Day 24 — Sapphira Falls (Acts 5:7-11) | May 19

Let's pick up the story in Acts five, seven through eleven. About three hours later his wife came, not knowing what had happened, but And tell me, Peter asked her, did you sell the land for this price? Yes, she said, for that price. Peter said to her, Why did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out. And instantly she dropped dead at his feet.

When the young men came in, they found her dead, carried her out, and buried her beside her husband. Then great fear came upon the whole church and on all those who heard these things. And boy the young men were getting a workout, weren't they? Sapphira walks into this gathering unaware and her husband's already in the ground.

She doesn't even know that. She almost certainly expects to be welcomed in as a generous partner in this new community she helped give to. And instead Peter asks her a very direct question. He says, Did you sell the land for this price? Again, I think he's giving her a chance to tell the truth. This moment right here is the off-ramp for Sapphira. Just a simple admission. No, we kept some of the money back for ourselves.

So I I don't believe it was a trap. I think it was just an opportunity for her to be honest. But Sapphira had already made her choice before she even walked into the room. She and Ananias had agreed on their story together. The the phrase Peter uses is is revealing. He says, Why did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Their deception was coordinated, they had rehearsed it, they committed to it, and now sh now she was seeing it through to the end.

And so she looked Peter in the eye and she lied. She said, Yeah, that was that was it. And instantly she's dead. Uh Luke, the author, doesn't linger on the drama of the moment. He just says it plainly and moves on with the story. And and again, these poor young men who had just returned from burying Ananias found her her dead too and carried her out to bury her beside her husband.

And Luke gives us this summary of this moment. He said, Great fear came on the whole church and on all who heard these things.

So the their first instinct in this community was now fear. And and it's easy for us to spiritualize a word like that into something like reverence or awe, but hi it was it was fear. The kind that recalibrates you, the kind of fear that makes you think twice about what you say and what you claim before God or other believers. And these early Christians had just watched two people die within hours of each other.

Because they tried to deceive the Holy Spirit. So whatever casual assumptions anyone had about what church life was going to be like or the Christian life was going to be, you know, low stakes, all of those assumptions were gone. And and and again, I realize some people will find this passage troubling. Like, does God still act this way? Is this what we should expect when you know when we're less than fully truthful about our spiritual life?

So remember that the church is brand new. The spirit had just been poured out. The integrity of the whole movement is being established in real time right here. And God's making clear, He's protecting kind of from the very beginning. Making clear that his church is going to be built on authenticity and not performance. And and what strikes me most in this story is how much uh Sapphira's fate was sealed by a prior agreement.

that she made before the moment. She and Ann and I had made a private decision to deceive this community together. It was premeditated. So by the time Peter asks the question, she's already committed that the the lie didn't start in this moment. It started in their own home. In a conversation between two people, maybe yesterday or the day before, who decided that appearances were worth protecting more than integrity.

And again, that's where deception almost always starts, privately, in the small decisions we make. When no one's watching We we when we premeditate what we'll say and what we'll leave out and what image we're trying to project. And by the time it goes public, we're already in too deep to uh to feel like we can turn around. And so the fear then that fell on the church.

It wasn't meant to drive people away. Lu Luke tells us that people kept coming to faith. Like their fear ha had a purifying effect. It reminded everyone in that community that they were part of something real, something the spirit was actually inhabiting. Like you can't fake your way through a community where the living God is present. God sees through the version of of you and the the version that you curate for other people. And I I think that's the most clarifying truth in this passage.

And once we really believe it. The energy that we spend on managing appearances starts to feel like exactly the kind of weight we were never meant to carry. So what might a step of ordinary obedience look like today? Let me give you a takeaway. Here's a sobering meditation. Sapphira had a chance to tell the truth. Peter asked her a direct question she should have and could have confessed.

But she chose to lie instead. And so I I wonder how many times we get chances like that. Like we get a moment where we could come clean, a moment where we could admit the truth, drop the pretense. But instead we double down. And so today, would you ask God to show you if there's an area where you're being given a chance to be honest? and you're choosing to maintain the facade instead. Maybe it's um uh maybe it's at work.

Maybe you're taking credit for something at work that you didn't fully do. There's a chance to get out of it. Or maybe it's in your spiritual life. Like you're letting people think you're closer to God than you actually are. God's giving you a little bit of a