Acts 5:1-11 | HypocrisySample

NT Wright writes about how the early Christian community mirrors the temple – at least the temple as it was once supposed to be among the people of God. The temple was the place where God dwelled. That made it a place of holiness. It was designed as a place where people could experience God’s holiness, but with a lack of holiness being consumed by the sheer presence of the holy God.

God is dangerous. Because the holy and the unholy just don’t mix. We see the danger of the presence of God’s holiness in Joshua 7, just after God’s miraculous deliverance of his people at Jericho. In the same vein as Ananias and Sapphira, he holds back a part of God’s blessing and dies because of it. We see similar things in Leviticus 10 when two sons of Aaron bring “unauthorized fire” into the presence of the Lord and are consumed, with Uzzah who reaches out his hand to steady the ark of the covenant in 2 Samuel 6 and dies because of it, with King Uzziah who contracts leprosy for infringing on the temple in 2 Chronicles 26, and even in Israel’s exile where the people God elected became too unholy for the land to bear.

We see it in the New Testament too. Blindness strikes Simon Magus when he tries to buy the Holy Spirit in Acts 8. Elymas the Sorcerer is stricken blind in Acts 13 for seeking to turn people away from Christ. Other warnings about persisting in unholiness include passages like 1 Corinthians 10 and 11:29-30.

Changed hearts and miraculous healing, along with judgment on sin, are the inevitable consequence when God dwells among you. God is holy, and this is what happens in the presence of holiness. Unholiness is consumed. Acts 5 is a reminder of the holiness of God, and the implications of God’s holiness among his people.

We’ve seen already in Acts how God has come to dwell in his people. They now become the place where God’s holiness resides, not the temple building. That’s one reason we see the crippled beggar get healed by Peter and John outside the temple gates in Acts 3, and perhaps why we see the believers gathered in Solomon’s Colonnade outside the temple in Acts 4. It’s why Luke keeps putting such emphasis on the life in the Spirit the believers experienced in passages like Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-37. Ananias and Sapphira show the flipside of being unholy in the presence of holiness.

That should fill us with awe towards God. And perhaps a bit of fear. It did for the early church, just as it did for others who saw them. It also drew them to confess their unholiness to find a new holiness in Jesus’ name.

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