The NXR Podcast - January 14, 2023


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

Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Apostle Paul Sabbath Barnabas Reformed Baptist Sabbatarian Thomas
DAILY TRUTH - Are Miraculous Gifts For Today？ DAILY TRUTH - Social Justice Gone Wrong

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

187.46

Word count

1,826

Sentence count

98

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 All right, listen, guys, I get it.
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00:00:43 Was the early church being tyrannical when they met daily, Acts 2, 46, or do you see it as a
00:00:49 temporary aspect of the inauguration? Great question. No, I don't think it was tyrannical.
00:00:54 I think, you know, for one, you had another level of authority that we just don't have today.
00:01:00 You had apostles of Christ. For the record, the word apostle, it literally translates as just a
00:01:06 messenger or erander. So it's just, you know, so my point is the apostle, you know, all human
00:01:13 authority is vested authority and apostles would be no different. So the apostle doesn't have any
00:01:19 inherent authority in and of themselves. So here's the question. When you're measuring the
00:01:24 authority of an apostle. An apostle is just an errander. So the question is, who sent them on
00:01:30 an errand? That's how you gauge what degree of authority they have, right? So if it's an apostle
00:01:35 of the church, which there were in the book of Acts, that's what Barnabas was. Barnabas is an
00:01:40 apostle of the church, right? He's sent down to the church at Antioch to see what's going on there,
00:01:48 see if the doctrine is sound and those kinds of things. And he's sent as an errander from the
00:01:53 church at Jerusalem. And so he's not an apostle of Christ, an eyewitness of the resurrected Lord
00:01:58 and commissioned by Christ and endowed with authority. But he is still an apostle of sorts.
00:02:03 He's an apostle of the church. So you have apostles of the church and you have apostles of
00:02:07 Christ. You only have a few apostles of Christ with a very clear criteria for them.
00:02:13 And apostles of Christ, what makes them more significant in their authority is an apostle,
00:02:18 no matter what kind of apostle it is, an apostle is an erander. So the question is,
00:02:23 who sent you on the errand. If you were sent directly by Christ on his behest, that Christ
00:02:30 is the one who sent you, then you're speaking for Christ. And so that's Christ's authority.
00:02:37 The church's authority is nothing to scoff at, but the church's authority is subservient to
00:02:41 Christ's authority, who is the head of the church. So we had apostles of Christ. And so if apostles
00:02:47 of Christ are saying we need to meet daily, then Christ, in a sense, is saying we need to meet
00:02:51 daily. And then, yeah, I would agree with your assessment that it's probably because of this
00:02:55 temporary season of the inauguration of the new covenant, the beginning of the Christian
00:02:59 church. But I think more likely, that would be my kind of secondary answer, possibility,
00:03:06 but my primary, my inclination is to say that they were meeting together primarily
00:03:11 of their own free will. That it was not so much, hey, if you skip, if you meet on Monday,
00:03:20 Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but skip Tuesday, you're in sin, because this is
00:03:25 an official ecclesiastical order that you are disobeying. I think it was less of that,
00:03:33 and I think it was more of simply the sense that when the church says they're meeting together
00:03:38 daily, I don't believe that it's necessarily church, an official gathering of the saints for
00:03:44 the administering of the ordinary means of grace. So what I mean is, so Paul mentions, for instance,
00:03:50 he says, when you are gathered together on the first day of the week, that you should take a
00:03:55 collection, an offering, bring in your first fruits offerings so that when he comes, he can
00:04:01 collect this offering that's already been gathered rather than having to try to coerce or try to
00:04:07 get people to come up with some kind of donation when he arrives. And he's going to take this
00:04:12 offering to another church that was experiencing hardship and financial disparity. But the point
00:04:19 is, Paul, I know it's brief. I know it's not the strongest case for the Christian Sabbath and
00:04:25 Christ renewing the Sabbath by virtue of his resurrection, raising from the dead on the first 0.64
00:04:29 day of the week, renewing the Sabbath from the last of the first. But that would be one scriptural
00:04:34 example. The point is, Paul knows that many of the Christians are gathering together every day,
00:04:39 daily, right? For the breaking of bread and prayer and to commit themselves to the apostles'
00:04:44 teaching. This is the daily practice of the church. But Paul assumes that everyone will be
00:04:49 gathered together on the first day of the week. And I don't think he just says you're gathered
00:04:53 together all together every day of the week, but on the first day of the week, that's the day that
00:04:57 you get paid. And so that's the day you should bring your offering. Or because it's the first
00:05:01 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 that fruits work, right? So when we give our first fruits, most people give monthly because
00:05:10 they get paid monthly or they give, you know, weekly because they get paid weekly. And we want
00:05:14 to give first fruits, not just what's left over. And to do the first fruits, you have to give the
00:05:18 first from when you receive the fruit, when you're paid. But if you're a farmer, you receive fruit
00:05:25 once a year. You may actually only give annually when you actually harvest. It depends on your
00:05:31 vocation. It depends on all those kinds of things. So I don't think Paul is saying everybody gets
00:05:35 paid weekly and everybody gets paid on the first day of the week. No, I think Paul is saying,
00:05:40 you guys, the church is gathering together informally, organically, daily, but there's
00:05:46 some kind of official gathering that the Apostle Paul assumes that's taking place on the first day
00:05:51 of the week. So that would be the logical context that everyone's there to take an offering.
00:05:58 And so anyway, so all that being said, I'm confessionally Reformed, 1689, Reformed Baptist,
00:06:03 this particular Baptist, I am Sabbatarian. I hold to the Christian Sabbath, which has been held for
00:06:08 hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years by Protestants, that we are still
00:06:13 Sabbatarian. The Sabbath belongs to the moral law of God, the Ten Commandments, and not the 0.91
00:06:19 ceremonial law of God, which has been fulfilled, but also abrogated by Christ. But rather, it
00:06:27 belongs to the moral law, but the Sabbath has been not removed, but renewed, because Christ is Lord
00:06:31 of the Sabbath. And as Lord of the Sabbath, he doesn't remove the Sabbath, but renews the Sabbath
00:06:36 from the last day of the week to the first. And he does so by virtue of his resurrection. And then
00:06:40 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 the apostles a week later, again, on the first day of the week when Thomas is now there. And Paul
00:06:51 mentions, he emphasizes the first day of the week, this assumption that you're all going to be
00:06:55 gathered together for the administering of the ordinary means of grace, and that that would be
00:06:58 the proper context to take an offering. I think that there is biblical merit and there's certainly
00:07:03 merit in church history, confessions and creeds and these kinds of things. And so I would hold
00:07:09 to the Christian Sabbath as a reformed Protestant. All that being said, again, I think that what's
00:07:17 probably happening with the church meeting daily is we still do that now, 2,000 years removed from
00:07:23 Christ's earthly ministry, my church, many members in the church gather together on just about a
00:07:30 daily basis. You have one family in your home for dinner, you're going to visit these other families,
00:07:34 you're doing a Bible study with so-and-so, and these aren't church-sanctioned programs, right?
00:07:38 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 a tyrant. There's a difference between the authority of counsel and the authority of command,
00:07:47 right? A lot of times as a pastor, I'll counsel someone, but if it's not directly from Scripture,
00:07:52 then I'm not going to command it, which means I'm not going to overly bind their conscience.
00:07:56 I'm going to leave room for them to disagree. And so I don't necessarily think that this is
00:08:02 under an apostolic command that every member of the church is gathering corporately together
00:08:08 for the Lord's Supper. They're breaking bread. I think that there's a difference. This is not
00:08:12 like 1 Corinthians 11 that's referring to the Lord's Supper, and I think that first day of
00:08:17 the week gathering on the Lord's Day versus, you know, breaking bread daily and committing
00:08:23 themselves to the apostles' teaching and prayer, I think that that's more so referring to potluck
00:08:27 meals, that people are just in each other's homes, exercising hospitality, sharing a meal
00:08:34 together, praying together, discussing doctrine and theology and the apostles' teaching together
00:08:39 and spurring one another on to love and good works in this informal, organic thing daily.
00:08:44 But then the whole church, not just subgroups of the church, but the whole church gathers
00:08:48 together on the first day of the week for the preaching of the word, praying of the 0.97
00:08:52 word, singing of the word in hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, and seeing, S-E-E-I-N-G
00:08:59 of the word, and the only two images that have been prescribed directly by Christ himself,
00:09:03 which is baptism and the Lord's Supper.
00:09:06 And that also would be the proper context for receiving an offering.
00:09:09 I think that that's, so anyway, so I don't think it's tyrannical because I don't think
00:09:13 that it was an official ecclesiastic or apostolic command. I think that this is not prescriptive,
00:09:22 but rather descriptive. The book of Acts is describing the daily life of Christians.
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