The Work In Philippi Series

The whole family drank in these wonderful words of life, and their hearts were opened to the gospel. Paul and Silas surely reckoned the sufferings they had endured not worthy to be compared with the glory that followed—of seeing the Holy Spirit bring this whole family to Christ.

33a And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes.

The witness to Christ was primary and took precedence over everything else. Now the jailer became aware of the two prisoners suffering and bathed the wounds which they had received from the beating by the lictors. Perhaps this took place in the courtyard where the household water supply would be located.

This was the first act of a converted man. Callousness was changed to concern, brutal language to brotherly love. With his own hands the jailer took sponge and water and gently washed away the blood and grime and tended his prisoner’s wounds. He could not set them free, but he could ease their pain. One of the evidences of true repentance is a loving desire to make restitution and reparation wherever we have hurt others. We should not only wash one another’s feet (John 13:14-15), but we should also cleanse the wounds we have given to others. There is something heartwarming about the sight of this tough jailer gently ministering to the physical needs of his prisoners as they, a moment before, had ministered to his spiritual needs. But that is what the gospel does. It makes crooked people straight, drunk people sober, and immoral people pure. It transforms lives so that we see a converted Zacchaeus giving away his money and a converted jailer washing his prisoners’ wounds. We can be sure, too, that every other prisoner in that Philippian jail noticed the difference in their jailer before the day was over.

33b And was baptized[2], he and all his, straightway.

The jailer, then, was baptized, and his baptism, as it always is with Christian baptism in the New Testament, was “the outward expression of an inward experience,” a public confession of his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Luke does not tell us where this baptism took place, but probably it was in the river where Paul and the others had first met Lydia. Baptism, by its very nature, should be as public a ceremony as possible.

This is one of the most abused texts in the Bible. It has been seized upon, torn out of context, and used repeatedly to support the doctrine of infant baptism. It teaches nothing of that kind. “Prove it,” you say. “Look at the next verse,” I say. It says, “Believing in God with all his house.” That proves that everyone in his house was old enough to believe. There were no babies in that home at that time. The Bible teaches believer’s baptism, not infant baptism.”

Neither does this verse teach so-called “household salvation,” which has no basis in the Word of God—that is, that the decision of the head of the household brings salvation to the other members of the household. The people in the household of Cornelius were old enough to respond to his call (Acts 10:24) and to understand the Word and believe (Acts 10:44; 11:15-17; 15:7-9). The household of Crispus was composed of people old enough to hear and believe God’s Word (Acts 18:8). And each individual member of the jailer’s household must be saved by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.