Ananias And Sapphira 2

As a church, we exist not only to know Jesus but also to make him known. We have the threefold message: ‘Jesus is wonderful: you’ll love him. Jesus is Savior: you need him. Jesus is Lord: obey him.’

In making Jesus known, we want to remove all unnecessary barriers. We want people to leave a church service having been lifted, inspired. We want them to know God is good.

Then we come to a passage like this. This is a pretty uncomfortable section of scripture and we’re not sure what to do with it.

Did God really strike this couple down? Doesn’t that just reinforce the perception that God is an angry judge just waiting to slam his fist down on us at every misdeed? Is this scripture recorded here in order to say to us, ‘Shape up and watch your step, or this could happen to you’? Well, the answer to that is ‘no’. If this was God’s normal way of dealing with Christians who sin, every Sunday morning would be a funeral service, and it wouldn’t be me leading the service, for the first funeral service would have been my own.

This passage is here partially just to record accurately what the early church was like.

People say, ‘We need to be more like the early church’. If we read Acts we do see things like personal conflict, theological disagreement, petty grumbling. We see bold hypocrisy in this Scripture. These things have shown up in the church right from the beginning, because the church is made up of forgiven but not perfect people, and the Bible never glosses over that. That is good for us to know.

But more significantly, though, this passage reveals something crucial both about God and about what it means to be the church: God so closely identifies himself with the Church that he treats it as an extension of himself.

We often think of the church as something other than that. We think of the church as an incubator for our spiritual nurture, or as a community or family for our spiritual support, or as a Christian vocational institute for our spiritual development. And it is all of these things. But behind all of those things is the assumption that the church is primarily for us.

Yet the fundamental purpose and identity of the church is that it is to be the revelation of God to the world. So again: God so closely identifies himself with the Church that he considers it an extension of himself. That is the truth behind what happens to Ananias and Sapphira. The background to this Scripture begins at the end of chapter 4.

We read in chapter 4:32-37 the description of the church: Their ministry is done with power, and they enjoy God’s favor, or grace. One of the evidences of the reality of God among them is the fact that there is a fundamental unity among them, that is, they are one in heart and soul, and there is a sharing of their resources so that no one among them will be in need. We read that There was not a needy person among them, “for as many as were owners of lands or 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”.

As an example of this, we are introduced to Barnabas, whom we’ll see again in Acts,

but whom we meet here for the first time. Barnabas isn’t his name at all but his name is Joseph. Barnabas is a nickname given to him by the apostles; it means ‘Son of encouragement’.

The name speaks of the affection and esteem Barnabas was held in because of the character he demonstrates here: Barnabas sold a field he owned, brought the proceeds from the sale, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. And then chapter 5 begins, and it begins with the word ‘But….’ What we are about to read at the beginning of Acts 5 forms a stark contrast to the description that we’ve just read at the end of chapter 4: ‘What a great church! United, generous. For example, here is Barnabas.

On the other hand, though, here are Ananias and Sapphira. But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

Immediately, a couple things to notice:

First, notice the phrase ‘kept back’. The Greek word used here by the author occurs only one other time in the New Testament, in Titus 2:10, where it is translated ‘steal’ or ‘pilfer’. The idea is that by holding some money back Ananias is acting dishonestly. We find out very soon in the text what that dishonesty was:

Ananias is giving part of the money from the sale, pretending he is giving all the money. Later Peter will say to Sapphira: ‘Is this how much you sold the land for?’ and she will boldly lie: “Yes”. Second, notice that his wife is in on it. There is collusion in this affair. This is a planned act of willful deceit by which they want the church to think something about them that is false. Probably, they want to appear to be of the same stuff as Barnabas, but without being actually generous. They want the ‘platinum partner’ plaque on the wall, but without giving at a platinum level. But if Ananias was expecting public affirmation, he got something very different!

Verse 3: But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land?

While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold was not the money at your disposal? Why is it you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God. It was not the keeping of the money that was the issue. Ananias’ right of ownership is actually affirmed here. Peter says, ‘You could have done what you wanted with the field before you sold it and with the money after you sold it.’ They could have said, ‘We sold the field for two thousand, and here’s one thousand.’ That would have been fine.

But what Ananias did was sell the field for two thousand, but say, ‘We sold it for one, and here’s all of it.’ The sin was deceit, hypocrisy. They wanted to be thought of as generous, but without sacrifice, they wanted reputation without character.

Jesus warned in Matthew 6 about giving publicly so that people will praise your generosity. He called such people hypocrites but Ananias and Sapphira were a step below that, yet. Not only was their motive for giving wrong. Their giving itself was a sham.

Who was the sin against? It was against the church. Ananias lied to the community of faith. But more significantly, it was a sin against God.

Notice what Peter says, ‘Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit…. You have not lied to men but to God.’

Ananias thought this was merely a deal between himself and the others in the church. Maybe he thought, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’ But what was really happening was that Ananias was sinning against God, that what he was doing was an insult, an affront to the perfect goodness of God.

All sin is ultimately against God. King David understood that when, after his adultery with Bathsheba and his plotting the death of her husband, he said to God in Psalm 51,

Against you only have I sinned. Had he not sinned against Bathsheba? Absolutely. Had he not sinned against her husband, his own comrade-in-arms? No question. But all sin is fundamentally against God above all. For the very nature of sin, any sin, is to move God off of the center and place ourselves at the center. David said his own lusts were to be obeyed, not God’s call to purity. Ananias decided his greed and his desire for the affirmation of others took precedence over God’s call to integrity. Notice who was behind all this: Peter asked Why has Satan filled your heart? Greed and deceit are evil, and those who are slaves to those things place themselves in Satan’s camp.

This is not so much an issue of demon possession as it is a question of allegiance. Ananias professed allegiance to Christ, but really his allegiance was to himself and, therefore, to the kingdom of Satan. What fills your heart? What are you committed to? What do you open your heart to? Jesus spoke so often about money, recognizing that it is money or the things we need money to do that pose the greatest threat to our pursuit of the Kingdom of God.

And yet even underneath the money issue, the greed issue, there is the god of the self. It’s the god of ‘me first’ or ‘I want’: I want comfort! I want reputation! I want to be great, to be comfortable, to be admired! I’m full of myself.

We, by contrast, are to be filled with the Spirit. That is, fully allegiant to the Spirit and Kingdom of God, having his character and his values reigning in our lives.

When Ananias hears these words of Peter (that he had lied to God), he falls down and dies. Great fear comes upon all who heard of it. (Of course it does!) And he is buried.

Then his wife Sapphira comes in, about three hours later, and she doesn’t know yet what has happened. Peter gives her the opportunity to come clean by showing her the money and asking, Is this the price for the land? Inside Peter was probably thinking, praying, hoping, ‘Please let her tell the truth!’

But she sticks with the story she and her husband have settled upon and says, Yes, it is. How Peter’s heart must have sunk to hear those words! So Peter replies, How could you agree together to test the Spirit of the LORD? And she, too, dies on the spot, is carried out, and again the result is that great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.

No wonder there was fear! Two people have been struck dead in the space of a few hours. The clear implication of the text is that this is the judgment of God. And so no wonder we’re uncomfortable with this passage! This Scripture doesn’t show up in my kids’ Children’s Bibles.

I do not remember this during a children's sermon when I was little, or a lesson at vacation bible school when I was a child. We do not like what looks like a plain, mean act of God. We are confused by what looks like an unfair and inconsistent act of God. Why did he strike down Ananias and Sapphira, and why does he not then strike down the high-profile hypocrites of our day? Isn’t this a classic example of an unnecessarily severe punishment? It is the kind of question we often ask as we read the Old Testament. And yet here we are confronted with it in what we thought is the ‘kinder, gentler’ New Testament. So how are we to take this text? Because we do have to deal with this text.

We do not have the freedom to say, ‘I don’t like or understand what this says about God, therefore I reject it.’ I do not have the freedom to skip over it as a preacher because it is a hard text. This is God’s Word given to us.

This text reminds us that God is unchanging. We do not have a new God in the New Testament, that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament a God of mercy. No, the God of the Old Testament is profoundly merciful, and the God of the New Testament is still a God of wrath against sin. Nor do we dare to judge God on our terms. It is God’s prerogative to judge.

So we receive this account in Acts and are forced to wrestle with it. This scripture reveals God to us, and reveals what it means to be the church. It reminds us, for example, that God is a judge. It is his prerogative, not ours, to judge. This is the kind of text that prompts us to sit in judgment over God, not the other way around. We decide that this judgment of God on Ananias and Sapphira is inappropriate, that God crossed the line here.

But I wonder why we are prone to ask why God’s judgment is so harsh. Why do we not ask, ‘What does it mean to sin against God?’ Why are we more appalled at the judgment of God than at the sin of Ananias and Sapphira?

Could it be that we only think God as severe because we do not have a real sense of what sin really is. If we could see sin truly, we would be more likely to wonder why God does not strike more people dead.

Which raises the question, why doesn’t God strike more people dead? Is there something unique about this story? Consider the Old Testament parallel to this story. In the book of Joshua, God’s people have just entered the Promised Land and are about to be established in their own place, and about to begin living their calling to be the visible people of God in the midst of the nations. They are the people the other nations identify with Yahweh, the LORD.

It is not just about Israel moving into the land. It is about God moving into a land where the people thought their gods were supreme.

Israel’s first battle is against the city of Jericho, and they were commanded to destroy everything as a picture of their surrendering it all to God. But one man, Achan, disregarded this command and took some of the plunder for himself. ‘Took’ is the word ‘kept back’ is the same word and it’s the only time the word is used in the Greek Old Testament. In an act of deceit and greed Achan hi-jacks the establishment of the people of God and is severely judged. If this willful, conscious rebellion against the character of God goes unchecked,

and is allowed to take root, the whole mission of God’s people veers off course.

In Acts we have the people of God, the church of Jesus Christ, being established. They are bearing witness to the people that Jesus is the son of God whose death and resurrection fulfill the requirements of God on man’s behalf, and that therefore in Jesus (and in Jesus only) is forgiveness of sin and acceptability to God. In other words, like Israel of old, they are the revelation of God.

In Acts 4 Satan tries to hi-jack the church through threats of violence and persecution. He fails, and the church, if anything, becomes more bold, more powerful, more effective.

So now in chapter 5 he tries to corrupt the church from within and if he succeeds, the mission of the church to be witnesses of Jesus to the ends of the earth will be compromised. That is why it is a fearful thing to willfully be deceitful. Again, this is not just about imperfection, or sinning. This is not about our being fearful of God when we fail. This is not about struggling with sin and feeling like we are being hypocritical. This is deliberate, premeditated, spiritual hypocrisy. This is publicly identifying oneself with God while at the same time living a conscious rejection of all that God is. Ananias and Sapphira willfully and intentionally misrepresented themselves.

They were thinking in purely human terms about themselves and about deceiving the church. What they forgot to take into account was that they were not just trying to deceive the people. They were lying to God.

So, like a surgeon cutting out a cancerous tumor, here God judges Ananias and Sapphira.

Peter’s words here are very revealing: You have not lied to men but to God. That’s why I said in beginning of this sermon that God so closely identifies himself with the church that he considers it an extension of himself.

1 Corinthians 3:16-17 You are God’s temple. If you destroy that temple, God will destroy you. We are not just God’s agents in the world, or his servants. The Bible calls us the ‘Body of Christ’ and the ‘Temple of God’. That means God lives in us. We are his revelation to the world.

That God so closely identifies himself with the church is a word of challenge, certainly, but it is also a word of tremendous encouragement! It speaks of God’s protection and vindication of his people. His nearness and care. His commitment to his church for eternity. For God is with his people. When we gather together, God is among us. When we are apart, God still walks with us.

God is at work in us to purify us, to make us more like Jesus. God does shine through us – even through imperfect us – to show the world what he is like. And even as he shows himself a judge of sin, he is revealed as a God of grace. Consider what lengths God has gone to save us from judgment.

For the reality is that we were all in the place of Ananias and Sapphira. We were all objects of wrath, we were all set in opposition to God, his enemies. Our sins mean that what is deserved is for us to be struck down, our sinful lives cut short and our eternities spent under judgment.

And it is through the giving of his only Son Jesus Christ that we are saved from that.

If there is anything that separates us from Ananias and Sapphira, it is that we recognize and lament our sin, and realize that apart from God’s grace to us in Jesus, we are lost. We are not better than Ananias and Sapphira, and should we ever become hardened to our sin, and consistently and willfully elevate ourselves, our desires, and our wants above the reality of God in our lives, we then become like Ananias and Sapphira and, in the words of Scripture, no sacrifice for sin is left.

A man named Charlie Peacock wrote a song called In The Light some of you may have heard of it. It goes like this.

I keep trying to find a life

On my own, apart from you

I am the king of excuses

I’ve got one for every selfish thing I do

The disease of self runs through my blood

It’s a cancer fatal to my soul

Every attempt on my behalf has failed

To bring this sickness under control

Tell me, what’s going on inside of me?

I despise my own behavior

This only serves to confirm my suspicions

That I’m still a man in need of a Savior.

Are you in need of a Savior? Are there any areas of deceit or sin you need to pay attention to? We all do. But as we do, we thank God for his grace given to us in Christ Jesus!

Amen.

Benediction.

As we leave here today Go and spread the good news that Jesus Christ is King, He is our Lord. It’s an incredibly hard task to meet a non-believer and convert them, to have them come to the realization that they too need Jesus. I’m telling you today Don’t. Don’t take on the task of trying to do all that. It will in all likelihood end in frustration for both you and the person whose eyes you are trying to open. You just need to plant a seed. Like everything that grows it starts with a seed. you will quickly know if the person you are talking to has already had that seed planted. and if that's the case, water it. If everyone commits to either planting a seed or watering it in just 2 or 3 people a week we will all be surprised by the fruit that will produce. I’ve heard countless times and have even said it myself when talking with someone.

Discussing a time we had a short conversation and they said “I remember when you said this or you said that” And I thought to myself “I didn’t think they were listening or really paying attention. But they were. I had planted a seed and at the time was sure it fell on hard dried soil. Spreading the news of Christ, Reading his words. Surrounding ourselves with others that share an interest in knowing Christ more will help us to grow our relationship with God. It will grow our faith. A faith that we should all aspire to. I’m probably going to get a few side-eye looks for what I’m about to say, but I believe that our goal should not be to have “ Great faith in Jesus” But it should be to have The faith of Jesus.

I’ll say that again. Not the faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus. I don’t desire to be one of God’s disciples that is in the boat far out to sea when the storm is raging, frightened but knowing Jesus is with me. I desire to be that disciple that is in the same situation yet comfortably asleep because I know with every part of my being that I am God’s and he is mine. That there is no end to what he can do. That there is no end to what I would do for him.

May God bless you and keep you. May he make his face to shine upon you. Bless you, Have a wonderful week. Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory, forever.

Amen.