Chapter 5

Real life doesn’t happen nicely and neatly. It’s one of the differences between reality and fiction – “Reality doesn’t have to make sense,” as Tom Clancy once said.

Therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that the events in acts happen to some degree haphazardly. The narrative in chapter 5 is an example – the things that happen don’t tie together, and perhaps nor should they. If Luke is writing down what happened and when, then sometimes stuff will happen out of order.

Verses 1 to 11 tell us the cautionary story of Annanias and Sapphira. I have always had difficulty with this story because of the vengeful nature of God shown here; but then again, I accept that their crime was quite serious, as well as inexplicable – what possible motive could they have had to lie about the price of their field? Why not tell the truth? Surely it would have made perfect sense to bring a portion to the disciples and then live off the rest, right?

Actually, it’s not that easy. You can see the social pressure on the couple, and perhaps an inkling of the pressure these two people felt, if you read what was happening in the previous chapter (remembering that the chapter division came long after the writing of the book) – people were selling their possessions and living in community, with all property in common.

It wasn’t that these two wanted to look good, not exactly. The environment that they were in was something special, and they wanted to be a part of what was going on – but it went against the ethic of owning property of their own.

Note that although the social pressure was against it, there was absolutely no problem with them owning the money, however. So whilst you can easily understand their lies, their lies were still lies. And as Peter said, they “have not lied to themselves but to God.”

God is unlikely to be fooled, which is why you get what we have here.

Then we move into verses 12 – 16. Every chapter you find at least one little passage like this, chronicling what the baby church was doing. This passage gives you some idea as to why Annanias and Sapphira might have wanted to be involved – despite the risks of being connected with the early church, what they had seems wonderful. Living in harmony, worshiping together daily, even the sick being healed.

But it’s too good to last indefinitely. And remember there’s a spiritual war taking place. So perhaps we’re unsurprised to learn of the opposition marshalling against the church. The apostles are arrested and gaoled in verses 17 – 20.

Quite humorously, the Disciples are promptly released miraculously from Prison, and in a rather Monty-Pythonesque moment they are told to go out to the Temple and start preaching again.

Cute. But in a place where they’re wanted for preaching this very message, let’s not kid ourselves – it’s a deliberate challenge to the authority of the leadership. There can be no question that both God and the disciples were 100% aware of what they were doing. They were provoking a showdown.

And sure enough, a showdown is what they got.

Next thing you know, they’re up before the Sanhedrin. When commanded grandly to stop (forgetting that these are the same guys who failed spectacularly in organizing for the disciples to be locked up), the Disciples politely but firmly say “No”, and tell the Gospel so that the Sanhedrin are left in absolutely no doubt as to what they are preaching.

It looks like things are going from bad to worse when suddenly we get a flash of real wisdom from a Sanhedrin guy called Gamaliel.

Curious sideline: There are two guys in the Bible named Gamaliel. One turns up in Acts, the other in Numbers. Cute coincidence . . .

Anyway . . .

We know precisely three things about THIS Gamaliel:

1) He was a member of the Sanhedrin (from this passage).
2) He was a mentor of Paul (from Acts 22:4)
3) He was awesome (from this passage and from the fact that Paul thought him to be worth bragging about).


What we know for sure is that he had a very common-sense approach to this vexing problem of the Disciples and their teaching. He simply said “Let them go for it. If it’s from God, it will succeed and we can’t stop it. If it’s not, it’ll fail. Just be cool and chillax, my BRO-THERS.”

Okay, maybe I’m making it a little more colloquial, but that’s the general idea.

So the Disciples are released (after being given a nice solid beating).

But we know that the Zombie Apocalypse is still coming for these guys.

So all very nice stories. What do we do differently?

Well, from Ananias and Sapphira, we learn to be 100% straight with God. We tell God what’s really happening even when we don’t want to. God is big enough to take it all. And whilst we don’t necessarily expect God to strike us dead if we’re lying to Him (this may have simply been an example), it’s still a bad thing for us to do. Whatever else, He is the person you need to be honest with.

The second thing we can learn is this – when we see something happening that we are unsure about in a Church, Gamaliel’s advice could be valuable – Let God deal with it! If He wants it to happen, he’ll make it happen, and nothing we can do would stop that happening. On the other hand, if it’s NOT something God wants to happen, there’s no point in pushing the issue. It’s not going to happen.