Can you imagine what it must have been like for Philip to run alongside the chariot of a man he’d never met before, all to share the good news of Jesus Christ with him in the middle of the desert? In this sermon, R.C. Sproul draws us into the scene of this divinely ordained encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.

So when they had testified and preached the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.

Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is desert. So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, and had come to Jerusalem to worship, was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet. Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.”

So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him. The place in the Scripture which he read was this:

“He was led as a sheep to the slaughter;
And as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
In His humiliation His justice was taken away,
And who will declare His generation?
For His life is taken from the earth.”

So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him. Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?”

Then Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.”

And he answered and said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

So he commanded the chariot to stand still. And both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him. Now when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught Philip away, so that the eunuch saw him no more; and he went on his way rejoicing. But Philip was found at Azotus. And passing through, he preached in all the cities till he came to Caesarea.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it.

The Old Gaza Road

In the previous sermon, we looked at the beginning of the ministry of Philip in Samaria. We were told the whole town, after hearing the gospel preached by Philip and seeing the signs and wonders God performed, was given over to joy because the oppression they had suffered under Simon Magus and occult powers had been defeated and lifted. We also saw the treachery of Simon Magus when he sought to purchase from Peter the gift and power of the Holy Ghost.

Luke continues the narrative of Philip’s missionary journey in our text today. We often hear about the missionary journeys of Saint Paul and sometimes forget that the missionary journeys of the early church began before Paul, and we see it specifically in this text in the person of Philip. We are told that after Philip left the city he was in, he and his entourage continued to preach throughout the villages and the cities of the region of Samaria.

In many Bibles, after the book of Revelation, there are maps. If you look at Palestine on those maps, you will see that in the north is Galilee, in the south is Judea, and sandwiched in between is the region of Samaria. Philip had been ministering north of Jerusalem in Samaria, and now an angel of the Lord came to him in a similar way to when God called Elijah to his desert ministry. He said to Philip, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.”

What strikes me about the angel of the Lord’s instruction is that the city of Gaza, which had been one of the five important cities of the Philistines, had been destroyed by Alexander the Great. This road that originally went from Jerusalem to Gaza was in almost complete disuse because a new road in that direction had been built.

It reminds me of when I was growing up and I met a girl when I was in the second grade, and she was in the third grade, and she lived on a street in the town where I grew up. Her address was 241 Old Clairton Road. This was the girl I eventually married, so I remember that address. During my youth, if anybody was traveling from Pittsburgh to the city of Clairton, nobody drove on Old Clairton Road because a new Clairton Road had been built, and you would lose a lot of time meandering via the roundabout way on Old Clairton Road. But thanks be to God, Old Clairton Road was not destroyed, and homes were built along it that gave to me the one celebrating Mother’s Day at our house today.

That was the way it was when the angel of the Lord said, “Philip, I want you to go to the ‘Old Gaza Road.’” Nobody went on the “Old Gaza Road” anymore, so it was almost like God was directing Philip into the middle of the desert for no apparent reason. But Philip obeyed the commandment of the Lord and went down from Samaria past Jerusalem and made his way along the road.

The Ethiopian Eunuch

As Philip went, there was somebody else traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, and we are introduced to the one called the “man of Ethiopia, a eunuch who had great authority under Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians.”

Let me take a moment to talk about the Ethiopian eunuch. To be a eunuch meant to be emasculated surgically in antiquity. This was not uncommon, as eunuchs were often made to stand guard over a king’s harem. The reason for their emasculation was obvious, as the king could trust a man who would not be inclined to interfere with the king’s harem.

Some eunuchs rose to elevated positions of authority. They became household stewards for the royal house, chamberlains, treasurers in the community, and so on. In this case, we are told that the Ethiopian eunuch was a man of great authority under Candace the Queen of Ethiopia.

In antiquity, the kings of Ethiopia did not take care of the royal business of the nation. It was the belief in Ethiopia that the kings were descendents of the gods, and being divinely human creatures, they were too holy to be charged with taking care of the business of the empire. So, the business of the empire was put in the hands of the queen mother, and every queen mother for many generations was given the title or name Candace. That was the way it worked in Ethiopia centuries ago, where the king reigned, but he did not rule.

Luke says that the Ethiopian had great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians and charge of all her treasury. The Ethiopian eunuch had come to Jerusalem to worship, which indicates that he was either a Jew in dispersion or, more likely, a gentile who somewhere along the line had embraced the teachings of Judaism and had made a long journey from Ethiopia to Jerusalem for some special occasion. He was now on his way back to Ethiopia.

Philip Overtakes the Chariot

“And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet.” Luke mentions the term “chariot,” but do not picture the Ethiopian eunuch driving down the road to Gaza at breakneck speed, the reins in his hands with his team of horses pulling his chariot on two wheels like Ben Hur racing around the Circus Maximus. That is not the kind of chariot he was in. He had an entire entourage with him, and it was more like a covered wagon or stagecoach being drawn along the desert road. The chariot was not racing at speed, and the eunuch himself was not driving the chariot. The eunuch would not have been holding the reins, as some subordinate to him would have been driving.

We are told that he was seated in the chariot reading, and we are also told that he was reading out loud. That may sound unusual, but think back to the days when you learned how to read in kindergarten or first grade. In my first grade classroom, there was a semi-circle at the front of the room, and when reading hour came, we went up to the semi-circle, took our readers, and had to take turns reading aloud, sounding out the words as we went. People normally learn to read out loud when they first begin reading.

By the time you get to college, you are not supposed to go to the library and read out loud. It takes a certain sophistication to be able to read silently. In fact, people who are slow readers and go to speed-reading courses are taught to read without moving their lips because the motion of moving their lips slows them down.

People like the eunuch were not reading books published by Gutenberg or modern publishers. They were reading manuscripts that were very difficult to follow, as they conserved space by placing the words close to each other. As a result, people would commonly read them out loud.

Here is the scene: in the middle of the desert, a caravan was proceeding down the road. There, a high official from Ethiopia was seated, reading out loud, and God sent Philip to intercept him. Luke says, “Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go near and overtake this chariot.’”

We do not know how fast the chariot was going, but we are told that Philip had to run to catch up with it. I am positive that the chariot did not have rearview mirrors. Otherwise, whoever was riding in the passenger’s seat would have been alerted that a man was running behind them in the desert, apparently chasing after the high official from Ethiopia.

Philip Preaches Christ

The Ethiopian man was sitting in his chariot, reading a text out loud from the Old Testament. He looked up and there was an unfamiliar man running alongside his chariot. As Philip was running, he shouted to the Ethiopian eunuch, because he could hear what he was reading, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?”

The eunuch looked at the man running alongside him asking if he understood the text of Isaiah and said: “Frankly, no I don’t. How can I possibly understand it unless somebody can explain it to me?” With that, the eunuch invited Philip to come up into the chariot and talk to him about the text. Luke says:

The place in the Scripture which he read was this:

“He was led as a sheep to the slaughter;
And as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
In His humiliation His justice was taken away,
And who will declare His generation?
For His life is taken from the earth.”

Does that text sound familiar to you? When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper and I read from the text of Scripture while the elements are being distributed, my first choice for reading is Isaiah 53. It begins with these words:

Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Isa. 53:1–6)

Is this not familiar? It sounds almost like an eyewitness description of the passion of Jesus, but these words were written almost eight hundred years before the cross. In that interval of eight hundred years, no one came along to fulfill the Isaiah’s prophecy of the Suffering Servant of the Lord who would bear the sins of God’s people.

Eight hundred years later, as an Ethiopian was reading this text, Philip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian answered: “No. Who is this prophet talking about? Is he talking about himself, or is he talking about someone else who is to come?”

Luke tells us, “Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him.” Why did Philip not just turn to the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, First or Second Corinthians, or the prison epistles, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, or the book of Revelation? Those books had not been written yet. Not one word of the New Testament was yet in print. When the gospel went to Ethiopia through Philip the evangelist, it went through the preaching of the Word of God, because we are told that faith comes by hearing from the Word of God.

Philip preached Jesus not from the New Testament, but like Jesus Himself preached to the people on the road to Emmaus from the Old Testament, Philip preached Christ. He covered not just a few of the verses in Isaiah 53, but the whole chapter of Isaiah 53, then brought him up to date with the work of Christ in His atonement, resurrection, and ascension.

Conversion and Baptism

The Ethiopian eunuch was hearing and absorbing what Philip had to say, and the chariot was still moving down the road. As they were going down the desert road, they came upon water alongside the roadside, probably a small oasis they did not expect to find in the vicinity. When they saw the water, the eunuch said: “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?”

I am sure Philip had already talked about the Great Commission to go into all the world preaching and teaching Christ and baptizing all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I am convinced he explained to the eunuch that just as circumcision was the sign of the covenant before Jesus, now the new sign of the kingdom of God and the new covenant was the sign of baptism. The eunuch had absorbed all these things, and he saw water and said, “Is there anything that keeps me from being baptized?”

Philip said, “If you believe with all of your heart, you may be baptized.” The Eunuch then answered and said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

What is the significance of this exchange? In the early church, when the gospel was preached to foreigners, people who were strangers to the old covenant, who had never been circumcised as infants, who came for the first time to the covenant community as adults, before they could receive the sign of that new covenant, had to make a profession of faith. That is still true in the church today.

At the same time, in the early church, we know that the process went like this: when gentiles were converted, first they made a profession of faith, then they were baptized, then they were welcomed into the fellowship of the church and engaged in what was called the Didache, or the teaching of the Apostles and disciples.

Converts did not have to pass a test on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on Moses, David, or Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the Psalms; all they had to do was embrace Jesus, be baptized, brought into the church, and then they were taught all the Old Testament that led up to these things.

No Hindrance

In the twentieth century, a church historian and New Testament scholar named Oscar Cullmann made a discovery. In the early church’s liturgy, there was what was called a “hindrance formula,” going back to Jesus’ rebuke of the disciples with respect to little ones, when the children tried to crowd around Jesus, get His attention, and come to Him, and the disciples said, “Go away, don’t bother the master,” and so on. Jesus rebuked His disciples, saying, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” The word “forbid” there could also be translated as “hinder.” Jesus was saying, “Hinder them not.”

Cullmann said that in the New Testament, in the early church, before a person could be brought into communion with the church, they did not have to jump through hoops or pass a theological examination. What was required for membership was minimal. If there was no clear hindrance or barrier to joining the church, and if they made a profession of faith in Christ, they were given baptism, welcomed into the community, even as gentiles, and then received their fuller instruction.

When Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may,” and the eunuch said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” what happened? The eunuch said to the driver: “Stop the chariot,” and they stopped on the spot. Philip and the eunuch got out of the chariot, went over to the water, and they did not just stand by the water. They walked down into the water, and Philip baptized the eunuch.

Be careful how many inferences you draw from that. There is not one word in this text about the mode of baptism. They may have walked down to the water, and we have seen paintings in the early church where people would go into the water and take a handful of water and pour it onto the convert’s head. That was one way of baptism. Others talk about immersing. We do not know whether the eunuch was sprinkled, sprayed, or dunked. All we know was that he was baptized in and with water.

The Joy of Christ

Luke continues, “Now when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught Philip away, so that the eunuch saw him no more; and he went on his way rejoicing.”

John Guest, the evangelist from England, once told me of his conversion in Liverpool when he was a young man. He had gone to a meeting and heard the gospel for the first time, and he was converted. He said, “When I went home that night, I ran through the streets of Liverpool, and I jumped over every fire hydrant.” He said: “I was jumping in the air and I kicking my heels together. It was the happiest day of my life because it was the day that I met Christ.”

The eunuch made an arduous trek all the way to Jerusalem to go through the rituals of the Old Testament, and on the way home, he discovered Christ. The evangelist who explained Christ to him was taken away from him, but the joy of Christ stayed with him all the way home to his nation.

“But Philip was found at Azotus,” which was a name given to Old Testament Ashdod. Luke continues, “And passing through there, he preached in all of the cities till he came to Caesarea.” Philip did a U-turn. He went north to Samaria, then he was called by God to go back south toward Jerusalem, back down toward Gaza, and then back up the cities of the plain, the five cities of the Philistines. Remember, you can find that in the maps in your Bible. Finally, Philip headed north, back to the city of Caesarea, which had been built by Herod and given the name in honor of Caesar Augustus, and that was the headquarters of the Roman procurator. As an aside, remember that Pontius Pilot did not live in Jerusalem. He lived in Caesarea and came on special occasions down to Jerusalem. The gospel first went north, then back south, and then back up the plain again, and north to Caesarea.

At this point in the text, we leave the study of the missionary journeys of Philip, and we do not hear about him until many years pass in his life, but his ministry is picked up later in the book of Acts. For now, we are being prepared for the introduction of the supreme missionary of the New Testament church: Paul, the Apostle.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Father, how we thank You for this wonderful testimony of the way the Spirit empowered Philip to reach out to a foreigner who understood not the text of Isaiah. What was true of him is often so true of us, that we do not understand these things until somebody explains them to us. We thank You for those opportunities we have to study not only the New Testament but the Old Testament and see how both converge in their proclamation that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Be our tutor and deepen our understanding of these things, even as You worked through Philip to explain them to the eunuch of Ethiopia. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.