How shall we decide what they were? His own wisdom lay in accepting what was now shown to be fate. There were religions that believed in the Christ as the Great World Spirit, but denied that Jesus was the Christ (1 John 2:1822; 4:23). Indeed, he had been more guilty, more rabid than they, in persecuting Jesus of Nazareth. Finally, Paul had to deal with a fallacy that was and still is very common in the pagan world: that because nations have grown up in different parts of the world and so have developed their own cultures and ways of looking at things, they have a right to conceive of God, or the gods, in a way that appeals to their particular mode of thinking. nor will they train for war any more. It is at once evident that David could not be speaking of himself: David cannot be his own 'my Lord' to whom Yahweh addressed the invitation, 'Sit at my right hand.' But the year that Jesus rose from the grave there were bigger things to celebrate. Simultaneously, his commission from the chief priests was replaced by an altogether different commission from the risen Lord which not only illuminated his mind but dramatically widened his vision: in place of his obsessive, narrow concern for Israel's rights and privileges, it gave him a love, a message big enough for Israel and the whole Gentile world (Acts 26:17). Paul was obliged to demonstrate that the source of the girl's testimony was demonically evil, basically and unrepentantly hostile to the Lord Jesus. It could not be. . The credibility of the story of Peter's miraculous deliverance out of prison depends in the first place on our estimate of the reliability of the inspired historian, Luke. Here was a man who needed to find peace with God through faith in Christ. That is not enough; like Paul we must become missionaries and go back into the world to make God known. . The same thing would once have been said about him; and yet he had been converted. The father, says Luke, was a Jewish chief priest. 1 . This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Now the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit would transform every Samaritan who received him into a spiritual temple. The confidence of men who had seen, handled, and talked with the risen Lord is not to be questioned. Be warned, says Paul: 'The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. We wait for Christ as our deliverer from the coming wrath, he asserts in 1 Thessalonians 1:10; and as we wait for him to come again we are to know that God has not appointed us 'to suffer wrath, but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ' who died for us (1 Thess 5:910). Sadducees, as Luke explains (Acts 23:8), did not accept even the possibility of resurrectionanyone's resurrection, let alone the resurrection of Jesus. I try only to have three commentaries with me in any series and in both Luke and Acts, David Goodings commentaries are part of the trio. But what a thing for a Jew to have to tell a Gentile: that the Jews, the saints, the people blessed with a God-given religion, [p 214] zealous for righteousness, with a privileged role among the nations, killed the supreme doer of good! They replied, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be savedyou and your household' (Acts 16:31). He had attempted 'to desecrate the temple; so we seized [i.e. But for some reason he rejects it, and refuses to play with it. One thing, they warn us, the modern mind cannot and will not tolerate any longer: the monopolistic claims of old-fashioned, fundamentalist Christianity. Past masters at interviewing and conducting investigations, they began the proceedings by asking, as if they did not know, and as if there were a hundred and one possible answers, 'By what power or what name did you do this [miracle]?' We should not be surprised, therefore, that by the time Philip reached Samaria they had paid the price of their error: they had been completely taken in by a sorcerer named Simon. Paul could see that Festus had already grasped the fact that he was innocent of the charges relating to the Jewish law, temple, and people (Acts 25:10). . At 15:15, Paul, along with Barnabas, fights tooth and nail against the imposition of circumcision, and eventually all the apostles state their united view that the imposition of circumcision would subvert the doctrine of salvation. If they had waited for the Jerusalem church to send them out as missionaries to the Gentiles, the church at Antioch might not have been founded yet. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. But once she has ceded this fundamental right of ownership to him, he certainly maintains her right of private property over her body against all others. Why must they offend so many people's traditions and culture, create such bitterness and provoke so much religious animosity and civil strife by continually trying to convert people from other religions to their own? but who are you? (Acts 19:15), and proceeds to rout the would-be exorcists. . And what is more, it does not apply to Christians in their lives outside the church. Nothing survives, except individual atoms. Similarly with Stephen's contemporaries. The ethics governance for the whole . Admittedly, Epicureanisn made pleasure the chief good to be aimed at in life; but by pleasure it meant a state of trouble-free tranquillity. Only Israel had this message of hope. Somewhere between AD 6 and 9 some Samaritans went to Jerusalem at Passover time and scattered bones in the templean act calculated to spread the maximum ritual pollution (see Num 19) in the Jews' most sacred place. What if there had been no interval and he had proceeded at once to stamp out evil? On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. When he reminds the Gentiles that they were once disobedient, he is thinking of what he said earlier (Rom 1:1828), that God originally revealed himself to the nations but that they did not like what they saw of God and refused to accept or believe it. Creation around them told them, if only they would listen, that the Creator of heaven and earth cannot be confined to a temple. The truth of the proposition is self-evident: if the Creator has to, and does, give us everything we have, we have nothing of our own with which we could satisfy his needs, even if he had any. How long before the great day these disturbances would take place Joel did not specify; but it is obvious that they were to act as premonitory samples of the judgments that the Day of the Lord would unleash. Heaven must receive and retain him until the times of the restoration of all things. His True to the Faith is one of the best theological works I have come across on the Acts of the Apostles. In this context, what Ananias and Sapphira did was as bad as what Judas did. In spite of all appearances, the spirit-medium and the apostle Paul were not in fact 'all in the same business, really'; the spirit within her was an emissary of the power of darkness. But at the same time I believe that there is no other ground of forgiveness and acceptance with God for any man or woman on the face of the earth than the death of Jesus. the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established Out of sincere zeal for the sacred honour of the name of God he persecuted them with all his might and main. The wall was invented to serve a necessary practical purpose. Some say yes; for if Luke, as a doctor, reports that the boy was picked up dead, he must have been dead. Parents may forbid their early-teenage daughter from going to certain sleazy parts of a city. Item 4: '. [p 43]. They denounce his demands as absolutism. Even if what she said was true, for Paul to have accepted her testimony would have validated her form of spiritism in the eyes of the public. Jesus was God's universal Saviour for all mankind (Acts 4:12). Thank You So Much our brother David Gooding and may The Lord give you a good health. It is used of the powers in the heavens being shaken (Matt 24:29), of the foundations of a prison being rocked (Acts 16:26), of people being shaken in mind (2 Thess 2:2). But the facts are that most people in the ancient world didn't believe in the possibility either. But when it comes to salvation, God does not think in terms of continents and masses of people: he is interested in people as individuals. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession . This salvation was an absolute necessity if they were to be ready for Christ's [p 123] second coming. What an admission! No! Citing the example of two comparatively recent political rabble-rousers, who had briefly led insurrectionist movements and then had come to disaster, he argued that the Sanhedrin had no need to try to suppress this new Christian movement. All was not lost. They were presumably much helped by what he did, and their consciences, being still weak, were saved from being further scandalized. Lives of famous Christians. His next move in that direction was to get two of his servants into the physical jail at Philippi. The crowd had been listening to Peter in one of the temple courts. The truth is that God loves good works, and he is interested in the good works even of people who are not yet saved. It is an incalculable mercy to be allowed to repent. Repent and . Paul in his climax speaks of the risen Lord as judge: 'God . Her business [p 312] prospered: when she was converted, she had a house big enough to accommodate Paul and all his companions (Acts 16:15). But it was slanderously untrue. The present exposition, therefore, has not thought it necessary to repeat all the massively detailed arguments that others have advanced for the historicity of Acts. He talked it over with his companions and 'we concluded', says Lukethat is, we inferred'that God had called us to preach the gospel to them' (Acts 16:10). To reject Jesus was to reject Godand up to the moment the high priest, and indeed all the members of the Sanhedrin present, had rejected Jesus. First, they were not obliged to sell their field and give the money to the church. It was meant to be. on November 10, 2020. Not so, according to Peter, for he adds: 'Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12). David Gooding - True to the Faith - Part 1 - YouTube In sending a certain Ananias to tell the now blinded Saul what to do, the Lord explained to Ananias: 'This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel' (Acts 9:15). Only, we must be careful not to miss the overtones of the biblical language as we read the words that accompanied the vision. He was as loyal a member of Israel as any member [p 117] of the council. And anyway, in their fear and misery people would have had no stomach for food, even those who were not hopelessly seasick. Many in the crowd before him had stood a few weeks before and shouted for the crucifixion of Jesus. Luke has not placed it at the end of Paul's first missionary journey at 14:28, where it might have seemed natural; nor at the end of his journey to Jerusalem and back, at 15:35. So they went down to Troas; and there God intervened yet again. . This comes about because at the centre of the universe, and pervading all its parts, is reason, which is the active agent in the creation and in the control of all that goes on. The fact that it happened showed that it was part of the operations [p 351] of universal reason and was for the good of the whole. 3 . He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead' (Acts 17:3031). At first sight that might sound a very strange statement to Jews, almost a contradiction in terms. - And how would Paul defend the gospel at the highest levels of society, against every kind of misrepresentation, when he found himself under the power of Roman law and order? In James's quotation it runs: 'That the remnant of men may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who bear my name . . What is more, in doing this he became a prototype of the promised Messiah. But there are grave difficulties with this interpretation, first, at the basic level of understanding the thought-flow between the Lord and the apostles. No one-off, isolated incident, but a regular succession, until these occurrences which at first shattered almost every norm they had hitherto known became virtually normal (Acts 1:3). And that was how Paul found himself dispatched under military protection to Caesarea, to stand trial before Felix, accompanied by the letter from the commander, which we have earlier noted, explaining the details of the case so far. He is not a God who has a right to interfere in some nations and cultures because he fits in with their ethos and concepts, and no right to interfere in other nations and cultures because he is alien to their way of thinking. FREE SHIPPING FOR AUSTRALIAN WEB ORDERS OVER $99, In a vivid and original study of the book of Acts, David Gooding brings to life the world of the early church and leaves the reader with the clear vision of what it really means to be true to. Each wanted his fellow believers to regard and to use his possessions as though they were their own. The classical statement of the steps necessary to becoming a Christian in the true and full sense of the term is given by Paul later in Acts, in his address to the elders of the church at Ephesus (Acts 20:21). The time of that judgment is already fixed; and assurance that the judgment will in fact take place is now 'given to all men', and given in a form that makes it immediately relevant to all human beings everywhere, whatever their nationality or culture: a man, a human being, has been raised from the dead (Acts 17:31). He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. . The question strikes us today with even greater force than it may have struck the Jerusalem crowd. But where has there ever been any serious evidence that he has even attempted to solve the problem of evil? There was forgiveness for having rejected Jesus; but in the nature of things there could be no forgiveness for knowingly rejecting God's final witness, the Holy Spirit. Does 'even the Gentiles' sound a little odd? Nonetheless, it was an extreme step for uneducated laymen to take, to defy the highest spiritual authority in the land. Everyone had heard about the nature [p 70] and quality of those miracles. In him God had undone the results of Israel's folly to Israel's unexpected and unending advantage.
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