Is God Greedy? (Acts 4:32-5:11)

Introduction

If there's one passage that makes American Christians squirm a little, it's this one. "Held everything in common"? "No needy person among them?” Sell the house, sell the land, drop it at the apostles' feet? Our first instinct is to wonder if private property itself is the problem. It certainly appears to be the case, considering that Ananias and Sapphira drop dead after deceiving the apostles about their land sale. Why is it such a big deal that they did not give the whole amount to the apostles?

Sharing Burdens

The apostles had just prayed for boldness, and Luke shows us that prayer answered as they give the testimony of Christ’s resurrection. This leads the community to also seek to share one another’s burdens.

The Jerusalem church was poor. Scripture tells us that the church was poor. The widows live on the church (Acts 6),Paul explicitly calls attention to the poverty of the Jerusalem church (Romans 15). Paul lays out the procedure and defense of the offering for the Jerusalem church (1 Corinthians 16). So when Luke says there was "no needy person among them," he is summarizing how well the church joins together to bear one another’s burdens.

Acts tells us how they did this: Christians sold land and houses and laid the proceeds at the apostles' feet. This is a demonstration of submission. The Apostles would distribute the funds as needed by individuals.

Barnabas, literally meaning “son of a prophet”, but Luke names him "son of encouragement.” This tells us that the word of God is encouragement. Barnabas is a Levite who technically should not own land under the old case laws, and yet he does, and he's never rebuked for it.

This is puzzling: is it okay for a priest to own land if he gives it to the church? Does this mean that the call for Christians is not to have private property?

Being a Burden

Ananias (grace of the Lord) and Sapphira (beautiful) enter the scene. Unfortunately, they do not live up to their names. They sell land, keep back part of the proceeds, and present their offering as if it were the whole. Peter's word for what they did is "pilfered.” This is a word that Luke borrows from Joshua 7 with the Achan story. Achan stole from the Lord, and so Luke is drawing the correlation to this couple in the context of the church.

It is important to understand that this is not something they did as an absent-minded oversight. Acts 5:2 makes it very clear that they conspired together as a couple. We might think that the problem is that they wanted private property. However, Peter is explicit in verse 4: the land was theirs; they were never obligated to sell it, and even after selling it, the money was still theirs to keep or give as they chose. This tells us that the gifts were still voluntary, but people gave generously to share one another’s burdens.

So, the sin was not withholding money. It was staging a performance to gain a better place in the community. They are pretending to give everything for the praise of the church. They want to have a prestigious place in the community rather than seeking to serve their fellow Christians.

Peter calls attention to the heinousness of this sin, “Why has Satan filled your heart?” We might think that Peter is a hypocrite in asking this question. Christ himself says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” However, Peter knows that one cannot blame satan. He knows that Ananias could have and should have stood up to Satan. However, his desire to be significant in the community without Christ is his downfall. The devil did not make him do it, but he did it himself. So, Peter is not condemning them for having land. He's exposing a heart that wanted to look sacrificial without actually being sacrificial. They lie to the Holy Spirit as they deceive the church. They use the church to prop themselves up rather than being used by the church.

Conclusion

Is it wrong to o