The high priest and his officials, who were Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. (Acts 5:17-18)So the whole thing boiled down to jealousy.
The apostles were preaching and teaching and gaining quite a following. People liked to hear them preach and they were healing a lot of people. The crowds thought they were great.
The high priest and his officials were jealous. They wanted to be popular, but were not. they were pompous and boring, high handed and didactic. Nobody wanted to hear them.
So what did they do? They tried to stop the ones who were popular.
When it came down to it, the officials could see the hand of God in all this. But they had come from a background of trying to stop the representatives of God and couldn’t figure what else to do. Prophet after prophet had been killed by the ones who had preceded these men (Hebrews 11) and just recently, they had even killed Jesus.
They felt they had to stop this move of God no matter what else happened. If they could just stop it, God would finally let them be in charge like they felt like they were supposed to be.
That’s what it comes down to most of the time. It is couched in doctrinal terms and people pretend it is something that it is not, but it is often just plain jealousy.
It comes down to: I cannot have it, so you won’t either. Good is stopped because bad is jealous.
These people hid behind charges of blasphemy and the like, but it was just plain jealousy.
Jealousy has damaged more ministries than anything else.
It is a fact that any preacher has holes in his life. That is because he is human. And you look hard enough and you can find something wrong with anyone. But it is jealousy that motivates the looking.
The desire for prominence, to known as a man of God, for people to comes to you and hear what you have to say is strong. And sometimes it is strong enough to make you do things that are wrong to get that prominence.
Of course, the minute you try to seize it like that, you have lost God. You may have gained popularity, but God is no longer with you.
The efforts to stop the people of God in this passage didn’t work. They jailed them, they beat them, they killed them and Christianity is the world’s largest religion today, and has been ever since.
And those who were petty and jealous are dead.
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