Mount Sinai and the Pentecost: Recreating the People of God

Sunrise on Mount Sinai in Egypt-click for Eastern Orthodox icon of Pentecost

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.


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The Middle of Acts: Continuing the Ministry of Jesus

st-matthias

Warming Up

As 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
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The Beginning of Acts

Caravaggio's The Conversion of St. Paul

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
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How to Read a Story

The Creation of Eve

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.


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The Story of Acts

conversion-of-paul

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.
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