Acts 7:39

39. Caught away Philip This, with the correspondent phrase in the next verse, was found at Azotus, can be hardly understood otherwise than to mean that Philip was by bodily “rapture” transferred to Azotus miraculously. So Ezekiel says, (Ezekiel 8:3,) “He (the Lord God) put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the Spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north.” The Old Testament prophets, at one period, not seldom underwent such transport. Said Obadiah to Elijah, “As soon as I am gone from thee, the Spirit of the Lord will carry thee whither I know not; and so when I come and tell Ahab, and he cannot find thee, he shall slay me.” And again: “Let them go and seek thy master, lest peradventure the Spirit of the Lord hath taken him up and cast him upon some mountain or valley.” The Greek for caught up here is used to describe the ascension of glorified saints, (1 Thessalonians 4:17,) and of Paul’s rapture into Paradise, (2 Corinthians 12:2-4,) and of the man-child into heaven, (Revelation 12:5.)

Rejoicing So that as there was a rapture of Philip’s body, there was a rapture in the eunuch’s soul. Joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit; and that the eunuch showed this fruit is good proof that his conversion was as sound as it was sudden. As to Philip the angel of God had given command, so to the eunuch, Philip, like an angel, had suddenly come, briefly but beneficially stayed, and instantly disappeared, never again to be beheld. One was to go beyond the land of the pyramids; the other northward, to the Roman Cesarea.