Acts 5:1-11

Act 5:1-11

1. But [much stress is not to be laid on the word But, for no contrast is intended] a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession [the same word is used Mat 19:22 ],

2. And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it [an aggravated offence], and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles' feet.

3. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart [made thee bold enough] to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?

4. Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived [implying long and deep deliberation] this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.

5. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.

6. And the young [younger] men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him [it was common to have graves ready beforehand].

7. And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in.

8. And Peter answered [yet not an answer but a question] unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much [and no more].

9. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.

10. Then fell she down straightway at his feet [where the money probably lay], and yielded up the ghost [an expression used in one other place only, Act 12:23 ]: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

11. And great fear came upon all the church [assembly or congregation], and upon as many as heard these things.

Communism and Its Violation

WE have just seen what great excitement there was outside the Church. A lame man had been healed, and Peter and John had been shut up in prison, and had afterwards been threatened by the Sanhedrim. "And being let go, they went to their own company, and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them." The Christians, having heard the report, "lifted up their voice to God with one accord," and praised him, and gave themselves into his keeping, saying, "And now, Lord, behold their threatenings; and grant unto thy servants that with all boldness they may speak thy word. By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus." There they left the case. They passed no official resolution amongst themselves: they looked up unto the hills whence their help came, and having looked upward, and having spoken to God, they waited for an answer from heaven. That answer came: "When they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness." They did not offer it as a suggestion, they did not submit it as a possible solution of great moral anxieties: they hurled it across the heavens, they uttered it with thunder, they spake it with the accent of the soul. We must go back to that cordial eloquence. Preachers of the everlasting Gospel do not stand up to make suggestions: they stand to deliver what they believe to be God's testimony; and in proportion to their faith in the Divine testimony will be the clearness of their utterance, and the bold and thrilling emphasis of their very voice.

A great practical issue immediately took effect A new conception of property entered into the mind of the Church. Little ownerships, and narrow boundaries of individual claims and primacies, were done away. "No man said that aught he had was his own; they had all things in common." "As many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the price of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." Here then are two concurrent movements, viz., a spiritual movement, and a social movement. The social movement arose out of the spiritual; if the cause go down, the effect must go down along with it. The Church can only do great social duties, and continue with constancy in great social sacrifices, in proportion as its heart is continually inspired by the Holy Ghost. The hand cannot go without the heart. The heart cannot be right without compelling the hand to do its holy and ennobling bidding. It is in vain to attempt to keep up the outward when the inward has given way. That is precisely what we are in danger of doing now. We keep up churches, institutions, organizations, machineries, after we have lost the Spirit. Is there anything more ghastly to the religious eye and the spiritual imagination than a Church out of which GOD has gone? The building stands there of undiminished magnitude, and undimmed beauty of form and colour, and undiminished commodiousness; but GOD has gone. The Bible is read, and not read. It is not the Bible that the man mumbled, but a book which he has found somewhere, out of which the Spirit has been driven. The very selfsame old hymns were sung that fifty years ago caused the walls to vibrate as with conscious joy; and though the music was exact in technicality, and well performed as to mere lip service, the old passion was not there, and the hymn rose to the ceiling, bruised itself against the beams of the roof, and fell back, a service unrecognized in heaven. This accounts for all the results of statistics as to attendance upon places of worship; for all the "dilapidated husbandry" of the Church; for all the boundless provision of mere space, and accommodation, and machinery, without eliciting the sympathy and the consent of the great heart of man. We have lost the Spirit; or we have forgotten that there is diversity of operation even under the same Spirit, and we have been trying to maintain old economies without new inspiration. What has to be done? Not to mend the outside, but to fall to praying, and to bring to bear upon heaven the violence of our impatient necessity, and the sacred ambition of men, who have found by prolonged and bitter experience that all answers worth having are to be had from heaven only. What is now wanted is a mission to the Church. It would be well for you if you would be good enough to let the masses alone for a while; the Church is now mad upon the masses. Any proposition to go after the "masses" is hailed with delight by those persons who do nothing but approve excellent schemes and then leave them to themselves. The great soul I cry for is a man who will preach to the preacher; who will convert the pulpit; who will set fire to the Church, and bring back our conscious need of the Holy Ghost. We are orthodox, but we are not Christian. Our notions are in excellent repair, but our love is a dead angel in the cold heart. We are sound in doctrine, but we are bitter in speech. We are clever in the arrangement and the rearrangement, and the repairing and the re-adaptation of machinery; but when we come to pray, it is as if a skeleton should open its cold mouth and chatter with its lifeless teeth.

We come now upon a scene that contrasts with the marvellous exhibition of feeling we looked upon in our last reading of this exciting story. When persecution began to take effect upon the Church we trembled needlessly. The Church needs persecution. Now we come upon real danger. External persecution brings to our memory the heroic words of our heroic Captain, "Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do." Now we come inside the Church, and it is there and there only, that any deadly mischief can be done! The Church! Fire cannot burn it, water cannot drown it, fiends cannot intercept it; but it has in its own hand the power of suicide! Annas and Caiaphas, and John and Alexander, and all the kindred of the high priest, cannot touch the Church. They can "threaten" it, and they can denounce it; they can for a time imprison it; but its life they cannot touch. Do not fear the issue of anti-Christian literature, as if that could do the slightest injury to God's truth. There is a secret fever amongst men as to the answering of the latest attack which has been made upon the Christian doctrine. We are not called upon to answer the last fool who has escaped from the mortar in which he was brayed. That is not the work of the Church: it is but an incidental service, and upon some occasions it may be a most valuable and indispensable service; but there is another work to be done. Let the Church put on her beautiful garments, and she will create a space for herself. Let her be pure, noble, seen as the angel of mercy and help and hope, that God meant her to be, and all other things will settle into their right courses and eventuate in their proper issues. Ananias and Sapphira can do more mischief in the Church than all the atheists that ever declared the heavens to be an untenanted space! That is the truth that needs now to be understood; and no other is, in comparison with it, worthy of a moment's consideration. You uttered an unkind speech about your brother: that did more mischief than all the atheistic publications that have been poured from the press of infidelity for a quarter of a century. You, a preacher, a student, a member of the Church, a professor of Christianity, did a mean trick: that had a deadlier effect than all the denunciation possible to the feeble eloquence of unbelief. The "BUT" with which the fifth chapter opens is like a blow in the face. We were reading so joyously, passing on with a step of triumph, and suddenly an invisible but tremendous fist felled us to the earth. We gloried in the statement found in the fourth chapter, we smiled at Annas, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, when they threatened Peter and John: we felt the infiniteness of our strength, the overflow and redundance of power. Now that we come to this great, black "But" of the fifth chapter, there is no longer any laughter in our voice; nor does mirth write its signature upon our solemn faces. This is death. Ananias and Sapphira endeavoured to keep up a mechanical enthusiasm, and that is an impossibility in the divine life. We must here have reality. Some people try to sing in God's house; but if you look at them they are not singing at all, for their eyes, like fools' eyes, are wandering all over the congregation. They bow in the attitude of prayer, but all the while their eyes are upon vacant space, or upon the earth.

This is a beautiful revelation of the life of the early Church, in so far as it shows us the entire voluntariness of every sacrifice and every service rendered by the first Christians. The selling of houses and lands was not a compulsory act. The property belonged to the individuals, they might claim it, they might part with it, they might keep a portion of the proceeds of the sale: all that was wanted from them was reality. This is the glory of all Christian service, that it is voluntary, expressive of the will, and of the vital love of the person rendering that service. This is the charm of our work; every man is here doing what he can do because he loves the engagement. Sunday morning is too slow in its movement for the inspired heart, for that heart is saying all the while, "Would that the golden gates were opened, and that the service were begun, and that we were already half-way up the hill which is crowned by heaven." Nothing is done of constraint; therefore labour is rest; therefore giving is getting; therefore prayer is its own answer; and therefore the Sabbath is the golden crown of the week of toil.

What then was the guilt of this man Ananias? It was the guilt of every age. Do not regard Ananias as a liar eighteen hundred or nineteen hundred years old; Ananias is the liar of today, and he is present in every congregation, and probably will be present until the end of time. Ananias represents those who say they have done all they can do, when they know that their statement is a lie. No man has done all he can do. Are we then all guilty before God in that respect? Certainly not. If a man will honestly say to God. "There are twelve hours in the day, and I cannot profess to give thee more than two of them," that man is an honest man, and the two hours may be acceptable. But if a man shall endeavour to represent his two hours as twelve he will die, he will be killed, he will be buried, but not in "the sepulchres of the kings." Which of us has done all he can? Not I. I could have done ten times more. I could have prayed more, preached more, and suffered more. What they can say who have done nothing but enjoy themselves I know not. They make me afraid. I was told of persons who were supposed to be worth five-and-twenty thousand pounds that at the Communion of the Lord's Table never contribute a coin, but put in the communion card alone. Is it possible? Thy money perish with thee. Keep it; keep it. Take it in the coffin with thee. Do insist upon having it there. Make a pillow of it; make a footstool of it; make a lining of it. Keep it, thou whited sepulchre! Ananias lied without speaking, and that is the worst form of falsehood. The blundering speaker of a lie may be converted; but the actor of a lie can only be killed.

The discipline of the Church here sets in very strongly. Ananias and Sapphira, his wife, probably thought that Christianity would endure only for a little time. They meant to make the most of it, and, in order to do that, they must undergo something like the process of a sacrifice. They underwent it. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." To bring my piece, and lay it down as if it were all, can any atheist stab the Christ of God so far in as that? To sit in the Church and drop in the little square communion card as if there might be something behind it, when there is nothing can any bloodless atheist strike him between the eyes like that? O Church of the living God! conversion must begin within thee; and then the fire will burn, and throw out its happy influence upon the wide circumference, and there shall be joy in the presence of the angels of God over a prodigal Church, repentant and returned!