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Luke set our expectations for the book of Acts in 1:8. That’s where he indicated that the disciples are going to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. But first, Jesus told the disciples they would be baptized by the Holy Spirit. That happens in Acts 2 and it is crucial for the rest of the book. In this post we look at one of the reasons for its importance.
Warming UpAs we begin to read the book of Acts along the lines of story we want to continually keep in mind that we are reading from expectation to fulfillment (or from tension to resolution). There are two aspects to that kind of reading
In the introductory post of this series on The Story of Acts I tried to explain how plots work, that is, that they move from expectation to fulfillment or from tension to resolution. In the second post I used Gen 2:18-25 as an example of How to Read a Story. In this post we’re back in the book of Acts
In the last post I introduced this series on reading the book of Acts as a story, or, according to its plot. Even though everyone knows how to read a story we’re not used to reading the Bible that way and so in this post I’m going to offer Genesis 2:18-25 as an example of a short narrative text that has its own beginning, middle, and end. When we read the story of the creation of Eve according to its plot then we begin to see the connections between the events in the story. When we see the connections between the events we understand the significance of the story.
Starting this Sunday and lasting until the middle of July I will be teaching three Sunday school classes on the Book of Acts. With each class I only have four weeks to go through the whole book so I thought maybe I could supplement the classes with some blog posts on the same theme. The big idea behind this series is to uncover the broad sweeping sense of the book and, in the meantime, to learn more about what it means to read according to the plot of a book.
Way back in the first post of this series (December 2009!) I suggested that the frame question for this series will be:
Toward an answer to the question
Understanding the culture and environment in which the Bible was written can often prove to be helpful for understanding the biblical text. If we take just a very brief look at how temples were perceived in the Ancient Near East (the environment in which the Bible originated) and then go back and look at the biblical text, we gain some insight for understanding the significance of the relationship between temple and creation in Scripture.
On March 6-7 I had the opportunity to preach at First Evangelical Free Church in Rockford, IL for the spring missions conference. The title of the sermon is “In the Mi(d)st of Reality” and is from Isaiah 46 (same as in Davis a few weeks ago). I was able to get an audio file from Rockford and have embedded the sermon presentation with the sermon audio above. If you would like just the audio version you can get that here: In the Mi(d)st of Reality (I’m working on fixing this link) Continue reading for more on why I think preaching is to teaching as poetry is to prose.
In this post we’ll be taking a look at the creation account in Gen 1:1-2:3 (but also in the rest of chapter 2) in comparison to the views of the surrounding cultures. In the last post I tried to show that the form of the text plays an important role in conveying the author’s claims and in this post I want to show that the cultural background also plays an important role. Between this post and the next,
The last post of this series took a look at Gen 1 from the perspective of Hebrew narrative and we saw that the chapter has a grammatical structure giving strong indication that this is a narrative text. In this post, however, we’re going to look at the poietic shaping of this text and see how it contributes to the meaning the author intends to convey. |
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