John H. Paterson
"Meanwhile, the church had peace throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria,
and grew in strength and numbers. The believers learned how to walk in the
fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit." Acts 9:31 ( Living Bible)
IN a previous study, I suggested that it is instructive to notice how the development and progress of the early Church, as reported in the Acts of the Apostles, went by fits and starts. There were times of great expansion, and others of great hostility or opposition but, in between these, there were breathing spells when things seem to have gone quietly forward. For these I borrowed the phrase used by the Apostle Peter in Acts 3:19: "times of refreshing".
In the early Church, as I also pointed out last time, disturbance or disruption was due to two quite separate sets of causes -- external and internal. As a matter of fact, in the record that we have in Acts, there is an almost exact alternation [61/62] between the two: disturbance from outside, caused by opposition to the Gospel, alternating with disturbance from within, caused by spiritual conditions among God's people. It is on this second type of disturbance that I want for the present to concentrate. And the names I suggested for the "disturbances" in our previous study were hypocrisy, envy, counterfeit spirituality and exclusiveness.
Those first days of the Church's history must have been breathlessly exciting. A group of transformed disciples and their fellow-believers were taking Jerusalem by storm: miracles were happening, and so far the authorities were acting only cautiously against the followers of Jesus. There was every reason to be happy!
So, what was it that first cast a shadow over this scene, and replaced joy with fear (Acts 5:11)? It was the tragic fate of Ananias and Sapphira -- tragic because, so far as we know, it really was the first break in the continuity of fellowship which had begun at Pentecost.
It is important, of course, to be clear just what went wrong. Peter himself, in judging the matter, was careful to eliminate some of the possible charges against the pair (Acts 5:4). It was not that, as believers, they were required to turn over all their property to the Church. It was not that they were forbidden to decide what proportion of the whole they should give. They were entirely free to do so. Their fault lay in giving a part and pretending that it was the whole.
The conjunction of this story in Acts 5:1 with that of Barnabas in Acts 4:36-37 can hardly be fortuitous. To underline the connection, the translator of the Living Bible begins Acts 5 with the words, "But in contrast there was a man named Ananias ...". What had happened was that others, Barnabas among them, had set a standard of full commitment to God and His people, and Ananias and Sapphira did not want to seem to fall short of it. They wanted to create the impression that their commitment, too, was total. That was hypocrisy or, as my dictionary defines it, "a feigning to be better than one is, or to be what one is not."
None of us can pretend to be ignorant of this; never to have experienced, and probably taken part in, that kind of competition that sometimes occurs among God's people to see who can set the highest standard of holy conduct, or separation, or shock at what some other believer feels free to do. All that is wearily familiar. Let us simply notice two things: firstly, that this was indeed the very first thing to break the internal harmony of the Church, so that it is the oldest source of weakness known to us; secondly, that the outcome was so appalling.
Ananias and Sapphira dropped down dead; that was a stunning fact. But now, consider: the only people within the knowledge of these Jewish Christians to whom anything remotely so drastic had happened were guilty of enormous crimes against God and His people. They were men like Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10) who, as priests, offered "strange fire", or Korah (Numbers 16) who had directly set out to oppose Moses. To come under the direct judgement of God was the fate of people like those of Sodom and Gomorrah. Within their own experience, nothing at all like this had occurred. Indeed, when some Samaritans refused to receive Jesus (Luke 9:52-5) and His disciples wanted to call down fire in the oldfashioned way, Jesus rebuked them. Not even Judas Iscariot had been struck down like this for what he did; his own remorse killed him.
That was the background against which, quite suddenly, Ananias and Sapphira met their fate. Can you imagine the impact upon the onlookers? It must have been, in modem terms, like a bomb at a garden-party. As they tried in the aftermath to piece together what had happened, they must have realised with horror that hypocrisy, for which the Lord Jesus had endlessly denounced the Scribes and Pharisees, had got into His Church as well. Hypocrisy, they must have argued, puts us on a par with Sodom and Gomorrah, as objects of God's peremptory judgement. How that realisation should persuade us all to honesty with the Lord and with one another!
The next hold-up in the progress of the Church is reported in Acts 6:1. That it should have happened not over some key theological principle but over the handing out of food to the needy may strike us as ludicrous to the point of absurdity, but anybody with an inside acquaintance with church life will at once recognise this as quite authentic! I once worshipped in a church which represented a merger of two companies of God's people. The elders and deacons of the [62/63] combined church got on together most harmoniously: the only real trouble arose among the catering ladies over which former church's set of tea cups should be used at church fellowships!
Envy may be provoked, as in the case before us, by a simple, practical thing (and did you ever stop to think how remarkable it was that, at this very early stage in the Church's life, a "daily ministration" to an ever-growing number of needy believers already actually existed?), but it easily spreads to other things -- spiritual gifts, for example. Envy over the food programme may so easily be followed by envy over the preaching programme; that is, the provision of spiritual food. A rivalry grows up among those who are supposed to be ministering to the spiritual needs of God's people. It was the late Watchman Nee who once remarked, "There was a time when I had a lust for preaching.". It is easy to feel envy over others' gifts.
Small wonder, then, that the apostles took prompt action to nip this problem in the bud. Small wonder, too, that the epistles are so full of pleas and exhortations to put aside envy. How inconceivable that a Church, likened by Paul to a body with arms and legs, should be hampered in its workings by arms wishing to be legs, or toes complaining that fingers have more to do, instead of rejoicing, all together, in the fact that the body exists: that their is a "daily ministration" at all!
It all sounds rather petty, as we read Acts 6; yet how wonderfully God turned this incident to good! For theresult of this matter being raised was that Stephen emerged on the scene. The setting up of a group of deacons to deal with the practical side of the Church's life brought to prominence a man who might otherwise have spent his years simply in the shadow of the apostles. He himself was not an apostle. His emergence as a leader cost him dearly in his brief career. But he was the very first non-apostle to speak for the Church of Christ -- and what a speech he made! Under the hand of God, we owe Acts 7 to some unknown widow lady complaining about the size of her free meals.
The third problem was one which was bound to arise in the early Church, given its origins and setting in the world of first-century Palestine. As the New Testament makes clear, that world was full of magic, movements and messiahs. There were any number of false prophets, and the more conjuring tricks they could do, the more likely they were to attract a crowd. Men who had seen as many of these movements come and go as had the Jewish council could well afford to adopt the wait-and-see attitude to the Christians recommended by Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-40).
So, let us not imagine the early Church as growing up in a kind of vacuum -- as the only candidate for public attention. The question which the Jews had put to Jesus must have been asked repeatedly in that society: "By what power are you doing these things?" It was put not only to Jesus and the apostles, but to every claimant or charlatan who came along. Even before anyone had time to ask it, it was answered by Peter (Acts 3:12-13) when he healed the lame man at the gate of the Temple, because it was the obvious question to ask: "Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk? ... His name through faith in his name hath made this man strong."
In such a society, it was only a matter of time before the Church would encounter the problem of distinguishing between true and false in its life and teaching, and anyone who thinks that the problem has disappeared in our own day has not read a newspaper lately! The passage or period with which we are concerned here is that covered by Acts 8:4 - 9:30. Persecution drove the believers out of Jerusalem and, among other places, to Samaria. There, we are told, a remarkable work of God developed, evidenced by many miracles and acts of healing.
I have always felt it significant that, at this point, Peter and John were sent down to Samaria by the other apostles. The "Samaritan Revival" was being led by Philip, but the coming of the Holy Spirit on these new believers was delayed until Peter and John laid hands on them and prayed. Much special pleading by Bible expositors has surrounded this particular event but, in the context of this passage, and in view of the aftermath, one explanation seems to me quite clear.
Samaria had for centuries been the great rival of Jerusalem, as capital city and as religious [63/64] centre. Jew and Samaritan were permanently at loggerheads. What more likely than that, if the preaching of the Gospel in Samaria resulted in the Spirit's immediate coming upon the believers there, the next step would be a renewal of the ancient rivalry, with Samaria claiming that its spirit was different from, and more powerful than, the Jerusalem Spirit? What more likely than that Jerusalem would respond by denouncing the Samaritan Spirit as counterfeit, and claiming (as certain firms used to do) that there was only one genuine article, and that customers should refuse all substitutes?
It had to be made clear that there is only one Holy Spirit, and that He is the same in both Jerusalem and Samaria. And there can have been, in the mind of God at least, no question as to the priority of Jerusalem over Samaria. For Samaria had never represented God's will. It was the capital of a breakaway kingdom; it had been developed as a rival to Jerusalem. and not one good king had ever reigned there. It had been a centre of idol worship and the home of Ahab and Jezebel. God was not likely to overlook that; not likely to allow the old rivalry to start up again within His own Church. And that, I think, is why Samaria received the Spirit via Jerusalem ; not so much to teach us the theology of the baptism or fulness of the Spirit as to stress the overriding priority of the divine plan.
But that is to recognise what we might call the negative lesson of the passage. The positive lesson was not long in emerging. The coming of the Gospel to Samaria may be said to have put out of business a sorcerer called Simon (Acts 8:9-11). He had built up a great reputation locally, but had now been upstaged by Philip and hismiracles. Simon professed conversion and was baptized (8:13). However, when Simon later met Peter and John, and saw what they could do, he at once betrayed his own ignorance by offering them money to be taught this new trick!
Simon's foolish misunderstanding was only the first of a whole series of incidents in Acts where the attribution of activity to the Holy Spirit was in doubt. Was this, or that, really God at work? And lest you feel that I am making rather a lot out of one small incident, let me call your attention to the rest of our study passage, and point out that the very next case of truth-or-counterfeit concerned no less a person than the Apostle Paul himself!
You will remember that, when Saul of Tarsus was led, blinded, into Damascus and, later, when he returned to Jerusalem, he encountered a lot of very sceptical Christians. Was his sudden conversion real or counterfeit? Could such a complete turn-around possibly be genuine? These questions were not in the least theological: this was quite literally a life-and-death issue. We have become in our century all too familiar with the idea of the "double agent" -- the person who pretends to be on one side, but is actually working for the other. What better device for Saul the persecutor to trap the Christians than by loudly announcing his conversion, gaining the confidence of true believers, and then rounding them up? No wonder that Ananias queried his orders (Acts 9:13) to go and welcome Paul into the circle of the persecuted!
So the early Church confronted, and in dramatic ways, the permanent problem of discerning the true from the false. This problem has in no way diminished with the years; it is as difficult to solve as it ever was. I have written before in these pages [see Vol.10, No.3, "Surprised By The Spirit (2)"] of the few, rather general guidelines which can be offered for its solution, and I shall make only the briefest summary of those suggestions here.
How are we to judge whether what we witness is a work of God's Spirit or not?
(1) The Spirit is the Spirit of truth. His business is to lead us into all truth. No falsehood or prevarication can be from His hand. Our basic criterion of truth lies in the Word of God.
(2) The Spirit's task is to glorify Christ. His business is not to give us experiences of Himself, but to enlarge our appreciation of the Lord Jesus.
(3) The Spirit always works to build up the body of Christ, not to disrupt it.
(4) With all this, the Spirit is sovereign. He does not work to our order. We can never argue that, because He has done a thing once, He is obliged to do it again. He has the prerogative of always beginning afresh.
While the early Church dealt briskly and, on the whole, well with these problems, it could not know -- and it is perhaps as well that it did not -- how long-continuing they were going to be. The fourth problem was the most persistent of all -- to judge, at least, by the frequency with which it cropped up in the apostolic period. To put things [64/65] in their simplest terms, everything was going smoothly (we are now at Acts 9:31) when, once again, the Church's peace was disturbed, this time by Peter taking the Gospel to the Gentiles.
The question whether the message of Christ was for all men or only for Jews was, I suppose, bound to crop up sooner rather than later in the mixed, polyglot society of Palestine. Here once again, we must try to think ourselves into the context of Acts, and realise how deeply the principle of separateness from other nations was buried in the Jewish consciousness. Their forefathers had suffered untold loss from mixing with other peoples; indeed, they had been punished by God for doing so. Furthermore, the Lord Jesus had directed His ministry almost wholly to Jews: had He not acquiesced in the idea of children at the table being fed and dogs picking up the crumbs beneath it (Matthew 15:26-7)?
So Peter's initial resistance to the idea of carrying the Gospel message directly to a Gentile home was not merely a breach of some race-relations act; it was not merely understandable reluctance at doing something for the first time. In Old Testament terms it was right. He was evidently bewildered at the reversal of God's instructions, and a lot more bewildered when, while he was still speaking to Cornelius and his friends, the Holy Spirit fell on them. But Peter responded magnificently at the time: after that, all he had to do was to convince his fellow-believers back in Jerusalem!
So the long wrangle about Jew and Gentile began and continued. It was to occupy Jerusalem on at least two occasions (Acts 11 and 15). It was raised in most of Paul's epistles. The story is familiar enough, and I make only one point here. With this problem, as with all the other three we have studied, it is possible to overcome it on one occasion and to fail miserably with the same problem on another. That, alas, is what happened to Peter. Acts 10 and Galatians 2 stand in inevitable contrast. Exclusiveness, like envy, is an attitude -- an attitude which needs to be guarded against not once and then never again, but every day; every time a situation arises, even if it is a situation we already know from yesterday. May the Lord keep us watchful!
At the beginning of the first portion of this study, I quoted the Apostle Peter's words about "times of refreshing" -- breathing-spaces. But in that same speech he referred to another sort of times -- times of "the restitution of all things" (Acts 3:19-21). The word translated "restitution" means to reconstitute, rather in the sense of a player at skittles standing up the pins after they have been knocked over, and reconstituting the set in its upright order.
As I have been pointing out in these studies, the Church's "times of refreshing" have come and gone, not only in its early history but down to the present day. God has given His people respite periods from struggle or opposition, and graciously continues to do so. But "restitution" is evidently another matter. That day, long ago, Peter declared that the breathing-spaces were given until, in the future, there came the restitution of all things -- the putting in order of a whole creation, starting with the putting in His rightful place in that order of the Lord Jesus, whose place in any order must be, quite simply, first (Colossians 1:18).
When that time comes, all that has been upset or, like our skittles, knocked over, will be restored, including the overturned order of world rule, and the overturning of justice, mercy and truth with which we have lived so long. A new order, with the Lord Jesus at its head, will introduce a reconstituted creation, and God will say, "Now let me show you how it was meant to be from the beginning!" No more fits and starts after that, and no more need for breathing-spaces!
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