SECTION TWO: MOVEMENT 2 The Gospel and Samaria s Unorthodox Worship (8:4-25)

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1 SECTION TWO: MOVEMENT 2 The Gospel and Samaria s Unorthodox Worship (8:4-25) The second story in Section Two is Philip s evangelization of Samaria; and the connection of thought between this second story and the first is not far to seek. Like the Jews, the Samaritans too had a temple or at least they had had, until the Jewish high priest John Hyrcanus destroyed it about 128 BC (some say 108 BC). Unlike the Jews temple, theirs had been built not in Jerusalem, but on Mount Gerizim; and though by now it no longer existed, the Samaritans still worshiped at the spot where their temple had once stood. For them, this location was no accident of geography or matter of indifference. It had been chosen with deliberate care, and was maintained with vigorous ethnic and religious pride (see Jn. 4:20). As with the Jews, so with the Samaritans, the coming of the Holy Spirit would make possible an advance to a higher form of worship than anything that they had known before. Their temple, like that of the Jews, had been a material temple built of stone, located in its fixed position on Mount Gerizim. Now the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit would transform every Samaritan who received Him into a spiritual temple. Geographical location would no longer be significant, as our Lord had once remarked to a Samaritan woman: Believe Me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem (Jn. 4:21). That time had now come; and through Philip s preaching of the gospel the Samaritans were to be offered that spring of living water (Jn. 4:14), that gift of the Holy Spirit through faith in the Lord Jesus, which would enable them to worship God with the ideal kind of worship which alone can fully satisfy God s heart. A time is coming, our Lord had said to the

2 126 CHRISTIANITY S WORSHIP & WITNESS (6:8-9:31) Samaritan woman, and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth (Jn. 4:23-24). But the Samaritans had a special difficulty. The Jews for their part found it difficult enough to change from their traditional form of worship, good and God-given as it was, to that higher form of worship now made possible through Christ. Indeed many Jews never brought themselves to make the change. Many Samaritans, by contrast, proved ready and eager to make the change from their traditional way of worship to the new. But unfortunately in their traditional form of worship there was an error so basic and so serious that even when they believed on the Lord Jesus and were baptized in His name, they were not allowed or enabled for a while to make the change. The Holy Spirit without whom they would never know the Father as He really is, nor ever be able to worship Him in spirit and in truth, was temporarily withheld from them, until they were brought face to face with their past error, repented of it, and knowingly forsook it (8:14-17). Then what was that error? And why was it so serious? To find out, we must delve into their history. THE BACKGROUND TO PHILIP S EVANGELIZATION OF SAMARIA If, as the last story showed us, respect for the temple at Jerusalem was, for the majority of Jews, an important expression of orthodoxy, the Samaritans were very unorthodox indeed. They had no respect for the temple in Jerusalem whatsoever. That was not because they were pagans. They weren t. They believed in the same one true God as the Jews did, and they accepted the five books of the Pentateuch as God s inspired Word. They believed that one day God would send His Messiah into the world as the Saviour of the world. 11 They believed also in the Day of Judgment. And they religiously offered the sacrifices required by the law of Moses. But they repudiated Jerusalem and its temple. It was not that they thought like the people at Qumran. The latter, you remember, felt that the Jerusalem temple in and of itself was good; it was only that the prevailing abuses and irregularities in its priesthood and festivals made it impossible for them to take part in its services. The Samaritans, by contrast, did not believe in the Jerusalem temple at all. Nor did they think like Stephen that earthly temples, levitical priesthood, and animal sacrifices were obsolete and about to pass away. It is true that by the time Philip took the gospel to them they no longer had a temple of their own. But they still had a high priest, they still offered animal sacrifices at the place where their temple had been; and they had no intention of giving these things up. 12 It wasn t even that they objected to the form of the Jerusalem temple or

3 SAMARIA S UNORTHODOX WORSHIP (8:4-25) 127 of its high priesthood. 13 No, the position of the Samaritans was this. They accepted, as the Jews did, that Moses directive in Deuteronomy 12:4-18 laid it down that there should be only one center at any one time in the whole of the Promised Land where sacrifices might legitimately be offered. They just did not believe that the temple in Jerusalem was that God-ordained center. According to them, their Mount Gerizim was the center. As the Samaritan woman remarked to Christ: Our fathers worshiped on this mountain [i.e. Gerizim], but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem (Jn. 4:20). This disagreement went back to the time of the return from the Exile, when the Samaritans worship was heavily mixed with idolatry, and the Jews had for that reason refused to allow the Samaritans to participate in the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem. Later the Samaritans renounced their idolatry; but the Jews still did not accept them, because of their insistence on having their own temple on Mount Gerizim. The basic disagreement between Jews and Samaritans became a chronic, festering sore, and by the time of our Lord it had often broken out into violence of one sort or another. The Jews for their part, as we have already observed, had destroyed the Samaritans temple; and the Samaritans had retaliated in kind. Strack and Billerbeck instance the following story: R. Ishmael b. Jose was going up to Jerusalem to pray. He was walking past a plane tree (by Gerizim) where a Samaritan found him. He said to him, Where are you going? He answered, I am going to Jerusalem to pray. The former said, Would it not be better for you to pray in this blessed mountain rather than in that dunghill? 14 Somewhere between AD 6 and 9 some Samaritans went to Jerusalem at Passover time and scattered bones in the temple an act calculated to spread the maximum ritual pollution (see Num. 19) in the Jews most sacred place. Again, when Christ and His disciples attempted to put up for the night in a Samaritan village, the people of the village would not welcome Him, because He was heading for Jerusalem which so angered James and John that they were for calling down fire from heaven on them (Lk. 9:51-56). And in AD 52, the Samaritans actually killed some Jewish pilgrims at En-gannim, and of course the Jews retaliated. The modern reaction to such religious strife is disgust and impatience, the more so since the history of Christendom contains worse examples of it than the history of the Jewish-Samaritan dispute. People weary of such rancor and violence in the name of religion. They cry a plague on both houses. They urge that true spirituality is concerned with loving one another and that the doctrinal questions that lie at the bottom of such disputes are not worth arguing about.

4 128 CHRISTIANITY S WORSHIP & WITNESS (6:8-9:31) But that was not Christ s attitude towards such differences. Time and again, in action and in teaching, He went out of His way to dissociate Himself from the rancorous hatred and unregenerate hostility of the Jews towards the Samaritans, and positively to express the love of God towards them (Lk. 10:30-37; 17:11-19; Jn. 4). But with compassionate, firm faithfulness, He did not hesitate to bring home to the Samaritans the falsity of their position. When the Samaritan woman raised the agelong controversy, He replied: You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know (Jn. 4:22). All agree on what He meant. He was alluding to the ignorance which the Samaritans had brought on themselves by their rejection of the whole of the Old Testament beyond the Pentateuch. Westcott paraphrases our Lord s words to the woman: Your worship is directed to One with whose character as He has revealed Himself through the prophets and in the history of His people, you are really unacquainted. You know whom to worship, but you do not know Him. 15 Such ignorance was sad indeed; but it was also culpable, for it was self-induced. In addition to that immeasurable, self-inflicted loss, there was another serious consequence. If they had accepted and read the Former and Latter Prophets and the Writings (the second and third divisions of the Old Testament), they would have found the answer to the question of where they ought to sacrifice and to worship God. They would have read in 2 Samuel 5:6-10 and 2 Samuel 7, for instance, that God entered into a covenant with King David of Judah and Jerusalem; that He guaranteed to maintain a special relationship between Himself and David s seed; and that He ordained that David s son, Solomon, should build Him a temple for His Name (2 Sam. 7:13). And they would have discovered from the remaining historical books, the Prophets and the Psalms, that Jerusalem was the place where God chose to have it built (see, for instance, Ps. 132, particularly vv ; and Zech. 3-4). It used to be said in favor of the Samaritans that when the schism between them and the Jews took place, the Pentateuch was the only part of the Old Testament to be regarded even by the Jews as canonical and therefore authoritative. The Samaritans accepted the Pentateuch, therefore, because it was already canonical, but naturally after that, having repudiated Jerusalem, they ignored any further books that emanated from that source. But the modern assessment of the available evidence shows that the schism did not take place that early, in the time of Nehemiah, as used to be supposed. Even though the Samaritans built themselves a temple about 400 BC, their final break with Judaism and their final repudiation of Jerusalem did not occur until the Hasmonean period, probably after the destruction of their own temple by John Hyrcanus, say about 120 BC. 16 By that time the Former and Latter Prophets were certainly held by the Jews to be canonical, and in all probability the Writings as well. The Samaritans

5 SAMARIA S UNORTHODOX WORSHIP (8:4-25) 129 final break with orthodox Judaism, then, and their repudiation of Jerusalem and its temple, was made made, that is, by their leaders, priests, and teachers; one could not blame the ordinary people like the woman at Sychar s well for it in full knowledge of what those Scriptures said. 17 Their repudiation of Jerusalem, therefore, and their repudiation of twothirds of the Old Testament because of their preference for Gerizim, was doubly serious. First it involved disobedience to God s expressed will regarding worship. But in addition it obscured, if not denied, the allimportant question of the source from which the Saviour of the world would come. You Samaritans, said the Saviour, worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews (Jn. 4:22). The Samaritans believed that God would one day send the Messiah, for Moses in the Pentateuch had promised that The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like Me from among your own brothers (Deut. 18:15). But as the centuries had gone by, God had added promise to promise, and prophecy to prophecy, indicating where and when and how the promised Messiah and Saviour of the world should be born; so that men might know where to look for Him and from where to expect Him, and be able to recognize Him as authentic when He came. Among many other details, God had indicated that the Saviour would be of the line of David (Isa. 11:1), would be born in David s birthplace, Bethlehem of Judea (Mic. 5:2), and when He came officially He would come to David s city of Jerusalem as Jerusalem s King (Zech. 9:9). Repudiation of Jerusalem and rejection of the God-given promises and prophecies of two-thirds of the Old Testament had landed the Samaritans, then, in a sad and potentially dangerous ignorance. Of course it must have been hard for Samaritans, after all the hostility they had suffered from Jews, to abandon their deep-seated and long-held prejudice, and to accept that salvation is from the Jews. Certainly the Lord Jesus was not justifying or excusing the wretched behavior, pride, arrogance, and rancor of Jews who should have known better. But if the Samaritans wished to find salvation and satisfaction, and to receive the gift of the Spirit to enable them to offer God the true worship He desired, they would have to recognize that the Saviour of the world was a Jew, and not a Samaritan, a king whose earthly capital was Jerusalem, not Gerizim, who called the temple at Jerusalem My Father s house (Lk. 2:49; cf. 19:46) the very Jew, indeed, who had long since been indicated in the very Scriptures which for centuries they had rejected. PHILIP, A SAMARITAN CITY, AND THE RECEIVING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT News that their fellow countrymen of Sychar had come to faith in Jesus as the Messiah (Jn. 4:39-41), would doubtless have spread to other towns in the province. This helps to explain the success that followed Philip s

6 130 CHRISTIANITY S WORSHIP & WITNESS (6:8-9:31) preaching of the gospel when he visited a city in Samaria. 18 Like his Lord before him, of course, Philip acted wisely. He did not spearhead his approach to these Samaritans by rehearsing the old controversy all over again; and he certainly did not advocate the claims of the temple at Jerusalem. He proclaimed the Christ, says Luke (8:5); and God authenticated the message by granting many miracles. Crowds of people came to faith. But then a strange thing happened: the Holy Spirit did not come upon them (8:15-16). They did not receive the Holy Spirit when they believed, as Gentiles normally did, before they were baptized (see the case of Cornelius, 10:44-48; 11:15-17, and Peter s remarks at 15:7-9). Nor did they receive the Holy Spirit at or after their baptism, as the Jews on the day of Pentecost did (see 2:38). They were eventually given the Holy Spirit; but at first they were made to wait. Why? Many answers have been given to this question; but the safest way to proceed is to notice what happened, and presumably what had to happen, before God was prepared to give them the Holy Spirit. Apostles from Jerusalem (notice Luke s precise language) had to come, to pray for them and to lay their hands on them; and the Samaritans for their part had to submit to having apostles from Jerusalem lay their hands on them; then, and only then, was God prepared publicly to acknowledge the genuineness of their conversion by publicly giving them His Holy Spirit (8:14-17). Again we ask, Why so? It was obviously not that Philip was somehow an inadequate preacher: no suggestion is made in the next story, the conversion of the Ethiopian (8:26-40), that Philip s ministry had to be supplemented by that of the Jerusalem apostles before it could be fully effective. Nor is any further case recorded in the whole of Acts of the Jerusalem apostles having to come from Jerusalem and lay their hands on converts before the converts could receive the Holy Spirit. The answer to the question seems clear: the Samaritans were made, first by the period of waiting, then by the visual and physical gesture of the public laying on of hands, to acknowledge their dependence on Jerusalem, and their identification with the apostles at Jerusalem. Their long-standing repudiation of Jerusalem must be given up. True, they would not be asked to begin attending the temple at Jerusalem: both it and the holy place on Mount Gerizim were now fast becoming obsolete. Nor was God saying that forever afterwards Jerusalem must be recognized as the ecclesiastical headquarters of the church. But they were being required to recognize what the Saviour had told the woman of Sychar: historically speaking, Salvation is from the Jews, and it comes via Jerusalem. There is only one Saviour of the world, and only one salvation (4:12). In a world full of a thousand and one voices, advocating the claims of innumerable religions, it is of the utmost importance that we should have clear, objective, historical evidence to establish who that one and only Saviour is. God has devoted centuries to providing that evidence: by call-

7 SAMARIA S UNORTHODOX WORSHIP (8:4-25) 131 ing Abraham; by the development of a special nation; by establishing patterns of law, of redemption, and of worship through Moses; and finally and supremely through the raising up of David, King of Judah at Jerusalem, ancestor and prototype of Messiah, with numerous prophecies spread over several centuries foretelling Messiah s birth, birthplace, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. The Christian gospel is not a philosophy that anyone, no matter who and of what country, could think up and develop provided only that he had a touch of genius out of universal general principles. The gospel, as Paul later put it, is the gospel of God the gospel He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding His Son, who as to His human nature was a descendant of David (Rom. 1:1-3). The gospel is the product of a long, objective, historical, and geographical process, controlled at every juncture by the God whose gospel it is. Historically it is inseparable from Jerusalem. According to Luke, when between His resurrection and ascension Christ briefed His apostles for their world-wide mission, He did so in these words: This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem (Lk. 24:46-47). For ever and for ever the gospel is inseparably linked with certain historical events that happened at Jerusalem. If then the Samaritans had been allowed to receive the Holy Spirit without first having given up their long-standing repudiation of Jerusalem and their rejection of all those scriptural prophecies that indicated that the Messiah would be of the seed of David, they would have been in real danger. They could easily have imagined that they could believe in Jesus and receive the Spirit without repenting of their former attitude. There could have come into being two forms of Christianity: one Jewish, based on the Jesus of history, inseparably connected with Jerusalem, and the other a Samaritan version with a Jesus and a Holy Spirit who had nothing necessarily to do with Jerusalem at all; and they could have claimed to have a salvation that was not from the Jews. Such a Samaritan version would, of course, have been spurious. There are false cults even today who claim to be Christian, and talk much about Jesus and the Spirit, but who would either deny that Jesus actually and historically died at Jerusalem, or deny that He bodily rose again, and would repudiate the authority of the apostles from Jerusalem. Their Jesus and their Spirit have little or nothing to do with the historical facts. We are not talking about imaginary dangers either. God s original directive through Moses that His people were not to offer their sacrifices just anywhere, but in one place and one place only that He Himself should choose, was not motivated by narrow-minded religious exclusivism. It was meant as a protection against the real danger of being seduced by the

8 132 CHRISTIANITY S WORSHIP & WITNESS (6:8-9:31) false Canaanite cults that surrounded them in Palestine. It was so easy for people, especially in those pre-scientific days, to be taken in by the superstitions, magic, and demonism of pagan religion. Deuteronomy 12 explicitly says that it was to protect Israel against such deceptions that God directed them to set up one, and only one center, where the knowledge of the true God might be perpetuated. It is true that Israel disobeyed and set up other, illegitimate, shrines and the deportation of the ten tribes and the syncretism of the early years of Samaritan religion are a witness to what eventually came of that. It is also true that the temple at Jerusalem itself became corrupt, was destroyed at the Exile, and had to be built again. But the true tradition was never permanently obscured, and Jerusalem continued to be the center which God had chosen and where He could be known through His written Word, through the imageless temple, and through the divinely appointed system of sacrifice and worship. But the Samaritans had repudiated God s center, Jerusalem, and its temple, and two-thirds of God s written Word. We should not be surprised, therefore, that by the time Philip reached Samaria they had paid the price of their error: they had been completely taken in by a sorcerer named Simon. He peddled a mixture of magic and spiritism, and gave himself out to be someone great. Amazed by his magic, they had been deceived into thinking that Simon was the divine power known as the Great Power (8:10). Even before Philip came, proclaiming the true Messiah, the Samaritans need never have been taken in by this pagan spiritist. Annas and Caiaphas at Jerusalem may not have been the last word of true spirituality; but there was no room in their temple and its services for men like Simon. And had the Samaritans not rejected two-thirds of the Old Testament they would have found there descriptions of the true Messiah that would have saved them from being taken in by Simon, with his pagan concepts of deity, his unbiblical terminology, and his demonic powers. Moreover, it is instructive to notice that when Simon heard about Jesus and saw the miracles done in His name, he was quite prepared to believe in Jesus and get baptized in His name. But what followed showed that he had not the beginning of an idea of what the historical Jesus stood for, nor any true idea of the Spirit of God. To him Jesus and the Spirit were simply two demonic powers, more powerful but of the same kind as those he already used. He was prepared to pay a considerable sum of money to add Jesus and the Spirit to his repertoire, so as to gain greater power over people, build up his religion and increase his income. God therefore taught the Samaritans a very needful and salutary lesson when He refused to authenticate their profession of repentance and of faith in the Lord Jesus until they submitted to, and identified themselves with the apostles from Jerusalem.

9 SAMARIA S UNORTHODOX WORSHIP (8:4-25) 133 FINAL REFLECTIONS We have spent a long time on the first two stories in this section of Acts, far more than we shall need to spend on the next two. Even so, we should linger briefly to consider how the lessons taught by these two stories complement each other. Stephen s story forcefully expounds the fact that God is the God of progressive revelation, the God who has been on the move through history; and it urges us to make sure that we have moved on with God into His full revelation in His Son, and not stayed in Judaism or gone back into a mixture of Christianity and pre-christian Judaism. Philip s story makes the opposite, but equally important, point: that true Christianity is rooted in history, and we must never cut those roots. We cannot refuse to accept the divine inspiration and authority of the Old Testament and still be true to Christ and Christianity. And most certainly we cannot refuse the teaching and authority of the apostles from Jerusalem and still rightly lay claim to preach Christ. Those who reject the inspiration and authority of the New Testament and advocate a Christianity divorced from faith in the historicity of the events on which Christianity is founded are not in fact preaching true Christianity at all. They have cut their roots with history. What they are preaching is at best a mixture of Christian ethics with an alien, pagan, even if modern, philosophical world-view; and at worst little better than Simon s superstitions.