Acts 5:29 Meaning But Peter and the Apostles Answered

God here is your own imagination, and men are the outer voices of fact and authority that command you to accept things as they appear. To obey God rather than men is to hold to the state you have assumed within over everything the senses report and everyone who tells you to be reasonable. The awareness saying I am in you outranks the whole visible world, and loyalty belongs to it first.

Peter is the faith that stands on this and will not be talked down. When the evidence of the eyes contradicts the assumption, a person either bows to the men in front of him or stays faithful to the God within, and only one of these actually creates. To obey the imagination is to keep feeling the wish fulfilled while the outer world still argues against it. What a person consents to inwardly becomes his experience, so the whole matter of his life is decided by which voice he agrees to obey.

Obeying the crowd is easy. A person wears the face the group hands him and rests in its approval. But sometimes a deeper voice speaks from the center of the self and asks for something the crowd would forbid. This is what conscience really is, the pull to become who one truly is.

The apostles had heard that voice, and once a person truly hears it, the threats of others lose their grip. Choosing God over men means obeying the authority felt within, even at real cost, because to these men the inner voice carried more weight than any court.