Acts 5:17ff

In his book The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis writes of the creation of fictitious Narnia through the song of Aslan (the lion who represents Jesus in the book). The Creation Song is clearly intended to reveal the majesty and glory of Aslan. As in Genesis 1, it is a grand call to worship.

But there was one (Uncle Andrew) who would not hear it. The consequences were staggering:

When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the whole point, for a rather interesting reason. When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel.

Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a Lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make himself believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. Of course it can’t really have been singing, he thought. I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?

And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.

And when at last the Lion spoke and said, “Narnia awake,” he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl. And when the beasts spoke in answer, he heard only barkings, growlings, bayings, and howlings.
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

Christians ought to be able to read their culture and understand what’s going on and learn how to communicate. I’m not saying you shouldn’t know those things. I am saying that must be worked out in the framework of passion for the gospel all the time or you do far more damage sometimes than unbelief itself.

There is a lot of reflection in John’s gospel about unbelief. In chapter 8 is one of the most stunning descriptions of unbelief anywhere in all of the Canon. In chapter 8, Jesus goes so far as to say to some of his hearers on that occasion, “Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe.” 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Jn 8:45.

It’s a causal clause. “Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe.” It’s the very truth, in certain contexts, that compels unbelief. It’s the truth itself. For some people bound up in another worldview who are not willing to change, for whom the whole thing is so alien or foreign or different or repulsive it’s the very truth that is obnoxious. It’s the articulation of the truth that will guarantee unbelief.

That’s reflected on even more in John, chapter 12, where the words from Isaiah 6 are picked up. “Go, tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people hard.’

What do you do when it’s the truth that is obnoxious?

What are your options?

Tell lies?

There are many leaders in churches that want to do exactly that.

“If the truth is unpalatable, say more palatable things in the name of contextualization.”

But if, in fact, in the name of communicating, in order not to offend, we manage to trim the truth, we have gained nothing, and we have forgotten that Scripture itself, both in the Old Testament, as in a passage like Isaiah 6 and other passages, and in a passage hinted at here and made very strong in John 8, it speaks of the fact that the truth can, in many circumstances, guarantee unbelief, so we’d better be ready for it.

There are some audiences like that. It is the truth itself that prompts, elicits, and calls forth unbelief. Precisely because their minds are so corrupt, their worldview is so shaped by anti-God perspectives that the truth when it appears is something repulsive. It’s because we tell the truth that some people don’t believe.

Now once you see that, all the methods in the world to change that don’t change anything. What are your options? Tell the non-truth? Become more attractive? There are some times when the truth itself damns. The truth itself hardens. The truth itself blinds. The truth itself makes ears deaf because there is already this guilty, God-forsaking, unbelieving, self-focused hatred of all things other than, “Me first.”

Isaiah’s responsibility was to preach God’s message knowing full well that the outcome of God’s message at his time and place in history was merely to confirm people in their unbelief. I know there were some minor exceptions, a small remnant, but that’s what his main message was. Jesus now quotes those words to explain something of his own reason for speaking as he does.

This incident is almost incredible. Then the high priest rose up, and all they that were with him, (which is the sect of the Sadducees,) and were filled with indignation.
Now it is really extraordinary that the religious leaders reacted the way they did. We can also understand why the people “magnified” the apostles. They would have felt that this was wonderful and would have been favorably disposed toward men who had been given such power. But what is surprising is that any group of people could have reacted with such anger an anger so great that it led the Sanhedrin to arrest and imprison the apostles. And this is the phenomenon that we have here.

The New Testament records are very honest; they not only give us one side but give us all sides. The elements of belief are:

1. The fear of the unseen and of the power of God

2. It leads to a readiness to listen, a readiness to accept and to obey the message of the Gospel,

3. The power of the Holy Spirit, bringing about, not some temporary, superficial reaction, but a profound change in men and women, as a result of which they become part of the body of Christ.

Let’s look at the unbelief of the religious leaders because it is just as important for us to understand the nature of unbelief as it is for us to understand belief.

The anatomy of unbelief.

The biblical records not only give us the positive, but also the negative pictures. It is all designed to open our eyes and understanding and bring us to a belief in this great Gospel of salvation.

We always find it easier to grasp a point or a principle when we see it in somebody else rather than in ourselves. We are so well disposed toward ourselves, on such good terms with ourselves and always so protective of ourselves, that we never really see the truth about ourselves.

But when we see one of our faults in somebody else, it is much easier for us to recognize it.

A good example is the story of David and Nathan (2 Sam. 12)..

Unbelief is always the same regardless in what time frame it happens; it does not change at all. There was unbelief in the first century, and there is still unbelief today. Of all the modern fallacies, there is none quite so pathetic and so feeble as the fallacy of thinking that there is something new about unbelief.

Ask the average man today why he is not a Christian, and he will almost invariably tell you that it is because he is “a twentieth-century man” In his ignorance he has an idea that in the past, people swallowed Christian teaching because they did not know any better. They were all Christians.

The Gospel was rejected in the first century too. The Son of God is being rejected today in exactly the same way as He was rejected two thousand years ago, and after He died, His disciples suffered the same hatred and rejection. There is never any change.

Christ remains the same, belief and faith are the same, unbelief is the same. So as we analyze the behavior of these members of the Sanhedrin in their unbelief, we find nothing but the simple truth about all who still reject the Gospel, all who turn their backs upon it, all who dislike it.

What is the nature or cause of unbelief?

It is not intellectual. At the present time it is the proud boast of those who scoff at religion, we see them on television and read their articles, that they are rejecting Christianity for intellectual reasons. They claim they are people who have great ability, great understanding, and great powers of reasoning.

And today, they especially maintain that they are governed by a scientific outlook. The scientific outlook, they claim, is calm, dispassionate, and unemotional. They say scientists have no preconceived notions, prejudice is the mark of religious people, and with truly detached minds they look on the facts objective.

If modern knowledge is the cause of unbelief, what was the cause of the unbelief of the religious leaders in Jerusalem?

Since they rejected the Gospel too, they must obviously have had some other reason for their unbelief. Unbelief is not, therefore, a question of knowledge. If it could be shown that everybody in the past believed the Gospel and that unbelief has only come in since we split the atom, then, of course, you would have a watertight case, but not otherwise.

So we split the atom, does that tell you any more about yourself?

Does the fact that we have put a man on the moon, explain why you committed that same sin again last night that you said a week ago you would never do again?

Does all this increase in knowledge tell you anything more about human beings, what they are, who they are, or what they are doing in this world?

Does it tell you how to live a clean and a straight and a moral life, how to die or what lies beyond death?

What is the cause of unbelief?

Then the high priest rose up, and all they that were with him … and were filled with indignation.

A better translation might be “anger” it actually means to boil, like boiling hot with anger, “and laid their hands on the apostles, and put them in the common prison.”

Is this a picture of a calm, cool, scientific, unprejudiced observer?

There is no such person, and there never has been.

There is as much prejudice in scientific circles as I have ever seen anywhere else.

This is the deception of the devil; this is where he fools us. Unbelief is not man’s ability to reason but is always the result of irrationality. Unbelief is entirely a matter of feeling and prejudice, as we see here in Acts 5, and as we see equally clearly from the way in which was our Jesus was treated.

They had seen extraordinary manifestations of supernatural power. They did not understand it; they could not explain it. Yet they did not adopt the truly scientific attitude, which would have been, we cannot dispute the facts. Facts are facts, after all.

They could have said, these things are happening, and it’s obvious that they are not caused by these men alone. There must be something else.

What is it?

Let’s watch; let’s see what this will lead to.”

Instead of adopting that attitude of humble inquiry and tolerance and fair play, instead of giving the apostles an opportunity, they dismissed these events.

They were filled with angry jealousy and annoyance and indignation, and they tried to put a stop to all this preaching and teaching.

Look at us, the moderns of today. how tolerant we are. We are so tolerant that we are prepared not only to excuse but to legitimize moral perversion.

We say, “in the past we’ve judged this behavior with passion. We’ve regarded people as criminals and have called certain actions sinful perversions. But that’s all wrong. We’ve grown out of that now, and we really must look at these actions in an intelligent and scientific manner.”

So we the modern man, are prepared to tolerate something that breaks the very laws of nature. I am sorry for perverts, but I am talking now about the principle, and I think the worst thing you can do for such people is praise them and make them feel that they are normal. They are not.

It is the boast of modern men and women that they will tolerate even perversion, even foulness, but they will not tolerate the Gospel.

But now they saw these uneducated men occupying the center of the stage with the crowd running after them and listening to them, and they were furious! They did not worry about
miracles or the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira. All that mattered to them was their position, their great position.

I can understand these Sadducees very well. Notice that the record puts emphasis on their party: The high priest rose up, and all they that were with him, (which is the sect of the Sadducees).

The Sadducees had a real problem because they did not believe in the supernatural or in life after death, and therefore they had always taught that there was no such thing as resurrection. They did not believe in angels either. There is something almost humorous about this.

Do you see their predicament?

Here were these apostles, able to do marvelous things and claiming that it was because of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus whom the Sadducees, along with the other religious leaders, had condemned and succeeded in putting to death, and who had been buried. But the apostles said he had risen and was exercising power from heaven. Resurrection!

But still more humiliating for the Sadducees at this point was the fact that after they had the apostles thrown into the common prison, with the doors locked and the keepers on guard, on the first night the angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought the prisoners out. Angels!

Now when you have always said that resurrection is impossible and that there is no such thing as an angel, and everybody has believed you, then when things begin to happen that prove that both are true, you are obviously in trouble.

Your whole position is shaken, and people tend to laugh at you. When you come with your great pomp and ceremony in the morning and say, “Bring out the prisoners please,” and the soldiers go to the prison and come back saying that they have found the prison intact, with all the doors locked and the guards standing before them, but that there are no prisoners inside the prison, then you are indeed in trouble.

This is a perfect picture of modern men and women who reject the Gospel.

They have always said that there is no God.

They have always said that there are no miracles, and that Jesus Christ was only a man. But then something happens that they cannot explain, and some fool or one they call an ignoramus who calls himself a Christian seems to be able to live a better life than they can and is able to help people in misery and distress in a way that they cannot.

Things happen through this ignoramus that they cannot explain. And they are in trouble. Their whole attitude, their whole position, is threatened. People are turning from them. That is the crux; that is the real cause of unbelief.

That is why most people are not Christians; that is what is really happening within them. The whole mental framework of the modern, literate, educated, sophisticated, scientific man or woman comes crashing down to the ground, it becomes valueless if the Christian faith is accepted. And, of course, that is a terrible thing and a blow to their pride. That is why men and women do not believe the Gospel.

Look at the way the religious leaders treated Jesus. Look at the way they treated the first Christians. Look at the treatment of Christians in the first and second centuries, the massacres, the cruelty, the branding with hot irons. Look at what happened in the Middle Ages and the treatment meted out to the Reformers in London and elsewhere. Look at all those killed in the twentieth century.

Go,” says the angel, “stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.” Here is life! Life is what you need, and the world cannot give it to you.

Does drinking alcohol give you life?

Does taking drugs give you life?

Does a big bank account give you life?

That is slavery; that is cutting out your highest faculties; that is crippling your mind, interfering with your judgment and your understanding of what is right. Getting drunk, or any addiction is not life. It is existence on an animal level.

Here is life, in the message preached by the apostles. Here is something that delivers the whole person. Here is a truth that is bigger than humanity and the world; it is the truth of God, and it stretches through death to eternity. Here is a great worldview that explains everything and all that nothing else can explain. It not only gives you intellectual life—it gives you a new moral nature, and it gives you a new joy and a new appreciation.

The final proof of irrationality is this: The members of the Sanhedrin ordered the apostles to be seized and thrown into the common prison.

These leaders ought to have known better; that is why we must emphasize that word “then” in verse 17: “Then the high priest rose up.” When? After the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira. fools! Why did they not see the power of God there, after all the miracles?

They were standing against that, not against men. They were not opposing ignorant and uneducated men, but the power of God.
That is the final irrationality and madness of unbelief.