' identity that it needed no elaboration. Everyone knew whose Name they meant.
Then comes verse 42, the capstone of the entire account: "And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus." The language is blunt. They did not stop. After arrest, imprisonment, a formal trial before the highest court in the land, and a brutal flogging, there was no pause. No strategic retreat. No period of recovery and reassessment. The very next thing the apostles did was the very thing they had been beaten for doing. And they did it every day, in public and in private, with the same message: Jesus is the Christ.
This is what makes the gospel unstoppable. It isn't the strength or resilience of its messengers, though the apostles' courage is genuinely remarkable. It's the authority behind the message. God opened the prison doors. God confused the council. God provided a restraining voice at the moment of greatest danger. And God so transformed the hearts of ordinary men that they counted a flogging as a privilege. The mission advanced not because of favorable circumstances but through hostile ones.
The pattern Luke establishes here runs through the rest of Acts. Persecution scatters the church, and the scattering spreads the gospel (Acts 8). Imprisonment gives Paul a platform to witness to guards and governors. Every attempt to contain the message ends up amplifying it. The authorities threw everything they had at the early church, and when the dust settled, the apostles were still preaching.
We tend to measure faithfulness by outcomes we can see, by comfort, by open doors, by the absence of resistance. The apostles operated with a different framework entirely. They measured faithfulness by obedience. Opposition didn't signal they were on the wrong path. It confirmed they were on the right one. The unstoppable life, as Acts 5 presents it, is not the life free from suffering. It's the life that keeps going when suffering comes, carried forward by a joy the world can't explain and an obedience no authority can silence. God's purposes will advance. The only question is whether we'll be the kind of people who advance with them.
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