Friday Acts 5:1-11

God strikes two dead for lying.

Click here for an online Bible. Acts 5:1-11

We just saw the example of Barnabas selling a piece of property and giving the money to the church. Barnabas was a godly man. Now we see another example of people selling land. But in this case, there is a very different outcome.

Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of land and donated some of the money to the church. They were not required to sell the land. Peter makes it clear that the land was theirs. He also makes it clear that the money from the sale was theirs. The problem was that they pretended to donate all of the money from the sale to the church. Their concern was appearances. They wanted to appear to be more generous than they really were. We can fool other people (not as much as we think), but we cannot fool God. The Holy Spirit revealed to Peter that they were lying.

Peter challenged Ananias about the deception. We don’t know what would have happened if Ananias had confessed to the lie and repented. I suspect that there would have been some kind of consequences but there would also have been reconciliation. Ananias continued the lie. Peter pronounced judgment and the Holy Spirit struck Ananias dead.

Later, Sapphira arrived. Peter confronted here about the deception. She maintained the lie and the Holy Spirit killed her too.

Is this too severe? Absolutely not. The judgment was from God and enacted by God. He is perfect so this response is perfect. The problem is not that God is too severe. The problem is that we too often have a soft view of sin. After all, all that Ananias and Saffhira did was to desire honor for themselves rather than honor for God. Woops, I guess maybe that is pretty serious.

But are we any better? Do we pretend to be more holy than we really are? How was your quiet time today? Oh, it was great (both minutes)… (last week). I’m just as bad as anybody.