The Sons of the Eunuch

     The Bible records only one Ethiopian coming to faith in Christ. It is an unusual story. In Acts 8, God calls Philip away from a successful preaching ministry in Samaria to an out of the way destination where, by divine circumstance, he encounters an unnamed Ethiopian official. As was not unusual for court officials of that time, he was a eunuch. God himself did the prep work by having the eunuch, an apparent convert to Judaism, read from Isaiah about the suffering savior at the moment Philip showed up. Talk about an opening for the gospel. Philip began with that passage to teach about Christ.  The eunuch responded in faith right away, requested baptism at the first body of water they came to, then Philip was miraculously whisked away by the Spirit to another area of ministry.
     Why did God so uniquely pursue an unnamed traveler who didn't even have a family to carry on his faith? Because God knew that millennia of Christians would be born of that eunuch's faith. There are still believers in Ethiopia and there, like so many other places, they are being martyred by Muslim extremists. They are the spiritual sons of the eunuch. This is my tribute to them.

The Sons of the Eunuch

 The sons of the eunuch are dying

in Ethiopia, slain.         

Dying because they are Christians,

martyred for Jesus' name.

Spiritual sons of a father

unnamed in the Bible's pages,

but in those that came after him,
his faith lives on through the ages

.

The ways of God are mysterious,

but the will of Christ is plain,

He lives through the sons of the eunuch,

and they die to live again.