Faith As Seen in The Book of Acts

Faith, as Seen in the Book of Acts

Let us notice the faith that the disciples had as recorded in the first fifteen chapters of the book of Acts before the Pauline Revelation became known.
Acts 1, The disciples met the Master. They touched Him. They ate with Him. They heard his voice. Their faith in Him was based upon Sense Evidence.
It is not the kind of faith that you have. You have never seen Jesus physically. You have never heard His voice. You have never touched His body, yet you believe He arose from the dead.
They had lived with Him before His death.
They had lived with Him again for forty days after His Resurrection.

Read carefully Acts 2:1-4.
“And when the day of Pentecost was now come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of fire: and it sat upon each one of them. And
they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
They heard the sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind.
They saw the tongues like as of fire parting asunder upon the brow of each one.
They heard them speak in tongues and glorify God.
There was no Revelation faith; it was purely Sense Knowledge Faith.
They believed in tongues because they heard them.
They believed the Spirit had come because they had seen the evidences.
The mighty miracles that followed, which are recorded in Acts, 5, gave the multitudes great faith in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

It was not the kind of faith that you have today, because you have no such physical evidences as they had in Jerusalem.
I John 1:1-4 “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us); that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us; yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his son Jesus Christ.”
There were Peter and others who had seen Jesus with their own eyes after the Resurrection, and with their own hands then had handled Him.

Jesus had given them the right to use His Name and to lay hands upon the sick.
They manifested this authority.
Acts. 3:6 Peter and John used the Name to heal the impotent man at the beautiful gate of the temple.
The multitude could see the man whom they had known as a helpless cripple, healed before their eyes.

The Sanhedrin could say nothing when they arrested them.
Acts 4:14 “And seeing the man that was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it.” It closed their mouths.
Peter did not say on the day of Pentecost
when they asked, “Men and brethren, what must we do to be saved,” that they were to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
He simply said, “Repent, and be baptized everyone of you in the Name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins.”

The Revelation of faith had not yet come. God was dealing with them as children.
He did not ask them to believe anything they could not see, hear or feel.
It may be interesting to note that many times believers have said to us, “We want a primitive type of Christianity such as the church had in the first few years of its existence.”
They did not know that by attempting to get that type of Christianity they were repudiating real faith and the Word.
They declare that no one ever received the Holy Spirit unless he has received a physical manifestation.

They do not believe God is in the midst of people unless there is Sense evidence.
That is not faith in the Word of God. That is faith in the Senses.
I “saw it”; I “heard it”; I “felt it”. Therefore, I believe that I have it.
Galatians 3:2-3 “This only would I learn from you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now perfected in the flesh?’ (or senses).

You can see that God has dealt in great grace with us as children, when by reason of time we should have grown up and learned to walk by faith and not by sight.
If you study carefully the first fifteen chapters of the book of Acts, you will notice there is not the slightest evidence that any of them understood the teaching of Substitution.
There is not one hint of the great teaching of Righteousness.
There is no indication they understood what the New Birth meant.
They enjoyed it; they walked in the fullness of it; but they did not understand it.
That was to come later through the Revelation the Father was to give to the Apostle Paul.

We would naturally expect that in the book of Acts, there would be an opening of the great subjects: Redemption, Substitution, the New Creation, the ministry of Jesus at the right hand of the Father, but there is not an inkling of them.
The nearest of anything like that in the books is found in Acts. 15:10-1 1, at the council at Jerusalem.

Paul laid before the apostles the message he had preached.
Then Peter said, “Now therefore why make ye trial of God, that ye should put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus in like manner as they.”
He had reference to the keeping of the law under the First Covenant. The last statement is in regard to the Gentile believers.
Before we take up Revelation faith, we should notice the different kinds of faith that men have in Jesus today.

Christian Science, Unity, and the other Metaphysical and philosophical teachers of today do not believe that God is a person.
They will tell you that He is a perfect mind, but He has no location.
It is just a great universal mind which finds its home in every individual. He has no headquarters.
It is a mind without a brain, without a personality.
They do not believe in sin as Paul taught it in the Revelation given to him.
They do not believe that Jesus died for our sins, but that He died as a martyr.
They do not believe He had a literal Resurrection, a physical Resurrection, but as one puts it, “a metaphysical resurrection.” (whatever that means)
If God is not a person and Jesus did not put sin away, then who is Jesus and what is the value of our faith in Him?

One of them calls Him “The way-shower”. He is not a way-shower. HE IS THE WAY!
Their faith in Jesus and their faith in God is, after all, faith in themselves and what they inherently have within themselves.
It has caused mighty changes in them, but it has never produced a New Creation, nor brought them into real fellowship with the Father God, nor given them Righteousness.

What is the faith that the modernists have today?
It is not faith in Jesus as a Substitute, for they do not believe in the Substitutionary Sacrifice of Christ.
It is not faith in God the Father as unveiled to us by Jesus.
It is faith in man’s conception of Jesus. It does not produce a New Creation.
It does not save the lost.
Man has faith in science and loudly proclaims science as the modern god of the human.
But science is but the fragments of knowledge that man has gathered out of the great body of hidden truth in the universe.

He has gained this knowledge through the Five Senses.
These Five Senses have been unable to find the reason for Creation or the cause of Creation.
They have not discovered the source of Life or Motion, or the Authority or Power that holds the Universe together.
They do not know the Reason for man, nor the end of man. As Sense Knowledge is limited, so Sense Knowledge Faith is limited.