We’ve tried to understand 1st Thessalonians 5:16-18 by reflecting on Paul and Silas’s experience in Philippi described in Acts 16. After obeying God to go there, they were promptly tortured and imprisoned. But by midnight they were praying and singing hymns to God.
God heard them and dramatically responded. “Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everybody’s chains came loose!”
I don’t know what the other prisoners’ thoughts and attitudes were while listening to them sing praises to God. I also don’t know if Paul and Silas prayed for the other prisoners. But when God answered their prayers things happened so fast no one tried to escape. The earthquake woke up the jailer, “and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, ‘Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!’” When the jailer asked how to be saved they said: “believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved – and your household.”
What first seemed hard to understand now is seen as the means God used for the jailer and his household to be saved that very night. Can you imagine the joy experienced and expressed that night, both in the jailer’s home and also in heaven? And be assured, God’s will was fulfilled through it all!
