The Acts of the Apostles Acts
Acts
The story of the four gospels is continued in the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke as “part two” of his earlier work. He refers back to his gospel as the story of “everything Jesus began to do and teach” (1.1); the story he now tells is of what Jesus continued to do and to teach, through the presence and power of the holy spirit. The story moves outwards: beginning in Jerusalem, the news about Jesus spreads to Judaea, then into the contested territory of Samaria, and then onwards into the wider world, ending up with Paul in Rome announcing God as King and Jesus as Lord openly and unhindered under the nose of Caesar himself. It is easy to be disappointed when reading Acts because the second half tells the story of Paul’s missionary journeys, and when he gets to Rome under armed guard to have his appeal heard by Caesar the reader naturally wants to know, “What happened next?” But the hero of Luke’s story is not Paul, but the Jesus-gospel itself. All roads in Luke’s world led not only to Rome but from Rome. Once the gospel has taken root there, it will spread to the rest of the world.
The spirit turns the family of Jesus-followers into a strange kind of new Temple. The Jerusalem Temple was the place where heaven and earth met; many Jews longed for a new event in which the divine glory would fill the “house” once more, as (for instance) in Exodus 40 or 1 Kings 8. The wind and fire of Pentecost (Acts 2) answer to this expectation, indicating that now the Temple is a community, not a building—which is why, in much of the rest of the book, the moments when the early church clashes with the authorities in Jerusalem and the wider world are often focused on temples. The implicit early Christian claim was that the one God had opened up a new heaven-and-earth reality, which was bound to be a threat to existing structures and authorities.
This leads to suffering and martyrdom. The church which was founded through the kingdom-bringing death and resurrection of the Messiah must itself make its way in the world through the same shadowed valley. There will be opposition, too, from within the movement itself: Acts is not shy about describing sharp disagreements among the early leaders. But, as in the biblical books upon which Luke is drawing, the reader is tacitly invited to see the work of divine providence throughout the strange events. And, as with the four gospels, those who hear and read this story are drawn into it, to face the question of vocation: what will it look like today to follow Jesus and make his kingdom known?
The Acts of the Apostles
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The Acts of the Apostles Acts: NTFE
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a. The New Testament for Everyone, Third Edition. Copyright © 2011, 2018, 2019 by
Nicholas Thomas Wright, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. All rights reserved. Published by Zondervan, 2023.
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