I'd just like to read my text
for this morning and say a few words and then we'll sing number
48 at the end. One of the things that's lovely
about that psalm, you might have noticed in Psalm 19 that it says,
the word of the Lord, the word of the Lord, the word of the
Lord is a warning. It says, moreover by them is
thy servant warned. One of the great challenges of
scriptures and one of the great blessings of actually going through
the scriptures verse by verse as we come across characters
in the scriptures that cause us pause. and to be warned, to
be warned that we might not judge things through these eyes of
human flesh, but we might judge things through the eyes of God's
Word. And you might remember in Acts,
we have the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2
and 3, and then Extraordinarily, we find that
in the midst of all of that, in the midst of this church that
is growing and is esteemed and honoured and people are coming
in from outside of Jerusalem to witness the things that are
done and no doubt to be saved in the midst of that church was
Ananias and Sapphira. And here in Acts chapter 8, we
have in a sense a second Pentecost event where the Gospel goes out
into Samaria, that despised land of idolatry and compromise, just
next door to Judea. And we had, and we saw last week
at the beginning of Acts chapter 8, that there was great joy in
that city and that land, had heard the gospel and they had
responded. And then in Acts chapter 8 verse
9, the passage we're looking at today, Some of that passage,
we're going to spend two weeks looking at it, Lord willing,
but we actually come across a man called Simon who, for all intents
and purposes for a time, seemed to be genuine. Genuine in the
sense that even Philip, who was full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom
and a man to be honoured, Simon was baptised by Philip. And yet,
It is shown, and it is only shown through the ministry of the apostles
when they came down from Jerusalem, that this man Simon was actually
a false professor. And so we have these lessons
of great warning and great import before us and God has laid out
two of them before us in these very, very early chapters of
Acts at the very beginning of the history of the church. And
that's why, moreover by them is your servant warned. We are
warned and in keeping them, in keeping them it's referring to
the keeping in Psalm 19, the keeping of closeness in terms
of our estimation of things by the word of God. So let's read
these verses from chapter 8 of Acts and just read down to verse
17. But there was a certain man called
Simon, which before time in that same city used sorcery and bewitched
the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great
one, to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest,
saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they
had regard, because that of a long time he had bewitched them with
sorceries. But when they believed Philip,
preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name
of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Then Simon
himself believed also. And when he was baptized, he
continued with Philip and wondered, behold the miracles and signs
which were done. Now when the apostles which were
at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God,
they sent unto them Peter and John, who when they were come
down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Ghost.
For as yet he was not fallen. He was fallen, for as yet He
was fallen upon none of them. Only they were baptized in the
name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on
them, and they received the Holy Ghost." I'll continue down to
verse 24. And when Simon saw that through
the laying on of the apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given,
he offered them money saying, Give me also this power that
on whomsoever I lay hands he may receive the Holy Ghost. But
Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou
hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot
in this matter, for thy heart is not right in the sight of
God. Repent therefore of this wickedness
and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be
forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art
in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. Then
answered Simon and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none
of these things which ye have spoken come upon me. I suppose one of the things that
is striking and has struck me so often is that in the midst
of preparation for that, and this passage has been before
me for some time, we have so many, we have again and again,
I have laid out before me practical examples of the fact that we
need desperately to cling to the Word of God and we need for
the Word of God to be our guide and not for the things that we
see with our flesh. And you're probably all aware
to some extent or another that this week has marked the passing
of Billy Graham and the world. has unified itself in esteeming
this man as highly as possible, the secular world and the religious
world has esteemed him so highly. And he has had the most enormous
influence on what is called professing Christianity in this world. Probably
no one, no one, no single person has had such a big influence.
In fact if you go to the Bible colleges of Australia at any
time in the last 40 years, all of the evangelical Bible colleges
in Australia, all had their principals and most of their lecturers.
as Billy Graham converts and the apostolic, I mean the witness
that we see, the Gospel witness that we see around us has been
hugely influenced by his evangelism, by the Gospel that Billy Graham
proclaimed. The whole business of two ways
to live, the whole business of the decisions that people must
make are all based on the Billy Graham Gospel, and his popularity
has been marked in large to large extent by the fact that he was
willing to have cooperation with anyone as long as he had an opportunity
to preach. And so his popularity and his
success in such large measure come from him compromising fundamental
issues of truth. I have a book here written by
a fellow who came from South Africa to work with Billy Graham
in the 1960s, early 60s in England, and he wrote a book talking about
the dilemma that they had because in the book he outlines the fact
that in those campaigns Billy Graham was teaching a false gospel,
he was denying all of the fundamental issues of the gospel. He was
denying the fall of man. He was denying the absolute sovereignty
of God. He attributes to man free will.
He attributes to man that he's not dead in trespasses and sin,
that he has the capacity to make a decision. He promotes a Gospel
in which the Lord Jesus Christ is offered to people if they
will take Him because He has died for the sins of everyone.
He promoted the fact that God loves everyone over and over
again. The main plank of His Gospel
proclamation was that God loves everyone all the time and the
proof of God's loving everyone is that the Lord Jesus Christ
died for everyone. And this theology has spread
and it pervades this world. The thing that's extraordinary
is that in this book, and there are many others written and there
are multitudes of sermons written, almost none of which would have
been mentioned in this last week, this book charts the fact that
for from the 1950s, which is now 60-something years ago, from
the early 1950s, people who were close to him and supporters of
him were warning him again and again and again not to compromise
the truth of God for the sake of success in this world. And
there are many books, and I've read several of them, where again
and again whenever it came to a situation where Billy Graham
could follow the word of God and stand for the glory of God
or accept popularism and the applause of men by compromising
the truths of God. At every junction in the road
for 70 years he chose the way of popularity. And He is, in
such a significant way as I said earlier, responsible for the
religious landscape that we find ourselves in. And in a sense,
as much as we must grieve over the man, we must, I trust the
Lord would cause us to to heed the warnings of scripture, that
it is the truth of God, it is the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ
and who He is and what He's done on Calvary's tree and what He
did for His people in eternity and what He's doing for His people
even now, are the fundamental things that are the comfort of
God's people. When we call upon the name of
the Lord, we are calling upon Him in all of His revealed character. We call upon Him in His revealed
character of His sovereignty, in His absolute holiness, in
that He is a perfectly just God and a Saviour. to say that he
died for everyone is to accuse his father of injustice for punishing
him on Calvary's tree because they are saying that God the
Father crushed his son for sins of people who he will then punish
in hell forever because they didn't make a decision. We are
We love the fact that God is an electing God, that He chose
the people in the Lord Jesus Christ from before the foundation
of the world, and for those people salvation was assured because
God had made a covenant and He had kept those promises. And
the things that we have found to be the delight and the comfort
of our souls, The comfort of my soul is that God the Father
looks to His Son as the surety of that covenant for everything
that He requires of me and has always done so and always must
do so. And He doesn't look to me in
my will and my decision and in my good works. We delight in
the fact that what happened when that blood was shed on Calvary's
tree was the revelation of the entire character of God in all
of His holiness, in all of His sovereignty, in all of His love
for His people, in all of the wonders of substitutionary atonement. And all of the wonders of that
are brought to us through the Word applied to us as those promises
become our life. And yet these things are denied
by the religious world around us. They are denied. And the glory of our God, and
the reason our God is blasphemed in the streets and on the airways
of this world of ours, is because in the pulpits of this world
He is diminished to someone who tries his very best and fails. again and again and again. And
the declaration of God's service throughout the Word of God is
that Thy God reigneth. All flesh is grass. By Your Word, says the Psalmist,
is thy servant warned." We come to passages of scripture like
Ananias and Sapphira and issues to do with Judas and deatrophies
and many, many others, and we are led again, I trust, to be
warned that we might find ourselves clinging to the Word of God.
We might find ourselves assessing the things of this world through
the lens of Scripture. The lens of Scripture which declares
the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we wouldn't We wouldn't be
captivated by things of our sight and our feelings and others,
but we would find the Word of God to be our rock and our stay
in the midst of a world where our hearts are deceitfully wicked
and beyond cure, and Satan rages around as a roaring lion seeking
those whom he may devour. The Gospel sets the people of
God free, and one of the things it sets us free from is the freedom
from being deceived and taken captive by Satan's viles. As
Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11-3, that we would not be led astray
as Eve was led astray by the cunningness of Satan. But I fear, he says, lest by
any means, any means whatsoever, as the serpent beguiled Eve through
his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity,
the singleness that is in Christ. that we mightn't be corrupted,
that we might hold firm to the Gospel, that we might find the
declaration of who the Lord Jesus Christ is and what happened on
Calvary's tree to be the source of all of our salvation, His
electing love, His predestinating love, His divine providence ruling
and reigning over all things, the declaration that our God
reigns. And our God reigns in revealing
Himself through the Lord Jesus Christ in the preaching of the
Gospel. And He takes the captives and He sets them free. He takes
the weary and the heavy laden and He puts a light and easy
yoke upon them, not the yoke of their doing and their works
and the esteem and the applause of men. Whenever we come across
these passages and these circumstances, the question is, isn't it, that
there is so much pride in all of the hearts of men, that may
the Lord humble us. And may we be warned and may
we walk humbly before our God. And may we be just so, so indebted
and so much more in love with the Lord Jesus Christ and his
sovereign power to rescue us and to redeem us and to protect
us because we have no strength in ourselves. The other gospel
declaration is that all flesh is grass. That's what we are,
brothers and sisters, just grass. We are in desperate need of a
word from God. We are in desperate need of The
Word of God to come and to protect us, to reveal Himself to us,
and to continue to do so.