Well, do turn with me to the book of Acts or to the printout of the passage that we're looking at this evening. If you glance at some of the previous sermons that have been preached from this pulpit, you'll find that there was a sermon preached a long time ago by Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse called, Men That God Struck Dead. I know that because Dr. James Montgomery Boyce, when he was preaching on this passage, introduced his sermon by telling people that that was the title of Barnhouse's sermon and then hijacking it for himself. Men that God struck dead. In this story, and both Drs. Barnhouse and Boyce were referring of course to men and women, but in this story we have the record of A man and a woman who are among that select few in the Bible whom God struck dead. The reason behind it all is this great act of hypocrisy. Now true spirituality is very easy to mimic or hijack for personal glory, but God sees through that kind of hypocrisy. It's a good word, hypocrisy. It's a word that you'll often find on the lips of people who aren't Christian. Maybe you've used that if you're visiting here this evening and you've used that of Christian people. Maybe you look around and you think here are a church full of hypocrites. Of course, the word is often used wrongly. What very often people mean when they say that, that all Christians are hypocrites, is effectively what they mean is that all Christians are sinners, or all Christians sin, or all Christians do bad things. Well, there's no argument. There's nobody in this room that I know who's a Christian who's going to argue with that. In fact, what we've just done this evening in our liturgy is to corporately confess our sins to God. We say the Lord's Prayer and the Lord Jesus teaches us every day to pray, forgive us our sins. But there are those who mimic true spirituality. They do it to suit their own agenda. They may do it to gain office in the church. They may do it to gain celebrity within the wider Christian culture or to attract attention. to themselves or to attract a following of willing devotees or simply to appear more spiritual in the eyes of others. That's what we find happening here in this little section of the Bible. Now first of all, let me give you a bit of context. The key to understanding all that's been going on up to this point, including this in the book of Acts, is actually chapter 2, verse 42, where we're told of the effects of the coming of the Spirit on the church and the world. We read there, these words, All came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. That's the beginning and then the section is bracketed by this further statement in verse 12 of chapter 5, almost repeating word for word what we read there in chapter 242. Many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. So this whole section is telling us about signs and wonders accomplished by the apostles, which was provoking a response both inside and outside the church. And the response, we're told, was a response of fear. The signs were both welcomed and feared by the people, so much so that we are then told that there were some who did not dare, did not dare join themselves to the believing community. There was such a sense of awe in the presence of God that there were people who were interested in Christianity, would not dare to join the church. That's a serious situation, isn't it? Not one we have today where people aren't joining because they are awed at the power of God demonstrating, demonstrated among the people of God. And their awe was right. It was a genuine and a healthy thing, a sense of awe at the presence of the supernatural and reverence for God rather than terror or panic. It was a sense of fear, godly fear of the living God. Now these signs and wonders have taken various shapes. There's been the healing of this crippled man that we've been looking at in chapters 3 and 4 particularly. This was done in full public view with the authorities checking it out. And now it's illustrated here at the end of Chapter 4 by the emergence of this new community of unity and love. And the section that we've read belongs together, and it's held together by the use of one word translated great here in our English translations, mega. Mega power, mega grace, and mega fear. And all of them are pointing, all of those expressions are pointing us to an awesome gospel, an awesome grace, and an awesome God. An awesome gospel. With great power, we're told, the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. This was the driving force. This was in answer to their prayer. Back in chapter 4, they were being persecuted. They prayed. And what did they pray? They prayed that they would be given power, be enabled to speak Your Word with all boldness. And to do that, while You stretch forth Your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of Your holy servant, Jesus. And the prayer was being answered. Here's how the prayer is being answered. First of all, there's great power in the apostles to proclaim their testimony, their first-hand witness, their eyewitness testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. That pivotal event that is the foundation on which the message of Christianity is built and based. That message that is the foundation of the structure of this new community, which will be given a name for the first time in the book of Acts slightly later on in this section that we're studying today, this new community. God has answered prayer. The Spirit has been given. There is boldness. There is power attending the preaching of the apostles. And they're being marked out as the people who have the message. that the world and we need to hear today an awesome gospel. Secondly, there is awesome grace here. Grace, great grace we're told, was upon them all. Now what was this grace, what was it looking like at that point? It's interesting that if you compare the two halves of Luke's great work, what we call the Gospel of Luke and now the Book of Acts, you'll find that in the early part of the Gospel of Luke, we have Luke reflecting on the father's favor that rested upon Jesus as a boy growing up. You read that in Luke chapter 2, verses 40 and verse 52. And now here in the second volume, he's focusing on the infant church, the early church, and he sees the Father's grace resting on this infant church, creating a community of love and of mutual compassion. I can't help but contrast what's described here with a description that I heard of that was used in a television series of adverts by the Greenpeace organization a few years ago. Greenpeace, an organization that beats the drum for ecological concerns. And they once ran the following ad on television. They wanted us to think, rather than thinking of the world as 4,600 million years old, they asked us to consider our planet as if it were a person of 46 years of age. We know nothing of the first seven years of the person's life. Dinosaurs and the great reptiles only appear one year ago, when the planet is already 45. Mammals arrived on the scene eight months ago. And in the middle of last week, man-like apes evolved into ape-like men. Last weekend was the Ice Age. And modern man has been around for only four hours. During the last hour, man has discovered agriculture. The Industrial Revolution began a minute ago. And in the last 60 seconds of biological time, modern man has made a rubbish tip of paradise. It's a depressing, sobering picture of humanity. And if it's right, then we need something different. And here it is. Here at the end of Acts 4, we have one of the loveliest glimpses of human life imaginable. Read it for yourself. Now the full number of those who believe were of one heart and soul and no one said that any of the things that belonged to them was his own but they had everything in common. Jesus is calling his people to be this different sort of human race. And here in this snapshot of the early church we find a model quite different from the British infant described in the Greenpeace advert. The first thing we are told about this new community is that they shared what they had. This They did out of an overwhelming sense of spiritual unity with one another that affected their attitude towards their material possessions. They were of one heart and soul. Echoing the language of Deuteronomy chapter 6, where the people of Israel are called to love the Lord their God with all their heart, all their soul, and all their might. And then in the next verse, it's noted that the apostles gave their witness with great power. So that these terms occurring together in this way are telling us that here are people who are one in the way they think, they're one in the way they are committed intellectually and spiritually to these truths. and the truths of the resurrection of Jesus. The truth of the gospel was impacting their lives. Great grace was upon them all. The grace of God produced generosity in their hearts. No one said that any of their things belonged to him or was his own. These people were people who knew what bound them together. It wasn't their feelings that bound them together. It wasn't that they felt all mushy in one another's company or that they felt as if they were all emotionally connected in any way. There was something far greater than an emotional connection. They were bound together by their relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the risen Lord Jesus Christ. The closer we get to Him, the closer we get to Jesus. Then the closer we get to one another. If you can imagine for a moment the bicycle wheel where the spokes, as they get closer to the center, get closer together. You may say, well, that was then and this is now. What's it like now when you consider Christian churches and Christian communities? I remember reading a little ditty some time ago. To live above with saints in love, oh, that would be glory. To live below with saints I know, well, that's another story. Is that your experience? of the church. Maybe you've left another church. Maybe your church is going through difficulties and you're here this evening to have a little bit of a break in the anonymity of a center city church. But here we see this snapshot of this period in salvation history as the Lord Jesus is continuing His work and words through the apostles, we have this snapshot here of what their unity looked like. Here's how it looked. As many as were owners of lands and houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet and it was distributed to each as any had need. And now you say that sounds like communism, but it's no, nothing like communism. Let me tell you, it's not even like socialism. I should know, because I come from a country that has been in the grip of socialism. Private ownership continues. People retain their own homes and lands. There's no coercion, there's no legislation, there's no pressure, there's no peer pressure. These people are not even being preached at to give more. They're not listening to the radio every day. One of these appeal sessions, marathons, where people are trying to raise money and you're hearing a good song played and then there's this appeal comes on. And you think, give over with the talking and let's hear more music. No, they want your money. That's what they're doing. There's nothing like that going on here. The selling of their lands was entirely voluntary with no hint of compulsion or legislation. John Calvin puts it like this, the goods were not divided up equally but a careful distribution was made so that no one was oppressed with poverty. There are no secret police here. There is no Big Brother here. There is no guilt-trip-style, high-pressured drive for donations here. There is no fear and no imposition here. It is a spontaneous movement of love. And what is its biblical, theological significance? Well, the language that's used here tells you there was not a needy person among them. We've been seeing this little new community as the new Israel. Well, here is the new Israel fulfilling something that God wanted whenever he brought Israel into the promised land. You read Deuteronomy 15 verse 4, where it was prophesied that there would be no poor among the Israelites when they were settled in the land. And then, of course, in Deuteronomy, realism kicks in, and the rest of that book is a bit more realistic about what will happen when they get into the Promised Land. In other words, that statement was a prophecy, and it's a prophecy that comes true here, provisionally at least, for this period of time in the new Israel. In the new Israel, there was not a needy person among them. And what's being suggested is there's a parallel here between the redemption of the Israelites in the Old Testament from Egypt and their settlement in the land and the redemption that is in Christ and the establishment of this new community. Whereas we don't read of Israel ever having a state like this, here we find it for a short time at least among the new community that is the church. And you can understand why. It would have been the most monumental undermining of the gospel if while preaching Jesus as the risen Lord and Israel's Messiah, there were brothers and sisters of the Messiah left in poverty. What we have here is an anticipation of the renovated earth, the new heavens and the new earth that is to come. Here we have in this period of time this perfect snapshot of the kind of situation towards which we are moving in the purposes of God towards a day in which there will be no needy person among them. That's where we're going. What did they do? They laid their money at the apostles' feet. They recognized the official status of the apostles as stand-ins for Jesus himself. By laying the money at their feet, they're not simply giving to charity, they're giving to the Lord Jesus. They're acknowledging Jesus' sovereign rights over all they possessed. He was not simply their teacher. He was not simply the One who had come to give them instruction, but He was their Redeemer, and that meant He owned them. He had bought them by His blood. He owned them in all they possessed. He was Israel's Messiah. The vineyard was His, and the fruit of the vineyard was rightly His. He was exalted to the very highest place by the right hand of the God of the universe that belonged to Him. And so with glad logic, they express what they believe by their action. And they give gladly. There's an example given at the end of chapter 4. The example of Joseph, who is also called Barnabas, which means a son of encouragement, who was a Levite. That is, he came from the priestly family, a native of Cyprus. He probably never exercised his Levitical ministry in the temple in Jerusalem. But now he sold the field that he owned and presented the money to the Lord by laying it at the apostles' feet. And in doing so, he's fulfilling the spirit of the law, which said in Joshua 13, to the tribe of Levi, Moses gave no inheritance. The Lord God of Israel is their inheritance, just as he had said to them. In later chapters, we find this man, Barnabas, giving up his home, traveling around the world for the sake of Jesus, in pointed contrast to another man who'd held the sacred office of an apostle and who abandoned it and bought a field with his money from the proceeds of his treachery towards Jesus. This is awesome. Grace. Awesome grace at work in the early church. We look back to this and we think our church, I hope, helps people and I think does, but our church is nothing like this. No churches that I've served have been exactly like this. The church nowhere in the world is exactly like this. Here in Salvation History is a moment in time. back towards which we look in terms of getting instruction and stimulation for our own work now, but also that encourages us to hope of that new day that's coming when there will be no needy among us. Awesome gospel. Awesome grace. Thirdly, awesome God. We come to the third chapter. And again, a little bit of the context. In the second movement of this book following Pentecost, we find the church being oppressed by the world at large. Chapter 4, we saw the apostles being dragged before the court. We saw their interpretation of what was going on as nothing less than the kings and rulers of the earth raging against God. This took the form of an attack against the Lord and His Messiah. Now we're going to see opposition coming from another quarter. Back in chapter 2 we read, everyone was filled with awe. And here we're given one more reason why people were filled with awe. Not just that people were healed like the crippled man, but now they're filled with awe because God struck men dead. The story of Ananias and Sapphira. And what that taught the world was this. Here is a community in which God's presence is palpable. You can see the references to God's presence here in verse 3, to the Holy Spirit. Verse 4, to God. Verse 9, to the Spirit of the Lord. Each of these verses highlights the supernatural character of this fellowship. And just as the healing of the crippled man pointed to the purpose of God one day to renew all things and bring about a resurrection of the body, so this idyllic picture of the church is a signal of God's intention to make this idol, this picture of a perfect state, the general experience. In the eschaton, in the last days, the future is as bright as the promises of God. But when we hit chapter 5, we're being reminded that the last of the last days hasn't arrived yet. The eschaton, the final things, have not yet come. They're being tasted by the early church, but they have not yet kicked in. We get to chapter 5 and we realize that we are caught up between the already, that is what we have now, what we share now in Christ, and the not yet, what is still to come in Christ. Here we are, we live our lives in the tension between these two moments, the now and the then, the here and the hereafter. Now what we have here in chapter 5 threatens the unity and peace of the church. with prophetic insight identifies the problem as people conspiring to test the Spirit of the Lord. He takes it to be the work of Satan. Remember earlier on in Luke's writing in the Gospel, Luke has talked about Satan sifting the disciples after the Lord's arrest. And now Satan is turning his attention to seek to sift and destroy the people of God. He's not been able to destroy the apostles. He has taken Judas, as it were, and Judas has fallen. Now he seeks to undermine and destroy the people of God. So flowing from the story of Barnabas, we're introduced to these two people, Ananias, whose name means the Lord is gracious, and Sapphira, whose name means beautiful. They sell a piece of property. It's their property. It belongs to them. It's their decision. No one's told them to do it. But what we're told is this, that with his wife's knowledge, Ananias kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet. Here is Ananias and Sapphira conspiring together reminding us of an original conspiracy of Adam and Eve who act together to bring humanity into a state of sin. Here are these two who disregard the presence of God in the Christian community. You read that little bit at the end of Acts 4 and you see a new Eden. You see a perfect Israel. You see the way Eden was and Israel could have been. You see a little glimpse of paradise. And here is the snake in the garden as Satan provokes Ananias and Sapphira to disregard the presence of God. To disregard the sacredness of the community in God's eyes. To disregard the relationships that they had with people in that church. and who failed to see their sin as a deliberate act of deceit directed against the church which was in fact therefore directed against the Lord of the church. What they did was to keep back something for themselves while projecting the idea that they were giving it all to Jesus. Do you know I have noticed something in pastoral counseling over these years? That when people are actively involved in some known sin, they very often become far more vocal and verbal in using spiritual language. Suddenly their You know, they're adding, if the Lord wills, at the end of sentences. Or they're, you know, saying things like, the Lord's given them peace. Or He's laid this on my heart. Or, you know, all this kind of spiritual verbiage that we throw sometimes into our conversation for effect. For effect. And that's what these people were doing. They were doing something for effect. and were deceiving everyone. It wasn't that they wanted to be richer. It was that they thought that they wanted the church to think that they were better than they were. They were far more interested in other people's opinions than they were in pleasing God. They were turning the church into a horizontal thing. and forgetting the vertical relationship between the people in the church and God. Taking the role of the prophet, Peter poses a series of penetrating questions. His first question exposes the heart of the problem. Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? Usually it's the Holy Spirit that fills someone with the necessary gifts and graces they need. But here, their hearts are filled with deceit and hypocrisy by Satan. If the devil's first tactic was to destroy the church by force from without, his second tactic is to destroy the church by falsehood from within. Sometimes we are co-conspirators in keeping silent about sin that needs to be dealt with within the church. The second question exposes the needlessness of it all. Listen to what he says to them. You know, while it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? It was yours. And after it was sold, was it not yours? to use as you wished. You could just go and splash it out on a new car. They didn't have cars then. Equivalent, chariot, whatever. A kind of Mercedes chariot. It was still yours. You could have done with it as you pleased. No one was forcing you. No one was twisting your arm up your back. You have not lied to men, but to God. See, the Bible doesn't have a problem with you having things. What it says to you is they're God's first and He's given them to you to use for His glory. A Christian woman's body belongs to the Lord, but she retains the right to decide whom she will marry. She's not bound to marry the first man who comes along and decides he needs a wife and decides she will do. Once we cede all our material goods to the Lord, then the Lord gives it over to us to decide, with His help and guidance, how best to use them. So in a sense the goods remain our own because God graciously shares them with us. So the sharing was voluntary. The ownership of goods was a divine right as well as a human right. It was Ananias pretending to give all while holding back. It was the hypocrisy. It was the play acting. It was the deceit. It was the embezzlement of God that was the problem. And what's at stake in this story? Why is it in the Bible? Is it just to warn us not to make false promises about what we're going to get? The real issue that's at stake is the reality of the power of God and the presence of God through the apostles in the church. That was the question of the day. The question of the day in the flow of the story up to this point is this. This is what the officials, the Sanhedrin, the high priests wanted to hear the answer for. By what power and in whose name do you do this? That's what they asked the apostles. Satan had filled the heart of Judas to betray Jesus. And now he'd filled Ananias' heart to cheat for the same reasons. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, Ananias and Sapphira were tempting the Spirit of God. They were testing the Lord just as Israel tested the Lord in the wilderness. In the Old Testament, Israel had seen God's hand rescue them through judgment from Egypt. Plagues in Egypt. The drowning of Pharaoh's army. The destruction of Korah. In the New Testament, Jesus had performed miracles that expressed God's mercy through restoration and protection, through healing and feeding the multitude and exercising demons and stilling the storm. With one miracle of judgment, cursing the fig tree is a sign of coming judgment on Israel. In the book of Acts, we find the apostles performing miracles of healing and rescue alongside four miracles of judgment. inflicting blindness on Saul and Elymas and death on Ananias and Sapphira and King Herod. What that reminds us of as we look at the bigger story of the Bible is God is consistent throughout the Bible. He is both exceedingly gracious all over the Bible's pages and He is jealously holy all over the Bible's pages. We don't leave a holy God behind when we turn from Malachi to Matthew. Nor do we leave a compassionate and merciful God behind when we read backwards from Matthew to Malachi. The same God is all over the Bible. He is a God of salvation, but He is also a God of judgment. That's first Ananias and then Sapphira fall dead at Peter's feet. We have a foretaste of final judgment that is to come. And judgment begins in the house of the Lord. And the result? Great fear at such a great God. A healthy, sobering, solemn sense that they were handling eternal matters and dealing with a power greater than we are. And it's now. Here's interesting. It's once this has happened. Once judgment has fallen, once the presence of God and the power of God are demonstrated through healing and judgment. Mercy, judgment. Now, for the first time in the story, this new community is named. It is the Ecclesia. It is the church. It is the assembly of God's people. And we are being told by this narrative something important about the church. God is not going to nuke any of you here tonight. And I reassure you of that. That is not His normal way of dealing with people in church. He does not strike men or women dead. in the way he did then today. He does it here to teach us that the church belongs to God. That the church is built on the Apostle's ministry. That the church is pervaded by the presence and power of God whether we're conscious of it or not. that the church is people with those who are of one heart and one mind with the apostles and with people who are pretending. Or they're not really belonging. This is a one-off in the history of redemption. Interestingly, it doesn't inhibit church growth. It doesn't inhibit true conversions. the world, that the early church, who were prepared to defy the state and official religious authority, were not anarchists. They lived under the authority of God by His Word and Spirit. Their death did not inaugurate the day of the Lord or signal the arrival of the time for the restoration of all things. Today the wheat and the weeds grow together without the weeds being rooted out. But one day, they will be rooted out when the Lord sends His angels to harvest the wheat and cast the weeds into hellfire. And there is something else, of course. God has His way even now weeding his church. Paul can write to the Corinthians about those who were abusing the body. That is, they were not recognizing when they came to the Lord's Supper that they were part of the body of Christ. That is, the church of Christ. And he can warn them. Because of their abuse of the Lord's table, many were weak and sickly among them. and some had already died. Those were heavy days for the church. And what this should do for us is to give us a solemn sense, a serious sense. The church of God is important to God. The church of God is shot through with the presence and power of God. I remember once a lady came to a church where I was the pastor and she was a Spiritist medium. And she said, I came to your church. Your people are very ordinary. I've improved over the years, but the people are very ordinary. But as I sat in your church, I felt a power greater than any power I've ever felt in a seance. A power that is frightening to me. I cannot come back. Because whenever God's people are together, though you may not realize it, the power and presence of God is as real as it was the day God struck men dead in the church. Just as real. God has called you and I to this kind of vital fellowship. healthy fear of an awesome God. John Murray said, it is the essence of impiety not to be afraid of God when there is reason to be afraid. Sometimes we're afraid of God when there's no reason. But a healthy fear of God is good for you. Let me tell you this about this early church. After that event, There was not one small group, Bible study, discussion, in which anybody sitting around said something like this. Well, I like to think of God as... Let's pray together. Father, we pray that you would strike upon us this evening as your people gathered here a sense of your reality, your awesome power and presence with your people. Give us, Lord, to embrace that, but also to see it in light of the great grace that you pour in the church. You did then. We long for such grace to be poured out upon us. We thank you for the bonds of affection that bind us one to another in perhaps smaller groups within this larger fellowship, and we're grateful for that. We pray, Lord, that those bonds of love would deepen and strengthen as the days go by. As we get to know each other, as we get to connect with one another, as we get to share our lives with each other, we pray that you would deepen those bonds of affection that we have. That knowing each other better we might find it harder to play act, find it harder to deceive, find it harder to lie, find it harder to hide. but seek to live out in the open in your presence under your word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.