In a Nutshell
The Holy Spirit has been busy preparing for the further extension of the gospel to the Gentiles. Luke tells us about Saul's conversion, then of Peter's moves "here and there" outside and away from Jerusalem. Then Peter visits Cornelius.
Questions
What kind of a book is the Acts of the Apostles? Is it just history? Doesn't it also collect together some of the decisions transacted between the Holy Spirit and the young churches?
But becoming
one of Jesus' students, and being ruled by what He had taught, these first
disciples soon discovered that many of their instinctive social customs were at
odds with the teaching they had committed themselves to follow. Luke tells how
the church took up the challenge, and how they were encouraged to consider the
issues that confronted them: If God by raising Jesus from the dead had
shown Him to be the Son of Man, then how far did this Sonship extend? What was
their place in the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, by which all the earth
would come to hear of God's Salvation?
We
can describe Luke's intentions in telling us about Peter's work like this:
Peter began to do the work His Master had commanded him to do. Luke gives us a
picture of Peter as one who was becoming a shepherd, following the footsteps of
the Good Shepherd. As Peter continues this work, at Lydda, then at Joppa, then
at Caesarea, he found he was becoming more sensitive to the promptings of the
Holy Spirit. He begins to better understand his own experiences as a student in
Jesus' school. He begins to grasp Jesus' teaching in new and fresh ways.
Luke
reported these events shortly after Saul's conversion telling us about Saul's visit
with Barnabas to the apostles in Jerusalem. That the persecution ceased for a
time leads us wonder whether Gamaliel's comments to the Sanhedrin (to leave the
apostles alone) had been part of a policy in support of Saul's operation
against the 'rank and file' members of the church. God's intervention on the
road to Damascus seems to have exposed Gamaliel's ruse!
Luke
was writing a book for those who needed to know, for those who knew part of the
story. The followers of Jesus were being formed into a new society by the Holy
Spirit Himself, enabling them to face up to, and overcome, long-term inherited
practises that had confirmed their separation from each other. But the Holy
Spirit was not poured out simply to enable the earliest Christians to devise
new customs as Jews and Gentiles welcomed each other. That they did is an
amazing fact in itself, but it was all part of an ongoing work directed by the
Holy Spirit by which the good news would be told throughout all the earth. The
soil will be prepared and the good seed will bring forth a great harvest.
For as the earth brings forth its shoots and as a garden causes
what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and
praise to spring forth before all nations.
And
what are we to make of "tongues", the amazing sign of God's Spirit
being outpoured? Paul later wrote that "tongues
are for a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers". This has an
important application for how we understand Luke's account of tongues in Acts 2
and Acts 10. It is not that the absence of tongues means a person is
still in unbelief, so much as the gift of "hearing tongues" being
God's way of impressing upon those who have not understood the wide extent of
His grace. The work He undertakes in us will not be limited by ethnic or
lingual backgrounds. The creating and renewing power of the Son of God overcame
the cultural confusion that had bedevilled human relationships since Babel.