Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the first episode of Ecosystem, where kind of I get to be a nerd because the Bible matters. The Bible is complicated, but it's complicated in a way that we can understand it. In fact, it's complicated in a way that we can live in it and learn about it through our whole lives. So today I'm here with my friend Grant.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Yo. It's really good to be here.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Oh, sweet. Thanks, thanks. Thanks for being here.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: I'm ready to try to soak all this in.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So Grant is cool. Grant is not a nerd. Grant has a social life and friends and things. I'm a nerd. I read things that people hate for fun because for some reason it's interesting to me to do that. So we're going to be talking about the Book of Acts. If you've been at New Life for a while, then, you know, we are in this series called Acts Life on Mission. We're walking really play by play, chapter by chapter through the Book of Acts. So we're going to be doing a deep dive behind the scenes into the Book of Acts. And Grant is here to just ask questions that just a normal person who's listening to sermons and sitting in the seats would have.
And then we're just going to talk and we're going to talk about what's going on behind the scenes of the Book of Acts.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So, okay, so we pull our Bible out, we open to the Book of Acts.
What are some initial things? Like why is it called Acts? Or what would be a good way to just have our mind set right before we even start reading the first chapter?
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Oh, sure, that's a really good question. So one of the really important things about the Bible in general is that the Bible is written within genres.
People don't think about that. But if ninth grade literature class, you learn poetry, you learn history, like you learn novels, right? There's all these different styles. The Bible is written within genres. There are a whole bunch of different genres in the Bible. You've got poetry, right? Like Psalms. That's songs and poetry. You've got history or narrative history, like 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, a lot of Genesis, parts of Deuteronomy, Judges, Joshua, that kind of stuff. You've got epistles, and these would be letters that are written to a specific person or a specific group of people to address a specific thing. So like Paul's letters, Galatians, Ephesians, first, second, third, John. Not Paul's John's.
And then you've got this Genre that people don't talk about that often. And it's called gospel.
So when people think of the genre of gospel or the four gospels in the Bible, they generally just think that they're history, that they're narrative history.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I always thought just the gospel was like kind of what they're talking about, but it's actually a genre of.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Actually a genre. Yeah, yeah. The word gospel is a Roman word. It's something that the Christian writers co opted from the Roman world to begin to describe Jesus. Now, the book of Acts is written by Luke, who was the author of the Gospel of Luke. And in Acts, chapter one, what we see is that Luke says something along the lines of, in my previous work, I wrote to you everything Jesus began to do. So we see in the very opening line that Acts is actually part two of the book of Luke.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Ah.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: So Acts is a gospel.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: It's the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. It's not a separate genre, it's a continuation. So a couple of things that are important about the authorship and then we'll talk about what a gospel is. So Acts is written by Luke. It's generally believed that Luke was a compatriot or companion of Paul later on in his missionary journeys. People believe this because when you get later on into the Book of Acts, instead of saying, they did this and they did that, it starts saying, we did this and we did that. So the author was there, he was there. Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: And Luke, a lot of people think he was a Gentile. He wasn't a Jewish person at all. We don't know that for sure. But people think he was.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: It's believed he was a doctor and it's confirmed through the quality of writing. So Luke writes at a kind of higher grammatical level of Greek than a lot of the other writers. A doctor would have been very well educated. One of the most educated people in the ancient world. Right.
So. And Luke gives us a different perspective than the other gospels do in both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, because he was not an eyewitness for the majority of it. Right. So you've got John, Matthew and then Mark. Those are generally understood to be eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. Right. And Mark is Peter's account.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Well, Luke was not.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Luke was not.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Luke was operating more as a historian. So Luke gives us a lot more details. He's someone who's going back and he's piecing together the narrative from eyewitnesses. He's hearing from Paul. He's hearing from Peter, he's hearing all these other accounts. He might have been reading the original copies of Mark.
And he is going in to get the story. Right. In detail. Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Like a journalist, Like a historical journalist, something like that.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: So that's kind of Luke's perspective. So we get a lot more detail. And because of Luke's missionary work with Paul and probably because of his background, Luke gives us more emphasis on the way Jesus interacts with gentiles, women, slaves, people who were not considered part of the inner circles in the ancient world. So each of the Gospels is written from a perspective. Luke's perspective is really Jesus is the God of everyone. He's the God of the outcast, the poor, the sick, the people, the unimportant in culture. Right. So you see that, and you see that continued in the book of Acts.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: So, yeah. So that you'll notice that theme and you'll notice that theme continue from Luke all the way into Acts. That, you know, if the story of Stephen is the story of the early Christians caring for the widow and the orphan. Right. The early church continues. Jesus focus on widows and orphans. Right. Caring for the poor.
You see Saul and Ananias. Right. Saul's a bad guy. Jesus reveals himself to Paul, which is Saul. Saul and Paul, same guy. Yeah.
So Jesus shows up personally to this. So even in the first few chapters, first half of the Book of Acts, you see this theme already, that Jesus is crossing the boundaries of in and out and good and bad, and he's the God of everyone who calls on him. Yeah. Not just the high class or preferred people.
So with all that, the genre of gospel. Right. So this is important. This is one of my favorite things. My favorite. Like, I've never heard this, actually. Yeah. This is fun. So it's the Greek word evangelion.
The Greek word evangelion means good news. Now you'll hear people talk about that in the church all the time. They'll say gospel. It just means good news.
That's sort of true. Okay, it does mean good news, but it doesn't mean good news like buy one, get one free at Starbucks. Right. It's not good news. Like, that made my day better. It was a specific type of good news. So in the Roman world, there were a lot of people who that. Let me back up the cultural things that are going on.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: The Roman emperor was called the Son of God.
It was regular. It was common for people to say things like, caesar is Lord. Hail Caesar. Right. So the early Christians said Jesus is Lord. The Romans said, caesar is Lord. There was something that was fairly common around the time of the early church that was called the emperor culture, where people actually worshiped the emperor.
They believed the emperor was divine, so they called him the Son of God. Right.
And they would write stories that would be called something like Evangelions. There would be this story of how Caesar came to power, of how he was born uniquely and all of this type of thing.
And they would paint Caesar as divine. So they wanted people to worship Caesar, so they would write a gospel about Caesar.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: Okay, Right. Yeah.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: And it wasn't just that the word evangelion was also used in the military.
So if.
Let's say Rome conquered Wyoming. Right. If Rome conquered Gillette, then they would have sent a herald or a messenger to the city of Gillette, something like an evangelist.
And that evangelist would come to preach good news. And that good news would be a evangelion. And what they would say is something along the lines of, Caesar is king, Caesar is Lord. Hail Caesar. Because of Caesar, you have liberty. Because of Caesar, you have freedom and justice. In Caesar, you are free.
So you can hear the Bible in that.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: So these writers were used to that style, and so they kind of just used that style in order to reveal the good news of Jesus.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Yeah, basically. So gospel was a genre that already existed. So when they're writing the story of Jesus, they're writing a gospel, which means it is historical. Let me be explicitly clear. I'm not saying they made up the birth of Jesus. I'm not saying they made up any of the divine stuff. What I'm saying is that the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that they were writing within this genre to make a point. They were telling us history, but they weren't just trying to tell us what happened for the sake of us knowing what happened. They were telling us that Jesus is king.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: They were telling us that he is actually Lord. And they were telling it in a specific way because they weren't saying the kingdom of God is the most powerful military on earth and will defeat you and enforce its rule on you. They were saying Jesus is God. He is king. Not the way you expected. He's king because he didn't defeat Rome's enemies or Israel's enemies. He defeated death, which is humanity's enemy.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: So they're. They're preaching a gospel.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: So first off, when you say, I want to tell you the gospel, you're not saying just that your sins are forgiven. That's part of the Gospel. The gospel is that Jesus is king, that he's making everything right, and he is bringing everything under his rule and reign, ousting sin and making everything right that will be culminated in the resurrection and new heavens and new earth. That's the gospel. Jesus is king, nothing else is. And no one else is. Right. Okay. So the book of Acts is part two of a gospel. So you mentioned this earlier. Who is acting in the Book of Acts?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah, like.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people call the Book of Acts the Acts of the Apostles.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: And that's why they named it Acts then. I mean, why didn't they just have Luke 1 or 1 Luke 2 Luke, you know, like. Or just have a longer book. But is there a reason why there's a.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: That's a great question. A lot of the books of the Bible, who knows why they were named that? Right. Mark is Peter's account. But people think John, Mark wrote it down, but they couldn't call it John because there already was the disciple John. So Mark, so Acts, probably because it was the acting of the church. But the thing is, and the Bible Project, Tim Mackey does a great job of pointing this out, that the person acting in the Book of Acts isn't the apostles. There's no one apostle that's consistent throughout the book of Acts. The person acting in the Book of Acts is Jesus.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: He is the focal point. He's the main act.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: He's the actor.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yep. So because the Book of Acts is a gospel, it's telling the rest of the story of Jesus. Right. Jesus ascends. But what does Paul tell us that the church is in 1 Corinthians 12, where his body. Yeah, we are the body of Christ. Right. So the Holy Spirit, Jesus says in John 14, 15, 16, that the Holy Spirit's going to come. Right. So in Acts chapter two, the Holy Spirit comes. The Spirit of God indwells the church. Jesus sends the. In Acts, chapter one, verse eight, he sends the. His disciples, the church, to be his witnesses. In other words, they're continuing his acting. Right. He is now acting through them. Yeah, because the Spirit of God has indwelt and enlivened them. Right.
So the Book of Acts is Jesus now acting in the world through the church. That's why the Book of Acts is so important, maybe the most important book for us to read as Christians who are part of a church. Right. Because it's telling us how we are still participating in the work of Jesus in the world. Jesus is acting through us because we are the church.
We don't just preach the gospel. We live the gospel. We're part of it.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: So if the gospel is Jesus's king, his rule and reign is over everything, then we as Christians, the church is the embodiment of his rule and reign.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: It's crazy. That's cool, right?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: So this is why the perspective of.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: When you start reading Acts then, like, knowing that kind of. Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: It's not just, oh, here's a story, let me get a nugget out of it.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: But it's. This is telling us how we are. This is telling us who we are, is telling us what we do, telling us how we engage with the whole world, because we are. Jesus is acting through us. Right. Like going to Walmart matters now because Jesus is in Walmart through you. Right.
Gathering on a Sunday morning matters now because Jesus gathered, like the body of Christ is all in one place. Right. It matters a lot. And there are some important things here because the Book of Acts is super messy. You got Anias and Sapphira who die. Right? Yeah. You've got. We're going to get to, you know, Peter, who doesn't like Gentiles. And even after Jesus tells him you should like Gentiles, he still doesn't later. He's a little bit racist. Right. Like, there's a lot of complicated stuff. In other words, the church doesn't get it. Right. So we actually see in the Book of Acts that us messy, complicated, backbiting, bickering, like, we are still the body of Christ.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Even though we do all of that wrong, Jesus is still working through us. Just like the Book of Acts.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Right. So we are. There's a church planting network called Acts 29, which is. That's important because there are only 28 chapters in the Book of Acts. So the name is basically the idea that we are still. That the Book of Acts is our story and we are the continuation of the history or the gospel in the Book of Acts. Right?
Yeah. So the book of Acts was written by Luke and it is a gospel, the rule and reign of Jesus given to all of us.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah.
Is there like any kind of like, cultural background that we need to know about? Like, as we're going into the book and you kind of reference Rome a little bit. But is there more into that area of like, what are these, what are, what are the. What is Luke living in at the moment when he's writing this? Like, what is the culture of this environment? Like, does that kind of help frame what how we're reading it.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
So highly divided, extreme, like multicultural, but not in a. I don't think like New York City, where it's a cultural melting pot.
Think like, think culture is everywhere, but they don't like each other. Right. Okay, so you got the Jewish people that in general. And I'm, I'm painting with a broad brush here. Jewish people view Rome as a threat. Rome. Rome conquered Israel. They believe that they are God's people. They are from the Old Testament, God's people.
And. But now they are subjugated to Rome. So Rome is an offense to the people of God by their existence and their rule over them. People of God feel like they are not supposed to be under Rome's charge. Right. Which is why throughout the Gospels and the book of Acts, in the early parts of the book of Acts, you see the disciples, they're like, hey, are you going to overthrow Rome now? Because they hate Rome and they think that's what Jesus came to do. Um, so you've got, you've got some Jewish people that were called Hellenized, meaning they adopted the culture of, of Jewish people or of Greek and Roman people. And then you've got more traditional Jewish people. And there wasn't a. They wouldn't have liked each other very much. Right.
Because the Hellenized people would be kind of sellouts who adopted the culture of Rome. The enemy. They didn't stick to the rules. Right.
In addition to that, I already talked about the Emperor cults. There are people all around the church literally worshiping Caesar.
You've got a lot of intellectuals at this time who are like basically functioning atheists. They might have worshiped the. Or they might have claimed the Roman gods, you know, your Jupiters and things like that, in kind of a mythological sense. You know, more like we're telling this story, we don't really believe it's true. Kind of like a legend type thing.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: More so atheist.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Or agnostic, something like that. You know, GK Chesterton in his book the Everlasting man, talks about that, how a lot of the elite and philosophical world of Rome was really more atheist than anything else. Or humanist would maybe be a better way to say it. So you've got. That, you've got Emperor cult. You've got these like, very intellectual, basically like agnostic or atheists. And then you've got mystery religions and cults that are all over. So you've got mystery religions would have been these highly experiential belief systems. Very, very charismatic, like ecstatic, spiritual Experiences, often with, like, kind of gross rituals involving blood and stuff like that.
You've got the various Roman gods that are worshiped as well.
So when you see this play out in different books of the New Testament, because you see, like, you know, Ephesians, the book of Timothy, written to Timothy, who's the pastor of the church in Ephesus.
Hard word. Oh, yeah, Ephesus.
So he's the pastor of that church. And he talks about women, right? He talks about women not talking in church. Pretty edgy thing to say. But history tells us that there was a cult, I believe, to Artemis. I might be wrong about that. I might have that off.
But it was a cult that worshiped this divine feminine in which the sexuality of the women was divinized.
And there's a whole lot of complicated things going on. But all of that's to say that was affecting what Paul was saying there. Like, people were worshiping a divine feminine thing in a world where women couldn't be educated. So in the church, there was this new equality. Yeah, right.
But then there's this, like, divine cult worship of the sexuality of women where people would literally go to prostitutes and things like that. And sexual acts were part of the worship. Yeah, but women weren't educated. There was also at that time something called the New Roman Woman, a very feminist, like, what we would consider, like, liberal feminist movement that was going on in Rome, like a subsect of that all kind of colliding in Ephesus. At least some people think that's what was going on. So Paul was basically saying, like, you've got. You've got to stop talking.
Yeah. Like, you just. This is too. You got to stop talking. It's messing things up. So you know that. Which is why you have other churches, like in First Corinthians, where women clearly talk. You know, they're given instructions on how to prophesy and how to pray and all that stuff. So you've got different cults that are going on in different backgrounds.
And on top of that, the Roman world was extremely violent and extremely sexual.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Okay, so.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: And you don't even have to take my word from this. If you've seen Gladiator that was set in Rome, like, that's kind of common knowledge.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Like, people went and watched people die.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah, get the kids. Someone's getting eaten today. Yeah, yeah.
So there was also.
It was. It was a highly, highly sexualized world.
There was a. This is, you know, like PG13, what I'm about to say. If there are kids watching, maybe turn the volume down or put on headphones.
Like, the early Christians called communion a love feast, and they were accused of having sex parties with their love feasts. They were accused of being incestuous and having these sex parties.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Was that because the culture assumed that.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah, basically, they called each other brother and sister, which weirded people out.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: And they would have love feasts, and that's what they called them. But these love feasts were just them getting together, having communion like it's church. But the Roman world was like, there's no way they're spending that much time together without.
So they got accused of that. In. In Corinth, there was a. An ancient poet who coined the term Corinthian as a derogatory term for a sexually active person.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: So the city of Corinth was so lascivious that, like, there was a turn. Like, that's what you called people. You're like, ah, you're being a real Corinthian.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: So, I mean, if you can imagine, like, Las Vegas and Amsterdam mushed together and then give everybody a sword, that's kind of the background of the book of Acts. So. And it. Like, these are all the extremes. Right. So people were obviously alive. Everyone wasn't getting killed all the time. But you want to talk about how radical the early church was, living in generosity in refusing to worship Rome, refusing to worship Caesar, and believing in one God. So, like, they're pushing against the philosophers who are basically atheists by saying, no, Jesus died and rose again. They're pushing against Rome, the whole structure of the government of Rome by saying, Caesar isn't lord, Jesus is right. And they're pushing against these mystery cults in this violent and lascivious world by saying no, we honor God with our bodies. Right. And we don't kill one another in the gladiator games. We don't support that type of thing. So everything that they're doing is pushing against the gravitational force of Roman culture. Right.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: To me, that's almost inspiring because as I read Acts then, and I put myself in now our current times, whether you think it's good or bad, whatever, like, there's still all those things still going on today. And as a Christian, maybe you could feel like you're overwhelmed and you can't. Can't do anything. But, I mean, you. We get to read the early church going through the same thing and persevering and. I mean, that's cool.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things it invites us to think is if all of these things were Pulling the church, Right? And you see, as you read the rest in the New Testament, you see that they had all these problems, right? Like, especially Corinthians, like, they got. Had a lot of problems there.
So it invites us to ask, like, what's the gravitational pull of my culture? John Mark Homer talks about that term. He says culture has a gravitational pull. It might pull us towards being sexually lascivious. Right. It might pull us towards self absorption or violence or nationalism, or it might pull us towards greed or materialism. Right. We should notice what that pull is, you know, because the church ecclesia can literally mean set apart or called out.
So you see that in a very literal way when you consider Acts as a gospel. But also this was the background of the early church. Like, they were this community of people that wasn't Jewish, they weren't Roman, they weren't. They were partially all of those things in a secondary way, but they were primarily loyal to Jesus and every other loyalty bowed to their loyalty to King Jesus. So they were called out. They did not do what everyone around them did.
There's tradition in church history that tells us one of the things that got the early Christians in trouble was they would. They would pick up the babies in the Roman world, rather than practicing something like abortion, they did something called, oh, exposure, infant exposure. If there was a baby they didn't want, they would just literally put it outside in the trash pile. The Christians would go around picking up those babies and adopting them. Wow. Say, like, when you say set apart or called out, you see a community that literally was refusing the pull of society around them and living in a different way because of their loyalty to Jesus.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Wow, that's. That's cool. That's a cool perspective.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Is there any kind of, like, themes that you can see throughout acts or, like, anything that kind of like that? I guess, yeah. Themes. I don't know. I don't know how to say it.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. So a couple of themes we've already touched on is, first off, Jesus is king, right? There's that. Second, God is the God of everyone. He's the God of the outcast. He's the God who crosses cultural, socioeconomic boundaries. He's the God who invites slave and free into the same church. Hellenized Jews and traditional Jews are in the same church. Gentiles and Jewish people are in. Like, there's that theme, but there's an overarching theme that I think Luke is pointing out very intentionally that we need to notice. But we've got to get real Nerdy for a second in case. I mean, if you think we've been nerdy so far.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: Yeah, here we go.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: We're jumping in the deep end.
So there are three things, probably more, but three things specifically that collide in Acts, chapter two that tell us really, they set the tone for the entire rest of the book. Okay, so first is wind. So Genesis chapter one, verse two, what was hovering over the waters?
The spirit of God. Right? So it's ruach is the Hebrew word there. Ruach means spirit or wind, right? Spirit of God's hovering over the waters and forms from the chaos of the deep, the world, right? When God forms Adam, Adam the human from the ground, what does he do?
Breathes life into him. Breath, wind, it's all the same visual, right? So in the creation of the world, spirit, wind, in the giving of life to humanity, spirit, wind breathed into life, right? And you see this theme in other places, right?
A easy example of this is the book of Ecclesiastes, which is a bummer of a book. It's a downer because he says over and over and over again, it's all vanity, a chasing after the wind. If you take that, chasing after the wind, first off, wind, right? You take that and you translate it in a more literal way. Another way you could say it is a breath chasing a breeze or a breath, a wisp or a whisper after a wind.
So it's this image of like. Like the. The teacher, as he's called in Ecclesiastes, is looking at the whole world and he's saying we are after ruach, the creative, the spirit that was hovering over the chaos. He's like, I see the chaos and we're after that, but the best we can do is just a breath chasing the breeze, right? It's beautiful. It's poetry, you know, it's what it is, right? You need to understand the nuances of that phrase to see how beautiful Ecclesiastes is, right?
So everything is just a breath chasing the breeze. It's just a. It's just a touch of life chasing the creative life force that God in put in humanity, right? So then, and I'm just picking highlights here, and Jesus dies. And I believe it's the end of John. Jesus breathes his last, right? And the word changes to pneuma, Greek word, which is also translated spirit or breath, which is the Greek version of ruach, which is the spirit breath of the Old Testament, Testament of Hebrew.
So Jesus breathes his last, right? And then the early church is in the upper room waiting for the Holy Spirit to come. For the holy pneuma to come, right? It's the Greek word. The Holy Spirit is Greek word, pneuma, breath, wind, right? So they are waiting, as Jesus told them to, for this. Before they can do anything, right? Before they can act, they have to wait for the Spirit to come. So then the pneuma comes and the sound of a great wind, right? So the ruach hovers over the waters and out of the chaos forms life. And then the pneuma, while they are waiting, comes in a rushing wind and gives life right and births the church again. So there's this theme that's happening, like new creation. It's happening again is kind of this idea. But then you've got fire, right? The tongues of fire rest on their heads. So you've got that. So once again, a theme throughout the Old Testament. You've got the fire that falls down on Mount Carmel. And I think it's 2nd Samuel 18. No, 2nd Kings 18. I think I might have the chapter and verse wrong. But Elijah, right? He's taunting the servants and prophets of baal, right?
Because he won't send down fire. And Elijah's like, maybe he's asleep. Shout louder. And then Elijah calls down and God sends fire from heaven, right? When they would make a sacrifice. If you read the Levitical laws, Leviticus isn't boring. We just read it wrong. That's just my hot take. I mean, it's kind of boring, but it's interesting when you see the nuances, the sacrificial laws. You gave a burnt offering, right? Something had to be burnt. It's this purification, right? Throughout Scripture, you hear about, like, purified by fire, right? You've got the Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who are thrown into the fire. And there's another in the fire standing next to you, you know, whatever.
So all you've got all these themes, right, that are consistent. You got. I mean, they get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and there's in Genesis 3, and there's a angel with a fiery sword, right? So fire seems to represent in various ways this sort of like purification. Yes, guidance. You know, you had the. When they're wandering in the wilderness, pillar of fire by day, or pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. But you had the burning bush.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I was about that, too.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: God calls Moses, right?
The burning bush, right? You have Isaiah who says, I'm a man of unclean lips. I come from a people of unclean lips. In Isaiah, Chapter six, I think and the angel of the Lord picks up a coal and touches his tongue, right? You've been purified.
So there's this kind of purification, sacrifice theme. So, you know, this image of fire would definitely make people think of the sacrifice, the burnt offering, you know.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: So tongues of fire rest on their head because who sanctifies? The Holy Spirit sanctifies. Right. Who cleanses his church? Jesus cleanses his church, Right. It's through his sacrifice that we are made clean. So the wind falls, new life for the church. And tongues of fire land on the heads of these people, representing the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit gives life and the Holy Spirit purifies. Then there's another thing, because after it happens, they start speaking in tongues.
They're given this gift. And all throughout the Book of Acts.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: This is all happening in the upper room, right?
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah, this is all happening in the upper room. But you see this, like, fast forward in the Book of Acts, and you see not every time, but a lot of the times, people get filled with the Spirit and they start speaking in tongues.
So not getting into the theological tongues thing right now, just talking narrative themes, right? So in the beginning of the Bible, you've got a family, right? Adam and Eve walking with God. Then there's sin, right? So they have a perfect relationship. A good way to imagine in Genesis 2, when it says, I'll make a helper suitable, or I'll make a helper like you, is if you imagine two people face to face and eye to eye, that's the way we should picture that. Based on the, you know, Hebrew language, at least my understanding of the language, you can also translate that as rescuer like, I will make a rescuer like him.
So there's this perfect balanced relationship.
Sin happens. Genesis 3, we have the results of sin. Her desire will be for her husband, and he will lord over her, right? So the dynamic breaks. Face to face breaks down, right? So perfect unity broken because of sin. You see that cascade into Genesis 4. Abraham or Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel, right? And you keep casting that forward. And then you've got Lamech, right? Who like Lamech, says, well, if Cain was avenged seven times, I was. I'm avenged 70 times seven. He says that after he kills a young man for harming him or does something to a young man for arming him, it's just like violence gets worse and worse to the point of the Flood, that God's like, my goodness, this is awful, right?
And the same thing happens again. They get out of the boat and ham Offends his father. We don't know exactly what happened. We know it was bad.
Scholars, from what I understand, seem to believe that, like the writers didn't want to tell us what happened. They just kind of used like. Yeah, they basically want us to know it was bad, but they felt weird writing it down. Okay, so it all happens again. Like there's that we, we descend into chaos until you get to the Tower of Babel, right? You've got unity again. True, but it's the wrong kind of unity.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: It's not, we are unified because I want what's good for you. It's, well, if we work together, we can all get what we want. You know, it's self unity. It's, we can get to God, we can rule the world. You know, it's like we see examples of selfish unity all throughout human history. Right? Like there was a point where in the 1940s, Germany was fairly unified. Not in the good way.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah, not a good way. So, yeah, okay.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: But there was a unity there, right?
So it's this negative. It's a unity that's going to lead to harm because it's selfish unity. Right. They are building a tower to rule the world and reach heaven on their own.
So God in his mercy confuses their languages.
Right?
They don't speak the same language anymore. So they can't work together in their selfishness to really put a bow on this. Until the Spirit fills them and the fire cleanses them, they shouldn't be working together like that anymore. Right. Which is kind of part of the reason, maybe I'm theorizing here, but why God calls one nation after that and people join the people of God in the Old Testament by becoming Jewish. You know, they get circumcised, they change their laws, eating habits, working habits, and that's how they become part of God's people. Right? So then Jesus defeats sin and death, right? Through his death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit comes. The Holy Spirit enlivens the church. The fire represents the cleansing of sin, that we are not enslaved to sin anymore, that we are not ruled by our own selfishness. So the Holy Spirit undoes the work of Babel, Right?
Because now through the Holy Spirit. They're speaking in tongues, everyone. It says that people from all nations were there and they heard them in their own languages. Right?
So it's the anti babble.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: So the theme that you see in the Book of Acts is like the church is to bring this all back to the gospel. The church is the rule and Reign of Jesus, Right. Not perfect. We are still sinful and broken, but we are not enslaved by our sinful brokenness anymore. Right? We are not as Christians trying to rule the world. Right? We as Christians are trying to submit to King Jesus and preach his rule and reign of the world. So you see this play out in the New Testament in the Book of Acts, as the early church goes out as ambassadors of King Jesus. Right? You see Philip, who goes, preaches to an Ethiopian eunuch. You see Peter who goes and preaches to Cornelius, the role Roman centurion, like the baddest of bad guys, you know, that's who Cornelius is. Peter preaches to him.
You see, once again, the Hellenized and traditional Jewish Christians are in community together and they work it out. There's this crossing of all of these boundaries. So Ephesians, In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul says that through the cross that Jesus destroyed the barrier that divides. And from the two is building a new temple and a new humanity. Right? So I mean, that is like Old Testament language cast forward into the life of the church. Yeah. So the church is this rule and reign of Jesus. We are the embodiment of Jesus destroying the barrier that divides. Right. So that we. What unites us as Christians? Jesus.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:45] Speaker A: We're filled with the Holy Spirit, cleansed by the Holy Spirit through the death and resurrection of Christ. Right.
So that's what we have in common. And that's why the church, that's why there are American Christians and Canadian Christians and Iraqi Christians and Israeli Christians and Christians of every nation and tribe and tongue. And that's why I have more in common with a Nepali Christian than I do with a non Christian neighbor.
Because we are under King Jesus. We are part of the, like, the rule and reign of Christ.
So I should be loving my neighbor so that he can come under this new rule and reign of Jesus. You know, that we'll be like theologians call it the already not yet kingdom of God, that there are parts of the kingdom that are already here. The Holy Spirit's in us, right? Pentecost happened. We are the church.
But there's also things that are not yet. Everything's not made right yet. There's still sin, there's still brokenness. So the church is a window of the already, right? We show the world what it should be like. And this is why it's so important for Christians to confess and repent and admit our sins and our shortcomings. Because we show the world what the forgiveness of Jesus is like. And when we pretend like everything's fine. We can't show that.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Right. So we confess and we repent and we hold ourselves accountable, we seek justice, all of these things. Right. And we, through our unified, unified connected mission. Right. That crosses all of those boundaries that would divide us, we show the world that King Jesus is still rule and reign. Right. So, and that really, like you see this theme take us up to like Acts 10 and then after Acts 10 you see this, Acts 12 maybe you see this big shift and the church goes out of primarily Jewish controlled or like Judea, Israel, and into the whole world as Paul goes to Corinth and to all of these cities and eventually to Rome. Right. So the second half of the Book of Acts is really the playing out of this multinational cross cultural unified mission of the church. And our next episode, we can dive into the second half of the Book of Acts. You know, Paul's missionary journeys and that type of stuff.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: So that's really interesting. Yeah, that kind of helps me just like different perspective and just kind of knowing what's going on.
As I read it just. Yeah, that's pretty sweet.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I love the Bible, man. And I don't just say that because I'm a pastor. Like, I've heard more sermons than anybody should. Like, my dad's a pastor, my grandpa, I got uncles that are pastors. I've been in church my whole life.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:42] Speaker A: I just, I hear multiple sermons every week.
And what I can tell you is the more that I've gotten to know the Bible, the more I like it. Not the less it's an ecosystem.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: It's not getting. Yeah. Like there's more and more there.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's like to me, I know not everybody hunts, but that's why I like this ecosystem analogy. Because, you know, I've spent hours and hours and hours sitting in the woods hunting whitetails in South Carolina. And every time I go out there, there's something I didn't know, you know, something I didn't foresee.
And that's what scripture is like. It's this. I can live in this. This helps me interact with the world around me. It's alive, living and breathing, sharper than a two edged sword. I can live in the ecosystem of the Bible if I am willing to actually notice it, get into it.
Quit being afraid that it's complicated. Quit saying, I can't understand that. You can't. It's God's word to you. You're made in the image of God. You can understand his word. You just got to do a little work. Get in the ecosystem.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Get in the ecosystem. I do like that analogy. That's sweet. Sweet. Pretty cool.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Well, this is fun, man.
[00:41:52] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for doing this.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for asking the questions, man. Yeah, this was great. So we'll be back for round two sometime in December for the second half of the Book of Acts.
