“….. and he (the jailer) threw them (Paul & Silas) into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; and suddenly there came a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison house were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.”
(Acts 16:24-26 NASB)
“Threw them into the inner prison….”
“Fastened their feet in the stocks.”
They “….were praying and singing hymns of praise to God…”
“….the prisoners were listening to them…”
These “stocks” weren’t the kind we normally picture where the prisoner’s head, arms and feet were clamped or a neck collar was worn. Here, only their feet, as if to mock them; as if only partial bondage is a type of freedom. But they were the truly free…they were the “free indeed.”
Their fellow residents were listening - attentively. It’s not often one hears song in the middle of a dungeon in the middle of the night.
They couldn't run….but they could sing; and I bet they lifted their aching arms and empty hands to the One Who held their hearts captive in true freedom.
Thomas Barnes says about this scenario:
“The darkness, the stillness, the loneliness all gave sublimity to the scene.”
Scientists tell us that singing releases endorphins; the brain’s “feel good” chemical. That night, singing released more than that. Singing in the middle of one’s midnight releases what holds us to the pain of this world and frees us to stay, unshackled, to sing to the rest of its listening captives. Worship shakes the foundations of dungeons and darkness and pain and death, opens doors, and loosens chains.
Singing praises to God, in the midst of the world’s vice-grip, when all is lost, is a sacrifice, which by the nature and origin of the word makes it holy.
Humanity made the first attempt at sacrifice by making an exchange that wasn’t theirs to make. They sacrificed eternal fortune for a lie, walked into their own dungeon, bent down and cuffed freedom to the cold metal of sin and self; the world’s most costly and painful redundancy.
And so… a true sacrifice had to be made in exchange for the false one. The ankles and wrists of Royalty were empaled and Heaven’s heart rubbed raw and bloodied by the shackles of what man could not do, and a Song was composed in the middle of a dungeon that should rightfully hold you and me.