The temple courts
This week's study is on Acts 5:17-21, and Acts 5:42:
These verses describe some more of what we would call evangelism today. The apostles were doing what we would probably call healing ministry outside of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. People were becoming Christians because of what was happening and the priests of the temple were jealous, so they had the apostles thrown in jail. Then an angel of the Lord appears, busts them out of jail, and commands them to go to the temple courts and tell people all about this new life.
For those who don't know what the temple courts are, they're not legal courts in the sense of "I've been arrested and now I'm going to court." They're courts like in the sense of a courtyard or a complex. Think of the temple sort of like an ancient Jewish version of a modern megachurch campus. On the outside, you have a giant parking lot patrolled by elderly men on golf carts with walkie-talkies, then you enter an expensive glassed-in facade full of expensive palm trees imported from Israel, a giant indoor fountain full of holy water, and neatly dressed greeters with illegible name tags handing you paper cups full of coffee while you wait for the monorail that takes you up to the stadium seating. Behind the main stage and movie screens are offices that only the pastoral staff are allowed to go into. Only picture the hypothetical megachurch in pre civil rights America, since the Jews hadn't yet gotten the memo about racism being bad, so outside in the outer court there was a sign warning non-Jews that they would be lynched if they tried to go to the inner courts and it would be their own fault if that happened.
In the Jewish temple the parking lot would be "Solomon's Colonnade," the atrium with assorted plants and coffee drones would be the "Outer Courts," and then if you were allowed on the monorail the stadium seating would be like the assorted inner courts, and then the office complex with the more expensive coffee and hidden liquor cabinet would be like the "Holy of Holies."
So up until they got arrested, the apostles were praying for people and healing the sick out in the "parking lot." The temple was the only game in town as far as people wanting to worship God, so they were being respectful by staying near the edge. But as you can imagine, the "pastoral staff" were not amused by these guys lurking out in the parking lot putting on a better show than what they had going on inside, so they called the cops and had these guys physically removed from their "safe space." Problem solved, right?
Wrong. The Angel of the Lord appeared and told them to go back and do some more, only not in the parking lot this time but in the atrium! Just to clarify again, the Angel of the Lord is seen as the direct voice of God. So God basically intervened directly in this situation, pulled rank, and told them to defy the church authority that claimed to be His exclusive mouthpiece. Things were just going from bad to worse for the high priest and his staff.
When the Angel of the Lord shows up, busts you out of jail, and tells you to do something, you generally go and do it. So the apostles went and began to share directly, inside the atrium, and possibly even on the monorail and inside of the plush seating of the "Jews only or else we'll string you up" inner courts. You can imagine the rage of the high priest, having thought that this whole situation was handled, only to find these guys right under his nose, and not just healing people but preaching a message that contradicted his own! The lines I snipped out of this week's verses are what you would expect in that kind of situation: The priest and his security team rounded up the apostles, had a board meeting, and then roughed them up a bit. But the priest and his hatebats were no match for the direct command of the Angel of the Lord, so the apostles were right back at it as soon as they were done.
If you've never been to a church, you probably don't fully understand the amount of courage this took. Since it's Advent, I'd recommend you go to church this Sunday and stand up in front of everyone and say "Jesus Christ is our saviour! He died on the cross to pay for our sins! He conquered death, and our religious obligations, to offer us eternal life!" (If you're feeling less bold, you can leave out the "religious obligations" bit as that one is rather controversial still amongst career clergy.)
I can guarantee that approximately half of the people will act as though they'd never heard such a preposterous thing in their lives. You can probably feel your anxiety mounting just thinking about it, even though there's no danger of lynching, or getting beaten and whipped, or even of the cops showing up. The worst that would happen, other than the angry stares, would be some elderly usher wearing something like a band uniform politely asking you to leave. So you can get a feel for how dedicated the apostles were, as well as how fired up the Angel of the Lord's pep talk made them.
So, apart from the apostles' fearless dedication, an exclusive call directly from God that didn't get filtered down through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the perspective to not let beatings scare them off, what else cool is there in these verses? The proclamation that Jesus is the messiah and that there is a new life available to us! If you were to do a top ten of things Christians yell out over megaphones to passing crowds, those two things probably wouldn't make the top five. And yet they're the top of God's list.
Going from memory, I'd say that the modern evangelism message goes something like this: "Stop fornicating, you whores! And quit drinking alcohol and using drugs! You're going to hell! All of you! And stay away from the movies! You need to come to our church and memorize the Bible or else you will burn for eternity in hell! Nothing you ever do will make it right, except tithing, buying our worship albums, and Jesus Christ, in that order." And yet the Angel of the Lord didn't send these apostles to a nearby university or a shopping mall, but to the church itself, and not to preach about the ten commandments, but the one thing that is more important: Jesus. And instead of listing the hateful things we're not supposed to do, they shared the new life we have instead, thanks to the love of God.
So looking at this in the theme of evangelism, we can wonder if maybe the first step of evangelism might be our own churches. Modern doctrine says to evangelise people by bringing them to church, so they can be fed into the ecclesiastical sales funnel and eventually help pay down that pricey monorail. But God seems to suggest that finding Jesus and going to church are different things, and in order for church to be useful to people looking for Jesus, the people in that church have to have that new life and that awareness that Jesus is the messiah.
So, play a game this week. When you go to church next, or hang out with your Christian friends, remind them that we have salvation because of Jesus. If you mention it first, you win! If someone else beats you to it, you both win!
Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. “Go, stand in the temple courts,” he said, “and tell the people all about this new life.”
At daybreak they entered the temple courts, as they had been told, and began to teach the people.
[...]
Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.
These verses describe some more of what we would call evangelism today. The apostles were doing what we would probably call healing ministry outside of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. People were becoming Christians because of what was happening and the priests of the temple were jealous, so they had the apostles thrown in jail. Then an angel of the Lord appears, busts them out of jail, and commands them to go to the temple courts and tell people all about this new life.
For those who don't know what the temple courts are, they're not legal courts in the sense of "I've been arrested and now I'm going to court." They're courts like in the sense of a courtyard or a complex. Think of the temple sort of like an ancient Jewish version of a modern megachurch campus. On the outside, you have a giant parking lot patrolled by elderly men on golf carts with walkie-talkies, then you enter an expensive glassed-in facade full of expensive palm trees imported from Israel, a giant indoor fountain full of holy water, and neatly dressed greeters with illegible name tags handing you paper cups full of coffee while you wait for the monorail that takes you up to the stadium seating. Behind the main stage and movie screens are offices that only the pastoral staff are allowed to go into. Only picture the hypothetical megachurch in pre civil rights America, since the Jews hadn't yet gotten the memo about racism being bad, so outside in the outer court there was a sign warning non-Jews that they would be lynched if they tried to go to the inner courts and it would be their own fault if that happened.
In the Jewish temple the parking lot would be "Solomon's Colonnade," the atrium with assorted plants and coffee drones would be the "Outer Courts," and then if you were allowed on the monorail the stadium seating would be like the assorted inner courts, and then the office complex with the more expensive coffee and hidden liquor cabinet would be like the "Holy of Holies."
So up until they got arrested, the apostles were praying for people and healing the sick out in the "parking lot." The temple was the only game in town as far as people wanting to worship God, so they were being respectful by staying near the edge. But as you can imagine, the "pastoral staff" were not amused by these guys lurking out in the parking lot putting on a better show than what they had going on inside, so they called the cops and had these guys physically removed from their "safe space." Problem solved, right?
Wrong. The Angel of the Lord appeared and told them to go back and do some more, only not in the parking lot this time but in the atrium! Just to clarify again, the Angel of the Lord is seen as the direct voice of God. So God basically intervened directly in this situation, pulled rank, and told them to defy the church authority that claimed to be His exclusive mouthpiece. Things were just going from bad to worse for the high priest and his staff.
When the Angel of the Lord shows up, busts you out of jail, and tells you to do something, you generally go and do it. So the apostles went and began to share directly, inside the atrium, and possibly even on the monorail and inside of the plush seating of the "Jews only or else we'll string you up" inner courts. You can imagine the rage of the high priest, having thought that this whole situation was handled, only to find these guys right under his nose, and not just healing people but preaching a message that contradicted his own! The lines I snipped out of this week's verses are what you would expect in that kind of situation: The priest and his security team rounded up the apostles, had a board meeting, and then roughed them up a bit. But the priest and his hatebats were no match for the direct command of the Angel of the Lord, so the apostles were right back at it as soon as they were done.
If you've never been to a church, you probably don't fully understand the amount of courage this took. Since it's Advent, I'd recommend you go to church this Sunday and stand up in front of everyone and say "Jesus Christ is our saviour! He died on the cross to pay for our sins! He conquered death, and our religious obligations, to offer us eternal life!" (If you're feeling less bold, you can leave out the "religious obligations" bit as that one is rather controversial still amongst career clergy.)
I can guarantee that approximately half of the people will act as though they'd never heard such a preposterous thing in their lives. You can probably feel your anxiety mounting just thinking about it, even though there's no danger of lynching, or getting beaten and whipped, or even of the cops showing up. The worst that would happen, other than the angry stares, would be some elderly usher wearing something like a band uniform politely asking you to leave. So you can get a feel for how dedicated the apostles were, as well as how fired up the Angel of the Lord's pep talk made them.
So, apart from the apostles' fearless dedication, an exclusive call directly from God that didn't get filtered down through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the perspective to not let beatings scare them off, what else cool is there in these verses? The proclamation that Jesus is the messiah and that there is a new life available to us! If you were to do a top ten of things Christians yell out over megaphones to passing crowds, those two things probably wouldn't make the top five. And yet they're the top of God's list.
Going from memory, I'd say that the modern evangelism message goes something like this: "Stop fornicating, you whores! And quit drinking alcohol and using drugs! You're going to hell! All of you! And stay away from the movies! You need to come to our church and memorize the Bible or else you will burn for eternity in hell! Nothing you ever do will make it right, except tithing, buying our worship albums, and Jesus Christ, in that order." And yet the Angel of the Lord didn't send these apostles to a nearby university or a shopping mall, but to the church itself, and not to preach about the ten commandments, but the one thing that is more important: Jesus. And instead of listing the hateful things we're not supposed to do, they shared the new life we have instead, thanks to the love of God.
So looking at this in the theme of evangelism, we can wonder if maybe the first step of evangelism might be our own churches. Modern doctrine says to evangelise people by bringing them to church, so they can be fed into the ecclesiastical sales funnel and eventually help pay down that pricey monorail. But God seems to suggest that finding Jesus and going to church are different things, and in order for church to be useful to people looking for Jesus, the people in that church have to have that new life and that awareness that Jesus is the messiah.
So, play a game this week. When you go to church next, or hang out with your Christian friends, remind them that we have salvation because of Jesus. If you mention it first, you win! If someone else beats you to it, you both win!
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