In Step with the Spirit
Acts 8:1b-40
August 12, 2007
Raised a Baptist, I’ve still got Baptist feet. In other words, you don’t want to see me try to dance. That doesn’t mean I don’t have rhythm; I’m okay there, but dance? No. I’ve never laughed as much in my life, I don’t think, as I did a few years ago when some friends persuaded Karen and myself to join them in taking a cha-cha class. All I remember from the class is “1, 2, cha cha cha, 3, 4, cha cha cha”. It wasn’t pretty.
But the Spirit of God bids us dance in step with Him, to live life in rhythm to His timing, stepping beyond our own comfort zones and dancing a dance wherein He calls the moves. And it’s scary, for those of us left-brained, analytical types who like to reason our way through life. But in Acts 8, the church is light on its feet, responding to circumstances that the Holy Spirit has thrown its way, “dancing” to a tune that most in the church didn’t like—and yet, the Holy Spirit was in the lead, and He used this set of circumstances to further His agenda for the world.
I. The Spirit Leads thru Circumstances
:1b-8
We want to know “why” things happen that seem to be random circumstances. Why did the bridge collapse on the day that it did in Minneapolis? I’m sure that some of the families and friends of the victims are asking that question, why on that day, at that exact moment when their loved one was passing across, why not one minute later, or five minutes earlier, and why that bridge, and all of those questions. Why? And the answer is that we will never know. Period.
Did the people who were being persecuted understand why? No, but this was God using persecution to accomplish His purpose - Sort of cuts across the grain of the idea that when we turn to God, everything will automatically be peaches and cream in our lives, huh? And yet, at the same time, this is a beautiful illustration of God’s promises to work out His will through all the circumstances of our lives if we will trust Him. Kent Hughes says that “following the church through Acts is like following a wounded deer through the forest. Drops of blood mark the trail.” Mao-Tse-Tung launched the most ambitious program in human history to eradicate the Christian church. He was responsible for killing over 70 million people, many of them followers of Christ. Chairman Mao threw out the China Inland Mission missionaries, and the number of believers in China dwindled. Under Mao’s iron fist, there were only 1.5 million believers in China in 1970. Today, there are around 100 million.
They went out “preaching the Word.” Five times in this chapter Luke uses a term that he’s used only once so far in the book of Acts, and it is the verb euangelizo, from which we get our words “evangel”, “evangelize”, and “evangelism”. The “evangel” is means “good news”; to evangelize means “to bring good news”. Luke is introducing the necessity of sharing the good news of Christ with those who are not yet followers of His, and as Stott points out, “there can be no evangelism without an evangel”, and “Christian evangelism presupposes the good news of Jesus Christ.” Let’s not run on by this without pausing for a moment: guarding the message of the gospel, the whole message of the gospel, is critical in the times in which we live. The tendency to water it down, to try to make it more palatable, to leave out the difficult parts, is as powerful today as ever. But we don’t have that prerogative; the methods we use might change, but the message never can.
Something else that we see in this passage is a clear transition, the beginning of the Christian mission to the world. Jesus said, “you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and Samaria, and to the remotest part of the earth.” Samaria was the land of half-breeds, the despised people who followed a quasi-Judaistic cult, as to worship, and who had intermarried in a way that provoked the Jews to hatred (this is why the story of the Good Samaritan is so compelling). Philip is a man who pioneered this outreach, and then further down the passage, we find him conversing openly with the Ethiopian secretary of the treasury. This Philip fellow was quite the pioneer! Philip was just the man for the job. His semi-castoff status as a Hellenist put him in league, if you will, with the Samaritans, who were fully castoffs, and his message, which discounted the Jerusalem temple which the Samaritans hated, in favor of Christ, was one which would have resonated with them as well, for this they had in common with the Jews: they looked forward to a prophet like Moses—which was Philip’s message, that Christ was the fulfillment of this prophecy of Deuteronomy 18:15, 18-19. And when he spoke, the Samaritans responded. Philip was dancing in step with the Spirit, Who orchestrated the circumstances in order to accomplish His purpose.
II. The Spirit Leads in Discernment
:9-25
The events of :14-17 are unusual, and not easy to explain at first glance. Our Catholic friends, and some of our charismatic friends, see in this passage warrant for a 2-stage experience of God’s grace (though they differ greatly with each other as to the significance of this). This approach doesn’t seem consistent with the rest of the Bible. Still, we are left with what to make of this idea that the Samaritans believed and were baptized, but didn’t give evidence of the Holy Spirit. Some suggest that their faith and baptism were spurious, that they didn’t really accept with their hearts Philip’s gospel. Others try to get around this by saying that the Samaritans believed, were baptized with water and with the Holy Spirit, but that what happened when the apostles came was that they began to demonstrate without outward signs the presence of the Spirit. We’re not certain exactly how the Holy Spirit manifested His presence in the lives of the Samaritans upon the laying on of hands by the apostles, but it’s likely that we should assume that the gift of the Spirit was here evidenced by speaking in tongues or some other similar manifestation as took place on the day of Pentecost.
But a prior question, when looking at this, is whether or not this experience with the Samaritans should be taken as the norm for our Christian experience today, and I submit that it is not. Descriptive, rather than prescriptive, is our rule. Whatever it was that happened there in Samaria, we find no clear parallels anywhere else in Scripture that would lead us to believe that this is the norm. What is worth considering is if the Samaritans were granted the gift of the Holy Spirit in a very public way in order to confirm to all concerned this fact, that they were, along with Jews, now the people of God. And this, it would seem, might be the clue that unlocks the mystery. The Samaritans were regarded as half-breeds by the Jews, and in one sense, they represented something of a “halfway house” between Judaism and the Gentiles. Would the Samaritan believers be accepted by the Jews, and vice-versa? It’s a fair question, and I think it altogether likely that this is just why God acted as He did. Peter and John—the same John who suggested to Jesus that fire be called down to destroy a city of Samaria—were sent to Samaria to investigate. This wasn’t normal practice either, for the apostles to run the countryside verifying the authenticity of people’s faith claims. But this wasn’t a normal situation. God acting as He did—and their acting as they did—served to confirm both to the Jews and to the Samaritans that God was doing something new, and bringing into one body all of those from whatever nationality who placed saving faith in Christ. The timing was perfect, because this persecution that scattered these Christ-followers who went about proclaiming the gospel would have the result of bringing many from all over the known earth, Jew and Gentile alike, to faith in Jesus, the Christ. As Michael Green suggests, it would have been a shame, and a crippling factor for the early church, for Samaritans and Jews to find Christ but not to find each other.
But even after we reach a conclusion as to what was happening in this, we face the situation with this man Simon.
• A magician
• An egotist – some suggest that he was claiming that he was almighty God!
• A professing new believer – and yet to know just exactly what might have constituted his faith is beyond our ability to discern. Jesus Himself attached little value to faith that was concerned with miracles alone (John 2:23). When he saw the apostles having such success in seeing people converted to Christ, he saw his own star fading.
• Amazed – he recognized a power greater than his own. And he thought that he could purchase this kind of power, and if so, what a wonderful thing this would be! How he could fill his coffers, extend his legend, make a killing for himself! Contrast this with the attitude of Paul, the apostle, who told the Corinthians that when he had come to them to proclaim the gospel, it wasn’t with eloquence or superior wisdom, but in weakness and a certain amount of fear (I Cor. 2)!
• A zealous guy with a misplaced heart – it appears that his interest was in self-aggrandizement, to use his newfound “faith” in such a way as to build himself up
And the Spirit of God led Peter and John to know what was in Simon’s heart, what was prompting him to act as he did—he had made a profession of faith and followed Christ in baptism, but his heart was not right. Peter basically says, “you and your money can go to hell if you do not repent!” And we’d like to know the end of the story. Did he repent? Did he continue in his deceptive, self-serving ways? Regardless, the narrative ought to remind us of the possibility of false profession. And we should be reminded that we do not manipulate God into doing our bidding; faith is not some good luck charm kind of enterprise. We see folks with plastic Jesuses on their dashboards, crossing themselves before they step into the batter’s box, and the like. We hear some of the so-called “Faith” teachers suggesting that if we do certain things a certain way, God is absolutely bound to do exactly as we wish. No, He doesn’t give up His sovereignty or His throne for anybody, and he’s not at my beck and call as though He were some celestial Step N’ Fetchit.
The Spirit led Peter to discern the intents and motives of Simon’s heart, and to confront him about it for the good, not only of Simon himself, but of the young church.
III. The Spirit Leads Audibly
:26-38
The Holy Spirit spoke directly to Philip twice, once through the agency of an angel, we’re told. Did He speak out loud? Why wouldn’t we come to that conclusion? I believe that this is certainly the way God spoke to Philip. It’s a bit of an odd command; if there was nothing more to it than the text indicates, Philip was called to go, to obey, without having much of a clue just why—though that’s not the first time Scripture records that happening; Abram, the man of faith, was given a similar command, and when he acted in faith, God blessed; same here.
Of this Ethiopian eunuch, we are uncertain of some of the details. Was he a full-fledged proselyte to Judaism? Or was he on the way, considering the Jewish faith, and thus the reason for his pilgrimage? Perhaps the best contemporary term we could bestow on him would be “seeker”, one who was genuinely open to the work of God, not fully understanding everything but willing to allow God to show him. “Seekers” are wonderful people, and those who genuinely seek after God will find Him, according to Christ. Such was the case with this man.
But in reading the Scriptures which he had obtained in Jerusalem, he found himself puzzled by the meaning of a passage from Isaiah 53. Luke, alone among the gospel writers, uses this Isaiah 53 passage to point to Christ’s fulfillment of it in His passion, His suffering being the very thing that Isaiah had predicted of the Anointed Messiah. Jesus applied this passage to Himself (Mark 10:45; 14:24ff). The idea of a suffering Messiah was foreign to Jewish thinking; they had pictured a triumphant, ruling and reigning, conquering Deliverer, and yet Jesus conquered by first dying on a cross, and rising again. Philip hears the man reading aloud (which was a normal practice, “the universal practice in the ancient world” – Cadbury), and running alongside the carriage, he asks, “do you get it?” The answer being “no”, the Ethiopian minister picks up God’s hitchhiker and asks him to explain the passage’s meaning. He didn’t have a clue who Isaiah was writing about—but Philip knew (and we know!).
In this passage today, twice we see baptism as the proper response of faith. What would prompt baptism on the part of this fellow, the Ethiopian eunuch, save faith in the message about Christ that Philip was giving? There is a difference between faith and baptism, but there is a vital linkage nonetheless. In four weeks, we’ll hold a service of baptism. Baptism was the primary identifying outward symbol of Christ-followers in the early church, and it is today in most parts of the world; that we in the West have made such a cleavage between faith and baptism is, to my way of thinking, a mistake. If you are a follower of Jesus, and you’ve not been baptized, I challenge you to consider being baptized in a few weeks. When people put their faith in Christ in Acts, they were baptized!
IV. The Spirit Leads Supernaturally
:39-40
We’re not sure exactly how this happened, except that somehow Philip was taken, whisked away, by the Spirit of the Lord in such a way that he “found himself” many miles away—where he just continued doing what he had been!
Points to Ponder
• The gospel spreads when “ordinary folks” are obedient to the leading of God.
Both personal and mass evangelism both in view here, as is the fact that the same gospel message was effective with the somewhat-gullible Samaritan crowd and the proper, educated Ethiopian official. The Hellenists who were persecuted didn’t leave Jesus in Jerusalem; they took Him where they were exiled! And these weren’t “preachers”, per se; they were just people saved by God’s grace and willing to share their testimonies of Christ.
• God is sovereignly directing the events of our lives; are we following His leading, trusting and obeying Him?
If God is indeed Who we believe He is, the sovereign Lord of the universe, then He is certainly One Who is arranging the events of our lives to enable us opportunities to trust Him and obey Him—are we sensitive to His working, to the opportunities He provides us? Divine appointments await us if we are willing and sensitive to the Lord’s leading. There are no accidents in God’s economy!
• God has spoken clearly to us in His Word—are we following the unmistakable direction that His Word gives us?
Do we follow the more “pedestrian” lead of the Holy Spirit, when He has so clearly spoken to us? God guides us primarily through His Word. Do not put anything else on par with His Word—but take it seriously!
