Intro
I didn’t say very much last week about our sermon series title, “Through The Fire”. So I’m going to fix that right now. Some of us believe that God can really only work in our lives or in our world once a bunch of other things get sorted out. You know, once the pandemic is over, or I get through my schooling, or this busy season of work ends, or my kids have grown up a bit, or I retire, or I’m physically healthy, or all hardship stops and everything is exactly right in the world. Once that’s settled, then God can do His thing.
Other people have the mindset that some so-called health and wealth preachers have proclaimed. God’s desire is to remove all those hardships from you. Therefore, if you encounter trials, you simply need to claim your victory, because God’s will is not for you to experience them.
I’m going to call balderdash on all that. I’d call it something worse, but that wouldn’t be very pastory. Or something.
In this section of the book of Acts, from chapters 5-12, we are going to see the church encounter trials of all kinds, both from within and from outside. Remember, this is the church at its best. As we talked about last week, God was building a foundation in the early church that would serve as the basis for global impact, a foundation that would have to sustain a lot of weight in the years ahead. And yet the first Christians were hardly immune to difficulties. They “passed through the fire”. But what they knew, and some of us have forgotten, is that fire has the potential to strengthen and purify the church. We talked about that a little bit regarding the aftermath of Ananias and Sapphira last week. Here’s how Peter, the foremost of these early disciples, put it in his letter:
“In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire- may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
1 Peter 1:6-7
Proven. That’s what passing through the fire does. It tests, purifies, strengthens, proves. In that way, fire isn’t something to fear or to run from. This is a lesson I need to learn, because I tend to shy away from the fire. Maybe you do too. Let’s learn from the early church together.
17 But the high priest rose up, and all who were with him (that is, the party of the Sadducees), and filled with jealousy 18 they arrested the apostles and put them in the public prison. 19 But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, 20 “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.” 21 And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach. Now when the high priest came, and those who were with him, they called together the council, all the senate of the people of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought. 22 But when the officers came, they did not find them in the prison, so they returned and reported, 23 “We found the prison securely locked and the guards standing at the doors, but when we opened them we found no one inside.” 24 Now when the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these words, they were greatly perplexed about them, wondering what this would come to.25 And someone came and told them, “Look! The men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people.” 26 Then the captain with the officers went and brought them, but not by force, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people. 27 And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” 29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. 30 The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. 32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” 33 When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. 34 But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. 35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail;39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice,40 and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.41 Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. 42 And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus.
Acts 5:17-42
What the authorities do
If you got lost, here’s a quick recap. The Sanhedrin doesn’t like the spread of faith in Jesus, they throw the apostles in jail with the plan of interrogating them the next day. In a bit of a comedic twist, an angel performs a midnight jail break, commissions the apostles to preach in the temple, and the next morning the Sanhedrin convenes. But where are the apostles? Someone misplaced them! Then a guy comes in, says “they’re preaching in the temple”, they have a verbal altercation, and decide to let them off with slap on the wrist, or more realistically, a whole bunch of whips to the back and a command to stop talking about Jesus. The disciples say “no thanks” and leave the place full of joy.
Whaaaaat? Let’s break this down, and let’s start by talking about the human authorities we meet here. That would be the Sanhedrin, which was the ruling council of the Jews. Judea at the time was fully under the thumb of the Roman Empire, but the Romans gave the Sanhedrin authority in religious matters- something the Romans weren’t terribly passionate about. The Sanhedrin was a diverse group politically and theologically, which you get hints of in this passage. However, together they represent probably the biggest external threat to the early church.
1. Promote common good
We’re going to expose some tendencies of human authorities, but let’s start charitably. Very rarely are human authorities completely bad or completely good. It’s usually a mix. We see that in the Bible. You get a passage like Romans 13, where Paul says that governments are a gift from God to the world and are meant to exercise justice and maintain order. That’s a good thing. However, governments and other human authorities can also be used by Satan to exercise injustice and oppression. We see that at various points in Revelation. Both of those characteristics of human authority are evident in Acts 5, with the good stuff coming out especially in Gamaliel’s speech.
Gamaliel was a well known Jewish rabbi, one of the foremost Pharisees of his day. He was actually the mentor and teacher of the apostle Paul before Paul met Jesus. That’s probably why Luke knew about what Gamaliel said. Either Paul was there, or Paul heard it later from Gamaliel. And Gamaliel says that the Sanhedrin needs to cool their jets a little, or something along those lines. They’re eager to snuff out the Christian movement. They’re ready to put these apostles to death and be done with it. But Gamaliel’s counsel is that if this movement is not from God, it will take care of itself. He points to other historical examples of failing movements. But if it is from God, then there’s nothing they can do to stop it, and they will only be fighting against Him. Not a great thing for a group of people allegedly all about honoring God and leading His people well.
Gamaliel isn’t a Jesus follower. There’s no indication he ever became one. But because of the common grace in humanity, Gamaliel had wisdom. He led in a way that gave a measure of freedom for the Gospel to be proclaimed. That’s an example of what human governments can do, at their best. When they function as God intended, they can create the conditions for human flourishing, guarding against injustice and promoting the common good, including freedom of religion.
2. Self-preserve at all costs
But sometimes, maybe oftentimes, they fail to do this to some extent. Instead, they become primarily concerned with self-preservation. We see that in our democratically elected leaders. They are often less concerned with doing what’s right than they are with doing whatever will garner them the most support. It’s instinctual. If you don’t have support, you may cease to hold on to power, and you want to hold on to power!
That’s the main concern for the Sanhedrin. What are they most upset about? They are most upset that their own public credibility is being attacked by the apostles. Verse 28, “you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.” Later on, the thing that the apostles say that really gets them worked up is when they say that God raised Jesus from the dead, “who you killed by hanging him on the cross.” Listen, the apostles aren’t trying to get revenge here. After all, the death of Jesus was instrumental in the forgiveness of sins and was in accordance with God’s plan of salvation. But they don’t shy away from the fact that these religious leaders, heirs of all the prophetic promises that had pointed to Jesus all along, were the ones who ended up crucifying him! And what’s the implication? That the leaders themselves need to repent and live differently!
And there’s another layer to this too. The apostles proclaim the resurrection of Jesus. Well, the majority of the Sanhedrin were from the Sadducee sect, and the Sadducean Jews denied that there was such a thing as the resurrection. It’s not just that the apostles were filling Jerusalem with teaching about his death. The teaching of the resurrection itself was offensive and heretical to the Sadducees and would require a change in deeply held beliefs!
What you need to understand about human authorities is that because they are invested in self-preservation, they are also resistant to calls for repentance and transformation. I mean, they might change in accordance with a direction favorable to them. But to see society changed in a way they don’t deem to be favorable for their own cause? That they can’t tolerate. To hear calls for radical repentance in their own hearts? No way.
3. Persecute
So what do they do? They persecute. First they throw the apostles into prison. They interrogate them. And finally, in verse 40, they flog the apostles and order them not to speak in the name of Jesus anymore. They stop short of execution…for now. But they are ramping up the pressure.
This has been the pattern again and again, and it’s been true in so-called Christian governments and countries as well. I’m reading the journal of John Wesley. He was an Anglican priest and missionary in England in the 18th century, but when he was about 30 had a deep experience of the love of God. The Gospel became real to him. And he began to preach all over England, becoming one of the primary figures in what has been called the Great Awakening. People would gather in the thousands in marketplaces and open fields to hear him preach. But at least for the first 20 years or so afterwards, he also faced intense backlash and opposition everywhere he went. People didn’t want to hear that they were to repent, or that their hearts were cold and needed to be revived. Many times, mobs carried him away, mayors forbid him from preaching, preachers kept him from entering their churches, people tried to stone him to death, tried to break down the doors of homes he was staying in. In one story, a mob brought a bull and tried to disperse the crowd by driving the bull among the people. Wesley says, “the beast was wiser than his drivers and continually ran either on one side of us or the other, while we quietly sang praise to God and prayed for about an hour.” Eventually, they got the bull to the table Wesley wanted to preach from, the bull itself bleeding all over because of its owners’ beatings, and knocked the table over. Some of Wesley’s friends caught him as he fell, and carried him off to another spot while the mob tore his preaching table to pieces. Meanwhile, Wesley finished his sermon a little ways off “without any noise or interruption.” Again, this was among so-called Christians, condoned by so-called Christian authorities, and the whole time Wesley was still part of the national Anglican church!
And it is happening and will happen here in Canada too. A bill has just been passed by our Canadian government, Bill C-4, that addresses some very legitimate concerns that Christians should want to address. However, it is also a very broad bill. It essentially makes any practice or service that encourages people to live in line with biblical standards of sexual morality a criminal act, punishable by jail time. If a counsellor encourages someone to, in the words of Paul, not gratify the desires of the flesh, that is now a criminal act. Human authorities don’t usually take well to biblical calls to repentance and transformation, in the first century or ours.
What God does
1. Allows
What does God do about this? Let’s talk about that. First off, we’d have to admit that God allows human authorities to persecute and commit injustice. God does not prevent the jailing of the apostles. He does not prevent them from being flogged. In Acts 7, He will not prevent Stephen from being stoned to death. In many cases, He allows these things to happen. Like we said last week, except in very rare instances like with Ananias and Sapphira, we humans do not pay the ultimate price for our sins at the moment. Instead, God gives us the free will to commit those sins and gives us opportunities to repent of them. He does the same with corrupt human authorities. He allows them to sin, to go off track, to persecute His people.
2. Protects
Occasionally, though, God also protects His people from persecution. Sometimes we get a divine jailbreak. Anyone watched the show Prison Break back in the day? The one brother is wrongly on death row, the other brother gets the blueprint of the whole prison tattooed on his body, and attempts a bank robbery just so he can get thrown into prison with his brother. He then orchestrates an elaborate escape. It takes 22 whole episodes, because, as I said, it’s very elaborate. And then, since the whole show is premised on breaking out of prison and it did quite well and the producers wanted to keep the gravy train rolling, the brothers have to get thrown into other prisons and break out of those too for 4 or 5 seasons. Anyway, God doesn’t need an entire season. One night, an angel opens the doors and brings them out while the guards are sleeping, and then closes the doors behind them. Boom. Done.
A few decades ago, Brother Yun, the Chinese underground house church leader, had something like this happen too. He tells a story- I know this sounds unbelievable to some- but he says he was imprisoned in a maximum security prison that nobody had ever escaped from. One day, on God’s prompting, he walked through a door that should have been locked, past security guards that paid him no attention, through more supposedly locked doors, all the way out to the front street. (Story told in full in The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun and Paul Hattaway).
The question is, why doesn’t God always do this? Why doesn’t He always protect His people? Brother Yun was imprisoned three other times and endured unbelievable torture and physical harm. Why didn’t God deliver him those other times? Why are the apostles still flogged, and imprisoned, and ultimately executed for their testimony about Jesus? I wonder if the answer is similar to physical healing. Occasionally, God heals miraculously and supernaturally. Other times He doesn’t, no matter how much praying is done. I think the times He does heal in those miraculous ways are reminders that He’s around. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still at work, and healing is a taste and a sign of what He’s going to do for all His people in eternity. In the same way, there are instances of divine, supernatural protection. These are signs of the security and freedom that His people will enjoy forever with Him. The divine prison break is a sign to the human powers that they are messing with God, and it’s not going to turn out well for them. It’s a sign that ultimately, their purposes are going to be in vain and that God is doing something despite their efforts. As Psalm 2 says, in verse that are almost thematic for the whole book of Acts, “why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain…the One enthroned in heaven laughs, the Lord scoffs at them” (Psalm 2:1, 4).
3. Makes Himself known
But here’s one thing God always does, whether He keeps us from any physical harm or not: He calls us to make Him known. The angel breaks the apostles out of prison and immediately instructs them to get back to the temple and keep preaching Jesus. Keep making him known. Keep telling people about the life that comes through Jesus, a quality of life that is not dependent on the comforts and securities of this world.
This is what God wants to do through His people. He wants to make His gift of life known to the world, and He can do this in every circumstance. Remember 1 Peter 1, those trials that have come will ultimately result in praise, glory and honor and will be the means of displaying what faith looks like. Brother Yun in his biography says,
“We must submit ourselves to God and embrace whatever he allows to happen. Sometimes there are times of peace, other times struggle and persecution. But both are from the Lord, to mold us into the vessels he wants us to be…instead of weakening us, the persecution just made us stronger. The more pressure there was, the more fire and love there was to spread the gospel.”
Brother Yun, The Heavenly Man
God is able to work through us, He is able to make Himself known through us, even in something as intense as state-sponsored persecution.
There is an application here for everyone, regardless of whether you feel you are being actively persecuted by human authorities or not. I’ll touch on that at the end. But sticking close to the Acts 5 story for the moment, I want to say again how important it is that we are ready. The further the hearts of our authorities are from the Lord, the more the pressure on the church will ramp up. Be ready for that. Expect it. And ensure that your desire is not to avoid it or to fight it, but to allow it to make Jesus known through you, and through your church.
What the disciples of Jesus do
We’ve already been hitting on this, but let’s talk finally about what the disciples do in this story.
1. Obey God
First off, they obey God. God tells them to go and preach in the temple courts, despite the fact that doing that just had them arrested? They go and do it. And take note of this: the priority of obeying God means that they also disobey their human authorities.
2. Disobey authorities
Something I’ve observed is that some Christians have an idea that to submit to authorities means to obey them unconditionally. That if your authorities tell you to do something, you do it. And in the Western world, despite some shortcomings, governments have comparatively exercised justice well. They have been relatively free from corruption. Please hear me clearly here: I’m using words like comparatively and relatively. Governments in the West have been far from free of scandal. My point is that obedience to the government has generally not been a problematic thing for Christians in Canada, and so we haven’t had to really wrestle with the potential of civic disobedience.
That’s changing, though. Like I said before, the pressure is ramping up, and we need to be awakened to the need for discernment. There will be more and more instances where God has called us to do or say something that our government forbids us to do and say. What will we do? The apostles are pretty clear on this: “we must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29)
I recently saw a testimony video by a woman in Ontario. During the pandemic, when governments had shut down in person worship services, a church in her city had stayed open in defiance of those orders, resulting in fines and other forms of pressure from the government. This woman was a drug addict, living on the street, but somehow came across this church. She visited a service, prayed with the pastor and elders afterward, and in time gave her life to Christ and experienced freedom from her drug addiction. She says in her baptism testimony that if the church had closed its doors in obedience to the government, she would be dead and would never have known the love of God in Jesus. I know, that’s anecdotal, and different churches discerned that matter differently, including The Bridge. But I think it still stands as an example of the cost of obeying God rather than humans, as well as the resulting fruit.
3. Willing to pay the consequences
The apostles obey God by continuing to preach Jesus, they disobey the authorities, and they are willing to pay the consequences. I wonder if that’s part of what it means to submit to authorities even when disobeying them. The apostles say, we have to talk about Jesus, you can do what you want to us. They don’t stir up a revolt against the Sanhedrin, they don’t fight off the temple guards with their apostolic superpowers. They willingly go to prison, they are willingly flogged. They’re willing to pay the consequences of obeying God and disobeying authorities.
You might have heard of the Brazilian soccer player Neymar, one of the most talented players in the world. Neymar was once known for being very outspoken about his faith in Jesus. However, a recent contract he signed with his team, Paris Saint-Germain, pays him a bonus of 500,000 euros a month if he follows an ethical clause. Part of that ethical clause is that he will avoid making any statements about his religion that could damage the unity of the club. It would seem that the consequences of talking about Jesus imposed by the authorities- the loss of 6 million euros a year- are too great for Neymar to pay. Hey, we can understand. We are human beings too. Maybe we’re not sure what decision we would make if faced with something like that. But clearly, it’s a very different response from what we see in Acts 5.
4. Rejoice
The disciples obey God’s instruction to make Jesus known, disobey the authorities, willingly pay the consequences, and finally, here’s the craziest thing, they rejoice. Verse 41, they left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name. They rejoiced because they had been counted worthy of suffering for Jesus.
Let’s go back to John Wesley’s journal. Like I said, for about 20 years, Wesley faced suffering for the name of Jesus almost everywhere he went. I think I would have grown discouraged after the first instance. I think after the fifth instance, I would have strongly considered packing it in. Wesley kept going. He seemed unfazed by it. In fact, he writes in his journal about visiting one area of England where people treated him very well. This is his reaction:
“I was much surprised wherever I went at the civility of the people- gentlemen as well as others. There was no pointing, no calling of names, as once; no, nor even laughter. What can this mean? Am I become a servant of men? Or is the scandal of the cross ceased?”
John Wesley
I read that and laughed. Like, what? People didn’t call me names or laugh at me and treated me civilly- this is terrible! Have I become a people-pleaser? Wesley expected that opposition and took it as a sign that he truly was preaching the scandal of the cross.
I think that’s part of the reason the apostles could rejoice after their altercation with the Sanhedrin. They expected it. They knew that if they were truly in line with Jesus and the Old Testament prophets, this was their lot. The prophets had almost always been met with rejection. Obviously, Jesus himself suffered at the hands of the authorities. If they were followers of Jesus, it made sense they’d be treated the same. Jesus told them it would happen. It was a sign that they were on the right track.
They also rejoiced because they recognized that their own salvation came through that suffering. The suffering of Jesus wasn’t just a detail, it was the means by which their own sins were paid for. Suffering disgrace and dishonor is kind of at the heart of the Gospel. It goes back to what we said in the previous section: God makes Himself known through us in persecution. He draws people to Himself through it, so the apostles could rejoice on that basis.
And I think they also rejoiced in persecution because of their love for Jesus. What they valued most was not comfort or security in this world, or the esteem of people, but their relationship with Jesus. Suffering at the hands of the authorities was one way they could identify with Jesus and know Him more.
Why did they rejoice despite the pressure from the Sanhedrin? Because it was a sign that they were on the right track, because it was a way in which Jesus was being made known to others, and because it was a way in which they themselves were knowing Jesus more.
Conclusion
What I’m driving at this morning is the need for many of us, including myself, to shift our mindset. When we encounter trials of various kinds, when we pass through the fire- whether it’s opposition, sickness, financial difficulties, relational troubles, or whatever else- don’t assume it’s because God doesn’t love us or is punishing us. Don’t run from the fire. Because passing through the fire is often how God strengthens us and purifies us and proves the genuineness of our faith. And particularly if you experience hardships because of the Gospel, if you face ridicule or rejection because of Jesus, if human authorities ratchet up the pressure on you for your faith in Christ, rejoice. Rejoice because it is an indication that you’re on the right track, because it is a way in which Jesus makes himself known to you and makes himself known through you to those around you. Getting in trouble for the name of Jesus? As long as it’s a product of our faithfulness and not our foolishness, may we say, bring it on. May we learn from these early Christians and praise God in the midst of it.
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