Excitement and victory jump from every page of the first four chapters of the book of Acts. In those chapters, you are almost immediately introduced to an awe inspiring, visual and auditory spiritual event that completely stuns everyone who witnesses it. There are a number of mass salvations causing the church to grow in instant leaps and bounds. There’s Peter’s fiery victorious sermons, and a humbling of falsely pious and persecutory religious leaders. There’s an unquestionable public love among the members of a brand new church that compels them to voluntarily sell all they have, and then freely and generously share all of their proceeds with one another.
But then in Acts 5 a terrible tragedy strikes. The hearts of two believers – Ananias and his wife Sapphira – are filled with the spirit of Satan. Under that dark influence, they willfully contrive in their hearts to deceive their fellow believers, as well as God who was living through those believers via his Holy Spirit. Like the other members of their church, they had sold some property and donated to their faith community some of the proceeds from the sale. However, instead of being truthful about what they had earned from the sale, they lied and gave only a portion, but represented that portion as the full amount. God then strikes them both dead (Acts 5:1-11). Although greed of some kind probably played a part in their demise, it isn’t the holding back of money that brought on their judgment. Peter makes this clear when he reminds them that both the land and the money they earned from its sale were theirs to do with as they pleased. Rather, it was their lie that drew God’s displeasure.
The harshness of this judgment should make all of us uneasy. Not because we are greedy – though we should certainly deal with that if we are – but because we tend to be liars. We lie to ourselves the most, and those lies can cause us to lie to God as well. We have a strong psychological inclination to avoid difficult things, and we suffer from the false belief that a lie helps us escape unpleasant difficulties. It does not. It simply delays them, transfers them, or complicates them.
It is hard – perhaps impossible with just the Acts 5 text – to figure out all of God’s reasoning for this swift and apparently harsh punishment of those two believers, but we can speculate. The bible says that God must be worshiped in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Sacrificial giving is a clear form of worship. Did Ananias and Sapphira violate this principle when they lied about the worship they were giving, and did God need to set an example against false worship for an infant church that did not yet have the letters of Paul and an experienced apostolic structure? The bible also says that God does not hold those guiltless who use his name in vain (Deuteronomy 5:11). Did Ananias and Sapphira breach this principle by misrepresenting his name as Christians when they forgot or ignored the truth that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 9:10)?
Whatever the case, lying is an egregious and destructive sin. In fact, it’s the first sin that humans experienced when Satan lied to them, causing the crash of creation. How much more egregious it is to lie to God. What terrible things might happen to the nature of our faith community if our worship is a lie? What does our lying say about our fear of a Holy God? What lies have you told? Do you fear God?
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