Why Acts Really Matters
Why did Luke write Acts?
Of all the Gospel writers, Luke is the only one who writes the story of Jesus and the story of the early church. Luke believed both were incomplete without the other. Luke tells the one story of the birth of a movement in two parts—how it began with Jesus and how the movement spread from Jerusalem to Rome on the way to the ends of the earth.
Luke’s Gospel dealt with all that Jesus began to do and to teach. Acts covers what the risen Lord continued to do and teach through his disciples, empowered by the Spirit. In the Gospel, salvation has come through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Acts is the account of how that salvation spread from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.
The story of the early church is part of the ongoing story of salvation reaching back to the mighty acts of God in the OT, to the ministry of Jesus and forward to the end of history. It explains how this new movement is grounded in the ancient promises to Israel and how it has come to include the nations. Luke uses historical biography to tell the story of salvation. In that story, the key character is not Peter or Paul, but God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Most of God’s activity is directed towards the spread of the his Word to the ends of the earth.
Not just history
Luke is a good historian with reliable sources. His account of Jesus at the synagogue in Nazareth is the best description we have of a synagogue service in the first century. If you want to understand navigation in the first century, read Luke’s eyewitness account of Paul’s voyage to Rome. But Luke is more than a historian describing events.
Luke writes history with a purpose. He is showing us how God works in and through this movement to accomplish his purposes. He is showing us what God commands his people to do as they participate in his mission. His history is selective.
Long before Paul or any apostle arrived in Rome, there are churches there. We can speculate that they were started by Jewish believers who returned to Rome after Pentecost, but we don’t know for sure, Luke doesn’t tell us. He’s not writing a full history of the early church. He is writing an accurate history, but for a purpose. He selects his material accordingly and tells us part of the history. As John tells his readers, if we wrote down everything Jesus did, the whole world could not contain the books that would be written. The same is true for Acts. Luke the historian has a Spirit-inspired agenda.
The relevance of Acts
Acts is relevant today because Acts reveals how this movement of Jesus’ followers was brought into existence by the will and purpose of God in fulfilment of the Scriptures. Acts shows how the movement is directed by God, how he intervenes by sending angels, or prophets, or his Spirit, or the risen Lord at crucial moments.
The Word triumphs over the world and wherever it goes it brings forth disciples in community learning to follow Jesus and reaching the world around them. This expansion is not the work of exceptional leadership, or astute communication, or generous funding. At every point, it is a work of the living God.
The disciples face hardship and persecution. They are ridiculed, beaten, jailed and murdered, they run from persecution, they are shipwrecked and put on trial. Yet time and time again, God intervenes to ensure the Word goes out and communities of disciples are formed, built up and multiplied from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.
Acts ends but the story is not complete. Rome is not the ends of the earth, but the heart of the Empire. The age of salvation continues until the gospel goes to every people and every place. God continues to pursue his mission, through his people in the power of the Spirit. The Word still goes out, the Risen Lord still leads the way.
The history of the early church is not a one-off, unrepeatable era in the history of salvation. What God was doing through Jesus and through the power of the Spirit, he continues to do in every generation until the mission is complete. Luke tells us about the Peter and Paul, and the unidentified witnesses who take the gospel to Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, and others like Philip, Apollos, Lydia, Priscilla and Aquila because he wants us to learn from them and do what they did. Luke doesn’t just describe what happened in the life of the first church in Jerusalem, he is challenging us to live as they did.
Acts now
Those who deny the relevance of Acts today are confused about its purpose. Luke is not just handing us a record of what happened in the first century, he’s challenging every generation to see what should be happening now. His Gospel and Acts tell the story of the rise and spread of the movement of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It reveals how God is at work in the world to fulfil his plan. To play our part, we are to look for principles and patterns of behaviour and teaching that we can emulate.
We can keep asking: What did Jesus do? What did he train his disciples to do? What does the risen Lord and the Holy Spirit continue to do through God’s people in Acts? What does that look like today?
Acts is about the expansion and triumph of the gospel as communities of disciples of Jesus are formed from Jerusalem to Rome despite opposition.
Acts calls every new generation back to the beginning—to a movement born in obscurity without power, wealth or influence, devoted to prayer and the spread of God’s Word, bold in the face of opposition, generous in love, experiencing God’s powerful presence, captive to his saving love in Jesus, always on the move from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.
What if Luke not just writing to say, “This is how it was.” What if he’s saying, “This is how it still is.”
