Clough Acts Lesson 15

The Choosing of Seven - Acts -6:1-6

We continue in the book of Acts and we’ll start by turning to Acts 1:8 for the verse that gives you the theme of Acts. It’s necessary to go back to this passage of Scripture because as we have seen, Acts is made up of three steps in the evangelization of the world. One is the work done at Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the world, and Luke follows this outline in the book of Acts. This is why Acts 2-7 deal with Jerusalem; chapters 8-9 deal with Judea and Samaria, and chapters 10 and following deal with the world. There’s a movement in the book of Acts and we’re going to see something today that I didn’t see before, about how the Holy Spirit leads us.

Now because we always tend to think in terms of our work and how great we can be and how many brownie points we can make with God, we tend to omit the obvious feature about the leading of the Holy Spirit, which is that in most cases He leads us in spite of ourselves. Often we read Acts 1:8 and see the passage where it says “ye shall receive power,” and we, rightly, as far as we go, think of that as the empowering of the Holy Spirit, we consciously can see Him working in our life, we can see Him open doors and close doors and bring this person here and bring that person there, and that’s what we think about Acts 1:8. But there’s even another dimension to the leading of the Holy Spirit that transcends that and that is that the Holy Spirit can lead us while we’re out of fellowship. We have this circle that we’ve used again and again to represent the will of God for our life at any given moment in time. Our position is something, due to our election, we are “in Christ,” etc. etc. etc. But then we also have the fact that the Holy Spirit reveals the will of God and we can be in that will or out of that will at any given time. Just because we are out of God’s will in the [can’t understand word] moments of our life does not mean that the leading of the Holy Spirit ceases. The Holy Spirit can actually lead you because of election, because of His sanctifying decree, He can actually lead you when you are out of fellowship, and this applies to individuals and it applies corporately to the entire Church.

The book of Acts is a testimony of how these three steps, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the world, God the Holy Spirit led the Church into these three areas whether the Church was consciously trying to do this or not. Maybe we can state it another way as far as the principle of grammar is concerned. We can take the verb “go” and say that is the imperative mood, “go,” the command. And it is addressed consciously to our volition. We can say yes I’m going to go, no I’m not, it’s our choice. But the Holy Spirit, because of His sovereignty can take that imperative mood of the verb and turn it into an indicative future and say, you will find yourself going. So whether we consciously obey this thing or not, we will find ourselves actually obeying it. And this is what the Holy Spirit’s working in the Church here.

As we come to Acts 6 we’re engaged with the last part of that first section of the book that deals with the witnessing in Jerusalem. And since it’s the last part obviously something is happening to the Church to get it ready to go to the second phase of church growth which is to move out into Judea and Samaria. And you’ll notice that the way the Holy Spirit does this is working in spite of the Church. The church people are going to make decisions in this passage, they are going to encounter problems in this passage and they have utterly no concept in front of their face that what they are really going to do is move to phase two in the evangelization of the world. Actually they’re going to do it because God has decreed this is the way it’s going to be, but in practice they themselves are not conscious that this, in fact, is what’s happening to them. This shows you, then, a dimension to God’s leading which we’re going to see, which should be very comforting to know that because God has decreed certain things about the Christian, those things will come to pass, whether the Christian is sympathetic with it or not.

Now we want to see some means by which God the Holy Spirit led the Church and to do so we’re going to take a survey of 3 or 4 verses scattered throughout Acts to notice how God the Holy Spirit did this. Beginning in chapter 6 and going through chapter 7, this last section, we have a section which we could entitled the breakthrough into the dispersed community of Jews. Normally we think of Stephen when we think of Acts 6, but Stephen is beside the point; he’s only the instrument in God’s hands. Stephen actually is a very small part of what’s going on in chapters 6 and 7, even though Stephen is the prime actor.

To see what’s happening, if you’ll notice in verse 1 how the thing starts, it does not start with Stephen. It starts with a church fight between the Grecians and the Hebrews. These are two cultural segments in the local church, because the Church is made up of people from all races, all backgrounds and so on, there are going to be social tensions in every local church. It’s just normal and it started out here; the Grecians are Jews of the dispersion; that is, they are Jews who dispersed throughout the world, they are great-great-great-great-great-grandsons of the ones who were thrown out of the land in 721 and 586 BC. These people have settled throughout the ancient world, some of them were present on the day of Pentecost, others were not, but by this time these Grecians have become Christians and have come into the local church. We call them Jews of the dispersion because they, although here are living in Jerusalem, they actually were not living in Jerusalem before this. They are new immigrants; or in the language of the modern day Israeli they are called the Olim, the ones who are coming up out of the world.

Now that’s one faction in this church fight. The other faction in the church fight are called the Hebrews, but the Hebrews are not just all Jews, the Hebrews are a special subset of Jews and that is what we will call the Palestinian natives, that is the people who have lived there, and they are the great-great-great-great-great-grandsons of the people who came back with Ezra. So although they are Jews, united in their genes, united physically and racially, and to a large degree culturally, yet they are also separate, they come from completely separate environments with completely separate outlooks. Today we call the native Israeli the Sabra. So the Olim and the Sabra represent two groups fighting within the local church and it looks like a bad news type operation. It looks like a disaster; surely so many years have not passed since the resurrection that we should already be involved in a church dispute, but no, Acts says that within months after the church began they were already having church disputes. For all of you people who naively want to get back to the early church in Acts, do you want to get back to church disputes like this? Go right ahead; they had church disputes.

Now the church disputes involved these two parties and I want you to notice one of the parties of the dispute because this party to the dispute is going to be the key for evangelization of the world. If this dispute, humanly speaking, had not occurred we would not be here this morning; the gospel would have remained trapped in the city of Jerusalem. So God is going to turn all things together for good including the first church dispute, to break out and form stage two of world evangelization. It is going to be through these Grecians. Notice in verse 9 that in Jerusalem at that time the Grecians or the Jews of the dispersion came from various areas. Notice they had their local synagogue. Next week when we get to verse 9 I’ll show you a picture of that synagogue on the famous model of Dr. Avi Yonah. “Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.” Disputing with who? With Stephen, so Stephen is a member of the dispersion community, he is a Christian, goes back to his special synagogue, which was a synagogue not of Palestinian Jews, now what we would call the Sabras today, but the synagogue of Olim, the synagogue of the immigrants from all over the world.

Now you’ll notice the places from which these Jews come from, and this reminds us of just how far the Jews had been dispersed in that day. They had been dispersed to the city of Alexandria in Egypt; Alexandria replaced Athens as a prime intellectual center in the ancient world. It had one of the greatest libraries in the ancient world, destroyed now but at its time it was a fantastic library. Then Jerusalem, this is where the center of the action right now is, but you’ll notice in this passage some people coming from Antioch, some from Cyprus, and a place called Cilicia. The significance of Cilicia can be found by turning to Acts 21:39. Again, all this by way of background to understand why the Holy Spirit is doing what He’s doing in the middle of a church dispute. Paul, at one of his trials, gives his background; he says: “But Paul said, I am a man who is a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia,” now that’s interesting isn’t it. How did Paul get integrated into the Church. You say well he got integrated on the Damascus Road. No he didn’t; what was he doing on the Damascus Road? He wouldn’t have been on the Damascus Road if the events of Acts 6 had not occurred. Because of Acts 6, because of the fact that the gospel now began to break away from just the Jerusalem natives and began to flow over into the community of Jews that had come out of these areas, now the Hellenistic Jews, Jews who by the way had a greater world view than the native Jews, because this happened Paul was eventually won to Christ. And we know what happened once Paul was won to Christ.

In Acts 11:19 you will find something else in line with this problem of the dispersion. “Now they who were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen, traveled as far as Phoenicia, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. [20] And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who, when they were come to Antioch, spoke unto the Grecians,” so now isn’t that interesting, you have this dispersion occurring and it’s always occurring by means of Jews who float back and forth between Jerusalem and these other parts of the ancient world. You have a travel [can’t understand word] going on here and therefore a mechanism has now been developed for the expansion of the gospel. Turn to Acts 9:29; when Paul finally starts his preaching, notice the first group to whom he preaches, “he spoke boldly in the name of our Lord Jesus, and disputed against the Grecians; but they went about to slay him.” So you’ll notice that Paul’s major ministry was to the Hellenistic Jews.

Now let’s see if we can summarize what we’ve been saying in five points so you can grasp the background for the movement in Acts 6. The first point is that Jerusalem had the monopoly. Right now it starts off with Jerusalem having the monopoly on the gospel. The gospel is confined to the city of Jerusalem; because the gospel is confined there you can have a close knit fellowship and you have a lot of things happening but if the gospel stays confined to Jerusalem then we would never have been saved.

So something has got to happen, which leads us to the second point. The great commission: God had said that that gospel is going to go forward to all the world; now the great commission was given in an imperative mood, you go into all the world, but because God is sovereign and because He does not leave the great commission to be fulfilled just on the energy of men, but rather through the sovereignty of God, the imperative mood is turned to an indicative future tense and the Church finds itself going into all the world. We’ll iterate this again as we go through the passage but the point seems to be that God has a system of training us.

We can stop right here and make a personal application. God has a way of addressing us with the Word; so we start with the Word of God, we become familiar with the Word of God and then God will put pressure on us to apply the Word. It’ll always be that way; you’ll see that in your life, time and time again, you’ll learn Scripture, you’ll take in the Word, take in the Word, take in the Word, of course some people never get to this stage because they never have the persistence to take in the Word long enough, but people who do persist, who take in the Word, take in the Word, take in the Word, will then find themselves somewhere along the line God brings a catastrophe, God brings pressure in, you say what happened, how come this is in my life. We were find until we started with the Word and now since we’ve started with the Word the ceiling caved in. We’ve had men join the board of this church and almost every one of them can report increased pressure in his job and in his profession and they ask why? This is not a discouragement to join the board but just realistic, that as you assume further responsibilities then Satan will also begin to attack you. It’s more exciting that way, more interesting, it shows you’re upsetting somebody.

And when you do this you’ll find the same technique, learn the Word, then pressure, apply the Word, and then we learn that lesson, next lesson, we start learning the Word some more, we learn some more, nothing seems to happen for a while and then boom, suddenly more pressure. Where did that come from? Because God considered us ready to take it. And so there’s this way all the way back to Acts 6 when He taught the church and taught the church and then finally the church would go out. All the reason, He’s changing the imperative mood “go” to a mood of reality, you are in fact going. And because of God’s grace man does not change the imperative mood to an indicative mood, God does. God does the doing because He is gracious.

Now we come to the third point, combining the first two; Jerusalem has a monopoly on the gospel, the great commission is telling us that they are to go into all these worlds, we come to a third problem and that is there is a danger of a gospel freeze, that is, of it staying in the city of Jerusalem and if you look at Acts 6:7 there’s a little notice in that verse that tells us, it looks like it’s optimistic and in a sense it is, but it also tells us why God the Holy Spirit did what He did through a church fight. It says, the Word of God is multiplying in Jerusalem greatly, “and” notice the last part of verse 7, “and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.” So what’s happening? The gospel is becoming part and parcel of the priestly establishment that ran the city of Jerusalem. And God is an excellent sociologist and He is cognizant of sociological pressures and structures and He knows that once that gospel gets locked down too solidly with the culture of the urban establishment it’s going to stay there. Those priests have stayed there, they’ve stayed there for centuries, and if they’d get hold of the gospel and the priests being the better educated people are going to be the ones that eventually wind up on all the boards in the local churches, they are going to be the ones who are going to be executing the executive decisions on who goes where, when, how, where the money is spent, who’s going to be a missionary, where he’s going to go, if these are the kind of people that are going to make the decisions of the future church the church has a very great danger of never fulfilling the great commission.

So we move to the fourth point, and that is [can't understand word] going on between them, but more importantly because they’re Hellenists, that is, they are people who dwell in the Hellenic culture, the Hellenic culture is the Greek culture, it’s the Greek word for Greece, and so the Hellenists, because they’re Hellenists, what do these Jews have which will be used to evangelize the world? They know the language, they can go into any part of the world, they can speak the dialect of those various cities. Paul was raised in the city of Tarsus; Tarsus has its own dialect; Paul knows that dialect, Paul lived in Tarsus, he knows all the stores, he knows all the people on the city council, he knows the entire cultural setting in Tarsus so Paul’s a natural. If anybody can evangelize Tarsus it’s not Peter, it’s not John, it’ll be Paul, the man who lived there. And so it is throughout the world; who can best evangelize the city of Alexandria but Jews who lived there all their life; Jews whose cultural ties are with Alexandria as well as with the rest of Israel. So the Hellenistic Jew is going to be the breakout tool for the gospel.

Remember that because during the tribulation that is to come upon this world it will not be Gentiles who will be doing most of the witnessing. It will be the Jews who will be doing the witnessing. Now why will the Jews be doing the witnessing? Because the Jews are natural missionaries; the Jews are planted already, they know the languages, it is not necessary for them to go to missionary training school, all they have to know is doctrine and right where they are they can be missionaries. And by the way, if the Church had been evangelizing the Jew over the last 1900 years we wouldn’t have to send out many missionaries. Take South America for example, who is involved in the high places of South American business today in banking? Jews. When I flew to Israel last summer I happened to sit in a chair with a man who was a Jew from Argentina and he was a very influential man, he had several posts in the Argentine government, he was involved in the banking circles of Argentina, now who would be the natural missionary to Argentina, training some guy from the high plains and teaching him Spanish and going down there to a completely foreign culture or a Jew who already lived in Argentina. Obviously the Jew who lived in Argentina.

And if the Jews of South America witnessed and evangelized South America you wouldn’t have the mess you now have where Catholicism came into South America with the Spanish, moved in and said we’re going to baptize everybody in the name of Christ. So what you have in South America is a breeding ground for Marxism as you always do when you have this kind of Catholicism that goes in, refuses to accept the issue of conversion and just takes all the statutes, the idols and everything else, calls them Mary, Joseph and Saint somebody else, and says that’s conversion. Nothing’s happened, you’ve just changed the suit of clothes but the person is exactly the same and that’s the story of South America today. You have had no widespread conversion simply because the Word was not made the issue; it was just a case of making them from religious pagans into religious (quote) “Christians.” But you see, the Jew would never have tolerated the paganism because the Jew is the strongest monotheist the world has ever seen and you would have had a clarification of the gospel had the Jews been in the forefront of the evangelization of South America. But of course again we have failed and did not do what the Lord told us to do and that is to evangelize the Jew so the Jew in turn, then, could be one of the leading missionaries and we have paid a tremendous theological price for it.

The fourth point in our synopsis of what’s going on in Acts 6 is that the breakout tool will be the Jew. This has always been true, it will always be true, it is the way the tribulation is going to operate, it is the way it worked then. God means what He says when He says to do it a certain way.

The fifth point is that the next step, therefore, had to be contact with the Hellenists; it’s the logical conclusion to the thing. If the Holy Spirit is going to get the Church operating in the great commission and the Hellenists are going to be the tool, the simple conclusion is you’ve got to meet the Hellenists, and that’s what Acts 6 and 7 is all about. Acts 6 and 7 is the local ingrown Jerusalem church suddenly latching outward and grabbing hold of these Hellenistic Jews in whose ranks will eventually include the apostle Paul.

Another point about this since we’re also on the way of application. You’ll notice that in this section God the Holy Spirit has given the great commission and He is moving that great commission from the imperative mood to the future tense. I said that that represents a system of training, where God will train us in the Word and then after He trains us in the Word He’ll put us in the pressure cooker for a while to see if we can apply the Word. Now we can find this not only in the evangelization of South America to cite specifics, we can show that generally on the mission field. Where we have had people who came from good old American fundamental churches, where they were programmed to death, where they learned that if they brought someone to Sunday School they got a balloon, or a kite and if they brought them on time to Sunday School they got a string to go with it, and a few other things, and had all this ridiculous program upon program, and what therefore does the missionary do when he goes to some foreign field? He simply repeats his American heresy; we had programs back in the States so we have programs here, that’s the way to witness. And so we have some native who has zero knowledge of the Word of God, the first thing he knows, he’s putting this guy in a high pressure straight jacket to go witness, witness, witness, he doesn’t even know what he’s witnessing about. He’s not even cured of his idolatry yet and yet you have him on the streets supposedly witnessing to Christ.

It’s ridiculous, and of course what did God say? If we read the New Testament I challenge you to find a command to the individual believer to go out and witness. Now isn’t that strange; ever thought of that. In all the passages of the New, all of them, all the epistles in the New Testament, isn’t it strange there isn’t one, not even one verse that is commanding new believers to go out and witness. Are we to conclude that the Holy Spirit doesn’t want Christians to witness; no, we can’t conclude that because He obviously does and we can prove that from doctrine. Well, why is it then that we have no imperative? For the simple reason, witnessing is a result, not the first step. It is a result of teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, training, sanctification and growth, then you will get your witnessing automatically and it will be high class witnessing, it will be emphasis on the local church, emphasis upon having good trained pastor-teachers. What’s happened to the American missionary; everywhere he’s gone he has taken the weak anemic form of the American church with all the American gimmicks, the hotshot Madison Avenue approach, got to sell everyone. And so we have this thing in Latin America, in depth evangelism or something which is nothing more than Madison Avenue selling. And this goes on and on and now guess what’s happening in Africa to the poor black Christians who were won to Christ by white Americans who transported to those black Christians his deformed American Christianity and now you have black Christians suffering, dying because the Americans who came to him didn’t emphasize that he ought to have a strong pastor-teacher, didn’t emphasize training and training and training and so the black Christian dies, is tortured to death by idiots like Tombalbaye and others in Chad, and other graduates of American missionary schools, turn into paganized leaders simply because God told us in Scripture how to do it, He is not going to tell us again, next time around pressure, and it’s the same thing here. God told the apostles the great commission, I want that gospel to go into the world. And He’s not going to say it again; the last time in the book of Acts He says it is Acts 1:8 and from that point on it’s as though God says okay, I made the issue clear, you guys won’t listen so now I’m going to force you to do it. So Acts 6 is the beginning of the forcing of the great commission.

Acts 6:1, “In those days,” the days of the great teaching of Acts 5:42, “In those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were being neglected in the daily administration.” Now notice “the number of the disciples was multiplied,” now Luke has three words for Christian, one word is “brethren,” another word is “believer” and another word is “disciple.” All three of these words have their special usages; we use the word “believer,” Luke has used that several times. If he used the word “believer” it would read in verse 1, “In those days, when the number of believers was multiplying,” now having said that we could interpret verse 1 very easily. We could say well, what Luke is telling us in verse 1, he’s reporting that the Church was increasing in number. But Luke doesn’t use the word “believer,” he used the word “disciple,” the “number of disciples was increasing” and that doesn’t necessarily mean at all the same thing as the number of believers increasing.

What is a disciple and what is a believer. A disciple is one who is discipled or trained; a believer is simply one who responds to the gospel. So what is verse 1 telling us? That the number of trained believers was increasing in the city of Jerusalem. See the concept: God is training them, training them, training them, training them in the Word and what’s going to happen? Boom, there’s going to be a pressure situation develop and sure enough, that’s what happens in verse 1, pressure. Why? Because God has said okay you guys, you’ve heard the apostles, you’ve heard them exegete Psalm 110, Psalm 2, Deuteronomy 18, you’ve heard them go through 2 Samuel 7, you’ve learned enough about apostolic teaching, you probably have heard so much in some of you can memorize, you’ve heard about the resurrection of Christ, you’ve heard about His virgin birth, you’ve heard about His death on the cross, okay you guys, you’re ready for some action now. So they’re going to get some action but notice first they are trained, they do not enter into a program.

You do not read in verse 1 where all the church finally got together and said folks, God has told us to go into all the world so we must have a program; I think we can start if we have evangelization in the suburbs of the city of Jerusalem, we’ll saturate the place, we’ll put posters on all the boards. You don’t find that at all here. What you find is people sitting under the teaching of the Word, and you notice in verse 42 where was the teaching going on? Daily in homes; notice the word “daily” they were teaching; these people took in the Word of God not at the 11:00 o’clock nod to God service but they took it in daily. I don’t know about you but I can’t go more than two or three days without getting in the Word of God and I don’t think any of you can either unless you’re a very unusual individual. So if you happen to be those kind who drops in here once in a while on Sunday morning to see what strange things happen over here, and if you’re not constantly taking in the Word of God you are never going to amount to a hill of beans as a Christian. That doesn’t sound very nice to say that but it’s the truth. I’m up here to tell you what you need to know, not what you’d like to know, not what you’d like to hear me say. But that’s the truth as far as your spiritual life is concerned. You have to take in the Word of God on a daily basis; it can be by tape, it can be by your own study but somehow you’ve got to constantly take in the Word of God or you’re just not going to make it in the Christian life. There’s too many pressures exerted on believers today to live without taking in the Word of God.

So that was the situation that led to this thing and “there arose a murmuring,” now the word “murmuring” means a simmering rivalry. The idea was not necessarily that the widow thing was the center of the controversy, it was so often as you see in Christian groups, there was one party over here, another party over here, they kind of looked at each other, and they weren’t getting along and it finally was this widow thing that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It wasn’t that they were arguing just over this; it was a cultural tension in the local church. See, the local church God has designed to include men of all races and all cultures.

Now God the Holy Spirit knows that down through the ages you can have one church, the church on one foundation. And over here you will have a Jew, over here you will have a white Gentile, a black Gentile, a yellow Gentile, a red Gentile; here you will have an educated person, here you will have an uneducated person, here you will have a poor person, here you will have a rich person. It doesn’t matter, the point is they are all one in Christ, but what does matter is the fact that there will be these little tensions between the group; there’s always going to be these things, these are normal. You cannot have an educated and uneducated person in the same room without some adjustments being made. You cannot have a poor person and a rich person together in the same room, in the same company without adjustments being made. You cannot have a yellow Gentile and a white Gentile together without adjustments being made. These are going to have to be made down through history.

And so here you have one of the first cultural adjustments that Christians had to make. Now what was the nature of the thing? We do not know, apparently the Holy Spirit doesn’t consider it important exactly what the problem was but we get a hint of it in verse 13 when they accuse Stephen of doing certain things. And apparently this was characteristic of the Olim party, or the Hellenist party, they “speak blasphemous words against this holy place, and against the law.” That was the accusation leveled against Stephen and it’s wrong in the sense that it’s a sin, but apparently these Jews of the dispersion were, shall we say, more cosmopolitan in their outlook. They were the kind of person that had been around a little bit. It kind of reminds me of Christians who have done a little traveling versus who have stayed in one place. It’s very interesting, you take some Christian who’s raised all his life in some area and he’s never seen Christians from another area, another geographical area of customs and so on, and he has his own little thing about how Christians ought to behave. And then he might go to France or Germany and find Christians drinking beer and he becomes all unglued because in America we don’t drink beer, that’s wrong. And yet apparently the Christians in France who have been studying the Word for centuries and the Christians in Germans studying the Word for centuries, including Martin Luther, love beer. Now what’s the deal. We know Luther loved beer because A Mighty Fortress is Our God is a German beer drinking song that he just changed the lyrics too.

The point is that we have Christians as we go from one place to the other with different sets of customs. Now what goes on, what would be the difference. You take a person who has been around and who has watched Christians outside of the city limits and he notices that they do things a little differently and so he comes back and he joins the church and he sits in the pew next to somebody who’s never traveled outside the city limits, who doesn’t know anything about Christians in other areas, and there’s going to be tension. This person who is sitting down is going to think, look at this guy that’s been doing all this traveling and think man, he’s liberal. It has nothing to with theology; it has to do with the fact that the guy’s been around and he knows how people live on the other side of the fence. And the person who walks in who’s the one who has been around and visited different places, he walks in, what kind of a creep are you, get real.

So there would be this tension and that’s apparently what led to this Grecian/Hellenist, the Hellenist/Jewish tension here in the early church. The Hebrews, located in verse 1, that’s the name for the natives; they didn’t travel, they were kind of just narrow minded and restricted and the Grecians were more socially liberal. Now notice, in the controversy during the murmuring, “the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were being neglected,” whose widows? The widows of the Grecian community. Now let’s think this through.

Why do you suppose the Grecian widows are being neglected and not the native widow. I suggest two reasons: first, as I said last week, Jews would come from all over the world to the city of Jerusalem to die so they could be buried…there’s a famous burial ground in the Kidron Valley, thirty or fifty thousand grave stones there until the Arabs took them all up and used them for urinals, but before they used to have a tremendous graveyard there that the Jewish people have finally restored, but at one time it was a very famous burial ground in the world and people would come in their latter days to retire in the city and die there, which left their widows. Now if someone, say from Ramah, say, to the north of Jerusalem, or Hebron to the south, if they came up here and they died their widow would have relatives down in Hebron or relatives in Ramah, relatives close by who could take care of the woman. But what about the person who traveled all the way from Cyprus; what about the one who came from Rome to die in Jerusalem; what would happen to his widow. His widow’s family is back in Rome, or Cyprus, or Alexandria, she had no one in the city to take care of her and she was marooned. So therefore it was the Grecian widows who had the more urgent monetary need for the reason that they had nobody around to help them.

The second why the widows were neglected, beside the fact that they had minus money, because they had minus family, was probably due to the liberalization. The Palestinian Christian Jews kind of went wait a minute, these people…[tape turns]… and it was that attitude that had crept into the congregation. So it finally rose into a big mess. And Acts 6:1 is the first church split, so to speak, in history. Notice what they had done, they were having some sort of operation, “were neglected in the daily ministration,” in other words, they had evolved some plan to cope with the problem but it was being badly managed. They had a good plan badly carried out. “The daily ministration” apparently was patterned after one of the Jewish welfare programs.

At this time in history there were two kinds of welfare programs that operated in the nation Israel. I might add they were both charity programs. That is, it was like Good Will Industries, where individuals from the community give and then the needy members of the community receive. There’s no government middle man confiscating property in the name of charity; this is not government welfare, this is private welfare. And the two kinds of programs had to do with the Jew and the non-Jew. For the Jewish people in the city at this time the men of the village would go down each Friday afternoon before Sabbath began. Shabbat begins at 6:00 p.m., nothing happens after that. So if you’re going to do anything you’ve got to do it before 6:00 p.m., buy food for the weekend and everything else because if you don’t you’ve had it. So Friday afternoon they’d go down and they’d open a big box, each village had its own box, and it was sitting there by the gates of the city and during the week people would give money to this box, it was a charity box, and they’d open up the box and they’d count the money. And then they’d work out sums of money to be distributed to people on the basis of their need, and the people who were too poor to feed themselves would receive enough money to buy 14 meals starting with Friday afternoon. So there was enough for two meals a day to get through the week until next Friday afternoon. So that was kind of like food stamps except it was private.

Then the second thing, the strangers or the non-Jews or the Jewish immigrants who were new to the community, they were not handled that way; they couldn’t get the 14 meal ration ticket from the box on Friday afternoon. The way they handled that problem was that they went around to the individual homes and asked for donations of fresh food, and since it was fresh food and wasn’t refrigerated and couldn’t be preserved they had to obviously distribute it each day. And so they’d have tables, and then the strangers who had no food, hadn’t got a job yet, would come to the table and eat the food that had been donated directly that day, and that was the daily ministration.

So it shows you that at this point the church had begun to use that second welfare program, bringing it underneath the Church and letting the Church handle the program in the name of Christ. So it was a Christian welfare system that was operating at this time. And by the way, I mention this passage and emphasize it for the reason that local churches may eventually have to go back to this if everything caves in around our ears some day.

Acts 6:2, “Then the twelve,” so we have a fight, the twelve are going to take an answer to it, by the way this is the verse that someone asked about earlier, why do I no longer accept the fact that Paul was the twelfth apostle? Because of this verse; they had twelve apostles, it says “the twelve” right here in verse 2, “the twelve” and this is written by Luke years later. So he is sympathetic with the title “the twelve” and he therefore obviously is accepting Matthias as the twelfth apostle. “Then the twelve called the multitude of trained believers [disciples],” emphasis on their training, “and said,” now here you have a very practical, very practical rule of divine guidance that you can use in your life, very reassuring, it’s one that always works, it’s one that’s easy to apply. You see, before I started verse 1 I gave you that big long song and dance about the background of this thing, to show you the big picture of how the Holy Spirit is moving the church into stage two of the gospel and so on. Now keep in mind though we know that, these people at this point in time don’t know that or they’d forgotten about it. Their eyes are blind to that big picture that’s going on, but notice what they do see and this is their, so to speak, their salvation.

This circle represents the will of God at any given time; all right, the will of God for the apostles was what? They at least knew that, it was to teach the Word. So let’s put that down; teach the Word. Now also it’s the will of God, which they had forgotten, the will of God was the great commission but the great commission was out beyond their visibility at the moment; they weren’t cognizant of that; all they knew is God told them to teach the Word. Now how did the Holy Spirit lead them from the known to the unknown areas for their life? It’s very simple; all the apostles did was they took what they knew of the will of God for their life and carried it out and the act of carrying this out led them to the second part, or the unknown will of God. So this is why in verse 2 it says, “It is not reason [fitting] that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables.” Now the thought furthest from their mind is evangelizing the world. All they are concerned with is they’ve got a church split, they’re having to devote all their time to the church split instead of teaching the Word. That’s what occupies their mind at the moment. So they’re honest and faithful to the Word, they say look, God wants us to teach, and I don’t know about all the ramifications but I do know that that’s what He wants me to do right here at this point with this little detail, so I will be faithful to God and I’ll apply the Word to my backyard, my little detail.

And so everything works out for good. This thing is going to be solved and not only is it going to be solved, it’s going to be solved in such a way that the gospel is going to go out to the ends of the earth, simply because believers, though they didn’t know, and had forgotten even the great commission, just simply kept operating, we’ll follow the Word, we’ll follow the Word, we’ll follow the Word, we’ll follow the Word. I could give numerous illustrations of people in our congregation that found this principle of divine guidance true.

I think, for example of the many times when I have taught the Word of God verse by verse by verse and somebody would walk in here with some big hairy mess of problems, I didn’t know it, the person sitting next to them never knew it and in the course of teaching, just going through verse by verse, that Sunday, just that Sunday we just happened to touch on a particular verse that had a particular doctrine that was applying to their particular problem. And this has happened so many times that I wonder, I’ve often thought this through, I wonder if the Holy Spirit programs peoples problems to phase with the way He wrote the Scripture. That’s the only conclusion I can come to; how can you have hundreds of people with needs that vary from A to Z and beyond, totally beyond the capacity of the human being to say now let’s organize all these problems together and solve this one, solve this one, solve this one, solve this one; you can’t do that, there’s just too many of them. And yet you stick with the Word over and over and these problems get solved, one after another.

How many people have come in here and other Bible churches and said oh gosh, I’ve got 65 questions that I’d like answered. But instead of writing out a big long sheet and answering these 65 questions in five minutes what did they do? They were patient, they took in the Word of God week by week by week and after about a year or two, all those questions are gone. Of course, now they have 108 new ones, but the point remains that their questions are being answered. And of course, to grow all these are going to stimulate you to ask some more questions. But that’s the process; do what you know is the will of God and He’ll lead you onto the other areas. Don’t worry about those other areas; do what you know in your own backyard. That’s what they did here.

Acts 6:3, they pick out seven men; seven because the Jewish city councils were made of seven; they apparently copied the Jewish city council system. Now I have said earlier that this passage represents the origin of deacons; technically speaking that is not so. The office of deacon developed years later. These seven men went on to be far more than deacons, but what we can say is that this chapter certainly shows you areas of deaconship. Obviously these people were called upon to solve a financial problem, not a theological problem. Notice they are there to solve the problem of teaching, to manage the affairs of the church so the pastor-teacher can devote his time to studying and teaching, studying and teaching, study and teach, study, teach, study, teach. Dallas Seminary has a program for summer seminary students; and we have this summer, and they’ve got all these 8,000 things that I’m supposed to through and did he talk to so many people about Christ, did he visit so many people here, did he do this, did he do that. As far as I’m concerned the best kind of training what John’s doing, that’s just studying in the library all day, 8 to 10 hours a day, that’s preparation, and that’s what a pastor-teacher is supposed to be doing.

But what happens in most cases, the guy will go out and first thing you know the deacons want him to do this and then somebody wants him, oh pastor, can’t we have a lonely hearts club for young people, my daughter doesn’t get any dates and I want her to have a little social life and blah, blah, blah, and all the idiots that promote this kind of program stuff always wind up with idiot children. I haven’t seen people who have come to any Christian group with the idea of that as their first goal amount to anything, ever! I can remember Bob Thieme telling me one thing when I was training under him; he said when he first came to Berachah Church in Houston he spent hours and hours and hours working with the young people, romping with them, wrestling with them, carrying on games, football, baseball and all the rest of it and that whole generation that was raised with that format all are spiritual washouts. And yet it’s the kids who came to Bible class day after day after day, those are the ones who are now in the Marines, in the Navy, who are involved in companies, executives, who are living for the Lord and using the Word of God. Why? Because the Word was placed first and yet we still have it, Christians by the carload, why don’t we have this program, why don’t we have that program.

Programs are fine but not at the expense of the Word and people say oh well, I wouldn’t upset the teaching of the Word, I just want the programs. That’s how it always starts and then first thing you know, we need a bigger room for the programs so why don’t you go teach in the closet and we’ll have our basketball game in the auditorium. And that’s the way it always winds up; it always does this, the resources are always allocated to these secondary and tertiary programs and meanwhile pastor, you administer the thing, which means call everybody on the phone that practices tonight and so on. And then people wonder why aren’t we growing? Because the Word isn’t being taught, that’s why.

So here, notice, “that we should not leave the Word of God, and serve tables.” Serving tables was right, but it was not as right as teaching the Word. Verse 3, “Therefore, brethren, look watch among you for seven men of honest report,” now the idea was to get men who had credibility, that word “honest report” means they were credible. Now there may have been other fine believers but they were disqualified from the office because they did not have public credibility. The Word of God says this; too bad, but a man who holds an office oftentimes in these kinds of situations, and remember what worse situation could you have than a group of squabbling females, and that was the first church split that you had; a bunch of females on one side of the fence and a bunch on the other side. I’d a lot rather face men who fight than females who bicker because a man will get it all over with and women tend to keep grudges and make snotty remarks and be catty and all the rest of it and it goes on and on and on and on. Men usually get it out of their system, they clobber someone against the wall, knock them over or something and it’s all over, but not with women. It just goes on and on and on. And this is the kind of situation that the apostles face. So they face a difficult situation and so they needed men, it says, “full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom,” now lest you think of that as too spiritual, turn back to Exodus 31:3 and we’ll see what Luke means by “full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom.” Here’s the usage of those terms: “And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship. [4] To design skillful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in bronze.” You notice what wisdom is; it’s not something intellectual there. What is the word “wisdom?” What would be another way we could translate it that these seven men had to have handle a group of bickering women? They had to have the filling of the Holy Spirit plus skill, the word “wisdom” means skill. They had to be very skilled men to step in there and administer this program fairly and justly, listen to complaints, sort out which complaints were good, valid, and which complaints were just somebody blowing smoke because they didn’t feel good that day. This takes discernment and skill.

Back to Acts 6, the men, seven of them, “filled with the Spirit,” that’s the spiritual side, “and skill, whom we may appoint over this business. [4] But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. [5] And the saying pleased the whole multitude; and they chose,” now here’s the breakthrough that is made. We don’t know why they did this, but the ironic thing of all these seven names is they’re all from a Greek background. Isn’t that strange; you had a fight in a local church going on between the Grecian women and the Hebrew women; between the natives and the immigrants, and where do all seven of these deacons show up? On the Greek side of the ledger. Now maybe it was the fact that the natives realized that they were wrong, and we don’t know the human reason why this happened this way. We know God’s reason though; He wants to reach the world with stage two of the gospel.

So let’s look at these men that were selected. At the time it looked like just a lowly job, taking care of a welfare program, big deal! No mountain top experience, no great testimony, since I was the director of this welfare program I’ve had such a close walk with the Lord and all the rest of it. It was nothing like that; it was just a lowly job that had to be done, but look at what happened to these men that assumed this, at first what appeared to be a mundane low-down job and they did it as unto the Lord. God promoted them.

First, “Stephen, a man full of faith, and of the Holy Spirit;” Luke, by the way, when he uses this notice he uses the Holy Spirit plus a noun of quality, and that qualifies what he means when he says full of the Spirit, he means full of faith. “They chose Stephen,” Stephen is going to turn into the first martyr of the Church, he is going to become a skilled evangelist and apologist, we will observe his skill next week at the end of chapter 6 and chapter 7. Stephen was promoted but he started his career waiting on tables. Those of you who are on the nominating committee for the board and those of you who are voting as members, you think of that; when a man runs for the board one way to gauge his qualifications is look at what he has done in the committee work, look what he’s done, maybe has a ministry, maybe he does something else; that way you can tell and you can also tell where he’d fit best on the board by his background. He doesn’t just pop on the board from doing nothing; it’s the same thing here. Stephen didn’t just hop in one giant step and become the Church’s first martyr.

Let’s look at the next man’s name; Philip. In Acts 8 we’re going to find out how Philip was promoted. He started out waiting on tables and he wound up as a great evangelist, he had daughters who had the gift of prophecy, he won one of the top black men to Christ in the world at that time, who was the treasurer or Ethiopia; he was a fantastic evangelist. He was a master at exegesis of Isaiah 53; he was a strong Bible student. Stephen and Philip prove to you, or should, that these men, before they were appointed, had hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of Bible teaching. Stephen didn’t just get up and give the famous address he’s going to give in chapter 7. That took years of preparation; same with Philip, he didn’t get up and start going through the exegesis of Isaiah 53 just because God gave him the Word. God gave him the Words all right but it was over an extended period of preparation.

The next man, “Prochorus,” now we don’t know much about Prochorus except from what comes down through church history. This man wound up as the personal secretary of the apostle John. And he was the man who had the tremendous blessing of sitting there, as the custom goes John fasted for about three or four days and he wrote the Gospel of John and he dictated it, he was an old man when he did it, according to tradition, we can’t be absolutely sure of it, but he went on a fast for three or four days and during this fast Prochorus sat there and he took notes, notes, notes, and the text that you read of the Gospel of John was first written by Prochorus, so again a man started with a very lowly job of waiting on tables; he wound up, he had the privilege of listening to John dictate the book of John.

And “Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas,” we know nothing from extra church history that I can find. The last one we know something about, “Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch.” That’s interesting; what was the city that was to become the missionary center of the Church? Antioch. Here is your contact already developing, right back here. The Holy Spirit moving in the middle of a widow’s controversy to get the right man in the right place from the right background at the right time. And Nicolas being a proselyte was not even a Jew, this man was a Gentile. So here we have the first Gentile being incorporated into the Church structure and not only incorporated but into the managerial elite of the first church. Later Nicolas, because he became so outstanding, as often happens in history, had a group of apostates name their movement for him, called the Nicolaitans in Revelation 2:6. He apparently didn’t have anything to do with the heresy, they just used his name to gain entrance.

Acts 6;6, “Whom they set before the apostles, and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.” This was signifying their place in the chain of command. Verse 7, “And the Word of God increased, and the number of disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly,” notice what is increasing now; not the number of believers, but the Word of God is increasing, that is, the Church is getting strength. The emphasis in chapter 6 is not no numerical growth, it is on depth growth. Why? Why do you suppose the Holy Spirit is emphasizing depth growth? Because right in the next chapter and after starts the first major blood persecution of the Church. While there is freedom in time believers must be trained because the hour will come when the freedoms will be taken away and the pressures will come too late for doctrine. Ask some Christians in South Vietnam where their pastors are now; ask them how easy it is to get the teaching of the Word of God after the communists took over Saigon.

There are four places, so far, in the text, as verse 7, where the Church is strengthened. We are going to close by reviewing these four areas and see what led to the strengthening of the Church in that day. In Acts 6:7 the reason that the Word of God is increasing, from the context, the reason is good management. They effectively used the resources at their disposal, “the Word of God increased.” They did not waste the time of their teachers, they deployed their fighting men on the front, they didn’t keep them back in the quartermaster section worrying about whose poncho was turned in last night. So principle one: effective management of resources.

Acts 5:14, the second principle, it says: “And believers were the more added to the Lord,” they were being added at a faster rate. Why, in context was this growth occurring? Answer: internal discipline. The Ananias and Sapphira incident had just occurred, these people knew that God meant business, so besides the fact that they had good management they had internal discipline; they got rid of the phonies, all the flake-outs, the pressure just purged them out of there.

Third factor in the growth of the early church, Acts 4:4, “But many of them who heard the word believed; and the number of men” or males, “was about five thousand.” Notice the third factor in context is that these believers had courage under persecution, under opposition they weren’t silent witnesses; they opened their mouth. They were not afraid to lose their job, to lose their possessions, to lose their life if that was necessary, they were going to teach the Word and they would do so even in civil disobedience to the authorities; that was the third factor of the early church’s growth.

Finally the last, Acts 2:47, “…And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” Why? Because of verse 42, “They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship,” emphasis primarily on the teaching. Constantly the teaching, day after day after day after day the teaching. Why? Because there’s so much to teach, there’s just so much content to teach. People who knock teaching have no idea of the content that is necessary to have to live the Christian life. The emphasis, then, is the foundation of the Word, it was always the Word.