Acts 5:4 indicates that selling possessions and distributing them to others was not considered by the apostles a practice of legality. The believers were not required to have all things common. That was something that should have been done willingly. If Ananias and Sapphira did not want to sell their property, they were not required to do so. Furthermore, the money from the sale was in their own authority. It would not have been sinful for them to keep their property or to keep the proceeds from the sale of the property. Their sin consisted in lying to the Holy Spirit. Their intention was to cheat the church and to get a name for themselves by lying. This was a gross sin that offended the indwelling Spirit. Their sin was a willing cooperation with Satan, the evil resident within them.
In 5:3 Peter told Ananias that he lied to the Holy Spirit. Then at the end of verse 4 Peter said to him, “You did not lie to men, but to God.” This proves that the Holy Spirit in verse 3 is God.
Later, when Peter was speaking to Sapphira, he said to her, “Why was it agreed together by you to test the Spirit of the Lord?” (v. 9). The Holy Spirit in verse 3, God in verse 4, and the Lord in verse 9 are all one, especially in the experience of the believers.
We should not think that the Spirit to whom Ananias and Sapphira lied was the Spirit in the heavens, the Spirit outside them. They did not lie merely to an objective Spirit; they lied to the very Spirit who was within them. If the Holy Spirit had not been within them, Peter would not have said that they had lied to the Holy Spirit. Both Satan and the Holy Spirit resided in Ananias and Sapphira at the same time.
The fact that Ananias and Sapphira suffered the punishment of physical death for lying to the Holy Spirit does not mean that they will suffer eternal perdition. Although Ananias and Sapphira were saved, they committed a sin unto death (1 John 5:16-17). In God’s governmental dealing, some of His children may be destined to physical death in this age due to a certain sin. This was the situation of Ananias and Sapphira, who were punished with physical death because of their lying to the Holy Spirit. Their case teaches us to be extremely careful about ambition and dishonesty in the church life.
Ananias and Sapphira pretended to be absolute for the Lord (vv. 3b-4a, 8). They pretended to give everything to the church. This was their hypocrisy, which was due to their ambition to be somebody and to have a name for vainglory.
The second failure in the churches was the failure of being overcome by racial difference. Acts 6:1 says, “In these days, when the disciples were multiplying, there was a murmuring of the Hellenists against the Hebrews, because their widows were overlooked in the daily dispensing.” The Hellenists were Jews who spoke Greek, and the Hebrews were Jews who spoke Hebrew. At the very beginning of the practice of the church life, there was a failure that seemed to be caused by different languages. Apparently the problem in the church at Jerusalem was a problem of language related to those who spoke Hebrew and those who spoke Greek. Actually, this was a problem not mainly of language but of race.
We know from Acts 2 that Jews had come from their dispersion to Jerusalem to keep the feast of Pentecost. Those who had been dispersed among other races gradually came to speak the languages of those races. Thus, when they came to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Pentecost, they were not able to speak Hebrew but spoke their native languages. In particular, the Hellenists spoke Greek. The difference of language became a problem. Actually, the source of the trouble was not language but race. If all of mankind were of one race, there would probably be just one language. Different languages are the result of different races. According to Genesis 11, the source of this problem was Babel.
Since the time of Babel, mankind has been divided into different races that have formed their own nations and kingdoms. This division is the basic problem of the human race. According to Ephesians 2, the Lord Jesus on the cross abolished all the ordinances among the races. Nevertheless, the church at Jerusalem suffered from racial differences.
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