Week 37 Acts 8
Simon the Magician appears once in the bible in Acts 8. Twenty-six verses and then never mentioned again.
He’s a pretty intriguing character. Famous & charismatic & mysterious:
Simon practiced sorcery…and amazed all the people of Samaria
He boasted that he was someone great
People said this man is rightly called the Great Power of God
He had amazed (people) for a long time with his sorcery.
Simon was a powerful & arrogant & well-established practitioner of dark magic. So it was against the odds when he believed and was baptized by Philip.
The last part of his story gets interesting… Simon offered to pay Peter for the power to dispense the Holy Spirit. It was an outrageous offer and Peter lowered-the-boom – told Simon to repent of his wickedness. The story ends with Simon asking Peter: pray to the Lord for me so that nothing you have said may happen to me.
That’s it. No report that Simon repented for himself. Just that he asked Peter to stand-in for him as a kind of proxy-repenter.
I looked outside the bible. There’s quite a bit about Simon. If it’s reliable none of it is very hopeful. It looks like he returned to sorcery and stayed a pagan & magician & heretic. A convert who un-converted.
Acts 8 doesn’t spell that out so it might be that stayed true to the faith. It’s other sources that say that after testing-the-waters of faith Simon decided he didn’t like what he’d found.
Note: quotes from Acts 8:9-11 & 24 (NIV)