Acts 5:1-11 - Homiletics

The first hypocrisy.

Hitherto all had been bright and beautiful in the new-born Church of God. Brotherly love, disinterested kindness to one another, heroic courage in the face of danger, unhesitating devotion to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, and an unflinching profession of faith in his Name, had been the common characteristics of the multitude of them that believed. The Church was as the garden of the Lord in the midst of the world's wilderness. It was a bright spring-tide, soon, alas! to be checked by the cold blasts of selfishness and the love of this world. The time of millennial blessedness was not yet come. Satan was not yet bound. On the contrary, he was unusually busy, with persecutions from without and temptations from within, in his endeavors to hurt and corrupt the children of the kingdom. Indeed, we may notice, as a universal feature in the economy of the kingdom of darkness, that every great step in advance of the kingdom of light is followed by some corresponding movement intended to defeat it. The sowing of the good seed is the signal for the sowing of the tares. The salvation of God is confronted with some counterfeit of Satan. The faith of God's elect was opposed, even in the first century, by subtle heresies of man's or Satan's devising. The glorious spread of the gospel in all lands had a counterplot in the extraordinary growth of the imposture of Mohammed. The great Reformation in the sixteenth century was hindered by the hypocrisies and fanaticism which sprang up by its side. And so it was now. The great enemy of man could not look on the blessedness of the company of Christians without trying to mar it. He must have some portion even within the enclosure of Christ's Church. Even there all must not be guileless truth, all must not be unselfish love. He must have some to do him service even though they called Christ their Lord. But how could he find an entrance into those holy precincts, how climb up into that heavenly fold? In human character the highest rank consists of those who love righteousness for its own sake, and with various degrees of success actually attain to it. There are those among them who attain the sublimest heights of virtue and godliness, and there are those who at the best, and amidst many stumblings and falls, are only struggling upwards. But they all belong to that highest class who really desire to do the will of God and to be conformed to his image. But there are others who do not belong to this class at all. They, perhaps, admire virtue in others. But especially do they covet the praise and high esteem which virtue conciliates to itself. In a religious society they perceive that certain actions are praised of men and bring certain pleasurable consequences to the doers of them. These fruits of goodness they desire to possess. But then they will not make the sacrifices, suffer the losses, endure the privations, which are inseparable from such actions. The double heart immediately casts about to find some method of obtaining the good without making the sacrifice. To be thought righteous, good, religious, not really to be so, becomes the aim and object. Fraud, deceit, lies, false pretences, are called in to help, and the hypocrite stands, kneels, gives alms, talks religiously, by the side of God's true saints, till his hypocrisy is brought to light, and he stands revealed as a dissembler before God and man. But meanwhile, in the sight of the world, true godliness is discredited by each fresh exposure of the hypocrite. The defamers of God's people are encouraged to say that there is no such thing as the pure love of God and disinterested obedience to his will; and they argue that the most consistent livers are only the best dissemblers. There are, doubtless, many other useful lessons to be learnt from the study of this first hypocrisy in the Church of God. It is good to dwell upon this account of it, upon its detection, and upon its awful punishment, because it is only a type of countless other cases which have since happened, and are daily happening, and which, whenever they do happen, do injury to the cause of Christ. We may learn in this melancholy example how the love of money, or the love of the praise of men, or a greedy appetite of applause, or an ungodly emulation of the fame of other men, or the habit of thinking of appearances more than of reality, and of putting on a religious garb without taking care that our hearts are really moved and guided by the Holy Spirit of God, may, almost before we are aware of it, be leading us into the paths of the hypocrite instead of into the way of the just. And in the fearful exposure and punishment of these first Christian hypocrites, we may learn how certain it is that sooner or later every hidden thought and every secret of the heart will be brought to light; and that none will be able to stand before the all-searching eye of God but those who walk before God in godly sincerity, while they trust with a steadfast faith in the merits of their almighty Savior. But anyhow we may be sure that this example of hypocrisy by the side of eminent holiness in the primitive Church, is thus set forth in its distinctness by the inspired historian, to be a touchstone by which to try future actions, to be a type of an evil which would be found to exist in all subsequent ages, and to be a warning to the children of God to watch against the very first beginnings of declension from simplicity and sincerity in their relations to Almighty God.