Clough Acts Lesson 20

The First Missionaries – Acts 8:1-25

I’d like to answer one of the feedback cards; it’s the kind of question that is a very, very good question and it’s one that some of you who may have been raised in a fundamentalist home or background may not appreciate this; other people have these kinds of questions, so we’ll respond to this and maybe in doing so you’ll learn something about the problems that other people have and how to respond to these kinds of problems. Remember when we finished Acts 7 I had just covered how Stephen was killed. This was the first great martyrdom of the Church and when you read about somebody being stoned to death they weren’t picking up little marbles and stoning them with them; they shoved people off a wall about 15-20 feet tall, tied their hands behind their back and had them lying on their back facing up and they usually dropped a hundred, two hundred pound rock on their chest to smash it and crush their heart. And in so doing this would prepare them to be clobbered and finished off by other people who would throw large size rocks, so don’t get the impression that they were throwing B-B’s at them when they were being stoned to death.

It wasn’t a pretty sight; it was quite gory but during all of this God’s dying grace came through to Stephen and you’ll recall that as he was being stoned to death and literally crushed into the ground the Lord Jesus Christ got up off the throne, the only place in God’s Word where this ever occurs, and welcomed Stephen into heaven and this was a dramatic manifestation of God’s dying grace of how God deals with the problem of His saints when they’re being tortured and physically killed. This is going on in many parts of the earth and has gone on in the past. We in America happen to be lucky so we don’t think of these things too often. But I concluded how Stephen had this great supernatural manifestation of dying grace. After the service someone handed this question in and again, it’s a good question, so don’t interpret what I say as directed the person that asked the question, I encourage this kind of question, but this question is very typical of unbelief in our day.

The question goes like this: Help! I am having great difficulty in picturing supernatural events, like the resurrection, Stephen’s vision and so on, as being real and not just words, or myths. Cultural influences and scientism affect me heavily, so these events seem so utterly unreal. Saying lightly that Stephen went along enjoying the roots of his martyrdom made it seem even more unreal than ever this morning. Can you give me some more logical proof?

Now it’s ironic but the very speech of Stephen himself, I said at the beginning of Acts, that Stephen refused to answer the wrong question. But if somebody walked up to him and asked him a question, obviously Stephen would respond but he wouldn’t respond by necessarily answering that particular question. Obviously if someone comes up to you and asks you how many times last week did you beat your wife, that’s a question that’s a setup. In other words, the question is asked given the answer. And so with this question; this is a typical question asked by the person grappling with the culture today and it is asked out of a basic thought system of unbelief. The very question itself cannot be answered from the standpoint of Scripture directly, because it says that the Word of God as it is given in Acts 7 and as all the details of Acts 7 coalesce around this, that that in itself is not clear, that God’s authoritative Word isn’t sufficient; that what we need in addition to the Word is something else; that God operating in history is incredulous. Now that is obviously the position of unbelief and once a person starts there there’s nothing you can do about it directly. You have to argue indirectly.

And so we have to go back once again, as Stephen did, using exactly the same technique that Stephen did in his day and that is going back to the divine viewpoint framework. No one can respond to these kinds of things unless you go back to basics so we go all the way back to the very beginning of that framework; creation and fall, and we ask ourselves, there’s the foundation of divine viewpoint and human viewpoint and let’s go back to that foundation and see what’s wrong. We are not going to argue from human viewpoint across the line to divine viewpoint. You cannot prove divine viewpoint starting from human viewpoint. This is what was wrong down through history, why in the Middle Ages when they had all these elaborate proofs for the existence of God they didn’t prove anything; all they proved was what the philosopher wanted to prove. And therefore the direct argumentation is never used in the Bible and we ought not to use it.

We must argue indirectly, and how do you argue indirectly? You argue simply by starting with this human viewpoint and then saying that here is where the human viewpoint leads; this is the grand result of human viewpoint. Are you satisfied with that kind of result? Is this the kind of thing that you want believed; is this the sort of thing that you want to live with? If not, then consider the opposite alternative, starting here with divine viewpoint and seeing the results here.

Now that’s called indirect line of reasoning; that’s the kind of reasoning God uses in our sanctification; the prodigal son discourse is a classic illustration of indirect reasoning. Starting with the prodigal son, starting with his rebellion, he is simply taken to the pigpen and discredited by showing where his position leads. And then after that, then coming to himself he comes back to his father. And so a person laboring under this difficult is like the prodigal son, laboring in the pigpen of modern unbelief, and he must be shown all the parts of the pigpen to make sure that he’s really that comfortable and then maybe he will consider more seriously the Biblical position.

Let’s look at the human viewpoint position for a moment. Let’s take Stephen’s martyrdom which we’ll call S’s miracle, and start with this and look at it from the human viewpoint. Starting with the human viewpoint man has to opposite propositions; that is, all, ALL mind you, non-Biblical thought is basically in fundamental tension with itself. There’s a basic antinomy or contradiction underneath every non-Biblical viewpoint. The first proposition universally believed by everyone who denies Scripture is that ultimately all things are 100% irrational; that is, that everything comes out of Chance, that chaos is the grand creator of all things. You say I never heard an unbeliever say that. No, they don’t say that, but this in effect is what they believe, because if you ask the evolutionist or if you ask the cosmogonist, what happened before the Big Bang all they can respond is well, the universe was just there or the universe was collapsing from a prior state of expansion or something of this order, that basically we start with it was just there; no other reason given. That’s what we mean when we say that all things come out of the great void of Chance, out of the bottomless sea of Chance. It’s just floating on this sea, nobody can tell you where the sea came from or where it is going, the universe just was there. And so this ultimately is as far back as any unbeliever can go; he believes that everything including himself and his own brain that’s making these statement has come out of this great void. That’s one position and one statement.

But the, unfortunately for the unbelievers, he also entertains exactly the opposite presupposition, that everything is 100% rational. He does this by saying that the universe is what I think it is or what corporately man thinks it is. So therefore it’s what the philosophers say the universe must or must not be. A good example in an obvious sense would be David Hume who said that miracles can’t exist because by definition they don’t exist. In other words, David Hume and all of his finite intellectual assets has decreed there’s no such thing as a miracle; David Hume has taken, undoubtedly a time machine and gone back into infinity past and gone into infinity forward and he’s gone through all the lengths, heights, and depths of the universe and with an infinite array of data David Hume says there is no miracles. Now obviously David Hume never had a time machine and he did not have omniscience and so therefore David Hume is not qualified to make a universal negative statement. But nevertheless, David Hume goes ahead and makes negative statements anyway and all men have done this down through history. Based with a limited knowledge they hold that logic legislates, that man can sit with his limited array of data and decree what the universe is not or is.

Now this is the idea of 100% rationalism, that reality is what I think it. These two obvious suppositions come in conflict. There’s no way you can hold to both of them at the same time; one of them is true or the other one is true but they both can’t be true. And yet every unbeliever holds that, in fact, they both are true. Take Stephen’s miracles for example. Stephen’s miracle is unreal; why does Stephen’s miracle appear unreal? Because Stephen’s miracle is part and parcel of the universe structured along the lines of Genesis, structured along the lines of the created entity of God and such cannot be says the unbeliever and the unbelief in our society. That is the kind of universe that is impossible; I say that that universe does not exist and therefore I will erect a counter universe and so out of my own finite limited resources I engender some sort of universe that I control, that is totally rationally under the sense of man. And so because of proposition two Stephen’s miracle seems unreal; Stephen’s miracle clashes with this kind of thing.

Let’s take another example to see how proposition two gets the unbeliever or will get him in trouble. Let’s suppose we’re down to the last moments of history. Now let’s suppose we want to make a meteorological and geological forecast of the next 7 to 8 days of the earth’s history. Let’s suppose that we sit with all our meteorological data coming in, temperature, humidity, wind flow, pressure levels, and we amass this data into our computer. Given all the five different simultaneous equations that meteorologists use to solve and project the future state we sit with our computers and digest this semi-infinite array of data and it comes out with a forecast of the next seven days. And so this we say is what must happen is because this is our knowledge, this is what we build on. And then the geologist, perfecting maybe the earthquake forecasts that’s just in the bare research stages; he has all of his sensors scattered at various points across the face of the earth, reporting daily on tremors, major and minor, wherever they may occur. He has various physical principles that he uses of moving solids, friction, the problem of lubrication along faults of the earth. And he takes all this data together and he makes his forecasts that over the next seven days this is what will happen on the face of planet earth. And so the geologist, the meteorologist operating on the second premise come to us with an absolute forecast of the seven days. And then two days into the forecast period the sign of the Son of man appears in the heavens and the earth is shaken and the heavens pass away, and both forecasts are nullified immediately.

What happened? It was because in his limited array of data he didn’t take into account prophetic data of Scripture, but he did more than just not take it into account, he absolutely rejected it, for those men had three piles of material; on the one hand they had all their meteorological material; on the other hand they had all their geological material; and over here they had all the prophetic material of the Word of God. Three piles of data but while they were analyzing the data almost unconsciously, almost subliminally they followed this second premise that the universe must be what I say it is and therefore I say that this third pile of data will not be fed into our computers; we will discard that and proceed only on the basis of the meteorological and geological data. We will deliberately exclude data from the very start because our presuppositions say we have to do that. And so presuppositions enter into every system of scientific and philosophic reasoning known to man. So on the second basis man’s forecast was jeopardized because on his rationalistic basis he had from the very start eliminated this kind of material.

Or take the role of this thing; the idea that everything is run by pure Chance, that the universe is just there, that God, if He does exist, is also trapped in the machine, and He, along with men, struggle in history; that kind of view, that behind God there’s a prior force of Chance. And if a person holds to that first proposition they too have problems with Stephen in Acts 7 because when Stephen peers up through the clouds he sees the throne of God and he sees the Son of man at the right hand of the throne, and if there’s a throne in heaven over all things then Chance does not rule but God rules, and in particular the Son of man rules. And so therefore the vision is incredible to such a person; such a person cannot tolerate a sovereign God in that situation, and so because of proposition number one that says everything comes from Chance they cannot tolerate a sovereign Son of God reigning on a throne in heaven, the miracle seems unreal. But yet on the other hand because I say that everything is 100% rational and proceeds out of what I say it is or what I say it is not, therefore the miracle is impossible.

And so both of these propositions act to undermine the reality of the miracle, and whoever the person is the only solution to this situation is enmesh yourself further into the divine viewpoint, test it, correlate it, see what it says about various events of history and check your own system because you’re basically way off the track. If this is unreal it’s just a testament to how far human viewpoint has infiltrated your soul; I’m glad you’re honest to ask this kind of a question but it does betray a very fatal sickness of the soul if this sort of thing appears that unreal.

Let’s go on to Acts 8. Remember that Acts 7 was the last part of stage one of the gospel. The outline of Acts, the gospel would go to Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the world. The gospel has stayed in Jerusalem for these first six chapters; now chapters 8 and 9 deal with stage two, the gospel now breaks out of Jerusalem and goes to Judea and Samaria. Now when we see the things that are given in the book of Acts we want to review something; always remember, Acts is transitional. Nothing you see in Acts can be arbitrarily taken as a model for the rest of the Church Age. This is where Christians get in trouble; they seem to think that because they can go into Acts 8, this very passage, and see the laying on of hands that the Holy Spirit is given by the laying on of hands, and so they take this one incident in Acts 8 and say ah, this is the model for the entire Church Age. And so we will absolutize what we see going on here in Acts 8 and extrapolate it for the rest of the Church Age. And thus we arrive at such things as the baptism of the Holy Spirit after salvation, such practices as confirmation and so on. These are practices that come out of an absoluzation of Acts 8.

Now what’s the proper way of handling the book of Acts? Acts is historic literature and in the Bible there’s a rule, a vital rule that is you fail to see this rule you’ll always wind up with an error, every time. The rule is didactic literature interprets historic literature, not the other way around. Didactic literature would be the apostles, didactic means teaching literature, literature written expressly to teach doctrine; that would be the epistles, Romans, Corinthians, Timothy, Titus, that’s the didactic literature. That’s where you go to get your doctrine and then using that doctrine you come over here and look at your historic literature and interpret the historic literature in the light of the didactic literature. But no, what do Christians do today? They get locked on to one little passage in the book of Acts; they loft this way up above everything else and they say this is the norm and standard, even the didactic literature must submit to this one thing we find in the historic literature.

The rule: didactic literature interprets historic literature. Illustration out of the Old Testament: the Law of Moses interprets the prophets. The Law of Moses is the norm and the standard of the history books; the history book of Joshua, the history book of Judges, the history book of Samuel, the history book of Kings, you don’t go into Kings and find a normative thing out of Kings and extrapolate it for the entire Old Testament? You have no way of knowing what you’re reading in Kings, what you’re reading in Joshua, what you’re reading in Judges; you have no idea whether that’s right or that’s wrong unless you compare it to the Law of Moses. The Law of Moses is your standard and then you interpret the historic literature in light of that. And so when we come to the New Testament it’s exactly the same thing; read your epistles and interpret Acts in the light of the epistles. If you do it you’ll get the right answer every time. If you don’t do it you’ll always fail.

Now I know that some of you listen to that and you think I dream this up, that the didactic literature interprets historically is just something Clough thought of last week. And lest some of you be tempted to think along those lines I found this statement in Professor George Ladd’s book, A Theology of the New Testament; Dr. Ladd is one of the top evangelical New Testament theologians and he writes in the book: “Some Christians pick out the experience at Samaria, where the gift of the Spirit was subsequent to faith and resulted only from the imposition of hands and have defended the theology that the baptism of the Spirit is a second work of grace, after saving faith. It is obvious, there is no single pattern in Acts.” Now I didn’t write that, Professor Ladd wrote that.

Now the problem some of you have here is that you’re so unused to quality teaching and so unexposed to the great men, Luther, Augustine, and Calvin that when I do make a statement like this it sounds strange to your ears. Well, that’s not because I’m strange, it’s because you’re strange, [laughter] and if you had the proper historic background you would understand that what I’m saying is what’s historically always been said. There’s nothing new here, this is just stuff that’s been known for centuries. It’s just we live in a very stupid generation. And therefore anything that’s been known beyond 1900 is rare truth.

That’s one thing we want to remember about Acts. The other thing to remember about Acts as we go through this is that in this particular section of Acts we have the origin of missions. Why missions? And we’re going to see the principle of divine guidance, in other words, although missions is the particular thing that’s going on here you can look at this and say hey, I see a principle here I can use in my Christian life all the time. And the principle is how the Holy Spirit leads us along the path of sanctification or how the Holy Spirit causes you to spiritually grow. Now God at the beginning gave the Church in Acts 1:8; that command is sometimes, known as the great commission, to go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature and so on. That particular one is in Matthew but the same thing in Acts 1:8. So the great commission is given as a command, do this, Go! Wait in Jerusalem until you have the Holy Spirit, then you shall be witnesses in this place, this place, this place and this place. So we say that that is the imperative mood. The verb of imperative mood is addressed to your volition. It orders, solicits, invites your response. That is the imperative mood. But the Holy Spirit is also sovereign and under the principle of election He is going to guarantee that the imperative mood turns into the mood of reality or the indicative mood. The great commission starts as a command saying Go! The great commission winds up in history under the power of the Holy Spirit to be you are going; reality. The Church is, in fact, carrying out the great commission.

So what you’ve got here and this is what we’re going to study, is how the Holy Spirit changes a verb, changes a command, verb of the imperative mood or a command into an indicative mood, the mood of reality. How is destiny carried out, and you can say in your life, God says to you certain things, you will do this, you will do that, you ought to this, you ought to do that. Summing it all up He says, Christian, you ought to be conformed to the image of Christ. Said another way, you ought to be Christ-like. Now in spite of our sin nature, our rebellion, our thrashing around against God’s authority, in fact, if we are Christians it is certain you will wind up Christ-like. The imperative command will wind up in an indicative mood, will wind up as describing what in fact has happened.

But here’s the interesting thing; to listen to some Christians you would think that what happens in this process of going from the command to the destiny goes something like this. Well, gee, I’m convinced that that’s what God wants me to do, I’m just going to sit down here and I’m going to pray about it, and I’m going to see how I can carry out God’s will for my life. Well now that may work, but that basically, if you’re honest, is only about 5% of your Christian life. How does the other 95% operate? Well, I’m not interested in that, got other things to do, etc. etc. etc. That’ the 95% of the Christian operation and yet isn’t it interesting that God always works His will in a person’s life. Well, obviously the Holy Spirit cannot sit around waiting for us to decide whether or not we’re going to catch up with what He wants us to do, and so therefore we have an excellent model of how the Holy Spirit gets the church functioning in fulfilling the great commission.

Now let’s think of something, what happened. Part of that great commission in Acts 1:8 was that after Pentecost they were to move out of Jerusalem to Samaria and Judea. There is nothing in the great commission that said you are supposed to take a 30 year vacation in Jerusalem. The command said after Pentecost get going. But nobody got going, everybody sat around. Even the apostles in the temple, everybody was glued to the walls of Jerusalem. Nobody moved outside of the city; year after year after year after year dragged by and God’s great commission sat there flapping in the breeze to no one, until God decided you are going to be carrying out the great commission because the Lord of the Church who is the Holy Spirit will see to it. And what did the Holy Spirit do? He used the principle of adversity; He used the principle of various kinds of adversity. He used, in Acts 6:1 the principle of an old lady’s fight, a very flattering way that he got the men off their rear ends to operate spiritually. He had to get the men going by having the old ladies start a fuss, and that was Acts 6, dramatic leading of the Holy Spirit, great beginning of the Church Age but that’s how God the Holy Spirit operated, because it was out of that widow’s dispute in Acts 6 that the Holy Spirit jarred somebody in the leadership to get these Hellenists, remember the Hellenists, Stephen was a Hellenist Jew; that meant that Stephen had lived around, he had a wider horizon than these hicks that were living inside Jerusalem. Stephen had been around to the great cities, he lived in Rome; the Hellenists knew about Corinth, they knew there was a Mediterranean Sea, they knew of such things as Italy, as Greece, as the Aegean, as the city of Alexandria in Egypt, they knew all these areas and so as the result of the pressure of the adversity, the Romans 8:28 factor coming into operation, God the Holy Spirit impressed upon the Church to get somebody in charge who could lead.

The second thing happened; out of that came Stephen’s address and you had the doctrinal base of missions established, that’s the story of chapter 7. Missions did not get started because God had somebody come up in some missionary conference and give some tear-jerking story about how the Hottentots were going to hell if you didn’t come right down the aisle right now and dedicate your life to go to the foreign field some place. That was not how missions began; missions began by getting somebody with brains to establish a doctrinal base for that work. Everything needs doctrine. You cannot operate apart from doctrine, no matter who you think you are and you say well, I don’t have any…oh yes you do, every person has implicit or explicit doctrine. In the Vietnam War one of the reasons why the United States Air Force had such a time and really was never used to its full potency was because for years and years the Air Force refused to develop a doctrine of warfare involving counter guerilla operations. And so when Vietnam came along the Air Force didn’t know… what are you going to do with a B-52 and 2 VC and a coconut tree down there? Obviously you can’t use a B-52 against that kind of situation. So there was no doctrinal framework for the warfare to be conducted.

The early Church was the same thing, they had all this great commission, fine, but where’s the doctrine? No doctrine, so Stephen had to get that doctrine. This is why we have Christians in public office who are worse than non-Christians because they don’t have any doctrine. We have men like Senator Hatfield who are just flopping around with every human viewpoint socialist scheme imaginable because they have never understood that grace, doctrine that is not new to this day and age, it’s something Luther taught, it’s something Calvin taught, it’s the doctrine of the divine institutions and every Christian politician or seeker of public office ought to know God’s laws, His rules, His cause/effect relationship for marriage, for the home, for education, for government, etc. etc. etc. But no, we have Christians that get up and they trust Christ and they come trotting down an aisle and they sign their cards and raise their hands and Hallelujah and all the rest of it, and go around and give their hotshot testimonies at one Christian meeting after another and when it comes to trying to make a decision in government their decisions are no different than the decisions of any intelligent non-Christian. Why? No doctrine…no doctrine!

Now this is how you can tell when the Holy Spirit works and here’s how we can tell that right at this time the Holy Spirit is taking that early Church and bending it and saying you guys have been sitting in Jerusalem so long I want you out of there, and you can tell the Holy Spirit is starting to take over the steering and starting to move the cart because something is happening with doctrine. There is never a work of the Holy Spirit ever done in history apart from doctrine. Doctrine is always the first thing that is clarified whenever you have a work of the Holy Spirit. That’s how you have a litmus test to tell, hey, is the Holy Spirit really working? Do you know how you can tell? Not by somebody’s glowing testimony. Satan can work all sorts of miracles and works and if you’re going to go on the basis of experience you’re shot down from the very beginning. You’ve got to have something else and that something else is where the doctrine is being taught, where the doctrine is being clarified. You need doctrine; if you are a Christian you ought obsessed with the idea of getting some doctrine in your life. I have never been able to understand in all my life how men in particular who are Christians can think they are going to live the Christian life, walk into business, make business decisions, go into the military, make military decisions, go any place and make any kind of decision without doctrine. And yet man after man has an I don’t give a damn attitude toward Scripture. And it just shows how idiotic they are, because you’ve got doctrine, either human viewpoint doctrine or divine viewpoint doctrine, and if you’re not hot to get divine viewpoint doctrine wherever you happen to be, whether it’s by tape recording, by some local church, some place some how you should be obsessed with getting a doctrinal base for your life.

So Acts 7 gave the Church this doctrinal base. Then came Acts 8:1 and right here the next step in the leading of the Holy Spirit, and notice how the Holy Spirit led this. The first sentence of Acts 8:1 ought not to be there, [“And Saul was consenting unto his death”] actually that first sentence should be on the tail end of verse 60 of chapter 7; the chapter break occurs here after the word “death.” The rest of verse 1, “And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. [2] And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him. [3] As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison. [4] Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.”

Now you see what happened? Notice in verse 1 at the very end what did not happen. Do you notice in verse 1 that the entire leadership of the verse was not involved in this advance. The text clearly states that every single one of the church leaders stayed in Jerusalem. They weren’t even on the frontier when this breakthrough occurred. Why do you suppose Luke records that? He’s trying to show us something; hey guys, it didn’t happen because you geniuses sat down and decided a big hairy program, you scheduled a revival for the fall. Is that how the breakthrough came? Not at all; it came because the Holy Spirit decided to get the Church moving and He did so independently of its hierarchy and its leadership.

And then in verse 4 it says “they were scattered abroad everywhere preaching the Word of God.” All right, if you turn to Acts 11 we’ll see where “everywhere” is. In Acts 11:19 the “everywhere” is defined and described; it says, “they who were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose on account of Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but the unto the Jews only.” Now it’s true they kept to the Jewish community but let’s see where this “everywhere” was and get an idea of just exactly what’s going on and how God is effectively spreading the Church out from this area. This is a map of the great trade routes of the ancient world. All those dark lines are areas where the gospel eventually went, because the gospel concentrated on the lines of communication of that ancient world, and one of the great lines of communication was the coastal road here; this is the Dead Sea, this is the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem is about here and these people fled up along that coastal road all the way up the coast to what is now Lebanon and Syria. This is modern Turkey, here is Syria and there’s the city of Antioch, there’s Phoenicia and there’s Cyprus. So already independently of apostolic leadership solely the result of the gracious leading of the Holy Spirit, believers are taking the Word of God up almost to the bridge of two continents. Over here you have Europe; over here you have Asia; over here you have Africa and before chapter 8 is finished representatives from all three continents are evangelized. But notice the bridge is already running northward and it’s at Antioch that the Church finally established its headquarters after expulsion from Jerusalem. So this “everywhere” means at least everywhere along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, known in the ancient world as the Levant.

Back to Acts 8; the method that the Holy Spirit used to move the Church, Saul, there was a great persecution against the Church. Now in the United States we haven’t had that kind of thing but believers right now in Africa, believers right now behind the iron curtain in Russia and China are experiencing adversities. Some of the great Oriental churches are in China today and they are surviving by underground meetings house to house. Some of the greatest black churches that have ever existed in history now are being persecuted in the heart of Africa. Some of the greatest saints of Europe in western Russia are being persecuted. So all over the world with some exceptions, the United States being one, believers today are being physically persecuted, just like this.

“…the Church was at Jerusalem, and they were scattered,” and notice the places they were scattered to; deliberately the next stage that Christ told them to go to, Jerusalem, Samaria. See, there’s a reason for suffering; remember all the reason that we have studied, why does a Christians suffer and we went through and we categorized those six reasons and one of those reasons was to learn something and here we have that kind of reasoning. Notice too in verse 2, the “devout men carried Stephen,” this is kind of a sub note and you wonder what’s that got to do with the persecution. Plenty: according to the Mishnaic Law, Sanhedrin 66 in the Mishnah, it says you cannot lament, that is have a public funeral, for anyone who has been stoned by the Sanhedrin. And so here in verse 2 you have believers openly and publicly defying the authority of the Sanhedrin with a full public funeral for Stephen. It was apparent that this was wrapped up with this kind of persecution that was going on; this stimulated them to come back down hard on them for daring, right under their nose, to carry on a forbidden public funeral for a person who had been stoned.

In particular the leader, verse 3, was Saul. It was Saul who was, imperfect tense, “making havoc daily of the church, entering into every house,” that shows you how the Church met, it didn’t have big buildings, it met in private homes, and as it did so Paul would break into their meetings and carry of “men and women,” remember one of the categories of suffering is category three suffering, suffering because of identification of the divine institutions, a husband might be a believer and his wife was there in the room when they were having… she got dragged into the street, the word “haling” in the King James means to grab by the collar and pull down the street. So it happened to both men and women and Luke notes that because he’s going to notice a very interesting blessing that came out of it all later on in the text. “…committing them to prison.” Saul was a model here of the kind of person who is above average in talent.

You can graph people, if you want to make a graph, showing how people can be for good or evil; you take someone with great talent, say person A or person B, person B has great talent, they can be fantastic in the cause of the Lord; they can also be very fantastic in the cause of Satan. The same with person A, person A may not have as much talent, they can go either way also, but person B, who has greater talent can go farther in either direction. And Paul or Saul at this time was operating negatively; here he’s Saul and later on he becomes Paul, as Saul he is a fantastic opponent to the Christian faith. Paul was brilliant and furthermore it also shows something else. Paul was vindictive and you’ll notice this. One of his great problems in his own personal sanctification was he was a fighter, but he was also a very vindictive individual. It was very natural for Paul t sink into the mental attitude sin of hatred, animosity, vindictiveness. He was just that kind of person, and here he was, because obviously Stephen got the better of him in the synagogue debate and Paul never forgot that, until, that is, the Damascus Road experience and the Lord straightened him. But while you see Saul operating here in all of genius to destroy the church you are seeing a vindictive, hate-filled individual using all of his talents in the cause of the destruction of the Church.

So they’re scattered abroad and beginning at verse 5 we now have one story about what happened during this Christian dispersion. The story occurs at a place called Samaria. Again we want to get some background so you’ll be able to visualize in your mind where the story took place and be able to relate it in your mind how this is related to various portions of Scripture because remember it was in Samaria that the Lord Jesus Christ spoke to the woman at the well. Here’s a map of the area of Palestine; Samaria is located in this north area. [He shows slides] Apparently, although we can’t be sure, the story of Acts 8 occurs at Shechem; Samaria proper, the city is up here but scholars say it happened down in this area and if so, that is very interesting because the Lord Jesus Christ a few years before this, maybe half a generation or so, twenty years before this had come up this road that runs up along the edge of the top of the highlands, He goes up north, it’s a main highway north and south, and all the travelers used to stop at Jacob’s well; this is one of the rare wells that never ran dry. And you read in John 4, people in a village on the south side of Mount Ebal came down to this well and they were evangelized by that woman and then went back up and apparently had a minor revival.

Along comes Philip in this same territory, years later, and the territory because it has rejected once again the Word of God, has gone into demonism. And he runs into a spirit-filled mess that he as to work with. Look closer, here’s Mount Ebal, here’s Mount Gerizim, Mount Gerizim is the place where according to the Samaritan religion you have the replacement for Jerusalem. Remember the cowman at the well asked Jesus, she said as they were both talking at the intersection of those two roads, they were looking southwest, and she said, Your ancestors say that we are to worship in Jerusalem, ours say we are to worship in Gerizim, who’s correct. And Jesus Christ said it is the Jewish position that is correct, the Samaritan position is wrong, salvation comes from the Jews and Jerusalem is the place; down here, not here. Philip, Acts 8, John 4, all occurred down in this valley; you can picture the conversation with the woman in John 4; these people came down the south slope of Mount Ebal down to Jacob’s well and then back again. Philip comes into town years later, he finds the spiritual situation in the area completely changed. These people have, as a corporate community, rejected the Word of God and they have paid a very severe price. So we once again see God’s grace exercised to a group of people who have rejected the Word of God.

Now let’s see what happens. Acts 8:5, “Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them. [6] And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spoke, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. [7] For unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many that were possessed with them: and many taken with palsies, and that were lame, were healed. [8] And there was great joy in that city.” Why is it that there’s such an almost demon infested hornet’s nest in this particular area? A very, very simple principle that the Church has run into time and time again. Wherever you have great demonism you usually, if you know your history or you have the data available, you can trace it back to a prior evangelism and here’s the way it works. The Word of God will go into an area; let’s take North Africa for one thing; all around the coast of North Africa you have some of the greatest Christian theologians that ever existed. You had Athanasius, Origen, Augustine, all of the great thinkers that straightened out the Church on the doctrine of Christology, were North African type theologians. Now all of these men had a virile church along the North African coast but what happened? Gradually these people became negative, negative, negative, negative, negative toward the Word of God and so finally God damned the whole area and today North Africa is a spiritual wasteland. At one time in the last ten years a missionary to North Africa was telling me you could count the number of living believers on one hand. So that shows you what happened to one great, great area of the world. Why? Because you had people exposed to the Word and they turned against it and it’s like the parable, Jesus said, they sweep the room clean only to have seven unclean spirits come again.

Now that’s why the United States is in a problem; there has never been a country in the history of mankind that has greater exposure to the Word of God than America and yet we have Americans by the tons who could give a damn for the Word of God, and as a result we are seeing our country disintegrate in front of our face. We are seeing attitudes develop in this country of hostility toward all kinds of authority; that’s just an outworking of hostility to God’s authority. We see all kinds of evil in high places and in low places. Why? Because of a basic turning away from the Word of God.

And so it was in this kind of a situation that Philip’s in and he began to exorcise demon powers from these people, the unclean spirits in verse 7 are demons who are indwelling these people. Now how did the demons do the demon powers get there? They don’t get there because they’ve been to see the Exorcist or something and you get these creepy pictures of demonic workings. Demon workings usually work unnoticed; you don’t have to cough up green stuff to be inspired by demon powers. So the idea is that you have negative volition, you have minus conscience, these are steps, and then you have the acquisition of human viewpoint all the way from the world into the brain and into the soul of the individual.

And one thing you want to understand about ideas in Scripture and it strikes us in the West as kind of odd but this is the way Scripture says, and that is that ideas are living; there’s no such thing as a propositional truth that neutral but it carries a spirit with it. For example, the gospel itself, it’s conscious, I preach doctrine but when you teach doctrine in a gospel situation the Holy Spirit is locked into that message. So the same thing is with human viewpoint, where human viewpoint is articulated, whether it’s in the area of mental attitude sins or whether it’s in the great intellectual areas, there’s always the evil spirit, the principalities and the powers and the darkness of this world that are locked in one to one relationship with those ideas. Ideas are not the naïve little harmless things that western man has deluded himself into thinking.

And so these people had sucked in the spirits along with their ideas and Philip came and he blew them out with the power of Christ. People were taken who were lame and they were healed. These are the signs of Joel 2 authenticating the Church it its first generation. Notice the lame that were healed. Luke is a doctor who is writing this and Luke distinguishes between demon problems and physical problems. The Bible doesn’t say that every person who is sick has a demonic problem; not at all. The demonic problems are categorically apart from the physical problems; [can’t understand word/s] in one person but the point is that there’s a very, very clear Biblical distinction made. [8] “And there was great joy in that city.” The spirit of oppression had left.

Acts 8:9. “But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: [10] To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. [11] And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries.” Now this man is one of the most evil men in the history of the first 150 years of the Church. He’s known in literature as Simon Magus, it’s the Greek word for magician. And Simon was, you can see his origin here but he later went on to start heresies all over the eastern Mediterranean; he began a little private cult of Gnosticism all by himself, and then he decided he couldn’t leave Peter alone so everywhere Peter went to evangelize old Simon would chase around after him. Peter would hit one town with doctrine, Simon would come in and hit them with Gnosticism. Peter would go up the road, preach the gospel again, Simon would come in and take them all out with his sorcery.

He just chased Peter, he had a vindictiveness to Peter which is explained by this passage, until they finally met face to face in the city of Rome. And although we can’t give full credence to the extra-Biblical tradition, some of it is true, but he confronted Peter in public before the people, both believer and non-believer, and he challenged to a dual of supernatural powers to see whether Simon was God incarnate or whether Peter was a bona fide representative of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. And so they put on kind of a magic show contest, sort of reminiscent of Pharaoh and the magicians in Exodus. And as it went on Simon would do a miracle, Peter would do a miracle. Simon would do another miracle, Peter would do another miracle, until finally Peter’s miracles became very clearly qualitatively better, bigger, and more powerful than Simon’s and Simon was discredited; afterwards he disappears from the pages of history and we don’t know where he went. But this evil individual that caused so much later ideological and demonic havoc in the Church started here and this is his story.

Notice in verses 9-10 how he had successfully snowed everybody in the town, but then in verse 12, “they were believing,” imperfect tense, “They were believing Philip who was preaching things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.” See that statement; that’s reminiscent of verse 3; just as the men and women had been cursed together, so the men and women were blessed together. The wives had been dragged off in verse 3 with their husbands into the persecution of the Church; but the wives here were also led to Christ with their husbands under the advance of the gospel. Another thing to notice; as Philip collides with these people, he walked into an area that has been on negative volition for a long time historically and therefore has very little doctrine. So Philip starts out, it says, preaching “the kingdom of God.” Now what does that mean? It means that Philip has gone through the divine viewpoint framework with these people; Philip did not do what so often happens in Christian evangelism, tell Jesus stories. You don’t have to tell Jesus stories for people to understand Jesus.

When my older boys were younger we had some people that were interested in evangelizing small children, and they wanted to tell them Jesus stories and I said no; and my wife and I did everything we could to make sure that they were taught God’s essence first, then Jesus stories. It does not good to come up to some little kid, five, six, seven years old and start telling him about Jesus; he doesn’t have the equipment to understand. What has to be taught him first is the essence of God, then after he understands who and what God is that’s the time to introduce the person of Jesus to him. But how is a kid going to understand Jesus if he doesn’t first understand who and what God is. How did God Himself prepare the world for Christ? Didn’t He spend century after century training people to be ready to accept Christ? I just got through spend two and a half months writing one chapter in the fourth coming framework pamphlet on the theology of Christ. That one doctrine is called the doctrine of the hypostatic union and it took Christians 630 years to properly state. Now do you seriously think a five year old kid is going to understand the person of the Lord Jesus Christ when it took the Church 600 years to get their thinking straight on how to define the person of Christ, because you’ve got undiminished deity, you’re got true humanity, somehow they’re united but somehow they’re not united, all this complexity and we’re going to tell a Jesus story to a kid. It’s crazy.

So Philip doesn’t start with Jesus stories, he goes all the way back to the foundation of the kingdom, he tells them about the Noahic Covenant, he tells them about the Exodus, Mount Sinai, he goes through the Old Testament and the stories of the kingdom of God and the prophecies, and then it says he teaches them “the name of Jesus Christ,” which means the character of Christ. Philip spent time, he spend hours and hours and hours teaching and teaching and teaching these people because the Samaritan group was a group that had historically isolated themselves from divine viewpoint; the Samaritans… and this whole situation here in Acts 8 is a sign of something else, a very vital thing. It’s a sign of how the gospel can go to different cultures and different races and how the Church solved that problem very early and has since forgotten how to solve it.

Let’s look at the Samaritans for a moment to appreciate the problem. The Samaritans are half-breeds; they were half Jew and they were half Gentile, which made them despicable in the eyes of the purebred Jews. The Jews would detour… that’s why you have the story of the good Samaritan in the Bible; how did that story get in there? It’s simple, because the Jews did not consider Samaritans worth speaking and associating with and therefore they bypassed them and when somebody asked Jesus who his neighbor was He said the Samaritans, that’s why they came to Me.

So here you have a half-Jew, half-Gentile race but what happened was that they had gotten some divine viewpoint from their Jewish background and they had gotten a lot of human viewpoint from their Gentile background and they tried to mix the two and they wound up with a Bible that had five books in it; they tore every book out of the Old Testament after the book of Deuteronomy, and they believed Mount Gerizim replaced Sinai and Jerusalem, they were just all fouled up. So this is why, when Philip comes in there he realizes these people don’t have a background to understand so he takes his time and he teaches this point, this point, this point, this point, and then he presents Christ to them. Now if only missionaries would do this, but instead what happens. We have translators spend some of the best years of their life going into some heathen tribe some place and what do they do? The first thing off the press, translate the Gospel of Mark. Brilliant! How is someone going to understand the doctrine in Mark; it doesn’t require a genius to realize that the Gospel of Mark is at the end of the Bible, not the beginning. God wrote this book in [can't understand word]. If you’re going to start and train somebody in the Word of God you don’t start with Mark; you start with Genesis. That’s where God starts and that’s where Philip starts and that’s where missionaries should start. So this is an excellent illustration of sharp missionary work.

So Philip goes in and he straightens them out, all the way in this background, and then many of them were baptized. Simon himself was baptized, [Acts 8:13, “Then Simon himself believed also;] and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done.” In other words, Simon here, it looks like he’s a Christian, doesn’t he; he’s believed and he was baptized, but we know by what Peter says to him in a few verses later on that he was never regenerated. We know from church history what happened to this character so here is a warning to some of you when you see somebody trot down the aisle and make this great decision for Christ and so on, just play it cool; be friendly, be nice, but don’t you think that they’ve become a Christian until you’ve seen some evidence of the doctrine of perseverance. Don’t jump to hasty conclusions. Peter is one of the sharpies in this story and he spots it right away with a beautiful statement which I’m going to translate out of the gross original, just for your own pleasure and for the displeasure of all the legalists.

It goes on that these people are baptized, and in Acts 8:14 a strange thing begins to happen. “Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John:” now what is going on; why did the apostles come down in this situation. It goes back to the Samaritan religion; the Samaritan religion had to be told very clearly and in unambiguous terms that the blessings that they were experiencing here that day through Philip were blessings that came not from Gerizim but from Jerusalem. The apostles came down from the city of Jerusalem to identify to the Samaritans that it was the Jewish position, as Jesus asserted in John 4, that was the correct position. They could not be left with any kind of a false conclusion. But there was a second reason for all this goings on, the apostles coming down and that was to get rid of the problem of racial prejudice in the Jerusalem church. The Jerusalem church would have last thought, this was the last thought, that the first place the Holy Spirit is going to work is among Samaritans. Surely not, they thought, and the Holy Spirit says surely I think and I’m going to do it. And so therefore the Holy Spirit could point out to them that the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is open to every member of every race on the face of the earth.

It goes back to Noah. Noah has three sons; he has Ham, Shem and Japheth. Each of these races has strong points and weak points. Take the Japhetics, western Europeans, you can’t use color on these, most of the Japhetics are white but that doesn’t mean anything, the Shemites are brown and the Hamitics are white, black and all the colored races. So you can’t use color on this. You have three sons; the Japhetic’s strong point in history has always been to systematize; that’s what they’ve done, they’re the ones who have basically worked with science; they are the ones who have basically worked with philosophy, Greece, the Romans, law, bureaucracy. The Semitics, the Arabs and the Jews, have been known in history for their great contribution which is monotheism. Think of it for a moment; all three monotheistic religions did not originate with Japheth. Most of you come from Japheth and when your great-great-great-great-great fathers were trotting all over Europe in their primitive long cloths they were not monotheists; they were a bunch of pagan Norsemen or something, Vandals, and while they were clubbing one another all over Europe it was the Jew who began to move out with monotheism. And so the Shemites historically have always made their contribution in the area of religion. What about the Hamites? The Hamites have always been the ones to organize civilization. They are pioneers, they are founders, every major civilization on every continent has come from Ham. Think of it for a moment; who were the first ones to organize the first society in the Mesopotamian valley? Sumerians; Sumerians were black. Who were the ones that organized the first civilization in Asia? The Chinese, yellow. Who were the ones to organize the first civilization in the North American continent and the South American continent? The Indians, and they’re red. So every continent on earth follows this principle. If you want the outline of how these races work out it’s all for you in Genesis 9 and Genesis 10, it tells you the whole thing, but nobody believes Genesis so everybody has lost their whole concept of the Biblical view of what race is all about. So all of these races have their strong points; God has deliberately taken humanity and divided it into these parts; there’s seventy parts, not three, seventy parts so that each particular group can specialize in what they are best at doing.

And so in this case you have the Samaritans who pick off a Semitic background from their Jewish side and they pick off a Japhetic background from their Gentile side, and the Samaritans, then, are blessed with the advent of monotheism, which is the strong point of their Semitic background and they’re also quite inventive and industrious as by their Japhetic background. So this is a racial group that belongs in the person of Christ. You see, Jesus Christ goes back to replace Adam in Scripture. Adam had all the races in him; some of you think of Eve as some Nordic blue-eyed beautiful blonde. Well, I hate to disappoint you but I rather suspect that Eve had brown hair and was brown in color; it’s the median color of the human race. So lest any of you think of some romantic attachment to Eve forget it.

Christ has all of Adam’s potential; Christ is regenerating a new race and included in that race will be regenerate Hamites; regenerate Semites, regenerate Japhetics and the unregenerate race is still over here with unregenerate Hamitics, unregenerate Semitics, unregenerate Japhetics. And that’s all organized under Adam. Christ, therefore, is the new author of the race by regeneration, and that lesson had to come very, very hard to the Church. So all during this business of the apostles coming down, laying on hands is two-fold. The apostles have got to learn that all races are open to Christ and the Samaritans have to learn that their religious heritage is all screwed up so forget it and let’s just go to the Old Testament.

So in Acts 15 they prayed that they may receive the Holy Spirit. [“Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Spirit.” It is not a model for all time; it is a model only for this point. Later on, in verse 25 Peter and John are going to go from Samaritan village to Samaritan village and there is no record whatsoever that they spoke in tongues. They only spoke in tongues, presumably though it’s not stated here, they apparently spoke in tongues on this occasion so that Samaria would have a Samarian Pentecost. Tongues occurs in the book of Acts only, ONLY when you have a new group incorporated in the Church. In Acts 1 it occurred because you have the origin of the Church; Acts 8 it occurs because you’ve got a whole new racial group coming in and God the Holy Spirit wants to identify that they have as much business and status in the body of Christ as anybody else. [Acts 8:16, “(For as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.)”]

So they laid their hands on them in verse 17, “Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” Apparently what is happening here is they’re speaking in tongues when this happened. Now verse 18, this is a classic, “And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Spirit was given, he offered them money,” this obviously shows he was still in idolatry. What’s the center of idolatry? That God is under my feet; the idolater confuses the original commission given to man; the original commission given in Genesis to man was subdue the earth under your feet; the idolater says I will subdue God under my feet with the result that the idolater subsumes neither God nor man under his feet; always manipulating, the idol worshipper is one who has his little genie, rub Buddha on his belly and you’re going to get something good, that concept. Same thing here, money can buy blessing. Now in Christian groups every once in a while you’ll find some hotshot who likes to come in with a fat bill and plop it down and say here. I’ll never forget, one of the most interesting experiences I had was when I was training under Bob Thieme under summer and some well-known Houston man came into his office and plopped down this check for $10,000 on his desk, with this kind of smirk on his face. I remember Bob Thieme got up out of his chair, picked that check up, handed it back to him, get the hell out, and that’s how he handled the whole money problem; we don’t accept that kind of attitude; if you want to give to the Lord, that’s fine, but if you’re going to give to buy off somebody just take it some place else and all that attitude, even the words, goes back to Peter; now hang on, some of you who are not used to tough language in the Scripture. Some of you think that every time somebody uses a hell or a damn they’re cursing. Wrong!

Acts 8:19-20, “Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.” So he wanted to be kind of like the apostles, he not only wanted to have the Holy Ghost, he wanted to use him. [20] “But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee,” now that’s a sweet little translation but let me show you what it looks like in the Greek; the King James translators are a bunch of prissy characters who ever good passage there is they have to mess it up. “Your money, with you, let it go to hell.” Just take you and yourself and your money and get out of here and go to hell; that’s what Peter is saying. Now this is not condoning to use this every other word, Peter saves this kind of expression for the proper occasion, but when that proper occasion came he wasn’t afraid to use the word. And he didn’t have a group of people, oh, Peter, you can’t be a Christian and talk that way. Sure he could. When it was appropriate to say hell, he said hell. And you do too, except you won’t admit it.

So Peter made it very clear from the very beginning that money was not going to be a big thing with the Church. See, if Peter preached the way some pastors would—oh, dear Simon, listen, I’ll tell you what, we need a building fund, our building fund is real low Simon and we can really use that, we appreciate how the Holy Spirit is working, we’ve $100,000 worth of beams out here we have to pay for so Simon we appreciate that great gift. No, because the issue was grace. God gave what Peter had that was worthwhile free of charge so what business does Peter have charging for it? Never, if you’re in a group and you’re on a board of deacons, if you’re on some Christian organization don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever get that organization in such a position that somebody has to pay to hear the Word of God. Every creature on the face of this earth has the right to hear God’s Word free of charge. You didn’t buy the Word and you can’t make money off the Word of God. The Word of God is free; Christ died, that was the price, He paid the price. Everything else is free and every creature has the right to hear the Word of God; offerings are not the issue. Money is not the issue, it’s what the person wants to do with Christ that’s the issue.

So Peter tells of Simon and then he goes on to describe why he tells of Simon the way he does, verse 21, 22 and 23. [verse 20b, “because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.”] “Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.” The phrase “thy sight is not right” is a quotation from Psalm 78:37 which speaks of idolatry. [22] “Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.” Notice in verse 22 there is some question whether Simon Magus had become a Christian. It’s a very sobering passage. And Peter, in verse 23, explains thy he thinks Simon Magus may indeed have very, very great trouble, in fact it may be that Simon Magus can’t become a Christian. Verse 23 is the explanation, “For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” That is a direct quote from Deuteronomy 29:18 that speaks of the chains of idolatry encasing the human soul. Simon has got himself in so deep, not, notice, in immorality; there’s nothing immoral about this whole thing. There’s something very evil about it though, it’s apostate demonic false religion.

And Simon has got so deep in it Peter says your heart is chained, “the bond” here, the bond of evil, is the chain of evil; his soul may be locked out because of the minus R learned behavior patterns, he has responded negatively so much, so long, for such a great portion of his life that he knows no other way to respond to God except negatively. And that’s why there’s this caution… now just be careful here, you can’t, I can’t, say that a man can’t be saved; we have no omniscience, we can’t know that; all we can say is we teach the Word and we pray that God the Holy Spirit works to bring them to Christ. But be careful also that you continue to understand, there may be people walking around today who are beyond redemption. It’s not our business, but it’s a theoretical possibility. Simon Magus may have been one of those people; he had rejected so long that grace, so to speak, had run out in his case and that’s why Peter prefaces everything he says, maybe… maybe… maybe you can become a Christian.

Acts 8:24, “Then answered Simon, and said,” and this answer very clearly indicates that Simon was not being regenerated, was not influenced by the Holy Spirit because he himself doesn’t pray, he says, “you pray to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.” There’s no record that Peter ever prayed the prayer. The last verse we read in this episode, verse 25, [“And they, when they had testified and preached the word of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem, and preached the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.”] they’re going out, breaking open this whole new region for the gospel of Christ and therefore showing the principle we began with, the principle of God the Holy Spirit leading, from the imperative mood to the indicative mood, going from a command to a declarative sentence, leading the Church onward in sanctification, Romans 8:28; same thing individually.

That we may sing something compatible with this…