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

187.4551

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 .

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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