Lecture 2: The Acts of the Spirit: Gentiles, the Missionary Journeys, and the First Council

The lecture, section by section

1. Acts: the Spirit's record of thirty years

   Luke wrote Acts as the sequel to his Gospel. The Gospel covers roughly thirty years ending at the cross; Acts covers the thirty years from Pentecost in AD 30 to Paul's first Roman imprisonment around AD 60. Though titled the Acts of the Apostles, it is really the acts of the Holy Spirit working through the apostles, and its first eight chapters concentrate on just the church's first two years.

2. Extraordinary, not normative

   Acts records a transition in salvation history, so it contains unique and extraordinary things that should not be assumed for all of church history. Busenitz previews the charismatic question: in Acts, tongues are authentic unlearned human languages, prophecy (like Agabus's) is infallible and binding, and healings are instantaneous and undeniable. The modern movement, which traces itself to Topeka, Kansas in 1901, has redefined all three, so the same words no longer name the same things. Ephesians 2:20 is his pivotal text: the sign gifts belonged to the church's foundation age of apostles and prophets.

3. Why the signs were needed

   Salvation has always been by faith, but for the first time since Moses, some fifteen hundred years, God was incorporating Gentiles into his people on equal footing with Jews, the mystery Paul unfolds in Ephesians 2 and 3. So massive a shift required significant, undeniable authentication, which is why God gave signs to the Messiah and then to his apostles.

4. Stephen's blood and Saul's rage spread the gospel

   Stephen's stoning unleashed the first great wave of persecution, with Saul at its head, and God used the persecutor to scatter the church: Acts 11:19 traces believers fleeing to Cyprus, Cyrene, and Antioch, preaching as they went. Philip carried the gospel to Samaria and to the Ethiopian eunuch, a proselyte, so the Great Commission's own outline, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, structures the book.

5. Damascus, Arabia, and the missing years

   Acts 9's 'many days' hides three years or more. Galatians 1 fills the gap: after the Damascus road and the good Ananias, Paul spent three years in Arabia in communion with the Lord himself, returned to Damascus, made a quiet trip to Jerusalem to meet only Peter and James, then went back to Damascus, escaped over the wall in a basket, and came to Jerusalem, where Barnabas vouched for him. Luke notes wryly that when Saul finally left for Caesarea and Tarsus, the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria enjoyed peace.

6. Cornelius and a decade of transition

   Philip had settled in Caesarea and Paul had preached there, so the ground was seeded when the Spirit sent Peter to Cornelius, the first uncircumcised Gentile convert, sometime after AD 37. The Spirit fell on his household exactly as at Pentecost, giving apostolic, eyewitness authentication, and the stunned Jerusalem believers concluded that God had granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life. Full Gentile incorporation took the better part of a decade; it did not happen overnight.

7. Antioch, the first Gentile church

   Scattered believers preached to Greeks in Antioch, the empire's third largest city at perhaps half a million people, and a church was born. The apostles sent Barnabas as its first pastor; he fetched Saul from Tarsus around AD 45, and some in that congregation were likely pastored by the very man they had once fled. Antioch joins Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and later Constantinople among the great cities of early Christianity, and it becomes the first missionary sending church.

8. Jerusalem interlude

   Barnabas and Saul carried famine relief south, and uphill, to Jerusalem around AD 46, a date anchored by the known famine of the mid forties. Acts 12 records the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee (not the Lord's brother, who remained a pillar in Jerusalem), Peter's imprisonment and release, and Herod's death. Returning, they brought along John Mark, Barnabas's young relative, whose mother's Jerusalem home hosted the church and who would later write the second Gospel.

9. The first missionary journey

   Antioch's named prophets and teachers show a leadership structure that freed Paul and Barnabas to go, and leadership is the pattern of their whole method. On Cyprus, Saul begins going by his Greek name Paul, and John Mark turns back. Through Perga, where an illness seems to have struck Paul's eyes, to Pisidian Antioch (not Syrian Antioch), Iconium, Lystra, where Paul is stoned, left for dead, and walks back into the city, and Derbe. Then, instead of the easy road home through Tarsus, they deliberately backtrack through every city, strengthening the disciples and appointing elders in every church.

10. Synagogue first, creation for pagans

    Paul's pattern was to begin in a city's synagogue, reasoning from the Old Testament that Jesus is the Christ, as in his long Pisidian Antioch sermon of Acts 13, which is actually longer than Mars Hill. Before pagan audiences, as in Athens, he began instead from creation. Either way the message drove to Christ crucified and risen, and to the claim of Acts 13:38 and 39: through Jesus everyone who believes is freed from what the law of Moses could never free them from.

11. The Jerusalem Council: the gospel on trial

    Around AD 49 men from Judea taught that without circumcision according to Moses no one can be saved, and the first church council met over nothing less than the heart of the gospel: faith alone, or faith plus works. Galatians 2 gives Paul's side: seventeen years after his conversion he laid his gospel before the pillars, Titus was not compelled to be circumcised, false brethren had sneaked in to spy out gospel liberty, and James, Peter, and John added nothing but the right hand of fellowship. In Acts 15 Peter appeals to Cornelius: God cleansed Gentile hearts by faith, made no distinction, and it tests God to lay on disciples a yoke no one could bear.

12. Galatians: the council's echo

    Judaizers dogged Paul's churches for the rest of his ministry, and when they reached the young congregations of southern Galatia, Paul wrote his first epistle, pronouncing a curse on any other gospel even from an angel. Busenitz frames the heat of the letter by the cost of the journey: the man nearly killed planting those churches was not going to watch a false gospel take them. He adds that the Reformation fought the same battle, Rome having become a sixteenth century version of the Judaizers, with baptism cast as the new circumcision.

13. The second and third journeys

    Both later journeys begin as return visits to the same churches; the Macedonian call comes only while Paul is revisiting. Philippi, Thessalonica, noble Berea searching the Scriptures, Athens provoked by idols, and a long stay in Corinth; then Apollos, the disciples of John receiving the Spirit in Acts 19, the Ephesian riot over the collapsing idol trade, and the tearful Miletus farewell to the Ephesian elders. Paul was no hit and run evangelist: he planted, appointed leaders, prayed, wrote, sent emissaries, and went back in person. The 2 Corinthians 11 catalog of sufferings covers only the first half of his missionary life. Convinced his road to Rome ran through Jerusalem, he arrived there around AD 56, knowing arrest awaited.

14. How the New Testament grew alongside

    James was likely the first New Testament book completed, with Matthew soon after; Galatians was Paul's first letter and 1 Thessalonians his second, written on the road. The order in our New Testament is canonical rather than chronological: the four Gospels and Acts as histories, Paul's letters from longest to shortest, the general epistles, and the Apocalypse. Knowing when each letter was written, Busenitz argues, gives the preacher the story behind the text.

1. Busenitz argues the extraordinary events of Acts authenticated something new rather than setting the pattern for every age. How does that distinction help you weigh claims you hear about miracles today?

2. Gentile inclusion took a decade to sink in, even for believers. Where might we be slow to accept something Scripture makes plain, simply because it cuts against everything familiar?

3. Paul kept going back: letters, emissaries, return visits, elders appointed in every church. What would that kind of follow through look like in how our church supports missionaries and church plants?