Welcome back. Some of my pals and I went to see a movie is about World War II and it's about fighting. Come on, I think we've talked about this before. I keep wanting to say the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but that wasn't it. That was horrible. Sean Connery, it was like 20 years ago. In the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they sailed a 500-foot-long submarine through the narrow, twisting, turning canals of Venice. That wasn't even my biggest problem with it. It wasn't that it wasn't the League of It's like the exceptional, ungentlemanly warfighters, warriors. Henry Cavill's in it, set in World War II, and there's bullets and people get shot and stuff. And it's cute. It's trying to be funny and quirky. It was fine. It was an okay movie. But I'll tell you what didn't work about it for me is there was just no problem. All the team, the super squad of fighter warriors, they were all real good at things and they all had talents, the same talent that every roster has in movies like that. You got the demolition guy, and you got the technology guy, and you got the gunfighter guy, and you got the bruiser, and you got the beauty. It was just exactly what you'd expect. But what was weird about this movie is they just never had any problem whatsoever. Everywhere they walked into, they were like, no, we will win, and then they just won. And we need this thing to work out, or we're all gonna die. And then the thing worked out. It was fine. You get to the end and you're feeling like, huh. Well, I guess I guess that was it. Well, that was no fun at all. I needed the bad guys to be more competent. I mean, if their thing is so good, you would expect, given the rhythms and paces of storytelling, that there would be an equal and opposite thing that is so bad, and they're gonna have to eke out a victory over it. But the incredible league of ungentlemanly, exceptional, extraordinary Henry Cavill warfighter gun World War II warrior fighters was just anticlimactic. It was way too easy. And maybe the first time somebody's reading through the book of Acts, you might be tempted to think that it's gonna be like that. You're just gonna cruise to victory. This is so easy. Jesus is there right at the beginning. He says the Holy Spirit's gonna show up, then the Holy Spirit shows up and breaks the laws of time and space, and a whole bunch of people immediately convert. And then right after that, Peter and John, two of the people are gonna be the linchpins and whether or not this thing works out, they're not afraid of anything. John is very young, Peter has made big mistakes, but it doesn't matter, they're unfazed. They just go right back into the place where all the enemies are who just got done killing their buddy Jesus, and they're like, We're totally associated with him, which is a huge amount of character growth on the part of Peter, by the way, from when he was denying Jesus just a few weeks earlier. Now he's like big and bold and out in public. I follow Jesus, I'm here, and here's what you need to know. And further, y'all got a bunch of stuff wrong, but that's okay, because this was all designed by God for the message of forgiveness and redemption and God's redemptive plan and the establishment of the kingdom of God to happen. And they heal a crippled guy who's been crippled since birth, and everybody sees it, and it just it looks like maybe this thing is just gonna be completely cake all the way down to the easiest, simplest thing ever. But this is a good story. And then good stories put great, brave, bold ideas on a collision course with somewhat equal and somewhat opposite bad ideas. This new thing that is the message of Jesus is heading for yet another showdown with the religious status quo. And that's what happens over the next few chapters of the book of Acts. The religious leaders, the same people who killed Jesus, they find out what Peter and John were saying, the stuff we talked about yesterday, and they don't like it. Of course they don't like it, and they're like, well, we're just gonna arrest them. Now, theoretically, these guys couldn't just go around arresting everybody all the time and killing people, but they were sort of tugging at the leash of their Roman overlords. You know, they tried their hand at sowing the seeds of violence with the Jesus thing, and it kind of seems like they got away with it. So who's to say? Maybe they'll do something more violent and see if Rome puts a stop to it. So they go and arrest Peter and John and they bring them in before the high priest, which I mean is a pretty big honor to be, I mean, you must be a serious problem to be brought in before the high priest. So this is not a little thing. Don't underestimate this title. They ask Peter and John a question, like, hey, by what power are you doing this? And it's funny that they're asking again, they're really obsessed with this question, because over in the book of Matthew, that's one of the questions that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, they hit him with, hey, by whose authority are you saying this stuff? Are you doing these things? Jesus fires back at them, like, well, okay, well, the baptism that John the Baptist did, was that from man or was that from God? And all the religious leaders are like, uh oh, that is a tough question because either way we answer, we're gonna get in trouble with people. So they huddle up and they think about it and they come back and they're like, We don't know. And Jesus is like, Cool, then neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. So it's kind of funny that that thread is still hanging out there from before the crucifixion, and now the same religious leaders are gonna revisit that with Jesus' followers, Peter and John. Yeah, well, yeah, where do you get the power to do this? How come how do you have the authority to do this? That by whose name are you doing this stuff? And then it says, Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, Rulers and elders of the people, if we're being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel. It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. I mean, every chapter that goes by, we're seeing Peter get better and better at this, and he immediately goes to an Old Testament reference, Psalm 118. Peter says, He, that is Jesus, is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone. And then here's a doozy, Acts 4 12. Peter, remember, this is the same Peter who fled into the night because somebody said, Don't you know Jesus? Peter, who now apparently has no fear whatsoever and is a completely transformed man, says, Salvation is found in no one else, for there's no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. He's made an exclusive claim. What he's saying is nobody is going to be saved through the old stuff, the stuff that Jesus has fulfilled, the law that you religious leaders represent. It is only by the name of Jesus, it is only through the work of Jesus that there is deliverance, that there is forgiveness of sin, that there is eternal life, that there is reunion with God, that there is atonement. Well, here we go. Stuff's getting spicy. This isn't gonna be a boring story. We're gonna have some real friction here. What are the religious leaders gonna do? I mean, they already killed Jesus, are they gonna have to kill these guys too? It says when they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there's nothing they could say. So they ordered them to withdraw from the Sanhedrin, and then they conferred together. What are we going to do with these men? They asked. Everybody living in Jerusalem know they've done an outstanding miracle, and we can't deny it. But to stop this thing from spreading any further among the people, we must warn these men to speak no longer to anyone in this name. Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, Judge for yourselves whether it's right in God's sight to obey you rather than God, for we can't help speaking about what we've seen and heard. And after further threats, they, the religious leaders, let them go. They couldn't decide how to punish them because all the people were praising God for what had happened, for the man who was miraculously healed was over forty years old. So there you go. There's our first post-Jesus collision between the message of the kingdom and the religious leaders, which again, a version of that is basically what we're still trying to sort out once we get on to Galatians. Well, to round out this story, Peter and John they get released and they go back and they tell all these other people who are now followers of Jesus exactly what happened. And everybody's excited and they praise God and they sing together and they pray together, Sovereign Lord, you've made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David, quote, why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one. And then they recall all the powerful leaders who tried to resist the Jesus thing. And they recall how God the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit overcame all of that. And after the celebratory prayer, the Holy Spirit shows up, and it's almost like there's an earthquake or something. The tangible presence of the Holy Spirit is so evident in the room and in the lives of the people. And so the message of the kingdom, the whole Jesus thing, has just passed the first Jesus is ascended into heaven test with flying colors. It says that all the believers were of one heart and mind, and they were sharing everything with each other, and nobody had any need, and they were adding people to their number every day, and there's nothing that anybody could do to stop it. People are dumping their money into helping each other. And so we end Acts chapter 4 kind of the same way that we started it, feeling like, wow, what can stand in the way of this message? We asked a couple of days ago, why is there a Christianity? And it's coming into focus. It's because the Bible holds us out as this message being the truest, realest thing, and God being firmly and demonstrably behind it, and there's just no resisting it. So I guess it's just gonna be smooth sailing from here on out, right? The rest of the book of Acts, all the way up to the Galatians, should be cake. Well, I'm peeking ahead. No, it's not gonna be cake. There are gonna be more indifferent challenges that we didn't see coming, and we'll unpack a couple more chapters of all of this manana. I kind of feel bad. I feel like I was mean to that movie now, and maybe some of you like the movie, maybe some of you want to go see the movie. I'm not trying to talk you out of seeing the movie. It's harmless. It's fine. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I got up and I went to the bathroom, and that's when the conflict happened. Thanks for hanging out with me. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.