Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word podcast. In this episode, the early Christians learned the hard way that the fear of the Lord, awe and reverence for God, is not just an Old Testament concept. Ready? Let’s get started. Acts chapter 5, not to be trifled with. In chapter 4 of Acts closed, we saw how some of the Christians in the growing community of believers at Jerusalem were demonstrating very sacrificial, generous, Christ-like love to others in that community.

Many of the early Christians in the first church at Jerusalem, remember, were from faraway places. They just happened to be in Israel at the time for those religious festivals. They heard the gospel about Jesus, became believers, and then decided they didn’t want to go home. Dear, if we don’t leave for Caesarea today, we’re going to miss our ship back to Greece. What? And miss the amazing things God is doing here?

Let’s stay on for a while at least. So people stayed, and other Christians generously enabled them to stay by selling valuables, even real estate, to create a fund that the apostles oversaw. Luke cites Barnabas as one example, a man who went on to become a prominent Christian leader, sold a very valuable piece of property, gave the entire sum to the apostles to use in caring for the needs of those out-of-town believers who wanted to stay on. Those days must have seemed like a bit of heaven on earth for the early Christians. It was very exciting. They were growing rapidly.

The signs that God was performing through the apostles were inspiring and amazing. They had times of worship together, times of teaching together. And the love and generous sharing being exhibited by the whole community was just wonderful. Wouldn’t you have liked to have been there? And then something awful happened. Something that caused a holy fear and reverence for Almighty God to grip that whole community of believers.

Luke describes in chapter five how a couple named Ananias and Sapphira also sold a piece of property. And just as Barnabas did, they brought a sum of money to the apostles for this benevolence fund. But something was wrong. It appears what was wrong was these people gave the impression, or claimed, that they, like others, had dedicated a piece of property to God and were bringing the full proceeds from its sale to give to others who are in need. But once Ananias and Sapphira sold the property, apparently, they changed their minds, and they decided to only give part of the sales price and to hold back the rest for themselves. The Holy Spirit actually revealed this to Peter, and he called in Ananias and questioned him.

Ananias, why have you let Satan fill your heart? You’ve lied to the Holy Spirit, and you’ve kept some of the money for yourself. The property was yours to sell or to not sell as you wished, and after selling it, the money was also yours to give away or not give away. But how could you do a thing like this? You weren’t just lying to us. You were lying to God.

We have to read a little between the lines to kind of piece together what was actually going on here. Apparently, it seems Ananias and Sapphira wanted to look as generous as Barnabas and others, and pledged the value of this property to benefit the needy. Until they sold it and reconsidered. Maybe they found it was more valuable than they thought and reasoned, Hey, that’s just too much to give. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, they had second thoughts and they did not follow through completely. They went back on their pledge.

Peter said they had given in to Satan. They had yielded to the temptation of greed, and he said their action was tantamount to lying to the Holy Spirit because they had pledged the entire proceeds to God and then reneged on that. You know, it’s important to understand, as Peter said, these people weren’t obligated to help the needy. There was no forced communism going on in the early church. The problem was they made a show of saying they would do something, pledged this property. They didn’t follow through once they actually had the money in their hand.

And it might surprise you to see just how big of a problem this was because after Peter called out the duplicity of Ananias in this way, the man fell down and died right there in front of him like he had a stroke or a cardiac arrest on the spot. A few hours later, not knowing what had happened with her husband, Sapphira was also called before the apostles and questioned. She was asked point blank about the price the land was sold for, and she flat out lied, insisting they had honored their pledge and given the full price to the Lord to help the needy. Peter rebuked her for putting God to the test. Then she also collapsed right in front of him and died. Yikes.

Luke says, When the other Christians heard about this and realized Ananias’ sudden death was no freaky accident since Sapphira suffered the exact same fate. Great fear gripped the entire church. I guess so. I can only imagine. It makes my blood run a little bit cold just to think about this. It’s sobering, isn’t it?

But it’s in God’s Word, and it’s preserved for us forever so that we would do, I think, exactly that. Think about it. What does this situation show us about God? That question, I think, is worth our time today. In our generation, more than ever before, I’m afraid, we tend to maybe overstate and overemphasize qualities of God we like, like love and kindness and patience, at the expense of His other qualities like justice and holiness. A God who hates sin and judges it is just not a God for the 21st century, I’m afraid too many people think.

Is it possible our current feelings about what God is like have gotten out of balance? Is it possible we have sort of reinvented God, and a God we are more comfortable with, made up a God who better conforms to our sensibilities? I hope that when you think about that, it seems really stupid to you. I mean, God is God, and it is we, beings He created from the dust of the ground, who need to conform to Him. There is an inescapable lesson here to be learned from this section of God’s Word regarding Ananias and Sapphira. And although it is admittedly uncomfortable, we would do well to consider what it tells us about God’s nature, which is important enough to warrant Luke’s recording this episode and it becoming a part of the New Testament.

How should this situation instruct us about God, what He’s really like? When Peter called Ananias out, he asked him why he had let Satan fill his heart. That terminology is in direct contrast to what we’ve already been reading in Acts a few times about the early Christians, how they were being filled by the Holy Spirit. It shows us that Christians can choose who fills them, by whose influence they yield to. When choices or temptations come our way, as they do almost every day, we can choose to be controlled or influenced by good or evil. We can yield to the Holy Spirit within us, or to the tempter, or to our own evil desires.

It’s been this way since the Garden of Eden. In this situation, when Ananias and Sapphira had a big sack of money in their hands from selling their land, they deliberately decided to yield to an evil impulse of greed, even though it meant they would be lying to the Christian community and ultimately, as Peter pointed out, to God, since they had pledged this money. Peter asked Sapphira, Why in the world would you test the Holy Spirit like that? He meant, How foolish of you to imagine you could play games with God and test His limits. This drastic public judgment on those two was obviously intended by God to have the impact that it did, that is, create a healthy fear and sober them up, to make them all remember that God is not to be trifled with. The Apostle John, in his first epistle, in one place writes about a sin that leads to death.

Well, here’s an example of that happening if there ever was one. Probably not the example we might expect, but here it is nonetheless. We might reason in this case, Hey, but they gave some of the money, probably even most of the money. Isn’t that better than others who probably gave nothing? That obviously was not God’s feeling. He was offended at their hypocrisy and their presumption in trying to make themselves look like great benefactors of the needy, all the while lying and holding back some of what they’d promised out of greed.

That, and perhaps other things going on in their lives we don’t know about, moved God to make an example of them, a drastic example of them, an example He must know we sin-prone humans need to see. Otherwise, He would not have done it, nor inspired Luke to include it in his account of developing early Christianity. Thankfully, God does not usually respond so drastically to our failures, to our hypocrisy, to the times we yield to those wrong impulses that come into our fallen hearts, into our minds, rather than yielding to the Holy Spirit. Thankfully, or I, for one, probably wouldn’t be here telling you about any of this. There’s a scripture from the Old Testament that came to my mind as I pondered this chapter and thought about Ananias and Sapphira and what happened to them, and it’s from the wisdom book of Ecclesiastes at chapter 5.

And it says there, starting at verse 4, When you make a promise to God, don’t delay in keeping it, for God takes no pleasure in fools. Keep all the promises you make to Him. It’s better to say nothing than to make a promise and not keep it. Don’t let your mouth make you sin, and don’t defend yourself by telling the messenger from the temple that the promise you made was a mistake. That would make God angry, and He might wipe out everything you have. Talk is cheap, like daydreams and other useless activities.

You remember to fear God. The idea of God getting angry probably comes as a shock to many 21st century people, maybe to you if you’re a new student of the Bible. That’s because, as I suggested earlier, many people today are being dangerously misled about God’s nature. He is a God of love and mercy, for sure, and He’s patient, for sure, and He’s a lot more than that. And that is plain to see if we make any attempt to understand how He has revealed Himself to us in the Scripture. We discussed the idea of Jesus getting angry, if you remember, back in the Gospel of John.

Remember Jesus raging at the wrong things He saw going on in the temple. God gets angry sometimes, and for good reasons, what we refer to as righteous anger. Connected to this is the concept that we just read in Ecclesiastes about the fear of the Lord, mentioned very many times in the Old Testament. As in that passage I just quoted, it has to do with keeping a healthy reverence for who God is, because He is also, besides being patient and kind and all of those good things, an utterly holy and righteous being, someone not to be messed with. That’s a reality Ananias and Sapphira didn’t take seriously enough, and what happened with them was a clear divine reminder. It was a warning from God to His people.

Vows we make to Him and before others are sacred. We should never discount them or go back on them. Our marriage vows, the promises we make when we dedicate our children to the Lord. How about the promises we make to God when we are in trouble and we’re pleading for His intervention? Oh God, get me out of this mess, and if You do, I promise… whatever. One big lesson we can learn from Acts 5 is to be careful what we promise God, what we vow.

Be careful what we tell God we will do. He takes it seriously. And if we’re wise, we will take it seriously too. This is an integral part of His divine nature, which we do well to understand and respect. He expects we who have been born into His family by faith in Christ to be people of truth and integrity. We should never put Him to the test by seeing how far we can go and how patient He will be.

We should never go back on our vows and promises, rationalizing that we now, for some reason, have a good excuse for doing so. Someone gave me a very wise piece of advice a long time ago, and I try to remember it. He said, Never mistake God’s patience for indifference. God takes seriously things that are serious. We should not assume that because He has not dropped some drastic judgment on our head, that our hypocrisy or our lying or our breaking promises that we have made to Him and others is no big deal. He sees all of these things.

He is grieved by them and possibly even angered by them, as He clearly was here in this case in Acts chapter 5. As I’m describing this to you today, maybe there are some things that come to your mind that you realize are wrong, things that you’ve said or done or promised, then for whatever reason have gone back on. If so, that’s something to take seriously, to do whatever you can to try to make it right. The Bible calls that maintaining a good conscience. If this lesson brings something up to your memory, or maybe multiple things, I’d encourage you to determine to do your best to make those things right. That happens by seeking God’s forgiveness, and then possibly having to seek the forgiveness of the people that you have hurt or let down.

And it may even involve restitution, doing something, giving something to make it right. If the Holy Spirit is bringing something like that up to you now, don’t ignore it. Remember, God takes serious things seriously. That’s an essential part of His character. And connected to that, remember what someone told me: never mistake His patience for indifference. He is very gracious and patient, but He is not to be trifled with or put to the test.

Luke goes on to tell us in this chapter how the number of believers kept increasing, even though it was becoming increasingly dangerous to be associated with the Christians. The high priests who ran the temple very much wanted to shut the Christian movement down. They saw it as a real threat to their power and influence, badly wanted to stop its growth, even if it meant killing its leaders, the apostles. So the apostles were rounded up and called before the Sanhedrin again because they had ignored that earlier order to quit preaching about Jesus. Interestingly, there was a one man on the council of great influence, an older man, who cautioned them against acting rashly. That man actually is well known in Jewish history as one of the most esteemed rabbis ever.

His name was Gamaliel. He was not from the high priestly clan or someone with political ties to the Romans. Gamaliel was a religious scholar and teacher. Pious elder of Israel who was well respected by everyone. At this second hearing, he cautioned the others not to do anything extreme to the apostles. He reminded the others that messianic movements had come up before and many people had gotten involved in them, but they’d always flamed out after a while.

His counsel was then, leave the apostles alone. Release them, in fact. If they’re planning and doing these things merely on their own, all of this will soon come to nothing. But if in fact it is from God, we will find ourselves not able to overthrow it and may even find ourselves fighting against God Himself. Boy, that was wise counsel. But the leaders of the Sanhedrin ultimately, I’m sure reluctantly, decided to take it for now, but not before they had the apostles beaten and ordered once again to stop sharing their Christian message.

Remember, Jesus had also been flogged, beaten by these same men after His arrest. This was an extremely brutal punishment. But at the end of this chapter, Luke tells us that although they had been treated like this, the apostles counted it a privilege, a blessing, to have suffered like Jesus had for His name’s sake. Luke writes that the threats and physical abuse notwithstanding, the apostles did not stop publicly preaching about Jesus, even right in the temple courtyards. Nor did the early Christians refrain from meeting together and teaching the new believers in homes all over the city. They had already decided that obeying Christ’s instructions must supersede those coming from men.

If the two interests collided, even when the civil authorities told them to shut it down. So we’re on a course now to collide for sure. The high council should have listened better to Rabban Gamaliel, who wisely advised them, Hey, if this movement is from God, nothing you do can overcome it. And in trying, you will find yourselves fighting against God, perhaps. But his caution was soon thrown out the window, as we’ll see. And things are going to reach a boiling point.

You can probably already feel that. Next time, when we continue the early Christian story into Acts chapters 6 and 7, we’ll see the situation boil over in a very violent way. And we’ll also meet, right in the middle of this mess, a man who became the most influential follower of Christ ever, someone you’d never imagine that that would be his future when he first appears on the scene in Jerusalem. I can’t wait to tell you that piece of the story. Until next time, this is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul.

You know, as many times as I’ve listened to each episode, there are still things that I pick up every time I listen again. And by the way, check out our archive at sharetheword.org. Share the Word podcast began in September of 2023, and our goal is to see it shared around the world. If you have friends and family outside of the U.S., please help us connect with them. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.