Q&R: An Angel from the Lord Strikes Down Herod with Worms!? – Brad Jersak

A Lousy Way to Die … Is Jesus to Blame?

Question:

What do you make of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 and King Herod in Acts 12? Both seem to imply that even in the New Covenant era, God is striking down people in a way that seems inconsistent with Jesus and his gospel!

Response:

First, regarding Ananias and Sapphira, I’ll simply direct you to my previous blog with Richard Murray titled “CSI Jerusalem: Who Killed Ananias & Sapphira” (click the title for the CWR Blog).

Second, as for the death of Herod Agrippa, I might start with:

  • From a wrathful perspective, the family had it coming: in Acts 12, we have Herod Agrippa 1, nephew of Herod Antipas (who beheaded John the Baptizer and interrogated Jesus), and grandson of Herod the Great (who slaughtered the infants in Jerusalem to try to kill Baby Jesus). Agrippa had also already beheaded James and imprisoned Peter. From the biblical perspective, these are not good guys.
  • From a Jesus-follower’s perspective, we wouldn’t and shouldn’t ever wish that wormy death on our worst enemies. But let’s look at what the text says:

20 Now Herod was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon, and they came to him with one accord, and having persuaded Blastus, the king’s chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country depended on the king’s country for food. 21 On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to them. 22 And the people were shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” 23 Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.

In his book Antiquities, Josephus describes the same event a little differently:

On the second day of a festival, Herod Agrippa appeared in the theater with a robe made of silver. When it sparkled in the sun, the people cried out flatteries and declared him to be a god. The king, carried away by the flattery, saw an owl (an omen of death) sitting on a nearby rope, and immediately was struck with severe stomach pains. He was carried off to his house and died five days later.

In either case, ouch! I hate when that happens. It’s a lousy way to die. And a difficult dilemma from a New Testament perspective. My response will come from some convictions about the God revealed in Jesus and what we notice in the text:

Luke’s Description

The author of Acts (Luke) sees a cause and effect scenario between Herod’s sin and Herod’s death by worms, then connects the dots to infer that the agent of Herod’s death is the act of “an angel of the Lord.”

For now, we’ll put a pin in our doctrine of inspiration, but I promise to come back to it. Before we go there, can we see that apart from direct revelation, Luke is making a logical leap with biblical precedent. Here’s the math:

  • Herod dies of worms. Why?
  • Herod’s death coincides with the people’s blasphemous response to his wonderful oration. The suddenness of his death seems to indicate supernatural intervention.
  • Herod must have died by complicity with their blasphemy, robbing God of glory by accepting their adoration as worship.
  • Therefore, since the death involved blasphemy leading to death by supernatural intervention, who was the agent? The text says “a messenger of the Lord struck him down” via a parasitic attack.

If this is what Luke is doing, can we pause to notice where Luke’s storytelling seems congruent with some Old Testament accounts (that inform his writing) but also seem inconsistent with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ?

Old Testament Parallels

  • 1 Samuel 16 — After the Spirit of the Lord departs from Saul: “Now the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.” — 1 Samuel 16:14 See also 1 Samuel 16:15; 18:10; 19:9, all of which refer to “an evil spirit from the Lord” whose role is to torment.
  • Judges 9 — Abimelech and Shechem, after violence and betrayal:“God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the leaders of Shechem…”
    — Judges 9:23 Here the “evil spirit” seems to refer to hostility, discord, or destructive animosity.
  • 1 Kings 22 — Lying spirit in the prophets, according to the prophet Micaiah:“The Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets.”
    — 1 Kings 22:23 Difficult, because the spirit God allegedly sends is involved in deception.
  • Isaiah 45:7 — More generally, God is named as the creator of calamity.“I form light and create darkness,
    I make peace and create calamity…”     The Hebrew word translated “calamity” here is often rendered “evil.”

These texts come from an era when the ancient Near Eastern worldview assigned God’s sovereignty to all events, even troubling ones. Later Jewish and Christian thought would try to distinguish between:

  • God directly causing evil,
  • God permitting destructive forces,
  • or God withdrawing protection so that chaos overtakes someone.

So, depending on one’s hermeneutical tradition, we might interpret these passages very differently:

  • some read these texts literally,
  • some read them symbolically or psychologically,
  • some see them reflecting an early stage in Israel’s theological development.

In any case, whatever Luke’s actual worldview, his literary approach aligns with the theological descriptions of the Hebrew textual tradition.

The Wrath and Destroyer Overcome

Even in the Old Testament, certain authors began to question whether “the destroyer” (sometimes translated “destroying angel”) is actually “from the Lord” at all. Where the OT sometimes names God as the death-dealer, then tries to wash God’s hands of guilt by simply “sending the destroyer” (a cosmic assassin), eventually, “the wrath” or “the destroyer” are regarded as enemies of God to be overcome by the Messiah.


The key text is Wisdom of Solomon 18:20–25, where Aaron prefigures the Messianic deliverer by “staying the plague”:

For a blameless man was quick to act as their champion;
he brought forward the shield of his ministry,
prayer and propitiation by incense;
he withstood the wrath and put an end to the disaster,
showing that he was your servant.

He conquered the anger [wrath] not by strength of body,
nor by force of arms,
but by his word he subdued the punisher [destroyer],
appealing to the oaths and covenants given to the ancestors.”
— Wisdom 18:21-22

The passage culminates with the image of the destroyer halted, not by violent force but by intercession:

“For when the dead had already fallen on one another in heaps,
he intervened and held back the wrath,
and cut off its way to the living.”
— Wisdom 18:23

That passage is referring back to this passage in Numbers 16 with Messianic anticipation:

Then Moses said to Aaron, “Take your censer and put fire on it from the altar, and lay incense on it, and carry it quickly to the congregation, and make atonement for them, for wrath has gone out from the Lord; the plague has begun.”
So Aaron took it as Moses had ordered, and ran into the middle of the assembly, where the plague had already begun among the people. He put on the incense and made atonement for the people.
He stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stopped.
— Numbers 16:46–48 (NRSV)

New Testament Sin, Death, and the Lord

  • In the New Testament, SIN kills you, God does not. The direct “wages of sin is death” is dramatically different than saying “the wages of sin is divine punishment that kills you.”
  • And if we imagine that the consequences include a supernatural aspect, is the destroyer an angel or a demon? In Acts, the Greek word is a ‘messenger’ (literally) … but the problem is that it is supposedly “from the Lord.” If Luke is simply echoing earlier texts for effect, or worse, actually believes this spirit truly comes “from the Lord,” it is all the more problematic because in the New Testament, “the Lord” is none other than Jesus Christ. So are we meant to believe that Jesus ever sends supernatural messengers of death to kill blasphemers through natural (albeit instant) means (worms)?
  • Jesus himself denies this. Eventually we come to John’s gospel, written decades after Luke-Acts, when the beloved disciple has had time to work out the implications of Jesus’ revelation of the God “who is light and in whom there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
  • The Jesus of John settles the question in John 10:10: “Who steals, kills, and destroys? The thief. Always the thief. But I [the very image of God] am not a death-dealer. I AM an abundant life-giver.” In Jesus’ model, the Christlike God is not the author of death, nor does God send angels to kill to keep his own hands clean.

The Inspiration of Scripture

The Doctrine of Inspiration takes many forms. I address this in some depth in A More Christlike Word but for now, I can say that my doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture includes:

  • belief that Acts has been received into the Christian Scriptures as canonical,
  • belief that divine inspiration is a work of the Spirit that does not require literalist interpretations of the text (indeed, even the literal sense of any text precludes literal-ISM).
  • belief that divine inspiration is a work of the Spirit that involves the authors’ or narrators’ still-unfolding understanding of God, the gospel, and its implications—a growth-curve evident in their language.
  • belief that divine inspiration is a work of the Spirit in the reader, who must treat the text honestly and without alarm wherever the narrator’s language appears incongruent with the revelation of God in Christ. Here, we as readers are dependent on the Spirit’s guidance in reading spiritual words spiritually (1 Corinthians 2) and recognizing how even the New Testament must be read through Gospel and Holy Spirit lenses.

In other words, my way of reading Acts 12 is that, as with the OT, so too the authors of Scripture in the apostolic era are still in a developing conversation about how the consequences of sin relate to the providence of God, culminating in the words of Jesus in John’s Gospel, which then tempers the interpretive inferences of Luke in Acts.

Rather than reducing it to a zero-sum, right-wrong contradiction, we see these disciples faithfully enroute down the Emmaus Way, making their way towards the fullness we see in our canonized Scriptures, and recognizing how our own reading is developing so that your question arose in the first place. Well done.

Do you have Questions? Check out the many questions and our Christ-centered Responses on PTM’s Q & R page.

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