Jesus reveals to us that God never actively engages in violence, so how do we explain the story of Ananias and Sapphira falling dead after lying about their financial giving in Acts 5:1-11 ?
First, it is important to note the text itself does not say God is the one who actively took the lives of Ananias and Sapphira. Rather, that conclusion is an assumption that many people read into the text. A better way to interpret this passage is in light of its ancient Mediterranean context. Unlike our modern Western Christian culture, the early church believed in semi-autonomous spiritual power that, although given by God, could be accessed and directed in specific ways by humans—including ways that do not reflect the love or will of God.
For example, in Acts 3:6, Peter says to the lame man at the temple: “I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you, in the name of Jesus Christ: walk!” Notice Peter’s belief about the power to heal. He doesn’t pray to God to heal the man as good American Christians would do today. Instead, Peter tells the man that he, Peter himself, possesses the power to heal through Jesus’ name, and commands him to “walk.”
This isn’t a fluke. This pattern of semi-autonomous spiritual power is repeated throughout the early church (e.g., Acts 9:32-35, etc.), and displayed in Jesus’ example and teachings. For example, Jesus says to his disciples: “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done” (Mark 11:23).
Notice Jesus does not say that if they pray to God, then God will do it for them. Rather, he implies that the faith-infused spiritual power of their own words will be a determinative factor. As creatures made in the “image of God” (Genesis 1:26-28), one of the ways that humans “image” God is by speaking new realities into being. Just as God created the world through spiritually powerful speech (Genesis 1:3), so one of the ways we are to steward the world is through spiritually powerful speech. In the same way our muscles enable us to change things in the physical realm, so the spiritual power of our words affects reality as well.
Because Peter is filled with the power of the Spirit, he has the ability and responsibility to decide when and how to disperse this power by speaking “in the name of Jesus.” This doesn’t mean, however, that Peter, or any other Christian, will always use this speech-power wisely or lovingly. As an analogy, when a police officer is given a gun and a badge, they possess the legal power to say, “Stop in the name of the law!” They are supposed to use this power for good as “public servants,” but we know that a police officer can also use the power of the badge and gun to hurt rather than help people. The same is true of Peter’s spiritual speech-power.
We find the misuse of semi-autonomous spiritual power throughout the Bible. For example, when God gave Moses the power to use his staff to make water flow from rocks, he allowed Moses to decide when and where to use it (Exodus 17:6). And one day Moses decided to use the freedom and ability of his spiritual power in a sinful way out of anger (Numbers 20:6-12 ).
Similarly, Paul explains in his letter to the Corinthians that, even when someone has been given a miraculous spiritual gift, that person can still use their spiritual power outside of the love-centered purposes that God intended. This is why Paul places 1 Corinthians 13—the “agape-love chapter”—in the middle of his discussion on spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12-14).
In light of all this, we believe that the Ananias and Sapphira incident is an example of Peter abusing his spiritual speech-power by cursing instead of healing. There is no indication that God wanted him to kill these people, but Peter decided to use his power for the purpose of death that day. Never again in the New Testament do we see anyone use their spiritual speech-power to speak a death-curse.
Now, some may disagree and say that God directed Peter to curse Ananias and Sapphira (even though the text does not say so explicitly). But if this is the case, then we should expect God to judge them according to the pattern we see throughout the Bible. When God does bring judgment on people in the scriptures, we find that he withdraws his protective presence, and simply allows the always-present forces of evil and chaos to do their work.
The text tells us that Ananias had allowed Satan to occupy his heart (Acts 5:2), and Jesus tells us that Satan is a “thief” who “comes only to kill and to steal and to destroy”—in contrast to Jesus who comes only to give us “overflowing life” (John 10:10). And so, even if God wanted judgment to come upon Ananias and Sapphira in this way, we would suggest that he didn’t do this by actively killing them himself, but rather by simply withdrawing his protective presence from them, thereby allowing “the devil, who holds the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14) to have his way with them.
