Acts 4:32 – 5:11 – Ananias and Sapphira (sermon notes, v2)

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Notes of a sermon preached at St Edumunds, Costessey, and again at St Helen’s, Costessey, on 27th October, 2024.

Here is ‘one of the most unnerving episodes in the entire NT.’ (Dunn)

‘Your God is too small.’ (Title of a book by J.B. Philips)

Resident Policeman – waiting to blow the whistle as soon as you step out of line
Emergency Firefighter – useful in an emergency
Slot-Machine – put in a prayer, and receive miracle
Cheerleader – just wants everyone to have a good time

‘The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him – and of her.’…

‘The God I Want’

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This was the intriquing title of a book which was published in 1967.  The editor, James Mitchell, collected a number of essays, written by well-known personalities, which described the sort of God the authors were willing to believe in.

More recently, the Rev. Dr. Clay Smith, the lead pastor of Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter, has written a piece with the same title.  It demonstrates well the gulf between ‘the God I want’ and ‘the God I need’; between a God of human fabrication and the God of divine revelation.…

Theology of Prayer 3 – Parts of Prayer (ii)

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B.M Palmer, Theology of Prayer, ch. 3

Confession and supplication.  These together form the language of guilt, with which we must all approach the Almighty.

Man’s first duty is obedience to the law.  Now, having transgressed the law, his first responsibility is to repent and confess.

In Greek, Latin and English, the word literally means, ‘to speak together’.  In confession, God and man unite in an agreed declaration concering sin.

  1. It begins with a clear perception of the nature of sin. 
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Lk 19:12-26 and ‘editorial fatigue’

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In Jesus, Contradicted, Michael Licona discusses the issue of ‘editorial fatigue’ as a way of explaining some of the differences between the Gospels.

He quotes Mark Goodacre:

When one writer is copying the work of another, changes are sometimes made at the beginning of an account that are not sustained throughout. The writer lapses into docile reproduction of the source. Like continuity errors in film and television, editorial fatigue results in unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail that naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative.

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1 Tim 3:3 – ‘The husband of one wife’

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3:2 ‘The overseer then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, an able teacher, 3:3 not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not contentious, free from the love of money. 3:4 He must manage his own household well and keep his children in control without losing his dignity. 3:5 But if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for the church of God?’…

Apollumi = “destroy”?

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[Usual caveat applies: I am not a Greek scholar, so I draw on the knowledge of those who are]

The question to be explored here is whether the Greek word apollumi implies the complete and permanent destruction (annihilation) of something.

According to Bill Mounce, the basic meaning of this word is ‘to destroy, perish, lose.’

The following examples illustrate the range of meaning:

“to make void” (the wisdom of the wise, 1 Cor 1:19),

“to lose” (one’s reward, Mt 10:42),

“to be lost” (referring to the lost sheep of Israel, Mt 10:6).

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2 Kings 15:27 – ‘Pekah…reigned in Samaria for twenty years’

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15:27 In the fifty-second year of King Azariah’s reign over Judah, Pekah son of Remaliah became king over Israel. He reigned in Samaria for twenty years.

The chronology of Pekah’s reign is fraught with difficulty: there appears not to be room for a 20-year reign.

The difficulty is summed up by Archer (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties):

‘Second Kings 15:27 states that “Pekah son of Remaliah became king over Israel in Samaria—twenty years.” (NASB inserts “and reigned” in italics before “twenty years.”)

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Mt 20:29; Mk 10:46; Lk 18:35 – Approaching, or leaving, Jericho?

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Matthew 20:29-30 As they were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed them.  Two blind men were sitting by the road. When they heard that Jesus was passing by, they shouted, “Have mercy on us, Lord, Son of David!”

Mark 10:46 They came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus the son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the road.

Luke 18:35 As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the road begging.…

Mt 28:19 – “Go and make disciples of all nations”

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Mt 28:19 “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 28:20 teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

What should we make of the fact that, in the original Greek, the word translated ‘go’ is a participle – ‘going’?

Murray Harris (Navigating Tough Texts, p24) comments that the Greek grammar here is often misunderstood.  It is said that there is no command to ‘go’, but only a participle, ‘going’. …

Inerrancy – a mainly American problem?

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Michael Bird, while not disavowing biblical inerrancy, is concerned with how that doctrine has functioned, especially in North America.

‘American evangelicals demand a rigid precision for inerrancy not shared by the global church, they position inerrancy rather than christology as the chief marker of orthodoxy, and they police inerrancy in their networks with a Taliban-esque ferocity.’

Moreover, suggests Bird, when they seek to defend inerrancy what they often end up doing is defending the inerrancy of their own interpretation of Scripture and the hegemony of their own evangelical tribe.…