Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

The early church, no less than ours, was a church that was filled with personalities. Sometimes those personalities clashed. Sometimes it was messy. And still the Word of God grew and flourished.

This is the moment where all the trouble that has been brewing finally comes to a head. And remember that John Mark deserted them in Pamphylia and returned to Jerusalem (Acts 13:13), the place where the resistance to Paul's mission was most pronounced. John Mark most likely did not come back to Jerusalem with a good report either, which may account for Paul's low opinion of him later on in this chapter.

As the gospel slowly spread out from the center at Jerusalem, it began to be accepted by various representatives of the variegated Gentile world. Remember . . . Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8). There were the Samaritans (Acts 8:5ff). There was the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:38). There was Cornelius and his people (Acts 10:34). There was Sergius Paulus, the first out-and-out pagan (Acts 13:12). There was resistance to this, and some complaining (Acts 10:45; 11:2-3, 12), but nothing was definitively settled.

A business leader once commented that nothing worthwhile “was ever accomplished by a reasonable man.” In this passage, we see once again how dedicated and how tough the apostle Paul was. And, some would say, how unreasonable. But look at what he accomplished.

The psalm is arranged into five sections: two small sections at the beginning and end, and three larger sections in the middle. The first section (v. 1-4) introduces the twin themes: God's character and his covenant with David. In this psalm, his character is defined by his steadfast love and his faithfulness. Both of these words are applied in terms of his covenant with David–the promise that the seed of David will sit on an everlasting throne (v. 3-4). And this is crucial: the psalmist says he will sing of God's steadfast love and faithfulness forever.

The Trinity is the central doctrine of the Christian faith because it is the doctrine of God Himself. Getting it wrong renders all other theological pursuits nonsensical. Like attempting to learn scuba-diving in the middle of the Great Sand Dunes. It might feel like a complicated doctrine, but we ought not to be intimidated by this doctrine. It's not as if you won't be let into heaven if you once were teaching a Sunday School class and used eggs as a metaphor for the Trinity. Just don't do it again. This is one doctrine where charity should be shown in the articulation of it; severe strictness should be shown to someone who is in error and then doubles down on his error after being shown his error. St. Augustine once hedged his entire book on the Trinity with this, “If herein I am foolish, let him who knows better correct me.” To which I reply, “Ditto.”

As we celebrate the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit to the church, which is how God created the church in its new covenant form, we should make a point to pay close attention to the way His arrival is described. And that means paying thinking carefully about the wind and to the fire. At that glorious day of Pentecost, the wind was heard and the fire was seen.

Say a teenage boy is hired to do some landscaping work. He shows up promptly at 7am with his sunscreen on and water jug full, ready to make some money for his college fund. He is told by the owner of the property that he needs him to clear out a few overgrown acres. What he beholds is a veritable jungle of thistles and thorns. Some of the plants look extraterrestrial. Then, to make things worse, the owner informs him that the only tool he has is a pair of finger-nail clippers. Clearly, the job that needs doing and the tool to do the job are mismatched. However, when it comes to the task which Christ has assigned to the church and what is necessary to accomplish that task, there is no deficiency.

Having departed from Antioch, Paul and Barnabas came to Iconium, another significant town in Galatia. The ministry here was one of the most successful missions that they engaged in, and the results were predictably tumultuous. But in the course of this passage we learn a few things about how gospel proclamation ought to go. How the gospel was preached had a significant impact on the results.

Think of how you might feel if you were suddenly notified that you had been made a guest of honor at Buckingham Palace. In order to make it in time you were to immediately hop on the private jet that was waiting for you. However, through some cruel twist, you would not be allowed to change your clothes, freshen up, or brush up on which fork to use for the salad and which one for the main course. You might arrive and find yourself absolutely overwhelmed with the sense that you had two left feet, your hands were all thumbs, your mouth was full of teeth, and your mind full of cobwebs. The doctrine of Christ's ascension, unlike the sense of being “out of place”, is meant to lead us by faith to understand that we are made acceptable before God.

We know that the Lord Jesus was turned over to the Romans by the Jewish leaders because of envy. Pilate had been around political posturing long enough to be able to detect it when he saw it. Pilate wanted to release Jesus, in part because he could see what was going on. “For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy” (Mark 15:10).We have come to the point in the story of the expansion of Christianity where the Spirit-blessed kingdom was starting to provoke the same kind of response. This is as it should be.

We are here given an outline of the sermon Paul preached in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch. The sermon was preached to Jews and Gentile God-fearers both. Remember that by this point in history, the faith of Israel was mighty attractive to many Gentiles, and they admired it from their seats in the back row. But circumcision and keeping the entire law was a real barrier to full entry, and the message brought by the Christian evangelists was therefore electrifying.

This may be a bit of a public service announcement, but in this world there are difficult people. Such strained relationships are difficult to navigate. There are the wearisome conversations. There might be false accusations. There may be betrayals. There may even be a sense of danger, or a threat of violence. Such relationships may literally cause you to lose sleep. But this Psalm presents us with a case study in how we should deal with all variety of difficult people.

We are now accompanying Paul on his first missionary journey, together with Barnabas and their associate minister, John Mark. Now remember the theme of the book of Acts—that being the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem at one end to the uttermost parts of the earth on the other. We are engaged in the arduous process of including the Gentiles in the Christian church, and we have now come to the first giant step.

Isaiah prophesied from around 740 to 687 B.C. during the reign of four kings: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Ahaz was a wicked king who locked up the doors of the temple in Jerusalem, burned his sons in fire, cut the vessels of the temple to pieces, and made Judah a vassal state of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser by paying him for protection (2 Kings 16:8, 10). Ahaz's son, Hezekiah, came to the throne at twenty-five years old and called for a recovery of the Passover festival in Jerusalem. That assembly of joy was so grand the like had not been seen since the days of David and Solomon (2 Chronicles 30:26). But the Assyrian threat was looming. They took Samaria in the sixth year of Hezekiah's reign. And by the fourteenth year of his rule, the Assyrian king Sennacherib had come against Judah and Jerusalem.

In this chapter, we should notice a few introductions, and a notable contrast. We are introduced to John Mark, the author of the second gospel, in which he served as Peter's “secretary.” We are also introduced, obliquely, to James the Lord's brother. And the contrast is between how the angel of the Lord treated Peter over against Herod.

The philosopher Leibniz put the problem into a nutshell when he asked “why is there something rather than nothing at all?” That is one of the fundamental questions, is it not? But for the believer, because God is the eternal I AM, the idea that there could ever be nothing is nonsensical. It could have been the case that there was no created thing, but an absolute vacuity is absurd. God is the living God, and He is the answer to all our questions.

The number of rival stories to the Gospel are legion. You are confronted with a host of competing salvation stories. All of these rival stories are powerless to save. Their allure is found in their escapist fantasy. Escape from responsibility. Escape from consequences. Escape from accountability. Christ's Resurrection is the true story of restoration, true salvation, and life.

In the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, we see that the cross is very much in view. At the same time, it is still appropriate to call it a triumphal entry because the resurrection is equally central. We might even say that the death of Christ is surrounded by resurrection.

Culturally we have a relatively strong liturgy for Christmas but a weak liturgy for Easter. This is an area where recovery and reformation are needed. That reformation must start in the church. One way to begin this is to become very familiar with the story itself. Just as you should read and re-read the Christmas story, read and re-read the account of Christ's final days on earth. Scripture spends significantly more time on the final week of Christ's life, leading to his death and resurrection, than on his birth and life as a child. So naturally we should do the same with our time spent reading this story.

As we continue to work our way through the book of Acts, we are not going to spend very much time on the retelling in verses 4-14. But we are not setting this repetition aside as unimportant because Luke obviously intends to emphasize it. He wants us to note it. He tells the story in chapter 10, and then repeats it in detail in chapter 11. Then there is a strong reference to this episode at the Jerusalem Council later (Acts 15:7-11). This incident was a significant event.We can note a few additional details we learn in this recounting. We learn that six Jews accompanied Peter from Joppa (v. 12). We learn that the angel told Cornelius that the message that Peter would bring would be words of salvation (v. 14). And Peter tells us here that the Spirit fell on them near the beginning of his talk (v. 15). So we will begin our exposition at verse 16.

So we need to begin where we left off, which was at the house of Simon the tanner. Simon Peter was somewhat settled there, and it was there that God spoke to him about how he should not consider Gentiles unclean when God had declared them clean. This was hard for Peter because he had never eaten anything common or unclean, and God's instruction to him about the Gentiles came in the form of telling him to eat unclean food.But tanning was an unclean occupation. A tanner has to handle the carcasses of dead animals, as that is his profession. Simon the tanner lived by the sea because he required salt water for his work, and because the sea breezes would help with the smell, which was bad. We know that handling dead animals made one unclean from Scripture (Num. 19:9-10), and this was the case even if the animal was a clean animal.

This episode is the second time in Acts when the Lord makes a point of introducing two people to one another by supernatural means. The first time was in the previous chapter when He appeared to Saul and said that Ananias was coming, and then appeared to Ananias and told him to go minister to Saul (Acts 9:11-12). Then an angel of the Lord arranged for Philip to meet the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8: 26-27). And in this passage, Cornelius is told to send for a man named Simon Peter (v. 5), and is given the address (v. 6). The next day Simon Peter is told that the men sent by Cornelius are in fact from Him (v. 20). And this is not the last time it will happen in Acts either (Acts 16:9-10).Remember our Table of Contents from chapter one (Acts 1:8), and realize that the Spirit is actively involved in introducing wildly disparate people to one another. It is as though the Spirit is working the room, making all kinds of introductions. This is how the kingdom works.

We are now reading about the very beginning of Saul's Christian life, and his apostolic ministry. We are looking at just 21 verses, and in that short span we see two distinct attempts on his life. The thing that infuriated them against him was the fact that he was so powerful in his proclamation and reasoning. In fact, it was the very same response that Saul had earlier given to Stephen. Saul was now on the receiving end. 

We are now reading about the very beginning of Saul's Christian life, and his apostolic ministry. We are looking at just 21 verses, and in that short span we see two distinct attempts on his life. The thing that infuriated them against him was the fact that he was so powerful in his proclamation and reasoning. In fact, it was the very same response that Saul had earlier given to Stephen. Saul was now on the receiving end. 

We come now to Luke's account of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Remember that Saul is not his non-Christian name, but is rather his Hebrew name. Paul is his Roman name, not his Christian name. He goes by Saul for some years after this event. But such was the nature of this remarkable appearance that we still routinely refer to any surprising conversion as a Damascus road conversion. One moment Saul had murder on his mind, and a few moments later he was being led by the hand to the place where he would be baptized three days later.Remember also that Saul of Tarsus was wound tight inside when the Lord appeared to him. The Lord had appeared to him directly, but the Lord had also done some preparation work in Saul's heart beforehand through the faithful testimony of Stephen—how Stephen argued, how Stephen preached, and how Stephen died.

Many passages in the Bible speak of the glory of God's creation. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Psalm 95 says, “The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Psalm 104 says, “How many are your works Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small.” The first category we think of is nature. From the towering peaks of the Andes in Venezuela, to the great freshwater lakes of Michigan, to the parched sands of the Sahara the Lord has made a variety of breathtaking biomes for life to flourish in. The water cycle refreshes the earth with vitality. The seasons form a natural rhythm for life. The day and night cycle establishes periods of activity and rest. The stars and the moon give light by night. And the sun sheds its energy, light, and warmth by day.

Remember that the Lord had said the gospel would progress from Jerusalem to Judaea, to Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. The books of Acts begins in Jerusalem. After the murder of Stephen, the disciples scatter into the province of Judaea, and also Samaria. Philip went to Samaria and ministered there. An angel then sends him into the wilderness toward Gaza, but does not tell him why. While there, Philip sees a chariot (and probably a caravan, given the importance of this man). As the gospel fans out across the world, this is the next stepping stone, and the word of the psalmist is fulfilled. “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31). And as the next verse makes plain, Ethiopia is the harbinger of all the other nations coming to Christ. “Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the Lord; Selah” (Psalm 68:32).