To Obey God Rather Than Man
One day Peter and the apostles had to practice civil disobedience. Peter and John had healed a man who had been unable to walk for years; he was a well-known beggar at the temple, and so the healing gained quick notoriety. Soon, the priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came and seized Peter and John and put them in jail. Admittedly an odd reaction on the part of the authorities, until you consider that they were frustrated with the fact that the followers of Christ had not gone away when Jesus died. Instead, they claimed he came back to life; and now the miracles that had created such a problem for them with Jesus were continuing. They saw the rise of Christianity as a threat to the continued existence of the Jewish nation: they feared Christianity would create a rebellion or some other problem with Rome and that Rome would then destroy everything. Their motivation was to preserve their people–and incidentally, their comfortable positions of leadership.
The following day, the rulers, elders and teachers of the law met in Jerusalem; Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander and the other men of the high priest’s family were present and had Peter and John brought before them for questioning. Peter and John took the opportunity to tell them about Jesus, his resurrection, and the salvation from sin offered by him. Since the man whom they had healed was standing there with them, there was little they could say. So they ordered them to withdraw from the Sanhedrin and began discussing the matter. “What are we going to do with these men?” they asked. “Everybody living in Jerusalem knows they have done an outstanding miracle, and we cannot 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.” (Acts 4:16-17)
Then they called Peter and John back 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 is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)
The principle of civil disobedience that the apostles here institute is this: they will act as they believe God wants them to act and if that involves violating the commands of human beings and human governments, so be it. But, as the events that followed demonstrate, they were willing to then accept the punishments, whatever they might be, that would be meted out by those people or governments.
The important principle that became the norm in the early Christian community was to obey God, even if that meant breaking the law. Unjust laws simply could not, in good conscious, be obeyed. Over the centuries that followed, many Christians, both individually and in groups, operated according to this basic principle, whether it was continuing to worship God in the face of persecution or even at the risk of execution, or if it meant disobeying what the law said was right, because they believed that it was, in fact, wrong. Thus, in the United States, opposition to the practice of slavery led many believers to work tirelessly to help slaves escape from their enslavement, even though the law said that what they were doing was wrong and was, in fact, theft.
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