Acts, 5:17-41

Alright, now as Josiah was leading us previously, Ananias and Sapphira had gotten everybody's attention by disappearing. So then we get into the next scene here. And Josiah had left us with some Questions remember what was the scene here? We're looking at acts 5 17 through 41 here are the apostles with speaking in the temple and The sad you see through a surprise party for them, right? They were just so delighted to have them there they decided to host them at the local jail. Just as I had mentioned, there were three of them in Jerusalem that we know of. We don't know which one they were at. Peter and John had spent some time in there before, right?

So if it was the same one, they may have said, hey, we've seen this before. Can you imagine for a moment, okay, now we've got 12 apostles, and by the way, the history of people who had come up with sects, leadership of groups that weren't accepted. The history was they were often killed. So here's the 12 apostles. They're heading off towards this prison.

Take a while to get the Sanhedrin together and make some kind of decision. But they were frequently just slaughtered. Why would you think they would be slaughtered? What would be some of the reasons that they would want to get rid of guys like this? Guys that would start some new movement.

Yeah, get it done with. You cut it off at the head, right? Get rid of the leaders. Here you got all 12 of them in one place, one time. Hey, it was a perfect opportunity, let's get rid of these guys. So yeah, just get rid of it. What would be some other reasons why they'd want to get rid of these guys?

In 40 BC, which was not in ancient memory, but it had been some decades prior. The Parthians had come in and some of the Jewish leaders had joined the Parthians and actually booted the Romans out for a short period of time. And then the Romans came back in and said, no more of this. And that's when they put Herod the Great in. And they said, Herod the Great, we know you're an ugly, mean ogre, but we want you to keep the Parthians out and keep this area settled. So one of the things was, they didn't want any more of that kind of stuff. So anything that sounded like disruption, cut it off.

And the people who were the leaders in that part of the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire knew, if you've got trouble, get rid of it quick. So there was a tendency, there was an inclination to just kill them off. Because that's what the Romans wanted. And, in fact, that's what the Sadducees and the Pharisees wanted, because their situation, their political balance with the Romans was rather delicate. And they didn't want any trouble. They said, if I can keep in control, that's the way to do it. Okay, so now, here's the twelve apostles.

They're sitting there in prison. What do you think they're thinking? What are they thinking as they're sitting there in prison? Hey, no biggie. An angel's going to come and get us out of here. It's not a problem. Is that what they're thinking? Do we know that they had any idea? Is it possible they were thinking, most of the people that get put in this jail the next day, they're gone? How about that? So they could have been, from their standpoint, looking at, hey, we're just about the end here.

Other than the Lord seemed to indicate that that wasn't what was going to happen, right? Okay, now I get to these questions here. These are Acts 5, 17-41, page 3. The apostles were miraculously delivered from prison. Upon the apostles' recapture, they were likewise delivered from a death sentence by the pivotal words of Gamaliel. Should Christians categorically expect this kind of delivery from problems and difficulties?

Why or why not? What did you think? Should Christians just consistently say, hey, the Lord's going to get me out of this? You're shaking your head no. Nope. Okay. Anybody come up with a different answer? What's that? Ah, yeah. And I think that's the key thing. The Lord is certainly able to get us out of everything, right? What would be wrong with the Lord just Across the board, getting us out of every hot spot we get into. What would be the problem with that? Is there one?

Ah, yes. And Paul talked about it. Peter talked about it. I mean, this was something the apostles said across the board. That the trials and tribulations are there for good purpose. James, just get through. saying hi I'm James and the next thing he says is rejoice when you encounter various trials that the Greek there means you must esteem it ultimate joy ultimate joy when you encounter various trials so yeah that would be one reason why not is is that the trials have a purpose if the Lord determines to deliver us and he's not obligated to do so if he determines to deliver us It's because he has some other purpose, but it shouldn't be the thing that we expect the Lord's going to do every time. As a fellow I knew some years ago put it, somebody becomes a believer and the next morning they get up and they're getting ready to go to work and two tires are flat, you know, and they say, thanks Lord, that isn't what I signed up for. Well, guess what? It's exactly what you signed up for, isn't it?

The Lord certainly can deliver But every single situation we get into, the Lord is not going to deliver us from because he ultimately has a purpose higher than just getting us out of every hot spot. And in truth, Christians over the centuries have gotten in all sorts of hot spots where the way out has not been an easy one, sometimes involving dying. All right, how about question two? Since the apostles were to be witnesses for Christ, to the remotest part of the earth, why was there any value in them staying around Jerusalem, even to the point of having the angel, after releasing them from prison, directing them back to the temple to preach? It wasn't sticking around the temple a part of their lack of understanding? You're shaking your head, Mary. No? Yes, yeah, good point.

Jerusalem was a place where Jews would come not only from the area around, you know, immediately around there, but from all over the Roman Empire and outside the Roman Empire. To the east, where the Parthians were still ruling, the Jews would come in great numbers. You would also have even to the south of the Roman Empire, farther down in northern Africa. Christians coming from there. And all throughout the Roman Empire as well. Christians from all over the place would come. Yeah, Jews rather. And they would come to Jerusalem. So excellent point. Think also of this.

What were the four places that Jesus told them, you shall be my witnesses in? Verse 1 is Jerusalem, right? So there was a place and a time and an intent. to have them be witnesses in Jerusalem. So what the angel told them wasn't some stray thing that should puzzle us, but it's simply, this is stage one. And being in Jerusalem and talking to the people about what you've seen, perfect place to begin.

One of the other things we've noted in our previous gatherings, think about this. Here are the 12 apostles. Certainly they, and from what we have of evidence from Paul, 500 people still alive who had been around Jerusalem most of them probably were still around Jerusalem and somebody you know somebody say you know hey Jesus was resurrected and some scoffer came in and said nah and all of a sudden dozens of people in the crowd say oh yeah oh yeah count on it I've seen him and right over there just over the hill That's where he was crucified. Want to go there? And right over there, that's where the grave is empty. You want to see it? It was a place where everybody could testify to the miraculous facts.

And it turned the apostles and others with them from guys that were scared chicken to guys that couldn't be shut up. So here they are. The angel tells them, go back to the temple and talk. Now they just got arrested. They might have spent some moments thinking about, well, these are my last breaths. And yet they had the boldness to all of them go back when the angel said, go back to the temple, keep saying what you're saying.

Because the message they had was irrefutable. Couldn't, couldn't be touched. The number of people who could testify to the facts that they were declaring. and the fact that within walking distance, you could find every piece of evidence you'd want. Powerful, powerful, potent testimony. All right. Now, how about we got question three, page four.

The book of Acts makes note that there was great support for the apostles among the people, even to the point that the Sadducees were afraid of physical harm. You remember what the Sadducees were afraid of? Yeah, the Sadducees were afraid of being stoned to death. Can you imagine that? The people were so convinced of the facts of what was being said that the Sadducees themselves, the temple leaders, and by the way, they had connections there with the temple guard, there was about 600 temple guard, still afraid.

How about that? Let's also get an order of magnitude. By this time we're getting to something like 5,000-6,000 people maybe. And number? That's about how many Pharisees there were. And we're talking a very young church. So the Sadducees were starting to get afraid. Because you're talking a 10 to 1 outnumbering of the temple guard.

And where'd the stones come from? What had been going on in the temple area since 20 BC? Reconstruction. And what was all the temple made out of? Except for the cedar ceilings and some of the other places, lots of rock. So it would have been pieces right nearby, downright handy. Okay. All right.

So with that in view, did that support from the people result from the direct efforts of the apostles to raise popular support? Should Christians today be seeking popular support? Or what should be our attitude and approach to those in the world around us? Does it matter what they think? What are your thoughts on that? That's several digging questions there. Should we be going around trying to raise popular support for our belief? Ah, yeah. Excellent. At this point, Paul is an enemy. His name hasn't cropped up yet, but we'll see him soon. Paul is an enemy, and yet later on, Paul tells the churches, pray for me.

He doesn't say, pray for me that I might raise some popular support, that we might persuade people to be somewhat inclined towards us. He says, pray that I might declare the gospel with boldness. When the Philippian jailer says, what must I do to be saved?

Paul didn't say, you know, get out there and give us some political support. We could sure help, you know, use the help, right? He didn't look for that. He said, hey, you got some pull with the officials here, being the jailer, you know, help us here. He didn't say that. He comes back, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you'll be saved.

So it's critical as we see that, what is the purpose and message of the church? Where do we need to be putting our focus? Now, where does that question meet us today? What's happening out in the world? What's the direction and inclination of the world towards Christians? Yes, the direction is, in general, away from support. In great part, away from support. Things that we just assumed would always be there are no more.

When I was in high school, we had a Christian principal. As a matter of fact, he goes to my brother's church today. We had a Christian principal who, three times a year in a public school, canceled all the classes, had an assembly, and had a pastor come in and talk to the students three times a year. football coach.

He'd just graduated from college and he'd been under Bear Bryant. That name may or may not ring a bell to you. He wasn't a believer, but he knew that I was. My nickname was Pete. He said, hey Pete, you pray for the guys here. So we'd kneel down and pray.

A lot of that kind of support is gone. As a matter of fact, you do that sort of thing now and you'll get legal challenges, right? It's drifting away. What we could assume in prior years, now you can have no longer. We used to sing songs about God and being thankful and resurrection. I remember in elementary school choir. Even Christ being raised in the spring season, what we call Easter. No more. Not in a public arena. You'd be real lucky to get away with it. So it's drifted away. Yes. Yes.

So what should be the direction of Christians? What should be the direction of Christians? Should we pour all of our efforts into legal defenses and legal battles? Should we go in there and do a lot of PR work? I think part of what we're seeing here is preach the gospel and let the Lord take care of the support issue. Yes, Mary.

There will be opportunities to have influence, but that's not our call. I can remember some years back, Palo Alto, which is now morally way off the track, but Palo Alto was having consideration of having an adult bookstore in an area near a school. And the pastor of the church, this was back in the 50s, he went to the council meeting and just, you know, he told about, you know, woe unto them by whom these little ones are stumbled. and they voted against it. I don't think, I mean, obviously the battle, that battle has been lost. That should not, however, be the primary focus of our efforts in energy.

What we see the apostles doing here, there was support, but not because they aimed for it. They aimed for preaching the gospel. And it's real important that Christians see the distinction between those two, because there are, frankly, a lot of Christians who are real focused on going around getting legal decisions, not that we shouldn't pursue that, but the point being, are we losing track of the main focus? That's the key thing. And what we see the apostles doing here, they got support, not because they were aiming for it, but because they preached the gospel, and then they just let the chips fall where they may after that. They said, you know, no matter what you do to us, we've got to tell the truth.

And I think that's critical and pivotal and important for us to remember in this time when support in general across the population is waning. Number four there on page four. The Apostles received most of their outside opposition in the early chapters of Acts from the Sadducees and the Pharisees Gamaliel. You'll hear it pronounced Gamaliel or Gamaliel, either one. Even provide some substantial support at a critical moment. Should Christians seek out the support of an alliance with other groups in society, even if those groups are not typically believers? If so, how big a priority should this be?

I've already kind of leaned on the flavor of this one too, right? Because ultimately it's the same support kind of question. One of the questions we run into, let's say for example in the pro-life movement, there are groups who would be philosophically aligned with us in that one pro-life question, but we may have other substantial differences with them. How chummy do we get? Real important question to ask. It comes back to the same issue as before. Let's make sure that whatever issue we're talking about, we don't lose track of the main focus.

And that's the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a horrific tragedy that we've had 30 million plus infants killed before birth. And by the way, the word fetus and Latin just means baby. It's a horrific tragedy that these babies have been killed before birth and that our nation has taken the direction that it's had to bless that. That being said, that's still not the primary issue.

We can get lost in what is certainly a gripping issue and end up aligning ourselves under what's not a primary cause. And it's always important for believers to remember that the key thing is the gospel, the truth of the gospel, and not to get pulled off track no matter how critical and important that issue is. Okay, number five. If one were to come to a place of choosing between what God has clearly revealed and earthly authority, does this passage provide any insight into what principles a believer would or should observe in doing so?

Here we are in the 21st century. Hard to believe, isn't it? Here we are in the 21st century, and time is screaming along, and suppose the government comes and says, we don't just have a social inclination that is contrary, but the government specifically directs you to do something contrary to scripture.

What are you going to operate with? You're going to say, boy, you know, they're the government, I guess we've got to do what they say. Or, well, I sure wouldn't want anything to happen to my kids, you know, my grandkids. So I guess I'll go along with it. But what principle do we operate with, or what principles do we operate with here? I saw a couple of things there.

I mean, first of all, they obviously decided to obey God rather than man. So that's the decision. Okay, ultimately what God lays out as priority is priority. Yes. But then I saw a couple of things, principles that they may have operated by at first. They clearly explained their actions. Ah, so people understood. Yes, very good. People understood why it was that they were making their choice the way they were. So they weren't just making a choice and appearing to be, oh, it's kind of a weird rebel. They made a clear choice and presented the priority issue in front of the people. Good point.

That's right. They were saying, you know, you got to do what you got to do, make your decision, but this is where we stand. So the flip side is there will be consequences. And the biblical thing is take it. Go for it. Whatever it is, take it. Those are the consequences. Let's ask one question. Is it possible that the Lord may sovereignly and even miraculously choose to exclude us from the consequences? Can the Lord do that? Yeah. Did not the Lord do that in sending an angel to let him out of the prison? Yes, the Lord did exactly that. I have a friend back from the Reno Carson City area. He now lives in St. Petersburg, Russia.

During the Cold War, of course, going behind the Iron Curtain, you weren't supposed to take gospel materials and things of that sort. At one point in time, they got stopped at a checkpoint and one of the officers there caught them with all this contraband literature.

And so they were You know, here's my friend Bill and his buddy sitting there, and all the literature was laid out on this table. It's like, here's all the condemning evidence right in front of them. And so the two of them prayed. And Lord, you know, just, we don't know what you're going to do, but just, you know, we want to turn this over to you. All the officers sitting there, scolding him on this thing. And then they started taking all the literature and putting it back into their pockets. And while the officer was sitting there scolding them, they put all the literature back in the pockets and they left.

Now, the Lord sovereignly somehow blinded this officer, because that's not what the officer's intent was, to what was going on right in front of his eyes. We cannot expect, however, that the Lord must do that. The Lord may in fact dictate, no, you're going to take the consequences. We have in this account, two different things taking place.

One, the angel let them out, but then told them to go back to get into the situation that got them in trouble in the first place. When they got rearrested, there was intervention through the appeal of Gamaliel. that they not be killed, as was the inclination of the Sanhedrin, but instead be flogged. We don't know how many times they were flogged, up to 39. That would have been the Jewish max. So the law says 40, as Josiah pointed out, in case you miscounted,

39. Didn't want to exceed the law, right? So they may have been flogged each up to 39 times, but however, they rejoiced. that they would be persecuted. There's an example of instances where they took the consequences, the Lord sovereignly drew the consequences back from where they could have been, which is just, hey, you're going to die in the morning. The Lord drew the consequences back from that, but that was His choice to make and not their expectation to hold.

Okay. Now, let's Turn it over, Acts 6, 1-15. A very different kind of passage. Here's Acts 6, 1-15. And now we have a real different situation. It doesn't include, substantially, opposition. Now we get the first evidence of some kind of internal trouble. Here's the internal problem, now we're going to deal with it. And so what we find is this, here are the apostles, and there are getting to be more and more people in the church, more and more believers, some several thousand. Obviously, the first day, 3,000, so some number above that.

Several thousand, perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 would be a guesstimate, who had become believers. gathering and They had a problem, but it wasn't because of the Pharisees or the Sadducees or the temple guard or anything of that sort And there wasn't any dividing up of you know loaves and fishes it was fairly practical problem Now envision if you would this here you have as Marian had mentioned people coming to Jerusalem and some of them were from that area and had stayed there for generations.

Others had come in from other outlying areas. And remember, twice as many Jews, at least, living outside of Israel as in. So now you've got a lot of Jews who are coming to Jerusalem with mostly a Hellenistic background, that is a Greek speaking background. It's not just the language, however, there's also cultural things.

You can imagine, here's, you know, they're serving up these, you know, meals to the widows, some of them Jewish widows, some of them of Greek-speaking background. Squabbles of different kinds. One of the Greek-speaking widows says, ah, my matzah always comes with an alpha on it, you know? The Jewish widow says, I'll have fun mine, okay? Whatever it is, there's some point of argument. There are differences in the way things are, the food's prepared and who gets what.

And previously, the apostles had just kind of handled it. What's happening at this point in time here? What's taking place that brings up the issue? What's happening to make the apostles say something's got to happen different here? Ah, they're busy teaching. And they make this point, and they make it simply, but they make it well, that this is getting to a point where it's distracting us from teaching and prayer from the ministry that God's called us to. And so this is getting distracting. So what's their solution? Tell the widows, get out of here! Right? No. So what are they going to do? How are they going to handle it? How do they handle it? Ah, okay, yes.

If I want to appoint seven guys, pick any one of them, right? No. These are guys, and we have some summary criteria here. as to what these guys are supposed to be and to do. And so here are these guys there to handle this. These seven are appointed and then that allows the issue to be dealt with. As Josiah pointed out, the apostles who are acting at that local church, in a sense, as elders in that capacity. They're not going out into the nations yet. They're not writing scripture yet. They're acting in a role as elders of the local church.

And they're saying, we don't want to be distracted, so we want to appoint character-qualified deacons to handle this, to take it over. Why didn't they just appoint deacons right off in the first place? Here's the day of Pentecost. We've got 3,000 people. We're going to have to do something pretty quick here. Why didn't they appoint deacons already? Why hadn't this happened already? Why did they not already have deacons?

Yeah, yeah. Essentially, what happens is that in a church situation, the need for deacons becomes apparent. It becomes apparent. That is why, for example, you go to Titus, chapter 1, verses 5-9. Paul is writing to Titus, and he says, I sent you to Crete. We won't have time to look at that this morning, but it's a crazy place. Anyway, I sent you to Crete to appoint elders, and here are the qualifications.

No mention of deacons yet. The need for deacons is real. The role of deacons is biblical. But what we tend to see is when the need becomes apparent, by all means, get yourself some deacons and make sure they're biblically qualified. And that's what these guys are doing. is the first instance where we see it, and they most certainly see the need. Now, let's walk our way through this. Let's look at the future here. Suppose the apostles, this somehow never entered their mind, or somebody suggested, hey, let's get some deacons, and they said, nah, we don't want to do that.

What's the scenario? How does that play out? What's going to happen? Ah, yes. Now here you start to see this pull. Here they are, they're going to get distracted and pulled away from it. As a matter of fact, is this problem going to go away? No, it's going to stay there and you're going to continue to have more and more need. And as the church grows, assuming that it would do so, you would have an increasing magnitude of the problem.

And now you've got what's happening less if that takes place. What's taking place less and less then? The teaching isn't happening, and the prayer isn't happening, and people in the church are not being spiritually fed. They're being physically fed, but not spiritually fed. And now you've got a serious problem, because the church, while it's growing in numbers, becomes more and more immature. Does that sound familiar? Less and less content less and less substance, less and less of God's Word, with the result that the church has nothing to grow on, but are being fed. So, yeah, it is a functional problem. It's also another problem.

It is a problem because, quite likely, these apostles may not have been gifted in that capacity to begin with. you'll see somebody acting in the capacity of the Lord's gift to them. And it's just like, oftentimes we find ourselves running to catch up with what the Lord is already doing through them. If they have a particular giftedness or role, we're acknowledging what the Lord's already making happen in their lives. And what we would see here is the apostles were gifted particularly for this teaching that was going on and for the shepherding of the local church body there. And that just would have been lost. That would have gotten watered down. I can't teach, I've got to finish taking care of these dishes over here. I can't teach because I've got to go over to this other place and pick up a shipment of more matzahs. Ones with the alphas on them and the alephs. So you can imagine them getting substantially distracted.

So here's the point here. It turns out later on, In 1 Timothy chapter 3, Paul has sent Timothy to Ephesus, which was an established church that already had elders. He sent Timothy there, and he tells them, here are the qualifications of additional elders, and here are the character qualifications in more detail than we see here in Acts 6. Here are the character qualifications of the deacons.

And by the way, in great part, they're the same. They're the same. It's interesting, the Lord doesn't say, hey, I'll take any warm-bodied person that's willing to serve in this capacity. Instead, he says, no, this person must have a character that meets these qualifications. And character-wise, they are in great part identical. A few exceptions for good purpose for each of the roles that they have, but in great part identical.

This is not a place for exhibiting immaturity. Now why? Let's ask the question. Why would it be important to have the character qualification sorted out? Why does it matter? Why can't you just say, hey, there's any warm-bodied person willing to raise their hand and say, I will? Why does it make a difference?

Think through the situation there in Jerusalem. You've got some Jewish women who are of strong local Jewish background and you've got the Greek-speaking women. If you have someone who is inclined to be more spiritually mature, more fleshly, worldly, What kind of difference is that going to make in their dealing with the specific issue there? What's that going to do to handling the problem? What are the things likely to crop up? Part of what they're wanting to do is to address it so that the squabble ends. What's going to happen?

You look at the works of the flesh, Galatians 5, right? The works of the flesh, boy, you're going to crank them up. you're going to pour gasoline on the fire. If what's happening is more fleshliness and more worldliness, and you're going to expect to solve a problem, boy, you just got ten more. So that's one thing.

Very interesting, the seven names given are all Greek names. So here, they're going to try to be fair, and yet, all the people chosen have Greek names. Do you see a problem coming up if there's not spiritual maturity? If these guys don't have a walk with the Lord that changes how they act, they're going to favor the Greek widows.

See that? This is going to be a major problem unless these guys have spiritual understanding. The apostles basically, if you had not put the character qualification in there, would have been setting this thing up to make a huge explosion. Were it not for this spiritual character qualification, this would have been a disaster. Now we set up something to make a fix, and it's a mess.

See that? Amazing difference. Now, as we get in here, This passage, I'm looking at the top of page 2. Acts 6, 8-15 introduces several firsts in the book of Acts. It's the first time that someone other than the apostles is described as performing signs and wonders. Okay, so this is point number one. Signs and wonders, the very first time.

It's the first time that someone other than the apostles is described as receiving persecution. Up to this point, the apostles get all the privileges. I'm sure all the people are saying, why can't I get persecuted like he does? You know how that goes.

It's the first time that opposition comes from somebody other than the Sadducees. Here we have an internal problem for the first time. Here come the Sadducees again. And then finally there, it's the first time that a case is brought against any of the church believers based upon false charges and conspiracy. Before, remember what was the charge against the apostles? You're teaching about Jesus. False charge?

Nope, it's exactly what we're doing. Peter didn't stand up in front of them and say, we're not doing that. He said, you decide, you know, how are you going to punish us, but we're going to follow the Lord. This is the first instance where they say, okay, we're not sure exactly what we're going to bring up against this guy, but let's cook something up because we've got to really do them in big this time. So the first time you see false charges and conspiracy.

We point out here in the middle, the beginning of the paragraph in the middle of the page there, there were about 390 synagogues in Jerusalem by the time the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. That's probably a rough, a fair estimate of the number that might have been there here at this time. This is only a few decades earlier. So a few hundred churches, a few hundred synagogues rather, at least. would have been a fair number. So lots of synagogues. This is the synagogue of the freedmen were the ones who cooked up this conspiracy.

The freedmen were those who had been slaves and been set free for various reasons. It may have been the owner set them free because they were in a Jewish land. Remember that there was the Jewish law and some of the Jews still would follow it. At the end of six years of slavery, you're now set free. So there would be that, there would be some set free because of a crime of the owner. So various things like that might have made them free. But here's this group of people who gather together in a synagogue with the thing in common that they were former slaves. And they were the ones who cooked up this scheme against Stephen here. Now, what's interesting here, One of the questions that we come across is, how do we get so much detail about what went on in the council?

The Sanhedrin. See, a lot of our public meetings and even courtroom scenes are open to the public, correct? You want to go to a town council meeting or a board of supervisors meeting. You want to go watch the California legislature, the Colorado legislature, and all our various states. You can go in and see the legislature in action. They have some kind of a place where the public can come in and watch it.

Sanhedrin meetings were not like this. So, question. Why is it that Luke, who is a Greek, Dr. Luke is able to record these conversations? Yeah. Possibly Paul could have been in there. That would be one possibility. At this point in time, one in opposition, right? But Paul could have been present. Some people have tried to say that Paul is a member of the Sanhedrin.

It's doubtful. First of all, scripture never says. He claims to have been a student of Gamaliel, but never a member of the Sanhedrin. And they don't seem to recognize him with that level of prominence when he speaks to them later in the Book of Acts. So, possible, but not as a member of the Sanhedrin, but allowed to participate as a supportive Jew. Yes.

What would be some other reasons? It is unlikely, but a good question to ask, it's unlikely that he would have been there, partly because he was Greek, a Greek name, and the evidence seems to be that he was from a Gentile land, and he would have been trained in Greek medicine, would have been his likely background. But it's an important question to ask, because he's obviously writing with some level of detail about what's going on here. Yeah, that's a good point.

Other thoughts on this? Yeah, let's think about who buried the Lord? Joseph of Arimathea, not mentioned in Acts, but someone who was supportive. And another name? Pardon? Nicodemus, okay, Aristotle's Nicodemus. Yes, absolutely. Nicodemus is actually mentioned more than Joseph of Arimathea. He's mentioned in the Gospel of John several times, initially in chapter 3 where he meets with Jesus. He speaks supportively of Jesus to the Sanhedrin and is rebuked for it, and we don't have any recording that he continued to do so after that. We don't know exactly how long he continued to be a member of the Sanhedrin, but he also shows up at the time to bury Christ, so still around then. So Nicodemus is another possibility. There may have been others unnamed.

So these are all possible connections that may have been, you know, how you could get a private group conversation recorded here in such detail. John particularly seems to have been connected, and we make some note of it here in the rest of these notes. We've run out of time here, but you have some questions there, and you also have some other suggestions. We've got five different suggestions there as to who could have recorded these things.

And you have three questions to follow up on. Let me just hit them briefly since our time is short. The apostles acting in the role of local church elders could have chosen to continue managing the feeding of the widows as they have been. What would have been the consequence? We talked about that some, so think that thing through.

The deacons, number two, seem to be gifted in other ways in addition to serving. Stephen does signs and wonders previously only attributed to the apostles, so this is one of the first that we mentioned. He also came to be able to speak the truth clearly, seems to be able to speak the truth clearly before the Sanhedrin. We'll see that The next chapter, and Philip, as we'll see in chapter 8, seems to be an evangelist as well. So we ask a question about spiritual gifts.

Give that some thought. And finally, on page 4, number 3, the last verse of this passage says that when Stephen appeared before the council, his face was like that of an angel. Given that our culture is likely to impose an idea as to what that means, what is Dr. Luke trying to convey to us about Stephen's appearance? Did Stephen look like a young baby, a woman, What does it mean to look like an angel? Think about that. And there's some clues in there, so I'll let you examine that for yourselves. Yeah? Yeah, one of the problems was a lot of that got destroyed. Yeah, in the temple. Now we do have additional writings from the time. And actually very voluminous, you know.

But the Talmud is probably one of the terms you've heard in their subsets of the Talmud that would be other records that they would have. And there actually is reference to Jesus in some of those. It also talks about Gamaliel. I think we recorded in here that it used to say in the Talmud, when Gamaliel died, so did the law. Not obviously that the law was ended, but just to speak of how momentous a death and a loss that was. Yeah, good question. I have some questions for you.

We've been through a couple of months here now of working through with this format. I have at the beginning of each section sort of a summary of the events. Is that helpful to you or should we just forego it? Is it helpful? Okay. All right, we'll continue with that. The questions, too few, not enough, you know, more, just right, make them harder, you know, explain the universe and give three examples, kind of those kind of things, you know. ones that make it, you know, look up the answers in footnote with at least 15 sources. Okay, well, we'll pass on that.

A couple more things. This is a video we've been passing around, St. John Exile. Anybody would like to see it that hasn't had a chance to? So anyway, feel free if you haven't seen it to give a holler. And then next week, I'll hand out another package, probably several weeks at a time. will be the pattern there. So we'll get those to you. Any other questions on your part? Thoughts? Exasperations? Okay? Alright, let's pray.

Lord, as we look at this, certainly these are dramatic moments that we see in the early church. It is also amazing to realize that though these people were profoundly influenced by what they saw and by the receiving of your Holy Spirit there was still yet much to be learned and known. And we thank you for what through these men and a few others we have come to know because you determined to have the truth revealed. What a marvelous set of truths you've laid before us. Lord, we will marvel in it for eternity. In Jesus' name, Amen.