Acts 4:4
The book of Acts opens with a bang as the Holy Spirit promised to the disciples by Jesus came with power. The early church exploded with many new believers and miraculous signs and wonders abounded. This was an exciting time in the church and we love to read it and share in the excitement.
Imagine if this was the end of the story. Acts 3 might read like this:
The disciples took the message of Jesus into all of Jerusalem. Peter and John went to the Temple to pray and as they passed a forty year old man who had been lame since birth and begged by the gate called Beautiful, Peter stopped and announced that in the name of Jesus he was healed. He reached out his hand and raised him to his feet. The man leapt with joy and when the crowd came to see what had happened, Peter preached the good news of Jesus. All there repented and that day joined the church. The Sanhedrin came out and after examining Peter and John were astounded by their wisdom. They repented of their sin for rejecting and killing Jesus and asked how they could be saved.
Soon all of Jerusalem was filled with those who followed Jesus and they took the gospel out to the surrounding area. Everywhere they went they were greeted with great joy as they proclaimed Jesus who had come to save the world.
Peace reigned in the world and no matter where a person traveled in the world, he or she would be greeted by those who loved Jesus and were serving him.
But that is not how the book of Acts goes. As John Stott points out in his commentary, if the Holy Spirit is the main character in chapters 1&2 of Acts, it is Satan who is the main character in chapters 3-6.
The church got off to a glorious start and then almost immediately was attacked. To fully understand the events of Acts, it helps to read along with Acts, the book of Revelation. There are two levels of activity taking place in the early church and indeed throughout all of history. There is the human level of activity and then the supernatural world. Luke in Acts wrote about what was seen in the early church. John wrote about what was happening in the unseen, supernatural world.
In Acts it is humans who oppose the church; in Revelation the antagonism of the devil is revealed and he is depicted as an enormous red dragon, assisted by two grotesque beasts and a lewd prostitute.
Someday Iâll summon up enough courage to preach from the book of Revelation, but for today it is enough to make the point that the battles we see in the church and the attacks we see against the church have both a human and supernatural component.
Paul made this point in Ephesians 6:12 when he wrote:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Opposition to the church has been intense and consistent from the very beginning and has come in the form of violence, moral compromise and false teaching. Let me elaborate on these three forms of opposition.
Violent opposition was present from the start. Peter and John were brought in front of the Sanhedrin twice and warned not to continue to teach in the name of Jesus. The second time they were called before the Sanhedrin, they were flogged before they were released.
Stephen was stoned to death and in that wave of persecution, the Christians spread out into the surrounding area.
King Herod had James, the brother of John, put to death by the sword
Paul was converted and then after some years of preparation began to take the gospel of Jesus out to the Gentiles and there he suffered in town after town, being beaten, stoned and left for dead, flogged and imprisoned.
Nero had Peter and Paul executed in his persecution against the church when he took Christians and used them as human torches to light up his garden
In the year 250, the Roman emperor Decius ordered all citizens of Rome to sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods. Those who did not were imprisoned or executed, among them the bishops of Rome, Antioch and Jerusalem.
Fortunately this lasted for only two years but then was followed by persecution in 253-260 by the Roman emperor Valerian in which church leaders were singled out and ordered to worship the old gods.
A few decades of relative peace and prosperity followed and then in 303, the most violent persecution yet took place. The decrees of 303 ordered the destruction of all church buildings, the confiscation of Christian books, the dismissal of Christians from the government and army, and the imprisonment of the clergy. A further edict in 304, ordered all Christians to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods. In Asia Minor, an entire town and its inhabitants, who were predominantly Christians, were destroyed by soldiers. An estimated 300,000 Christians were killed in this persecution.
Just a few years later, 700,000 Christians were killed in Egypt. Less than a century after that, Attila the Hun wiped out a huge block of Christianity, in the course of it making about 200,000 martyrs.
All of this and more took place in just the first 400 years of the history of the church and proved to be the norm for the church over the next 1600 years.
40,000,000 Christians have been martyred over the course of church history. The current rate is 159,000 Christians martyred per year. This number is rising.
Violent opposition has been intense and consistent from the beginning of the church and onward. But in addition to attacks from the outside, the church has been attacked from within. If you view the church as a castle, it can withstand a lot of attack if it has strong walls and strong defenses. Unfortunately, the churchâs moral weakness has made it an easy target over the years. The walls have crumbled, the water supply has become polluted, and the people from within the church have been so busy fighting each other that they have not had the ability to fight the real battle. Moral compromise has undermined the churchâs ability to stand up to the violent attacks it has received.
What is moral compromise? Just check off a list of the sins of the flesh. Start with envy. In the next chapter of Acts we will read of Ananias and Sapphira who tried to gain favor and esteem from the early body of believers without having to pay the cost of doing so.
Move to greed. Paul fought what he sarcastically called âsuper apostlesâ in the church in Corinth who were making themselves rich from their ministry. This is one more depressing constant in the history of the church with leader after leader fleecing their flock, taking advantage of those who follow them to make themselves rich and powerful. Turn on religious TV and you can see the current version of these religious predators.
Moral compromise has also been evidenced in materialism and indifference. Whenever there has been persecution, the percentage of those who refused to deny their faith has been small. Most Christians have chosen to deny their faith and maintain as comfortable a lifestyle as possible. When given a choice between this life and Jesus, people have chosen this life. The material world has pulled people from Jesus into a casual and convenient Christianity.
Sexual temptation has been one of the greatest weapons in pulling down Christian leaders. Over and over again in church history men who could have been great leaders have had their leadership destroyed by their inability to say no to sexual temptation.
You can look at the Popes, who are part of our own church history, who had mistresses, who accumulated great amounts of wealth and indulged in unrestrained sensuality and follow their stream all the way to the modern day with pastors who set up kingdoms where they are the center of attention, where they accumulate wealth and where they revel in their power. Mainline protestant ministers, Catholic priests, Pentecostal and Evangelical pastors are periodically in the news for having had affairs, taken advantage of young boys and girls, being involved in pornography.
All leaders have clay feet and if efforts are not taken to protect themselves from moral compromise, their feet break and the church suffers from their unfaithfulness. I read this week an Al-Jazeerah opinion article that lists the sins of Western Christian leaders as evidence that the Christian Bible itself is a decadent book. The church is being destroyed from within.
Opposition to the church has come from violence, from moral compromise and from false teaching. Again, right at the beginning there were false teachers, leading the early believers away from the truth.
Paul fought the Judaizers who wanted the gospel of Jesus attached to the long list of Jewish requirements to obey the Law of Moses. Paul fought them, particularly in the book of Galatians, and said that we are saved by grace alone, not by any acts of obedience.
The problem was and is that Christian faith is full of mystery. There is so much room for heresy. How could Jesus be without sin? How could Jesus be both fully human and fully divine? The Gnostics stepped over to the side of divinity and said that everything that was physical was evil. The body was evil, the spirit was good. People are all excited about the Gospel of Judas which came out of the Gnostics. We have known about this gospel for 1800 years. What is new is that an ancient copy was discovered in the early 1970s and is just now being released. The Gnostics were contemporary with Jesus and in this gospel, written a hundred years after Jesus, they claimed that Judas was thanked by Jesus for betraying him because this helped Jesus get rid of his body.
Others chose the side of the humanity of Jesus and denied that he was more than a prophet.
I am not a church historian but I doubt that there is anything new in false teaching today. The same struggles that existed in the early years of the church keep being recirculated in new clothing. The popularity of the DaVinci Code indicates that the false teaching in that book is still popular, seventeen hundred years later.
The Christological heresies focus on whether Jesus was human or divine. Other heresies focus on the mystery of salvation. Our human nature wants to earn and deserve what it gets so over and over again false teachers have pulled their followers into a system of good works that earn our way to salvation.
The health and wealth gospel is a current form of good works. It says that if I have enough faith I can be wealthy and healthy and if I am not either of those, then it is because I am not working hard enough to have faith. Paul fought against this heresy in the church in Corinth.
False teachers have been a constant over the centuries, some leading to world religions, others having a more limited affect.
Throughout the history of the church it has been attacked from without by violence. It has been weakened from within by moral compromise and it has been steered off course by false teaching.
It is because of all this that I say that the greatest miracle in church history is not Jesus walking on water or healing a leper or raising Lazarus from the dead. The greatest miracle in the history of the church is that the church has grown. Given all the opposition, it is miraculous that the church has grown.
This leads us to the text this morning. Peter and John are arrested by the Temple guard, taken away for preaching in the name of Jesus and Luke inserts this detail:
But many who heard the message believed, and the number of men grew to about five thousand.
Just as the violent opposition and moral compromise and false teaching in the early church foreshadowed what was to come, so did this detail Luke inserted. Regardless of what attack was made on the church, the church continued to grow. It began with a hundred or so followers of Jesus and exploded to 3,000 men on the day of Pentecost. At the time Peter preached his sermon in the Temple, the number had grown to 5,000 men. There were now, including men, women and children, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 members in this new church.
The church quickly spread around the Mediterranean Sea and in 100 AD there were perhaps 500,000 believers. In 1000 AD that number had doubled to 1,000,000. Five hundred years later in 1500 AD there was a fivefold increase to 5,000,000 followers of Jesus. Four hundred years later in 1900 there was an eightfold increase to 40,000,000. That number doubled in just fifty years, so that in 1950, the year I was born, there were 80,000,000 believers in Jesus. Thirty years later in 1980 that number had more than tripled to 275,000,000. The growth of the church has been exponential.
Today with a world population of 6,000,000,000 there are 720,000,000 Bible believing Christians. At the time of Jesus there was 1 follower of Jesus for every 250,000 people in the world. Today there is 1 follower of Jesus for every 8 people in the world.
Pentecostals, charismatics and evangelicals are together the fastest growing group of all world religions. They are growing at a rate of 3½ times the growth of the worldâs population.
And given what you and I know about the Pentecostal, Charismatic and Evangelical churches with which we have been associated, given what we know about ourselves, this is astounding, truly a great miracle.
In Matthew 16 Peter made his great confession of faith that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Jesus replied, âBlessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
This is a great truth.
I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not overcome it.
The growth of the church is inevitable. The kingdom of God is expanding daily and moving steadily to the culmination when Jesus will call time, this world will end and we will be brought into judgement and eternal existence. Nothing can stop this forward progression. The gates of Hell cannot overcome it.
Jesus was nailed to the tree and crucified. He was taken to the tomb, the stone was rolled to seal the tomb and Satan thought he had won a great victory but in fact he had suffered his greatest defeat.
Peter denied Jesus but Satan did not prevail. The resurrected Jesus met with Peter and restored him to leadership of the disciples.
Peter and John were arrested and the church must have feared that this was a huge setback. But the church grew. The gates of Hell could not overcome the growth of the church.
Paul was imprisoned and the church thought they had suffered a great loss but Paul wrote letters from prison that have fed the church throughout the centuries. The gates of Hell could not overcome the forward movement of the church.
King Herod tried to please the people by beheading James and then intended to do the same to Peter and arrested him. But Peter was miraculously released from prison. The people of the church were praying for him, despairing that he too would be beheaded. They were in despair but God was at work and the church continued to grow. The gates of Hell could not prevail against it.
Nero raised his hand and had Peter crucified and Paul beheaded. He used Christians as torches to light his garden parties but the church continued to expand and grow. The gates of Hell could not overcome it.
14,000,000 Christians were martyred between 33AD and 1900 and yet the church expanded exponentially. In the 20th century, 26,000,000 Christians, almost twice as many as in all the preceding years of the church, were martyred and the church continues to grow at a rate of 3½ times the growth of the worldâs population. The gates of Hell cannot overcome the church.
Individual Christians and communities of Christians have despaired many, many times in history and thought all was over. The French philosopher Voltaire in the 18th century observed a church so weakened and ineffective that he confidently predicted that Christianity would be extinct within his generation. But then came a second awakening that brought new life into the church. The gates of Hell cannot overcome the church.
It may be that my part of the church may be failing. My church may be declining. My Christian ministry may be failing, but never confuse your faith community or your ministry with the church. The church, the body of Christ, is growing. It will continue to grow. The gates of Hell cannot and never will prevail against it.
The church has from the beginning faced opposition but despite this the church has grown exponentially. The growth of the church is inevitable.
So what will you do?
Peter and John came back after being released from the Sanhedrin and they reported to the community of believers what had happened and then they prayed.
âSovereign Lord,â they said, âyou made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
ââWhy do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth take their stand
and the rulers gather together
against the Lord
and against his Anointed One.â
27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30 Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.â
31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.
Whether you pray or not, the church will grow. Whether you share your faith with someone or not, the church will grow. It does not matter what you do, the church is going to progress. The church is going to grow.
It is up to you to decide if you want to participate with what God is doing or not.
If you take a stand against the growth of the church, beware. You will one day stand before the creator of not just you but of all the universe that is seen and unseen and you will have to answer why you actively tried to block what your creator was building.
If you choose your material comfort and the acclaim of friends over Jesus, you will have to one day answer why it was you chose what slipped through your hands like the sand of the beach for what is substantial, real and everlasting.
If you sit back and say you are too imperfect to be of any help, you will have to answer why it was you did not trust the one who created you to use you with power and effectiveness in the building of the church.
The growth of the church is inevitable and you have the incredible privilege of being part of it. You can be like the church in Acts 4 that considered the threats made against them and chose to respond with confidence and boldness. They knew the promise of Jesus made to the church. They knew the church would grow and they were not going to be intimidated by the threats of the Sanhedrin.
When you look around, you see a land where the gospel of Jesus is not recognized. You see a Western world that seems to be rapidly drifting away from Godly living and morality. You see a world that is increasingly selfish. You see the dominance and oppression of other religions that violently resist the church.
I call you this morning not to be discouraged, not to be dismayed. We see from Lukeâs human perspective what is happening. We do not see from Johnâs Revelation perspective what is taking place in the supernatural world. The church is moving forward. This is not to say that there are not lots of problems and weaknesses in the church, but there have always been problems and weaknesses in the church. The church is moving forward. It is inevitably and irresistibly moving forward.
God continues to work his great miracle of building and growing the church. It is our responsibility not to give up hope. It is our responsibility to continue to pray, continue to study the Bible, continue to share our faith, continue to listen to the will of God for our lives. It is our privilege to work with Jesus for the growth of the church.
We do not give up. We go not give in to despair. We do not retreat into discouragement. We step out with faith to give a good answer for our faith. We step out to love people in the name of Jesus. We move forward with the inevitable progress of the church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
