hush hung heavy over the people between the tall white columns of the East Portico. They sat or stood, stunned: strung out somewhere between reverence and fear. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Sacrificial animals died daily in this place, but the instant death of a man among them from a spoken word had shocked all and terrified many.

Behind them in the Temple’s great court, sounds from the moving crowds even seemed subdued. Though, perhaps this was as much the lingering effects of a Nazarene prophet’s violent ejection of noisy merchants and haggling money-changers, nearly four months before, as from news of the shock death. The victim had been a man of good repute among the Nazarene’s followers. They could blame nobody. It had happened right amongst them, without any outside interference.

Even the Temple police had not interfered. There had been no visible violence toward the deceased and no disorder had arisen, so the small burial party had been allowed to quietly remove his body. It was three hours now since they had carried his corpse out from between the white columns of the great Portico. Yet, in the shock, no-one had left the worship meeting even to tell his wife. She didn't know…

When she came, she seemed unaware of the tension among the people and insensitive to the silent tears and muffled sobs between their muttered prayers. A subdued shuffle of bodies on the marble paving made space for her.

But the sound of her name brought her upright, and a path opened through the people before her as she came forward in answer. Among the high columns the worshippers watched intently as she lifted her head to hear the question.

sell the land for this much?” His voice was heavy with sadness but audible to all. With almost imperceptible hesitation she answered quickly.

of course – of course we did!” Her reply came just too quickly, as though to think about it caused discomfort. Her mind raced. Joseph, called the Encourager, had been lauded for his generosity; surely their gift also would now be praised among the people.

As the rebuke came her back stiffened noticeably.

could you have agreed together to test the Spirit of God? See! Those who buried your husband have returned and will carry you out.”

Her sharp gasp cut through the waiting silence as a look of bewilderment spread across her face. Reaching out an unsteady hand for support, she slumped to the floor – and was gone.

Women wept openly and men stood or sat in stunned silence. Just as her husband had died among them three hours earlier; so now she also, right among them, in their worship, and under public rebuke.

Yet the leaders of their worship continued on, guiding this first Christian congregation as though her husband’s shock death, and now her own also, were somehow a part of their worship discipline. This, among followers of a teacher who had defied religious leaders to prevent even the stoning of a prostitute!

As the meeting continued, their young men, who had just returned, respectfully wrapped her limp corpse and carried it quietly away to bury beside the husband whom she had trusted more than her conscience. The spiritual ministry continued; but people began to leave.

Attendance dropped sharply at meetings of Jerusalem’s young church, yet something else also changed. A new sense of the holy seemed to grow in the after shock; not of their meeting place as imposing as it was, but – of the people, the people who gathered there, the people in whom the Spirit dwelt.

Even though the grand setting of Solomon’s Portico in the Temple’s great outer court was a fitting place. It now really seemed irrelevant. A new sense of the sacred pervaded their meetings. Since news of the double death had spread, even those who had not been there at the time preferred to watch from a safer distance rather than sit among the believers.

To the pilgrim crowds that swirled continually through the Temple courts, these believers were now no longer just another reforming Jewish sect. Even out in the streets of the city, the public preaching of their leaders was being held in new esteem; especially of the Galilean who had spoken the fateful words. Simeon was now looked upon with such a different attitude by the people that many who had been sick were even saying that his passing shadow had healed them.

Their public presence among the columns of the Portico seemed to own a reverence more appropriate than the gilding of the Temple’s own finery. A sense of the Nazarene prophet’s Presence was among His people. To be with them was in a sense to be with Him.

Among the crowds that filled the Temple courts, a tide of conversions to the Way of Jesus began. Even beyond Jerusalem, the villages of the district sent their sick and their seeking to find hope from the messengers of this Way. All this: because His authority had been asserted among His people, concerning His people.

Their presence in the city could no longer be ignored by the authorities. His people had become a city within the city. Their life could not be contained. It must be stopped. The chief priests of the Temple met. But the teacher from Nazareth, whom they had so envied and hated, had already spoken –

Soon they would come to know the significance of His words publicly spoken to such an unimpressive assemblage of His followers before He had left them –

The sense of the sacred among these people-of-the-kingdom had not begun from the death tragedy in Solomon’s Portico. This young church’s background of amazing unity and uninhibited sharing of resources against which the donation deception occurred had grown out of its earlier experience when –

Then as now, the catalyst for this holy fear was Simon Peter’s assertive faith: confronting his nation in the crowded street of its capital city –

Once more, now among the believers in the temple portico, it is Peter’s assertive faith which God instantly honours in his words of judgment, and its shock effect of holy fear produces the same dynamic it had done on the day the church first began its mission. At that time, as a consequence of this holy fear –

Much later, Luke’s history implicates this same fob’os discipline as a norm for real church growth (as opposed to audience increase) with the words –

Leadership’s responsibility for direction cannot be over emphasised. Special responsibility for the state of the church is the heart of leadership. In this regard, Christ’s example of openly confronting for compromising God’s word and misleading the people had set a direction which the first church followed.

This sad couple’s congregation, Christianity’s first church, was enjoying an incredible quality of spiritual and practical unity.

Together, they had shared intense trauma and ecstatic joy: humiliation in the criminal crucifixion of their founder naked outside the gate of their holy city; His sudden physical re-appearance in resurrection, before more than 500 hundred of them at once on a Galilean mountain; and then the powerful baptism in the Holy Spirit Himself of some 120 in prayer at Pentecost, and later. Although the close-knit nature of Jerusalem’s church made this couple’s discipline even more traumatic to the rest of their congregation, its severity also highlighted the character of that unity to which they had been unwisely unfaithful.

The Jerusalem church took its character from the core group which Jesus had trained as foundation apostles. He had instructed –

The couple’s donation deception betrayed the fabric of this love into which new believers had been woven as Christ’s people. As such, it violated their spiritual identity in this world. For this reason –

Their shock discipline was rooted in the quality of life which at that time was intrinsic to being the people of Jesus. The unity of these believers was more than a common sentiment. It was more than a product of human bonding. Nor was it produced by any programme of group activity. It was the unity of a deeply shared purpose that arose from their common spiritual identity in Jesus through the Spirit of God Himself –

This ethos of giving in the first church had been established by Jesus Himself in His teaching –

This was a call to fear-free living, to elevate one’s assets to God’s priorities rather than accumulating them as security against the anxieties of life.

Peter makes it plain that they were not under any absolute command to sell or to give their possessions. There was no compulsion to liquidise assets in support of the church's poor-relief program. The people’s admiration for Joseph, nicknamed Barnabas, was precisely because he gave all in a heart-felt and voluntary act. So, Peter had faced them with –

Their giving, and therefore their deception over the price, was by their choice alone. To use their charitable opportunity as a facility to deceive in order to be admired was inexcusable.

Further than Christ’s teaching on giving, at the core of the congregation’s spiritual identity lay oneness in their shared experience of the Spirit of God. The unity of this first church expressed the oneness of the Holy Spirit, by whom the church held together and grew. It was born into its mission through the gift of the Spirit, and from the Spirit came the church’s growth. Simon Peter’s accusation against this deceitful twosome included –

In describing deception of the congregation as lying ‘to the Holy Spirit’, Peter reflected the intimacy between the Spirit of God and the believers in this first church’s thinking; an intimacy that amounted in practice to the Spirit’s virtual identification with the believers. This association of Spirit and believer is still foremost in Peter’s thinking when later, interrogated by the authorities after a night in prison with the other apostles, they respond –

As Christians, this deceiving couple had also received the Holy Spirit. For this reason their attempt to win honour among the believers by deception was a blasphemy of their spiritual identity and, as such, utterly intolerable. Lying to the believers, believers that they were spiritually part of, was thus effectively a lying to the Holy Spirit!

Yes, the first church’s understanding did need time to catch up with the reality of its experience, so it is helpful to our understanding also to hear two statements of the apostle Paul written many years later –

      And –

The Bible tells us that this relationship to the Spirit of God is so important that, even the resurrected Jesus Himself gave commands to His apostles ‘through the Holy Spirit’. Accordingly, He told them therefore not to leave Jerusalem until they had received the Spirit.

have taught us that this authority in the Holy Spirit was only for a special inaugural period and so is inappropriate today. This idea may mitigate their own lack of spiritual authority, but to subscribe to this teaching is to be responsible for hindering the restoration of God’s authority in His church. As such they also are in danger of being removed for damage done to the congregations of the Lord’s Beloved.

This authority continued as the Christian church spread: from Jerusalem-the-holy to Corinth-the-immoral, from Israel’s great religious centre to the Gentile commercial centre of renowned debauchery. The believers of Corinth are described as ‘one body’ and so the discipline must therefore be applied. But now it is not financial misrepresentation but a continuing immoral practice that needs action and so Paul instructs in the Holy Spirit –

Much later, in this context of Christian unity, the apostle John urges the careful and loving protection of the spiritual character of the Lord’s church by all believers –

Above all, the people of Jesus are sacred for they are pre-eminently the place of the Holy Spirit. He is now in the leadership place that Jesus had held in relation to the disciples, as Jesus Himself taught them –

God’s love in God’s people is the affection of His Spirit. In this is all that is ever to be evaluated in the life of the spiritual family of Christ. It is the response of the Spirit of God which affirms the reality of Christian identity.

These two aspects then speak loudly to us also today:
      1. identification between the Spirit of God and the people of Jesus;
      2. and the authority to protect that relationship and its ensuing quality of life.

The Jerusalem church was not the first church because that city was simply first to respond to the gospel of Jesus. Galilee was far more responsive. Yet, while Jerusalem was still the centre of murderous opposition, Jesus commanded the Galilean disciples not to leave this city until they had received the Holy Spirit.

It is thus by Christ’s command that Jerusalem became the place of the first church. The greater cost to these disciples of being the beginning was still acknowledged many years later among the Gentiles when Paul wrote –

The launch of Christianity with its first church in this city was not because Jerusalem was the place of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Even less was it because Israel’s temple was there. Rather these were because of something far predating Israel’s presence in that city.

Christian sentiment toward this city has left this relationship between church and city unquestioned and has debased it to no more than a place of pilgrimage made holy by history. But this relationship reaches back long before national Israel had any claim to this city. It is a relationship whose significance spans Bible history from Genesis to Revelation, and began even before the Bible began. This relationship provides us with the framework within which to understand the context of God’s authority in His people and its awesome completion in history.

Melchizedek’s ancient city, Salem-Jerusalem, symbolizes God’s people; the precious people to whom Christ will return in the glory of His kingdom. In this theme the first principles of church life were to be demonstrated in the first church – in this city.

That the Jerusalem church never fully understood the newness of Christ’s church and that it therefore later required a displacement from this centre to effectively launch the mission to non-Jews, does not negate the root significance of Jerusalem city as a biblical theme of the relationship between the Lord and His people – a relationship prefigured in the faith of Abraham; which faith the Christian church has always understood itself as being the continuation of …

God is not a charity worker, simply handing out sops to keep you going. He builds His people for victory: