The NXR Podcast - January 14, 2023


QUESTIONS - Did The Early Church In Acts Exasperate Its Members？ ｜ Acts 2_46


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

187.46

Word count

1,826

Sentence count

90

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the importance of the Christian Sabbath and the role of the early church in the formation of the New Covenant. We discuss the early Church's Sabbath attendance and whether or not it was tyrannical.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 All right, listen, guys, I get it.
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00:00:43.540 Was the early church being tyrannical when they met daily, Acts 2, 46, or do you see it as a
00:00:49.840 temporary aspect of the inauguration? Great question. No, I don't think it was tyrannical.
00:00:54.880 I think, you know, for one, you had another level of authority that we just don't have today.
00:01:00.720 You had apostles of Christ. For the record, the word apostle, it literally translates as just a
00:01:06.460 messenger or erander. So it's just, you know, so my point is the apostle, you know, all human
00:01:13.340 authority is vested authority and apostles would be no different. So the apostle doesn't have any
00:01:19.200 inherent authority in and of themselves. So here's the question. When you're measuring the
00:01:24.560 authority of an apostle. An apostle is just an errander. So the question is, who sent them on
00:01:30.320 an errand? That's how you gauge what degree of authority they have, right? So if it's an apostle
00:01:35.940 of the church, which there were in the book of Acts, that's what Barnabas was. Barnabas is an
00:01:40.900 apostle of the church, right? He's sent down to the church at Antioch to see what's going on there,
00:01:48.080 see if the doctrine is sound and those kinds of things. And he's sent as an errander from the
00:01:53.620 church at Jerusalem. And so he's not an apostle of Christ, an eyewitness of the resurrected Lord
00:01:58.860 and commissioned by Christ and endowed with authority. But he is still an apostle of sorts.
00:02:03.520 He's an apostle of the church. So you have apostles of the church and you have apostles of
00:02:07.620 Christ. You only have a few apostles of Christ with a very clear criteria for them.
00:02:13.040 And apostles of Christ, what makes them more significant in their authority is an apostle,
00:02:18.620 no matter what kind of apostle it is, an apostle is an erander. So the question is,
00:02:23.100 who sent you on the errand. If you were sent directly by Christ on his behest, that Christ
00:02:30.680 is the one who sent you, then you're speaking for Christ. And so that's Christ's authority.
00:02:37.660 The church's authority is nothing to scoff at, but the church's authority is subservient to
00:02:41.880 Christ's authority, who is the head of the church. So we had apostles of Christ. And so if apostles
00:02:47.900 of Christ are saying we need to meet daily, then Christ, in a sense, is saying we need to meet
00:02:51.520 daily. And then, yeah, I would agree with your assessment that it's probably because of this
00:02:55.720 temporary season of the inauguration of the new covenant, the beginning of the Christian
00:02:59.460 church. But I think more likely, that would be my kind of secondary answer, possibility,
00:03:06.480 but my primary, my inclination is to say that they were meeting together primarily
00:03:11.960 of their own free will. That it was not so much, hey, if you skip, if you meet on Monday,
00:03:20.300 Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but skip Tuesday, you're in sin, because this is
00:03:25.940 an official ecclesiastical order that you are disobeying. I think it was less of that,
00:03:33.040 and I think it was more of simply the sense that when the church says they're meeting together
00:03:38.540 daily, I don't believe that it's necessarily church, an official gathering of the saints for
00:03:44.820 the administering of the ordinary means of grace. So what I mean is, so Paul mentions, for instance,
00:03:50.800 he says, when you are gathered together on the first day of the week, that you should take a
00:03:55.100 collection, an offering, bring in your first fruits offerings so that when he comes, he can
00:04:01.560 collect this offering that's already been gathered rather than having to try to coerce or try to
00:04:07.680 get people to come up with some kind of donation when he arrives. And he's going to take this
00:04:12.160 offering to another church that was experiencing hardship and financial disparity. But the point
00:04:19.400 is, Paul, I know it's brief. I know it's not the strongest case for the Christian Sabbath and
00:04:25.460 Christ renewing the Sabbath by virtue of his resurrection, raising from the dead on the first 0.64
00:04:29.720 day of the week, renewing the Sabbath from the last of the first. But that would be one scriptural
00:04:34.160 example. The point is, Paul knows that many of the Christians are gathering together every day,
00:04:39.280 daily, right? For the breaking of bread and prayer and to commit themselves to the apostles'
00:04:44.940 teaching. This is the daily practice of the church. But Paul assumes that everyone will be
00:04:49.520 gathered together on the first day of the week. And I don't think he just says you're gathered
00:04:53.500 together all together every day of the week, but on the first day of the week, that's the day that
00:04:57.280 you get paid. And so that's the day you should bring your offering. Or because it's the first
00:05:01.120 fruits, it needs to be the first day that you... I don't think that... For one, that's not the way
00:05:06.320 that fruits work, right? So when we give our first fruits, most people give monthly because
00:05:10.480 they get paid monthly or they give, you know, weekly because they get paid weekly. And we want
00:05:14.520 to give first fruits, not just what's left over. And to do the first fruits, you have to give the
00:05:18.660 first from when you receive the fruit, when you're paid. But if you're a farmer, you receive fruit
00:05:25.440 once a year. You may actually only give annually when you actually harvest. It depends on your
00:05:31.400 vocation. It depends on all those kinds of things. So I don't think Paul is saying everybody gets
00:05:35.860 paid weekly and everybody gets paid on the first day of the week. No, I think Paul is saying,
00:05:40.320 you guys, the church is gathering together informally, organically, daily, but there's
00:05:46.140 some kind of official gathering that the Apostle Paul assumes that's taking place on the first day
00:05:51.200 of the week. So that would be the logical context that everyone's there to take an offering.
00:05:58.820 And so anyway, so all that being said, I'm confessionally Reformed, 1689, Reformed Baptist,
00:06:03.820 this particular Baptist, I am Sabbatarian. I hold to the Christian Sabbath, which has been held for
00:06:08.400 hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years by Protestants, that we are still
00:06:13.200 Sabbatarian. The Sabbath belongs to the moral law of God, the Ten Commandments, and not the 0.91
00:06:19.860 ceremonial law of God, which has been fulfilled, but also abrogated by Christ. But rather, it
00:06:27.220 belongs to the moral law, but the Sabbath has been not removed, but renewed, because Christ is Lord
00:06:31.960 of the Sabbath. And as Lord of the Sabbath, he doesn't remove the Sabbath, but renews the Sabbath
00:06:36.120 from the last day of the week to the first. And he does so by virtue of his resurrection. And then
00:06:40.120 he appears to the apostles also on the Lord's day, the first day of the week. And then he appears to
00:06:45.040 the apostles a week later, again, on the first day of the week when Thomas is now there. And Paul
00:06:51.000 mentions, he emphasizes the first day of the week, this assumption that you're all going to be
00:06:55.120 gathered together for the administering of the ordinary means of grace, and that that would be
00:06:58.520 the proper context to take an offering. I think that there is biblical merit and there's certainly
00:07:03.640 merit in church history, confessions and creeds and these kinds of things. And so I would hold
00:07:09.360 to the Christian Sabbath as a reformed Protestant. All that being said, again, I think that what's
00:07:17.000 probably happening with the church meeting daily is we still do that now, 2,000 years removed from
00:07:23.080 Christ's earthly ministry, my church, many members in the church gather together on just about a
00:07:30.300 daily basis. You have one family in your home for dinner, you're going to visit these other families,
00:07:34.280 you're doing a Bible study with so-and-so, and these aren't church-sanctioned programs, right?
00:07:38.380 I don't do a bunch of midweek programs. Like I said earlier, I don't think the church needs to be
00:07:42.200 a tyrant. There's a difference between the authority of counsel and the authority of command,
00:07:47.360 right? A lot of times as a pastor, I'll counsel someone, but if it's not directly from Scripture,
00:07:52.380 then I'm not going to command it, which means I'm not going to overly bind their conscience.
00:07:56.660 I'm going to leave room for them to disagree. And so I don't necessarily think that this is
00:08:02.680 under an apostolic command that every member of the church is gathering corporately together
00:08:08.300 for the Lord's Supper. They're breaking bread. I think that there's a difference. This is not
00:08:12.880 like 1 Corinthians 11 that's referring to the Lord's Supper, and I think that first day of
00:08:17.680 the week gathering on the Lord's Day versus, you know, breaking bread daily and committing
00:08:23.640 themselves to the apostles' teaching and prayer, I think that that's more so referring to potluck
00:08:27.980 meals, that people are just in each other's homes, exercising hospitality, sharing a meal
00:08:34.500 together, praying together, discussing doctrine and theology and the apostles' teaching together
00:08:39.420 and spurring one another on to love and good works in this informal, organic thing daily.
00:08:44.720 But then the whole church, not just subgroups of the church, but the whole church gathers
00:08:48.480 together on the first day of the week for the preaching of the word, praying of the 0.97
00:08:52.120 word, singing of the word in hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, and seeing, S-E-E-I-N-G
00:08:59.260 of the word, and the only two images that have been prescribed directly by Christ himself,
00:09:03.760 which is baptism and the Lord's Supper.
00:09:06.120 And that also would be the proper context for receiving an offering.
00:09:09.740 I think that that's, so anyway, so I don't think it's tyrannical because I don't think
00:09:13.800 that it was an official ecclesiastic or apostolic command. I think that this is not prescriptive,
00:09:22.180 but rather descriptive. The book of Acts is describing the daily life of Christians.
00:09:28.040 Thanks so much for listening. But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor,
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