《The Biblical Illustrator – Acts (Ch.3~4)》(A Compilation)
03 Chapter 3
Verses 1-6
Verses 1-11
Acts 3:1-11
Now Peter and John.
Peter and John
The union of the two brings the narratives of the Gospels into an interesting connection with the Acts. They were probably about the same age (the idea that Peter was some years older than John rests mainly on the pictures which artists have drawn from their imagination, and has no evidence in Scripture), and had been friends from their youth upward. They had been partners as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee (Luke 5:10). They had been sharers in looking for the consolation of Israel, and had together received the baptism of John (John 1:41). John and Andrew had striven which should be the first to tell Peter that they had found the Christ (John 1:41). The two had been sent together to prepare for the Passover (Luke 22:8). John takes Peter into the palace of the high priest (John 18:16), and though he must have witnessed his denials, is not estranged from him. It is to John that Peter turns for comfort after his fall, and with him he comes to the sepulchre on the morning of the resurrection (John 20:6). The eager affection which, now more strongly than ever, bound the two together is seen in Peter’s question, “Lord, and what shall this man do?” (John 21:21); and now they are again sharers in action and in heart, in teaching and in worship. Passing rivalries there may have been, disputes which was the greatest, prayers for places on the right hand and the left (Matthew 20:20; Mark 10:35); but the idea maintained by Renan, that St. John wrote his Gospel to exalt himself at the expense of Peter, must take its place among the delirantium somnia; the morbid imaginations, of inventive interpretation. They appear in company again in the mission to Samaria (Romans 8:14), and in recognising the work that had been done by Paul and Barnabas among the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9). When it was that they parted never to meet again, we have no record. (Dean Plumptre.)
Peter and John
In natural disposition, Peter and John did not very exactly correspond with each other; but diamond polishes diamond, and these two precious stones may have advantageously polished each other. (Rieger.)
Went up together into the temple.--
Public worship
The Christian has to regard this--
I. Negatively.
1. Not as a legal yoke.
2. Not as a meritorious work.
II. Positively.
1. AS a good and useful discipline.
2. As a thankworthy opportunity for increase in goodness. (Lechler.)
Love for worship
“I have in my congregation,” said a minister of the gospel, “a worthy aged woman, who has for many years been so deaf as not to distinguish the loudest sound; and yet she is always one of the first in the meeting. On asking the reason of her constant attendance, as it was impossible for her to hear my voice, she answered, ‘Though I cannot hear you, I come to God’s house because I love it, and would be found in His ways; and He gives me many a sweet thought upon the text when it is pointed out to me: another reason is, because I am in the best company, in the most immediate presence of God, and among His saints, the honourable of the earth. I am not satisfied with serving God in private: it is my duty and privilege to honour Him regularly and constantly in public.’”
We should have set places for the worship of God
The song-birds in our fields have a chosen branch on which they continually perch for their morning and evening songs. In time of encampment Washington reserved to himself a thicket where he could pray undisturbed. Bishop Leighton frequented a grove in a public park which was at last left to him as his own property. In the story of “The Path to the Bush” is an account of the beaten track through the forest to the praying huts of the native converts, and the faithful girl hinting to her sister that “the grass grew on her path.”
The house of God
A new student had come to the university and called to see Professor Tholuck. The latter asked him where he went to church. “Oh,” said he, “I do not attend preaching. Instead of confining myself to the four walls of a building I go out into the green fields, and under the lofty arches of the forest trees I listen to the singing of the birds and the countless melodies of God’s creatures, where everything that hath breath praises the Lord.” Then the professor asked him, “But what do you do when it rains?” Conformity to God’s plan is best.
Why do Christians go to church
Is it chiefly in order that they may give or receive, through the services and their own part in them? These questions would be answered very differently by different persons. Some go, out of a glad and grateful heart, to show and to express their gratitude to God, and to bear a part in His public worship. Others go in order to gain some personal advantage through what they see and hear and feel while there. The one sort are pretty sure to accomplish what they go for. They swell the service of prayer and praise, and by their countenance and evident appreciativeness they cheer the heart of the preacher, and give added force to his preaching. The other sort often find their church-going a failure. The singing is not what they hoped for; the prayers fail to meet their wants; the Bible selections are poorly timed to their requirements; and as to the sermon, “it does not feed their souls. It is a great pity that there are comparatively so few of the first class of Christian worshippers, and that there are so many of the second class. And it is a noteworthy fact that those who go to church to do what they can to make the church service a success, grow steadily in character and in intellectual power; while those who go there with a chief desire to be the personal gainers by their going, shrink and dwindle in their personality. The poorest specimens of church-goers are those who are constantly complaining that the preaching “does not feed” them. Hearers of that sort are like Pharaoh’s lean kine; the more they swallow the leaner they look. In this sphere, as well as in every other, the words of our Lord Jesus are true, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” (H. C. Trumbll, D. D.)
At the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.--
Hours of prayer
The ninth hour was 3 p.m., the hour of the evening sacrifice (Jos. Ant. 14.4, § 3). The traditions of later Judaism had fixed the third, the sixth, and the ninth hours of each day as times for private prayer. Daniel’s practice of praying three times a day seems to imply a rule of the same kind, and Psalms 55:17 (“Evening and morning and at noon will I pray”) carries the practice up to the time of David. “Seven times a day” was, perhaps, the rule of those who aimed at a life of higher devotion (Psalms 119:164). Both practices passed into the usage of the Christian Church certainly as early as the second century, and probably therefore in the first. The three hours were observed by many at Alexandria in the time of Clement (Strom. 7. p. 722)
. The seven became the “canonical hours” of Western Christendom, the term first appearing in the rule of St. Benedict (ob. a.d. 542)
and being used by Bede (a.d. 701). (Dean Plumptre.)
The proper hour of worship
Rowland Hill well knew how to seize the best opportunity for reproving culpable habits in his hearers. One of them, who, to his great annoyance, avoided coming to chapel in time for the prayers, and arrived only just soon enough to hear the sermon, complained to him of partiality in a magistrate. He gave him one of his most searching looks, and said with an emphasis and manner peculiar to himself, “Then why do you not come to public worship in proper time to pray that God would ‘grant all magistrates grace to execute justice and maintain truth’?”
The hour of prayer
1. The companions. This first verse reveals, as by a flash-light, the spirit of these companions. Peter and John together. What antipodes 1 Peter, impulsive, bold, energetic, daring; John, meditative, timid, loving, trustful. What ground in nature for fellowship between them? Yet, like Luther and Melanchthon in the crisis of a later age, they were joined in the strength and beauty of a friendship in Christ that gave to each supplemental grace and energy.
2. “Going up into the temple,” though the vail had been rent and the lesson of the spirituality and universality of worship had been taught them! Peter and John had reverence for sacred places--that reverence which is a mark of depth and spirituality in the religious life. These early disciples did not spurn religious custom, though it was a custom of a decadent Jewish Church. To their devout souls history and sacred associations meant something. Character that is strong has roots. These grow deep and take hold of institutions representing thought and life and history. Luther was loth to leave the old Catholic Church, Romanised and corrupt as it was. Wesley always clung to the Church of England. Superstition you may call this clinging to the venerable and historic. Well, if the choice is between irreverence and superstition, give me superstition. Irreverence weakens conscience and blunts the spiritual edge of character. Superstition, as the devout Neander has well said, often paves the way to faith. God’s plan was not to obliterate Judaism at a stroke, but to transform it.
3. “At the hour of prayer” went these devout men. But what need had they for prayer, just fresh from the open revelation and spiritual excitement of Pentecost? By this act they teach that prayer is apostolic; that special seasons of illumination and sanctification are a special call to prayer. Though men may not need more fire, yet need they more grace. Religion means daily duty, not occasional ecstasy. “Suspect any inspiration that makes you contemptuous of ordinary religious duties.” After your Pentecost be found “going up into the temple at the hour of prayer.” (W. P. Thirkkield.)
And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was carried.--
Spiritual lameness
I turn to the story because it brings before us very vividly the whole problem that lies before you and me; the whole problem that lies before the Church; the whole problem that lies before our Master. When you see that lame man carried daily and laid in all his helplessness at the gate of the temple, you get a very vivid picture of the whole problem. Do not let us gather round this impotent man in a questioning, philosophical way, and ask, “How did he become so?” Let us not start vain, seemingly wise, but at bottom foolish questions. The real problem is not, How did we come here? Why are we (the grace of God apart) such wretched creatures? Why is there in London and everywhere else such moral and spiritual impotence? Why is there in the East End, and not less in the West End--only it is better dressed and covered up--that which is so powerfully represented by this helpless man, that squirming misery, that loathsomeness, that wretchedness, that godlessness which no power of art or aesthetics can in the least alleviate? With all our culture, with all our philosophy, with all our fine speeches, and all our fine talking, to this hour there is the situation of things: human nature weary, abject, dejected, sick of itself, utterly loathsome, useless, and helpless; and the problem is not as I have said, “How did he come there?” but “How is that man to be got up?” not “How did you fall into the sea?” but “How are we going to get you out?” Let us turn to this story, then, to see how the great problem that baffles man’s wisdom and love even at its best, how the great problem is solved by Jesus Christ and by His humble servants in His name, working in immediate contact with an absent and uncrowned Lord. Man or woman here who objects to this description of human nature, disprove what I am saying; rise in the might of your own goodness, rise in the might of your own morality, rise in the strength and dignity of human nature, which you think I am talking against, and display it in this fashion: Walk in your own strength into God’s presence. Come, you cannot. The more you try it the more you prove you are an impotent man. This man saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, and he asked help. “And Peter, fastening his eyes on him, with John, said, Look on us.” I would we preachers could learn more thoroughly to do after them, for we do not find that the impotent first of all looked at them, but it certainly is strikingly curious that Peter and John fastened their eyes upon him. He saw them. They might have gone past. He looked at them for ordinary help just as he looked at any others, but the point is that Peter and John did not go past that man. They challenged him. Let us challenge the world’s need. We are blamed--it is the deepest part of the charge against us in newspaper and magazine articles, and there is too much truth in it, and the sting of it lies in its truth--that we are walking past the problem. Peter and John might have been so busily engaged in talking--talking, it may be, about Jesus Christ and the resurrection--that they would have swept past this man. He was not a very attractive sight to look upon, and it would have been very convenient, would it not, for them to have gathered up their garments and swept into the temple past him to engage in the worship of God, and to engage in high and holy converse on the mighty things which were, of course, within their ken? Is there not a good deal of church-going which is just that to-day? Let me ask you point blank, face to face, what is your church-going very often but just that walking past, and turning your blind eye to the squirming wretchedness all around you? When did you put out your hand to alleviate it? When did you utter Christ’s almighty name over it? Aye, this is far too true, that the worship of God with many of us is a denial of God; it is a useless, blind, formalistic, stupid, heartless thing. It has no power towards God or towards man. It is in ourselves and belonging to ourselves--a mere thing of dress, and of Sunday parading to the temple and home again. And the misery of the East End, and of the fat, well-fed, but still wretched West End, is utterly untouched by our Christianity. Not so with Peter and John. Do we believe after all at bottom the conclusion of the whole matter is this: sin is here not to defeat us, but to be defeated by us, to be changed into life and holiness by the power of Him who sits enthroned above the stars of God, even Jesus Christ. It is time that we did, whether we do or not--more than time. Peter and John fastened their eyes upon him and looked at him. They did not go past him. What a lesson for preachers! There are teachers abroad, let me tell you, who do not want to see you; you are a hard nut for them to crack. Why, when you were better off they could speak to you, and you go to them, but since these hard days have come upon you you have dropped going there. When comfort was needed they were too cold. Now, you are right for the gospel. Christ Jesus is here for the sake of this impotent man, and He has lifted up you and me, if we are lifted up, that we may go and fetch the others who have not been brought yet. This is really the whole scope and purpose of the mighty work which God has done upon you, and I rather fear that you are forgetting it. Think of Peter and John stepping forward there. Try to catch the light in their faces as their eyes burned like twin lamps, when, not only they, but Christ, the loving Saviour, in them and through them, bent down and stretched out a hand and looked into the very despairing soul of that helpless creature. And then let me understand, and let you, O Christian worker, understand how much is needed to be, indeed, in this wretched world a servant of Jesus Christ. Oh, if we are able to bring ourselves and our Christ into naked, palpitating contact, let us do so. Let us stand over the perishing as though we meant to take a two-handed grasp of them, and by our own power to lift them right off the sodden bed on which sin has stretched them. Ah, we need an eye in our head, and a tongue in our mouths, and a hand at the end of our arm which has in it some tingle of everlasting love, and we need a heart working behind all three which has been kindled from the heart of Jesus Christ, who for us men and for our salvation took flesh and died upon the Cross. “And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something of them.” That is something.