Acts 12:19b-24
When I think about the book of Acts I think about the excitement of the church as it grew from just a hundred or so followers of Jesus, to 3,000 converted at Pentecost, to the expansion of the church into Samaria and then into the Gentile world. I think about Acts as the inevitable growth of the church. Acts is a book packed full of excitement and our view of the early believers is that they moved from day to day thrilled at all the wonderful things happening to them.
In all the years of my Christian life I have heard people wish they could be part of a church like the early church in Acts. We love the excitement of the church as it experienced the power of God and grew.
We view our church today differently. While we hear reports of the church moving into new areas, this is not happening at the rate we wish it was. Where the church has made new inroads in the past several decades, we see it struggling with its attachment to folklore and superstition. Where the church has existed for centuries, we see it weakening in its influence. We don’t see very much excitement; we do see lots of reason for discouragement.
Newsweek, a national magazine in the US, had an issue this past April titled: The Decline and Fall of Christian America, which talked about the decreasing influence Christianity seems to have on the US.
It is not that Christians are a minority group in the US. 76% of Americans identify themselves as Christians and 1/3 say they are born-again Christians. The US is still a very religious culture, but if that is so, why does American culture so weakly reflect Christian values?
In the US, there are now six states that recognize gay marriages and the courts and politicians are busy pushing this agenda across the whole of the country. US culture seems to reflect the lusts and desires of this material world much more than the values of the Kingdom of God. Where is the church?
How can South Africa with an 80% Christian population elect Jacob Zuma as president when he had numerous corruption charges filed against him and when he raped the daughter of a friend?
In so many countries with a significant Christian population, the church seems unable to influence the conduct of its leaders or to elect leaders who are not corrupt.
Within the church, pastors and other Christian leaders are exposed for having moral breakdowns: sexual or financial.
The church is attacked from without and corrupt from within. We keep thinking we should be making progress but we seem to be moving backwards.
And so we can be discouraged. Despair, rather than hope, can be the emotion of the church.
I want to suggest this morning that this too is the experience of the believers in the book of Acts. There were miracles and wonders and rapid growth of the church in the times of the book of Acts but there were also many times when the people living in the times of the book of Acts were discouraged and worried and anxious about the future of the church.
The early church experienced rapid growth at Pentecost and in the days that followed, the church experienced growth pains and the disciples wisely chose seven men from among the Greek-speaking Jews to handle the daily details of the community of the followers of Jesus. And then in Acts 6:7 we read this:
So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.
Six chapters later at the end of Acts 12, in the reading for today, we read:
But the word of God continued to increase and spread.
That is how we view Acts, the church growing, increasing, spreading and that is what we want for our church today. But look at the events in between these two statements: Stephen was seized, put on trial and stoned to death; the church was persecuted and scattered with Saul at the front of the persecution; Samaritans were brought into the family of God when Phillip, Peter and John brought the Gospel of Jesus and the baptism of the Holy Spirit; Saul was converted on the road to Damascus; the Gospel came to the Gentiles when Peter went to the home of Cornelius and preached the good news; King Herod rose up and had James, the brother of John, beheaded; then Peter was arrested and while awaiting his trial and death, he was miraculously released from prison; and then finally at the end of chapter 12, Herod was struck down.
There is some wonderful news in the events between the increase and spread of the church in Acts 6:7 and the increase and spread of the church in Acts 12:24, but don’t pass over too quickly the other events between these two statements.
What did the early believers think about the future of the church when Stephen was stoned to death? How confident were they that the church would continue to grow when Saul came with the Temple guard to seize people from their homes and drag them off to jail? Were they filled with excitement when they fled in the middle of the night to escape the persecution in Jerusalem? Did they see this as good news because now the Gospel of Jesus would be spread? I don’t think so. That was a later realization. But in the moment, there was undoubtedly a lot of fear and despair.
Then about eleven years into the life of the early church King Herod stepped in. (There are three Herods in the Biblical account. This was Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great who was king when Jesus was born.) Herod found it politically helpful to take a stand against the followers of Jesus so he had James, the brother of John, arrested and beheaded.
Acts 12:1
It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. 2 He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. 3 When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also.
The church had faced the persecution of the Jewish rulers and now they were being hit by the Roman authorities.
James, the first of the inner circle of disciples of Jesus to die, was killed and now Peter who Jesus appointed to lead the followers was in prison and would soon join James on the list of martyred disciples.
How excited were the followers of Jesus now? How confident were they that the church would grow and grow and keep on growing?
We look around today and see the waning influence of the church on society. We see the corruption and scandals within the church. We see orthodox Christian theology being diluted by the leaders of our Christian denominations. We see our churches drifting with the culture away from Biblical truth.
Bus as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
In the very beginning the church faced obstacles and that has not changed in the two thousand years of church history since then.
But God is highly skilled in overcoming obstacles.
Jesus spent three years training twelve men to lead the church after he left and then, when he needed them, Peter denied knowing him three times and the rest fled. These men he had trained to be leaders hid in a room with a locked door.
How to make these men bold leaders who would speak with his authority and act with his power, that was the obstacle. And then the Holy Spirit came with power on these disciples at Pentecost and the church erupted.
The church was growing but the understanding was that this good news was for the Jews and only the Jews. Centuries old discrimination against the Samaritans was an obstacle to spreading the good news about Jesus beyond Jerusalem. But then God used the persecution against the church to have Phillip and others preach to the Samaritans and when Peter and John came to investigate there was a second Pentecost and the Samaritans were filled with the Holy Spirit.
If there was an obstacle of discrimination against the Samaritans, there was a much higher obstacle of racism against the Gentiles, non-Jews. So God again worked through Peter with a vision to lead Peter to the home of Cornelius where there was a third Pentecost and Cornelius and his household were filled with the Holy Spirit.
God is an excellent overcomer of obstacles.
As the number of the followers of Jesus grew, opposition arose from the Jews in Jerusalem and they began to be persecuted. Stephen was seized, put on trial and stoned to death. Saul led the charge against the followers of Jesus, putting them in jail.
Look at how creatively and masterfully God dealt with this obstacle. When Saul was on his way to Damascus to persecute the followers of Jesus in that city, God met with Saul in a dramatic encounter and with one mighty revelation took away the persecutor of the early church and gave to the church a new leader who would evangelize the Gentile world.
Then Herod stepped in, one more obstacle. Now the church had to deal with this new threat. What could they do against the power of the Roman government and those appointed by the Romans to lead the Jews?
Herod thought he could do anything. He thought he had all power and then God struck him down.
God has a plan and he will not be stopped. He overcomes all obstacles.
In John Stott’s commentary on Acts he writes about the 12th chapter of Acts:
At the beginning of the chapter Herod is on the rampage – arresting and persecuting church leaders; at the end he is himself struck down and dies. The chapter opens with James dead, Peter in prison, and Herod triumphing; it closes with Herod dead, Peter free, and the word of God triumphing. Such is the power of God to overthrow hostile human plans and to establish his own in their place.
What we see in the book of Acts we see throughout church history. There have been many times when the church despaired but God has, time after time, overcome the obstacles to the growth of the church and the church has expanded, renewed its influence on the culture around it, shone once again as a beacon on a hill.
Roman persecution of Christians began with Nero when Peter and Paul were martyred but the most severe wave of Roman persecution came in 303 AD under the rule of Diocletian, the Roman Caesar. He decided to destroy both the Christians and the book they used for their faith and sent out edicts to imprison and kill the Christians and burn their Bibles. His orders were carried out and he thought he was successful.
He thought he had destroyed the Christian faith and their Bibles and over a burned and destroyed Bible, he erected a Roman column and placed this caption on it: “Extincto Nomine Christianorum.” “Extinct is the name of Christian.”
If you are a student of Roman history you know who followed Diocletian. Just ten years later in 312 AD Constantine removed the insignia of the pagans from the shields of his Roman soldiers and placed on their shields a cross. And underneath the cross these words: “In Hoc Signo Vinces,” “In this sign, conquer.”
Many have tried to destroy the church but as Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 40:8)
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God stands forever.
In the middle of the 18th century, the French atheistic philosopher Voltaire predicted that in a hundred years, Christianity would be extinct and the only Bibles would be found in museums. A hundred years later the French Bible Society was located in his house.
When Voltaire looked around there was good reason to make his prediction. Attendance in churches was declining. The influence of the church on society was minimal. The great awakening in Europe and the United States was now thirty years old.
Voltaire died in 1779 and eleven years later came the Second Great Awakening that once again breathed new life into the church.
Voltaire’s Scottish contemporary, the philosopher David Hume, said, “I see the twilight of Christianity.”
His eyesight was not as good as he thought; what he thought was a sunset was actually a sunrise.
After listening to a visitor ranting against God, the Bible, the church and Christian doctrine for an hour while he worked on the man’s wagon, the blacksmith ceased his hammering, looked up, and quietly observed, “You know, this old anvil has worn out many a hammer.”
The persistent, constant, creative, powerful, life-giving work of God has overcome obstacle after obstacle over the years and the kingdom of God has added to its numbers in generation after generation.
There is no room for despair in the Christian life. On a human level the church expands and declines in its influence on culture but the kingdom of God steadily grows and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.
What are some current sources of discouragement?
Pope Benedict XVI recently visited Jerusalem. In addition to speaking for peace and unity, part of the pope’s agenda was to deal with the declining numbers of Christians in Jerusalem.
In 1946, two years before the State of Israel was established, the Christian community of Jerusalem numbered some 31,000, or 20% of the population. Today, Christians account for just 2% of the capital’s population, or some 14,000 people, including monks and clergymen from abroad.
Dr. Amnon Ramon of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the author of extensive studies on the Christian communities in Israel, spoke about this concern. “With this visit, the pope wants to awaken the Catholic world to the difficult situation of the Christian Arab communities. The most frightening scenario for the pontiff and the Christians here would be to witness the holy sites becoming museums due to the lack of the faithful using them – as has happened, for example, in Turkey.”
Sami Barsoum, the mukhtar of Jerusalem’s Syrian Orthodox community, echoed this sentiment. “Our future is so gloomy that it is not inconceivable that in the near future tourists will come here and look for Christians to tell them about our history here, and they will not find even one to do so! The tourists will find only stones but no Christians living here.”
Personally, I am not so concerned with the preservation of churches built where people think Jesus did something. But I do want to see the church flourish in the place where it was born.
Christians in Jerusalem and the West Bank are persecuted by the Israelis and by the Muslims. With this double dose of persecution they have been immigrating to other countries in large numbers and today they are only 1.3% of the Palestinian population.
Is it possible to see the twilight of Christianity in Palestine?
It depends on where you focus your eyes.
I received an email with a youtube link a few weeks ago titled Muslim Demographics.
There have been over eight and a half million hits on this video meaning that it has been watched over 8,500,000 times. I have checked it this last week and 200,000 more hits were recorded. This is a video that has gone viral, meaning it is spreading rapidly.
The clip begins with ominous music. These words make their way through the darkness of the screen.
The world is changing.
The global culture our children inherit
will be vastly different than it is today.
You are about to witness a report
on the world’s changing demographics.
And then it goes into statistics.
In order for a culture to maintain itself for 25 years, there must be a fertility rate of 2.11 children per family. A fertility rate of 1.9 has historically never been reversed. A fertility rate of 1.3 is impossible to reverse.
Then it goes on to show the fertility rate for European countries. France 1.8 England 1.6 Greece 1.3 Germany 1.3 Holland 1.2 and Spain 1.1. In the 31 countries of the European Union, the average fertility rate is 1.32, far below the 2.11 children per family required to sustain the culture.
Then the video says:
But the population of Europe is not declining because of immigration.
And then the music becomes threatening.
Islamic immigration.
The video goes on to say that while the birthrate in France is 1.6, for Muslims it is 8.1 and in 39 years France will be an Islamic republic.
In the Netherlands 50% of children born are Muslims, the same in Belgium.
It goes on to say that Germany will be a Muslim state by 2050. It moves to North American and presents slightly less threatening statistics but the overall conclusion is that Muslims are taking over the west because of their high fertility rate.
The video clip ends with a warning, a call to action, to evangelize – or else.
I have problems with this video on multiple levels.
First, it presents Muslim immigration as a grave threat. It paints the picture of Muslims as evil people who are going to walk in our front door and take over our lives.
Muslims are not evil and we know this first hand. All of us have Muslim friends and neighbors. My youngest sister married a Muslim from Somalia and he is a good man. Muslims are not evil and not a threat.
It is true that cultures get nervous when new communities enter. When the Irish and Italians immigrated to the US in large numbers, the culture was threatened. The established culture thought they were going to take over. Cultures always resist change and they resist those who bring the change.
But the Irish and Italians assimilated into American culture and enriched it with their own foods and traditions. Muslims who immigrate into Europe assimilate into the secular culture of Europe. In fact, we should be glad that people who believe in God are moving as an influence into secular Europe. Wait and see what God does in the coming years.
My second problem is that this video is a propaganda piece and like much of propaganda it is not concerned with accuracy. The unidentified person who made this video played fast and loose with these numbers to make his point. The 8.1 fertility rate of Muslims, for one example, is not an accurate figure. It is used to scare and create fear.
My third problem with the video is that it encourages fear and fear is a terrible motivator. Fear does not often motivate positive behavior; fear encourages negative behavior. It tends to encourage people to keep Muslims living in their community at a distance and treat them with distrust. Rather than welcome Muslims into the neighborhood, share hospitality and encourage relationships, it creates enmity.
But my biggest problem with this video is that it presents a world in which God is impotent to act.
The maker of this video assumes there will be no changes in the way people view God. This is the same mistake made by Voltaire and David Hume who predicted the extinction of Christianity on the basis of what they observed.
The renewing power of God is so tremendous that nothing can stand in its way as God brings life out of death in what can seem dark and dire circumstances.
We sang in the hymn this morning:
God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year
God, pre-existing God, God who created all we see and know, this God set into motion his plan for salvation. At great cost: the birth, life and death of Jesus, God opened up the door of salvation for us and nothing, absolutely nothing will stand in the way.
In each generation God is at work, using the tools at his disposal in that generation: the institutions, the churches, the politics and wars and natural disasters and epidemics, all that is at hand God uses to bring new members into his kingdom.
Like in the book of Acts, sometimes it will be exciting and we will feel energized as we see God at work. Other times, also like in the book of Acts, we will be full of fear and discouragement as we see the theology of the church drifting away with the culture, the persecution of the church or some other threat.
But despair should never be our Christian response.
In John’s Revelation the picture is painted of the kings of the world uniting with the Antichrist in a final battle against God. This is a picture of the greatest conflict in the history of the church and listen to what John wrote: (Revelation 17:14)
They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them
because he is Lord of lords and King of kings-
and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.
The Lamb will overcome them. As it has been, so will it ever be: God is the great overcomer of obstacles.
You need to know this morning that no matter what discouragement you face, no matter how dismal the future of the church seems to you in the moment, God is overcoming the obstacles to the growth of his kingdom. God is steadily moving forward, saving lives, protecting his children, bringing them safely into his kingdom.
When you are discouraged or moved to despair, focus your eyes on Jesus who is the great overcomer.
Despite what you see, despite what the media says, God is building his kingdom and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.
