Acts 6 Deacons

Acts deacons

At this point in the book of Acts the Church has, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, successfully endured under the threat of punishment by the religious authorities, the threat of corruption by false Christians inside the Church (Ananias and Sapphira), and then a more profound threat of death by the authorities that the Holy Spirit saved the Apostles from and it is worth quoting here the end of Chapter 5 to remind ourselves of how that story ended:

Acts 5:41–42 “Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus.”

What is the next challenge then for the Church? It is the challenge to actually BE the Church, which means to love God while also loving one another in Christ. How do we love one another in Christ as the Church?

Well, for one, we ignore the divisions that typically have divided us as humans since the Fall. And this was the hardest challenge for new Jewish Christians of that time, because under the old covenant the command of the Lord was to BE divided from the other nations. The Jewish people were to be separate from the pagan worlds around them and they were to be devoted to God and not mix their worship of God with the practices of the nations around them. We are going through Jeremiah and we see the destruction and the misery that people brought upon themselves when they would not separate themselves from the idolatrous practices of the other nations.

But under the New Covenant there is no longer a nation of believers. There is no longer a culture or ethnicity of believers. There is still a division between God’s people and the world, but it is no longer subject to the rules of food, clothing, language, etc. It is a spiritual division, which in reality it always was, but the Gospel will no longer be contained in Israel. The Messiah has come, and the work of the Holy Spirit is now for God’s people to go INTO all the nations, not be separate from them, but to go to them, to tell them of the love of God that can be found in Jesus Christ.

So we are divided from the world not in terms of food, language, clothing, skin color, or government. We are divided from the world by our love for God, love for each other, which we are gifted with from the Holy Spirit when we submit our lives to Jesus Christ.

Which brings us to the Hellenists and the Hebrews. What is this division? Now to us it is going to seem fairly minor. Both of these groups are Jewish, ethnically speaking, and they both would have been knowledgeable of the Torah and the covenant and the priesthood, etc. So what are their differences?

Well, the primary difference is that they spoke different languages. The Hebrew group spoke either Aramaic or Hebrew, or in many cases, likely both. The Hellenists spoke Greek, and many of them likely worshiped in their synagogues in Greek, reading the Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint, as opposed to the Hebrew texts. The Hellenists would have been in many cases part of what was known as the Diaspora, Jewish communities living outside of Israel. They would have felt less attachment to the Temple and the priesthood than the Hebrew Jews, although both would have acknowledged their importance.

But that’s about it. Other than that, they both worshiped God, knew God, celebrated the same holidays and shared the same history. It would be overstating the case to say that there was enmity between these two groups. They were just different, and they did share some differing views, but nothing too radical.

So let’s take this problem from the top and let’s think about this and how it might speak to us today.

First, this is a good problem to have. What do I mean by that? It’s a good problem to have, because it stems from good intentions. The Church is trying to care for the needy within the Church, their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. They were gathering food and goods from the members of the Church, and using those resources to care for widows, orphans and the poor. And we know this from other passages as well, and this only makes sense- if a group of people gather under the Lordship of Christ then they are going to try and follow His teachings, His example, and that means caring practically for one another, not just in word, but in deed as well.

Sometimes us doing a food pantry, or trying to help a brother or sister, or putting out a free food box, or doing a Summer Splash program, etc., sometimes these things cause problems. Because they get us involved with people, and people cause problems. Show me a church with no problems with people and I will show you a church that is doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for the community around them.

So it’s good. The Church attempted to do something right and Godly for the members of the Church, and that is good. But they have done it imperfectly. The text doesn’t give a lot of information, but it doesn’t seem likely that it was done maliciously, because I think the tone of this text would be much darker and concerning if that were the case. It’s hard to know what exactly is behind it. There are a number of possibilities as to why the Hebrew widows are being favored over the Hellenists. The explanation I found most convincing in my reading was as follows: Imagine there is a finite amount of food to distribute every day, and sometimes there just isn’t enough to go around. And so decisions have to be made about who is going to get that food. And if, as we have reason to believe, that many if not most of the people making the decision about who gets what were local Hebrew Jews, and Jerusalem lifelong residents, then of course you are going to give that food to the people you know and love personally. Aunt Judy is hungry and you know her kids, and there is a foreign family over there who are also hungry and need food but you only have enough for one family so what are you going to do? Are you going to tell Aunt Judy that you gave it to a stranger?

Familiarity can breed injustice. It does not have to be enmity or bad feelings, it can just be you tend to favor who and what you know. Which in turn, however, can foster bad feelings among others in the Church, which is indeed what seems to have happened here.

There is another good thing that happened here. The Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because of the neglect that they were feeling. They spoke up. They didn’t swallow it or ignore it, nor were they too afraid to say something. They felt like they could approach the Apostles and say this is not right.

That is somewhat remarkable given what happened just recently with Ananias and Sapphira, isn’t it? The Lord convicted them of greed and struck them dead before Peter- and they surely knew this. But they felt that the Lord would be understanding and sympathetic to their concern, because it was not born of greed, but out of a concern for fairness and equity, and at heart they believed something true- that Greek speaking Jews were not lesser than or inferior to the Hebrew speaking Jews. This is part of the Gospel, there are no second class citizens in the Church of God.

So the Church has done a good thing, but imperfectly, and another good thing happens, which is those who are feeling wronged spoke up and made the injustice known.

That is also a good thing. We should not be fearful to let people in the Church know when we see something unjust in our midst.

Now here is the good thing that makes you know this is God’s wisdom and heart at work, and not the workings of mankind. This good thing is that the Apostles decide that they personally are not called to fix this problem.

Because I struggle with this kind of wisdom. I struggle with issues of control- I really do.

If someone came to me and said, the people in your congregation who are from Champaign aren’t getting any donuts. They aren’t. It’s all the people from Urbana. The Urbanaites bring the donuts, and then share them with people from Urbana, and by the time they get to the Champaign people the donuts are all gone.

If that was reported to me, I would want to handle it. I would. I would be upset. You know I grew up in Urbana. But in all seriousness I would have a hard time trusting someone else to handle it. I would want to meet with the aggrieved parties, I would want to get to the bottom of why the Urbana people are not sharing donuts, and I would probably write a small book’s worth of emails and have dozens of hours of meetings and it would swallow most of my time for a solid month or two. Because I am the pastor and it’s a division in MY church and I should be the one to handle it and so on.

And leaders of all stripes, not just pastors, are so easily torpedoed by this kind of behavior that looks noble and altruistic, but at heart is a combination of being overly controlling and not trusting enough of others, and it leads to burnout, depression and often the failure of that leader to do what they are supposed to be doing.

You may recall that a very similar event happens after the Exodus. Moses is leading his people through the wilderness but the people are bringing every single dispute between them to Moses. And Jethro, Moses’ father in law, sees this, and rebukes Moses. He says, literally, what do you think you’re doing? And he tells Moses that no man, not even Moses can keep up that kind of a schedule.

And Moses protests, he pushes against Jethro and he says, but I know the Law- I am the one who knows God’s words. So I am the one who needs to do this!

And Jethro says, look, doofus (that may not be in the Hebrew text but it’s implied), look doofus, you aren’t supposed to be all things to all people. You do indeed know the Law and have been given wisdom and insight into God’s Word. So preach God’s Word! That is what you are supposed to be doing, be a teacher and preacher. And go and find God-fearing men among the Jews and put them in charge of select groups of people and let them figure out the disputes that arise between the people. And if there is a dispute that is particularly difficult or sensitive in some way then they can bring that one to you, but let them decide all of that themselves and give them real authority among the people so that you can do what it is you are supposed to be doing! You idiot.

So Moses did that, and he was able to continue to be a teacher and preacher for the Hebrews.

And I would not be at all surprised if Jethro was on the mind of the Apostles as they gathered to discuss this issue. A few months ago the church was a handful of people, a few dozen perhaps, it’s hard to know. But after the falling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost things started moving quickly. Thousands of people were now Christians, declaring Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

And they knew with a God given wisdom that it would be a mistake, sinful even, for them to try and settle every injustice, respond to every mistake, that would inevitably occur in their midst. In short, they needed help.

What we are looking at here, brothers and sisters, is a 3rd satanic attack on the Church, and it is a highly effective one. It is one I have succumbed to from time to time. This is the attack of distraction. If the Church cannot be destroyed by the authorities, if it cannot be corrupted from within, then perhaps Satan can distract the Church from its mission, which is the Great Commission, to spread the Gospel. But it’s like dominoes, isn’t it? Because the Church cannot reach out to the nations with the Gospel if those who are called to preach and teach the Gospel are busy doing other things, and if those other things are trying to put out fires and resolve the inevitable disputes that come up, then we will never get around to spreading the Good News.

Satan wants to distract the Church from its mission.

And the best way to distract Christians who are being remade into the image of God, who are being born again, who have this inexpressible and glorious joy that is the salvation of their souls, the best way is to distract them is to with good things that matter. Distract the members of the Church from their calling, their vocation, with other good things that they aren’t called to, but can get sucked into.

This can happen to anyone in the Church, not just pastors. And anyone who gets distracted from their calling to do something they aren’t supposed to be doing will leave a gap in our ministry, in our church life.

Every member of the Body of Christ has gifts to share with the Body. Every one of us. Some gifts are more prominent, more noticeable than others. The pastors are often the most noticeable. But hear me Church, pastors and leaders are just more noticeable. They are more visible. They are not more important. It is my calling and my privilege to rightly handle the Word of Truth and present the Gospel through the Bible on Sunday mornings, among other things. But no pastor can do that unless other people are doing other things in the Church. We might call it administration. We might call it a prayer team. We might call it fellowship. We might call it networking. We might call it social justice. The words change as the culture and the times change but all those things are the heartbeat of the Church- the working of the Kingdom of God among us. It can be Karen picking out the kinds of chairs we should purchase for the sanctuary. It might be Nanette working on a ledger of our Church finances. It might be Jim paying a water bill for a neighbor of ours in Steer Place. It might simply be someone taking 3 minutes, just 3 minutes, every night to pray for Cornerstone and our ministry here.

All those things need to happen and I have the suspicion that the less important you think your gift is, the less vital, the more precious it is in God’s eyes. When the widow put the single penny into the offering box at the Temple (Mark 12) Jesus said that she had put in more than everyone else. I don’t believe He was just saying that as a percentage of what she has, although that is certainly true, but that God would actually do more with that one penny than He would with far more substantive offerings because He can and it honors the sacrificial giving of the giver. In other words, if you have very little to give in terms of gifting, or perceive it that way, then it means all the more to God that you put those gifts into His service.

I don’t believe God is particularly impressed with me and my service to the Kingdom. What impresses me, and I think pleases God more, is when I hear of something that someone has been doing that I didn’t even know they were doing- most people didn’t know they were doing- that serves the Church in some way and they just did it quietly and humbly and without thanks because that’s their calling. I have had that moment a lot as a pastor- and what warms my heart is the knowledge that among us are saints who are doing things for one another and the Church that I will literally never know about, that most of us will never know about, simply because they love Jesus and are His people.

If all you have are modest and humble and non-noticeable gifts to give the church but you give them anyway because you want to honor God...then great is your reward in heaven. Because the Lord sees what others do not and it blesses Him when we serve simply because we want to serve Him, and love to do so.

The Apostles were called by Christ Himself to be teachers and preachers, first and foremost. Does that mean they were never to help others or never help do the dishes or never make sure that some particular needy person got the food they needed? No, absolutely not. When Jesus washed their feet as a servant He took away any possibility for the Apostles to ever say, this task or this job is beneath me. Helping figure out the fair way to distribute food to the widows was NOT beneath the Apostles.

But they had the wisdom to see it for what it was...a distraction from what they had been called to do.

And that is why this event in the early Church in Jerusalem is so important and their response to it rebuffed another of Satan’s attacks. They would not be distracted and the Church would be the full Body of Christ, the full people of God, working in unison, for the love of God and for the love of each other, each person finding their place in the Church, no matter how noticeable, no matter how invisible, knowing that each person called by God into His marvelous light, has a role to play.

And how does this story end? It’s so fascinating, the beauty of how the Lord works.

So the church picks these men- and it seems from their names that the majority if not all of them are Hellenistic Jews, Greek speaking Jews. They were to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. Given their background they will not be prone to neglecting the Greek speaking peoples, but that almost does not matter, if they are wise and full of the fruit of the Spirit, men of love and compassion then they will be sure to not neglect anyone if at all possible.

Still, one could look at this moment as a shift in power, if you wanted to look at it from a worldly point of view. You could say some of the power base has shifted from the Apostles, who were not Hellenistic Jews to the Hellenists. From a worldly perspective perhaps the Church is becoming less friendly, less open to Aramaic speaking Jews?

But we are told, here in verse 7- the word of God continued to increase, and Luke specifically says at this point a “great many of the priests” became Christians. Priests being assuredly not Hellenists, who certainly spoke Aramaic and or Hebrew.

The Church does not work like the world. When a church is in harmony, when our love for each other is apparent to the world, then the Gospel will be heard and the people who hear it are not going to care about language, skin color, ethnicity, kind of music or any of those things. People are hungry for God’s love and for communities that reflect that love, those who are being called into His Kingdom will celebrate the many kinds of humans in this world, and also celebrate our unity in Jesus Christ.

But I would be doing a disservice to end on a note of triumph. For that church in Jerusalem was just like our church in that it was not perfect and it did not do everything perfectly and, in addition to that, suffering was always right at hand.

First, the Church doesn’t do things perfectly even when it does them rightly or well. You may recall in John’s Revelation that Jesus specifically says to certain churches therein that he hates the teachings of the Nicolatians. And we learn from the Church fathers that Nicolaus, the proselyte from Antioch was the individual from which the Nicolatians derived their teaching. What seems to have happened is that Nicolaus at some point decided that God’s grace in Christ meant that sexual libertarianism was the order of the day, and so taught anything goes in that department. Should the church have known this? Were there warning signs? Who knows? Maybe and maybe not, but my point is simply that it is not possible to do everything perfectly even when you are doing the right things. Mistakes will be made. People will fall away. Satan will never cease his attacks, which is why we must be ever vigilant.

And, of course, suffering. To walk with Christ is to experience suffering.

Philippians 1:29 “For it has been granted t o you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake,”

Our next foray into Acts will be Stephen’s story, who Luke says was a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. And it is his story that gets cut short. It is Stephen who is stoned to death outside of Jerusalem’s walls.

There is great joy in Jerusalem for those who are finding Jesus. There is great suffering in Jerusalem for the nations are still ranting and raging and the Church will not, can not be made perfect until Her groom returns. And that remains the story of the Church to this very day here in 2025. Great joy, great suffering, and a hope that lies just beyond the horizon of our mortality.