Acts 5:1-11 | HypocrisySample

Luke doesn’t lie. He shows the early church in all its harsh reality. He doesn’t try to whitewash it. As William Barclay puts it, there’s a stubborn honesty to the Bible. And with it, a certain encouragement. Even in its greatest days the church was a mixture of good and bad. If churches were made up of only perfect people, there would be no church.

Peter asks Ananias how Satan has so filled his heart that it led him to lie – not only to the community of believers, but also to God. Satan and lies. Speaking the latter implies the former. In the Bible they go hand-in hand. Jesus calls lying the language of the devil and Satan the father of lies.

NT Wright writes: “The real, deep-level problem about lying is that it misuses, or abuses, the highest faculty we possess: the gift of expressing in clear speech the reality of who we are, what we think, and how we feel.” He points out that it’s almost opposite the gift of tongues. Rather than speaking the language of God and giving him free reign to speak through us, lying adopts the language of the devil instead. Lying implies we don’t like something about the world (or ourselves or a situation), but would rather project a false reality than do something about it. When we tell the truth, we stand at the intersection of heaven and earth. Lying holds them apart. It twists one so that it will not fit with the other.

It’s ironic that up to this point, the believers were filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking in his name. Not this time. Ananias and Sapphira are filled with something else and take on a different language.

Acts 5 is a story of what fills you. Ask yourself this question from Acts – which fills you? The Spirit, or the devil? And how does the language you speak give evidence to that?