Acts 5:1-11

IV. PENTECOSTAL CHURCH UNFOLDING IN PENAL POWER.

1. Ananias and Sapphira , Acts 5:1-11 .

The Spirit of light and love dwelling in this Pentecostal Church is also the Spirit of judgment. And, as the Spirit has now shown its power of love, so in this Church is the very place to show how severe its absolute standard of judgment is. And this is now done in the case of Ananias and Sapphira.

Their offence, according to the average standard of human morality, was not a very heinous one. In performing a large act of charity they had not defrauded anybody of a penny. They had simply retained a part of their own money and then denied the fact. Should a tradesman at the present day, for the sake of an undue credit for liberality, pretend to have donated half his income when he had given only a quarter, it would simply be esteemed a disreputable prevarication, but not sufficiently criminal to be amenable to human law. To worldly men, therefore, the fate of these two persons will ever seem to be unreasonably severe. We reject all naturalistic solutions, such as maintain that the deaths were not miraculous, but the natural effects of terror. Nor is any solution obtained by subdividing the sin into various parts, as some commentators have done, and showing to how many sins it amounted. Nor can any person probably be satisfied unless he can see the validity of the following considerations:

1 . The Divine Spirit being present with unparalleled power in the Church, the sin, as Peter says, (Acts 5:3-4,) is directly against Him. The sinner comes directly in contact with the pure Absolute, and is tried and executed by the absolute Purity and Law. Now the wonder is, when we realize that Presence, not that any one should be struck dead, but that any one, even the holiest of infirm mortals, should for a moment live. And this is a complete answer so far as any absolute injustice is concerned. Yet the question still remains, Why were these two selected as instances of absolute justice? It is, then, not a question of right or wrong, but of divine propriety. The question is not, Was this dispensation just? for of that there is no doubt; but it is, Why was this particular justice inflicted?

2 . The reason for this selection was to present and record at this beginning of the Christian Church a representative and memorial instance of the just doom of the hypocrite. The first Sabbath-breaker; and Achan, the appropriator of a Babylonish garment on the first entrance into Canaan; and Nadab and Abihu at the first founding of the priesthood, were punished with death at a beginning, with absolute justice. This was, in each case, a primordial token, and a declaration to all the future, what, if inflicted with exactness, the true deserts and punishments of the transgressor are. Such inflictions are at start the divine protest against the conclusion that God’s future forbearance towards sin is any contradiction of the fatal desert of sin. They are examples hung up at the commencement, once for all, that the wages of sin is death, a death which it is God’s right at any moment to inflict. Now this present couple were at any rate deliberate, positive, conceited, and intentionally permanent hypocrites. Their death was God’s declaration to all future ages of the true deserts of all deliberate hypocrites in the Church of Christ.

This special punishment was not meted out, therefore, from the fact that these two were sinners above all others. Worse sinners, both in the apostolic and later Church, have lived and died naturally. Simon Magus was a far viler sinner, yet underwent a far milder penalty before this same apostle.

3 . Peter’s share in the matter is not that of an originator or proper author of the death of the two sinners, but of a divinely required agent of God. By the extraordinary charism of the discerning of spirits he knows their secret sin; by the inspiration of the indwelling Spirit he knows their doom; by the impulsive command of God he pronounces it. Of the sentence the omnipotent God, is the executioner.

4 . Romanists maintain that the act was simply a deed of excommunication performed by Peter, and of the same nature as the destruction of the flesh specified by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:5. And on this Romanism and her Pope have based that terrible right of excommunication before which kings and nations once trembled, by which the fiery and bloody Inquisition was established, and dissenters from Popery, by thousands, have been cruelly murdered. Yet it is no doubt true that apostles were sometimes the required agents of divine infliction, and that St. Paul’s words describe a case like this of Ananias. And thence, after all, we deduce the consoling view that this display of wrath was an infinite mercy. It probably was the destruction of the flesh that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, 1 Corinthians 5:5. We do not, therefore, recognise this as a case of the sin against the Holy Ghost. For not every insult to the Spirit is recognised by the Holy Ghost as the blasphemy against itself. (See note on Matthew 12:32.)