Acts 4:32-37

Acts 4:32-5

Ananias and Sapphira

I. We have much need to lay to heart the lessons of this incident. Christ's Church has long since come to include so many false or unspiritual members, and to be so blent with the world, that we fail to realise its ideal sanctity as the body of Christ, animated in a peculiar manner by the Divine presence. We fail to feel that to offend against the saints is to offend Christ; that to fetch our worldly sins of conceit, ambition, envy, or covetousness, into sacred sources, is to affront God to His face; nay, more than this, we are apt to lose out of our hearts that faith in the Third Person of the adorable and undivided Trinity which realises Him as One who can be wronged, grieved, insulted, or lied to; One who, though He keeps Himself out of view, is yet sensitive to the treatment which in the persons of righteous men He daily receives from the profane. The peculiarity which makes the Church the kingdom of God, if it is the kingdom of God at all, must aggravate offences done against it; and the special presence of the Holy Ghost, if He is specially in it, must stamp all contempt or outrage with a darker dye.

II. It is to mark the sanctity of that enclosure, which is now for the first time called the Church, that this narrative of judgment is set thus in the forefront of its history. On the earliest appearance of open sin within the Church follows the earliest infliction of Church discipline. Because it is the earliest, it is taken out of the hands of servants, to be administered with appalling severity by the hand of the Master. As an instance of earthly discipline it was entirely exceptional, a warning not to be repeated. The time and fashion of all our deaths is with God. The life, which we are daily forfeiting by transgression, is daily spared through mercy. If one day His mercy turned to judgment, and He took from the earth two forfeited lives, for the warning and bettering of many, who shall say, either that the lesson was dearly bought, or that the penalty was undeserved. It is well that men should be taught once for all, by sudden death treading swiftly on the heels of detected sin, that the Gospel, which discovers God's boundless mercy, has not wiped out the sterner attributes of the judge.

J. Oswald Dykes, From Jerusalem to Antioch,p. 165 (see also Preacher's Lantern,vol. iv., p. 513).