John H. Paterson
THE New Testament tells the story of a lot of surprised people. The evidence is there in the use of words which express their surprise: the New Testament is studded with "amazement", "astonishment", and reports of "wonder" and "marvelling". From the time when the coming of the Lord Jesus was first announced to the time when the narrative ends in Acts 28, nearly everyone connected with Christ and His Church received a surprise at one moment or another! Friend or foe, committed or indifferent, they all seem to have been astonished at the way the story unfolded -- all but the Lord Jesus Himself and an old man who had gone up into the Temple to pray, and had no difficulty at all in recognising the Messiah, however astonishing His outward form.
The coming of the Messiah was one circumstance, we might feel, by which no Jew ought to have been surprised. On the contrary, it was the single great event to which they had all been looking forward for centuries. Their surprise, not to say their failure to respond, arose from the fact that, when the Messiah came, He did not look or act in the way they had expected He would. So His birth was a surprise; His choice of career or public role was a surprise; and His death was a surprise -- only that is far too weak a word for a situation in which they themselves brought about the death of the One they had so long expected. It was a case of lacking discernment or understanding: "Which none of the princes of this world knew, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8).
What I want to draw your attention to at present, however, is the way in which the surprise continued after the Lord Jesus had returned to His glory, and left the task of witness to His Church. Not all the surprises by any means were pleasant ones -- we need only to recall the astonishing events that surrounded the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5): great fear, we are told, came upon all who heard about them. The world in general seemed surprised by the vigour and the powers of the early believers, and the believers themselves were surprised by the direction in which they found themselves moving.
If we follow the narrative of Acts and ask the question, 'What were the greatest surprises of those early days?' then it seems to me that the answer is clear. For the onlookers, the most surprising thing was the transformation of the disciples from a timid, divided and, frankly, rather witless band of men into a team endowed with courage, clarity of thought and miraculous power. For the believers, the greatest surprise was the replacement of a Jewish tradition and Messianic hope by a universal message of God's grace to all who would believe and receive.
Why should God's actions in His Church have so greatly astonished people? It seems to me important to attempt some kind of explanation, and I think that there are three answers.
1. The first is that we must remember that what we have in Acts is the record of the work of the Spirit. Essentially, it was He who provided the surprises, for to human beings He must always appear mysterious in His ways. And this is so, I think, not simply because we lack a sufficient understanding of those ways to foresee what He will do, but also because the Spirit will not be tied down or commanded to act in a particular way. One thing which emerges very clearly from the study of Acts is that, on different occasions, the Spirit acted in different ways. [39/40] As a result, it is dangerous to try to build doctrines of the Spirit's work on individual incidents (a rich source of confusion, alas, among God's people!) As soon as they become convinced that they have fathomed the secret of the Spirit's ways, Christians seem to succumb to the dual temptations of thinking that they can command Him for the future and of writing a book to pass on their formula to others!
We shall return later to what might be called the certainties of the Spirit's activities. The point, as we shall see, is that these are few in number and that the Spirit always retains freedom of action in individual cases. What we learn from Acts is that there is no universal formula of His working. Pentecost was different from, say, Samaria (Acts 8:14-17), and Samaria from Caesarea (Acts 10:44), and Caesarea from Ephesus (Acts 19:2-6). We may certainly gain experience of the work of the Spirit, and profit by it, but we may never treat Him as predictable; never take for granted that we know what He will do next.
2. The second explanation of those many surprises in the early days was that people were constantly underestimating the Spirit's capacity to change lives. And here we must be sympathetic. God had done many wonderful things for Israel in the old days, but the only known examples of lives changed for the better lay far back in their history -- and some of them had unhappy endings to their tale. These Jews had certainly read of the transformation of Jacob after he met with God, and they knew how God had given Saul "another heart" (1 Samuel 10:9), to fit him to be Israel's king. But the transformation in Saul's case did not last, and the more common occurrence in the history of their kings (as with, say, Solomon or Uzziah) was that a change took place only for the worse.
Small wonder, then, that the conversion of that notorious persecutor, Saul of Tarsus, found the believers not merely surprised but extremely suspicious (Acts 9:26)! Small wonder, too, that these spectacular transformations were interpreted by men like Simon the sorcerer (Acts 8:18-19) as some kind of magic -- a trick that could be learnt and practised by anyone. Nothing in their previous experience had prepared people for this kind of transformation in the lives of individuals.
3. The third explanation is of a different character. But I think that the main reason for the surprise at the Spirit's working arose out of the simple human tendency to dislike or resist change, and so to be unprepared for it when it happens. If that sounds like a highly subjective assessment of the situation on my part, I can at least claim some excellent supporting evidence. For when Stephen was given the opportunity of defending himself before the council (Acts 7), it was resistance to change which he took as his theme! What his apparently rambling historical review was intended to do is summed up in his last sentences, and the reaction of the Jews to his statement made it clear (7:51-54) that they, at least, had understood the point: "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye".
We are all caught out by change because, fundamentally, we are hoping that it will not happen. Change scares us, and threatens us. And in the early Church the principle threat to its original members was clear: that the special, God-given status and privileges of the Jewish people -- and they were all Jews -- might have to be shared with Gentiles. That this came as a surprise to them is readily understood, for it was a reversal of everything which their early history had taught them -- no mixing with heathen peoples; a God apparently exclusively their own. The surprise was reasonable enough. But the reaction was not -- not if they gave any heed at all to the gospel message, and not if they had listened to the Lord Jesus proclaiming a new, universal kingdom. Their reaction was defensive; they wanted to keep their Christ Jewish, not share Him with the world.
We know from the epistles that these Judaizers were present from the start within the Church, and that they caused endless trouble. And if we are honest with ourselves we have to recognise that their descendants are with us today; indeed, that we all are guilty at times of wanting to possess an exclusive Christ. Is it not tragically easy to find ourselves reassuring ourselves that, because we have more light on the Scriptures than some other group of Christians, or more evidence of the Spirit's work in our midst, therefore we have a special status as believers, or greater claim upon Christ than they? [40/ibc]
There are plenty of modern equivalents to the scene in the house of Cornelius, described in Acts 10. Picture it, if you will. Here are a group of Gentiles, headed by a Roman soldier, untutored in the Christian faith and, until this very moment, unlinked with the movement that is sweeping the land. Upon this group, whose members have made no profession of faith so far, and who have been prepared by only the sketchiest of sermons from Peter (and actually the sermon was not even finished yet!), the Holy Spirit chose to fall. Do you not imagine, as I do, that there were some Christians present whose reaction was an astonished: 'Lord, how could You?' And that they then set off hotfoot for Jerusalem to report that Holy Spirit's breach of protocol, and blame Peter for allowing it?
There are lessons there for us all but, for the moment, let us concentrate on the positive, the happy side: that there was one man present -- Peter -- who was probably just as surprised as the rest but who responded splendidly to this shattering revelation of the Spirit's sovereign ways. So much depended on Peter at that moment -- so much that God had taken the very special precaution of preparing him by a dream (Acts 10:9-16); that is, of giving Peter what we should now call a 'dry run' so that, when the reality burst upon the company in Caesarea, Peter recognised the principle and accepted this dramatic change of direction. You may care to speculate on what would have become of us all -- of us Gentile Christians -- if Peter that day had come down on the side of tradition; if, throwing the weight of his own authority into the scales, he had announced that thiscould not be Pentecost all over again because God would never do such a thing for Gentiles.
So the scene of action shifts in Acts 11 back to Jerusalem. It seems to me that, in the Book of Acts as a whole, Jerusalem generally meant trouble. But on this occasion we can thank God that there were men there willing to do one of the hardest things that man can do -- admit that they had changed their minds! They began by reproaching Peter, as though he himself had in some way commanded the Spirit to appear. But in the end the New Testament reports, in one of its happiest verses: "When they heard these things they held their peace and glorified God" (11:18). They might well be surprised by the Spirit's ways, but they didn't have to be stubborn!
This particular battle had to be fought many times over, and similar battles are ours today, but at Caesarea the principle, at least, was established of the Spirit's sovereign right to do as He pleases; to bless whom He will; to lead while His people follow. There were longstanding prejudices to be overthrown, but how important for us that they were overthrown! It is not so much the unexpected in the Christian life as our reaction to the unexpected that counts.
But this, of course, leads us on to the problem: how do we identify the work of the Spirit? Is every unexpected thing in our lives one of His surprises? In these chapters of Acts which we have been using as a background, there are reports of many false spirits, and much confusion between sham and reality. And so we must ask what guidance there is, what safeguards there are, in our 'discerning' the spirits. How do we know when we are discarding mere prejudice, or when we are throwing away some vital principle? We shall try to answer this question next time.
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