Biblion Bible Commentary
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The voice of a god: Herod eaten by worms
Acts 12:20-25
20 Now Herod was very angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon. They came with one accord to him and, having made Blastus, the king’s personal aide, their friend, they asked for peace, because their country depended on the king’s country for food. · WEB
The king who killed an apostle accepts worship and dies of it — and the progress report that follows names the survivor of the chapter as the word of God.
The last scene begins with a trade dispute. Herod is angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon , and they need to be reconciled because their country depended on the king's country for food. The Phoenician coastal cities lived on grain from the interior, and a king with a grievance could starve them. So they buy the chamberlain's goodwill and sue for peace.
The occasion is a set piece. On an appointed day Herod puts on royal clothing, takes the throne, and gives a speech to a delegation that has every commercial reason to be pleased with him. The audience does what such an audience does, and the acclamation is put in five words: The voice of a god, and not of a man.
Nothing suggests Herod believed it. The point is what he did not do. The narrative supplies the charge in a single clause — because he didn't give God the glory — and the sin named is an omission. He was offered something that was not his and did not hand it back.
The contrast the chapter has been building is now complete, and it runs through three refusals. Peter raised Cornelius from his feet with I myself am also a man. Barnabas and Paul will shortly tear their clothes at Lystra rather than accept a sacrifice. Herod sat still. The difference between the men in this book who have power and the men who have office is measured by what they do in the second when worship is offered to them.
The death is reported without any softening: an angel of the Lord struck him, and he was eaten by worms and died. The same order of being that walked Peter out of prison strikes the king who imprisoned him, and the writer uses the same phrase for both — an angel of the Lord — so that the reader cannot miss that one power has been at work through the whole chapter.
What is not present in the account is any note of triumph. There is no gloating, no sermon drawn from the corpse, and no suggestion that the church prayed for this. The man who killed James simply stops.
Then comes the shortest and most audacious sentence in the book: But the word of God grew and multiplied. Six English words set against a chapter containing an executed apostle, a maximum-security imprisonment, sixteen dead soldiers and a king struck down. The but is doing all the work. Everything the chapter narrated happened, and the thing being tracked was never in the hands of any of them.
It is the third of the book's progress reports, and the placement is deliberate: the growth is announced at the end of the most violent chapter so far, and what is credited with growing is not the church's numbers but the word. Herod had armies and a throne and lasted one paragraph.
The chapter closes by returning to the two couriers. Barnabas and Saul, having completed the famine relief, go back to Antioch, also taking with them John who was called Mark — the young man from the house with the gate, who is coming along. He will matter twice more, once badly and once well.
settled What this mark means