Acts 12:11-20

¹¹Then Peter woke up properly. He said to himself, “Now I know that this is true. I’m not dreaming. God did send one of his angels to save me. That big boss Herod and the Jewish leaders wanted to hurt me, but God saved me from them.”

¹²Peter thought about this, then he went to Mary’s house. She was the mother of a man called John Mark. A lot of Christians were praying for Peter there in her house.

¹³Peter knocked on the door of that house. A working girl called Rhoda came to the door,

¹⁴but she didn’t open it. She heard his voice and knew it was Peter, and she was so happy she just ran back into the house and told all the people, “Peter is here, standing outside the door.”

¹⁵Those people said, “You are mad.” But she kept telling them that Peter really was there. Then they said, “It can’t be him. It has to be the angel that looks after him.”

¹⁶But Peter kept on knocking on that door. After a little while they stopped arguing and opened the door and saw him, and they were really surprised.

¹⁷Peter held up his hand to get them to be quiet, then he told them the story, about the way God got him out of that jail. Then he said, “Tell this story to the other Christians, and make sure you tell it to that other man called James too.” Then he left them and went to another place.

¹⁸After the sun came up the soldiers were really upset and worried. They were all saying things like, “Hey, what happened to Peter? Who let him get away?”

¹⁹Then Herod told them all to look everywhere to find him. But they didn’t find him. So Herod judged those 16 soldiers. He asked them some questions, then he told the other soldiers to kill them. After that Herod left Judea country and went to stay for a while in the town called Caesarea.

²⁰At that time Herod was very angry with the people that lived in the towns called Tyre and Sidon. This made a problem for those people. You see, Herod was the boss of Galilee country and those people got all their food from Galilee, and they didn’t want Herod to stop them from getting that food. So some of them went to Herod’s house to talk to him about this problem. At Herod’s house a man called Blastus was one of his important workers, so those men talked to Blastus and said, “Please help us get a chance to talk with Herod. We want to stop all this trouble.” So Blastus got Herod to agree to talk to those people, and Herod told them the day for that talk. On that day Herod put on his special clothes, and he sat in his special seat, to show everyone that he is the big boss of that country. And then he talked to all the people.