Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Sanctification and Growth from Acts 4:32-5:42
“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And much grace was with them all. There were no needy persons among them.
For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to everyone as he had need. Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’), sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.
Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet. Then Peter said, ‘Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.’
When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him. About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, ‘Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is the price.’
Peter said to her, ‘How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.’ At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.
The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade. No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people. Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.
As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed.
Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. ‘Go, stand in the temple courts,’ he said, ‘and tell the people the full message of this new life.’
At daybreak they entered the temple courts, as they had been told, and began to teach the people. When the high priest and his associates arrived, they called together the Sanhedrin—the full assembly of the elders of Israel—and sent to the jail for the apostles. But on arriving at the jail, the officers did not find them there.
So they went back and reported, ‘We found the jail securely locked, with the guards standing at the doors; but when we opened them, we found no one inside.’ On hearing this report, the captain of the temple guard and the chief priests were puzzled, wondering what would come of this. Then someone came and said, ‘Look! The men you put in jail are standing in the temple courts teaching the people.’
At that, the captain went with his officers and brought the apostles. They did not use force, because they feared that the people would stone them. Having brought the apostles, they made them appear before the Sanhedrin to be questioned by the high priest. ‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,’ he said. ‘Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.’
Peter and the other apostles replied: ‘We must obey God rather than men! The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.’
When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them: ‘Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing.
After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.’
His speech persuaded them. They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name. Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.”
So reads the Word of God.
How wonderful it must have been to be alive in the period of the early church. What spiritual vitality! What dynamic participation in the Holy Spirit! What phenomenal growth within a single generation! Cells of Christians planted throughout the Roman Empire and beyond! What great leaders! Leaders who, by their proximity to the initial events to Jesus himself, knew Christ in the days of his flesh! What moral concern there was! What zeal to revamp the social setting of the Roman Empire! What love for the brothers and sisters that could produce such sharing of material goods! How unlike today!
Where is the spiritual vitality that stamped that early church amongst us? Where is the phenomenal growth? Evangelicalism in Canada is not even keeping up with growth rate of the nation. Where can there be such proximity to God as existed in the first century when people knew Christ in the days of his flesh? Where is the moral concern? When statistics tell us in North America, as the external religious industries go up, the link with morality goes down. Where is this independence from material concern?
How wonderful it must have been to live in the period of the early church! Or was it? In fact, you can go over these same things and raise some fundamental questions about that thesis. Spiritual vitality? Dynamic participation in the Spirit? Why, then, does the author of the epistle to the Hebrews write to his readers and berate his people for being spiritual amateurs, mere babes, when they should have, by this time, absorbed the meat of the Word and gone on to teach?
Spiritual vitality? Dynamic participation in the Spirit? Well, I suppose so. In Corinth there was a lot of dynamism. It also produced an incredible amount of immorality, dissension, party spirit, factionalism, strife, hatred, and selfishness. Great leaders who knew the risen Christ? Yes, but at this stage in the early church, they hadn’t even gotten the details of their theology sorted out yet.
Peter, who should have known better from the teaching of Jesus in the days of his flesh, still has to go through the vision of the sheet in Acts, chapter 10, in order to learn the Gentiles may be included in the kingdom without first becoming Jews. Then the church has to wrestle it through. In the epistle to the Galatians, there is still the Jerusalem Council to confront. There is the Colossian heresy still to come. Then there is the problem over Caesar.
In fact, one could make a very good argument that we stand in a more privileged position because we have gone through 2,000 years of church history in which various doctrines have had to be shaped and formulated on the basis of the initial Christian revelation precisely because so many different lies and errors and heresies have been advanced that we’ve been forced to think things through.
Moral concern? Love for the brothers? Well, yes, moral concern, but meanwhile, somebody was sleeping with his stepmother in 1 Corinthians 5, so shocking a sexual lapse that even the pagans of sexually loose Corinth jeered. Then, of course, there is 1 Timothy 3, with that list of qualifications for high pastoral office. It includes such things as not getting drunk and not beating up your wife and things like that, which suggests a normal aspirant for high office was not all that elevated.
Of course, this great love for Christians one for another, it did not extend to Paul, for he can write in his very last epistle, “All the Christians in Asia have deserted me.” You cannot read the agony of 2 Corinthians 10 through 13 without seeing how much factionalism sometimes rent the early church. Of course, there is James writing to Christians. “Whence come wars and fightings among you? Do they not arise from your own lusts?”
Would it have been so wonderful in the first century? I was brought up in French Canada, and there they have a saying, Plus Áa change, plus c’est la mÍme chose. “The more things change, the more it’s the same thing.” But this very fact is one of the things that guarantees the New Testament remains relevant to us today for, in fact, the church continues to face the same victories and the same defeats, the same strengths and the same weaknesses. The same Holy Spirit empowers us. The same Devil aims to defeat us.
This evening we shall examine two foci of opposition the early church had to face, two which the church must continue to confront today. Life is not in the Christian way simply a bed of roses with victory and joy throughout. In part, it is a fight, and the church in every generation in some degree will inevitably face two central forms of opposition: foes from within and foes from without.
1. Foes from within.
In chapter 4, verses 32 to 37, the setting is provided. We see here early Christian devotion to fellow Christians. The early Christian communalism depicted here testifies to the intimate concern Christians had for each other. There was so much love and concern one for another that there was a remarkable independence of any ensnarement to mere things. “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”
These believers, of course, still owned their own goods in one sense, as is made clear, for instance, in the next chapter, verse 4, when Peter insists when Ananias and Sapphira sold their land it was still their money to do with as they pleased. In other words, there was no imposition of communism, no imposition of complete poverty as a criterion for entering the Christian community. No, no, no.
This whole thing came about by the dynamic power of the Spirit from within. Christians loved each other so much that if they saw each other in need, in a day before the welfare state, they did whatever was necessary to alleviate the pressure. If that meant selling some goods, they sold some goods. If that meant getting rid of the family homestead or some prized land, they sold it. If only the love they had for each other in Christ Jesus could be demonstrated so that there were no needy persons amongst them.
Whether this practice left them rather vulnerable later when famine struck, as some argue, we are not in any position to criticize, for the truth of the matter is these Christians were simply demonstrating in practical terms the pulsating power of the Spirit within them. As a result, a fund was set up, initially administered by the apostles.
Then a single example is drawn out, the example of Barnabas. Doubtless, he is introduced partly to give a concrete example of what was taking place throughout the church. Doubtless, also, this is a way of introducing a man who becomes rather important later on in the book. Also, he appears here as a foil to Ananias and Sapphira in the next chapter.
In part, the use of tenses all through this paragraph shows he was just one of many. This was a continuous, ongoing practice. It’s not that everyone sold their goods at the same time, but as need was perceived, somebody got up and did it, and as a result, Joseph, one of them, did exactly the same thing and met the needs of some poor Christians in the initial community. He must have been an interesting character. You can well imagine how his nickname came about.
By this time, there were thousands and thousands and thousands in this Christian community. There is no way the apostles could have known them all intimately, but probably some of them had perceived this chap going around encouraging people. He was the sort of person who always helped elderly folk up the stairs. He was the sort of person who, when he found a Christian was down, inevitably would be the first to offer encouragement, time, and in this case, money. He was the sort of person who was so constantly encouraging others that he earned a nickname.
“Ah, yes. What’s his name? Son of encouragement.” We don’t have the same way of speaking today, but in the Semitic world, to say the “son of something” means that you are characterized by that thing. Thus, the son of Belial, the son of worthlessness, means basically you’re a worthless person.
In Israel today, you might be called the son of a pig, which is no aspersion on your parents. It just means you’re a filthy, unclean animal in the eyes of whoever is calling you that. Son of encouragement simply meant this person was characterized by encouragement. “I don’t quite remember his name but, you know … the son of encouragement.” He picked up the name and it stuck. I can think of worse names that Christians could have attached to them.
Here, then, is an example of early Christian devotion to fellow Christians, and I suggest to you this becomes an important lesson for us today, not least because many of the kinds of problems the early Christians met with this kind of self-sacrifice are met today in our society by welfare state.
There is a real sense in which close up we don’t have the opportunities for this kind of help that the first Christians had. Our opportunities for help are always more remote: the church in Ethiopia or something. Somehow the intimacy of this caring is lost when you simply write a check and give it to the tier fund or give it to World Vision or SIM or something, but I suggest to you what that means in addition to worldwide concern in our busy state, in our churches we need to demonstrate devotion to one another by all kinds of other practical ways.
It may be there are some who need special amounts of money or care, practical ways. I guarantee in a congregation like this there are also all kinds of people who need time, encouragement, help with a new baby, elderly folk, blind folk, people in various positions of despair or loneliness or discouragement who need our time, and in our busy world, very often the greatest single mark of self-sacrifice is the gift of time.
We find it easier to write a check today than to give our time, but if we demonstrate something of this communal concern for one another amongst ourselves, then in our churches we will begin to light the entire community as people take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus and say, “They must be Christians for they love one another.” Does not the Lord himself insist, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another”? Here was attestation of the power of the Spirit.
Yet, on the other hand, we see in this passage the first documented example of early Christian deceit. Whenever high
so that he can do the same sort of thing. As soon as revival comes there will be some people who are not so much interested in holiness as in a reputation for holiness. They want to be part of the Christian community, and if the Christian community is characterized by sharing and love and demonstrated power of the Spirit, they want that, too, but they want it in a kind of domesticated dosage so they have the reputation of being a part but are not consumed by it themselves.
This is typical of many people’s approach to biblical Christianity. It was the way some people approached Jesus’ miracles, of course. They saw him raise the dead, heal the sick, cast out demons, and feed the hungry. Yet, they could go to him and say, “Show us a sign. Give us a miracle. Then we’ll believe you are the Messiah.”
You wonder, “Were they blind? Weren’t there already many signs being done?” But the truth of the matter is, they wanted a sign that would leave Jesus in their pocket, that would domesticate him. “Turn this stone into bread. Then I’ll believe.” Jesus turns it into bread. Tomorrow they up the ante. They ratchet up the conditions. By tomorrow it’s, “Feed my entire family and I’ll believe.”
Suddenly, Jesus is no longer the one who brings the power of the kingdom into people’s lives to transform and heal and give a foretaste of a new heaven and earth. No, no, no. He’s in somebody’s pocket, and that’s the way some people want their holiness or their religion or their generosity. They want it domesticated so somehow they are the masters of the situation. They want even to be masters of Scripture rather than to be mastered by it. They want a reputation for love rather than to love self-sacrificially.
But the heart of their deceit, as Peter points out, was the conspiracy to lie against the Holy Spirit. It’s not just that they lied before the community. That’s what they thought they were doing. They thought by this lie they could keep some of the money and, thus, gain that way and, yet, at the same time have a reputation for being extraordinarily generous and, thus, gain that way, and all you had to do was deceive a few Christians. What difference did it make since, after all, they were giving a lot of money, and the money would help a lot of people?
But under the new covenant, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the people of God in a transforming way. Do you recall the promise of Jeremiah in chapter 31? The old covenant was basically a tribal arrangement. At Mount Sinai, the people were afraid of coming too close to God, so Moses served as a kind of intermediary. He was like God to the people, and he represented the people to God.
Then later, as the years passed, there were various institutions and gifts. Prophets, priests, and kings served and some other notable leaders, like Bezalel on whom the Spirit was poured out, but never do we read the Spirit was poured out all on the people. No, the entire arrangement of that old covenant was fundamentally tribal. That is to say, God dealt with a group of people as a whole through designated leaders who stood for the people before God and who stood for God before the people.
Thus, when David sins, there is a curse that comes upon the entire people and the entire people are chastened. When the Spirit is poured out, the Spirit is poured out on the monarch or the priest or the king or other notable leaders. David, having seen that the Spirit was withdrawn from Saul, when he sins, cries to God and says, “Withdraw not your Holy Spirit from me!”
But Jeremiah promises a new covenant. We read in Jeremiah 31, beginning at verse 29, “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ” Part of the entire tribal structure of the old covenant. “Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge. ‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers.’ ”
Verse 33: “ ‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord …” ’ ” That is, as under the old tribal structure where there were various individuals who were designated teachers and intermediaries of one sort or another.
“… because they will all know me.” Under the new covenant there is no special brand of mediators, of priests who are one notch farther in who have a special enduement of the Holy Spirit. Gifts are distributed, but all people under the new covenant have the Holy Spirit. “ ‘They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness, and I will remember their sins no more.’ ”
So also in Ezekiel 36. So also in Joel, chapter 2. The promise of the new covenant is associated with the promise of the outpouring of the Spirit. When the Spirit comes, each individual person under that new covenant will be transformed and have God’s ways, God’s standards implanted on the heart so that people will be pure.
They will love holiness. They will not need to be taught by some special brand of mediators. No. There may be teachers in the church but not mediating teachers. Merely the distribution of gifts from this one Spirit. Now someone comes along within this new covenant community and apes holiness. Do you see the heinousness now of the offense?
The very heart of the new covenant is transformed character, the result of regeneration, people who love holiness where they did not once love holiness, people who have been transformed from the inside. Now someone wants a reputation for that and pretends, in fact, that they have been transformed. Thus, they are lying regarding the gift of the Spirit. They are lying before God. They are not simply deceiving the church. There is a sense in which they are flaunting the new covenant, trying to domesticate that.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, are there not many, many ways in which we today to our shame treat the same blessed Holy Spirit as lightly? We may stand up in our prayer meetings and pray passionately for revival. Do we pray so earnestly on our knees in the quiet places? What does Jesus say about those who pray only in public? How many of us in our churches are more concerned for our reputation for moral integrity than we are with moral integrity itself? What is that but the same sin of deceit?
As a result, there was early Christian discipline as well. Some think Ananias simply fell down from a heart attack when he found his deceit exposed, a fortuitous event, but by the time you come to verse 9, Peter is actually predicting the death of Sapphira. No, this is God breaking into the church to discipline it immediately and shockingly.
Moreover, it’s not the only place in the New Testament where this sort of thing takes place. The others are not quite so dramatic; they are no less final. We read in 1 Corinthians 11, because certain people approached the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner, some in Corinth had fallen ill and others had actually fallen asleep. That is, they had died.
Not only so, but in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, in the case of immorality I mentioned earlier, Paul counsels the church to hand this person over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh which, despite the NIV, does not mean the destruction of the sinful nature which is one meaning flesh often has in Paul’s writings, but means the destruction of his physical well-being to death if need be in the hope that instead he will repent and turn again.
Paul, elsewhere in his first epistle to Timothy, can say he has cast over Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan in order that they may be taught not to blaspheme, and Satan’s aim is certainly not to destroy the flesh in the spiritual sense. It’s certainly not to destroy the old, sinful nature. His aim is to destroy the body, to destroy the person and bring him down to death.
It is almost as if the ultimate sanction in the New Testament (excommunication) was a self-conscious removal of the person by the church to an orb outside the kind of sphere of protective covering that the church has under the lordship of Christ, to put him outside that and say, “All right. If you’re not coming under this lordship, come under Satan’s lordship and see how you do there.”
The final sanction in the New Testament is very severe. In the New Testament, this final sanction is imposed in three areas: major moral turpitude, as here; major doctrinal deviation; and major, consistent, loveless factionalism as in 2 Timothy, for example. “Warn a divisive person once. Warn him twice. Then have nothing to do with him.”
Those three areas are, interestingly enough, precisely the three areas John deals with in his first epistle when he describes criteria for genuine, vital Christianity. That is, there was a certain doctrinal test (in his case, the test of the confession that Jesus is the Christ), there was also a moral test (obedience to Christ), and a love test (loving the brothers in Christ’s name).
In the New Testament, of course, church discipline does not begin with excommunication. In the New Testament, church discipline is part of the ongoing intercourse of the entire Christian community. Christians exhort one another, check up on one another, pray for one another, listen to one another, gently rebuke one another, and confront one another. That’s part of normal Christian discipline.
If you see something going amuck in someone’s life in your own church, then you have an obligation to pray for that person and quite possibly gently and with humility, remembering the possibility of a beam in your own eye, nevertheless, ultimately challenge that person with the truth and standard of God’s Word.
The higher up you are in church authority, the more you have that responsibility, but ultimately the extreme sanction is not only approved by the New Testament; it is mandated, for the church is never a social club, a gathering of people who have common social interests. It is the people of the new covenant, and that redeemed community aims under God to be a confessional, morally pure group.
It’s possible to take this teaching and turn it into a new set of legalisms. “Unless you meet my particular standards of holiness (never drink, smoke, swear, or chew, and never go out with girls who do) then you really can’t belong here. We’ll turf you out.” That’s not the point. We are all sinners.
Many people who are converted take a long time to exhibit all the patterns of Christian maturity some would like to see. I am more concerned about the direction of a life than I am about this or that little bit, but where there is no sign of direction toward conformity to Christ, New Testament sanctions are mandated.
This is not an easy teaching. Moreover, it is not always clear that God will act to preserve his church in so dynamic a way. Elsewhere, in the New Testament the church itself is to take this decision, as in 1 Corinthians 5. Nevertheless, it is quite clear God is concerned that his people be a pure people.
Both in Scripture and in Christian experience, whenever the church exercises discipline with brokenness and compassion, there is inevitably good result. The only instances I’ve seen where church discipline has turned out badly is where it has been imposed harshly with a self-righteous attitude, with a supercilious, holier-than-thou stance.
But where Christians remember the advice Paul gives to the Galatians in the sixth chapter, to the elders to remember themselves lest they also should be tempted, when the advice Paul gives to the Corinthians in his first epistle, the fifth chapter, to grieve over the person who has committed such a sin as well as to exercise church discipline, whenever such advice is followed, inevitably church discipline becomes a cathartic experience. It cleans up the church, and it can have restorative value to the erring member.
Does God, then, ever intervene quite as dramatically today as he did then? Perhaps not commonly. Perhaps that’s a good thing. How many of us would be here tonight? A man whom I respected a great deal in the Lord, an Australian who died recently, served in his youth a church in the Outback.
It was the only church in the area, and confessionally, it was a believing church, an evangelical church, but in fact, it was a reflection of a rough, tough, and rather immoral community. He went there as a young, single man, and he quickly discovered amongst his deacons and elders were cheats in business and people sleeping with other people’s spouses and an array of problems just too deep for him to be able to root out. He could not impose church discipline. Half the leadership in the church was compromised in one fashion or another.
They thought he was an amusing and interesting young man who they held on a nice leash, but frankly, there was no way that church was going to exercise discipline. After 18 months of frustrating ministry, while he sank into deeper and deeper despair, he finally turned to the Lord, and for three months he prayed diligently.
“Lord God, this is your church. I can’t even follow the dictates of Scripture about church discipline. I’m not strong enough. I’m not capable enough. I’m not wise enough. I’m not enough of a leader. You clean it up. Clean it up or take me out. I’m the wrong person for this job.” He prayed along those lines with tears for three months. Then all of a sudden, in the next three months, he had 16 funerals, all leading people in the church. The next year he baptized 200.
That’s not something we should run out and do too quickly (we might be the first to go), but I am persuaded God is as concerned to have a pure church today as he was 2,000 years ago. It is not by the imposition of merely legalistic standards. It’s, rather, a question of where the church is headed, where its heart is. Does it betray the pulsating power of the Spirit who is part of the entire new covenant relationship? Foes from within. But there are also …
2. Foes from without.
I shall say three things.
A. Successful ministry breeds jealousy, and jealousy ignites all other suspicions and hatreds.
In chapter 5, verses 12 and following, there is so much blessing on the ministry of the apostles that its small surprise in a fallen world jealousy was ignited. Here there was so much popularity in one sense for the church that people thronged even to line Peter’s shadow in order that they might be healed, and God honored that.
It was superstition, but the same God who was able to make even the wrath of man to praise him was pouring out his hand in rich blessing so even these people who wanted blessing by mere proximity to the leader of the apostles were blessed by God with healing. Partly because of this, we read in verse 17, “Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy.”
Successful ministry breeds jealousy, and jealousy ignites all other suspicions and hatreds. That, of course, was part of the motive of the Pharisees and Sadducees against Jesus recorded in John 11 and elsewhere. “If we don’t deal with this man, there’s going to be unrest. Then the Romans will come in to put the unrest down, and we’ll lose our places.” Bottom line motive: “We’ll lose our places.”
In other words, many, many theological and moral judgments that are made against various leaders in the church have, as the igniting spark, ministerial jealousy or more foundational jealousy. For example, whatever you think of Falwell, who in some issues may please you and in other issues may not please you, it is not too difficult to see at least part of the animosity expressed against him is fueled by jealousy at his remarkable influence.
A bare 25 years ago, comparable influence was wielded by a man like Norman Vincent Peale. Some say they found Peale appalling and Paul appealing, but whatever their views of Peale’s theological stance, there was no doubt he represented, along with Harry Emerson Fosdick and others, a certain kind of influence in American society at large. Now, when that influence is being wielded by some preachers from a different camp, at least some of the criticism is fueled by jealousy.
That will take place even within Christian circles to our shame, for some are less interested in the multiplication of the church than in the multiplication of their own reputation about the multiplication of the church, but Christians who live with eternity’s values in view will be first to rejoice at another brother or sister’s success and triumph in Christ. Beyond this superficial observation, there is a second point to observe.
B. God, in his providence, uses strange means and degrees in limiting and controlling the suffering imposed on his people.
There is, of course, the miracle of verses 19 and 20, a kind of foretaste of Peter’s escape in chapter 12. Yet, although God protects the apostles by taking them out of jail miraculously, he doesn’t bother protecting them from the flogging in verse 40.
That’s a strange kind of way of handling things, isn’t it? Isn’t the God who is capable of taking the apostles out of jail in such a way that not even the guards know they’re gone capable of seeing to it that they don’t get flogged? That flogging could kill you. The way it was administered was with a piece of ass-hide handle and three long thongs attached to that.
You were then strapped down, face down on the ground, and stripped. A total of 13 blows were administered, roughly two-thirds on your back and one-third on the front, to make a total of 39 lashes which kept you under the safe biblical maximum of 40. Nice touch. It could kill you. Paul suffered this from the synagogue courts, he tells us, five times, a measure, perhaps, of his commitment to the Jew first and also to the Greek. God doesn’t bother sparing his apostles this.
In verses 33 and following, what does God use to at least help them escape the death penalty? He uses a man by the name of Gamaliel, a renowned theologian who actually gave a lot of really terrible advice. This Gamaliel was renowned for his piety in first-century Israel. A good tradition about him says when he died all learning of Torah stopped.
What is his advice? His advice basically is, “If the Christian movement succeeds, then it’s of God. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not of God. Therefore, let’s stand back and wait and see what happens.” How would you like to apply that criterion, for example, to the rise of Islam? “If it succeeds, it’s of God. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not of God.”
Either you must understand succeed to mean at the last day, but then it’s, of course, a little late to do anything about it, or it’s a terrible criterion, for there have been many instances when Christianity, in fact, has been so viciously opposed that in some locale it has been snuffed out. There are no churches in the same geographical area as the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 today.
The last person with any sort of Christian attachment left the area in the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923 at the settlement of the Ottoman Empire. You don’t find Christians in that area today. There are not more than 40 evangelicals in all of Turkey today with a population of 40 million. When Christianity first took root in Japan, it was buffeted and persecuted and opposed so viciously that, in fact, it was snuffed out.
What kind of advice is this? Basically, it’s bad advice. Terrible advice. But God used that, too. In fact, probably Gamaliel’s motives weren’t all that good. One of the reasons why Gamaliel could give even this kind of half-baked defense of Christianity is because, at least, part of the Sadducee’s opposition stemmed from theological difference of opinion. The Sadducees were against the doctrine of the resurrection. They did not hold the doctrine of the resurrection was a biblical doctrine. The Pharisees did.
If you recall, Paul used that a little later on when he stands up in the Sanhedrin and says, “In defense of the doctrine of the resurrection am I called to account this day.” It seems as if Paul wasn’t quite sure about the wisdom of that strategy some time later, but it certainly achieved instant success at the time, for immediately the entire Sanhedrin broke up into dispute, the Pharisees saying, “This man has done nothing wrong,” and the Sadducees saying, “He’s worthy of death.”
Almost certainly Gamaliel here, in anticipation of precisely that kind of division, is using another kind of argument in order, in fact, to put down the Sadducees because of a theological difference of opinion. God uses that, too. In fact, both in Scripture and without, God has used many strange means, many strange degrees in limiting and controlling the suffering imposed on his people. A little later on, Herod picks up James; James is killed. Herod picks up Peter; Peter is spared and released. What kind of God is it who does these things?
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I am persuaded one of the dangers of the understanding of Christianity in our generation is the danger of reductionism. We want God taped. We want him domesticated, predictable, and the God of Scripture isn’t always predictable. Take, for example, the matter of healing. Here the apostles, for example, are so influential in this outpouring of God’s grace that even Peter’s shadow serves as a means of grace so that people are healed.
Then Paul? He writes to the Galatians and says, “On account of an illness I first came among you.” Almost certainly what happened was he hit the southern coast, a malarial swampland, contracted some disease, possibly malaria, and then you did what you had to do in those days before sulfa drugs and penicillin and the like.
You headed up into the highlands. That’s how come he first got there. He wasn’t healed. He got there because an illness forced him to move. The same Paul says, “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick,” The same apostle writes to Timothy and says, “Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake and for your frequent infirmities.” Yet, the same apostle is capable under God’s grace of effecting miraculous healings.
Or take the ministry of Jesus recorded in the gospel of John. In John 5, a man who was 38 years paralyzed was, in fact, healed by Jesus and told not to sin again lest a worse thing befall him. The implication is this particular paralysis came about because of a particular sin, but in John 9, there we find a man who was born blind, and when the disciples asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”
Jesus says, “Neither.” It wasn’t the result of a particular sin, an individual sin, at all. This was brought about in the providence of God for the glory of God. We want easy answers, and there are not always easy answers. In God’s wisdom and providence, he sometimes puts the church through suffering and persecution and opposition, and sometimes he spares the church.
We hear, for example, of one particular pastor in Ethiopia who, just when troops were coming in to arrest him, was saved by remarkable “coincidences,” but at other times, three pastors a week are executed currently under the Ethiopian regime. Is God asleep in some instances? No. The truth of the matter is God has various ways of teaching and instructing his church while sovereignly controlling events to preserve his own sovereign autonomy.
Supposing it were any other way.… Supposing, for example, that as soon as you became a Christian you had an automatic ticket to safety in every circumstance. How many people would be trying to join in just to sort of get the insurance? You would not depict holiness or commitment to the Lord or devotion to Christ.
Supposing instead Jesus never saved his people from anything. There were never any healings, never any miracles, and never any dramatic display of this sovereign, in-breaking power of God. What then? Then you would begin to wonder if this really was the age of the poured-out Spirit, if this really was the time of the down payment of the blessing that was to come. We cannot domesticate God. God in his providence uses strange means and degrees in limiting and controlling the suffering imposed on his people.
C. Ideally, Christians under suffering respond in three ways.
First, they respond with more determination than ever. Verse 29: “Peter and the other apostles replied: ‘We must obey God rather than men!’ ” Back in chapter 4, we saw also there, when persecution was first beginning to break out the Christians banded together and prayed. Verse 24: “They said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” ’ ”
Verse 29: “Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” I tell you it is sometimes a whiff of persecution, of opposition, that strengthens Christian roots.
One of the things that is alarming about North American Christianity is the opposition we face is relatively slight. In some circles, it’s a little more severe. When I was a student at McGill, there was an orthodox Jewish chap who became a Christian and his parents held a funeral for him. When I was growing up in Quebec, sometimes when you became a Christian you automatically lost your job. It happened not infrequently when I was reared there, but that kind of opposition can sometimes strengthen the church.
Between the years 1950 and 1952, evangelicals in the province of Quebec spent a total of eight years in jail for preaching the gospel. While I was growing up at that time with very few French-speaking churches with more than 15 or 18 people in them, there came to the province of Quebec some missionaries who had served in French West Africa, so they knew the language. The accent was a little different, but they knew the language.
They had some exposure to French culture, although obviously there was an African influence in their experience that was not in ours. They had seen mighty things from God. They had seen exorcisms of demons, and they had seen tens of thousands of people converted and many, many churches built up.
They came into the province of Quebec, and they were going to teach the brethren there how to do it. Not one of them lasted more than three months. Not one. Why? They had never tasted the stern face of God. They had never known what it was to be without fruitfulness. They had no categories for it. They couldn’t cope with it, and they left.
Whereas people like my father and a handful of others stuck it out through all those lean years. Today the fastest part of the church growth in Canada is in the province of Quebec, and my father, in his mid-70s, is viewed as a senior saint. In a generation when very few churches have Christians who are more than five years old, he has been in the ministry for 50 years.
He might have died without seeing any of that. It is of the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed. We do not know where God will pour out his blessing and where he will restrain it, but of this we may be sure: a whiff of opposition, a whiff of persecution can be an immensely strengthening thing.
Sometimes Christians go out of their way not to witness, not to plant their flag on the job or with their neighbors or whatever, because they want to avoid some opposition. The truth of the matter is, even in small ways, a little bit of opposition forces us to choose. It strengthens us. A plant that has grown in a house does not have a complex root system. A plant grown outdoors where there are more temperature extremes and wind, there the roots go down a little deeper. The plant is a little more stable. It is made or broken.
That is true even in small areas. At the age of 14 I started working in the summers at Canadian Tire, and because I wouldn’t cheat in a couple of matters, I discovered the manager was about to fire me. He didn’t, in point of fact, which meant he ultimately could trust me with the till, but it was at his command I was told to cheat, and I wouldn’t, so I was mocked throughout this small store. It suddenly dawned on me that I was glad, for I would rather be mocked for not cheating than cheat.
Christian witness is helped by opposition. We should not be afraid of it or be alarmed of it. God will not permit us to be tempted above what we are able to bear but will, with the temptation, make a way of escape that we may be able to bear it. Meanwhile, the witness of Acts is that opposition fosters determination.
Secondly, Christians, ideally, under suffering respond with clearer understanding of their allegiance to Christ. Notice how when they are told what they must not say, in fact, that is precisely what they do say. They’re told not to blame the leaders, and they’re told not to stress the resurrection, so they reply, “We must obey God rather than man!”
Verse 30: “The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.” The very two things they were told not to say. For in truth, very frequently it is opposition that sharpens our understanding of Christian truth. It is precisely when justification by grace through faith is most systematically denied that the church is forced most clearly to think through these matters biblically and denunciate such matters.
For, although the truth may be one, lies and errors are many. Therefore, the church must constantly be going through a process by which it thinks through how it understands the Scripture in light of this or that particular attack, this or that particular aberration. Thus, throughout the history of the church, the very things which have seemed to strangle the church or threaten the church or cast the church aside or corrupt the church have, on the long haul, proved to the church’s benefit as the church has wrestled with these matters.
I suggest to you that was not only true of a major error like Arianism in the fourth century which denied the deity of Christ or before that the most dangerous heresy the church ever faced until the modern post-Enlightenment period, Gnosticism, in which the church formulated central christological doctrines, but it is true today.
Our very struggling with such matters as the authority of Scripture, the principles of interpretation, the danger of subjectivity, the place of pluralism in such matters.… Our very struggling with these things forces Christians who are principially submissive to the authority of the Word of God to think more sharply, more clearly, more biblically, to formulate more accurately than generations of Christians who had not faced these things before had ever done.
That becomes a challenge, for you see, that’s not just the responsibility for a few theologians in their ivory towers. That’s the responsibility of the church. The church is to be growing in its understanding of Scripture. The church is to be growing in its understanding of its own age to know how to apply the truths of Scripture to that age.
It was Luther who said, “He who defends the truth at every point, save at that place where it is being denied, is a heretic.” Every generation of Christians is forced to think through, “Where is the truth under attack today? In what way is it under certain kinds of pressure of conformity today?” and then think through what needs to be confessed and promulgated from the pulpit, from our witness, from our lives, from our jobs today.
Finally, ideally, Christians under suffering respond with profound identification with Jesus Christ. Look at verse 41. “The apostles left the Sanhedrin [after their terrible flogging] rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” Jesus said, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” Here you find Christians not bemoaning their fate but rejoicing they’re counted worthy to suffer.
In fact, do we not read in Scripture, “All those who will live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution”? At some point or another, we will be opposed because we still live in a world system that does not recognize Christ. Its god is itself, its love is its lust, and by God’s grace we have learned to follow another Lord.
We have been touched by the Holy Spirit who has transformed our desires. We are bound to be at enmity with the world. That is why John can tell us, “Friendship with the world is enmity with God.” You cannot have it both ways. Thus, there comes about in the face of external opposition a profound identification with Jesus Christ.
In wrapping up, I want to ask this question.… Why is there in the New Testament this strange tension between, on the one hand, victory, joy, fulfillment, pardon, release and, on the other hand, suffering, opposition, deceit from within, and danger from without? Why? Why? The answer is fundamentally related to New Testament eschatology, the doctrine of last things.
In fact, Christians have thought this one through quite well, I think, at least in theory. It’s the practice that’s more difficult. You may have heard of the formulation of this whole tension by Oscar Cullmann after World War II. He drew the analogy between the Christian’s experience and D-Day.
When the troops landed on the beaches of Normandy (D-Day), it was only a matter of days before a beachhead was properly established. Within three weeks there were a million men, countless tons of materiel ashore, and by that time, quite frankly, no matter what the German Nazis had done, even if Rommel had managed to send in his panzers, quite frankly, the most he could have done would have been to delay the ultimate victory.
By that point, anyone with half a brain in his head could see the sheer weight of numbers, the weight of materiel, the numbers of troops that could be provided by the free world, the fact that 20 million Russians had already died on the Eastern front and now the Russians were moving rapidly toward Germany itself, the fact that defeats had already been registered in Italy and in North Africa, the fact that the energy supplies were limited, and the fact that German factories were being bombed night and day by American troops, anyone could see the war was over.
But it wasn’t. There was a long lapse between D-Day and V-E Day, an entire year, and there were many, many battles to be fought. A breakout of the troops again at the Battle of the Bulge, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, so the victory had been won, but it had not been won. The crucial battle had been fought, but there was still a lot of fighting.
For the Christian, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are D-Day. The return of Christ is our V-E Day. The crucial battle has already been fought. We are on the winning side, and anyone with half a brain in his head can see how it turns out in the end, but there’s a lot of fighting going on.
During this period between D-Day and V-E Day, we may have the supplies but there’s a lot of fighting. We may be on the winning side, but there will be struggles and deprivation and discipline. Until V-E Day itself takes place and the church’s prayer, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” is finally realized, death itself is swallowed up, and there is no more death and no more tears.… Until then, Christians are caught in this tension.
That kind of analogy, that kind of teaching is now fairly common in the church. I have not told you something new, but I want you to see how easy it is to distort that tension. If you stress all the victory side of things (the blessings we have in Christ, the fulfillment we have in Christ, the healing we have in Christ, the promise of satisfaction in him, of finding ourselves and orienting ourselves toward him), then you may greatly stress what has taken place in the blessedness of the gift of the Spirit but forget there’s still a war going on before Christ himself returns.
If, instead, you stress this is a place of struggle and a valley of tears, a time of sorrows and pain and grief and opposition, but fail to recognize the crucial battle has been fought, and you fight out of discouragement and despair, or you throw up your hands and you know no joy, and you depreciate the cross and do not recognize that under the new covenant you, too, have the Holy Spirit and you, too, have power to overcome the Evil One, and you think only of the new heaven and the new earth but you forget the heritage we already have in Christ Jesus.
In this passage, all the focus is on the opposition (the foes without and the foes within) which will be with us until the end. Here we must recognize what it means to be more than conquerors for Christ’s sake, to use the language of Romans 8, is not escape from opposition or difficulty or deceit or doctrinal controversy or opposition or persecution. That passage teaches us to be more than a conqueror for Christ is precisely to persevere within those pressures.
Indeed, for his sake, we may be persecuted all the day long. We may be led as lambs to the slaughter. We may, God have mercy upon us, even in Canada in years to come face opposition or jailing or beatings. Nothing exempts the Western world from persecution. Empires have come and gone. The church is still here.
We may ourselves face those things. What it means to be more than a conqueror for Christ’s sake in the face of foes within and foes without is to persevere, strengthened by the blessed Spirit of God, identifying ourselves with Jesus Christ, both for this life and for the life to come. God help us to be found faithful.
