90-Day Challenge II

You just went on a journey through Genesis and Exodus.  Here we find ourselves with Stephen again.  He was one of the deacons who then turned preacher who was arrested by the Pharisees because he was speaking of Jesus as Savior.  The high priest asks him to begin our Scripture, “Is this so?”  The this, in the this, is the accusation that Stephen was speaking against the temple and that Jesus was going to destroy the temple.  This was a big deal.  You don’t mess with the temple because it was the residence of God.  I am so thankful that we do not believe that God actually lives in the church.  Sure, we respect the church and consider the church a place where we come together to worship, but we don’t believe that God lives there…do we?  

If we believed that God lived in the church then we would act one way in the church and another outside the church.  We don’t do that do we?  If we believed that God lived in the church then we would treat some people one way in church and then ignore them outside of church, and we don’t do that.  If we believed that God lived in the church then we would think that for some reason God can hear us and is closer to us while we are in the church and we can feel him more.  Wait, maybe we do think that God is somehow associated with the building of the church more than we should.  

Back to Stephen, he takes us on a journey through Genesis and through Exodus, the first two books of the Bible.  It is taking me more than two years to get through Genesis and he did it in less than 5 minutes.  Everything seems to be going great until he gets to verse 51 where he calls the high priest and those surrounding him stiff necked people.  He accused them of falling in line with their ancestors who stoned the prophets and refused to listen to the advice that they gave.  He accused them of being in line with generations of people in power who refused to listen to people that God sends to them in order to give them guidance.  As you can imagine they don’t like that.  But they can live with that.  It is what he says next that really drives them mad.

He blasphemes by saying that he saw God and the Son of Man standing next to him. The son of man, who would that be?  Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus called the Son of Man.  Here are some references:  Matthew 18:11, Mark 2:27-28, Luke 11:29-32, John 1:49-52.  So in every single Gospel we find Jesus called the son of man.  The Pharisees understood Stephen to say that Jesus, this man who had been executed as a common criminal, is standing next to God.  Stephen becomes the first martyr.  Here is another Rembrandt depicting the scene.

 I hope you noticed who was gathering the cloaks of the people as they got themselves warmed up to throw stones at Stephen.  Make sure you don’t miss vs. 58 where we find the first mention of Saul who will be the one who writes the most of the New Testament.  

And this is why we wear red on Pentecost.  What is somewhat more challenging in Acts than what we found as we made our way through the Gospels is that there is so much more movement in every chapter than what we found in Jesus’ life.  We could touch upon the first part of this chapter which describes the power of God in the Holy Spirit.  We could analyze Peter’s sermon or the effects of that sermon in the verses that follow.  We could talk about the life of the early church and how they lived with everything in common.  To be honest the latter is my preference.  I could spend and entire 90 days just on verses 43-47.  The effect of the Holy Spirit on our lives and the impact that a devotion and dedication to Jesus ought to create is revolutionary.  There is no other way to state it.  It does not come softly to gradually change us to be more like Jesus.  The power of the Holy Spirit is such that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2) and our lives are lived in such a way that this transformation takes root.  But let’s look at the earlier verses in this chapter.

What is absolutely crucial to understand as we make our way through Acts is that at this stage of the game the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the message of his salvation is almost, I said almost, exclusively a Jewish thing.  It was a message proclaimed by Jews and, this is critical, it was a message received by Jews.  The setting that we have before us is another Jewish festival where Jerusalem would have been packed with devout Jews who had come to the temple to worship.  Remember last chapter the disciples headed back to Jerusalem after Jesus left them in the ascension.  The Jewish festival of Pentecost was a celebration that had nothing to do with the Christian festival that we celebrate.  It had nothing to do with the Spirit of God descending upon his people.  Pentecost, in Hebrew it would be transliterated as Shavuot, was a celebration of God giving the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai 50 days after the Exodus.  It was a big deal, so Jewish pilgrims made their way into Jerusalem to celebrate that day.   I’ve added a picture of our family walking down Mt. Sinai just to whet some of your appetites for our next trip to the Holy Land.  I would love to include Sinai if it is not cost prohibitive.  Keep April of 2019 on your calendar open.

Back to this Scripture in Acts 2.  Taking advantage of this situation God sends his Holy Spirit, sends himself, upon the disciples who are gathered and he gives them the power to speak in the languages of the Jews who were gathered there.  So why the red?  Because just as the Holy Spirit came in the form of a dove when Jesus was baptized, so the Holy Spirit came this time in the form of tongues of flame descending upon those who were believers of Jesus Christ.

The pilgrims had no idea what was going on so Peter explains it to them.  But notice that he addresses his fellow “Israelites”.  He is speaking to the Jewish people who were gathered there.  Why am I stressing this so much.  Because it is not until later that the gentiles, the non-Jews, were welcome to hear the Gospel in a transformative way.  When that happens, and it hasn’t happened yet in chapter 2, then the Christian movement dramatically becomes something different.  So Peter is able to speak to those gathered in a way that he knew they would understand.  He speaks about King David and how Jesus was the Messiah that he had predicted.  He is able to speak about their ancestors, who were his ancestors, and how they had waited for generations for Jesus to come.  He ends the sermon with this phrase: “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (vs.36)

The reaction was immediate.  People approach Peter and ask him, what do we have to do now that we have blown it?  Repent and be baptized, Peter responds, it is not too late.  Peter tells them that this promise is for them but also for their families, their children included.  Do we need to say something more about the baptism of infants?  I don’t think so especially after this past Sunday when we had 8 baptisms in church and when we were able to see the tangible effects of infant baptism, where we were able to understand what it means when we say that God chooses us way, way, way before we even understand to choose God.  I think I said enough in the enews and on Sunday.  Suffice it to say that this Scripture is another in the arsenal of baptism of infants.

Now to my favorite concept in all of Scripture, this whole communal living thing.  So, when we were pastors in Italy one of the aspects of the ministry was that every single pastor was paid the same throughout the country.  We were about 120 Waldensian and Methodist pastors (we were Presbyterians who are Waldensian in theology but the Methodist church and the Waldensians had joined in their governance which included the payment of pastors).  We were paid about $900 a month and our rent and our transportation were covered.  It was awesome!  Fundamentally I felt so in touch with this Scripture in Acts 2 where we had to live by faith and so it was not a far step to ask the churches that we served to do the same.  That has stayed with me to this day.  In all the churches that I have served we have never taken the approach that we do nothing until the finances are there.  No, rather, we do that which the Holy Spirit demands of us, and then the finances will be there.  They don’t magically appear, but God warms the hearts of those men and women in the congregation to catch the fire of the vision that is being put forward.  I feel so strongly that the more a church is able to live out the ideal of Acts 2 then the more room the Holy Spirit has to work in order to perform acts that can only be described as miracles.  We’ll have another opportunity to see this concept later in Acts.  

One side note, if you are new to this 90 Day Challenge II and did not do the first 90 Day Challenge you can simply scroll down and you will see the first 90 Day Challenge, but it will be backward.  The point is that you read one chapter a day and it will cover the 4 Gospels, that was the first part.  The second part is that you read another 90 days, we are now in day 2, and that will cover from Acts through Colossians.  Again, enjoy  the journey.

It is pretty much agreed upon by all scholarship that Luke wrote the book of the Bible that we call Acts of the Apostles.  We know this because in both Luke and Acts we find the book dedicated to this person called “Theophilus”.  You can find those references in Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1.  In fact, at the very beginning of Acts we read about the “first book” that he wrote which we would be right in assuming was in fact the Gospel of Luke.  So who is this Theophilus?  I break the word down into two parts and we have Theo and Philus.  From my writings, and if you have been in church on Sundays, you should know already what both of these words mean.  Theo means God and Philus is from the root for the word that means love.  So Luke is writing both the Gospel and this book of Acts to those who love God.  I normally begin my letters: Dear friends and family of FPC.  Luke, however, began his writings with the phrase: dear lovers of God.  I think I like his way of beginning better.

Well, a lot has happened.  Jesus has spent three years with his disciples, he was crucified and much to the surprise of the disciples he was raised from the dead.  The resurrection has already taken place when Luke picks up in Acts.  In Acts 1 we begin with Jesus still with the disciples.  The disciples are wondering if this is the time that Jesus will bring in the new kingdom, you know the Kingdom of God, that he talked about more than anything in his entire ministry.  But Jesus responds and tells them that no, not yet, he still had to leave them with the greatest gift that God could ever give to us…Himself.  The Gift of the Holy Spirit, which is God himself, was about to come next.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves, that comes next chapter on the day of Pentecost.  

So for 40 days he stays with his disciples and he gives them a second Great Commission.  Do you remember the Great Commission that we saw in Matthew 28:19 when he tells his disciples to go out into the ends of the earth?  He  does that again in vs.8 where he tells us that we will be his witnesses.  There is a seminal work on the history of the Waldensian Church called “You will be my witnesses.”  If you are interested in learning more about this historical Protestant Church in Italy where Stacy and I began our ministry you can find this book here: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-My-Witnesses-Waldensians/dp/8870160890 .

So after 40 days from when Jesus was raised from the dead we find the biblical event of the Ascension.  Here in Amish country Ascension Day is a big deal.  It should be a big deal to us as Protestants as well.  We believe that Jesus was taken up into heaven 40 days after his resurrection.  That is what Ascension day is all about.  Jesus literally ascended.  It is part of our liturgical calendar that we celebrate, at least on paper, the day that Jesus left his disciples to take his place at the right hand of the Father.  

After the Ascension the disciples head back to Jerusalem to get to work to choose a disciple who would replace Judas who died in a field and his guts spilled out.  Wait, I thought Judas hung himself?  According to Matthew 27:5 he went out in disgust with himself after throwing down the pieces of silver given to him to betray Jesus and hung himself.  There are some who would harmonize Judas’ death and say that he went and hung himself and then his body fell and his guts spilled onto the ground.  I’m wondering if the details are that important.  What is important to this story is that at this point they needed one more apostle to run the church.  

Let’s give a quick lesson on the terms disciple and apostle.  An apostle is usually those twelve who followed Jesus.  They then returned to Jerusalem, except for Judas,  and ran the church.  A disciple is a much more general term and is used to describe any, past or present, who would be a follower of Jesus Christ.  So if you were a disciple of Jesus in Scripture, it did not always mean one of the twelve.  You can be a disciple but not an apostle, but all apostles were disciples.  But when the lists are given in the Gospels of the twelve disciples, except for the Gospel of John, they are called apostles.  This book of the Bible is called the Acts of the Apostles and it refers to the work of the earliest 12 plus one.  The plus one, as we will see later, is the Apostles Paul.  

So even today there are churches that still cast lots to choose their pastor.  It is absolutely biblical, but it is not the only way that decisions are made in the Bible.  I prefer the committee approach, but each church has its own tradition.  Here Matthias is chosen to replace Judas.