The Church Enjoyed Peace

Transcription

1 Dartmouth Bible Notes Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of Dartmouth Bible Church Series: Studies in Acts Lesson 14 Scripture: Acts 9:31a Speaker: Rev. Neil C. Damgaard, Th.M., D.Min. Date: January 6 th 2019 The Church Enjoyed Peace Acts 9:31 (ESV) So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied. Acts 9:31 NA28 H μὲν οὖν ἐκκλησία καθʼ ὅλης τῆς Ἰουδαίας καὶ Γαλιλαίας καὶ Σαμαρείας εἶχεν εἰρήνην οἰκοδομουμένη καὶ πορευομένη τῷ φόβῳ τοῦ κυρίου καὶ τῇ παρακλήσει τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος ἐπληθύνετο. Acts 9:31 (NASB) So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria enjoyed peace, being built up; and, going on in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it continued to increase. Acts 9:31 (The Message) Things calmed down after that and the church had smooth sailing for a while. All over the country Judea, Samaria, Galilee the church grew. They were permeated with a deep sense of reverence for God. The Holy Spirit was with them, strengthening them. They prospered wonderfully. Psalm 133 A Song of Ascents. Of David. Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! 2 It is like the precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes! 3 It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the LORD has commanded the blessing, life forevermore. Introduction Churches all over the world are pretty much constantly seeking the latest software download from heaven. To analogize this from the electronic world we, the Church, want the newest operating system --we want the latest version of it! We crave all the plug-ins and all the most recent bug fixes. Big churches, mid-size churches and little churches all want the freshest, most relevant and most biblically sound UPDATES. If some church is running on whale oil, we want electricity. If another church is content with electricity, we want transistors. If another church is running on transistors we want ICs with TTL. If a church is happy with TTL we want very high capacity solid-state. If a church is good with very high capacity solid-state, we want digital.

2 If digital is not enough we want Omnivision sensor monitors, and a tunable frequency-division duplexing RF front-end that combines passive and active self-interference cancellation. 1 Christian church people in America want the latest vision, the latest clever systems for growing their churches, keeping them cool and hip and attracting the largest possible number of attenders. We want crisp leadership development and state-of-the-art children s ministries with built-in guarantees that no children s leader will ever offend anyone. We want body life without calling it body life (since that is a 1970s term). We want low-demand expectations, shared and equalized authority that is decentralized and logic-gated from becoming too invested in any one person. We want the latest. We want the freshest. We want the coolest sounding. We re not going to call it Baptist or Presbyterian because that would be like saying you re still driving an Edsel or a Studebaker. But here is a thing we all want regardless of the kind of church we are: peace. We want peace and peacefulness. The fact that we want peace is predicted by Paul s statement that one of the fruits of the Spirit is peace (Gal. 5:22). One of the qualities that the Holy Spirit of God is working to produce in us is peace. So, we shouldn t be surprised that we like it as we do also love and joy and the other fruits. Last Sunday we flew through a large section in one message, seeking twelve lessons from what Luke wrote about the first days of Saul s conversion. Now we are going to double-down and give a really detailed look at one verse in Acts, 9:31. This verse would be a GOOD VISION STATEMENT admittedly, it is descriptive in Acts and I do not mean to suggest that Luke was implying that these five characteristics are some sort of all-time mandate. That is how we think today perhaps, but not how Luke thought. He was merely reporting, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:3) We need to always keep LUKE in mind as we read either the Gospel of Luke or the Acts of the Apostles. That being said, PEACE is a thing we can appreciate and maybe we should talk about it more. Peace is part of the package sometimes. In Acts 9:31 Luke is telling us that, THE PERSECUTION CEASED BECAUSE THE PERSECUTOR HAD BEEN CONVERTED. For a while there was a cessation of danger. It existed among all the churches for a while. 1 accessed 1/2/19 2

3 A.T. Robertson comments: The obvious meaning is that THE PERSECUTION CEASED BECAUSE THE PERSECUTOR HAD BEEN CONVERTED. The wolf no longer ravined the sheep. It is true also that the effort of Caligula A.D. 39 to set up his image in the temple in Jerusalem for the Jews to worship greatly excited the Jews and gave them troubles of their own (Josephus, Ant. XVIII. 8, 2 9). Had peace (εἰχεν εἰρηνην [eichen eirēnēn]). Imperfect active. Kept on having peace, enjoying peace, because the persecution had ceased. Many of the disciples came back to Jerusalem and the apostles began to make preaching tours out from the city. 2 Is our church living in a time of peace? You bet we are. We may not always have it but we certainly have it now. There is virtually no persecution of Christians in the Town of Dartmouth, in the State of Massachusetts or in the United States of America. This state of peace may not be endless but we can give thanks for it now. And for most of us it has been so our whole lives. Simon Kistemaker notes: Luke indicates that the entire church in Palestine enjoyed peace. He leaves the impression that the attention of those Jews antagonistic toward the Christian church was diverted by other matters. In other words, the religious and political news of that day captured attention, with the result that the church received respite from persecution. 3 The church would not have physical peace for lone but at that moment, for a few weeks or months, they were left alone. They enjoyed that! No one was after them. They could relax. Praise God, we are safe. We are OK. We re good. This word: ἐκκλησία, for church or fellowship or assembly. This is the 6 th of 24 times Luke uses this word in the Book of Acts. And what IS the church? That is a great question. Is it the building? Is it the organization? Is it the list of names that walk through the door at 8:25 or 11:00 am each Sunday? Is it the official list of members, those who have joined the church? Is it all people who are baptized? What is it? In Acts 9 it was a collection of people who gathered in different locations, united in belief that Jesus of Nazareth was alive. This collection of people looked to a loosely organized group of apostles who led and made rulings on questions. They were not educated. They possessed no central offices. They didn t have business cards. But they knew each other and were still shaken (I believe) by the newness of the movement in which they found themselves. By chapter 9 in Luke s story, the church had begun to see itself as represented in several cities. And they found themselves in a time of peace. The basic feature of the Gk. concept of εἰρήνη is that the word does not primarily denote a relationship between several people, 1 or an attitude, 2 but a state, i.e., 2 A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1933), Acts 9:31. 3 Simon J. Kistemaker and William Hendriksen, Exposition of the Acts of the Apostles, vol. 17, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, ),

4 time of peace or state of peace, originally conceived of purely as an interlude in the everlasting state of war. 3 While the Latin pax in the first instance denotes a reciprocal legal relationship between two parties, 4 εἰρήνη is primarily no more than the passionately asserted, emotionally felt and palpable opposite of πόλεμος (war). 4 But there is another kind of peace that is valuable too. That is INTERNAL PEACE, when we feel (as David did and wrote of in Psalm 133:1) Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! We should expect it. We should promote it. We should enjoy it. Luke says that for a while, after Saul was converted to Christ, the church had peace and was being built up. (We will consider that second phrase was being built up next week, Lord willing). But it is also a blessing, if we are paying attention, when a church is AT PEACE with itself. Many of us have felt the lack of this, all too often, in our churches. Certain things diminish peace in a church indeed, we could list a long tally of things that decimate peace: Distrust, betrayal, cheating, lying, misrepresenting, disloyalty, theft, bullying, inequality and prejudice, favoritism, criticism or even outright attacks, undermining, selfishness, self-focus, too much individualism, disagreement, lack of focus and confusion, rebellion, family preference, unfairness, ill-advised church themes, compromising truth, adultery, lack of church discipline, too-quick-change, too many picky or unnecessary rules, abuse of young people, abuse by young people, neglect, too much secretiveness about money, parsimony, waste, too many meetings, front seats given to more the more prominent, music tastes, too much emotion, too much Stoicism, bureaucracy, authoritarianism, too high or inappropriate expectations, and we could go on and on. Jesus wants His people to value peace within His churches. He desires us to value peace so much that we would be willing to work hard to maintain it. 1 For this reason the derivation from the stem AP with ι reduplication, which is advanced by K. Brugmann, ΕΙΡΗΝΗ, Berichte über die Verhandlungen d. Königl. Sächs. Gesellschaft d. Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, 68, 3 (1916), 13 ff., does not seem very probable; v. Fuchs, 167; cf. A. Debrunner, GGA, 178 (1916), 740, n. 3; E. Hermann, DLZ, 38 (1917), ; P. Kretschmer, Glotta, 10 (1920), 238 f.; F. Stähelin in ΑΝΤΙΔΩΡΟΝ (Festschrift für J. Wackernagel [1923/4], 151. Cf. A. Debrunner in M. Ebert s Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte, IV, 2 (1926), Brugmann, 2 f. thinks we have examples of the sense of peaceful nature in Hom. Od., 24, 485 f.: τοὶ δʼ ἀλλήλους φιλεόντων ὡς τὸ πάρος, πλοῦτος δὲ καὶ εἰρήνη ἅλις ἔστω, and also in Hes. Theog., 901 f., where Eirene, Dike and Eunomia are called daughters of Zeus and Themis, but these instances do not give us adequate proof. 3 E. Weiss, Griech. Privatrecht, I (1923), 171, 18; Keil, 7 ff. 4 Fuchs, 40. Nevertheless, the Roman concept of pax is present in Epict. Diss., III, 13, 9, where the εἰρήνη of Caesar means security against robbers and pirates. 4 Werner Foerster, Εἰρήνη, Εἰρηνεύω, Εἰρηνικός, Εἰρηνοποιός, Εἰρηνοποιέω, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964 ),

5 That means surrendering our rights to have our own way sometimes. It means apologizing sometimes. It means asking forgiveness and giving forgiveness. Peace means keeping our heads about the things that are really important and not willing to make every issue a do-or-die issue. He prayed (John 17:11-13) I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. It would be a good goal for 2019, indeed a good thing to fit into our vision for the future, to jealously, almost insistently KEEP THE PEACE. May the Lord, who is a God of complete peace, bless us in this. May we enjoy a season at least, as did the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria and may our sister ekkleisiai enjoy the same. Let s sing We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord And we pray that all unity may one day be restore And they ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love Yes, they ll know we are Christians by our love 5