for Jason and Cal and Willie Joe

". . . it is asked why [Paul and Silas] were cast into prison, since punishment had already been inflicted on them; for prison has been set up as a place of confinement. Obviously they made use of this kind of correction until they might make further inquiries. And so we see that the servants of Christ are treated more inhumanly than adulterers, robbers and all sorts of other criminals. That makes us see more clearly that power of Satan's in moving the minds of men to have no respect for any semblance of a judicial investigation in the persecution of the Gospel. But even if the circumstances of the godly in the defence of the truth of Christ are harder than those of the ungodly in their crimes, yet it goes well with them, because in all the injuries which they suffer, they triumph gloriously in the sight of God and the angels. They endure insults and ignominies, but because they know that the marks of Christ have more value and merit in heaven than the empty and fading show of earth, the more unjustly and abusively the world torments them, the richer grounds they have for glorifying. . . . Therefore even if the Lord allowed injuries to be inflicted on Paul and Silas by unjust judges, yet He did not allow them to be branded with any disgrace which would not result in greater glory. For since all the persecutions that we must suffer for the testimony of the Gospel are what is left of the sufferings of Christ (cf. Col. 1.24), just as our Head turned the cross, accursed as it was, into a triumphal chariot, so He will also honor the prisons and gibbets of His own, so that they may triumph over Satan and all the ungodly." From John Calvin's commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (16:22)