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Act_12:20-24
There was great consternation in the prison the next morning,
when it was found that Peter was absent. It would seem as if the
guard had been thrown into a deep sleep, seeing that they had
not been awakened by any of the circumstances that occurred; for
had they been cognizant of them, but passive through terror, they
would not have been so much surprised as soon as it was day.
Herod was in much wrath when he heard that, notwithstanding
the precautions he had directed to be taken, the apostle had
disappeared. He caused a diligent search to be made for him; and
when no trace of him could be found, he examined the soldiers;
and finding that they could not, or, as he perhaps supposed,
would not, throw any light on the matter, he ordered that they
should be put to death. It was in ancient times very generally
regarded as a capital offence for those to whose charge a
prisoner was entrusted to suffer him to escape; and it must have
seemed clear that in this case the guards had either slept upon
their post, or had been consenting parties to the escape. Herod
was probably the more induced to enforce this penalty, for the
purpose of conveying the impression that the soldiers had aided
in the escape of Peter.
Herod then proceeded to Caesarea, which had become the
political metropolis of the country since the great works and public
buildings which his grandfather had founded there. Soon after his
arrival, a grand commemoration was held in honor of the
emperor. The precise occasion we do not know. Some suppose it
was in honor of his birth-day; others that it was to celebrate his
return from Britain. There was, on this occasion, a large
that he was a very jealous God, and would not give his glory to
another. Of this he was instantly reminded, for immediately the
angel of God smote him, because he gave not God the glory. It
may be that the rays of the sun, which by shining upon his
raiment, did, in conjunction with the eloquent beneficence of his
speech, call forth this blasphemous adulation, were, in the shape
of a sun-stroke, made the appropriate instrument of his
punishment. He was seized with horrid torments in the intestines;
and he who had just been greeted as a god, was borne forth, in
all his splendid raiment, amid groans, and cries, and tears,
declaring that he had received the death-stroke, and
acknowledging the hand of God in his punishment. He survived
five days in extreme torture, being eaten of worms, and then
died of that horrid and loathsome death, which, as we formerly
showed, Note: Evening Series: Thirty-First WeekSunday. has
so peculiarly been the doom of tyrannous persecutors and
blasphemers, as if to show what weapons the Lord had reserved
with which to bring down into the very dust the loftiness of the
most proud.
We have combined, in this account of Herods death, the
statements of St. Luke and of Josephus. There is a remarkable
agreement between them, although Luke, in his more concise
statement, omits some circumstances which Josephus, in his
more full account, supplies, and which fit very well into the shorter
narrative. Thus both agree that his disease was of the intestines;
but Josephus says nothing of the worms, while Luke, as a
physician, naturally notices the cause as well as the fact of the
tortures Herod endured. Both also agree that the real cause of his
death was his acceptance of divine honors; for although Josephus
was tender of the memory of this king, and gives a more favorable
character of him than is warranted by the facts he records, he was