Acts 5:12-16

The Apostles Heal Many
12 The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade. 13 No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people. 14 Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number. 15 As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. 16 Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by impure spirits, and all of them were healed.



Dig Deeper
Quite a few years ago in Milwaukee, a new wave of partnership and charter high schools began to take root. They were small schools with little money and not much to impress the outside observer. They began, in many respects, as a fresh alternative to the much more impressive, well-funded, and significantly larger and more established high schools in Milwaukee. I don’t think anyone thought much of these little schools as they began, but you can imagine the anger and opposition from the regular public school establishment when students began to flock to these new, little outposts. They came in such numbers that for awhile, it seemed that a new one was opening every month to accommodate all of those who had left the traditional schools.

It was disturbing to the establishment that such a thing was going on but let’s take that example to the extreme. Imagine if a tiny, rag-tag bunch of high school drop-outs who were short on formal education but long on practical life experience, set up a new school of learning right on the grounds of Harvard University. This group didn’t have any impressive buildings so they met in a small grove of trees right on campus. It wouldn’t seem like much of a threat until the Harvard authorities began to realize that their own students were flocking to this informal place of education and were beginning to become quite a problem in their own classes at Harvard because they were constantly challenging the learned professors with the new alternative information that they were receiving at this informal little gathering place. What is more, the students that were coming to class and creating problems, were constantly inviting others into this new gathering place that had become virtually an alternate lifestyle for those that had become part of the group. In this scenario, how long do you think it would be before the authorities at Harvard began to take serious steps to eradicate this group from their premises? This is something of what was going on as this small group of Christians continued to meet every day right there in the Temple grounds right under the noses of the high priests and religious leaders of the day. They were becoming quite a nuisance in fact.

In Acts 4:30, the disciples prayed fervently that God would “Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” They wanted God to show a skeptical Jerusalem that he really had done something new through Jesus. They wanted him to demonstrate through miracles, just as he had in Jesus’ lifetime, that the creative power of God’s new age had broken into the present age and that those in Christ really were the fulfillment of the promised family of God. It would take more than mere words to convince many Jews that this movement truly was from God and that they were not guaranteed the status of being God’s family simply based on their birth status as physical descendants of Abraham and adherence to the law.

Luke gives us every indication that God had begun to answer that prayer in a powerful way. We should probably understand the previous incident with Ananias and Sapphira to be part of the answer to that prayer as God showed powerfully that this was no ordinary group of people; these people were functioning as the new Temple that housed the very presence of God. It would be like that small group of the untrained at Harvard university beginning to call themselves the real Harvard. This was a clear affront to the powers that be.

The sign of the death of Ananias and Sapphira also plays as an important connecting ligament with the present passage. God had answered their prayer for miraculous signs and wonders to be performed among the people so as to serve as a great testament to the Lord working among them through not just Ananias and Sapphira’s death but also on a daily basis at Solomon’s Colonnade in the Temple.

The signs had a powerful dual effect. On the one hand, it seems that Luke was indicating that the death of the married couple served as an incredible deterrent for those with marginal interest in the community. They were obviously duly impressed with the clear signs of God’s power that was manifesting in these great miracles. These were, in fact, the types of signs and wonders that most of them had only heard about through their study of the ancient Scriptures. That is, until Jesus and his followers emerged as conduits of God’s mighty power. Despite the persecution by the religious leadership, the Jewish people regarded the Christian community highly but at the same time most of them were afraid to join. Between the persecution and threats of more and the stories of the mighty holiness of God that had taken the life of two of their own group, those that were not serious about becoming part of God’s family were scared off. Thus, the signs of the married couple’s death and the ongoing miracles served both the purpose of attracting people to God’s kingdom while keeping away those who were not serious in their faith.

Many people were scared off by the over-powering presence of God among these people, similar to the type of fear we see in Exodus 20:18-19 after the Israelites saw the overwhelming presence of God among them. Yet, God continued to add constantly to their numbers. Those who came were not dissuaded by the prospect of persecution and they embraced the idea of the responsibility and risk that came with being the Temples of God’s holiness. The important detail is that it was God who added to their number. The Christian community was not going out of their way to attract people by watering down the message or sugar-coating it. They were functioning as God’s holy Temple and those who truly desired to be a part of it came and joined them. Those that were more impressed by the show of power than they were by God’s holiness simply admired them from afar but dared not enter in. In short, the death of Ananias and Sapphira scared off all those that were not totally committed to being disciples of Jesus Christ.

A balancing measure was surely needed to keep the church in Jerusalem focused in those early days. It could have been quiet damaging had the church been overrun with those who merely went along with the growing church for the excitement, the healing, or the show. The miracles were important but the weren’t the point in and of themselves. They were demonstrations that God’s new age of the new creation really was breaking into the present realm. This would have been incredibly attractive to people, so the counter-measure of the death of Ananias and Sapphira was important. There is always a danger in the church of people coming to it for the personal benefits without truly desiring or respecting the holiness of the God who is at the center of the community.

As a result of these great miracles and the attention that came with so many people streaming into the ranks of the this new people of god, people began flocking to Peter in a similar fashion to the way that people had come to Jesus in droves (see the similarity between verses 15-16 and Mark 6:55-56). The same power that had manifested through the ministry of Jesus was now breaking out in this group of Jesus’ followers. The attraction for the sick and the lame became so intense that people were brought to them in high numbers and they began to believe that even Peter’s shadow falling on them might have the power to heal them. Luke does not say directly here whether people just believed that Peter’s shadow would heal them or if it really did but it should not be surprising if it did. We certainly don’t see anything like this before this nor after in any biblical account, but it is one of the recurring realities of Acts that God was not acting in ways that could be squeezed into a pattern.

A word of caution is necessary, however. This was a unique time of specific manifestation of God’s miraculous power so as to verify the truth of the early Christian community as the people of God. Once the Temple had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and the New Testament Scriptures came together over the coming decades, the need for the specific gift of miracles to verify the message became increasingly unnecessary (and arguably undesirable based on the tendency of humans to be drawn to miracles for the wrong reasons and the potential abuse of such things). Thus, any modern claims for the necessity of miraculous powers amongst God’s people falls short. That is not to argue that miracles from God do not still happen. They certainly do. God performing miracles independently or through the persistent prayer of his people is quite a different thing, though, than certain individuals being given the power to perform miracles independently and on an ongoing basis.

What we see hear, though, is that the church through much prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit, acting in bold opposition to the world of darkness around them. When the God’s people really begin to do that, to take on the powers of darkness in real ways in their own time, context, and communities, that’s when people will take the message seriously and begin to come to see what is going on and to be brought into God’s community. That usually brings opposition as it did the early church but is it more important to fear men or fear the Holy God who dwells among us?



Devotional Thought
Think of one specific way today that you can begin to boldly stand up to the powers of darkness in your local context whether it be at work, school, or in your neighborhood? What can you do to demonstrate that the power of the age of the new creation really has broken into the present age and can continue to break down the strongholds of darkness?