“For Herod himself had given orders to arrest John and to chain him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because he had married her. John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ So Herodias held a grudge against him and wanted to kill him. But she could not, because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing he was a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard him he would be very perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever been in a situation that blew up to such an extent that you figured God had completely forgotten about you, or perhaps was punishing you for something you didn’t even realize you had done? That can be a scary and disorienting place to be. You thought you were right on track with Him, but suddenly things go sideways, and it seems like the devil had won that particular battle. There was no way God could do something to redeem this. It was simply a lost cause. And then some well-meaning jerk came along to remind you of Romans 8:28 where Paul said that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes. And while perhaps he didn’t mean it this way, the implication is that either you didn’t love God enough, weren’t being called according to His purposes, or both. You didn’t punch him, but you did wonder a bit if maybe he wasn’t on to something. What are we supposed to do when our situations blow up and it feels like God is nowhere to be found?

The passage that prompted today’s reflection is not the one at the top of the page. That passage helps give some context, though, so I put it there. What triggered today was my preparing to teach a Bible study on Matthew 11 a couple of weeks ago. The story there in Matthew’s Gospel picks up just after Jesus has finished commissioning His disciples to go out in pairs to proclaim the Gospel in the towns and villages of Galilee. He goes on to give them a dose of reality concerning the pushback and persecution that was likely coming their way as they went. It’s a pretty uncomfortable chapter. In any event, once He sends them on their way, Jesus goes to their various hometowns around Galilee to proclaim the Gospel there. My guess is that He went to their hometowns because He remembered how well His proclaiming the Gospel in His own hometown had gone (they tried to literally throw Him off a cliff when they didn’t like what He was saying).

While He was doing this, somehow word got back to John the Baptist about it. John was sitting in Herod’s prison because he had the audacity to tell him he was in the wrong for hooking up with his brother’s wife, Herodias. Herodias, as Mark tells us here, was particularly incensed by this. She’s probably the one who made Herod arrest him. She was out for blood, but she would have to wait for the right moment because Herod was so intrigued by and fearful of John. He knew John was tight with God, and he didn’t want to get on God’s bad side. Of course, his understanding of God was pretty thoroughly pagan in its basic orientation, but wrong though he was, it was a wrong that for the time being worked to John’s favor.

For John, though, here he was sitting in prison while Jesus was out doing His thing without an apparent care in the world. Perhaps more galling than that was the fact that Jesus wasn’t doing anything about his sitting in prison. I’m not sure exactly what John expected out of Jesus, but he understood the role he played in Jesus’ life and ministry pretty well. He knew he was divinely appointed by God to the task of preparing people for the coming of the Messiah. And he further knew that Jesus was the Messiah. He knew he was divinely appointed to this task because his birth had been announced by an angel (like Jesus’ was) who told his father that he was going to be the one to get the people ready to receive the Messiah. His birth was even more miraculous than that because his mom, Elizabeth, had spent her entire life unable to have kids and was post-menopause when she got pregnant.

So then, here he was, a divinely appointed prophet called to get the people ready for the Messiah sitting in prison doing nothing while that very Messiah was out doing none of the things people then typically associated with the Messiah. John was a pretty faithful guy. He stuck to his mission in spite of whatever obstacles had gotten in his way. He didn’t much care what people thought about him. But when your whole situation has blown up and the Messiah you’ve been telling everybody to get ready to receive seems to be ignoring you, you start to get a little frustrated. Then you get depressed. Then you get disillusioned. And then you send a couple of your disciples to Jesus with a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

In other words, you don’t seem to be doing any of the things I would expect the Messiah to do even though I’ve been telling everyone you’re the Messiah. Furthermore, you’ve left me to sit and rot in prison instead of using some of your Messiah powers to bust me out of here so I can continue doing the work God gave me a divine sanction to do. Are you sure you’re the guy? Have I been right this whole time like I thought, or was this whole thing a mistake and a joke and I’m screwed?

We’ll talk through Jesus’ remarkable response another time. What I want to give attention to right now is something that caught my eye when I was studying this passage for the first time in preparation to teach on it. That same week, I happened to have taken a fresh look at Acts 13 in preparation for the message I was writing for that Sunday morning. When I did, I made a connection I had never made before. I did a bit of digging to make sure I was right, and I think I am.

The Herod who had had John arrested and thrown in prison was Herod Antipas. He was one of the four sons of Herod the Great who had tried to have Jesus murdered when He was a baby after the magi told him about a a newborn king of the Jews and then didn’t come back to tell him where He was like he told them to do. The other name sometimes given to Herod Antipas was Herod the tetrarch because he ruled over a quarter of his dad’s original kingdom. That’s a detail that doesn’t seem to matter very much for this story. But stay with me.

From what we see here in Mark 6, we know that Herod seems to have occasionally brought John up from his cell to talk with him. We have to imagine that even in prison John was faithful to his mission of telling people about the coming Messiah. Because doing things as individuals was almost unheard of in that culture, it seems unlikely that these conversations were simply solo affairs between Herod and John. Yet for all of their conversations, while we don’t have any evidence that Herod himself ever came around to accepting Jesus for who He was, that doesn’t mean none of the people who might possibly have been in the room were similarly unaffected by the message John proclaimed. Perhaps Herod had some friends or advisors who were there who listened closely and were persuaded that this Jesus really was someone worth their time and attention. As a matter of fact, I submit to you that this exact situation did in fact play itself out over the course of John’s time in prison.

Come with me back to that passage from Acts 13. The chapter opens with Saul and Barnabas praying together with some men who we can presume were among the leadership of the church in Antioch. During their praying, God told them to commission Saul and Barnabas for their first missionary journey. Before we get any details about that call, though, Luke tells us who was in the prayer meeting. “Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers. Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen…and Saul.”

Now, if you go look up that verse for yourself, you’ll quickly notice that I left something out there. When Luke mentions Manaen, he doesn’t just give us his name. He also gives us something to help identify him. In context this doesn’t seem terribly relevant to anything for us, but it surely meant something to Luke’s original audience. He tells us that Manaen was “a close friend of Herod the tetrarch.” In other words, one of the leaders of the church in Antioch was a close friend of the very Herod who had John the Baptist imprisoned and later executed. John’s stint in prison that wound up ending his life certainly wasn’t a cakewalk, and definitely wasn’t something he wanted to happen, but God nonetheless wound up redeeming it in a powerful way. I wonder how much having “a close friend of Herod the tetrarch” as a part of the leadership of the church in Antioch saved them from experiencing much in the way of grief from local Roman authorities.

If you let yourself ponder on it for just a bit, the implications of this are staggering. This is something we see happen again and again in the Scriptures. The stories of Joseph, Daniel, and Esther all quickly come to mind for me. The simple truth here is that God occasionally allows His people to find themselves in situations that seem horrible. They are obvious impediments to their ability to be an effective witness for His Gospel. They cut tragically short a really effective Gospel ministry. They took someone who was enormously faithful and active in one church and pushed them somewhere else so that the vital ministry they were performing previously had to stop, and they couldn’t do the same amount or kind of ministry any longer.

There are all kinds of circumstances we might find ourselves in that leave us wondering where God could possibly be. They are the kind of circumstances that could prompt someone to send a messenger to Jesus and ask if He is really the guy, or if they should be looking for someone else. They are circumstances that we can’t in our wildest dreams imagine could be where God really wants us to be or from which He could achieve any meaningful good. And yet, here we are maybe fifteen years later with “a close friend of Herod the tetrarch” serving as a leader, possibly even an elder, of the church in Antioch. Maybe he came to salvation by totally other means…but just maybe God used the conversations John the Baptist was able to have with Herod while he was unjustly imprisoned for speaking truth to power.

It makes you wonder just a bit if when Paul later wrote that “we know all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purposes,” he had John the Baptist’s story as told by Manaen in mind. This is one of the reasons God is willing to allow His people to be put in earthly harm’s way in our efforts to advance His kingdom by proclaiming the Gospel. He knows that He is going to be able to use our faithfulness in the midst of our hardest, most unfair-seeming, make-us-want-to-throw-up-our-hands-and-walk-away circumstances to accomplish even greater kingdom good.

So then, what does this all mean for us? It means that no matter how hard our circumstances happen to be, it is still worth our time to be faithful. There are not circumstances that are going to be bad enough that we can finally conclude God has forgotten us and we are of no more use to the kingdom. Even if we happen to be facing hard circumstances because of sinful choices we have made rather than because of our commitment to proclaiming the Gospel with humble boldness everywhere we go, still, in those circumstances God can use and redeem our faithfulness to accomplish even greater kingdom good.

When the apostle John said that the one who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world, he meant it. As the modern praise song puts it: “There is no one like our God.” When we are faithful, His plans are accomplished. If we are looking only as far as our lives and our interests, though, we often won’t be able to see what this can and will look like because the return on our kingdom investments aren’t likely to come in our lifetimes. They may, but there’s no guarantee on that. When we are storing up treasures in heaven, we are investing on an entirely longer frame of reference than what we are going to be able to get our hearts and minds around in this life.

We far too easily forget that we are living our lives in Christ on the scale of eternity and not just this life. Now, it is an easy criticism to say that looking that far ahead just takes our eyes off all the things wrong with this world and makes Christians ineffective at dealing with the real problems people are facing in the here and now. But in truth, just the opposite is the case. It is when we set our sights on the eternal life we have ahead of us, and properly understand that our goal is to live now like we are preparing for that day, that we start becoming the most useful for making this world a better place. To put that another way, when we properly understand that Heaven is our home, then we start making meaningful efforts to make our temporary home feel more like our eternal one. That only ever accomplishes great good. As C.S. Lewis put it in his classic book that every follower of Jesus should read, Mere Christianity, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

Hard circumstances are going to come in life. That’s simply how it works when you live in a world broken by sin. Thankfully, though, our God is big enough to be able to redeem and accomplish kingdom good out of our circumstances regardless of how impossible they seem to us. All He needs is our faithfulness. No matter what things look like, keep following Him. He will yet redeem what you see and show Himself good.