Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
APOLOGUE.
This book is invaluable, giving us the inspired history of the founding, progress and establishment
of the Apostolic Church, with its organization emanating from the hand of the Divine Founder. As
we read and study this book we can see all the differentia of our Lord’s institution for the
evangelization and salvation of the world. We find the organization exceedingly simple and
practical, consisting of the episcopos, i.e., the overseer, having charge of the spiritual interest of each
little ecclesia, i.e., holiness band. Then the deacon, the custodian of the temporal interests of the
ecclesia. To these two specific officers is added the eldership, really an institution established in
Israel by Jethro, the Midianitish priest belonging to the Patriarchal dispensation, and the father-inlaw
of Moses. This well-known institution in Judaism was transferred by the apostles to the Christian
Church, an auxiliary of both the pastor and the deacon, having charge of the general interest, and
constituting a safety-valve and a balance-wheel for the general security of the whole machinery and
the efficiency of its operation. All these officers are determined by the Holy Ghost, the Builder and
Proprietor of the institution. When a church needs a pastor, a deacon or an elder, let all the members
fall on their knees before God and ask Him to supply the deficiency. He will always do it, clearly
revealing to His spiritual people the one on whom the lot falls. If divisions arise in the membership,
remain on your knees before God and He will heal all the breaches and happily unify His people.
Rest assured, there is universal harmony in the baptism of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 12:13).
“Let God be true and every man a liar.” The Word of God is the umpire in every case; that Word
says, “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” Carnal parties will frequently lop off,
manipulated by Satan. This we can not avoid; yet God’s true people are a unit, and will ever so
remain. Brethren, all who disagree and would have charity to please us, union there never can be
unless we be one in Jesus; one as He is one in God in spirit and in disposition; this the Holy
Scriptures teach; it is plain without an exposition. If the churches of Christendom would go back to
New Testament simplicity, all partition-walls would tumble down and denominational lines, in due
time, disappear. There is no reason why there should be a schism in the Church of God. None of us
will ever see His face without the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which invariably unifies all who
receive it. The people of God in non-essentials may yet differ as widely as in the Apostolic age, when
thousands of Jewish Christians were practicing circumcision, bloody sacrifices, watery catharisms,
Nazaritic vows and all the institutions of Moses, and the Gentile Christians doing none of these
things. Yet they were all bona fide members of the same gospel church under the immediate eye of
the apostles. Hence there is no reason why trineimmersion, foot-washing and kissing Tunkers and
utterly non-ritualistic Quakers should not be bona fide members of the same New Testament church,
worshipping together in perfect harmony and fellowship. This magnification of non-essentials, which
has divided up and alienated the Church of God, is simply a prominent form of Satan’s idolatry. The
New Testament [which really contains in practical revelation al the symbolic truth of the Old] is our
only code of laws. You may legislate as much as you will, yet it is all null and void, merely
optionary, unless it be at least a substantial transcript of the New Testament. So long as the
Christians were anathematized, persecuted and martyred by the world, they got along without a
human creed, satisfied with the simple Word of God. When the conversion of the Emperor
Constantine took them from the lion’s mouth and the burning stake to Cæsar’s palace, the first thing
they did was to call an ecumenical council to Nice, Bythnia, and make a human creed, under the