The Advice Of Gamaliel
THE ADVICE OF GAMALIEL
ACTS 5:33-42
If we try to crush what God has planned, we are taking on God himself.
At Pentecost the reaction to Peter’s gospel call was penitent acceptance; here it is enraged hatred and refusal. The gospel is ever a divider of people (see 2 Corinthians 2:14-16).
The intervention and speech of Gamaliel offers an interesting sidelight. Its first effect was to save the apostles from their fate (5:33). Gamaliel was a Pharisaic member of the council, and greatly esteemed. He belonged to the liberal wing of his party, as a disciple of Rabbi Hillel and was the teacher of Saul of Tarsus (22:3), who quite probably supplied Luke with the information here recorded.
His policy speech is typically Pharisaic in temper and content. It picks up the leading point in their theology—that God rules the world by a wise providence which is over all. “Everything is in the hand of heaven, except the fear of heaven,” the rabbis taught. That is, all is under divine control, but man is required to obey God and leave the issues with him.
Two notable uprisings had already proved abortive, Gamaliel reminded them. Let the new movement work itself out; if it is not of God, it is bound to fail, as did the Messianic rebellions of Theudas and Judas the Galilean. If God is really in it, no human opposition can break it. Is this really a valid argument (a) to test early Christianity and (b) to test later movements in the history of the church?
5:38. The counsel is “wait and see,” but at least one of Gamaliel’s students was not willing to accept this restraint. See 8:3.
Notes 5:36: there was a rebel named Theudas whose disaffection against Rome was crushed in AD 44–46, according to Josephus. But this is an impossible identification, for at the time of Gamaliel’s speech it had not happened. The name Theudas was common, and it is likely that an earlier (pre-AD 6, when Judas of Galilee was defeated, 5:37) uprising is referred to. 5:37: the census in this verse occurred in AD 6–7, but is not the one mentioned in Luke 2:2, which was before 4 BC. 5:41: “the name,” almost a substitute word for their Christian principles and faith, as in 3 John 7.
To think over How may we know where loyalty to civil and religious authority ceases in obedience to a higher allegiance? See Romans 13:1f.; 1 Peter 2:12-17.