Acts

Acts. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Acts is attributed to Luke, author of one of the gospels. The gospels focus on the life of Christ, but Acts focuses on the apostles as they established the church. Much of the book tells of the missionary journeys of Paul, and Luke indicates that he accompanied the apostle on some of those journeys.

In his gospel, Luke described the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, made several appearances to his disciples, sometimes large groups of them, until His Ascension. Luke shows that the resurrection of Jesus was central to Christianity from the beginning, being preached by Peter immediately after Pentecost and by Paul repeatedly wherever he went.


Peter was a leader of the apostles and he is prominent in the early chapters of the books. During this time, the growth of the church was concentrated in Jerusalem until the persecution led to its dispersion. This dispersion, along with a vision God gave Peter, was the beginning of the gospel being carried to non-Jewish people, Gentiles, and the growth of the church in that sector.

With the shift to Gentiles, the book turns from Peter to Paul. Paul was a Jewish scholar and a leader of the prosecution of the church. His conversion is described in Acts. He was appointed by the other apostles to be a missionary to the Gentiles and rose to become one of the great teachers in the church.

Paul took three missionary journeys. In the first, he established or encouraged churches in Asia near the Mediterranean Sea. His second journey revisited some of these churches and expanded into Greece. His third trip focused on Ephesus, a major economic center of the Roman Empire.

His preaching in Ephesus, and the growth of he church there, lead to conflicts with the temple of Diana. In Ephesus, Paul begins to feel the call to carry the gospel to Rome. Before he goes, he revisits Greece and Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was also a place of conflict for Paul. He was welcomed by the church there, which celebrated the work he had done among the Gentiles, but he came into conflict with Jewish leaders. These men captured him and took him to Roman officials wanting to have him put to death. These Roman leaders were too scrupulous of their laws to laws to execute Paul on shaky charges that they probably saw as a sectarian conflict amongst the Jews, but some were willing to do a favor a keep him out of the way. This eventually lead Paul to appeal his case to Caesar, a right he claimed as Roman citizen, and he was sent to Rome under military guard.

Paul spent a couple of years as a prisoner in Rome, though he had great liberty and was allowed to preach and teach there. Paul was probably acquitted after a couple of years in Rome and received better treatment that he would later when, as a prisoner again, he wrote his letters to the churches.

Acts may come off as a biography of Peter and Paul. It is really a picture of the great commission in action as the church began preaching and making disciples first in Jerusalem (Peter), then the nearby districts (shifting from Peter to Paul), and finally to the entire known world (Paul’s missionary journeys).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Holy Bible (especially the Gospels (especially Luke))
Fathered by God by John Eldredge
Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller
The Joy of Supernatural Thinking by Bill Bright