Acts: An Unfinished Story

When the Apostle Paul wrote his last letter to his son in the faith, Timothy, he said, "In the last days there shall come perilous times..." (2 Timothy 3:1b KJV). Those last days began when our Lord first appeared upon the earth. We make a great mistake if we read that as though Paul was talking only about the future. He was talking about the present age, his own day. All the time that lies between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ are the last days. During that whole time there would come periods of crisis, times of danger, times of peril, when men would be "lovers of self, lovers of money... and lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God..." (2  Timothy 3:2 RSV). Whenever those conditions prevail they are, indeed, perilous times. Selfishness creates violence, the demand to have your own way, do your own thing, stand up for your own rights, this -- spread large across a nation -- creates pools of dissent and attrition against one another, and results in waves of violence with bloodshed breaking out everywhere.

The parable of the wheat and the weeds (the wheat and tares in the King James Version) is the Lord Jesus' own prediction of conditions in the church during the age between his first coming and his second -- this present age in which we live. The whole series of parables there in Matthew 13 describes this, but in the parable of the wheat and the tares he said particularly that he, the son of Man, would begin by sowing in the field of the world those who would have the life of God in them, the sons of the kingdom. Shortly thereafter would appear certain signs of evil put there by the devil. The devil would also sow, he said, and do his sowing amidst the wheat so that right in the middle of the wheat would grow up weeds.

When I entered the city of Jerusalem for the first time I came down from the Mount of Olives and went through the gate called St. Stephen's Gate. In my mind's eye I can still see the activity in the Old City and I can feel again the tremendous impressions that were mine as I came in through that gate named in honor of the first Christian martyr. We meet him today in our studies in Acts. Of course this gate is not the one through which Stephen actually passed on his way to being stoned, for that wall and gate were destroyed by Roman armies in A.D. 70, but it is probably erected on the same site and so it is properly named. Stephen, you remember, was one of the seven chosen by the congregation of the early church to be apostolic helpers. Another was Philip, whom we meet again in chapter eight. These two men, like the apostles, did mighty signs and wonders among the people in that early day. We pick up the story in the sixth chapter of Acts, beginning with Verse 8:

On the day when the Lord Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives he said to his disciples,

You remember that the book of Acts opened with a dramatic presentation of three symbols that would characterize the ministry of the Holy Spirit throughout the age of the church. These three symbols are very prominent all through the book of Acts. They were: The mighty rushing wind, the tongues as of fire, and the proclamation of various languages, the gift of tongues. These indicate three elements which we will find again and again throughout the book of Acts, and throughout the age of the church, wherever the Spirit is at work.

In the great outline which our Lord Jesus gave of the progress of the gospel throughout the course of this age, he said it would move in three stages: First to Jerusalem, then to Judea and all Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. Now, in Acts 9, we are viewing that second stage wherein the gospel is going out to Judea and all Samaria. During that period of time the gospel was being systematically preached throughout every village of Samaria and Judea by outstanding leaders such as Philip and other Christians, and certain of the apostles, as Peter and John. But the Lord was also doing something else. He was preparing the instrument by which the gospel would move into the third stage, the stage in which we today are still involved, that of going to the uttermost parts of the earth. Thus, in Chapter 9, we come to the conversion of the Apostle Paul.

The ninth chapter of Acts is the story of the conversion of Paul, of when Saul of Tarsus became the mighty Apostle Paul. It is a great mistake to think, as many people do, that what happened to Saul on the Damascus road is a complete explanation of everything which can account for the mighty influence of this man during the rest of his life. Paul became a Christian on the road to Damascus but he did not start living the Christian life in all its fullness and potential power for quite a number of years after that. He had many lessons to learn first.

In the last year or so of Paul's life, when he was imprisoned in Rome, he wrote a letter to his son in the faith, Timothy. And, looking back across the years of his ministry, he spoke of the coming of our Savior Christ Jesus, "who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel..." (2 Timothy 1:10 RSV). That is the great and central fact in the good news about Jesus Christ: He has done what no other can ever do -- he has abolished death. That is what is unique about the gospel.

It is often suggested that the book of Acts ought to be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit. I agree. Nowhere is the sovereign superintendency of the Holy Spirit more in evidence than in this wonderful account of how he moved to open the door of faith to the Gentiles.

Let us resume our studies in Acts. Here we learn afresh of the movement of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit at work is like a great river, cutting a fresh channel, going wherever it wishes. Sometimes we Christian flood control experts are disturbed by that. We do not like the way the Holy Spirit moves. We like to dig a channel, line it with concrete, and say, "Come, O River of God. We have dug the channel. Flow through it now according to our desire." But God does not work that way. He makes his own channels. We build dikes and dams and attempt to direct the Spirit's flow. But, as the Lord Jesus said, the Spirit is like the wind; he blows wherever he wishes. No one can tell where he comes from or where he is going. It is refreshing to recognize that.