Introduction to Acts
Acts · Vern Peterman · Jan 2, 2005
Acts (2005), No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262317542553

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

What does Acts start with? What's going on at the beginning of the book of Acts? Is Jesus out of the picture, or what do you see? Okay, in terms of physical presence, you see the description of his ascension there's within the first chapter, the first half of the first chapter. So, and yet, You can't just take, if you took Jesus out of the picture, there would be no reason for the book of Acts, right? So it's not, although we're seeing Jesus ascend in the first chapter, he continues to be the theme to the very end. Very interesting. It's a time transition. There's certainly some timeless going on here, getting a break into a different time. It's also a transition of understanding.

What did the apostles, not understand when the Book of Acts is opening. What did they not understand? Okay, yeah, there is something different going to take place other than, okay, we're about to have a messianic kingdom established, alright? So that's one profound thing that they didn't quite understand. What else did they not understand when Acts had opened?

Ah, yes, the Gentiles. So we're going to have this discovery. And interestingly, it takes a little bit to get there. And this discovery that the Gentiles are a part of the church. I don't know about you, but that is kind of an amazing thing, because, you know, with the exception of some very small percentage, I'm a Gentile. So all of a sudden I'm included in this picture, not as a secondary citizen. Make huge difference, okay? Good. What else? What else did the apostles not understand? Okay.

One of the things that we see, you know, as we get through the book of Acts is, you know, we start from no mention of Paul at all. All of a sudden he, being the major focal point of the last roughly half of the book. Yet one of the things that Paul's going to bring along is that we've been identified with Christ.

See, they still didn't really understand this crucifixion thing. Now, let's put ourselves in the mindset of the apostles. It's only been when this thing's opening up, it's only been a couple months since this whole, you know, time in the garden, all the disciples scattered, Jesus, you know, hauled off and, you know, beaten and crucified, and the burial, and of course then they're just absolutely shattered. And then the resurrection was taking kind of a hard time believing, right?

And so this has all been phenomenal stuff. And So you can imagine, if that had been our last two months, let's say since the beginning of November, that had been going on. Can you imagine what kind of impact that's going to have? This guy that you figured was going to be central, you know, in things, he dies. Oh man, everything we've been doing is ruined. And then he comes back to life again.

I mean, try to get this all squared around in your head. Trying to understand what all this means, that has to have been just mind-boggling to them. That has to have been a real tough transition. They did not understand what this was all about. They were looking at this messianic kingdom to come, and Jesus was going to pull it off, and they were just going to join him.

Ben, if you haven't done so, go ahead and grab a binder. You got it? Cool. All right. So you've got a radical mind change taking place, and just getting adjusted to what all this is about, even having been through this horrifically discouraging event. Here's this guy who's supposed to save us, and they nailed him! And to think it's all over, and be in abject depression over this thing, and then to have that all turned around. Oh, he's alive!

And all within a couple of months, now you're supposed to sort of hang around and it keeps popping in and out, walking through walls and things, and then we're supposed to continue after this? What does this mean? See, this is a lot to absorb. This is a lot to absorb, isn't it?

So here's the transition that these guys are in the midst of. There's also a transition of dispensations. Now, a dispensation is basically a management arrangement. We've explained it a couple of times in our main service where a dispensation is an owner giving an assignment to somebody who works for, maybe even a slave or maybe a hired person, and they are responsible then to carry out certain things. That's the big picture on dispensation. Specifically here, there was a dispensation that was focused upon the Jews under the law. We've got what happening? Yeah, and it's not excluding the Jews. You're including the Jews, but now bringing the Gentiles in on exactly the same level. And the law has now been put out of commission. Which, going back to that understanding, they didn't understand that initially. That was something that had to come along. The law has now been put out of commission.

And you apostles have a particular responsibility. And that responsibility, as we mentioned earlier, doesn't include just the Jews. It doesn't include just Israel. But it's the whole world. And it's to take the gospel. So here's this change, this transition of dispensations. Now, think about this. When the law was given, Here's the Jews that are out in the Sinai Desert. The law is given. Did that all just happen in one day? What did they get first? They got the Ten Commandments, but Moses said, hey, you know, this is just a starting, you know, front end of this thing.

We got 613 to give y'all total. 365 of them are things not to do. Don't you dare eat that lobster. You may not bite into that apple with a worm. And make sure that you build this this way, and do this that way, and don't do this, and don't do the other thing. It took time, didn't it? It took time to transition into the law, even to the point that Deuteronomy is called it the second giving of the law.

Moses had to repeat all that stuff as the Jews were just about to go into the Promised Land. Now, transition of location. For the Jews in Israel, although the Jews got yanked around different places, the focus was Israel, wasn't it? Always Israel. Even starting off in the book of Acts, where do they start? Jerusalem and how about the church? Where's the church start? Jerusalem yeah, but that's not where it ends up is it? But where is the church it where's the church focus end up by the time to get to the book of Acts through the end? What's the location that things end up in?

Yeah, Paul ends up in in Rome and and as it turns out The largest church by the end of the first century was the church in Rome. So you'd have this church start off in Jerusalem with no idea that it was supposed to go anywhere else, meeting in the temple. And by the end of the first century, there is no temple. The temple's been gone for 30 years, and the largest church in the whole Roman Empire is in Rome, where the book of Acts ends.

So a major transition in location, right? Big shift. It's one of the reasons why Acts is so important to Booker. Lots of changes. Lots of changes. Tom. Just don't throw it too hard, but go for it. Here's what's interesting. It starts off in Jerusalem.

Then there's a shifted focus on Antioch. That's particularly the sending church for Paul, right? And then finally at the end, Rome. So you'll have a shift of location and the focus goes from Jerusalem up to Antioch and then finally to Rome. That's the focal point of the book, location.

Okay. And we'll be getting into the Antioch portion of it right about the middle of the book, roughly. Antioch take a central place All right now next page page seven All right now here's the fun part because this is where Different groups within the church play doctrinal tug-of-war They read the book of Acts And they run into the question, how do you determine what ought to be from what I read? If I start off, let's say I only had the first, say, half dozen chapters of the Book of Acts, where would you say the church is supposed to meet?

Huh? Was it? Yeah, actually, where do they start off meeting the church in great part? The temple. Yeah, you see later on, they did frequently come to the synagogue. But in the early chapters, if you were to only read the first half dozen chapters, you'd say, well, boy, that's where we ought to meet. Right?

But by 70 AD, there was no temple. Now, as we go through this, how do we determine what ought to be, what is What is God prescribing for the church? And what's transition? And how do I tell the difference? Not having good answers to those kinds of questions is where churches have gone all over the place.

You get into Acts chapter 2 and do good groups and say, well, that's exactly where the church has to be. We've got to get that tongues thing going. So you'll find folks that will focus on that. You will find churches around now that get the Jewish Christians separate. Have you encountered those? Some of the messianic churches get the Jewish Christians in separate groups there. So what are they doing? They're following some of the early chapters and grabbing on to that. There are also those who will take the book of Acts, look at it, and say, well, wait a minute, I don't think the church started in Acts chapter 2.

I think it started in chapter 9, or chapter 13, or chapter 28. So, it's a time of transition, isn't it? A time of transition. And sorting out what is what God intends over the long run, and what is transitional. Those are the questions that we look at on page 7, okay?

Now, one of the things that's characteristic of the various books in the Bible, Acts being one of them, but there are a lot of Old Testament books that are historical too, aren't there? One of the things that's characteristic is they tell us what happened, but they don't always give us an insight as to what does that mean, and is this good or bad. Reading through the book of Genesis, Is everything that was bad called bad? No. Everything that's bad or good is not always, you know, said to be bad or good. So, just by reading the history itself, we aren't always given the insight.

Okay? Now, so one thing is that we have the New Testament epistles, which tell us, alright, this is what is intended. So we use what is, here's the biblical interpretation principle, we use what is clear to interpret what is less clear. What is clear, as far as the church is concerned, is spelled out in the epistles. We use the epistles to understand the book of Acts better. We get an understanding as we go through it that, boy, you know, meeting in the temple in Jerusalem isn't all that important. So we go through and make those assessments. We understand far more clearly from the epistles that we're not under law.

So those kinds of things, we look to the epistles to understand the historical statements of the Book of Acts. Just like we would look at the various things in the Book of Genesis and judge that based on things where we have an explicit statement. about what's clear, and about what's right and what's wrong.

Where the historical account itself doesn't always give you that. Okay? Now, the second point there, Acts makes reference to a number of Old Testament passages, so first get the perspective of the Old Testament passage being referenced. When you start the New Testament, there's approximately 260 quotes from the Old Testament. Some of those are more the nature of, you know, graphic little phrases or, I don't know, it's even a paraphrase. But there's roughly 260 quotes of the Old Testament. So one of the things, Acts is one of the books that makes a lot of reference to the Old Testament. So as you go through there, we need to get an understanding of, more fully, what's the context to be quoted. And you go back in the Old Testament book and understand what's happening there.

One of the principles here is that revelation was progressive until the New Testament was complete. It continued to reveal things. God continued to lay things out. That's one of the things we're seeing in Ephesians chapter 3. There were things that were not revealed in the Old Testament that are now revealed in the New. Even as of the writing in the book of Ephesians, there's still some things yet to be revealed.

Now, an example here, Peter quotes Psalm 110, 1 in Acts 2.34 when he's speaking to the Jews. Peter is not making any point in that quote different from what the Jews already knew and believed, except to say that Jesus was the Messiah.

Did the Jews believe that there was a Messiah coming? Yeah, certainly they did. And Orthodox Jews today still believe that. They're still looking for a seven-year period of tribulation followed by the coming of the Messiah, and then a long period of reign of the Messiah. In the New Testament times, the Jews were looking for exactly that. They were anticipating the Messiah. The big connection that blew their socks off was this Jesus that you just crucified here just a couple months ago. That's the one. Ah! Okay? Explosive revelation.

It's not that Peter revealed anything new out of the Old Testament. They had not already heard. But the connection to Jesus Christ, whom they had just crucified two months before, stung them to the heart. That grabbed them. They just were absolutely ripped. They said, what do we do? How do we possibly respond to that? That's where Peter had a special connection to make. So we understand the Old Testament passage, but also understand that there are new connections and understandings and revelations to clarify what the Old Testament passage is spelling out.

All right, how are we doing so far? Alive and swell? Okay. Yes? What's interesting is Luke quite likely came onto the picture later, because he appears to be a Gentile. Like I mentioned before, a medical doctor, trained possibly in Philippi. I would say there's clues to that, but not a definite statement. And Luke appears to have come into the picture later.

In fact, what we'll see as we go through the book of Acts is farther on in the book, you'll see Luke use first person, we. we did this, we did that, and so he gets included. But in the earlier chapters, he's recording from what others have recorded, and he's kind of acting as editor, pulling these things together. He is written of in a few other places outside of, you know, Luke and Acts, so we have some clues, but it appears later on, in the early parts of the book, he's getting information from others. And that's one thing, is there appear to be quite a few eyewitnesses to draw from, people to ask and talk about. And so Luke appears to be writing from that.

Later on, the apostles that were around him appear to have had some connection with them. They seem to be familiar with them. Paul at one point in time actually quotes the Gospel of Luke. I think this is right in Timothy. interconnect between them and familiarity enough that the other apostles wouldn't know it. Okay. Then, point three here, middle of page seven.

Through the change of dispensations from Israel under law to the church under grace, there will be some things that change. God's manner of dealing with different people, people groups, and even changes within those groups, for instance. and some things which don't change. Now that's something to understand as we're interpreting scripture. If you interpret all scripture flat, not recognizing that God deals with different people differently at different times, you will get into some radical misunderstandings.

But what's important to recognize is what remains the same and what changes. Now, what are some of the things that remain the same throughout all time? God's character does not change. It was in Malachi 3.6. He says, I the Lord do not change. His character remains fixed and unchanging, so that continues on. Anything else? What else doesn't change? His plan. He has a plan since before time began. It's recorded for us in the book of Revelation that Christ was slain from before the foundation of the earth. God had a plan in place and that remains there. How about the character of man once man fell? Is man any different? No. The character of man remains the same. So there's another character of God. The character of man once fallen remains the same until saved. And what else remains the same?

Heart? Yes. Very good. The means of salvation is always by faith. Did Abraham understand everything that we now understand? No. But, how was he saved? By faith. How was Daniel, the prophet, saved? By faith. Here we are, you know, centuries later, and how are we saved? By faith. When we're taken up from this earth, and the earth is in the middle of this seven-year conflagration, tribulation, people will be saved by faith.

It will always be true. A fallen man is desperately in need of a Savior. The Savior is always in God's provision through the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is always by faith. Always. Okay? And then we've got to look at those are the things that are constant, then there are things that change. So we need to recognize that.

If someone doesn't recognize that God's character remains the same, that's a problem. They're not going to understand scripture. If someone doesn't understand that God's manner of dealing with people over time and with different groups changes, that's going to be a problem. They're not going to understand it.

So that's why you have to go after Christian groups now that say, oh, I believe and therefore I'm safe. And then they got to pull the law out of their back pocket. They don't understand because they haven't discerned what's different and what's the same.

Okay. Number four, since Acts is a book of transition from time portrayed in the four gospels into the teachings contained in the epistles, seek to determine what is transitioning and how it is transitioning. The understanding takes place by tracing the transitioners from the Old Testament through the Gospels, the Book of Acts, and the New Testament epistles. Let me give you an example here. Here's the law of Moses.

Jesus, on the Sermon on the Mount, he said, by all means, don't follow the law, right? Is that what he said? No. And we say, I haven't come here to put it out of commission. I haven't come here to set it aside here." And he goes and he gives the Sermon on the Mount, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7.

In Matthew, he continues to just lay down things that are explicitly Jewish. We pointed out in the Bible backgrounds class that the Lord's Prayer is a marriage, if you will, of two Jewish prayers. They had two prayers that they said regularly, and you put those together and that's the Lord's Prayer, what's called the Lord's Prayer. explicitly Jewish. He goes and talks about, you know, these people, and unlike the Gentiles, he makes the distinction between the Jews and the Gentiles, left and right. Now, you get into the book of Acts, and by Acts chapter 2, here's Peter, he's talking to all these people, and telling them, you just crucified Jesus Christ. Did Peter understand that something had changed regarding the law at that point in time? When did that come about? We'll get there, but... How did it come about that Peter came to an understanding?

Hey, I don't have to worry about these dietary laws. Okay, yeah, and we'll get there, Acts chapter 10. Here's Peter, and notice, by the time you get from Acts chapter 2 to Acts chapter 10, several years have gone by. So you can imagine, he's going around for the first few years of the existence of the Church, still thinking the law fits, and we've got to operate that way. So there's a real transition in understanding here. So now, we track that. Here's the Gospels, where you see continued reference to the law, and Jesus saying, I'm here to talk to the lost sheep of Israel. And I'm going to send you out two by two." I go, who? To the lost sheep of Israel.

Now, we've got this thing here. Peter's just, it's just dawned on him, several years after the church has begun, that I don't have to live by Jewish dietary laws, and now the Gentiles are a part of the church. In Acts chapter 11, and as soon as Peter steps into Jerusalem, what are they doing? They're grilling. Peter, you've got something to talk to us about here. We've got something to discuss with you.

And that's that Peter had stepped outside the Jewish law. See that? And that's still within the church. This transition and understanding is taking place. It wasn't until later we'd get Paul's epistles where he would say, you have died to the law. The law was put out of commission in order to create the church. Peter didn't understand that in Acts chapter 2. We can trace and track the progress of understanding through scripture, but we need to be careful that we don't grab something in the middle of the transition and make it the norm. Just because we all of a sudden see, for example, apostles. We've got apostles today. We'll see that there's later on reference to New Testament epistles. That doesn't mean we keep writing them. Alright, now, number five.

Use the principle of grammatical, historical, cultural interpretation. Now, we take the big word combinations, boil it down to three things. When we're looking and studying scripture, there's three areas we're going to observe. Language, history, culture. Those three things. So you want to make sure you look at those, because it's based on looking at those three things, language, history, and culture, that we're going to understand what's behind the passage.

One of the points that we use here as an example, as a kind of a historical background, is that the Pharisees, who by the way were the majority and the culture heroes in the Jewish culture, I mean, we think of the Pharisees, those are the bad guys. But in the culture, the Jewish culture of the first century, the Pharisees were the good guys. They were the heroes. Hoorah, Pharisees! Okay? And so those are the guys everybody says, boy, man, that guy is just fantastic. Boy, he's just a great Pharisee. Fantastic. There we go. Yes.

If you think of what we think of as a hero in our culture, whether it's a sports figure or something of that sort, carry that over in first century Judaism. It was the Pharisees, and so I can imagine, here's Jesus sitting there, you know, in Matthew 23, you know, just one strike after another after another, woe to these guys, it's like, you must be kidding me. You know, it's like calling Wayne Gretzky a really lousy hockey player. You know? What? It doesn't compute in our culture. using that as a measure. And so think of it, the message that Jesus brought, even, regarding the scribes and the Pharisees was just mind-boggling. Now, here is the Pharisees and the Sadducees later on in the Book of Acts. They're reading together in the Sanhedrin. They don't believe in any life after this one. No afterlife. No resurrection. They don't believe in miracles. They don't believe in angels. Life, you just live it. When you're done, you're done.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in the books after the first five books of Moses. They believed in miracles, they believed in angels, and they believed in the resurrection. So Paul steps into this group, not ignorantly at all. And how does he break open his conversation with them? He says, I'm here today to stand before you because I have a belief in the resurrection.

BAM! Okay? He just threw the match into the gallon of gasoline on the floor. The room explodes, and it actually describes, they're ready to tear people in pieces. Okay? Paul knew exactly what he was doing. If we understand the background, again, this isn't, you know, highly technical, but it's just a matter of understanding the culture. It makes perfect sense. why Paul would have done it, and why they would have reacted that way.

The mixture was explosive. The Jews had this leadership arrangement with the Romans. The idea is, okay, we'll stay together because that's the arrangement the Romans have set up, and we can work with them that way. But if that comes apart at the seams and the Romans come in and stomp, and they stomp Mark, well, it wouldn't be but another decade later and everything would explode and it would all come apart.

So, anyway, we'll get there. But the point being is you want to understand the background. So, anyway, we'll use those five principles as we go through the Book of Acts to determine, okay, what's transitional and what's long-term. What stays and what's just a part of the change that's taking place. Make sense? Okay. It's time to get out of here. We're about done. Okay.

What you'll see here is there is a there's a yellow sheet in there and right before that is two sheets that introduce what we'll be looking at next week. Behind that are some references for you to take a look at. If you've been in church history For Bible background, you'll recognize a couple of the first sheets. We've got a fairly lengthy thing, for example, on archaeology. And by the way, that was the shortest of several articles that I chose to print out, but the CD has far more information on it. Let's take a few minutes to go over this Acts 1 through 11, because this is the first section we're going to take a look at.

The background here is we have not just a bird's eye view, but a satellite eye view. It'll have a page like this, okay? It's in front of your yellow sheet. And so you have your areas kind of looking from the south, a satellite over the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, looking kind of northward over Israel and what's now Jordan. You have the Mount of Olives, a picture there. And by the way, what I will try to do is I will use color pictures every week to try to give you something that gives you a sense of what's there and what the background is. And then thirdly, you've got a map that shows Judea and then Samaria to the north. Obviously, the end of the earth, I can't put that on there, excuse me. So you'll have to insert that.

And then finally, a brief timeline. Here it is, about 30 AD. You will see chronologies anywhere from, say, 30 AD for the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ to 33. Different chronologists will argue one or the other. The point we made in Bible background is the exact date is not as important in understanding as the sequence. It's what happened and what followed that matters.

So, what we find here is, here's Dr. Luke. He's writing to Theophilus. And this former thing I wrote to you about, we said this. Now we've got this account. He's writing to Theophilus. Theophilus, by the way, and we've got some information kind of behind your yellow sheet there, Theophilus may well be a Roman legal bureaucrat, because he addresses him as almost excellent. which was the standard way of addressing a Roman legal bureaucrat when he submitted a legal document. The evidence is not absolute, but it's substantial that the Book of Acts and the Book of Luke were Luke's legal submittal to the Roman government on behalf of Paul.

So then what happens? Here's Christ and the apostles, and they're going to ask him some questions. I'll leave it to you to read through the passage, verse 11, verses of chapter 1. And then he ascends from the Mount of Olives, and that's after a brief response to their question. Isn't that interesting?

He didn't say, you know, I'm going to hang around here for a few more years because you guys just have a lot of catching up to do. No, instead he gives them a brief answer, Why would he only give them a brief answer? Why didn't he say, hey, I'm going to have to stick around here a while? Why only a brief answer? Are they going to be able to get the information some other way? No. No. He says, I'm going to send the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will teach you. So he gives them a brief answer and then Yeah, yeah.

And plus his continued presence continues to feed the idea that he's supposed to be some sort of an earthly king that's supposed to blow the Romans out of the water, right? Once he disappears, then it forces them to sort this thing out and get a true picture of what's going on. Otherwise, they're going to keep latching on. Because here he is ready to ascend, and they're still asking, it's now the time that you're going to establish your kingdom. They've still got that fixed in their mind, because he's there. Yes, Tom? Yeah, they had a hard time picking up this idea, even though that had been about two months before. Yeah, amazing. It takes them a while.

Now, next page, page two, there are five questions for you to dig into, okay? And so what I'd like you to do is to read the first 11 verses, there in Acts 1, 1 through 11, and then take a look at these five verses. What we will do is, or to get together next time, we'll go over those and any other questions that crop up from your studies.

And I will have the material for the following week available to you. And we'll go over that and take that home. And that'll be our sequence, okay? So what we'll do is we'll talk about it some beforehand. You'll take a look at the passage of the questions. When you come back, we'll talk about it, talk about your questions and what other questions popped up. and proceed like that.

So what you have here, I know the binder is like an inch and a half binder, you don't have anywhere near enough, but we'll get there. We'll fill it up. One other thing too, and you've noticed I've taken the pattern and just gone one-sided on the printout, and that's intentional too. Too many things written on both sides and it becomes tough, so the idea is something that you can easily read and use later on. Okay, feel free to look through the material that's in the back there.

There's a good article on Acts and archaeology. That's one thing that's going to be continually fascinating. There are some areas where the book of Acts takes us where there's abundant archaeology. We have multiple altars to the unknown God through archaeological finds. Erasmus is one of the fellows whose name crops up, and his name has been found in an inscription in stone. Of course, a lot of the towns and cities and places, they've all been located, so there's a lot of information to work from.

Any final questions here? Yeah, Tim. There are approximately 260 quotes in the New Testament of the Old Testament. It's interesting that probably somewhere around a fifth of those are from the book of Isaiah. Which, sadly, you see, is disbelieving. Real interesting. So there's lots of that.

One of the other points we'll make as we go through is that the quotes are often of the Greek Old Testament version. and not of the Hebrew directly. And one of the reasons being that is you're writing all these New Testament documents in Greek, and rather than going from the Hebrew and translating it, they would take the Greek Old Testament version and quote from that. So what we have in our Old Testament taken from the Hebrew is at times different. So as you say, wait a minute, this is the Old Testament and the words aren't the same. because in the New Testament you've gone from Hebrew into the Greek into English instead of directly from Hebrew into English. Okay. Other questions?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yes Yes Yeah Excellent point excellent point because you have the Holy Spirit's involvement in applying the truth of Scripture to the hearts of the people through Peter and the Apostles in what they displayed there on the day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit's work in the heart of those who were informed but not believers. Yeah.

Yeah, it just, what Peter had to say, and at the crucifixion he was in no condition to say anything, but there on that first day what he said was powerful and potent because, as Art pointed out, the multiple work of the Holy Spirit there on that day was profound and continuous. All right, let's pray. Lord, as we begin this wonderful and fascinating book, this book that answers our questions, this book that makes the connections between the life of our Lord on the earth, His first coming, the apostles that you commissioned to send out the gospel. What a neat and wonderful thing to see that connection laid out in front of us and to be able to go through it and to understand what you have accomplished. And we give you praise for that and we give you thanks for that. In Jesus' name, Amen.