The enemy coming in like a flood.
I. THE FLOOD OF INIQUITY CALLED FORTH BY THE OUTPOURING OF THE HOLY GHOST.
1. The corruption of the Jewish state. Instances in the case of Saul of Tarsus, assenting to the death of Stephen. The organized persecution as an answer to the gospel. The insincerity of those who pretended to accept Gamaliel's wise counsel. Their real cowardice in not venturing to lay hold of the apostles.
2. The persecution had now a leader in Saul. It was a more decided arraying of the priestly power against the new sect; a house-to-house visitation with assumed legal authority. This was to push forward the conflict between the two kingdoms as nothing else could. It was to give definite aim to the persecution, and so to prepare the way for the more decided lifting up of the standard against it by the Spirit of God in the conversion of Saul.
II. THE BREAKING UP OF THE FIRST FORM OF CHURCH LIFE, PREPARATORY TO A HIGHER, WIDER, AND MORE ACTIVE.
1. Fellowship is very precious, but activity still more so. Loving one another should prepare us to love the world. The temporary expedient of Christian communism gave way before the world's violence; it was a help to the realization of Church life, but not an abiding rule of action.
2. Stephen's funeral and the Church's lamentation would deeply impress upon all dependence, not on individual instruments, but on the Spirit of God. How little it was thought that the chief persecutor would soon himself be the chief preacher!
3. Those scattered abroad carried with them a body of facts, both the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles so far, which helped them to dispense with the immediate superintendence of the apostles. So the [New Testament would begin to be formed in that first persecution. The believers all over Judaea and Samaria, speaking to one another and to their neighbors of the things that they themselves most surely believed. How little Saul's "laying waste" the Church harmed it! Learn the lesson of confidence in the overruling Savior. "He maketh the wrath of man to praise him."—R.