WWUTT 2567 No One Can Deny It (Acts 4:13-22)

Peter and John healed a man in Jerusalem, and this was such an incredible miracle that no one could deny it. In fact, many believed the gospel that Peter preached and were saved when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ, that we may humble ourselves before the Lord and at the proper time, he may exalt us. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com.

And once again, it's Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the book of Acts, we come back to chapter four. And just to briefly recap, remember that Peter and John healed a lame man at the beautiful gate. He came dancing into the temple area.

People were amazed at what they saw. Peter preached the gospel to them and thousands of people converted to Christ. Well, then Peter and John were brought before the elders and the chief priests. They said, in what name do you do these things?

We do this in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved than by faith in Jesus Christ. And so we're picking up there in verse 13 to 22, hear the word of the Lord.

Now, as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and comprehended that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were marveling and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. And seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply.

But when they had ordered them to leave the Sanhedrin, they began to confer with one another saying, what should we do with these men? For the fact that a noteworthy sign has happened through them is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem and we cannot deny it.

But lest it spread any further among the people, let us warn them to speak no longer to any man in this name. And when they had summoned them, they commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus.

But Peter and John answered and said to them, whether it is right in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, you be the judge, for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard. And when they had threatened them further, they let them go, finding no basis on which to punish them on account of the people, because they were all glorifying God for what had happened.

For the man was more than 40 years old on whom this sign of healing had occurred. And remember, it was said of that man when we read about him in the previous chapter that he had been lame from birth for over 40 years, had no usable legs, and for most of his life had been sitting outside the gate begging for alms.

And here Peter and John have done this miraculous thing, healing his legs, having him stand up right there on the spot, and he goes leaping and dancing into the temple celebrating and praising God. And so many of the people recognize this incredible sign that has been done in the name of Jesus.

And of course, this has the chief priests, the scribes, the rulers, all upset because this is the very man whom they had crucified, not how many weeks before this. And here are Peter and John, which they recognize were with Jesus.

Let me pick up there in verse 13. Now, as they observe the confidence of Peter and John, remember that Peter and John have just said there is salvation in no one else. There is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.

And these guys are not like him hawing around it. They are absolutely confident in what they have seen and what they have preached. And remember that Jesus said to them, said directly to his disciples, that if you get arrested and you get brought before men and tried for speaking in my name, don't be afraid about what you are to say.

For the Holy Spirit will give you the words to say in that very hour. And we're seeing that take place here. That is being fulfilled as Peter and John respond to these men who are pressing them to answer their questions.

And as we're reading here, they're gonna stop them. They're gonna try to stop them anyway from speaking in the name of Jesus. So they recognize the confidence of Peter and John. They comprehended that they were uneducated and ordinary men.

All these incredible miracles that these guys have done. And they aren't con artists. They aren't specialized in running some sort of gag to fool people out of their money. That's part of what's being said here when it said that they comprehended that they were uneducated, ordinary men.

They weren't schooled in the ways of deceit. Because sometimes in order to pull a fast one on somebody, you actually had to be very smart in order to do that. Well, Peter and John don't appear to be schooled in the ways of running a con.

Then they don't appear to have any sort of higher education by which they're able to heal this man from some advanced medicine or speak the way that they speak in the temple. How is it that they know the things that they know?

And of course, the reputation has been there about them that they even speak in other languages. Talking about speaking in tongues, not the gibberish babble private prayer language thing, but they are actually speaking languages that people understand.

And yet here they're standing before these people in the temple, the rulers of the temple, who are educated men. And they see that Peter and John are just uneducated, ordinary men. That's the name of the book that John MacArthur wrote on the 12 disciples, 12 ordinary men.

And the leaders of the temple, they were marveling and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. Remember, Peter has said that there is no other name by which we can be saved than the name of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene.

And now it's kind of dawning on them as they're looking at Peter and John. Oh, okay, I know who these guys are. They were his disciples. Remember, these were among the men that followed him around. Now, why didn't the elders and the chief priests and the scribes just recognize that right away?

Well, because they're ordinary men, because they're ordinary and not educated. They weren't anybody to pay attention to. And Jesus had more than 12 disciples. I've shared this with you before. There were more than 12 men that followed Jesus around.

There were dozens of them. We read about the sending out of the 72 in the gospel of Luke. And we know that there were other disciples that were with Jesus in the garden, for as we read in Mark, there was one young man that ran away naked, who didn't, he wasn't given a name in Mark's gospel, but we assume that was probably Mark.

And so because these guys were just so ordinary, and there were so many of them that followed Jesus around, there wasn't any reason for the chief priest to just automatically recognize Peter and John as having been followers of Jesus.

But now it's starting to dawn on them. Now they're getting it, okay, okay. This is why these guys are saying that you must believe in Jesus in order to be saved. These guys were with him. And they probably thought here at this point, we thought we were rid of Jesus, not because they killed him, because they tried that and that didn't work.

He rose again from the dead, but now Jesus is gone. He's nowhere to be found. But now here's his disciples who are preaching in this name. So it's all starting all over again for them. And verse 14, this is a great line, by the way.

I'm gonna expound on this here in a moment. But Luke, who is the author of Acts, he writes this. And seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply. Hold on to that.

Hold on to that thought, because we're gonna come back to that. They're marveling at this man that is standing there with Peter and John. They know who he is. They know this is the lame man. They got nothing to say, because even they have to admit, this is a genuine miracle here.

This guy who for dozens of years sat out there in the beautiful gate and asking for alms, and here he is standing with Peter and John. Verse 15, but when they had ordered them to leave the Sanhedrin, they began to confer with one another, saying, what should we do with these men?

For the fact that a noteworthy sign has happened through them is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it. But lest it spread any further among the people, let us warn them to speak no longer to any man in this name, in the name of Jesus.

Yeah, he had already been attracting the attention of the people. Remember that it said to us in the gospels that the leaders of the temple were jealous of Jesus, and that was partly why they put him to death.

Pilate was the one that recognized that. Pilate saw that they were jealous of Jesus, and now Jesus has gone, but his disciples are doing these things, and now thousands of people were converted to Jesus Christ in one day.

So we're gonna beat these guys up unless they stop speaking in the name of Jesus. That's what they're gonna try to persuade Peter and John of, stop speaking in the name of Jesus. But I wanna come back to these two statements here, verses 14 and 16.

Seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply, and then the quote from them specifically, it's a noteworthy sign that has happened, it's apparent to everybody in Jerusalem, and we can't deny it.

Here's a point that I wanna make with this. Let me make two points, okay? Here's two points I wanna make. Number one, all of these things have been verified by eyewitnesses. This is not legend that has been passed down.

As Luke is writing these things down, he is writing down what he knows has been shared with him by other eyewitnesses. I mean, he met the apostles, he met people that no doubt were there, he's talked to plenty of people as he has written this down.

And at the time that Luke does write the book of Acts, those eyewitnesses are still alive. And so there were people who could verify, yes, I was there, yes, we knew the man that was there by the beautiful gate, no, he had no ability to walk and never had that ability, and suddenly, after the command of Peter and John, he's just walking, and he's dancing and singing and praising God.

It was obviously a miracle. It was an incredible miracle that we saw. And so what we're reading about here is eyewitness verified, testified to by eyewitnesses. This is not legend that was written down hundreds of years later.

This was written down in the lifetime of those eyewitnesses that saw this thing took place. There were people who would have read what Luke wrote and had distributed to the churches and said, yep, just like that.

That's exactly the way that I saw it. There's a quote from Votie Bauckham, you may have heard it. He said the following, I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.

They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin. And that's something that Bauckham had taken from what Peter talks about in 2 Peter 1.

No prophecy comes from a man, from the mind of a man, it's from the Holy Spirit who guides men to write what God wants them to write. And what we read written down, the entire New Testament was written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.

Now, Luke may not have been in Jerusalem when all of this is going on. So he may not have been an eyewitness to this, but about half of what we read in Acts, Luke was there. So he is one of the eyewitnesses that sees especially the ministry of the apostle Paul.

So we're reading stuff that has eyewitness testimony. You can believe this is true. It was verified by those who were there. This is documented evidence. And so what we have in Acts is not legend, it's fact.

Peter and John healed this man by the beautiful gate in Jerusalem, a man who had never walked from birth. There were people who were able to verify that. The man never had working legs. And then these two men just made him walk.

It was a miracle from God. Okay, so that's first of all, you can be confident that what we read here is eyewitness verified. Second point that I wanna make, the charismatic movement as it exists today has nothing like this.

They have nothing like this. Verse 14 again, and seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply. There is no evidence of any kind of miracle in the charismatic movement today that's like this.

There is no one, no one that the charismatic movement could bring in front of people and stand up like that and say this man had no working legs for 40 years, and now here he is, we just healed him. Miraculously healed him so that he's standing here before you, he's jumping and leaping in the temple as if he had always had good spry legs.

We've done this miracle. There is no one, no one in the charismatic movement that they can stand up in front of people and make that claim. Now, I want you to understand who this is coming from when I say that.

I was in the charismatic movement for years. I was attending charismatic churches specifically for 10 years. I was sympathetic to the charismatic movement for many years more than that, both before and after.

Some of you who have been listening to this program for many, many years, probably since the beginning, God bless you. I know that there's a few of you out there who have been listening that long, or you've gone all the way back to the very beginning episodes.

And if you've listened from the beginning on, then you know when I started this podcast, I was still a charismatic. I was still a continuous. I was still teaching, even in the book of Acts and 1 Corinthians 14, so on and so forth, I was teaching like a charismatic.

Though I was not attending charismatic churches. I was referred to as a Baptocostal preacher. That's the term. You know, when I get up and preach, my natural tendency is to want to move around. Like I don't want to stand behind a pulpit.

I want to walk around and teach. That's what I did the first five years as a preacher. Well, when I was a pastor anyway, the years before that, when I was more of an interim pastor, or not interim, that's not the word.

It's itinerant. Yeah, there you go. An itinerant preacher, when I was traveling around and preaching, I would walk around a lot when I preached. I wouldn't remain behind a pulpit. So I've always had this more charismatic tendency in my preaching, and I speak in that way, not in the continuous sense, but just in the high movement, high energy sort of a sense.

I'm in my 40s now, and yet I still want to do that. I want to move around more on stage than just be behind the pulpit. But I'm behind the pulpit because I want you to hear what the word of God says. I don't want you to see me.

I don't want it to be the Gabe show. It needs to be what God is saying through his word. You're hearing the word, you're not seeing Gabe. So that's why I stand behind the pulpit now. But you know, all that to say, my tendency and my history is more charismatic than it is cessationist.

Cessationism is for me fairly recent. Only it's not even been a full decade. So when I say as a former charismatic that the charismatic movement has no witness like this, you understand who this is coming from.

Never saw it when I was a charismatic. I believed that I did, but I didn't. There was never a witness like this. There were always these different kinds of miracles that people would claim happened that weren't really miraculous.

Like I had high blood pressure, my blood pressure got healed, but nobody who was like a paraplegic in a wheelchair who had no working legs suddenly able to stand up and walk. Now I saw people who were in wheelchairs that would stand up and they would kind of hobble back and forth, you know, and wiggle a little bit and maybe they would take a step or two and everybody would be so excited and they'd say, praise God, this person's been healed.

But after taking a few steps, after the adrenaline wears off, they would have to sit right back down in the chair again. We didn't really witness a healing. We witnessed a moment of ecstasy and a bunch of people getting really excited about it, including the person that had the chance to stand up for a little bit, but there wasn't any healing that happened there.

I witnessed this kind of thing in the charismatic movement all the time. And all of the leading figures in the charismatic movement, the Benny Hens, the Ken Copelands, Todd Bentley, Bill Johnson, the pastor of Bethel Church, Todd White, Heidi Baker, Paula White, even Joyce Meyer, she's one of them.

She's turned more into a motivational speaker over the last decade plus or something, but no, she's just as bad as all of them. All of these people are not the fringe of the charismatic movement. They are the faces of the charismatic movement.

These people still make millions and millions and millions of dollars every year from people that they con to sow a seed. And if you sow a seed, then you will get your healing. They're still promising people what they cannot deliver and people still eat it up.

But the movement does not have a single person who has received this kind of miracle that we read about in Acts four, that can stand before others. And then the rest of us who deny that the charismatic movement is legit, we would just become babbling fools and looking at this and going, we cannot deny it.

This is a noteworthy sign that's happened to all who live wherever we live. And we can't deny that it's happened. They don't have any sort of testimony like that. I've never seen one. The years that I was in the charismatic movement never witnessed a genuine miracle like that.

Todd White, who does that whole leg lengthening trick, all he does is roll the ankle. That's all he's doing to a person. He's not really lengthening a person's leg out to be even with the other one to help fix their back problems.

It's a gag. As I've noted in one of my what videos, he's literally pulling their leg. He cannot restore the legs of a person who's never had working legs. Todd White has no ability to do that. None of the charismatic healers and preachers can do it.

They don't have any witness that they could stand up in front of people that would make everybody else go, well, we cannot deny it. This movement is legit. Now, that does not mean that you shouldn't pray for healing or that I think God won't heal anybody.

I feel like I have to add this caveat anytime that I talk about this. I am not saying that God won't give you healing. There's just no such thing as an apostolic level faith healer out there who is able to restore your legs in this way.

This that we read about here in Acts 4, this was a very specific event, a specific miracle that happened for the purpose of getting the people's attention, of recognizing the power of God and Peter and John so that they would know the message that they were teaching was from God.

As said in Hebrews 2, 3, and 5, that salvation first spoken by the Lord was confirmed to us by those who heard, God also testifying with them. God also testifying with them. God providing testimony with them.

How?

Both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to his own will. This was by God's will. That they did this miraculous sign and the people believe the message that Peter and John preached and they were saved by this witness, this apostolic witness.

This happened in that day, verified by eyewitnesses, but there is no such thing as this kind of testimony in the charismatic movement as it exists today. And I'm talking about that movement that began in 1900 with Charles Fox Parham turned into the Azusa Pacific Revival on the West Coast.

There were the Topeka Revival movements. There was the Toronto Blessing. There was the Kansas City Prophets. All the stuff that kind of spun off of that eventually becoming the Assemblies of God Church.

You had Amy Simple McPherson and the Four Square Church that got founded. All this stuff that kind of spiraled out from what Charles Fox Parham began in the year 1900. This charismatic movement as it exists today, no witness to any miraculous healing on the level of what we read here in Acts 3 and 4.

There is no one that they can stand before people that we would say it's apparent to all and we cannot deny it. Will God still heal? The way you ask for that healing now, folks, James 5, 14, is anyone among you sick?

Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will save the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up.

And if he has committed any sins, they will be forgiven him. Call for the elders of your church. Let them anoint you with oil, pray over you. And if it be God's will, you will be healed. But even the apostles didn't heal everybody sick that they came across.

You know, the apostle Paul had told Timothy to mix in a little bit of wine with your water to help with your frequent stomach ailments. Why did Paul not just heal his protégé Timothy? Now, because those signs were for a certain time and place and reason.

It wasn't something that they just dealt out whenever they wanted to. It was to preach the name of Christ. And that's what these men have proclaimed here in Jerusalem in light of this miraculous sign that had been done among them.

We're gonna stop there for now and pick up on this tomorrow. Consider the truth of what we read in the scriptures and do not be fooled by snake oil salesmen trying to peddle these same kinds of things but cannot produce any verifiable witness.

All the verifiable witnesses are given to us in scripture. Heavenly father, we thank you for what we have read today. And I pray that you would continue to lead us and guide us in your truth. Make us good discerners that we would not be led astray but holding fast to what we read in your word.

And let your will be done in our lives. Let us be humble enough to recognize there may be some level of suffering you give to us to sanctify us because we're supposed to rely more on you. But God, if it would be your will to grant us healing, then do that as well.

And we seek fervently the Lord in all things. In sickness and in health, knowing that our souls have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for our sins rose again from the dead so that all who believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

And then on that day in glory, we will truly receive our healing in Jesus name.

Amen.

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