Clough Acts Lesson 13

Biblical Sharing and Non-Biblical Sharing - Acts 4:32-5:11

We’ll begin by turning to Joshua 7. So far in the book of Acts we have noticed the overall theme in chapters 2-7; we’ve seen the first third of the book, witnessing in Jerusalem; the outline, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the world. And the witnessing that is done is explained in each section. In chapter 2 we dealt with the day of Pentecost; chapters 3-4 dealt with the healing of the man, with the subsequent rise of persecution against the Church. We studied last week the doctrine of civil disobedience, why Peter and John could, without violating the fourth divine institution, selectively disobey that institution when Caesar intrudes into the domain of the Church. We pointed out that this is a model that may have to be used again in our country as the state insists upon butting into the third divine institution and insists upon dictating the terms of education to Christian parents. Ultimately it’s going to come down to a collision as to who is in authority, the Church or the state, and as we have noted this is an increasing thing; we have seen brush fires break out in Indiana, Ohio, California, and these are but the beginning of a slow process that’s gradually leading, if it isn’t headed off by grace, to a full-scale collision between Church and state. So that chapter is quite relevant.

Then the end of chapter 4 and chapter 5 we’re dealing with how God the Holy Spirit disciplined the Church within and how He also caused persecution to come without. So discipline inside and persecution outside, the developing body of the Church. We’ve also said throughout the series of the book of Acts that the book of Acts is a book of transition; that’s the only way you get it together, is to see the book of Acts in its transitory nature. That is, the book of Acts begins with great emphasis upon the kingdom. It is the kingdom that has been promised to the nation Israel. Jesus said from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And that gave Israel forty more years of a re-offer of the kingdom. So the apostles again and again and again would come back and say if you will accept your Messiah then the times of refreshing from the Lord can come, and the kingdom can be reinstated. And so this was the emphasis in those early days of Acts, but we know now, Monday morning quarterbacking, we know now that on the day of Pentecost, unseen, even to the apostles, a new body had formed, the Church. And as it became increasingly obvious the nation would not accept Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, it was becoming increasingly obvious that this new entity, the Church, slowly comes into being, just like brushing dust that’s off of pearls that’s in the dirt, and gradually becomes more and more visible. Two themes, a declining emphasis on the kingdom and increasing emphasis on the Church.

In this section we’re going to study this morning we see these two trends. As always, when you have a new era of God in history and Acts does, you note a new era, even though it looks like a continuation of the old one, actually as the time goes on the Church gradually takes over more and more. Because it is a new era, God does what many human beings do in the areas of certain social relationships and that is that whenever there is a relationship depended upon respect for authority, then the first thing that must be emphasized at the start is respect for authority. I don’t think there’s ever been a man who’s had some degree of military training that doesn’t understand why, eventually, there’s such a thing as boot camp. And why, it seems like it’s more than an initiation, it’s not just foolishness, there is a reason why recruits are asked to, say brush the floor underneath the bunk with a toothbrush until it’s clean and a few other ridiculous things. Why does this harassment start in, over and over and over and over? Why is it that DI’s can get three inches in front of your face and shout all sorts of things, not nice words that you usually hear in the home? And why, for example, are the training periods unusually severe in certain cases? There’s a reason behind it and it’s one basic principle and that is they are trying to weed out flaky people, people who can’t respect authority, people who don’t respect authority. When you’re in a battle type situation you don’t need people who disrespect authority. And if those people are there they become very dangerous to the entire organization and to other people. And therefore they have to be weeded out and the way to weed them out is lower the boom from the very start. If they can’t take it then let’s find out right now who can take it and who can’t and get rid of the people who can’t take it. That’s a simple process of selectivity, getting rid of flaky people.

God does the same thing as He begins each era of history. In Joshua 7 God had begun the dispensation of the age of Israel; it began at the Exodus, continued through Mount Sinai, and now it’s in the period of the conquest. And all during this time God insisted that because He gave the Torah that the Torah or the Law would be followed, whether people liked it or not wasn’t the issue. The issue was God gave the Torah and so we say “yes Sir,” we obey the Torah and carry on. And to get this lesson across there were some very severe incidents. And during the period of the conquest, which is a picture of holy war, a picture of sanctification, a picture of probably one of the most gruesome experiences the human race can see ever is holy war, the human race saw this is the 14^th and 13^th centuries when God ordered the extermination of entire peoples. Whenever there’s holy war, and we haven’t really seen holy war, the Arabs every once in a while believe in resurrecting Jihad, but nevertheless, holy war is when entire populations, men, women, children, dogs, cats, every living thing is erased, exterminated. That is holy war and that is what is going on in the book of Joshua. It was done by divine command for love for the human race.

The Canaanites were a people who had rejected and rebelled against the Word of God so far they became a spiritual cancer, and like physical cancers, they have to be surgically removed. So we have a complete massive destruction of the Canaanite civilization. Now during this destructive process the armies of Israel had been victorious in their first stage. The first stage is crossing the Jordan Valley, just north of the Dead Sea, and as you come across this very desolate area, and it’s still that way today, you’ll notice on the road up to Jerusalem a whole area of green, a patch, just sitting out there in an area of this otherwise desolate land. That’s Jericho, and traditionally in history whatever armies came from the east they had to refuel, they had to take on water, had to take on food, and so Jericho was the place where they sat, and therefore when Joshua ordered these invasions in the east, his first conquest was to control the oasis of Jericho. He couldn’t do this without controlling the city of Jericho and therefore ordered annihilation of the city.

Shortly after this they moved on into the highlands of Judah to a place called Ai, near Bethel, and when they hit this place, whereas they had been victorious at Jericho, they failed, and the analysis of Joshua 7 is an analysis of why they lost the battle. God was teaching them a very severe lesson. In Joshua 7:1 it says, “But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing; for Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed thing; and the anger of the LORD was kindled against the children of Israel.” Now you’ll notice that he “took of the accursed thing.” What is that “accursed thing.” It goes back to a principle of holy war. In holy war you have a principle called charem, it’s from the word where we get harem, we normally associate it with the fact that when a king had a lot of girlfriends he drew a circle around them and woe be to any male that crossed the circle; he marked off all his girlfriends for himself. That we call a harem, but the charem was only one illustration of this principle, and the principle is that what is God’s is marked off for Him, and the way it would be marked off, they’d go and conquer a city and they’d get all the possessions of the city laying out in the field some place, and they’d draw a line around it, that’s charem, that means that no soldier can take booty of those possessions, but those possessions themselves are cursed and must be destroyed. So therefore, an “accursed thing” is the booty of the city, the booty that was considered to be Yahweh’s and must be given sacrificially to him by burning. Achan was a soldier who took of this and the taking, in verse 1, of the accursed thing is a verb that is going to be used in the book of Acts.

The incident we are about to study in Acts is deliberately and consciously patterned after the Achan incident of Joshua 7. When Luke, years later, writes the book of Acts, he describes this event, he’s trying to teach us something. And so he describes this event that actually happened in terms of language borrowed from Joshua 7 to tell us, hey, look, theologically this is the same principle that’s being taught; theologically as the book of Acts begins, like the book of Joshua, back there it was the beginning of the dispensation of Israel; here it’s the beginning of the dispensation of the Church and from the very beginning God wants to establish the authority of the apostles.

In liturgical churches, if you’ve come out of those you’ve probably many times recited the Apostle’s Creed. Many of you have probably gone through and remember the part that says: I believe in the holy catholic and apostolic church. Now those are true words and that is a correct doctrine; that is good ecclesiological doctrine. The holy church is that which is set apart by regeneration to God; the holy catholic church, the word catholic means universal over all men who will but trust in Jesus Christ, and apostolic, “I believe in the holy catholic apostolic church,” what does it mean when we say we believe in the holy catholic apostolic church? When we use that phase, the apostolic church, we mean that we accept the authority of the apostles. You cannot know Jesus Christ apart from knowing the apostles. What do we mean by this? The apostles wrote the New Testament, that’s what we mean. You can’t come to Christ on the basis of your imagination. The only data where you can find out about who Christ is, in order to believe on Him at all, is through what the apostles have written down in the New Testament. Thus there’s a choke point, there’s a narrow path through which every man has to travel on his way to the kingdom and that is through the path controlled by the apostles. And God wants this to be known, just as in the book of Joshua He wants the authority of the Torah to be established, so in the book of Acts He wants the authority of the new prophets, called apostles, and He wants people to understand, you people, you may not like them, you may dislike their personality, but they are My apostles, they right now are mediums of revelation until the canon is closed and therefore you are to submit to the authority of the apostles, period over and out, no discussion.

So this is the background for the incident, now turn to Acts 4:32, we’ll look at this early incident I the history of the Church. Actually the incident goes across a chapter boundary, I hope you don’t get too enamored with chapter divisions; there are chapter divisions in Scripture that are good and chapter divisions that are bad and this is one of the bad ones. Actually the incident begins in Acts 4:32 and goes on to chapter 5:11, and as you notice this division, this event that happened, it’s sandwiched in between two verses, Acts 4:21 and Acts 5:12, and if you look first at 4:31 you’ll notice something it says: it says the apostles, “were speaking the Word of God with boldness.” And then skipping down to 5:12 at the other end of this incident it says, “by the hands of the apostles were many signs and wonders wrought among the people.” So obviously the incident is set in between these two things, and these two observations about the state of what was going on. What was going on? The local church in the city of Jerusalem at that time was operating very profitably, very victoriously, under the leadership of the apostles. Just like in the book of Joshua the armies had successfully whipped the Canaanites over the city of Jericho. Now comes the problem. The apostles can only be victorious, as Joshua’s armies were victorious, if the church is pure. The purity of the church, and by purity we don’t mean perfection, by purity of the church we mean the church’s subordination to the authority of the Word of God. Unless that is carried out, the apostolic ministry fails; the Church goes into eclipse, sanctification stops and the Church dies. So the lesson of this section, the overall lesson is God’s boot camp training to get across the point, at the beginning of the Church Age everything depends upon the subordination of believers to the Word of God.

Acts 4:32, “And the multitude of those that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. [33] And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon them all. [34] Neither was there any among them that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, [35] And laid them down at the apostle’s feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.” Now this section has often been used by, particularly liberals, to justify Christian approval of communism. They say look, in the early church there was communism; now obviously if there was communism in the early church then isn’t it true that Christianity today can be perfectly compatible with communism. Not at all! Communism is not taught here. Communism that we call communism is Marxism and it’s a completely different concept. So before we go too far let’s go back and review something about divine institutions.

Divine institutions are God’s established order for society and in these institutions we have the state and we have volition. Divine institution four which deals with justice and law is something that God imposed upon men. He did it, not to be a panacea for all other areas but simply as one of other institutions. As we have said from time to time, these have been called by the Reformers, spheres of sovereignty, that is, the state has sovereignty over certain limited spheres. The family has sovereignty over certain limited spheres. The individual has sovereignty over certain limited spheres. Let’s take an example. Take an average Christian situation: in each member of the family, each person has sovereignty in the sense each person has the freedom to accept or reject Christ. Your mother, your father, your children, cannot accept Jesus Christ or reject Him for you. That is an individual choice; no minister can do this; no church is supposed to pressure you to do this. You are not to be indoctrinated and make some phony decision. This is your responsibility, you are sovereign over, in that sense, the eternal destiny of your soul; you respond, you reject, it’s your choice, you determine the future.

But then we have divine institution two; that is an area of sphere sovereignty and is run by its own rules, given in Scripture. And here, two individuals operating inside the marital covenant are given certain mandates in Scripture; mandates that are God’s and not man’s, contrary to modern sociology. And then we have the third divine institution, the one that’s most attacked today, and that is the rights of children and the rights of parents and the question that we are fighting today is the question of the third versus the fourth divine institution. Who ultimately has the right of educating children? Does the state or does the family? The Bible is very clear, unambiguous. The state does not have, never has had, and never will have the responsibility to educate children.

As far as I personally am concerned the whole public school system can collapse tomorrow and we’d never miss it because then individual parents would have to get together, like the parents in colonial America, hire their own teachers and see that those teachers taught their children the right things, taught them Scripturally, and we’d have an excellent school system. People say oh, but you’d have to accredit it. Nonsense, I went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s an unaccredited school, never has been accredited; I don’t notice too many people upset because MIT isn’t an accredited institution. Accreditation means nothing; all it means is that a government bureaucrat walked into the building and passed judgment on something. The best statement of accreditation was given by a man who’s a Christian school teacher in Virginia and he said, well, if the bureaucrats want accreditation I’ll accredit them. See, accreditation means nothing, it’s a magic word and people are hypnotized by this, why we have to have quality schools. Look, we had better schools in colonial America than we’ve got now. When you read Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers that were published as letters to the editor of the New York Times, and they were published in the streets of New York and people read these documents, every person in New York City could have understood that. I challenge you to distribute the Federalist Papers in the middle of Manhattan today and see how many people understand it. So obviously the public school system was a mistake that was made by the Puritans, they made their mistakes too, and now we inherit the mess and this is what we’re seeing between the third and fourth divine institution. And eventually the state will take over everything because once you get the Trojan horse going it just keeps on going.

This is what we call sphere sovereignty. Now whenever you have these spheres working together you’ve got peace, prosperity and harmony. This is why in the past America was a tremendous country because we had, of all the countries in the world, the best finely tuned balance between these spheres. Now in the book of Acts what’s happening is that in the early Church you have this area of grace begin to develop. You have reproduced inside the community of the early Church a similar thing to all these divine institutions working together. Let’s see if we can diagram what’s happening. Let’s look at how God organizes society and how man organizes society.

God is infinite, He is omniscient, He knows you, He knows me, He knows all of our talents, so if you have a group of individuals, say in the body of Christ, one has the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher, another has the gift of helps, another has the gift of the word of wisdom, and so on. Now the way God has so designed things, because He’s the perfect designer, He can say to this person that has the gift of helps, maybe here’s a person with the gift of exhortation, He can say now look, believer b what you can do is you develop your gift to the maximum and I guarantee that you will never have to cross paths, in a hostile sense, with another believer. In other words, there’s room to expand to your potential without ever banging your head on the wall, because God has designed the body to function as our physical body, as an organism, where each cell has its place, each feature, each system works together and so each system can develop to the maximum without violating the rights of others. But when man sets it up, because he’s finite and limited and doesn’t have omniscience it’s more like this. We have people and they have to be put in cages, they have to be put in areas of blocks of legal rights and this person has a certain right but if he goes too far, bang, he hits the edge of his cage, because if he goes any further he’s going to be intruding on the right of someone else. This has always been the dilemma, from Plato, Aristotle, on upward, that man autonomously, trying to create his own system, imposing his own laws, upon chaos winds up with a caged system of society. Now that’s Marxism. These two systems are as different as night and day; in Marxism you have the state, the fourth divine institution, decreeing what you are going to do, what you are going to learn, how many children you are going to have, where they are going to go to school, etc. etc. etc. and it’s always done, as Karl Marx tried to do, it’s always done under the guise that well, everybody owns property in common. That sounds very nice, that everybody owns property in common, but it has a little fallacy. We supposedly all own the post office; try going down and retaining your brick. Obviously you don’t own the post office nor do I, nor does anyone else. In effect, what happens is that the bureaucrats are in ultimate control because everybody has deeded their title to the property over to the bureaucrats who run it and therefore under Marxism as Milovan Djilas the great Yugoslavian patriot pointed out in his book The New Class, communism has simply developed a new power class, the class of bureaucrats. That’s Marxism.

That’s not what’s happening in the book of Acts; in the book of Acts what you have are individual believers, each with their own private property and this private property is being sold off for assets to give to Christians in need, but notice, the state did not confiscate the property, the property was freely sold by an act of the will of the individual person. Now the difference between that, and this is not clear to the majority of Americans, there is a difference between charity and socialism. In socialism the government coerces you; it’s not an act of charity, that’s not love, because if you didn’t pay your taxes to the system then you’d go to jail, that’s coercion, and socialism operates on coercion; no matter how great and how noble may be the goal, the means is coercion; always has been, always will be. And communism is socialism par excellence; it is the highest form of the kingdom of man and in that you have coercion, the destruction of private property. In the book of Acts and in this early situation there’s no coercion at all; it’s individual choice, I given because I want to help a brother in need; it is my property to give, therefore charity is possible.

Now if you don’t have any property to give, big secret… you can’t give it and if you can’t give it, there is no charity. Thus, confiscation of property by the government destroys charity. So in the book of Acts, though the people are selling their assets to help the poor, understand something; this is not Marxism, it is totally opposite to Marxism. Now let’s go through the passage and the details of it.

In Acts 4:32, it says the people “were of one heart and of one soul;” Wednesday night we’re going to bring out some of the classifications of Old Testament uses in the New Testament and one of those is going to be allusions; that the New Testament authors allude to the Old Testament. Here is one of those allusions and it’s an allusion that it’s a technical word and it’s loaded with a lot of meaning. If you just read verse 32 quickly you’ll think why, all it’s saying there is that believers just got along well together. No, that’s not what’s meant. When it says they were constantly “of one heart and of one soul,” that is a technical term from the book of Deuteronomy that refers to the commonwealth of the nation Israel under Yahweh or Jehovah. Jehovah ordained the perfect society. “Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.” “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one,” the famous Jewish shamah, why is that? Because loyalty to Jehovah by this Jew, this Jew, this Jew, this Jew, this Jew, this Jew, this Jew, would cause them all to subsume their interest under God’s authority and what would you have: one heart, one soul! So the “one heart and one soul” is not just everybody is happy together. We’re going to see Ananias and Sapphira had a fantastic marriage, they had fantastic capabilities but they were filled with Satan, a slight problem. So it’s not just social compatibility; it’s a position where you have subordination under God’s Word.

Now there’s a comparison being made; when Luke uses “one heart and one soul” he’s comparing the Church under Christ, and therefore who is Christ being compared to by this allusion? Obviously here’s one of those indirect proofs for the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is freely being compared in the text with Jehovah Himself. And so the multitude “were of one heart and of one soul, and none of them said that any of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” Now that could be interpreted as communism except Luke goes on to clarify what was happening in verse 34, “Neither was there any among them that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices” or money, “of the things that had been sold,” so private property was being liquidated to gain assets for helping those in need.

Now why was the poverty problem so great in Jerusalem. We’re going to see here, we’re going to see in Acts 6, when the first deacons begin that there’s a tremendous amount of poverty in Jerusalem. Now most of this poverty was female in nature, women; there were a lot of poor women in Jerusalem. Why is that? They were all widows. Why did Jerusalem have more widows than, say Caesarea or Philippi or Jericho; why did all the widows congregate around Jerusalem? It’s very simple; when Jewish men got old they would go to Jerusalem to die because they wanted to be buried in the sacred city. To this day you can walk on the east side of the old wall of the city and you can see graveyard after graveyard along the Kidron Valley; Arabs desecrated it and used the tombstones for urinals when they took over but since the Jewish people have taken it back they’re reestablished this graveyard and have caused them to be established enough on the hillside so you can see, there’s thousands of these things there, just one after another after another; it was a sacred burial ground and so the prominence of the widows in Jerusalem is because they went there when their husbands were about to die and stayed there.

So when the gospel went out many of these widows became Christians. There they are! Now, who’s going to take care of the widows; they didn’t have social security then, they didn’t have retirement plans, private insurance type situations, they had a family situation. The welfarism of the Bible was familial. But since the widows had become Christians and their families might not be Christians, the familial source of welfare snapped, so here the woman is, she’s trusted Christ and now her problem is that she just cut herself off from all her retirement benefits. So the Church had to come in and handle the widow problem. That’s the source of poverty and apparently all this liquidation of private property was going to solve that problem.

But there’s another theme that was operating here. Remember the chart I showed about the immanency of the kingdom. Peter has still been in his preaching emphasizing, Israel, accept Jesus, this carpenter from Nazareth, who is the Messiah, and your kingdom will come. So the people are clustering in Jerusalem, not moving out, just clustering there hoping, waiting that the national leadership will accept Christ and if they will, then the kingdom can come. So also what’s working in verse 34, besides this massive influx of poor widows is the fact that you’ve got immanency of the kingdom. These people know, if the kingdom is going to be established shortly it really doesn’t matter too much anyway about establishing a long-term operation. There’s no long-term planning yet in the book of Acts. We’ll see that by the time this incident finishes there will be some long-term planning, but so far that long-term planning hasn’t happened, it’s just short-term planning, it’s emergency procedures. And we might also add by way of footnote that verses 32-34 has been one of the historic models for the Christian church in times of emergency. In times of bad depression, in times of persecution, the local churches have usually banded together, at least within their own congregations, to take care of their own poor, and there has become a welfare, in the Scriptural sense, circulating within Christian groups in times of emergency, patterned after this. So there’s another reason the Holy Spirit included this in the book of Acts, to teach us what to do in case of emergency.

Notice in Acts 4:33, while all this property thing was going on, the apostles, “with great power are giving witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus;” now as we have said over and over in this Acts series, the witnessing that Luke describes time and time again, he insists, is witnessing not about oh, I accepted Christ and had this great feeling in my heart. It is not a witness to your feelings, it is a witness to the objective historic work and word of God. God raised Christ the third day and that is what they’re witnessing to, so your faith will not hinge on your emotions, today you’re high, tomorrow you’re low and you have yo-yo Christianity. That’s what happens when people put their trust in their emotions. Today might have been a bad day; today is one of those days where you’re just dangerous, you can’t drink water without spilling it all down yourself and you should just to back to bed and try all over again. Well, Christianity isn’t any weaker because you’re having a bad day. Christianity rests on the object of historical fact and the resurrection of Christ is just as sure today as it was yesterday when you were having a good day. So the emphasis on the witnessing is emphasis on the historic works and Word of God. Always understand that.

Notice it says there was “great grace upon them all.” They had great receptivity in the community at large and I suggest that there’s no accident the Luke put verse 33 between verse 32 and 34, those are related, much as though they don’t appear to be related when you just read it quickly. It looks like verse 32 should go with verse 34 and it looks like verse 33 is just stuck in there as an interruption, a major interruption in the flow of the text. Why? I suggest the reason is credibility. The early Christians could teach the Word of God and have receptivity because the Word of God was credible. What do we mean by that?

Let’s take some evangelism that goes on today; you’re a businessman, 90% of your thought time is spent on your business, you’ve got debts, you’ve got contracts, you’ve got customers that haven’t paid their bills and here you are wrapped up mentally in your business. The average man is walled in in his obligation. Here he is coping day by day with his business and then out of the blue somebody peeks over his shoulder and says accept Jesus because He died for your sins. And the guy says so what and goes on. Why does he say so what? Because what’s Jesus got to do with my business. In other words, I spend 90% of my time on my business; now if you can’t show me that the Word of God is relevant to my business then get out of my way because you’re only talking about 10% of my life.

So the Word of God has declined in its credibility and therefore more and more people turn it off. And I suggest that most of the systems of evangelism that are currently being used only seed the incredibility because they insist on just talking about Jesus, never talking about the other issues, such as how the Word of God applies to the creation issue, such as how the Word of God applies to the free market principles, such as how the Word of God applies to criminology and law. The whole concept of incarceration is stupid; did they have jails in the Bible; they did not. How did they cope with crime in the Bible? Corporeal punishment, capital punishment and they had restitution and fines. Since most of the people are incarcerated are incarcerated because of theft and destruction and damage done to property, the wisest thing to do on God’s Word is to simply say what we need is not a bigger and better jail; what this county needs is a system where these rip-off artists go to work under supervision, they go to work, they earn their money and pay back their victim with interest. That’s the way it was done in Scripture. It would save tax money, it would preserve dignity on the part of the criminal; here’s some 18 year old kid gets thrown in with a guy that’s been in jail for 30 years, he gets homosexually raped and he learns all the ins and outs of crime; that’s a real real habilitation isn’t it? So he gets out of jail after 3 years and what’s he going to do; you’ve just trained him by caging him like an animal, training him to be just like the hardened grossest elements that can be found in the county because that’s the only way this kid could survive in his jail cell was to be just as tough, rotten, nasty and crooked as the other guy in the cell. That was real great liberal rehabilitation—and then we wonder why we have so many repeat offenders.

The Word of God has never been shown… say look, you people may not want to accept Christ but let’s just look at something here. If God has really spoken into history don’t you think He might possibly have some wisdom in the area of crime? Don’t you think the omniscient God who knew all about crime and the sin nature can tell us some hints on what to do. Don’t you suppose that Ephesians 4 where Paul gives apostolic advice on handing kleptomania, when he says let the thief steal, steal no more, but let him work and let him work to the point where he has a surplus of his wealth so he gives to the poor, where you have true rehabilitation. Now if Christians were doing this, doing this in every area, constantly attacking the fact that there’s no base for knowing anything apart from revelation, attacking the fact there’s no base for legislation apart from the wisdom of the Word; there is no base for criminal proceedings apart from the court systems laid down in the Old Testament and hit all over the place, then you come up and you say Jesus Christ has died for your sins, the author of that law. [tape turns]

…and over here we try the area of sanitation codes. For example, the Scripture in the area of diet, we found we had improved physical health. See, you’ve got credibility and initial credibility has been established so then the gospel gets a hearing. But we live in the so-called Bible belt where everybody “believes the Bible,” it doesn’t mean anything. This is just a custom to believe the Bible, it’s not believing the Bible out of conviction, personal researched conviction. It’s just a habit and like all habits sooner or later it’ll die off and we’ll be into some other habit. Don’t confuse habits with Scripture. The very fact that this area can be called a Bible belt refutes itself because if is how come the Bible isn’t being more widely applied, and how come it is that when Christians do suggest that the Bible be more widely applied they’re fought by Christians. It’s because those Christians who are fighting the system are Christians who are Christians in custom but not out of personal faith in the authority of the Word of God. Only those who believe the Word of God is really the Word of God are the ones who are concerned to apply it to every area.

So in verse 33 the apostles are witnessing with credibility; grace was upon them. Why? Simple old principle, money talks. And when these non-Christians in the city looked around, they saw the Christian community, hey you know what, these people put their money where their mouth is, and they listened to what their mouth was saying; it’s as simple as that. The message had credibility. By the way, this wasn’t a continual process, the point here is that you have people in need and as the needs arose the property would be sold. We might better translated the end of verse 34, “as they sold them they would bring the price of the thing that had been sold,” so that you might have a crisis in January and you might not have another crisis until April, and maybe not another one until August and as these crisis hit you’d have the liquidation of the assets.

All right, in the middle of this, Acts 4:35 says they “laid them down at the apostle’s feet;” now laying something at the feet is a custom in the ancient world that goes all the way back, we believe, to Genesis. Now the ancient world didn’t know where the custom came from, but the custom was in the army, when a commander would come across his POWs and he was going to execute them, the first thing he’d do, he’d walk up to the POW and put his foot on his neck; the enemy was under his foot. That’s the picture that Jesus Christ is going to do to Satan; that’s what Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15, He will put all enemies under His feet; it means power over that which is under your feet. Said another way, what this laying the property down at the apostle’s feet, we would say transfer of title; it means that they were giving title of the possession to the apostles, and that is clear proof that this is private property, not confiscated property that’s involved here. Private people giving title over to the apostles voluntarily to meet needs. “… and distribution was made unto every man according as he would have need.” This would be the man, it’s not eliminating women, it’s just every one, every person according as he had need.

Now in the middle of all this, in the middle of this probably people sold off clothing, they may have sold off furniture, they may have sold off minor holdings, they may have sold off their crop, part of their olive crop or something and they would liquidate and bring the cash and give it to Peter. Well, in the middle of all this there came a very unusual situation. Acts 4:36-37 deal with the famous Barnabas incident. Now this is an unusual incident or it wouldn’t be singled out. It doesn’t mean everybody was doing what Barnabas was doing. Barnabas happens to be an unusual person. Let’s read about it.

Acts 4:36, “And Joseph, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation), a Levite of the country of Cyprus, [37] Having a farm,” literally, “sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” This guy really cashed out, he took his whole farm, all the acreage, apparently it was on Cyprus, it wasn’t in Palestine, he had a family on Cyprus and there was very wealthy farmland on Cyprus at that time, and he just cashed this whole thing out and brought it to the apostles, probably thousands and thousands of dollars. Some of you were startled to find out that the perfume that Mary used on Jesus’ head was a $10,000 bottle; well that gives you an idea what perfume cost in that day, you can imagine what a farm cost. This thing probably was a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars at least that he gave into the treasury so obviously it was an item to discuss and it got around the gossip grapevine of the local congregation, hey, you know what Barnabas did, oh yeah, yeah, and it impressed people. Barnabas did not do this to impress people, he did it unto the Lord but the word got around. And Barnabas, in particular, was a very interesting man, he could take it. See what his title is, “son of consolation,” now that is actually the son of exhortation an that tells you what the spiritual gift was he had. Barnabas had the spiritual gift of encouragement.

Later on in the ministry there was a fall out between Paul and Barnabas. Barnabas was a tremendous man; he was the one who finally got Paul going. By the way, he was another man who started the church’s first missionary program. Look at the Mediterranean and think, what’s the island over here? Cyprus. Where was the early church’s first missionary training center? Antioch, right opposite Cyprus. And who was one of the big boys in the church’s missionary training program? Barnabas. See, Barnabas had a great deal of influence; he finally got the church out of this Jerusalem mess and moved it on up to Antioch to get out from under the chaos here and started evangelism. Barnabas, actually, was the great designer behind early missions. Barnabas was a tremendous Christian and what made him tremendous was his ability to give encouragement to people. He encouraged Paul; Paul was kind of an up and down erratic type person. He was a brilliant person but as often with brilliant people he was up and down. And he’d have his down days and Barnabas would…now come on Paul, let’s just cool it and move on. He’d encourage Paul this way.

Well one day he and Paul were out on a mission together and they had a young teenage boy by the name of John Mark. John Mark is known because of his mother, John Mark’s mother, also called Mary, was the one who owned the big house where the first Jerusalem church met and she, by the way, never did sell that, so it shows you that all people did not sell their property, Acts 12:12 clearly shows that Mary retained title to her private house. So John Mark, the teenager, got to be buddy, buddy with the apostles and he went out as a real young boy, they were going to train this fellow to be a missionary. And they got in some hot water deal, persecution started coming on them and guess who flakes out? John Mark, he takes off, leaves Barnabas and Paul holding the bag. Where’s John, where did John go? John took off. Well now Paul’s the kind of guy that when you cross him you’re in trouble and so Paul said: Where is that Mark? And Barnabas said now just relax Paul, just hold on. And we get intimations of a very, very strong argument that went on in Acts and Galatians between Barnabas and Paul because Paul would have nothing, from this point, to do with Mark. That kid’s a flake-out, don’t want him around, ever, period! And so he didn’t. And Barnabas said Paul, now I got you started and I’m going to help John Mark get started and if you don’t like it, you go your way I’ll go my way. So Barnabas started out on his own second mission with John Mark and out of that mission John was trained, later to become the amanuenses or secretary of the apostle Peter and from the notes that he took as a secretary to the apostle Peter we have a book of the Bible; it’s called the Gospel of Mark. So you see, Barnabas had his place in the Church, tremendous Christian encouraging people. And that’s what he was known for here, “the son of encouragement.” So he did this great act, contributed probably close to a quarter million dollars, maybe half a million into the treasury of the early church.

But as always there are those weaker Christians who have approbation lust and we meet them in Acts 5:1, “But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira, his wife, sold a possession.” We can’t be sure but we suspect that Ananias is pretty wealthy, the word “Sapphira” in the Greek means the beautiful one, so his wife was extremely good looking, probably were upper class type people, they had become Christians, they were involved in the local church, but you know, it used to get to them every time the treasure report went by; our fund, so and so, and so and so, and they’ look at that and they’d say hmmm, three hundred thousand dollars, look at that, and everybody would say yeah, you know who gave it? Barnabas. And everybody would go yeah, he gave it, Barnabas. And this got too much for Ananias and Sapphira so they wanted to compete with Barnabas. This is spiritual king of the mountain. They have their own thing and it would have been done fine if they’d just tended to their own business. But not content with that because of approbation lust they just have to have the approbation of all believers and they have to give some great glowing testimony, so therefore this developed.

And they link together, notice verse 2 because this is instrumental in solving the problem. First, the word “they sold a possession, and kept back” that verb, “keep back” is exactly the verb that the Greek Old Testament uses in Joshua 7:1 so obviously the author here is saying remember the Achan incident, remember how God was hard in the spiritual boot camp to prepare believers for authority; He’s going to do the same thing here. He “kept back part of the price, his wife having been privy [knowing] of it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” The important clause in verse 2 is that his wife knew about it; that is going to explain why she too gets clobbered. She would have not got clobbered if Ananias had made this decision himself; I want to point this out as a principle; sometimes Christian couples in their marriages get discouraged because they say gosh, I’m a Christian, and our marriage is here and you see some neighbor, non-Christian, they seem to have a real glowing relationship and you wonder why is this, how come Christian marriage is like this and non-Christian marriage like that, I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. Well, here you have perfect compatibility between Ananias and Sapphira, but it’s compatibility on a human viewpoint satanic level. Yeah, sure, non-Christians can be very compatible; just like if you have five people escape from Huntsville and while they’re running from the police they’re very compatible, work together fine, but why are they working together? To escape the law. And the same with a non-Christian couple who may have a fantastic relationship, sure they do, to what reason, for what philosophy? To avoid any submission to the Word of God they both agree very much at that point.

So here we have a perfectly compatible married couple in total disobedience to the Word of God. Acts 5:3, “And Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit,” now this one is really something. The word is pleroo, it is exactly the word used in Ephesians 5:18 for the filling of the Holy Spirit, and shows us along with four other verses in the Bible, shows us the extent to which Satan can dominate believers. These other four verses are: Matthew 16:23 where Peter gives good old satanic viewpoint to Jesus and Jesus looks at him and says “get thee behind Me, Satan,” and he’s not talking to Satan physically, he’s talking to Peter physically. The only implication is that Satan has been able to use the lips, mouth and brains of Peter to project his ideas toward Jesus. So in Matthew 6:23 Jesus says Peter, and He admits that he’s regenerated at that time, Peter is a perfect puppet of Satan. Here, Acts 5:3, is the second in the series of verses where you have a believer coming under the control, domination and leading of Satan himself. A third reference in the New Testament is 2 Corinthians 11:4, where it says beware believer, that you receive another spirit than the one that you already have received. What’s the Spirit that we’ve already received? The Holy Spirit. Well then what can be the other, heteros, spirit but a demonic one. And then 2 Corinthians 12:7 where it says that Paul received a thorn in the flesh in apposition, an angel of Satan. And apparently teaches a demonically induced physical ailment in Paul’s body for disciplinary reasons. So don’t just waltz on trusting eternal security, well, I’m in Christ now, don’t have to worry about those things. True, you don’t have to worry about eternal salvation, and true Christ possesses you, but the point remains, Christ possessed Israel but He let the Canaanites clobber them real good many a time, didn’t He. So Christ can also claim you but He allows the demon powers to work you over good at times for disciplinary reasons. And so here we have Satan arising inside the Church.

Remember Luke is analyzing early church history, he’s trying to warn us, these kinds of things are going to happen in the next 1900 years over and over and over and over and over and over again; you are going to have Satan caused discord inside the Church by dominating the thought patterns, attitudes, utilizing the lust of believers, and he can rip up the body of Christ, or try to, he definitely can rip up local churches this way.

But there’s something else interesting because in verse 4 when Peter goes on to explain, he says “why have you conceived this in your heart” obviously Ananias could not say well Peter, you see, I got no excuse but Satan made me do it. No, it says you conceived this in your heart. You see the deal is this, in our minds Ananias had all this human viewpoint out here which he sucked in. By negative volition he worked on this stuff and got it going into a great plot. It was his choice to do it; responsibility rests upon him. But once he had done this, it’s like you build a circuit board; Satan applies the juice to the circuit that you built and so he structured the system in his mind and Satan energized it and said yeah, yeah, let’s do that, and encouraged him to do it. So the teamwork of verse 3-4 preserves the volition of the individual yet it also warns us in very, very sobering terms, be careful, Satan can take your negative volition and fan it into a forest fire that can burn down a local body of believers very, very quickly. [4, “While it remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.”]

But then there’s something else significant about these two verses. When Peter confronts Ananias he accuses Ananias of a particular sin. He said Ananias, you have lied to the Holy Spirit. Now ask yourself, when did Ananias lie to the Holy Spirit? For all the lies you can read all these texts, you can read all the verses and I challenge you to find one place where else it’s reported Ananias lying to anybody. There’s only one place in the story that Ananias is lying and that’s right here to Peter, but it doesn’t say Ananias, Satan filled our heart to lie to me; it says Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit. Conclusion: this incident shows you why God was so furious, so hard-nosed in His discipline of this couple. He wanted to set an example for all time that His Spirit now works in the apostles; they held the keys to the kingdom of heaven. It was their authority on which the apostolic Church must rest and therefore you respect these apostles and don’t you try funny business with My generals. That’s what the Lord is saying. When they lied to Peter is was like they lied to Jesus Christ because Peter, as an apostle, represents Jesus Christ. So that’s the argument behind all this.

Acts 5:5, the Greek very picturesquely, “And Ananias, hearing these words, fell down,” the participle, the present participle means he’s actually in the process of hearing, there’s no scream, there’s no yell, it’s just as he hears Peter saying this boom, there’s a thud, everybody looks, and Ananias is on the floor; that’s all it is, and it happened apparently before Peter stopped talking because of the present participle, while Peter is talking to him this happened, thud, and obviously with great tongue in cheek the apostle Luke adds “and gave up the ghost [died]; and great fear came on all them that heard these things.” I would rather imagine that was the case.

Then in Acts 5:6 we have the first set of ushers in church history, “And the young men arose, wound [wrapped] him up,” it means to wind him in the burial cloths, so they “wrapped him up and carried him out.” Notice that, isn’t it interesting the first ushers in church history ushered people out, not ushered people in.

In Acts 5:7, “And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. [8] And Peter answered her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much?” See, Luke is accounting it in an abbreviated form. He’s set a trap for the woman, and Peter doesn’t need the omniscience of the Holy Spirit to find out. What he’s done is he’s put the money in front of his feet and as Mrs. Ananias comes trotting in wondering what happened to hubby, Peter says to her, with the money in front of him, by the way, how much was it that you said that you sold the property for. And of course, with the money there to reinforce her answer, she said oh, we’ll say five thousand; of course they had sold it for ten but all Peter needed to know it was five, she thought. And so he trapped her, because “she said, Yea, for so much.” Luke doesn’t bother to give us what the “so much” is. Verse 9, “Then Peter said unto her, How is it that you have agreed together,” you perfectly married couple with marital compatibility, “you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord?” The word “test” is again taken out of the Old Testament, for the testing of the waters of Meribah. You have “tested the Spirit of the Lord. Behold, the feet of the” ushers are here again to usher out the second person in church history. [“Behold, the feet of them who have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.”] We haven’t listed that on our ushering chart, usher out those who experience the sin unto death.

Acts 5:10, “Then fell she down immediately at his feet, and yielded up the ghost [died]; and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband. [11] And great fear came upon all the church,” I must say, “and upon as many as heard these things.” You see, after this was done the issue was now clear. Peter might be fallible, and he was, so was John, so were all the apostles, but they were apostles and God wanted every person in the Church to know you follow My authorities and until the New Testament was written the only authorities they had were the apostles. Today, to apply this lesson we have to say take the Word of God that seriously because if you don’t, God is as angry with you and with me as He would be with Ananias and Sapphira. Now it’s true, He doesn’t exert the same kind of discipline on us, thank God, we wouldn’t have any church membership, but God, though He doesn’t overtly execute the sin unto death for quite these reasons, since God is immutable we know He’s just as angry and it’s only His grace that keeps Him from doing this again and again. He did it here for a teaching lesson, but it does show the character of our God.

Which leads us to our conclusion. Every critic that I’ve studied who assaults the authority of the New Testament concentrates on this particular passage. They have a field day with this, they say ah, don’t you remember in the Gospels, remember when Peter asked Jesus, Lord, how many times do you forgive someone? Seven! No, seven times seven. Ah, say the critics, see here’s a central failing in impetuous Peter; Peter, same after Pentecost as before, still unforgiving, wouldn’t let poor little Ananias have time for repentance but just struck him dead right in front of him. It’s interesting, all these anti-supernaturalist critics never seem to see the obvious point of the text. Peter didn’t kill Ananias, did he? Peter was just carrying on a conversation with him and he dropped dead in the middle of the conversation. Peter couldn’t help that. Well then who is responsible? Jesus Christ is responsible, that’s who. And therefore, ultimately what we have portrayed here, as we do back in Joshua 7, is the holiness of God, the greatness of God, His attributes, and isn’t it interesting, when the Church begins, as it does here, for in verse 11 the first time in the book of Acts, and first time in the New Testament really, the word “church” occurs.

See, the Church has now become a separate body from the nation Israel. It’s now gradually getting its own identity and for the first incident in which the word “church” occurs, what is the theme? Subordination to the apostolic authority under the fear of the character of Jesus Christ Himself. Next week we will continue with the other incident that happened at this time.