NOTES for Act 5:1-11
We human beings are an amazingly inconsistent people. How frightening it can be for us to step beyond the line after which there is no return. How much we want to leave ourselves a backup option, an alternate runway... In everyday life this may work, but spiritually, as today's story about Ananias and Sapphira shows, it does not. And now it is fairly easy to understand what was wrong with Ananias's "worldly wisdom"; how much more in that time, when the will of God was not sought but simply known and seen within oneself, because the Spirit filled them.
This story was practically the first serious attempt by the devil, as we now understand it a completely useless attempt, to take revenge for the Resurrection. He had already tried to destroy the very young Church from the outside through those same Pharisees and scribes so dear to him. Through those whom Christ also accuses of inconsistency. After all, if they had loved and relied on the Lord with all their soul and had been sincere to the end in their faith, including their faith in the words of Moses, then "you would believe Me, for he wrote of Me" (John 5:46). But for them, as for all of us, it is more convenient to choose how and what to believe from what is offered, and what to leave to our own judgment.
Still, God won again. Now the evil one is trying to collapse from within the building founded by his enemy. Yet we know that "the gates of hell shall never prevail" against the Church (see Matt. 16:18), even now, when in many ways it is weaker than the community of the first apostles. And then, in the times described in the first several chapters of Acts, the Lord's power was so clearly upon His faithful that a person who allowed not the Spirit of the Lord but the spirit of the evil one to enter him, while also claiming a share in salvation, simply could not survive. It was so physically impossible for sin to remain before the face of God. Unfortunately, we manage to do that now...