Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 5

A certain man named Ananias.—We encounter the name again as belonging to the high priest in Acts 23:2; it was the Greek form of the Hebrew Hananiah. It had the same significance as John, or Johanan: “The Lord be gracious.”

The name “Sapphira” is either connected with the “sapphire,” as a precious stone, or from a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful” or “pleasant.” The whole history must be read in connection with the act of Barnabas. He, it seemed, had gained praise and power by his self-sacrifice. Ananias thought that he could obtain the same result more cheaply. The act shows a strange mingling of discordant elements. Zeal and faith of some sort had led him to profess himself a believer. Ambition was strong enough to win a partial victory over avarice; avarice was strong enough to triumph over truth.

The impulse to sell came from the Spirit of God; it was counteracted by the spirit of evil, and the resulting sin was therefore worse than that of one who lived altogether in the lower, more common forms of covetousness. It was an attempt to serve God and mammon; to gain the reputation of a saint, without the reality of holiness. The sin of Ananias is, in some aspects, like that of Gehazi (2 Kings 5:20–27), but it was against greater light and intensified by a more profound hypocrisy, and it was therefore visited by a more terrible chastisement. We may well trace in the earnestness with which St. James warns men against the peril of the “double mind”—i.e., the heart divided between the world and God (James 1:8; James 4:8)—the impression made on him by such a history as this.

And kept back part of the price.—The mere act of keeping back would not in itself have been sinful. The money was his own, to give the whole or part (Acts 5:4). But the formal act, apparently reproducing that of Barnabas, was an acted lie. The part was offered as if it were the whole. The word for “kept back” is rendered “purloining” in Titus 2:10, and always carried with it the idea of stealthy and dishonest appropriation. It is used in the LXX. of Joshua 7:1, as describing the sin of Achan.

Why hath Satan filled thine heart?—The narrative is obviously intended to leave the impression that St. Peter’s knowledge of the fact came from a supernatural insight. He had that prophetic gift which gave him insight into the hearts of men, and through this outward show of generous devotion he read the baseness and the lie. And that evil he traced to its source. Like the sin of Judas (John 13:2; John 13:27), it had in it a malignant subtlety of evil, which implied the perversion of conscience and will just at the moment when they seemed to be, and, it may be, actually were, on the point of attaining a higher perfection than before. The question “why” implies that resistance to the temptation had been possible. Had he resisted the Tempter, he would have fled from him (James 4:7).

To lie to the Holy Ghost.—The words admit of two tenable interpretations. Ananias may be said to “have lied unto the Holy Ghost,” either:

1. as lying against Him who dwelt in the Apostles whom he was seeking to deceive;
2. or as against Him who was the Searcher of the secrets of all hearts, his own included, and who was grieved (Ephesians 4:31) by this resistance in one who had been called to a higher life.

The apparent parallelism of the clause in Acts 5:4 is in favour of (1); but there is in the Greek a distinction, obviously made deliberately, between the structure of the verb in the two sentences. Here it is used with the accusative of the direct object, so that the meaning is “to cheat or deceive the Holy Spirit;” there with the dative, “to speak a lie, not to men, but to God.” This distinction gives a sense which is at least compatible with (2).

The special intensity of the sin consisted in its being against the light and knowledge with which the human spirit had been illuminated by the divine. The circumstance that it was also an attempt to deceive those in whom that Spirit dwelt in the fullness of its power comes in afterwards as a secondary aggravation.

Whiles it remained . . .—Fresh circumstances are driven home, depriving the act of every possible excuse. Ananias had not been bound by any rule of the Church to make such a gift. At every stage, he was free to act as he thought best; and had he brought part as part, or even brought nothing, he would have been free from any special blame. As it was, the attempt to obtain the reputation of saintliness without the reality of sacrifice involved him in the guilt of both sacrilege, though there had been no formal consecration, and of perjury, though there had been no formulated oath.

Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.—The parallelism between this statement and “lying to the Holy Ghost” in Acts 5:3 has often been used, and perfectly legitimately, as proof that while the Apostles thought of the Spirit as sent by the Father, and therefore distinct in His personality, they yet did not shrink from speaking of Him as God, and so identifying Him with the Divine Essential Being.

Ananias hearing these words fell down. It is to be noted that St. Peter’s words, while they press home the intensity of the guilt, do not contain any formal sentence. In such a case, we may rightly trace that union of natural causation and divine purpose which we express in the familiar phrase that speaks of “the visitation of God” as a cause of death.

The shame and agony of detection, the horror of conscience not yet dead, were enough to paralyse the powers of life. Retribution is not less a divine act because it comes, through the working of divine laws, as the natural consequence of the sin which draws it down. It was necessary, we may reverently say, that this special form of evil, this worst corruption of the best, should be manifestly condemned on its first appearance by a divine judgment.

And we must remember that there is a silence which we may not dare to break as to all but the visible judgment. The dominant apostolic idea of such punishments was that men were delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 5:5). St. Peter himself speaks of those who are judged according to men in the flesh, who yet live according to God in the spirit (1 Peter 4:6).

And the young men arose.—Literally, the younger men, implying the existence of a distinct body as contrasted with the “elders” of the Church. So in Luke 20:26 we find the same word answering in the parallel clause to him that serveth, and opposed to “elders,” where the latter word seems used in a half official sense rather than of age only. We find here, accordingly, rather than in Acts 6:0, the germ of the later diaconate as a body of men set apart for the subordinate services of the community. The special work here done by them was afterwards assigned to the Fossarii, the sextons, or grave-diggers of the Church.

Wound him up.—The word in this sense is found here only in the New Testament. It implies the hurried wrapping in a winding-sheet. It was followed by the immediate interment outside the walls of the city. Custom, resting partly on the necessities of climate, partly on the idea of ceremonial defilement, as caused by contact with a corpse (Numbers 19:11–16), required burial to follow quickly on death, unless there was a more or less elaborate embalmment.

In the act itself we note something like a compassionate respect. There is a reverence for humanity, as such, perhaps for the body that had once been the temple of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), that will not permit men to do as the heathen did, and to inflict dishonour on the lifeless corpse. The narrative implies that the new society had already a burial-place to which they had free right of access. Was it in the Potter’s Field that had been bought to bury strangers in? (Matthew 27:7) Did the body of Ananias rest in the same cemetery with that of Judas? (See Note on Matthew 27:8)