Acts 5:7-11 (NIV)
About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”
“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”
Peter said to her, “How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”
At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.
It was not a worship service in which these things happened. Many think that it was because that’s where Christians gather and bring offerings today. This all happened in one of the places that the people of the kingdom were typically living life together. That’s why Sapphira came in three hours later and this life together was still going on.
Sapphira expected to be greeted with cheers and pats on the back for the supposed great sacrifice that she and Ananias had made for the good of the body. Instead, she was greeted with a spreading silence. The people hadn’t been able to locate her to tell her that her husband had died three hours earlier, and no one wanted to be the one to break the news to her now.
So, they brought her to Peter. And though Peter was not harsh or unkind, he was very direct in what he wanted to know: was the amount of money that Ananias had brought in and laid at his feet the total amount that their property had sold for, as Ananias had claimed?
The question was a moment of grace. Rather than simply assume collusion between husband and wife, Peter was giving her a clear opportunity to tell the truth. If she had simply said, “No, it was only half of what we got for the property. We needed to keep the rest for our own needs,” the whole thing would have turned out very differently. She would have been thanked for her generous gift and comforted for her loss.
But instead, she lied, and repeated the story that she and her husband had concocted: that they had brought in all that they had received from the sale. Thus, instead of gratitude and comfort, she received God’s instant condemnation, and the same fate as her husband. She lied at the cost of her life, and the young men carried her out and buried her next to her husband.
These two deaths, happening because of God’s direct judgment and punishment of those among the Church who sinned, stunned the rest of the Church. They had never seen anything like this. It was as if the stories from the Exodus, when God lived tangibly among His people, were happening all over again.
And this was a closer analogy than they realized. Christianity is not merely a philosophy or a religion, a set of beliefs that are subscribed to in a greater or lesser degree by its adherents. It is a life lived in the kingdom of God, enabled by the sacrifice of Jesus, and by the Holy Spirit whom Jesus had poured out on the people of the kingdom. So, to live in the kingdom is to live in God’s very presence, a risky proposition for any who are unconcerned about sin in their lives.
Father, even though this is absolutely the truth, so many of the people of the Church don’t see it that way. We have all too commonly reduced Christianity to a series of beliefs, and we no longer see ourselves as living actively in Your presence. It is a mercy that we haven’t been entirely uprooted already! Forgive us, Lord, and help us to become Your people as You designed us to be, so that we can truly live in Your presence and serve You without fear, in holiness and righteousness all our days. (Luke 1:74-75).
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