Acts 8:26-40

THE CONVERSION OF THE ETHIOPIAN EUNUCH

26-40. After the apostles have completed their Samaritan tour and returned to Jerusalem, leaving Philip surrounded by hosts of his converts pressing the battle, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in visible form, and with audible voice sending him away on a southern tour down toward Gaza, the most southern city in Palestine, in the olden time occupied by the Philistines, the road leading through a desert. For expedition he leaves Jerusalem on the east, taking a bee-line toward Gaza. Ere long he recognizes a man in royal costume slowly riding along before him on a chariot, lost in meditation as he reads the wonderful prophecy of Isaiah 52, 53, describing the Lord's Christ in His first advent into the world, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, despised and rejected of men,” bleeding and dying to redeem a wicked world from sin, death and hell. The strange traveler proves to be the first comptroller of the royal treasury of Queen Candace, of Ethiopia. He is a Jewish proselyte, a worshiper of the God of Israel, who has traveled fifteen hundred miles to Jerusalem to worship the Most High in His temple, and is now returning. He has in his possession the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, translated by seventy learned Jews, B. C. 280, under the administration of Ptolemy Philadelphus, at Alexandria, Egypt, for the benefit of his Jewish subjects. It had no divisions into Chapter s, out he was reading the prophecy of Isaiah, found in Chapter s 52 and 53. Pursuant to his kind invitation, Philip mounts the chariot, and, seated beside his brother in ebony, preaches to him the Christ of prophecy, about whom he has been reading.