And when they had prayed, the place in which they were assembled shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and spoke the word of God with boldness.
Peter and John are free again, under orders never to speak in the name of Jesus again, so the believers pray together. The answer comes at once, and it raises two questions: what had they prayed for, and what does "filled" mean here?
Their prayer left out the requests we might expect:
Those gathered together in prayer recognised the character of the times, and asked for what they needed. What was that? Shelter from persecution? Power to crush their enemies? No. They asked that God would stretch out His hand — not to shield them, but to heal others — and that with all boldness they might speak the Word, and that signs and wonders might be done in the name of His holy servant Jesus.
The filling itself was never on their list:
We ought not to be surprised that our souls are filled with blessing. When they had prayed, the place was shaken. Better still, "they were all filled with the Holy Spirit." They had not asked for this; they had asked for boldness, and they got it.
Commentators differ on what the shaking meant. One reads it as the Creator answering those who had appealed to Him:
How certain the answer is, when the Lord and His interests are what the prayer is all about! God assures them at once that He has heard: He shakes the very place where they are gathered. This is the answer of the Creator, whom they had appealed to. He will yet "shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, and shake all nations," to bring in Christ (Hag. 2:6-7).
Another sees the shaken building as a picture of what was happening inside them:
Their prayer was united and real, and God answered in a striking way: He shook the building they were in. This pictures the deep stirring of the Spirit of God in their souls. They were all filled with the Spirit, which gave boldness in speaking the word of God. Such a miracle today would likely excite us so much that we would forget to proclaim the word.
Scripture also speaks of people being full of the Spirit, and the two phrases are not interchangeable:
In a few cases we have the word "full" of the Spirit, but in most it is "filled." The difference seems to be this. "Full of the Spirit" describes the habitual state of a soul always controlled by the Spirit — as our blessed Lord was, and Stephen and Barnabas in their measure. "Filled with the Spirit" is very often for some special service, prophecy, or testimony. I do not think that the opposite of "filled" is necessarily "empty." For instance, the apostles were filled again and again. It would not be fair to conclude that in between they were in a lower spiritual state. Rather, God gave special power as special emergencies arose.
This filling also differs from the Spirit's permanent home in the believer:
On the day of Pentecost the disciples did not simply receive the Spirit to live in them. "They were all filled with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:4). When a believer is filled with Him, no force inside is active to check His power. This filling of the Spirit is not permanent like His indwelling. Peter was filled with the Spirit again in Acts 4:8, and yet again in verse 31 of the same chapter.
Boldness was not the only result. The verses that follow trace a second effect back to the same cause:
All of them were filled with Him. The very building where they met was shaken, and God answered their prayer for special boldness at once. And He gave them what they had not asked for: they all were "of one heart and soul." This of course flowed from the "one Spirit" filling every one of them. If all believers today were filled with the Spirit, oneness of mind and heart would mark them. It is the only way such oneness can be brought about.
The scene is exceptional, but the experience is open to ordinary believers too:
No doubt we know we are born of the Spirit, and are sealed with the Spirit; but to be filled with the Spirit goes further. This blessing is not confined to the apostles… In Ephesians 5 we are urged to be "filled with the Spirit." Is that an impossible thing? Or is the exhortation not needed? We all should seek to be "filled with the Spirit," which means our whole being under His control.
- Ask — under threat they did not pray for safety or for power over their enemies. They asked for boldness to keep speaking, and for God's hand to heal others.
- Answer — God replied at once, and gave more than they had asked. The place shook, and He filled them all with His Spirit.
- Sign — some read the shaking as the Creator's own answer to those who had appealed to Him. Others see a picture of the Spirit stirring their souls.
- Filling — "filled with the Spirit" means special power for a particular moment. It is not the same as the habitual state of being "full of the Spirit," nor the same as His permanent indwelling.
- Effect — one Spirit filled them all, and two things followed: bold speech, and one heart and soul among them. Believers today are urged to seek the same filling.
And the heart and soul of the multitude of those that had believed were one, and not one said that anything of what he possessed was his own, but all things were common to them;
Luke describes a company so closely joined that no one called his property his own. Two questions follow. What produced this? And is it a pattern the church should copy?
This unity was not organised. Commentators trace it to the Holy Spirit. He alone can silence the self-will that keeps people apart.
Never before Pentecost had such a time appeared on earth... It is the Holy Spirit Whose energy works everything that pleases God and everything that builds up people. Without Him there would have been only so many separate people. The Spirit joins us to Christ, and by that He also gives practical unity, as here... Such unity could not have existed without one supreme, absorbing object — Christ Himself. But the Spirit's power also had to shut out the activity of each separate will. For flesh loves to differ, and seeks its own things.
The two words are not repetition. Writers take them to cover the whole inner life: how these believers thought, how they felt, how they loved.
In thought and feeling, as well as in affection, they were completely one. They kept proving it by still holding everything in common. This was the picture the Christian community presented to anyone watching. Happiness, confidence, and love reigned among them.
Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say they owned nothing. It says none of them called what he owned his own. Commentators press hard on that distinction.
There was no communistic law among these believers. It would have spoiled everything if there had been. It was a unity of heart that kept them all from saying that what was really theirs belonged to them. Selling lands and houses was optional, and no one asked for it. We can see that from the very naming of those who did it. So no one gave up personal ownership as a rule. Instead there was a love that held nothing back from another's need. It came from the instinct of hearts that had found their real possessions in the place Christ had risen into.
Nothing was demanded of anyone. Peter makes that plain later when he confronts Ananias.
As Peter says to Ananias, no one ever demanded that they give their goods to the assembly. No one even mentioned it to them. It was the free power of the Holy Spirit working in love to others. Nobody set up a community of people or goods at all. What happened was a voluntary giving up of what was one's own, where that could be useful. And most blessed it was. Acting in that spirit will always be blessed, even though there are no apostles at whose feet I can lay what I have to give away. Riches are as dangerous now as then, devotedness as acceptable now as then.
There is also a simple reason this worked here and nowhere else. Every Christian on earth lived in one city.
Remember one thing about this having of things in common. All the Christians in the world were there together in that one city. When God extended the testimony to other cities we never find anything of the sort... They were a family, and they felt that they were one family. But once God was working here and working there, the day for community of goods was clearly past.
The picture did not last. Writers hold it up against the divided state of Christians ever since, and they name one cause.
Unity, unity in visible display, is the next effect produced... and so the Lord's desire for His people — that they all might be one — was answered for the moment. A blessed sight, we might well say, surrounded as we are, on every side, with divisions and schools of opinion... The root, then, of all discords in the Church of God is the lack of the Spirit's power. Where He is ungrieved, He works without hindrance in a company of believers. There unity must follow: unity in feeling, unity in thought and judgment, and unity in display.
- Spirit first. No one organised this oneness. The Holy Spirit's energy shut out each separate will in hearts absorbed with one object: Christ.
- Heart then hand. One heart and one soul came first; shared possessions were the proof that followed, not the arrangement that produced it.
- Free, not forced. No law required it. No one asked for it. No one gave up ownership as a rule. Love refused to hold back from another's need.
- Local, not universal. It suited a moment when every believer on earth lived in one city. When the testimony spread, that form passed. The devotedness behind it never did.
- Lost, and why. The unity faded. Wherever it is missing, writers name one cause: the Spirit's power lacking or grieved.
and with great power did the apostles give witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.
God has just answered the prayer of the gathered believers: the building shook and they spoke with fresh boldness. This verse joins two things — what the apostles said in public, and what God was doing in the whole company.
One writer presses the point: a message that ends at Christ's death is a message cut short.
Do we need to argue that the apostles were right, and not the modern preachers who speak of the Lord in His service, or in His death, and stop there? These men cut the true witness short of its full blessing. All their preaching suffers — and, we may add, their faith too. Why separate the resurrection from the death of Christ? If He "has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain... you are still in your sins." Without His resurrection there is no proof that our sins are gone, that we are justified, and that God is glorified.
Preached in Jerusalem, that testimony had a sharp edge for the men who had condemned Jesus:
To preach the resurrection of Christ was to convict the Jews of sin in putting Him to death. It announced that God had defeated all their plans. At the same time it stripped off the cloak of religious zeal they had tried to wrap around their conduct. It left them without excuse. And it pointed to the ground of the preaching of forgiveness of sins: God had accepted the sacrifice.
No one disputed that Jesus died. His resurrection was another matter — and that is where the apostles pushed hardest:
Everyone admitted His death, and about that they only had to explain its meaning. But His resurrection they fiercely contested. Here the apostles faced the point of strongest opposition. They knew this: if the Spirit of God carried their testimony home and broke resistance here, the whole position of unbelief gave way.
The verse names power and grace together. One writer links the two:
The power seen in the apostles' testimony was tied to the state of the assembly — we might even say it was the result of it. To seek out special servants, and to hold special prayer meetings for the gospel, may be excellent things. But God may use His word in sovereign power for a moment, while the lasting power of the testimony will always depend on the state of God's people it comes from.
One writer notes who "them all" takes in:
The great grace, we read, was upon them all — that is, upon the whole Christian community.
Kelly refuses to reduce the phrase to public popularity. He reads the next verse as a sample of how that grace worked, not as the reason people liked them:
It is painful that anyone should reduce this "great grace" to "popular favour". The next verse does not tell us why the people looked kindly on them. It does not say they were liked because no needy person was left among them, as if the church were a good benefit club! Verse 34 simply shows one special way in which the great grace upon them worked.
This grace does more than save. It makes those who receive it gracious, and no command is needed:
God raised from the dead the One who made Himself responsible for our sins and went down into death under divine judgment for our sakes. That God is the Saviour God, and His great grace reproduces itself in those who know Him in this way. Love is not the fruit of a command or of an effort to love. His grace creates graciousness in those who know themselves loved by Him.
Can such days be brought back? One writer gives a warning:
It is little wonder that many have longed for a return of those days. But too many have sought it in vain, and that is the tragedy. Human energy can never reproduce this. There have been many imitations, and all of them have failed.
- Great fact. The apostles centred their witness on Christ risen. A message that stops at His death gives no proof that our sins are gone.
- Great opposition. Everyone admitted His death; His resurrection they fiercely contested. That is where unbelief had to break.
- Great power. Special meetings do not manufacture power. It flows out of the condition of the people the testimony comes from.
- Great grace. More than public popularity. It rested on the whole community, and the sharing in the next verse is only one sample of how it worked.
- Great result. Grace reproduces itself. Those who know they are loved become loving, and no command is needed. Human energy has never copied it.