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Can you think of the boldest stand you have ever taken in your life? A time when you knew you were right, where you stood publicly for something true and just and everyone else around you opposed you? Do you remember what that felt like? That is the kind of boldness that went with the apostles everywhere they went, particularly in Jerusalem and Judea. So far, since Pentecost, we have seen miraculous signs by the Holy Spirit, and nearly everyone encountering Him has repented. But now, the gospel faces opposition. Now there are enemies with teeth like knives and a serpent’s sting ready to pounce. Now we see the war in the heavenly places manifest itself on earth. And still, Christ’s church, filled with the Holy Spirit, remains bold. Let's examine Acts 4:1-31 for a great example of this.
Peter and John Arrested (v. 1-4)
As Peter and John preached in the temple, the priests, the captain of the temple guard, and the party of the Sadducees swarmed them. These men are all very upset that they are teaching the people and telling them about the resurrection of Jesus. You cannot do this here. And so they arrest them and throw them in a cell until the next day when the council can be convened and they can figure out what to do with them. It was evening, and the council by law was not allowed to meet at night. So they would have to wait until the next day. Since they got there at the ninth hour, this means Peter preached for something like three hours.
If you are tracking how this story parallels Jesus’s story, you already notice the continuities and the discontinuities here. They couldn’t arrest Jesus in the temple because they feared the people, but they arrested Peter and John there. But when they did arrest Jesus, they violated their own law and held his trial in the middle of the night. For the Apostles, they wait until the next day.
But even in the midst of this opposition, what do we see happen? The preaching bears fruit. Five thousand men believe. If you include the women and the children, you are looking at fifteen or twenty thousand people added to the church, just from one day in the temple.
Peter and John before the Sanhedrin (v. 5-22)
The High Priests and all the rulers and elders gathered together the next day. These are all the same men who had conspired and condemned Jesus to death less than two months before. And they have one question for them. “By what name or what power have you done this?”
Already you see another discontinuity with Jesus. When Jesus was before these exact same men, He did not say a word to them. But Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit speaks: If we are being put on trial for a good deed done to a helpless man, I am gonna tell you all exactly in whose name we did this. By the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here whole. Peter then quotes Psalm 118 and tells them that Christ is the stone which the builders have rejected but has become the chief cornerstone.
Remember, they are standing in the temple, the beating heart and dead center of the Old Covenant, the place that fills the Jews with great zeal, a place and a thing they believe is almost a magical talisman protecting them. How do we know the God who made heaven and earth is on our side? Because we have the temple. How do we know that God is going to give the entire planet to us, the Jews, to rule? Because we have His throne on earth. Well, what does this Psalm tell us? The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. The new temple is not one made with human hands. It is far more glorious and far greater, it is a temple made on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Paul tells us in Ephesians, and Christ is its chief cornerstone. It is a temple made out of the living stones of the people of God. And in preaching at the temple, Peter has just added thousands of more stones to this glorious building. It is a temple that stands in direct opposition to the current temple, a building that is doomed to be destroyed by Jesus. That is the meaning of what Peter is saying to them.
He tells them that only by the name of Jesus is their salvation. Your temple is not going to save you. Your oral tradition is not going to save you. Those things are going to doom you.
Now the Sanhedrin was amazed. These are just commercial fishermen. Rough men. I always tell people that when they think of Peter, James, and John, and the disciples from Galilee, they should think of the TV series The Deadliest Catch. If it were today, these are guys with dirty, grease-stained Carhartt overalls, calloused hands, and a cigarette perpetually hanging out of their lips. And this is like them going in front of the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court and passionately and articulately telling them to go pound sand. The result is the same as that. They marvel at these men. How can this be? They don’t have the education and decades of specialized training we do, yet they speak with such clarity and boldness.
What do they realize? They had been with Jesus. And they see the man whom they healed. These men were around the temple all the time. They had seen him regularly lying there at the gate. They surely had given him alms, but probably only when there was a crowd around to see them give alms. They knew there was nothing that could be done. This was a genuine miracle and thousands of people saw it. They know that if they execute Peter and John, the entire city will be in an uproar over it because everyone saw it. So all they can do is threaten them to not do this kind of thing anymore. They are in a similar position that they were in with John the Baptist. The people knew he was a prophet and his popularity prevented them from touching him until Herod was tricked into killing him.
So after convening in private they brought Peter and John back and told them you cannot do this anymore. It could have stopped there, Peter and John could have just left well enough alone at that point, but they would not. Peter and John tell them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge, for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” We are going to obey God and not you. Peter and John tell them this to their faces. And the council is powerless to do anything more. All they can do at this point is threaten them because the people are on the apostles’ side.
The Apostles’ Prayer (v. 23-31)
Peter and John returned to the rest of the apostles and told them everything that had happened. They all prayed together, and in their prayer, they quoted Psalm 2. The entire Psalm is about the rulers of the nations conspiring against the Lord and His Christ, but Christ ruling over them with a rod of iron and smashing them to bits. The Sanhedrin that murdered Christ, along with the Edomite Herod and the Roman Pilate conspired together against Jesus. But now He rules over them all from heaven with a rod of iron. And so they ask Him to look upon the threats they have made and to continue to give them boldness to speak His word and to continue to work the signs and wonders to establish the authority of His word.
And they receive an answer to this prayer. Confirmation from heaven. The place where they were was shaken like an earthquake. They were further filled with the Holy Spirit and even more boldness. The conquest of the church would continue to move forward.
Conclusion
The apostles have gone through the same trial as Jesus, but the outcome is different. They meet the exact same opposition as Jesus but have overcome it. The Spirit is in them and moves them with great power and boldness and the church grows massively.
You see the conflict in this passage revealed. This is a spiritual war. The sons of the devil are at war with the sons of God. This is a conflict that continues to this day. But for a number of reasons the church today, the very same church that has carried forward the faith once delivered to the saints, does not view our existence as one of war. We are not in a war against Satan and all his works, we are not in a war to conquer the kingdoms of this world until they become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ. The church, at least implicitly, believes that conflict and boldness against great evil is a bad thing. If you speak with boldness against things that God hates, well that is offensive and you are turning people off from hearing the gospel. Within that mindset, the mission of the church is reduced to a marketing operation. We have this product to sell, and we need people to have nice, warm, happy thoughts when they think about the product we sell. We don’t want people to either intensely love it or hate it. That’s bad for sales.
As a result, boldness goes right out the window. You might have seen the influential evangelical megachurch pastor, Andy Stanley, recently had a big conference about making the church a safe place for LGBTQWXYZ people. What is that about? Well, it is the same mindset. They have identified a demographic that has a high unfavorability rating of evangelical Christianity and want to make that demographic favorable in order to increase sales. It’s an untapped market and shrewd CEOs like Stanley want to corner that market.
You might think this all sounds so cynical but it is the reality in the church today. We have replaced boldness with shameless salesmanship. Is this how the apostles behaved? The Sanhedrin was also an untapped market for the gospel. Peter and John could have instantly won those guys over if they just would have said “actually Jesus never rose from the dead.” But they were compelled by the truth. They were compelled by the Holy Spirit. They were in war. The thought of compromise is something that did not even enter their minds
That same spirit, that same Spirit, is one that must reside in us today. The enemy wants us to compromise. It would be so easy. If you just bow down to me, all these kingdoms and their glory will be yours. Why suffer being despised by those around you, why be hated by people when you can be loved? We must reject all such notions. It is better to be hated by the entire world and loved by God than the other way around. It is better to be filled with the boldness of the Holy Spirit than the mealy-mouthed slipperiness of the religious merchant.
So the charge to you is this, to remember that just like the Apostles you are in a war. You must have the same boldness, the same resolute certainty to do the will of God everywhere in your life. The Christian life is not for the faint of heart, it is a life of struggle, a life of conflict, a life constantly filled with the temptation to give up and give in. But it is a life where the reward for faithful battle and for victory is so far above what our feeble, finite minds can even imagine. Strive forward in boldness and trust in the victory of Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen!
