A Commentary in Simple English on The Acts of the Apostles

1. The gifts of the Spirit do not show whether or not we are saved. It is better to have a little grace than great gifts. Many people who have great gifts are lost. See Matthew 7:21-23. ‘Great gifts, great doubts’. [2.1]

2.God shares out the gifts of His Spirit in His own way. See Hebrews 2:4. It is not our place to look for them. We should be thankful for what God gives to us, rather than pray for more.

3. God gives us the gifts of the Spirit to use. They are not to be listed. Some churches waste a great deal of time when they draw up lists of spiritual gifts.

4. The only right use of the gifts of the Spirit is to help other Christians. They are not there to make us proud. The gifts which we have do not make us better Christians than other Christians who have different gifts.

5. The use of the gifts of the Spirit should make Christians stronger. It should ‘build them up’. Some English Bibles use the word ‘edify’, which no one understands. It just means ‘to build up’. See 1 Corinthians 14:3-5. If we claim that the gifts of the Spirit are used among us, then we must ask: ‘Are Christians better and stronger?’ If they are not, our use of the gifts is not right. [2.2] Some people seem to think that Christian worship is not complete unless someone speaks in a tongue. This misses the point.

6. Not all Christians speak in tongues. The teaching of the Apostle Paul is clear on this. See 1 Corinthians 12:10 and 12:29 and 30, where the answer to Paul’s question is ‘No’!

7. Some Christians find great help and blessing in the use of ‘tongues’ in private prayer. We ought not to think that to pray with the mind is less ‘spiritual’ than to pray in a ‘tongue’ where the mind plays no part. See 1 Corinthians 14:14- 26.

Before we leave this subject, we should be careful to see that the Holy Spirit does not just ‘control’ us. See 1 Corinthians 14:32 and 2 Timothy 1:7. We need to think, too, about 1 John 4:1. The Spirit of God is gentle, like a dove. He does not make us do things that we do not want to do. He does not make us do anything that we ought not to do. He shows us things that we may do for the glory of God. When we are weak, He gives us strength. The Spirit of God is the Holy Spirit. He does not come to make us holy against our wills. It is the other way about. When we sin, we lose the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. See Isaiah 63:7-10, and of course, most of all, the last of these verses. See too Ephesians 4:30. We ‘sadden ‘or ‘offend’ the Holy Spirit by our sins. This sin may only be silly or foolish talk, as Paul warns us in verse 30. ‘Do I not buy my sin too dear? Sins are dearly bought with the grieving of the Spirit of God’. [2.3] So too Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:19 ‘not to put out the Spirit’s fire’. We do right to pray for a new outpouring of the Spirit. Yet we must also know how careful we should be to keep from sin so that the blessing is not quickly lost again.

Verse 5-13: People in Jerusalem that day

We have already seen (verse 5) why it was that Jerusalem was full of visitors. They had come to Jerusalem for Pentecost from many parts of the world. They were mostly Jews, and they were people for whom their religion did matter. They were ‘devout’. That was why they had made the long journey from their homes. When they went home again other people would believe what they said. We have read about the sound like a great wind in verse 2. It seems that people all over the city heard this noise. Yet the people knew where to come to.

(Verse 6) These visitors would have known Aramaic, which was the language which the Jews used every day. They might have known some old Hebrew. Many of them would also know some Greek. Yet each of them also knew one other language. This was their ‘mother tongue’. It was the local language which people spoke every day in their homes. We know now that when people hear God’s word in their mother tongues, it speaks to their hearts. It is not just that they understand it well. (Verse 7) The disciples would not know these ‘mother tongues’ at all. They would speak Aramaic and Greek and perhaps a little Latin.

So we should make the following points:-

1. These were not ‘unknown tongues’ that the believers spoke. They were languages which were well known to some of those who heard. They were languages that the speakers did not know.
2. ‘Tongue speaking’ does happen in other religions. What is wonderful is that Christians speak clearly in languages which they do not know.
3. Some people have thought that this was a miracle of hearing, not of speech. They think that the speakers used languages that they knew, but that the hearers heard another language. That does not agree with what verse 4 says. The hearers would have heard two languages that they knew, both at the same time!
4. In Genesis 11:1-9, we can read the story of the Tower of Babel [2.4]. Men wanted to ‘make a name for themselves’. Before this they had been given names. God had told them to spread out and fill the earth. Instead, they came together to build a city. So now God ‘confused’ their language. They could no longer understand one another. The city building stopped. What happened in Acts 2 at Pentecost was the opposite of this.
5. The Jews in the New Testament period thought that Hebrew would be the language of all peoples in the new age. Pentecost ended that idea. God had another way! [2.5]
6. It was not just that the believers spoke in tongues. It was what they said. They spoke about ‘the great things of God’. Now Greek had been used in a translation of the Old Testament. No one had ever used any of the other languages in the worship of God. Yet the Spirit of God found words to use. Now it often takes about fifteen years to translate the New Testament into a new language. Sometimes it takes thirty years. It may take years to find the right word for ‘love’ for example. There may be no word for ‘God’. On that day, it was not difficult to find the right word!
7. Quite soon, the early church produced translations in Coptic for use in Egypt. There was Old Latin and Syriac. The lesson of Pentecost was remembered. We may use every human language in the worship of God. Indeed, we must! All human languages will be needed in glory so that the praise of God may be full and complete. See Revelation 7:9 and 10.
8. God has now done away with language as a limit to what men can do in His service. In the same way, race should no longer divide God’s people. Once, the Jews had been the people of God, just as Hebrew had been the holy language. All languages are now holy, and all peoples and races may be one in Christ.

Colossians 3:11 is a very wonderful verse. There Paul tells us that Greek and Jew are one in Christ. So are slaves and free men. But he goes much further. The Scythians were the wild tribes who wandered in what is now the Ukraine and south Russia. It sounds as though some of them had been made slaves. Their owners had taken them to the cities of Roman Asia. God had saved some of them, too, by His grace. Paul had seen that these people could join the people of God.

So we come back to verse 8. These visitors to Jerusalem ask what is going on. We now have a list of the parts of the world that they came from.

(Verse 9) It will help you to follow this list if you can find a map in the back of a Bible. A map which shows Paul’s travels will be best.

The list runs mostly from east to west. We shall find that for some years, Paul did not preach in these areas. The list is not just a list of places. The people who became Christians would have gone home again after Pentecost. It was the work of the apostles to travel and to visit them. Paul did not want to preach where the other apostles had already been.

Parthians came from what is now Iran. Sometimes this part of the world has been called Persia. In New Testament times Parthia was a strong empire. The Romans were their enemies. There was often war between Rome and Parthia, mostly in Armenia. The Romans did not always win!

The Medes also came from the Parthian empire. This would be the south west of Iran today.
The Elamites were in the south of Iran, further east than the Medes. [2.6]
Mesopotamia is ‘the land between the rivers’. The rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is the main part of modern Iraq. This was where Daniel and Ezekiel had lived in Old Testament times. Psalm 137 is about life in Babylon, which was a city in Mesopotamia. 1 Peter 5:13 mentions Babylon, but most people think that there Peter means Rome. For hundreds of years after the New Testament period, the Jews in Mesopotamia were an important group. [2.7]

Judea does not fit in here. [2.8]
Cappadocia was about 600km. north of Jerusalem, beyond Syria and Cilicia. It was in the eastern part of what is now Turkey. See 1 Peter 1:1.
Pontus is another area which Peter speaks about in that verse. It was on the south coast of the Black Sea. Visitors to Jerusalem might well travel from Pontus by ship. Aquila, a well known early Christian, came from Pontus. See Acts 18:2, for example.
Asia was the western part of what we now know of as Turkey. Ephesus was one great city there where Paul worked. Probably John lived there years later and he sent messages to the churches in the Book of Revelation. Asia is also there in 1 Peter 1:1.

Verse 10

Phrygia was east of Roman Asia. See Acts 16:6 and also 13:14. It was an old area which the Romans had split up between their provinces of Asia and Galatia.
Pamphylia was to the south, on the Mediterranean coast. See Acts 13:13; 14:25 and also 15:38.

The Delta of the River Nile was an important part of Egypt. In the delta the Nile splits up before it reaches the Mediterranean Sea. This was only about 400 km to the west of Jerusalem. The Sinai Desert was in between. Egypt, of course, is a very ancient land. There were great numbers of Jews there. The great city and port of Alexandria was west of the Nile Delta.

There were several Jewish ‘synagogues’ in Alexandria where the Jews met for worship. One is said to have been so big that they used flags to let people know when a service had ended. The great Greek translation of the Old Testament is the ‘Septuagint’. That means ‘the version made by the Seventy’. The story was that seventy Jewish men who knew Greek and Hebrew well had worked together. They had written the ‘Septuagint’ two hundred or more years before Pentecost. This gives us some idea of the great number of Jews in Alexandria. [2.9] Egypt became a great centre of the Christian religion, yet hardly anything is said about it in Acts. See Acts 6:9;18:24 and 27:6.

We know that for 600 years there had been some Jews who lived 1000km to the south of the Delta. See Jeremiah 44:1. This area was called Upper Egypt. At Elephantine or Yeb the Jews built a temple about 650 B.C. The Jews’ enemies destroyed it in 410 B.C. It seems that the Jews were able to build it again. [2.10] The point is this. The Jews from Egypt who were at Jerusalem for Pentecost may have had a long, hard journey.

The parts of Libya near Cyrene’ were almost 1000 km west of the delta of the Nile in Egypt. We know the area in between as the Western Desert. There was then some good farmland around Cyrene and the Greeks built several cities there. The whole area is now desert. Many Jews lived there. [2.11] They would probably have gone to Palestine for the Pentecost feast by ship.

We can be fairly sure that the ‘visitors from Rome’ would have come by ship over the Mediterranean Sea. This was much the longest journey, about 2,500 km. Perhaps Paul speaks here about ‘visitors from Rome’ because there were some Romans who lived in or around Jerusalem. He does not mean Roman soldiers, for example.

(Verse 11) Many of these people were Jews. They were the children of Jewish fathers and mothers. These parents had brought their children up in the Jewish faith. Many others were ‘proselytes’ or converts to the Jewish religion. They had been brought up in some other religion, probably the worship of the heathen ‘gods’. They had got to know about the Jewish religion. To change religions was not easy. It was hard for a man to make the change. Yet these people saw that the religion of the Jews was pure and far better than the worship of the heathen ‘gods’. They were ‘converted’.

Now these words - ‘Jews and converts’ - may just belong only with ‘visitors from Rome’. It seems much more likely that both classes of people came from all the places listed in verses 9 and 10.

Crete was a large island in the Mediterranean Sea. It was about 1000 km from Palestine. See Acts 27:7-16 and the Letter which Paul wrote to Titus. Paul may have written this letter about A.D.63. It shows that more than thirty years after this first ‘Pentecost’, there were large numbers of Christians in Crete.
For Arabia see Galatians 1:17 and 4:25. See too 2 Corinthians 11:32. There Aretas is the Arab king of an area which was called Nabatea. This was the part of Arabia just east of Palestine. The rock-city of Petra was its centre. Later there was a Roman Arabia east and south of Palestine. We now use the name ‘Arabia’ for a much larger area. [2.12] We do not know how many Jews lived in ‘Arabia’.

As we come to the end of this list, there are a few things that we should say about it.

1. Some parts of the world where many Jews lived at that time are not in this list. Judea may just cover Syria. Cyprus and Cilicia are not in the list. Nor are Greece, Galatia and Bythinia. Some of these places were fairly close to Palestine.

2. Paul, it seems, kept away from these areas in the list when he really began his work. He went instead to places like Cilicia and Cyprus.

3. We feel that the Apostles knew where these visitors to Jerusalem lived. The work of the Apostles was to travel and visit them. The Apostles had to teach them and help them to lead the Christian life. [2.13]

So we come to the second half of verse 11. Verse 4 has already given us some help here. It was not just that the apostles and their friends spoke in languages which they did not know. It was not even that they spoke in languages which other people did know. It was what they said in those languages. The Holy Spirit gave them the right words in those languages. They spoke about the wonderful things which God had done.

(Verse 12) People who heard the tongues just could not understand what had happened. [2.14] These people who had come to visit Jerusalem began to talk to each other. They began to ask good questions. A great deal of what happens in the world does not mean anything. We hear ‘the news’ and much of it we will not remember. This was a thing which did have meaning. People would remember it.
1. It meant that God’s truth, the Good News, was now to go to every people. It was not only for the Jews.
2. It meant that all peoples could come into the Kingdom of God.
3. It meant too, that God had given His Holy Spirit in plenty to His people.
4. And this did mean, also, that God had now kept many of His great promises.
5. When we come to verse 33, we shall see that it means something else, too.
This is that Jesus is now in glory. He sits now with God in the place of honour and power.

(Verse 13) Not everyone who heard these languages thought that they meant anything. People who lived in Jerusalem did not know these strange languages. Some of them thought that the apostles were drunk. They thought that the apostles spoke nonsense. The word for ‘wine’ here means ‘sweet new wine’. At that time of the year, it would not have been ready. Peter answers this in verse 15, anyway.

What we need to see here is that miracles divide people. Some people see God’s work and they believe. But there are always other people who see but who do not believe. See John 11:43-46 and many other places in the four Gospels.

Verses 14-40: Peter speaks to the crowds.

This is the first great speech which sets out the Good News. What Peter says is made up like this:-

a) The Spirit has come. God had promised this. Peter uses verses from Joel 2:28-32 to prove this. This takes us up to verse 21.
b) From verse 22, Peter speaks about Jesus. Verse 22 is about His life. Verse 23 is about His death. Then in verse 24, Peter begins to teach that Jesus has risen. In verses 25-28, he uses some words from Psalm 16:8-11 to show that God had said that this was to happen. When we come to verse 33, Peter moves on to teach that Jesus is now in heaven, and here he uses part of Psalm 110. So he had told the people what God has done.
c) In verses 37-40, Peter tells the people what they must do.
(Verse 14) There would have been plenty of room in the open spaces around the temple buildings in Jerusalem. The crowd would be able to hear there what Peter said. First Peter speaks to those people who lived in Jerusalem. They did not understand the ‘tongues’ which they had heard. They thought that the speakers were drunk. (Verse 15) But it was only nine o’clock in the morning. They had not had time that morning to get drunk. This was the first hour of prayer. Jews were not to drink before this.

Peter is wise. He begins with something that the people all know about. Then from verse 16 onwards he speaks about what Joel wrote hundreds of years before. People might not agree with the way that Peter uses these words. Yet they had to agree that they were the Word of God. The verses stand on their own. It would not be easy for anyone to argue. People could not say: ‘ They mean something else’.

So (verse 17) God had from time to time in the past given His Spirit to some men. Usually this was for some special work, and for a short time. Now He will give His Spirit freely: He will ‘pour out’ the Spirit. This is not only for some men. It is for ‘all people’ or rather ‘all flesh’. God had promised to pour out His Spirit on the Jews; see Isaiah 44:3 and Ezekiel 39:29. We may perhaps add Ezekiel 36:27. The promise in Joel seems to be the only other one which speaks about the Spirit. On the other hand, there are many places in the Old Testament where God promises to bless all nations. [2.15] This is the only place where God promises to pour out His Spirit on all men. God will give His Spirit to all kinds of people. There will be both men and women. So Joel speaks about ‘your sons and daughters’. God will give His Spirit both to young and old people. That means other people in between as well. Peter speaks to the Jews and he tells them that they too may share in God’s gift.

Many of the dreams which we have are bad, or at least mixed up. They are not clear. The Holy Spirit can give us clear, good ‘visions’ and dreams. We need them to help us to know what Christian people should do. We need to learn what God wants us to do. We need to dream of schools and hospitals. We need to dream about homes for old people and for children who have no father or mother. We need to dream about the Good News going to places where no one has ever before preached it. We need holy dreams from God. Then we need to share them and to do something about them.

Some old Jewish writers did not like the idea that slaves would share God’s blessing. (Verse 18). So they said that these men and women were the servants or slaves of God. We know that the promise is to the very lowest of men and women. ‘They shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest’. See, for example, Jeremiah 31:34 or 1 Corinthians 1:27 and 28. We will often find that it is poor people and the sick who want to hear the Good News. God works that way, so that all the glory will be His. We must not feel sorry about it.

To prophesy is to speak out what God wants us to say. Sometimes it does mean that we tell what will happen in the future. This is not always a part of prophecy. There are many good Christians who do not believe that there is any prophecy now. We may not agree with them. We may feel that we know people who are prophets now. If we do, we must be sure of one thing. We must always be sure that the prophet agrees with the Word of God. The Bible is always the Word of God. What a prophet says may be God’s word to us today. It can be right today, but wrong tomorrow. It is not equal to Scripture. Also a person may prophesy at one time. We may feel that what they say is right. It comes from God. That does not mean that they have the spiritual gift of prophecy. We still have to ask when they speak at other times, ‘Is this from God?’ There is a danger. The person who speaks a prophecy may say: ‘This is not equal to God’s Word’. Yet the people who hear what he says may still think that it is as good as Scripture.

Verses 17 and 18 tell us what will happen ‘in the last days’. What God says there through Joel came true. That was the first Pentecost. In verses 19 and 20, we move on to the end of the age. Now we read what will happen ‘before......the great.......day of the Lord’. It may help us to see what these words mean if we look at Luke 21:25 and 26. Then look at Matthew 24:29 and Mark 13:24 and 25, and also Isaiah 13:10 and 34:4. The great day of the Lord is the time when Jesus will come again. There will be great trouble in the world. Yet all through the age one thing is always true.(Verse 21) God will save anyone who cries out to Him for help.

So Peter has spoken about the Holy Spirit. Now in verse 22 he begins to speak about Jesus. First in verse 22, Peter speaks about the life of Jesus. He begins again with things which people know. Of course, it is the people who live in Jerusalem who know this best. The people who have come to Jerusalem for the feast will not know so much about Jesus. Peter says:-

1. Jesus was ‘the Nazarene’. He was the man who came from Nazareth. He was a real man.
2. God pointed out Jesus to the people. So they should watch what else God did.
3. God did works of power, wonders and signs through Jesus. A sign, of course, is like a finger which points to who Jesus is. He is God’s Son.
4. Jesus did these things in the middle of the Jewish people. They knew what Jesus had done.

In verse 23, Peter speaks about the death of Jesus.
1. Judas Iscariot handed Jesus over to the Jewish leaders.

2. Then Peter says why this happened. As he does so, he touches on perhaps the very deepest question in the whole of the Bible. It was not just because the Jewish leaders hated Jesus. They were afraid of what might happen to them, it is true. But Peter says that it happened for two reasons.

One reason was God’s fixed plan. God had a plan of the way by which he would save sinners. Some people call this the ‘the Covenant of Redemption’. There are a few places in the Old Testament where we can hear Jesus as He talks with God the Father about this. One is Psalm 40:6-8.

The other reason is’ God’s foreknowledge’. The Greek word here is like our word ‘prognosis’. If we are ill, we go to the doctor. He listens to what we say, and he has a good look at us. If he knows what is wrong with us, he knows too how he can help us. Then he will be able to tell us whether we will get better. He may tell us how long it will take. If we are very ill, he may have to say that we shall not get better at all. He may well tell us that we will get worse. That is a doctor’s ‘prognosis’. Now God has a ‘prognosis’. He knew what would happen when Jesus died. He knew that there would be a way for sinners to become saints. There would be a new way for the lost to be found. And all this would be for His glory.

Now some people are not happy that Peter talks first about God’s fixed plan and then about what God knows. They think that God must know first, and then make His plan after that. I think that Peter is right. In those seven weeks since Jesus died, Peter had learnt great truths. [2.16]

3. ‘You’ here means the Jewish people. They had the help of ‘lawless’ rather than ‘wicked’ men. This means the Romans and most of all Pontius Pilate. They were men who did have the Roman Law. They did not have the Law of Moses. The Roman laws were very old and in some ways very good.

4. So the Jews and the Romans together killed Jesus. They ‘nailed’ Him. Peter does not speak about the cross here.

The Jews threw stones at people until they died. See Acts 7:58-8:1. It was the Roman way to nail people to the cross. This was a most cruel way to die. In such cruel ways the Roman ran their Empire. But it had to be seen that both Roman and Jews took part in the death of Jesus. Jesus died for all men, whether they were Jews or not. So all had to share in His death.

In verse 24, Peter moves on to tell the people how Jesus rose from death. Peter says:-

I. That it was God Who did this. Men kill: God gives life. This is God’s way. He takes the things that men do and turns them right round the other way. He gives life in place of death.

2. Then Peter says that this death was like a woman. The woman is about to give birth to a baby. She is in great pain. So when Jesus died, death was in pain. Now death can hold on to everyone else except Jesus. This is because we have sinned. The wages of sin is death. But Jesus had not sinned. So death is not able to hold on to Jesus. Death had to let Jesus go free.

The people who heard Peter in Jerusalem that day were mostly Jews. They were people who knew a lot about the Old Testament. Peter now talks to them about some verses from Psalm 16. Peter wants his Jewish hearers to say more than: ‘Yes, Jesus did rise from death.’ He wants them to say: ‘Yes, God said in His Word that this would happen’. So we must look at Psalm 16.

We do need to read the note at the top of the Psalm which says that David wrote it. We do not need to say much about the first two verses. Verse 3 is very difficult. Your Bible may have a note about it. No one can be quite sure what it means. [2.17] In verse 4, David says that he will have nothing to do with the worship of false ‘gods’. Verse 5 and 6 tells us how pleased David is with what God has done for him. The ‘lines’ are ropes or long strips of leather which the Jews used to measure out land. There would be knots tied in them to show how much land each person would have. Verse 7 really begins the second part of the Psalm, although Peter does not use it. God gives us pleasure (verse 6) so verse 7 says that we give Him the praise.

We shall come back to verses 7 and 8 when we have looked at verses 9-11. All men must die. When we die, our bodies ‘decay’. They go bad or rot. The grave is the place which is not seen. We say that we will remember people when they die. In fact we soon forget them. Death, we say, is the end. There may be joy and hope in this life, but not when we are dead. Of course, this is wrong.

In these three verses, we hear someone speak. The speaker expects to die. Yet his heart is very happy. The Greek Old Testament had ‘tongue’ here; the NIV follows this. But the Hebrew Bible had ‘glory’. This was a word which meant ‘liver’, and this came to mean ‘the very best part of us’. It is not only this part. His body also will be safe in God’s care. It will be ‘secure’. So in verse 10, the speaker says that God will not give him up to the grave. Most important and wonderful of all is the last part of verse 10. The person who speaks is ‘God’s holy one’. The speaker looks forward to death and the grave. Yet the ‘decay’ which happens to human bodies will not happen to his body.

Verse 11 of the Psalm looks beyond death and the grave. God will make known to His Holy One ‘the path’. This is the path which leads from death to life. It is the path which leads from the grave to God Himself. God’s ‘presence’ is His ‘face’. God will fill His Holy One with joy, because he will see the face of God. Here joy enters into us. There in glory we shall enter into joy. The joy which we have here comes to us from heaven. [2.18] There is joy in God’s right hand to give to His Holy One. There is enough to fill Him with pleasure for ever.

We said we would look again at verses 7 and 8 of Psalm 16. We can hear Jesus. Jesus trusts God to tell him what to do. ‘He counsels me’. Jesus had to be very sure that it was the will of God for him to die on the Cross. In verse 8, Jesus tells us how close he keeps to God. God is at the right hand of Jesus. God is nearer than his enemies. Perhaps the thought is that God’s shield covers Jesus. ‘If we desire to have God present with us, we must set Him before our eyes’.

So it is time to come back to Acts 2:25-28. David did not speak about himself in these verses. He spoke about Jesus. In these words, Jesus speaks to God his Father. So Jesus says (verse 25) that he looked at God all the time. So much happened in the life of Jesus. Still he looked at God. See Hebrews 12:2. We must look away to Jesus all the time. Jesus is at the right hand of God. He is safe, and he will not be thrown down or shaken so as to fall.

This trust and hope in God means that Jesus is glad, very happy. This is in his heart. He can speak with joy too. The last part of the verse is about the body of Jesus. Even when Jesus dies, he still has the hope that his body will rise again from death.

So, in verse 27 Jesus says that God his Father will not just leave his soul in Hades. Hades means the place of the dead. It means the grave, or the unseen place. We must remember that Jesus speaks here about ‘my soul’. If you use the N.I.V., you will not find this there. Jesus will not be left there, unable to help himself. It is ‘my soul’, but then Jesus speaks about ‘Your’ - that is, God’s - ‘Holy One’. The word for ‘holy’ there is not the one we mostly find in the New Testament. It is a great word which is not used many times. It means ‘pure’. So God will not let the body of Jesus, which is pure, ‘go bad’ or see decay.

When Jesus rose from among the dead, he was not just a spirit. He had a real body. Christians will rise from among the dead, and they too will have real bodies.

So in verse 28, Peter adds the last verse of the Psalm. God has made known to Jesus the paths, that is the ways, that lead safely from death to life. The Bible has a lot to say about the joy of the Lord Jesus. See Luke 10:21; John 17:13 and Hebrews 1:9 and 12:2. There are other verses. Here we see that Jesus knows that he will be with God and that God will fill him with joy.

(Verse 29) No doubt the Jews in those days were happy to show the place where David was buried. So, although David wrote Psalm 16, it could not be about him. He was not only a king. He was also a prophet. God had given a great promise to David. We may find this in verses like Psalm 89:4,29 and 35-37. Now in the time of Peter, there was no one from David’s family who was king. The Jews had no king then: priests ruled them. So Peter says that Jesus is the member of David’s family that God will place on David’s throne or royal seat. (Verse 31) David knew what God would do when Jesus died and rose again. David lived about a thousand years before the time of Jesus.

Perhaps we have said rather a lot about these verses. But Peter says that David wrote the words of Psalm 16 about someone. He did not write them about himself. (Verse 30) David was a prophet and God made known to him something future, that is, about Jesus. Jesus is the great matter that prophets wrote about. (Verse 31) So it is no surprise that David wrote about Jesus.

So Peter now moves on. In verse 32, he says

a) That God raised Jesus from death and
b) that Peter and his friends know that this was true. They saw Jesus after He rose from the dead. They talked with Him. They touched Him and ate with Him.
That is all very well. But the Jews would ask: ‘Where is Jesus now?’ So in verse 33 Peter adds:-
c) God has ‘exalted’ Jesus. Ten days before, Jesus had gone up from the Mount of Olives, as we have already seen in 1:9. A cloud hid Jesus, and the followers of Jesus could not see Him any more. Jesus ‘ascended’. Jesus also passed through all the heavens. See Hebrews 4:14.

Then Peter makes a great claim for Jesus. Jesus is now with God. He is at God’s right hand. This is the place of honour and power. Now we find this teaching in about twenty five or even thirty places in the New Testament. In Acts, we can look at two of them in 5:31 and 7:56. Some people think that Jesus stood to receive Stephen. He was the first Christian to die for his faith. Mostly we read that Jesus sits in glory. This shows that His work is finished.

Now Peter has two more questions to answer. A Jew could say to him:- ‘How do you know that Jesus is in glory with His Father? And what has He done in these past ten days? If Jesus is alive, He could be anywhere now!’

Peter’s answer to the second question is this. God had promised to give His Spirit. See verse 17. The Father has given to Jesus the power to keep this promise. The Father has given to Jesus the promised Holy Spirit. Jesus has poured out the Spirit. Because of this, people can now see the ‘flames like fire’ resting on the heads of Jesus’ followers. They could hear the sound like a great wind: see verses 2 and 3. They could hear Jesus’ followers when they spoke in languages which they did not know. Look at some verses in John’s Gospel. They will show you that this is what Jesus taught. See John 14:16 and 17; 14:26; 15:26 and 16:7. [2.19] Jesus has asked the Father, and now the Spirit has been poured out.

But what about the Jew’s first question? Part of Peter’s proof is that the Spirit has been poured out.

But verse 34 gives a proof from the Old Testament. Jesus also uses these words from Psalm 110 in Matthew 22:44; Mark 12:36 and Luke 20:42. What Peter says here is a little different. In the Psalm the Lord is first God the Father. He speaks to ’my lord’. That means David’s Lord. That cannot be David. And God speaks the words in heaven. So ’my Lord’ is in heaven. That must be Jesus. As Peter says, no one thought that David had gone up to heaven. The Jews did not teach that.

Verse 35 does add something that we need to know. Jesus sits now in glory. He is in the place where He has great honour and all power. He is ‘at God’s right hand’. We do not know how long He will stay there. We can see that Jesus still has enemies. The enemies of Jesus are, sadly, also the enemies of Christian people. Yet God the Father promises the Lord Jesus, His Son, that it will not always be like that. See Hebrews 10:13 and most of all 1 Corinthians 15:25. There you will need to think quietly about all that Paul says from verse 14 down to verse 28.

The Bible tells us very little about where sin came from. It does not tell us much about why all the bad things are in the world. It does promise that God will win in the end. All His enemies will be put down. Sin and evil will come to an end. God will even put death itself to death. Jesus is ‘the death of death’. When death is dead, there will only be life.

So in verse 36 Peter ends this part of what he has to say to the people in Jerusalem. He tells the people what they did. He also tells them what God did. The same Jesus had first died on the cross. The Jews and the Romans together killed him. What God did after that is very different. God made Jesus ‘both Lord and Christ’.

So our Saviour has three names or ‘titles’ here. The three names belong to the same person. The first name, ‘Jesus’, makes us think about our Saviour as a real man. He is ‘the Son of Man’. The second name, ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’ should make us think about Him as the One that God has chosen. He is the One who is able to save sinners. The third title. ‘Lord’, really means that all things belong to Him. He is the Son of God in glory.

Now we have to remember that Peter began to speak right back at verse 14. First he spoke about the coming of the Holy Spirit and His power. Then at verse 22 he went on to speak about Jesus. He speaks about what God has done for Jesus. Now the preaching of the Good News must not stop there. We want to know what Jesus has done for us. We also need to know what God will do in us. We need to know what we must do. This is still true when we preach the Good News today.

(Verse 37) The power of the Holy Spirit was not at work only in Peter and his friends. The people heard what Peter said. They did not just understand with their minds. What they heard went much deeper than their minds. The truth cut or stung their hearts. It could not go deeper. That was the work of God’s Spirit. They had deep feelings of sorrow because of what Jesus had suffered. They knew that they must now do something. They were willing to do what Peter told them to do.

So verses 38 and 39 are the second part of what Peter has to say. They are just as important as verses 14-36. So Peter says:-

a) The people are to repent. To repent is to change our minds. It is ‘after wisdom’. We cannot repent in our sins. We repent from our sins. We must leave our sins. We thought our sins did not matter to God. Now we change our minds. We know that God hates sin and that means our sin. Repentance is repentance to life (Acts 11:18). It is repentance from ‘dead works’, that is, works that do not lead to life (Hebrews 6:1). Our lives may have been full of religion. We have to repent of that, too. Repentance takes a man not just towards God, but into God. This is what Paul really says in Acts 20:21.

There is a need for repentance from sin all through the Christian life. A church has to repent when it is cold, dead and without love. See Revelation 2:5.

We have to repent from all our sins. When we love a sin we will be blind to what it really is. We often think that a sin is so small that it does not matter. We may think that a sin is useful for the time being so perhaps we will get rid of it later. We may think that a sin is secret. It may be a secret from other people, but we cannot hide our sins from God. See Psalm 139. We shall sometimes need God to teach us what is sin and what is not.

Many people feel some sorrow about their sins. Perhaps they see the harm that their sins do. They may wish to lead better lives. They may think that they can change by their own efforts. This will not do. It is less than repentance. Really to repent is the work of God’s grace.
b) Those who repent should be baptised. Baptism and faith are the outside and the inside of the same thing. So Peter really says: ’Put your faith in Jesus. He will save you. And then let other people know about this. Be baptised’. The saving power is not at all in the water which we use to baptise. All the saving power is Christ’s. We receive it by faith.

Peter speaks here about baptism ’in the name of Jesus Christ’. These words were special at that time, so Luke only writes about the name of Jesus here. See Matthew 28:19 for what Jesus taught His disciples to do. He told us to baptise in the one name which the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit share. This, of course, is what Peter and his friends did. It is what Christians still do.

This baptism is ’for the forgiveness of sins’. Baptism is a picture. It shows that our sins are ’washed away’. This is a great blessing which Christians enjoy. We know that God forgives our sins because Jesus died for us on the cross.
c) Peter said: ’Everyone of you’. Everyone of you must repent and have faith. I cannot repent for someone else. No one can have faith for someone else. No one is so good or so full of religion that they do not have to repent and believe. No one else can repent and believe for me. Each one of us has to answer to God.
d) Then Peter says that those who repent and believe will receive the Holy Spirit from God . He comes as a gift from God. He will come to all who believe, as He had come upon Peter and his friends earlier that day

It is still true that God gives His Holy Spirit to all who put their faith in Jesus. The Spirit may not come with the signs that Peter and the others saw and heard that day. But He comes most of all to make us new. See John 3:5-8 and 2 Corinthians 5:17. He comes to give us a living faith. He comes so that we know that God has forgiven our sins. In verse 39, ‘the promise’ is the promise which God has given. Once again, the promise is that God will give His Holy Spirit. The promise, Peter says, God gives to you. God does not promise to give His Spirit to a few special people. A promise which has been given to someone else does me no good! See Ephesians 2:17 and 18 and Acts 11:15-17. It is not only for the Jews. It is good for Christian people to know that the promise is for their children. The children of Christian people do not always believe. Sometimes they cause great sorrow. We must pray for our children, and teach them the Good News. It is a great blessing to us when they do hear the Good News and believe.

The Christian Church knew from the start that the Good News was for all men everywhere. See Matthew 28:19 and Mark 16:15. We have already looked at Acts 1:8. Now people from many parts of the world are in Jerusalem. They listen to the Good News as Peter speaks. He now adds that this Good News is for all people who live far away. So the people from Rome and Elam can take the Good News back home with them. They can pass it on to the people who live round them, and to people who live even further away from Jerusalem.

Peter adds one more great truth. The promise of the Holy Spirit is for all those that the Lord our God will call. He will call people to be followers of Jesus. Of course, the Bible also uses the idea that we call out to God for help and for Him to save us. See verse 21. Then God calls people to do a special work. In Romans 1:1, Paul says that God called him to be His apostle. God called him to take the Good News into the world. Still, very often this word ‘call’ speaks about the way in which we become Christians. God calls us. Now we will not say much about this. Just look at Romans 1:5-7. People are called

a) to the obedience - to obey God, that is - that comes from faith;
b) to belong to Jesus Christ; and
c) to be saints; we are sinners, but God calls us to be holy.
There is no other limit to God’s work of grace. It is for all whom He calls. [2.20]

(Verse 40) Luke only tells us the main points of what Peter said. ‘He pressed his case with many other arguments and pleaded with them’. (REB) ‘Warned’ in the NIV here does not seem quite right. He told the people to seek God. God would save them from the judgment which would come on the people of that time. They were ‘crooked’. They were like timber or wood which was no good because it was not straight. No one could make anything from it.

Verses 41-47 The first church in Jerusalem

It may be too soon to use the word ‘church’ here. Luke does not use the word yet. These verses are the first of their kind in Acts. You will find others in 4:32-35; 5:12-16; 5:42; 6:7; 9:31; 12:24; 13:49; 16:5. Luke speaks in these verses about the life of the church and the way that the Good News spread.

So these verses tell us these things about this new church at Jerusalem.

1. It was made up of people who had heard the Good News when Peter preached. They heard it and knew that it was right.

2. The apostles baptised them in water. Jesus had told his followers that they should do this.
We should remember that many of the houses in Jerusalem would have special baths in those days. People were worried about being ‘pure’, which is not quite the same as ‘clean’. The Jewish law meant that there were many baths. Some people argue that 3,000 people was too many for the followers of Jesus to baptise by dipping on one day. This would not prove that they only had water poured on them. The three thousand believed and they were added to the church that day. The apostles may have spread the baptisms over the days that followed.

Many of these people were visitors to Jerusalem. We do not know how long they stayed in the city after it was time for them to go home. They would want to learn more about Jesus. They would want to tell the followers of Jesus just where they lived.

3. (Verse 42) They gave their time to listen to the twelve, that is, the apostles. These twelve followers of Jesus were busy as they taught about Him. The people who had come to visit Jerusalem might want someone to write down the words of Jesus. Then they could take them home.

4. Fellowship means that we share. These first Christians talked to each other. They spoke about what they hoped for and what they feared. They told one another how God had called them to follow Jesus.

5. The ‘breaking of bread’ here is the meal that Jesus told His followers to keep.
See Matthew 26:26-30; Mark 14:22-26; Luke 22:19-20 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. There are many other names for the Lord’s Table. Yet from the start, it has been part of the life of the church.

6. We know from Acts 1:14 that prayer was already part of the life of the church. Jesus had given His followers teaching about prayer. We would like to know more about the prayers of these first Christians. We have to say that we do not pray nearly enough.

(Verse 43) God worked through the followers of Jesus. It was not only the people who believed who saw this. Those who did not believe also saw that God was at work. Miracles lead some men to obey the truth. People who did not believe would see the miracles. They would be much less likely to try to stop the Christians when they saw what God did.

From verse 44 on we have a picture of the Jerusalem church. This is when the visitors to Jerusalem had mostly gone home. What was said in verse 42 is still true. Now there is more to say.

1) The Christians at Jerusalem were united. They were not split up into groups which did not agree with one another.

2) They shared what they had. They helped each other. Some of them were poor. So those who had land or houses sold them. They used the money to help other Christians. No one made them do this. No one said that they had got to do it. They loved one another. So they gave to each other to make sure no one was in real need. (Verse 46) See 4:34-35.

Christians have sometimes lived in this way. We should always make sure that no Christian is in real need. This does not mean that we must all do what these first Christians did. When we look at Acts 5:1-4, we shall find that it was not quite so simple. And there have been times in the story of the Church when people have shared like this. It does not always work. We need to be sure that it is God’s will for us before we try.

In later years other Christians seem to have called the Jerusalem Church ‘the poor’. It may not have been easy for the Christians to live in Jerusalem. They may have found it hard to earn enough to live on.

3) (Verse 46) There was plenty of space around the Temple building at Jerusalem. This space was ‘the courts’. So the followers of Jesus had a place in which to meet.

4) ‘They broke bread in their homes’. These words may just say again what Luke said about the Lord’s Supper in verse 42. It seems better to think that Luke says something else here. It is better to understand that here Luke speaks about their every day meals. It can do us good to have other Christians come into our homes to share meals. It can do us good to eat meals in the homes of other Christians. We must not let this make us too proud of our homes. We must not envy the homes of other Christians.

5) They praised God. See 10:46. We may not find many other places in Acts which speak about this.

6) We know that some of the Jews in Jerusalem hated the Christians. The other people thought well of the Christians.

7) God was still at work and more and more people heard the Good News and believed. So it was not just the 3,000 Christians we read about in verse 41. God added more to that number.

It is, of course, `good to think about these verses. Then we look at the churches that we know. We have the same God Who was at work then in Jerusalem. If our church is not like that first Jerusalem church, there is a reason. God is not at work by His Holy Spirit. Prayer is our great need.