Summary of Acts, The Holy
Spirit and Church Growth. Acts 1 – 12
The key verse is Acts 1:8 NASB
“but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you;
and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in
all Judea
and Samaria,
and even to the remotest part of the earth.” It gives us the basic outline for
the book of Acts. It starts off in Jerusalem where
they are to wait until the Holy Spirit comes, who is the promise. The promise
of the Father is clearly articulated by John the Baptist: “He will come and
baptize by the Spirit and by fire.” The promise is the coming of the Holy
Spirit. Jesus clearly spelled that out in the upper room discourse in John 14
and again as He left on the way to the garden of Gethsemane
in John 15 & 16. The promise is that they would receive power when the Holy
Spirit came. This is what makes the difference between a church age believer
and a pre-church age believer. Nobody up to this point has had the kind of
relationship with God the Holy Spirit that comes into effect on that day of
Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is poured out upon the church and the foundational
ministry is the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. That was what was
predicted by John the Baptist and recorded in each of the Gospels, and that is
what was brought to fulfilment in Acts chapter two.
In Acts 1:5 Jesus said, NASB
“for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit
not many days from now.” When Jesus a phrase to summarize what happens on the
day of Pentecost He doesn’t says indwelling, He
doesn’t say filling, He says baptism. That is the foundational event. This is
what makes the difference between a church age believer and a non-church age
believer. In the Old Testament there was an enduement,
a term which refers to a temporary giving of power for a specific purpose. It
wasn’t permanent and it wasn’t related to the spiritual life, to an
individual’s relationship to God. The Holy Spirit was given to key leaders and
individuals—prophets in the writing of Scripture, kings in leading Israel, the
judges in leading Israel, Aholiab and Bezaleel as they are the lead craftsmen in overseeing the
production for the tabernacle. All that is done by the power of the Holy
Spirit; He comes upon people but He doesn’t indwell them or fill them. It was
not a spiritual life function. There were probably fewer than one hundred
people who had any impact from God the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. In the
church age every believer is indwelt and filled by the Holy Spirit. Every
believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit, every believer is given a spiritual
gift, every believer is sealed by the Spirit.
But in the Tribulation period in the
future none of that is going to be there for the believers. If they were there
it would be the church. These are the things that distinguish church age
believers from non-church age believers. At the end of the Tribulation there is
going to be this giving, this establishment of the new covenant when God the
Holy Spirit is going to indwell and fill in a different way—especially every
Jewish believer—going into the Millennial kingdom.
Jesus said they would receive power after
the Holy Spirit had come upon them. That coming upon them has been specifically
defined by Him as the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The result of this and all
that is related to this is going to be that they will be witnesses. He is
speaking specifically to the eleven apostles in front of Him, but by inference
to all church age believers. Acts 1:8 is the outline of the book of Acts. They
are in Jerusalem in acts 1-7, the focus shifts to Judea and Samaria in Acts
chapter 8-12, then “to the uttermost parts of the earth” in Acts 13 to the end
of the book.
What the Holy Spirit brought new was first
of all a new organism. This is a brand new organism. Nothing like this has been
in existence before. The Greek word ekklesia
[e)kklhsia] is the word
translated “church,” it also meant assembling. In any kind of gathering of
people there was a word that was used, and that was ekklesia. The counterpart to that word that was used in the
Hebrew was “synagogue.” So there was this assembly of people. So ekklesia doesn’t have that technical
Holy Spirit kind of meaning but it is a word that is taken over at this point
in the Scripture and given a technical meaning. It refers to those who are
called Christians. Then what unites this are these new ministries of the Holy
Spirit, fundamentally the baptism by the Holy Spirit which unites us in Christ.
So what every person has in common who has believed in Jesus Christ is that at
that instant God the Holy Spirit is used by Jesus Christ to identify them with
His death, burial, and resurrection, and they are brought into the body of
Christ. At that same instant they become part of the new people, the new
family, the royal family of God. They are part of the
new identity because they are now Christians, distinct from Israel
as a people of God. They have new spiritual resources, a new spiritual
destiny—to rule and reign with the Lord Jesus Christ—and they are the
recipients of new ministries of God the Holy Spirit. And they are given a new
objective, and that objective is to be a witness throughout the world.
The first chapter of Acts is the prelude
to the book. This is where we get the transition coming out of the life of
Christ. Jesus is going to leave the earth now in the ascension and His physical
body which has now been resurrected from the dead is going to be replaced by a
new body, the church. So there is this replacement that comes into effect.
Jesus ascends and then ten days later there is a new body on the earth. The
first chapter focuses on this promise of the Father, the promise of the Holy
Spirit. That is the prelude, the foundation for the rest of Acts.
The first major section then goes from 2:1
to 7:60 which is their witness in Jerusalem. We see
the progress of the church, the birth and the progress of the church that
focuses on the Jews. The church is exclusively Jewish, Peter is the key leader,
everything takes place in Jerusalem,
and it covers a period of approximately two years. Then the next section is
from 8:1 to 12:25.
In 8:1 we see Saul breathing threats against the church and being deputised by
the Sanhedrin to arrest and to persecute those who are followers of Jesus of
Nazareth as the Messiah. There is now this forced persecution, specifically in Jerusalem, which
causes the Christians to go out of Jerusalem. This is
called motivation for witnessing. We won’t go out and do it on our own so we
are going to turn the heat up a little bit, God says, and now we are going to
be forced to leave. All the Christians had to leave Jerusalem except
for the apostles. They stayed but all the other Christians were forced to flee
this persecution. This forces them out into the surrounding territories. The
focal point of the next five chapters is on how the gospel spread in Judea and Samaria. This
section covers a period of approximately thirteen years.
Who is responsible for the growth and
expansion of the church? It is God. That doesn’t mean the pastors shouldn’t be
involved, or anybody else, but they should be involved in witnessing. The
command is to witness. But God is the one who establishes and builds the
church, it is not based on getting the right methodology. The focal point of
the growth starts at the temple; the birth of the church starts on the temple
mount and explodes outward. So the temple mount is ground zero for the birth of
the church. It goes out from there.
God authenticates, empowers and directs
the apostles’ witness in Jerusalem.
Two basic things happen. First, the Lord Jesus Christ promises the Holy Spirit
in Acts chapter one. They are to wait until the Holy Spirit comes and so we
have the focus on the promise and the ascension of the Lord, and then the
selection of Matthias to replace Judas. The second division, 2:1-7:60, the Lord
gives birth to and the Holy Spirit expands the church in Jerusalem. It is
the Holy Spirit who is the real expander of the church. Some who have studied
this in detail have estimated that as many as 20 to 30 per cent of the Jews
living in Israel in the first century trusted in Jesus Christ, and believed
that He was the Messiah. But it did not involved the
leadership, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Even though there were a number of
Sadducees, priests, and a number of Pharisees, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who believed Jesus was the Messiah,
it did not impact the leadership; they maintained their rejection, and this is
a major theme in these first six chapters.
What happened? Peter preaches in Acts
chapter two. We don’t see much of a response from the Pharisees except that
they come out because they are really interested to see what in the world is
going on with them. But they don’t really do anything. Then a couple of days
later Peter and John come back to heal the lame man and they are preaching in
Solomon’s portico. They are preaching the gospel and the Sanhedrin sends the
temple guard to arrest them. They bring them and in and they are told to stop.
There is an escalation of opposition. First they are told to stop; then they
are told to stop and are beaten. Later they are arrested and then Stephen is
going to be martyred. So there is an escalation of violence against them and an
escalation of opposition.
In chapter six we have the selection of
the seven, and then the next part deals with Stephen and his witness. What are
they supposed to do? Acts 1:8, “You will be my witnesses.”
So the focus for Luke is their fulfilling of the mandate of Acts 1:8 to be a
witness. Stephen is the witness in Acts 7 and then Philip is going to be a
witness in Acts 8 as the gospel moves out from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria. There
are a number of progress reports given by Luke to help us understand how
rapidly the church expanded. There are progress reports in the first chapter,
progress reports of the response of the people to Peter’s sermon in chapter
two, and we are told that when he gives the command in Acts 2:38 to repent
there is a response. About 3000 souls that day were added to them. They
continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, breaking of
bread and prayers, and fear came upon every soul. Then we see in verse 44 that
all who believed were together and had all things in common. That really shows
the Jewish thinking that is in this early church because they are not thinking
of themselves as individuals, they think of themselves as a collective group.
They are group oriented and team oriented and are not focused on just how each
individual player is being taken care of, that Old Testament background and
that Jewish background affecting their thinking where they come together as a
team. Then we have the second sermon from Peter is Acts chapter three, and
again we are given a progress report in terms of the response. We are told that
5000 men responded.
In Acts 4:32 to 5:16 we basically
have an extended progress report, and that focuses
again on how God the Holy Spirit is working behind the scenes. The Holy Spirit
isn’t mentioned but that is the thrust of the whole book. God the Holy Spirit
is working through the apostles as they are obedient to their prime directive,
so to speak, which is to be a witness. Then we see the expansion problems with Ananias and Sapphira and the
administration of aid to the widows.
Then we come to Acts chapter seven and
Stephen’s witness. Really he is indicting the Sanhedrin and the Jewish
leadership for their failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and that this is a
sign of a consistent failure as they rejected God and went into idolatry in the
Old Testament. They rejected Moses and his commands. Even while Moses is up on Mount Sinai they are down
there telling Aaron to build a calf for them to worship. They consistently
defiled the temple, and he is answering all of their accusations that he has
blasphemed God and Moses, the Torah and the temple, and he shows that no indeed
it has been the Jewish leadership consistently—the people not necessarily in
many cases. But especially in this generation it is the leadership that is
guilty, though there were a lot of individuals who responded. In the meddle of
that section there was an interesting progress report in Acts 6:7 NASB
“The word of God kept on spreading; and the number of the disciples continued
to increase greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were becoming
obedient to the faith.” That shows that from the ranks of the priesthood
impressed with the lives and the teaching of the apostles studying the Torah to
see that Jesus indeed fitted the pattern of the prophecies of the Messiah there
were hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of priests who became believers
in Jesus as the Messiah.
That is what we have covered so far in the
first part of Acts. Then we get into the second division which shows from
8:1-12:25 there are six divisions. This covers God’s work in expanding the
church into Judea
and Samaria.
The first six verses show how God allows persecution to drive the church out of
Jerusalem.
This is important. So often we look at negative events in our life and we ask
how God can let this happen. Rather than looking at a negative event and say
God allowed this to happen because he is moving me in a certain direction, He
is going to open up, other avenues, other directions in our life that we didn’t
anticipate. We tend to look at the negative and say there is going to be
change, this can’t be good. God is saying you are really not fulfilling your
ministry at this point and He needs to rattle out cage a little bit and get us
pointed in the right direction so that we will get out of our comfort zone and
grow spiritually and fulfil His plan. So God allows this persecution to develop
for probably a number of reasons since God is the original multi-tasker and is
allowing this to come in order to move them out. But it has an individual
impact because they are also having to trust God. When
they looked around to see who was persecuting them some were friends and
neighbours and relatives who had not accepted Jesus as the Messiah. So they had
to make a decision as to whether they were going to faithfully follow Jesus
even though it would cost them life-long friendships and relationships with
their loved ones and members of their own families.
Now geography comes into place and over
the next five chapters we see a lot of geographical change. It starts off in Jerusalem with the
persecution and then it shifts to Samaria. There
is focus on an expansion into Samaria in Acts
8:4-25 and the key person here is Philip. He is going to have a key role to
play in the expansion, first to Samaria and then
he will be lifted by God the Holy Spirit down to Gaza where he is
going to meet the Ethiopian servant of Queen Candice of Ethiopia.
He is a Gentile and that is interesting. We usually don’t think of the first
expansion of the church to the Gentiles until Peter goes to Cornelius in Acts
10. But this Ethiopian eunuch is a Gentile. But he is a proselyte, he has
become Jewish. He is very interested and is reading through Isaiah. Philip is brought
there by God the Holy Spirit. Then he will come back up to Caesarea which is on the
border between Judea
and Samaria,
right on the coast, the site of many events in the book of Acts. Then the scene
will shift from Samaria
and Judea
to Damascus
in chapter none where the apostle Paul has been headed. He is saved on the road
to Damascus,
so the 9th chapter focuses on Saul of Tarsus. In 9:26-31
we are back in Jerusalem,
and then the scene shifts to Lydda which is just
outside of Joppa. It is at Joppa that God appears in a dream to Peter he is
going to be asked to take the gospel to Gentiles. He has this vision of the table
cloth coming down with all these unclean foods on it and God says to take and
eat. Peter is slow to get the message, there is a knock on the door and it is
some men who have been sent down to get Peter by this Roman centurion named Cornelius
who is classified not as a proselyte but as a God-fearer—a sort of first step
on the way to becoming a proselyte. So Peter goes to him, preaches the gospel,
they are saved, and the same kinds of things happen to them as happened on the
day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit comes and they are baptized by the Holy
Spirit. There are different “Pentecosts”: one on the
day of Pentecost, one in chapter eight with the Samaritans when John and Peter
come, and then there will be another one with the Gentiles.
Then the scene shifts up north. Now we are
out of Israel
to Antioch of Syria. This shows the expansion and the beginning of laying the
groundwork for the last part of the book. Then it is back to Jerusalem and the
section begins with them back in Antioch.
So the first thing that we see in this
section is the persecution to drive the believers out of Jerusalem. The
second is that God sends Philip to the Samaritans, and he goes to the city of Samaria and
demonstrates the unity of these new believers in Samaria with the
work in Jerusalem
by having a follow-up action by the two key apostles, Peter and John. It is
under their hand and leadership that the Holy Spirit comes upon these new
believers. It is interesting that when Philip goes they trust in Jesus as
Messiah but nothing happens. There is no baptism by the Holy Spirit, no
indwelling, they don’t speak in tongues, nothing happens. Then Peter and John
come, and Peter is the one who prays for them and they receive the Holy Spirit.
Luke tells us, Acts 8:16 NASB “For He had not yet fallen upon any of
them; they had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. [17] Then
they {began} laying their hands on them, and they were receiving the Holy
Spirit.” That is when they are brought into the organism of the church. Why did
that happen? Because the Jews hated the Samaritans and didn’t
want to have anything to do with them. They were a kind of mixed breed
of people who had been resettled there from the time of the Assyrian and
Babylonian empires, and the Jews so hated the Samaritans that instead of
walking straight from Jerusalem to Nazareth they would cross over to the east
side of the Jordan river and go up through the area that was known as Perea, and then cross back over when they got up to the Sea
of Galilee so that they wouldn’t even have to set foot on soil of Samaria. So
it would be very simple to see a division in the early church occur between Jewish
Christians and Samaritan Christians if Philip had gone up there, preached the
gospel, they had received the Holy Spirit and all of that had happened
independently of Peter and John. They are not brought into the church until
Peter is there. This establishes the unity of the body of Christ at the very
beginning. There aren’t going to be ethnic distinctions in the body of Christ. God
establishes that from the very beginning.
There is also the episode with Simon the
sorcerer—he is actually saved. Probably ninety per cent of the people we will
hear teach on this will say he wasn’t. But in Acts 8:13 NASB “Even
Simon himself believed; and after being baptized, he continued on with Philip,
and as he observed signs and great miracles taking place, he was constantly
amazed.” If he was not saved then that terminology that he believed—the same
terminology as used everywhere else when someone becomes a Christian—is
meaningless, and none of us knows whether or not we are saved. So he is saved
but he is just screwed up in the head. Being saved doesn’t mean one’s thinking
is suddenly straightened out, it just means that we have a different destiny
than we had before, and we have the potential to straightened
out our muddled thinking. Simon is still operating like he always did and thinking:
Well how can I make some money off of this? He hasn’t changed at all, other
than he is now saved. There has to be some teaching before there is going to be
change. He hasn’t had the teaching yet or the opportunity.
At the conclusion of this section we read:
Acts 8:25 NASB “So, when they had solemnly testified and spoken the
word of the Lord, they started back to Jerusalem, and
were preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans.” So we see the
expansion that takes place. Then Philip is taken to meet the Ethiopian and he
gives him the gospel. The Ethiopian is reading from Isaiah 53:7, 8 and Philip
asks the Ethiopian what he thinks it means. Acts 8:35 NASB “Then Philip
opened his mouth, and beginning from this Scripture he preached Jesus to him.” The
translation “preach” is not equivalent to the Greek word, it is the Greek word euaggelizo [e)uaggelizw].
It is “he explained the gospel.” [36] “As they went along the road they came to
some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look! Water! What prevents me from being
baptized?’” Verse 37 is not in the original. It is in the Textus Receptus only. It is not in the Majority Text, not in the
Critical Text; it is not in the majority of MSS and it is not
in the oldest MSS. “If you believe with all your heart”
doesn’t fit with anything else in Scripture. It you believe like a mustard seed
is what Jesus said. How much is enough? That verse is not consistent with
anything else and it is not in the majority of the MSS
or the oldest MSS.
Acts 8:39 NASB “When they came
up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the
eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing.” He is transported
instantly to the north west
part of Judea.
He goes through this area preaching and all the cities until he came to Caesarea. We stop the
action there. He is preaching in all the cities but the word that we keep
seeing translated “preach” in the KJV is euaggelizo—proclaiming the gospel,
giving the good news. He was evangelizing in all the cities until he came to Caesarea.
Then the scene shifts to Saul in chapter
nine—Saul of Tarsus who becomes Paul. He has been commissioned by the Sanhedrin
to arrest and to persecute the Christians. He has a letter of authentication
from the Sanhedrin to the synagogues in Damascus now. Acts
9:2 NASB “and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that
if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them
bound to Jerusalem.”
While he is on the way the Lord Jesus Christ appears to him and challenges him.
This is the point of Saul of Tarsus’ conversion. It
is not an interior event; he is not having an
hallucination. The men with him see a light and hear the sound of the voice.
They don’t see Jesus specifically and they don’t hear the words, because they
are not meant to. But the fact that they see the light and hear Jesus speaking
(even though they can’t distinguish the words) shows that it is an external
event. And it is an objective event, not a subjective psychological event
motivated by Paul’s guilt over killing all of these Christians.
Paul is blinded from this vision, he goes
to Damascus
and he has three days to sit and think. Then the Lord commissions a believer
name Ananias to go to find Paul and to heal him of
his blindness. Saul stays for a while in Damascus, but he
is pretty smart and has already rethought a lot of his Old Testament theology
and figured out that Jesus us definitely the Messiah. He starts going out and
engaging people and witnessing to them. Acts 9:20 NASB “and immediately
he {began} to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’”
Again it is euaggelizo—he evangelized.
He is arguing effectively that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. He so angered
the leaders in the synagogues that they conspired together to kill him, so he
had to escape in the night.
Then he heads for Jerusalem. They in
the church there don’t want to have anything to do with him, except for
Barnabas. This is the one whose name means “Son of encouragement.” He is the
one who looks out there and sees the man nobody else wants to talk to, and he
sees the potential. Barnabas is the man behind the scenes. Then we are told
that the church continued to grow. But there were a lot of things that were upset
because of Paul, and he is finally sent away back home to Tarsus for about 12-14
years. After he leaves we are told that all the churches throughout the area
had peace and were edified. The juxtaposition with Paul leaving is taken as
amusing. The point is that we started in 8:1 with persecution and by the end of
chapter nine there is going to be peace in all of these churches. The persecution
has ended.
Then the shift comes back to Peter. We see
Peter’s minstry to Aeneas who is healed from his paralysis, and then he is
going to raise a young woman from the dead. As a result of these miracles
performed by Peter we are told in Acts 9:42 NASB “It became known
all over Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.” There is where he receives the
messengers from Cornelius, and chapters 10 and the first part of 11 are all about
this inclusion of the Gentiles. There is a different order of events when they
come. The Samaritans didn’t speak in tongues but the Gentiles do.
Then we move to the last part which
focuses on Barnabas and Paul in Antioch—11:19-30.
Barnabas decides to go pull Saul out of obscurity. A number of years have gone
by in this transition. Barnabas goes to get Saul and brings him to Antioch, and he
becomes a key leader and preacher-evangelist in the church at Antioch. Acts 11:21
NASB “And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who
believed turned to the Lord.” This is the spring of 44, so it is nine years
after the outbreak of the persecution. They are going to be there about four
years before they go out on the first missionary journey. During that time they
are going to participate in the church at Antioch. He is
going to participate in sending money down to Jerusalem because
there is a tremendous famine that occurs.
The scene shifts in chapter twelve back to
Jerusalem.
Persecution arises again in the church. Herod the Tetrarch has James, the
brother of John, executed. This is the first martyr among the original apostles.
This made the Jews so happy that he seized Peter. This was during the days of
Unleavened Bread. So we see another echo of what happened with Jesus. Stephen’s
martyrdom was an echo of what happened with Jesus, and the point of all this
was to show that the leadership doesn’t repent. There is no repentance, there
is a hardening of their heart, and we have to watch that all the way to the end
where there is a riot and they try to kill Paul. This is designed to show that
the leadership of the Jews in Israel
get more hostile to the church; they are hardening their opposition to the
gospel, though there are thousands and thousands of Jews who believe that Jesus
is the Messiah.
In chapter twelve Herod is filled with
arrogance. The people are chanting that he is like a god and, of course, the
Holy Spirit is not going to put up with any competition and we are told, Acts
12:22 NASB “The people kept crying out, ‘The voice of a god and not
of a man!’ [23] And immediately an angel of the Lord
struck him because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and
died.” This is historically verified. [24] “But the word of the Lord continued
to grow and to be multiplied.” So we continue to see the church grow and expand
but they didn’t have any idea of what the purpose for the church was.