...
ways in which our blessed Lord is referred
to in this book.
And we've already found wonderful pictures of him,
the man who was taken up, the ascended
man, in the first chapter.
And in the second chapter, again, a very
unique thing in the coming of the Holy
Spirit to bear witness to his, shall I
say, his welcome in heaven, and coming down
here to represent him.
And then we were looking at him again
in chapter three, as the Prince of Life,
last night.
This evening I'm skipping over the rest of
chapter three, and coming into chapter four.
In the presence of the people, that is,
the apostles, the priests and the captain of
the temple, and the Sadducees came upon them,
being grieved or distressed that they taught the
people and preached through Jesus the resurrection from
the dead.
And they laid hands on them and put
them in hold until the next day, for
it was now eventide.
Howbeit many of them which heard the word
believed, and the number of the men was
about five thousand.
And it came to pass on the morrow
that their rulers and elders and scribes, and
Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John,
and Alexander, and as many as were of
the kindred of the high priest, were gathered
together at Jerusalem.
And when they had set them in the
midst, they asked, By what power, or by
what name, have ye done this?
Then Peter filled with the Holy Ghost said
unto them, Ye rulers of the people, and
elders of Israel, if we this day be
examined of the good deed done to the
impotent man, by what means he is made
whole, be it known unto you all, and
to all the people of Israel, that by
the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom
ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead,
even by him, doth this man stand here
before you whole.
And now we come to a fresh revelation
concerning our Lord.
In this eleventh verse, this is the stone
which was set at naught of you builders,
which is become the head of the corner.
Neither is there salvation in any other, for
there is none other name under heaven given
among men, whereby we must be saved.
I suppose most of us are familiar with
the fact that Christendom, as we know it,
is divided into, broadly, into two schools of
thought.
Those who are known as conservatives or fundamentalists,
and those who are known as liberals or
modernists.
Sometimes we get the idea that this is
something rather new, something rather recent.
But as we look back in the book
here, we find that they had similar divisions
back in the days of our Lord and
in the days of the apostles.
And these Sadducees mentioned here in the first
verse of our chapter tonight, they represent one
of these schools of thought opposed to that
of the Pharisees.
The Pharisees might be what we would call
the fundamentalists of that day.
They believed in the literal word of God.
But the Sadducees were the rationalists.
They did not believe in a resurrection.
They did not believe in an angel or
spirit, as we are told later on in
this same book of the Acts.
They had no use for that.
My friend Sidlow Baxter has very aptly noticed
that that's why they're sad, you see, because
they have no hope beyond this.
But these people are never content to keep
their beliefs to themselves, nor to let other
people believe what they want to believe.
And so we find that they're out to
get these people who believe in the resurrection,
and not only the resurrection, but you notice
it's a special kind of resurrection.
Did you notice as we were reading this
in the second verse it says, and they
preach through Jesus, the resurrection not merely of
the dead, but from the dead.
That is, from among the dead.
This was something which perplexed the disciples when
the Lord Jesus made reference to this in
his ministry here on earth.
This is something which is still not understood
by a good many people.
A lot of people still have the notion
that one of these days there's going to
be a general resurrection when everybody that's died
is going to be raised again.
And they don't seem to know that the
Scripture has taught us that there's going to
be a special resurrection from among the dead
before the great resurrection when men will stand
before the great white throne.
The time when the Lord Jesus Christ will
come, and the dead in Christ.
And I take that to refer to all
the saints.
I know that a very recent edition of
a very popular edition of the Bible now
restricts this to New Testament saints.
But in the older note of the Schofield
Reference Bible, you will find that Dr. Schofield
believed that this included all the saints of
the Old Testament as well as the New.
And for the life of me, as I
read 1 Corinthians 15, where I read that
the resurrection of Christ was on this order,
Christ the firstfruits, and afterward they that are
Christ at his coming.
Now if you can eliminate anybody from that
statement, then you've got a system of hermeneutics
or interpretation that I don't know about.
But to me this means that all those
who are his, and he claimed them in
his day when he was here, for he
said, All thine are mine, and mine are
thine, and I am glorified in them.
These are my simple reasons for believing as
I do about this.
But getting back to this matter of the
out-resurrection from among the dead, this is
going to be tremendous.
Not every grave will be opened when the
Lord Jesus Christ comes for his church.
The dead in Christ shall rise first, and
we who are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in clouds to
meet the Lord in the air, and so
shall we ever be with the Lord.
Now I'm sorry to say that there are
many professing Christians, I've already noticed, who don't
know about this.
They're greatly surprised.
They think you're twisting the scripture when you
show them this, but here it is.
And this little difference in the preposition here
is important.
We're going to see how the Apostle stresses
this again a little later on in his
trial the next day, in the trial before
these Sadducees, this resurrection from among the dead.
And so in order to keep this thing
from spreading, we find that these Sadducees had
these men thrown into prison for overnight.
But it's wonderful to read the fourth verse
of this chapter and to find that the
church actually thrives on this kind of persecution.
Because in this fourth verse we read, many
of them that heard the word believed, and
the number of the men was about five
thousand.
You know, sometimes we get in such a
hurry and pray to God to relieve our
brethren of persecution.
And of course, one says, yes, it's easy
enough for you to say what you're about
to say, because you're living in a land
where it's comparatively easy to be a Christian.
But no, I've been in countries where it
isn't easy to be a Christian.
I've known what it means on two occasions
to face my would-be assassins on the
mission field.
So I speak feelingly on this subject.
And so sometimes when I hear of persecution,
and there's plenty of it, there's lots of
persecution in the world today.
I have repeatedly called attention to the fact
that some years ago the United States Press
Agency sent out a report to the effect
that 175,000 Chinese had been done to
death in West China for no other reason
except that they were Christians.
We have reason to believe that in the
years that have rolled by since that report
was made, that that number has grown to
somewhere between two and three millions of people.
And on the basis of this, one makes
the statement that we believe there are more
martyrs to the Christian faith in this twentieth
century in which we live than there were
in all the previous nineteen centuries.
Men and women are being put to death
for Christ's sake.
But you know, this is one of those
things that proves again the old statement that
the blood of the martyrs is the seed
of the Church.
And wherever we see this, we find there's
progress.
God seems to use this very thing in
bringing about growth in the Church.
And here we have a sample of it
right here in this fourth chapter of Acts
tonight.
There are about 5,000 men who believe.
This is a tremendous revival.
Yes, I was looking over the report of
the results of the meeting up in Montreal
this last summer in the Sermons from Science.
And you know, that was quite an undertaking.
And it cost a good deal of money,
something like two-thirds of a million.
And the Brethren are still some $40,000
in debt, as was according to the last
report I had.
And yet they're thinking growing head again next
year.
But so far as I can tell, they
have brought out the number of about 3
,500, which is 1,500 less than this.
And all summer to do it.
You see, friends, we don't even begin to
match what they did in those early days
in the Church.
They're wonderful results, these were.
And so now we come to the trial
the next day.
And what an array of names we have
here.
Here's Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, and
John, and Alexander, and all those who were
the high priestly family, were all there.
It must have been a sort of a
family affair as well as a political situation.
The high ecclesiastical court.
I'm no doubt that this was intended to
overawe these poor ignorant men as they are
described later on in the chapter.
You'll notice down the 13th verse, which we
didn't read, it says, He and I, when
they saw the boldness of Peter and John,
and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant
men.
And you can imagine how they would try
to overawe them with this great ecclesiastical power.
I don't know whether they were wearing their
vestments on this occasion or not, but I
wouldn't put it past them.
You know, to put on their doctor's hoods
and what have you, in order to impress
these poor fishermen with the grandeur and the
glory of what you have.
And now they begin to inquire.
And there are two things in this inquiry
which intrigue me tonight.
It's this.
You'll notice it says here in verse 7,
when they had set them in the midst,
they asked, by what power?
Now that's interesting.
And this word for power is the strong
word for power that we have in the
New Testament.
This is the word from which we get
our word, dynamite.
It wasn't this simply the authority.
But this is a power.
It was an impact.
This made an impact.
And here they're tacitly admitting that there was
something powerful about this.
They couldn't deny it.
Because here's a man over forty years of
age, born a cripple, lying helpless at the
gate of the temple, begging day after day,
and now they see him leaping and praising
God.
This is evidence of a power that they
didn't have before.
And we like to draw a parallel between
that and the power of the gospel of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
You know, sometimes when I hear people talking
about the gospel being obsolete, and that we're
living in a post-Christian era and all
this sort of thing, I just remind you,
dear friends, of something we said the other
day, that nothing is obsolete which is doing
a job that nothing else can do.
And the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ
is doing a job tonight that nothing, no
other school of philosophy can even touch, can
even approach.
It's doing it.
And in spite of all their pretense to
knowledge and all this sort of thing these
days, they have to admit that with all
their counseling and their psychiatry and what have
they, they have not yet matched what the
simple gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ can
do, for it's the power of God and
the salvation to everyone they believe in.
The power.
Then the second thing that intrigues me in
this verse is the name.
You notice it says, By what power or
by what name have ye done this?
And already we've been looking at some of
the names of our Lord, and what a
unique personality he is and was when he
was here on earth.
And they've had to recognize that there's some
power in this name.
This is different.
And we've already seen that he bears names
that no one else could bear.
Yes, that one we were talking about last
night, the Prince of Life.
He's the only one who could rightly bear
that title.
And perhaps in the subsequent study we'll look
at some other names which only he can
bear.
They're his names.
By what name?
Oh, the power of the name of Jesus.
The name that you and I plead every
time we'll really pray.
Praying in the name of Jesus, what power
this has.
As I speak to you about this, I'm
thinking about an incident that took place on
the West Coast.
A spiritist medium came into the office of
Mr. Robert T.
Grant, who was the originator of a little
Spanish gospel paper called Las Buenas Nuevas, The
Good News.
And this spiritist came in and was trying
to argue against Mr. Grant's simple presentation of
the gospel in his little gospel paper, which
is still going out in thousands and hundreds
of thousands of numbers in all of Latin
America and even in Spain.
And finally, the question came, as to which
of the two had the most powerful thing.
And this man was boasting of what he
could do.
He could do this and he could do
that.
And then he looked at Mr. Grant and
said, and what have you got to say
to that?
And Mr. Grant says, there's one thing you
can't do.
What's that?
You can't say, Lord Jesus.
And he couldn't.
Turned on his heel and left the office.
He couldn't say it.
Because the wicked spirit that was possessing him
had no use for the Lord Jesus and
he would never allow this man to frame
that honorable title and call the Lord Jesus
the Lord Jesus.
There's something in this name.
And it's remarkable, isn't it, that even the
ungodly today, when they really want to swear,
this is the name they use.
Why don't they swear by George Washington?
Or a little more modern, by LBJ?
Or Hubert Humphrey?
No, they don't swear by them.
They swear at them, but they don't swear
by them.
And this is remarkable, isn't it, that men
seem to feel that there's something about this
name which will add to what they've got
to say.
That wonderful name.
The name of Jesus.
Now it's time for Peter to answer.
And you'll notice, friends, that Peter is here
filled with the Holy Ghost.
Remember we talked about that the other night,
how to get filled with the Holy Ghost.
We get filled by the Holy Ghost by
letting the word of Christ dwell in us
richly in all wisdom, speaking in psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs and so on.
Yes, Peter was really filled with the Holy
Spirit.
And because he was filled with the Holy
Spirit, he was more than a match for
them, because greater is he that is in
you than he that is in the world.
That's a great text in 1 John 4.
Greater is he that is in you.
That's the Holy Spirit in the believer, is
greater than he that is in the world.
That's the devil.
Yes, the blessed Holy Spirit who is present
in this meeting tonight, and who indwells every
true believer here tonight, and who has taken
every true believer in here tonight, and all
other believers, and baptized them into one body,
this one is greater than he that is
in the world.
Even though he's the prince of this world
and the god of this age, the Holy
Spirit is greater than he.
And here's Peter filled with the Holy Spirit.
And notice how he talks.
This man who was afraid to confess his
Lord before a couple of women, just before
our Lord was crucified, look at him now.
Oh, what a different person he is now.
This always gives me a great deal of
encouragement to know that even though we may
have failed the Lord, how wonderful it is
to be restored to him, and then to
be filled with his Holy Spirit to speak
as he does, when he says, ye rulers
of the people and elders of Israel.
You notice he doesn't say, Your Holiness, the
High Priest, and say anything like that.
No, he'll admit that they're rulers of the
people and elders, but that's it, not giving
them any flattering titles.
He could have done so, you know.
We have an example of this later on
in the book, haven't we?
Most noble festers and so on.
But Peter doesn't, he doesn't use any of
this flattery.
He just acknowledges that they're in a place
of superiority as far as rule is concerned.
He says, if you really want to know,
I can tell you.
He says, if we this day be examined,
and notice how he uses the adjectives.
I like adjectives used in the right place
in the right way.
If we be examined because of the good
deed, put emphasis on that word good.
The good deed done to the impotent, another
adjective, a different category, isn't it?
The good deed done to this impotent man.
Emphasizing on the one hand what God did
for him, emphasizing on the other hand what
he was.
You can see that this unlearned, ignorant man
is no fool.
He knows how to use language, because he's
filled with the Holy Spirit of God.
It's amazing what the Spirit of God can
give you, dear friends, in a time like
this, if you're dependent upon him, you'll do
it.
That's exactly what he's doing here with Peter
tonight, as he uses him to put emphasis
on these two adjectives here, that the deed
which was done, and nobody could deny it,
it was a good thing.
And they couldn't deny that the man upon
whom it was done was an impotent man,
absolutely helpless.
Absolutely helpless.
Then he says, if you want to know
by what name this was done, you notice
he says in the tenth verse, Be it
known unto you and all the people of
Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ
of Nazareth, he links this wonderful power with
this name, and then he goes on to
speak again of the power when he says,
Whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the
dead.
Notice he's got that same phrase again, Even
by him doth this man stand here before
you all.
Now, that would have been enough.
That would have answered their questions.
And sometimes in a court of law, it's
a wise thing to stop when you have
satisfied the question that's been put to you.
But this is different.
The apostle now is going to begin to
give them a little more than they bargained
for.
And here's where we come to this new
introduction of our Lord Jesus Christ tonight, when
he's introduced here as the stone.
Now, this is an old idea.
This goes way back.
Yes, this really goes back to creation itself.
You turn to the 48th chapter of the
book of Job, and as some of you
doubtless know, the book of Job is considered
to be the oldest book in the Bible,
probably written by Moses, but we don't know.
But generally conceded to be the oldest book
in the Bible, and here we get a
statement concerning the creation.
God is asking one question after another of
Job in that 40th chapter of Job.
He's asking one, 38th chapter of Job, rather.
He's asking one question after another.
And one of the questions is, Where were
you when I laid the foundation of the
earth and the cornerstone thereof?
Did you ever realize that creation had a
cornerstone?
And it must have been a wonderful celebration,
because the next verse says, And all the
sons of God shouted for joy, they sang,
when God laid the cornerstone.
Well, you know what God does has significance.
And I wouldn't be surprised, dear friends, that
when God laid the cornerstone of this creation,
He was putting down a figure at that
time which was going to speak of His
beloved Son.
That's exactly the way Peter refers to Him
later.
He says He's become the head of the
corner.
He's really that cornerstone.
Jacob referred to Him when he spoke of
Him as the stone and the shepherd of
Israel.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of Him as the
stone.
The prophet Zechariah speaks of Him as the
stone.
And Peter himself enlarges on this in his
epistle, in the first epistle in chapter 2,
when he calls Him the living stone.
Now, that's a contradiction, a natural contradiction, isn't
it?
You ever see a stone alive?
No?
Somebody says, Come to think of it, I
never have.
Maybe you've seen one, but you haven't recognized
it as such.
I'm going to take some of you younger
men back, you know, to those days when
you had already, as the Scotch would say,
you had her Gidwell de Promise, and you
went out and you bought that ring with
the solitaire in it.
And, of course, it was a great ceremony
that the evening it was put on, and
they had a great time to celebrate the
engagement party.
And after everybody's gone home, and he himself
has bidden her farewell for the 33rd time,
and now they come and look it over,
and they're standing there under the light, and
somebody says, It fairly lives.
What makes it live?
The light that shines in it.
And that's exactly the way the Spirit of
God puts these two things together in the
first chapter of John's Gospel.
In him was life, and the life was
the light of men.
This is the living stone.
Disallowed indeed of men, as Peter tells us.
Disallowed indeed of men.
Or, as he puts it here in this
passage of Scripture in verse 11, set it
not by you builders.
You thought you could get along without him.
There's a legend connected with this verse.
We just referred to it for what it
is worth.
The legend says that when they were building
the temple, a very queer-shaped stone was
sent up to the builders, and they looked
at it and said, We don't know where
this goes.
So they just threw it out.
But later on, they got on with the
building, and somebody says, We need a stone
of such and such a shape.
And they discovered it was the stone that
they had cast out.
The stone that was set at nought of
you builders.
And this very thing is incorporated into that
classic passage in Psalm 118.
The stone which was set at nought of
the builders.
The same has become the head of the
corner.
And how Peter, who is generally referred to
as the rock on which the church is
built, you know.
Oh yeah, how they love to wring the
changes on everyone.
And here the Spirit of God uses this
very man to tell us that it was
not himself at all.
It was the Lord Jesus Christ, the foundation
upon whom these other living stones are being
built.
The stone which was set at nought of
you builders.
But he's coming back again to this name.
You know, he hasn't forgotten that in their
question, they wanted to know by what power
or by what name.
All right, here we have it in verse
12.
Neither is there salvation in any other.
For there is none other name under heaven,
given among men whereby we must be saved.
You see, dear friends, in this matter of
salvation, it's not a question of choice or
option.
God doesn't say, Now if you don't like
this, you can have something else.
God is saying to us here, dear friends,
that either this or else.
And this is after the manner of scripture.
I'd like to give you a couple of
examples in the Old Testament.
Would you like to turn back first of
all to the book of Joshua, chapter 24?
For an example, shall I say, of this
very idea?
The 24th chapter of Joshua.
Here Joshua is talking, giving his valedictory to
these people at whom he has led into
the land and finally got them settled in
their respective places.
You notice it says here in verse 14,
Joshua 24, verse 14, Now therefore fear the
Lord, and serve him in sincerity and truth,
and put away the gods which your father
served on the other side of the flood.
The flood there refers to the Euphrates River,
and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord.
And if it seem evil unto you to
serve the Lord, then you have your choice.
You can choose this day whom you will
serve, whether the gods which your father served
were on the other side of the flood
or the river, or the gods of the
Amorites.
If you want a choice, you can have
either one of these groups of gods, these
idols.
But this is only if it's evil to
you to serve the Lord.
You notice he doesn't make it a matter
of choice here between the Lord and the
idols.
If you want to choose, you can choose
between any of these other idols, because it
won't make very much difference, they're all alike.
No, the Lord never puts himself on a
level with these idols and said, now I
hope you'll choose me.
There is no option here, dear friends.
There is no option here.
It's not this, or something you may like
better.
As our text of this evening says, there
is no other name under heaven among men
whereby we must be saved.
It's imperative.
I give you another example in 1 Kings,
the 18th chapter.
1 Kings, chapter 18.
An incident in the life of one of
the great prophets, Elijah.
How I love this passage of scripture.
I think I like it mostly because of
the sarcasm in it, but we're not talking
about that so much tonight.
But let's look at this.
1 Kings 18, verse 21.
And Elijah came unto all the people and
said, How long halt ye between two opinions?
If the Lord be God, follow him.
But if Baal, if Baal be God, then
follow him.
Notice his statement carefully.
He doesn't say now you can have either
God or Baal.
He doesn't say that.
If the Lord is God, follow him.
If Baal be God, follow him.
You see, dear friends, God never puts himself
on a level with these idols.
And so, coming back to our text here
in Acts 4, the Lord doesn't put himself
on a level with others.
He doesn't now.
You know, all roads lead to the same
place.
You can be a Buddhist or a Confucianist
or a Muslim.
It doesn't make any difference, just so you're
sincere.
No, dear friends, that's not it.
That's not it.
It's not optional.
It's imperative.
And if I'm speaking here tonight to anyone
who has never yet trusted the Lord Jesus
Christ as a personal Savior, remember, dear friends,
this is it.
There is no other name unto heaven among
men whereby we must be saved but the
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
And so we leave the subject tonight.
We trust, dear friends, that this answer from
the Apostle Peter will stand out in your
mind as something which God can give to
you.
These Sadducees had to admit that a mighty
miracle had been wrought.
If we'd read the rest of the chapter,
which I hope you will, you will find
that when they get behind the scenes, they
talk about it.
They say, We can't deny that this has
been a notable miracle.
We can't deny it.
But let's shut them up.
And so they tell them, Now you get
out of here, but don't you talk anymore
about the name of Jesus.
And Peter says, You can do as you
like.
We're going to do what we know to
be true.
And so, dear friends, God give us the
courage in these days, these days of apostasy,
when the name of our blessed Lord is
being put on a level with other names.
Let us remember, dear friends, that He's in
a class by Himself.
He is, as we've been saying here from
night to night, He is unique.
And this is one of the things that
gives one great boldness as he faces these
so-called intellectuals these days who try to
tell us this, that, and the other, and
that Christianity has outlived its usefulness.
We're living in a post-Christian era.
Don't you believe it.
This name will never lose its power until
all the ransomed saints of God are safe
home in glory.
In keeping with that, let's turn to hymn
number 121.
Hymn number 121.
My hope is built on nothing less than
Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but
wholly lean on Jesus' name.
Number 121.
Shall we rise?
We thank
Thee for reassuring our faith tonight as we
look into Thy holy word, and see what
Thou couldst do with men who were counted
ignorant and unlearned, and yet who were recognized
as those who had been with Jesus.
O our Father, we pray that we and
these our day and time may also have
similar courage as we stand up before those
who claim to be superior to us religiously,
ecclesiastically, intellectually, and so on.
But we thank Thee, our Father, that there
is nothing that can match the simple faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Nothing can match the omnipotence of Thy blessed
Holy Spirit.
And we just pray, O Lord, that we
who claim to be Thine here tonight may
go from this meeting strengthened in our hearts
and souls, and determined to bear a more
faithful witness to Him who loved us and
gave Himself for us.
These things we ask as we commit ourselves
now to Thy loving hand, in His most
precious name.
Amen.
You are dismissed.