Pretending to Be Spiritually Mature—Our Sobering Likeness to Ananias and Sapphira

God’s Undeserved Kindness

This is one of the more difficult passages of the Bible. Often people wrestle with the Old Testament and some of the challenges there, like Achan, who took the wedge of gold and the Babylonian robe from Jericho, and then he was taken out and stoned as a result. And people say, How could God do that? We don’t want to believe in this Old Testament God. We want the New Testament God of love and compassion.

And then you bump into this story, and you realize that actually, the New Testament God is the same as the Old Testament God. Right alongside the sign act of healing that we have in Acts 3, which of course appeals back to Isaiah 35 and the promise that when the Messiah comes, the lame would walk and run and leap. The case of Ananias and Sapphira is a negative sign act. In the Bible, most people who are sick don’t get dramatically healed, and most people who sin don’t get dramatically slain. But some do. And the reason for that is to remind us that God is a God of justice and that sin deserves death.

I think one of the reasons we struggle with these passages is because modern people don’t really believe that sin is all that bad. Why would these people get struck down simply because they didn’t come completely clean about the full amount that they’d sold this field for? They sold the field for a certain amount, and they gave a percentage of that to the church, but they pretended that it was the full amount. In the previous chapter, we see Barnabas actually doing that: selling a property and giving the full amount to the apostles. And everybody thought, Yay, Barnabas! What a great guy!

Turning the World Upside Down

Iain M. Duguid

In this practical, winsome guide, Iain Duguid explores the continuing work of Jesus after the ascension in Acts 1–8, encouraging believers today toward gospel-driven, Spirit-filled mission.

But there was nothing in the early church that said you had to sell your property, or if you sold your property that you had to give it all to the apostles. They could have kept all the property, or they could have sold it and given 10 percent to the apostles and kept the rest. That would’ve been perfectly fine. What was wrong with this was that they were pretending to be more spiritual than they really were. They wanted the admiration that would have come if they’d really given everything to the Lord.

When you start looking at it in that light, the sin isn’t so alien to us, is it? When we go to worship and we pretend that our full attention is on what’s going on there but our brains are on what’s going to happen on Monday morning, what’s for lunch, or the football game. We loudly sing, “I surrender all,” but what we really mean is, “I surrender some.” There are certain things I’m going to give to God, but other things, I’m not so sure about that.

When I fail to give all to God (as I do all the time), I merit death; but Christ has come and taken that death for me.

So the reality is we’re a lot like Ananias and Sapphira. The question is not, Why did Ananais and Sapphira get struck down? but, Why don’t we? Why is it that in our churches we don’t need a burial committee to go alongside our missions committee? The hard judgment of God is there to remind us of the truth that Paul states in more abstract terms in Romans 6: the wages of sin is death. Well, welcome to an object lesson of that.

Just as the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection means life and health to the lame man in Acts 3, so it also means death for Ananias and Sapphira. These are sobering passages that remind us that our sin is not a trivial thing.

When I fail to give all to God (as I do all the time), I merit death; but—and this is the great news of the gospel—Christ has come and taken that death for me undeservedly, out of his grace, and completely not out of anything I’ve merited or deserved. Christ took onto himself the fullness of the death that I deserved so that out of God’s grace and mercy I might not be Ananias and Sapphira. Again, what distinguishes me from them is not their sin. I sin like that too. It’s that God, in his grace and mercy, has protected me from the death that I deserve and counted me among his children. Praise God for that!

Iain Duguid is the author of Turning the World Upside Down: Lessons for the Church from Acts 1–8.

Iain M. Duguid (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has planted churches in England, California, and Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous commentaries and articles.

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