Acts

On God As Lord, Part 2

March 29, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The crowd thinks that these babeling (yeah, I meant to spell it that way) Christians are drunk. Peter, the leader of the group, and apparently still impetuous, even after being baptized in the Spirit, can’t let that slander stand. He speaks up.

He denies that they’re drunk. It’s only 9 am. How could all these people be drunk this early in the day?

And then he begins what one commentator has called “the first Christian sermon ever preached.” I suppose. If you don’t count the ones by Christ. Or the centurion at the cross.

He takes as his text a passage from Joel 2.28-32 (Ac 2.16-21). God, the prophet said, would pour out his Spirit on all flesh.

This is a new thing.

In the Hebrew Scripture, what we call the Old Testament, the Spirit “came upon” relatively few people—warriors facing battle, sometimes, and some of the prophets. Joel foresees a day when “all flesh” would receive this gift: men and women, young and old, even servants. This would be a decisive shift in the timeline of history, what Joel calls “the last days.” That’s what’s going on at Pentecost, at Jerusalem, in the days after Jesus’ resurrection.

Peter continues his quotation of Joel beyond that. He describes astonishing things, apocalyptic things: “blood and fire and vapor and smoke” as well as changes in the heavenly bodies (Ac 2.19-20).

Hmm. Don’t see any of that happening there in Jerusalem.

Interpreters have taken different views of what’s happening here. Some say Joel’s prophecy wasn’t fulfilled at all, because none of it will happen until the end of the world. All Peter was doing was using it as an illustration. I find it difficult to square that assessment with Peter’s direct words: “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Ac 2.16).

Others say that Joel’s prophecy was completely fulfilled at Pentecost—that references to the sun and moon are symbolic, meaning that the earthly powers will be humbled before the reigning Christ. I find that one unsatisfying as well, because there’s nothing in Joel’s prophecy to indicate to the reader that he’s moving from literal prophecy (the pouring out of God’s Spirit) to symbolic prophecy (the earthly authorities being described as the sun and the moon).

Which leaves us with a third possibility: Joel’s prophecy is partially, but not completely, fulfilled here. The pouring out of God’s Spirit on all flesh initiates a new age, which will eventuate in the apocalyptic events he describes. His prophecy plays out over a long period of time—so far, more than two millennia. Pentecost is the beginning of the “last days,” when God’s plan for history and eternity will come to maturity and fruition.

Why now? Why is the pivot point of all time here?

Peter proceeds to explain. He brings up, for the first time to this audience, the name of Jesus of Nazareth (Ac 2.22).

This man was endorsed by God, who empowered him to work miracles, mighty acts that some of those in the audience themselves had witnessed (Ac 2.22).
He was executed as part of the very plan of this God, who directs all things according to his will and for the goal of his glory (Ac 2.23).
And he was resurrected because God is Lord over death as well as life (Ac 2.24).

Why did God do these things? Because he had promised that he would not leave this one in the grave (Ac 2.25-28). Peter here cites another prophecy, this one by King David, in Psalm 16.8-11. But wasn’t David talking about himself? Didn’t he say, “You will not leave my soul in the grave”? Peter sees this objection coming, and he answers it conclusively.

David, he says, is still dead, a thousand years later. But David was a prophet—here his hearers would agree with him—and he knew that God would fulfill his promise to him, to have a king eternally on his throne (2S 7.12-16), even after he was dead.

This God is Lord over all. He empowers his people—ordinary people—to speak in the tribal languages of all present in this thronging crowd. He endorses an itinerant Galilean preacher, and that simple endorsement changes everything about how we view the man. He directs in the hearts of kings to arrest and execute this preacher, thereby perfectly fulfilling his plan. And then he raises him from the dead, demonstrating his lordship over unearthly as well as earthly powers.

Lord.

And there’s more to come.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

On God As Lord, Part 1

March 27, 2023 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

It’s been said that biblical Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. I’ve said before that the Bible uses metaphors of multiple relationships to describe our relationship with God. It’s as though no single human relationship can embrace all the complexities included in our relationship with God. Over the years I’ve thought of nearly 20 such metaphors.

In recent posts I’ve meditated on God’s standing as Father and as Husband, two of the most common metaphors in the Scripture. Here I’d like to do something similar for a third, his standing as Lord.

I could do that, I suppose, by surveying all the Bible verses that reference this concept. That would guarantee me something to write about for the rest of my life, and it would be a worthwhile study for both of my readers. But I think I’ll approach the topic in the same way I did the topic of God as Husband: I’ll choose a single passage that discusses the topic robustly and then see what’s to be found there. The passage is Acts 2, and as you know from the reference, the event is Pentecost.

For Israel God arranged a calendar designed to keep his people in constant fellowship with him. In addition to the weekly Sabbath, there were annual holidays, involving either fasting or feasting. Three of those holidays—Passover, Pentecost, and Booths—were designated as “pilgrimage feasts,” when the Law required all Jewish males to appear before God, first at the Tabernacle and later at the Temple. By New Testament times, of course, this meant coming to Jerusalem, to Herod’s Temple, the grandest Temple yet.

Pentecost occurred 50 days (thus the name) after Passover, which would be in our late spring (late May this year). Because weather was typically good, this festival was usually very well attended, with Jews returning to their homeland from all across the empire. It was a time of reunions, good food, and great rejoicing.

Luke tells us that the day “was fulfilled” (Ac 2.1). Some commentators see that wording as prophetically significant—that Luke was saying more than that a date on the calendar had come. John Polhill writes, “The ‘fulfillment’ language bears more weight than mere chronology as the fulfillment of the time of the divine promise for the gift of the Spirit (1:4f.). The time of waiting was over” (Acts, The New American Commentary Series, 96). He notes another passage (Lk 9.51) where the same author, Luke, uses the expression to mark another key turning point in the history of salvation, the crucifixion.

In the midst of all this hubbub, Jesus’ disciples gathered, perhaps in the Upper Room, but certainly inside a building (Ac 2.2), when to their surprise, the Spirit of God arrived and manifested himself in a most unusual way—a way not described anywhere else in biblical history. There was a sound of rushing wind (Ac 2.2), and tongues of fire appeared over their heads (Ac 2.3). And then they all began to speak in foreign languages—not because they knew those languages, but because “the Spirit gave them utterance” (Ac 2.4).

I think it’s safe to assume that at this point the small group of disciples erupted from the “house” and began speaking in those foreign languages to the massive crowd out in the street (Ac 2.5-6). This crowd was astonished. Those from the far reaches of the Empire were hearing the good news spoken, not in Greek, not in Aramaic or Hebrew, but in their local tribal languages—Elamite, from way east in Persia (Iran), and Cyrenian, from way west in North Africa. (That’s a 1500-mile spread, which covers pretty much the whole known world at the time—Marco Polo having not yet informed the “known world” of an entire well-developed civilization yet farther to the east.)

The crowds were perplexed. How did these people know all these languages?

Someone suggested that the disciples were drunk.

Now, I’ve talked to a lot of drunk people in my time, and never once has being drunk helped anyone speak any language more clearly.

There has to be a more sensible explanation.

Do you hear echoes of Babel?

The God over all nations, who once scattered its people around the globe by confusing their languages (Ge 11.1-9), now gathers its people from across the globe and brings them grace instead of judgment, using those very languages, or at least their linguistic descendants.

God is great, and he is good.

More next time.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Integrity Matters, Part 2: Case Study

November 4, 2021 by Dan Olinger

Part 1: Two Commandments

In Acts 5, we read of Ananias and Sapphira, a couple in the church at Jerusalem, who sell a piece of land and donate some of the proceeds to the church.

The Motive: Personal Recognition (Ac 4.32-5.2)

Hidden under the surface of this simple and apparently commendable act, however, are two key facts:

They do this immediately after many other church members, including a highly esteemed man named Barnabas, have done something similar (Ac 4.32-37).
They lie by saying that the money they’ve donated is the entire proceeds of the sale (Ac 5.2, 8).

It’s pretty clear what’s going on here.

Everybody’s making sacrificial donations to the church. Ananias and Sapphira don’t want to appear selfish, and they want a piece of the action; they want the praise of their peers, but they don’t want to make the sacrifice Barnabas and others had made. And thus they’re willing to lie to get it.

Nearly all sin is based in pride and self-centeredness: you want something for yourself more than you want God to be glorified. And this in spite of the fact that God has already given us “all spiritual blessings” (Ep 1.3) and promises much more to come (Lk 6.38).

What would you do for recognition? What would you do to have fellow believers think well of you? If you’d do something God forbids, then you’ve made yourself into an idol that you worship. Can you think of anything more ridiculous?

You know, the physicists tell us that you and I don’t have nearly enough mass to be the center of the universe.

The Sin: Lying to God (Ac 5.3-4)

It’s obvious that Ananias and Sapphira lied to the church; but at bottom, as Peter tells them, they lied to God (Ac 5.4b)—who, by the way, is omniscient.

How hopeless is that?!

Sin, you see, makes you stupid.

Like the bank robber who wrote the holdup note on the back of one of his personalized checks.

They didn’t have to do any of this; as Peter tells them (Ac 5.4a), they were free to do what they wanted with their property and with the money they got from selling it. Did they really think God wouldn’t know what they had done?

That’s just stupid.

The Penalty: Death (Ac 5.5-10)

Ananias lies, and then he dies.

Does this penalty seem harsh?

I’ll confess that it seems harsh to me.

But this is a direct act of God—Peter didn’t call for it—and we know that God is just.

Now, in this country we don’t have the death penalty for lying or stealing. I suppose there are circumstances in which your lying or stealing might get you killed—stealing copper wire from an electrical power substation is pretty risky—but you’re not likely to be executed for lying.

But God is just, and in the end of time all the scales of justice will be balanced, and all evil will be accounted for. Don’t put him to the test.

It doesn’t stop with Ananias. His wife Sapphira doubles down on the lie, and she dies too.

Ananias, who is supposed to be a tender shepherd for his wife, leads her into sin instead of out of it. And her conspiracy just compounds the crime.

The Outcome: Fear (Ac 5.11)

And now the body, this body so eager to care for one another, this body so generous with their belongings, this body surrounded by the grace and power of God, is afraid.

That’s what sin does—even to innocent bystanders.

It corrupts and disturbs and poisons everything it touches; it turns a delightful situation into a fearful one.

Now, this isn’t how God wants us to live. “Fear not,” Jesus said repeatedly (Mt 10.28; Lk 5.10; 8.50; 12.7, 32; passim). Perfect love, John says, casts out fear (1Jn 4.18). We sons and daughters of God should live as adults, not little children; we should be motivated by love, not by fear.

Sin keeps us from doing that. Living a lie keeps us from doing that.

Integrity matters, for so many reasons more than just reputation.

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Sometimes We Fight, Part 6

January 24, 2019 by Dan Olinger

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

In my last post we worked through the Apostle Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), looking for doctrinal content. Here’s what we came up with, in systematic theological terms:

Bibliology

The Hebrew scriptures are God’s Word (Ac 2.17) and therefore reliable (Ac 2.16).

Theology Proper

God directs history (Ac 2.23).
God does miracles; history includes some number of supernatural events (Ac 2.22).

Christology

Jesus did miracles (Ac 2.22).
Jesus died by crucifixion and rose again (Ac 2.23-24, 32).
Jesus continues his divine work from heaven (Ac 2.33-34).
Jesus is God (Ac 2.36).
Jesus is Christ, the fulfillment of the Hebrew messianic prophecies (Ac 2.36).

Pneumatology

There is a Holy Spirit (Ac 2.17).

Anthropology

People are sinful (Ac 2.40).

Soteriology

Salvation is available to all peoples (Ac 2.18, 21, 39).
Salvation is available freely (Ac 2.21) through repentance (Ac 2.38).

Eschatology

There is a coming “Day of Yahweh” (Ac 2.20).

When we put all this into our chart, we end up with something like this. (I’ve truncated our data slightly for simplicity’s sake.)

Where do we go from here? Well, we repeat this same process on the other apostolic sermons in Acts, filling in the other columns on our chart. A quick result might look something like this, though a more careful study—which you’ll do, right?—would yield more doctrines in the first column.

And then you see where the overlaps are—which doctrines are most emphasized in this database of sermons. For illustration purposes I’ve simply counted the number of sermons in which each doctrine appears and then sorted the list on that column, with the most common doctrines at the top. You can see that “quick and dirty” result here.

What are the biggest ideas?

The deity of Christ
Forgiveness of sins
The death and resurrection of Christ / witnesses
The reliability of Scripture
Repentance

It’s no surprise that our list includes “the gospel” as defined by Paul in 1Co 15.3-4.

Now, we’re not done yet. As I noted in a previous post in this series, we need to evaluate the other datasets that my friend Tom Wheeler identified in his dissertation, and then we need to compare all the lists we end up with to see if there are patterns there—which there are—as justification for producing a “meta-list,” which should serve as a pretty good indicator of What We’re Going to Fight About.

And then we need to decide where to draw the line. How far down the list do we decide this is a doctrine that isn’t “emphasized”? How far down the list do we go before we decide that we’re not going to fight about that one? I’d suggest that that’s a literary-analysis question: where do you draw the line at emphasis?

Tom’s dissertation has done a good job of that already. But you can do that work yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a scholar like Tom; with the Word and the illuminating work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, you have all the tools you need to do this study for yourself. Maybe you’ll notice something he didn’t. And even if you don’t, you’ll benefit immensely from the study, and you’ll approach doctrinal controversies in this polarized and freaked-out world with a calmness and a confidence that will communicate grace, mercy, and peace to all those around you.

That’s worth the effort, right?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 5

January 21, 2019 by Dan Olinger

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Last time I explained my thinking on why we should evaluate the doctrines taught in the apostles’ preaching as recorded in the book of Acts, as a step toward identifying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith—the things we ought to fight about. And I pause to remind my reader (all 1 of you) that we’re also determining, by their absence from this list, the doctrines that are not worth fighting about.

If you’ve done your homework from the last post—you don’t expect to really learn anything worthwhile by just reading blog posts, do you?—you downloaded my little chart as a working template and read through at least some of the sermons in Acts to list what doctrines they asserted.

How about if I go through the first one, and we can see how your list compares to mine?

The first sermon is Peter’s famous discourse at Pentecost in Acts 2, where he refutes the observers’ initial observations and explains what’s really going on with the sound and the fire and the inexplicable speech.

Let’s scan the text to see what we find.

Ac 2.16—What you’re seeing is a fulfillment of a prophetic scripture from long ago. Peter’s initial statement implies—strongly—that we should expect ancient scriptural prophecies to be fulfilled. And this in turn implies the truthfulness of scripture, even in its predictions. Lest I be accused of bringing my bias to the research, I’ve avoided using the explosive term inerrancy, but I would observe that “truthfulness” means the same thing.
Ac 2.17—In citing his source, Peter includes its claim that Joel’s words are what “God says” (NASB), and he says nothing that would soften the blunt statement. Joel’s words are the words of God, accurately recorded.
Ac 2.17—God has a Spirit that can be “poured forth.” Maybe not enough here to support a distinct person of the Spirit, but wording that is certainly consistent with that concept.
Ac 2.18—God’s empowering work extends to “bondslaves, both men and women.” His work is not limited by our social constructs.
Ac 2.20—There is a coming “Day of Yahweh.” We can’t tell this from just Acts 2, but the prophets gave us a lot of information about this coming day, and again, Peter seems to take it at face value.
Ac 2.21—Salvation comes to those who “call on the name of Yahweh.” This verse alone doesn’t tell us whether “salvation” here is physical rescue from catastrophe or spiritual salvation in the theological sense, but further study can settle this question pretty conclusively in favor of the latter.
Ac 2.22—Jesus did miracles. This has implications about both Jesus and the fact of the supernatural, of miracles.
Ac 2.23—God’s doing what happens, even when it seems disastrous—as the recent execution of Jesus certainly had seemed to Peter and the other disciples.
Ac 2.23—Jesus died as a direct result of the crucifixion. Yes, he was really dead.
Ac 2.24—Jesus rose from the dead. Really.
Ac 2.25—Here’s another fulfilled prophecy. We should expect that.
Ac 2.27—The resurrection was specifically predicted.
Ac 2.30—Like Joel, David was accurately reporting words directly from God himself.
Ac 2.31—David was speaking not of himself (Ac 2.29), but of Christ.
Ac 2.32—The resurrection again, this time with witnesses.
Ac 2.33—The living Jesus is the agent behind what is happening at Pentecost—namely, the coming of the Spirit.
Ac 2.34—Jesus is alive and active in heaven, the presence of God.
Ac 2.36—Jesus is “Lord.” It’s true that the Greek word here (kurios) can mean simply “sir,” similar to Elizabethan English (“Good day, my lord”). But since it often cannot have that meaning (e.g. Jn 20.28), and since the Jews used it to translate the name Yahweh in their Greek scriptures, this statement is much more likely claiming deity for Jesus.
Ac 2.36—Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one—by implication prophet, priest, and king—the fulfillment of the entire Hebrew scriptures.
Ac 2.38—Forgiveness of sins comes from repentance and baptism and brings “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Note that the presence of sin as part of the human condition is assumed. [Sidebar: here I’m simply listing what Peter is saying; this is what theologians call “biblical theology.” No, I don’t believe that baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins; that conviction comes from a comparison of this passage with others, which we call “systematic theology”—and which is not my purpose here.]
Ac 2.39—Again, God’s plan includes both Jews (“you and your children”) and Gentiles (“all who are far off”); God’s plan overwhelms our cultural and social barriers.
Ac 2.40—“This generation” is “perverse.”

How did you do? How did I do? Are there unfounded or biased assumptions in my list? How about yours?

Next time we’ll give some thought to what we’ve found so far and where we go from here.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 4

January 17, 2019 by Dan Olinger

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

So when believers disagree about doctrine—about their interpretations of what the Scripture says—how do we decide whether these disagreements are worth making an issue about?

A friend of mine, Tom Wheeler, wrote his PhD dissertation on that very question at the same time I was writing mine. For folks who are near Greenville, it’s available in the BJU library; for folks who aren’t, there’s interlibrary loan. 🙂 Tom looks at a number of ways we can discern which doctrines are most important, and better yet, he does so without killing you with boring dissertationish prose. It’s a valuable piece of work.

I won’t give away all his ideas, but here are a few—

We can look at what the apostles emphasized in their sermons in the New Testament.
We can look at the context of NT references to “the faith” or “doctrine” (e.g. 1Ti 6.3).
We can look at NT confessions of faith (e.g. Mt 16.13-16).

There are other places we can look as well. And then we can compare all the doctrines indicated by those different methods and see where the substantial overlaps are.

I’d like to look more closely at the first suggestion: NT apostolic preaching. This idea isn’t original to Tom; earlier in the 20^th century, C. H. Dodd nearly made a whole career out of the study of the NT “kerygma,” or preaching—though I would disagree with a whole bunch of his conclusions. And the concept was studied long before Dodd as well.

Why would the apostolic preaching help us answer the question? Several reasons—

Directed by the Spirit himself, the apostles were ordained by Jesus himself to relay inerrantly the facts and significance of his earthly ministry (Jn 14.25-26; Jn 15.26-27; 16.12-15). They’re going to relate the most important stuff, and they’re going to get it right.
While several apostles—Matthew, John, Peter, Paul—wrote portions of the New Testament, not everything they wrote was of primary doctrinal importance, as Paul himself said.
But there is a record of several sermons, almost all of them preached to unbelievers with the purpose of defining this new “religion.” If the sermon is definitional, it’s going to highlight the uniquely identifying ideas.
All the apostolic sermons are contained in the book of Acts.
- Peter preaches several—
  - The foundational explanation of Christianity at Pentecost (Acts 2.14-36)
  - The popular explanation of the healing of the lame man in the temple (Acts 3.12-26)
  - The official explanation before the Sanhedrin (Acts 4.8-12)
  - The Sanhedrin defense of the apostles’ continued preaching (Acts 5.29-32)
  - The introduction of Christianity to Cornelius, the first Gentile inquirer (Acts 10.34-43)
- As does Paul—
  - His first “synagogue homily” in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13.16-41). This is likely very similar to all his later synagogue preaching, which is not recorded for us.
  - His sermon to a pagan audience at Mars Hill in Athens, which is rhetorically very different from his synagogue sermon but evidences similar doctrinal content (Acts 17.22-31).
  - His “farewell address” to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20.17-35). This is unique in that the audience consists of believers.
  - His defense of his ministry to the angry Jewish mob in Jerusalem (Acts 22.1-21)
  - His defense before Felix, the Judean governor (Acts 24.10-21)
  - His report to Festus, the new governor, and Agrippa, the figurehead king, after his appeal to Caesar (Acts 26.1-29).

The last two are different in that they are mostly personal reports of his conversion experience, but they do have doctrinal content as well.

There are other sermons in Acts, most notably Stephen’s defense before his execution (ch 7), but since Stephen is not an apostle, we’ll set him aside.

Now. What we can do is list the doctrinal content of each of these sermons and then compare the lists to see whether there’s a pattern. Do the apostles emphasize the same doctrines throughout their recorded preaching? If they do, then we can argue that these are the defining doctrines, without which Christianity is not Christianity at all—and that they are thus worth fighting for.

So here’s your homework. I’ve made a chart for you. Download it and fill it out by reading each of the sermons noted above. Next time we’ll talk about what we’ve found.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Responding to Persecution, Part 1

October 29, 2018 by Dan Olinger

There’s been a lot of talk lately about persecution of Christians in America. I suppose it’s true that there’s more than there used to be—there’s been some name-calling and a lawsuit about wedding cakes, though the defendant won that one.

It’s worth noting that this sort of thing is relatively mild compared to what’s going on around the world and what has gone on throughout church history. Just a couple of weeks ago was the anniversary of the death of two famous British martyrs, and there have been thousands of others.

So for Americans, things could be a lot worse than they are now. And there’s no guarantee that they won’t be.

What then?

How should we respond?

As always, we ought to take our cue from the Scripture.

When the first persecution of Christians occurred, shortly after Pentecost, the church responded immediately—with prayer. And what did they pray for? That God would smite their persecutors? That he would send fire from heaven to turn the wicked into a smoking crater and thereby justify and endorse his people? Or that he would lighten their load, lessen their pain?

No, none of these things. They prayed, first, of their confidence in God (Ac 4.24) and of their certainty that such persecution was no surprise to him (Ac 4.25-28). And then, remarkably, they prayed for two things: for boldness to continue to obey in the face of the persecution (Ac 4.29), and for power to carry out their commission (Ac 4.30).

And this was just the beginning.

Since there are lots of examples of persecution in the early church, the letters of the apostles have a lot to say about how God’s people should respond to persecution. Peter’s first epistle is built entirely around that theme, and Hebrews has something to say about it as well. Paul’s epistles, unsurprisingly, bring it up repeatedly.

I find the situation in Thessalonica particularly instructive. Paul arrives in this Macedonian seaside city of hot springs on his second missionary journey, not long after receiving the vision of the man from Macedonia calling, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (Ac 16.9). After a brief stay in Philippi, which included a beating and a night in jail (Ac 16.12-34), Paul’s entourage worked their way down the Egnatian Highway to the next major city, Thessalonica (today’s Thessaloniki). There they were welcomed into the home of a man named Jason and began preaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath days, as was their practice (Ac 17.2-3). Before long Paul’s theological opponents stirred up a mob who came looking for trouble (Ac 17.5). Unable to find Paul, they seized Jason, his host, and dragged him—literally—into court (Ac 17.6).

Jason was able to get out on bond (Ac 17.9), but with his bond in jeopardy should more trouble ensue, and unable to prevent such trouble, since they hadn’t started it, the believers decided it the better part of valor to get Paul out of town (Ac 17.10).

So he had to leave. Gettin’ the trash out of NYC, and all.

This stuff isn’t new, folks.

Shortly later, Paul, now down in Achaia, the southern part of Greece, writes this little group of beleaguered believers a couple of letters, reviewing their relationship and situation, and instructing and encouraging them for what lies ahead. In 1 Thessalonians in particular he talks to them about persecution and how to deal with it.

If it would work for them, with all they were facing, it will certainly work for us.

Recently I came across a really helpful summary of Paul’s teaching on this point, written by Michael Martin, author of the volume on the Thessalonian epistles in the really excellent New American Commentary series, who at the time of writing was a professor of New Testament at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco. (He’s now their academic VP, and the seminary is now called Gateway Seminary.)

I’d like to summarize and extend his remarks in the next post. What are the big ideas we take into battle as we face persecution?

Part 2