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The Book of Acts – Introduction

Published since 19. Apr. 2025
Bible passages:
Acts 1:1-3
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Acts 1:1-3: "1 The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, 2 until the day in which He was taken up, after He through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen, 3 to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God."

A continuation

The Acts of the Apostles is the continuation of a report that the evangelist Luke addressed to Theophilus. You could also say that it is the second part of an extensive treatise. In his first account, his Gospel, Luke reported: "What Jesus began both to do and to teach until the day He was taken up [into heaven]." In the second part, we find the continuation – the continuation of what He began to do and His actions. However, the Lord now no longer acts as personally present on earth, but we find His work from heaven. It is from there that the glorified Christ, who came to this earth in the person of the Lord Jesus, works through the Holy Spirit. It is He whose personal presence and whose work are the focus of this book.

When the book of Acts describes the continuation of the “work” of the Lord Jesus, the question naturally arises: is there also a continuation of what the Lord began to teach here? Absolutely! However, we have this part less in the Acts of the Apostles and more in the letters of the New Testament. There, we find the teachings that the glorified Lord imparted to us through the Holy Spirit using various human instruments.

Luke’s concern

So, what is Luke’s concern? With what intention does he – inspired by the Holy Spirit – write his two-part treatise? Apparently, he wants to give the “most excellent Theophilus,” probably a high-ranking personality of Greek origin, an overview of the beginnings of Christianity, of this new and blessed era that began after the return of the Lord Jesus to heaven and the coming of the Spirit, and ere that is characterized by a special work of God, for God acts in this epoch according to His eternal counsel. And He pours out a blessing such as He has never done before.

 

The first account: the Gospel of Luke

Luke begins his first treatise, his Gospel, with the coming of the Lord Jesus into this world. In it he describes – perhaps even more than the other evangelists – the foundations of Christianity. In his Gospel, Luke presents the Lord Jesus in His humanity in a special way. This makes it clear how close God has come to us and how much He has stooped down to mankind. The man Christ Jesus is the great mediator between God and man, the one who visited us as the Ascension from on high to reveal the grace and salvation of God.

However, it was not enough for the Lord Jesus to live on earth as a man, no matter how great and glorious the grace of God shone in Him. In order to bring God's salvation to lost people, He had to suffer and die. In order to seek and save the lost, He had to fulfill His mission in Jerusalem. Even more, the Lord explained to the "Emmaus disciples" that He had to suffer and enter into His glory. This is how it was foretold in the Old Testament scriptures, and this is how it happened: The Lord Jesus rose from the dead after He had accomplished the work of redemption. After His suffering, He presented Himself alive in many visible proofs and ascended into heaven (Acts 1:2, 3). There He is now as a glorified man at the right hand of God.

These wonderful facts form the basis of Christianity; they are the prerequisite for the dawning of a new age of salvation in which God offers His grace to all people. They are also the prerequisite for  another divine person, the Holy Spirit, to come to earth and for God to begin a new work on this earth, a work that springs from the eternal counsels of His heart.

 

The second account, the Acts of the Apostles

Luke follows on from this in the Acts of the Apostles. In this second part of his treatise, however, he no longer deals with the foundations of Christianity but now describes the beginnings of this new work of God. Now, he shows how God begins His great new work on earth through the Holy Spirit. He describes how the new "entity," which the Holy Spirit has brought about through His coming, presents itself in the early days and what characteristics it has. And he shows how the new work of God is spread, starting from Jerusalem via Judea and Samaria to Antioch and from there to the whole world.

 

Resurrection and Ascension

Before Luke goes into detail in the first chapter of Acts, however, he picks up where his first account left off and revisits two important facts: the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus. The first report ends with these great events, which show the prerequisites and foundations for the new work of God. These two facts are also the starting point of his second report (the Acts of the Apostles) and, thus, the starting point of God's new work.

When God begins a new work that arises from His eternal counsel, He starts His actions from His Son, who rose from the dead and was glorified in heaven after completing His work of redemption. Through His coming, His death, and resurrection, Christ not only laid the foundation for God's new work, for the unfolding of His eternal thoughts, but the risen and exalted Christ Himself is also the starting point for God's new actions.

After the cross, God no longer concerns Himself with the first man, as He did in past eras until the coming of His Son. He no longer puts man to the test, for the incorrigibility and unsuitability of the first man had been fully proven. It was revealed most clearly on the cross, where man brought the Son of God. And on this very cross, where God was glorified through His Son in view of sin, He also executed the judgment of condemnation on the first man. On the cross and through the cross, God ended the history of the first man and set aside the old creation. On this basis, He began something new: a new creation that is connected to the resurrected and exalted man in heaven. It is people in Christ who are now at the center of God's activity, people who are made one with the risen and glorified Christ. This is not developed doctrinally in this book. For this, God has given us the letters of the New Testament (cf. Eph 2; Col 2). In the Acts of the Apostles, we find a historical factual account that illustrates many things. Particularly impressive here are the words of the glorified Christ to the greatest persecutor of the first Christians: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4; 22:7; 26:14). These words testify to the intimate connection between the glorified Christ and His own.

 

The beginning of the work

How did this intimate connection with the glorified Christ in heaven come about? The answer is provided in the beginning of the book of Acts, more precisely, the second chapter. There, we see the beginning of the new work of God, which is based on the death, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord Jesus. Fifty days after his resurrection, the promise of the Father came true. The promised Holy Spirit came to earth to dwell in redeemed people, so Paul reminds the Corinthians: "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?" (1 Cor 6:19). Furthermore, He also dwells in believers as a whole. He has thereby formed them into a single entity and united them with the glorified Christ and with one another. This is why they are later referred to as His body and individually as members of His body, "of His flesh and His bones" (Eph 5:30). This body of Christ, to which we have all been baptized by the one Spirit (1 Cor 12:13), is at the same time the temple of God, the dwelling place of God in the Spirit (Eph 2:21, 22; 1 Cor 3:16).

 

Illustration of Christian truth

The teachings about this great work of God are found in the letters of the New Testament, but the historical fact is described in the book of Acts. How could we understand the teachings of 1 Corinthians 12 about the baptism of the Holy Spirit if we did not have the account in Acts 2? The book of Acts shows us what Christianity means in practice. In it, we have a description, a divine account of how the assembly of God came into being, how it emerged from the hand of God, how it presented itself in the early days, and what characteristics it showed when the believers had a new consciousness of belonging together so that they expressed the unity they now formed through the Spirit of God impressively in their lives – even though they had not yet been taught about it.

 

Significance for us today

The fact is that we are no longer living in the early days of Christianity, as reported in the Acts of the Apostles. We live at the end of the Christian era. Nevertheless, this account is still very relevant for us today. For God's standards, His principles and thoughts on the realization of the assembly of God and true Christianity have not changed. It is, therefore, an important principle for all those who want to align themselves with His thoughts to return to what is from the beginning – back to the principles that are explained above all in Paul's letters and that are illustrated in the behavior of the first Christians.

 

Structure

The Acts of the Apostles can be divided into two main parts. In both parts, one apostle stands in the foreground. In both parts, a characteristic place is the geographical center from which a special work of God emanates. The first part comprises chapters 1 to 12, and the second part comprises the remaining chapters. In the first part, Peter has a key function; in the second part, Paul and his ministry are in the foreground. In the first part, Jerusalem is the place from which the work of God emanates. The work was extended from Jerusalem, first to Judea and Samaria and then to Antioch. In the second part, Antioch is the place from which the spread of the message and the work of God to the nations takes place. The first Gentile Christian assembly came into being in Antioch. It was from Antioch that Paul began his missionary journeys.

The first part of Acts shows how the assembly of God was formed and how the first Christians lived. The second part is primarily about the spread of the divine work, the spread of the message in the Gentile world, and the emergence of assemblies in various places, primarily through Paul's ministry. As a servant of the assembly, the mystery of Christ and the assembly had been specially entrusted to him (Eph 3:5).

 

Peter

Although Paul was the servant of the assembly, his ministry hardly plays a role in the first part of this book. It is the apostle Peter who takes center stage here. Peter had indeed been given a key role in connection with the new work of God. He had been entrusted with an important administrative task by the Lord. He had been entrusted with the keys of the kingdom on the occasion when the Lord spoke for the first time about the assembly that He would build (Mt 16:18, 19). Note: Peter did not receive the keys of the assembly of God. It is Christ who builds His assembly (Mt 16:18), and the Holy Spirit "poured out" by Him formed it through His coming. Even today, the Holy Spirit seals people who accept the gospel of salvation in faith and adds them to the body of Christ.

But back to Peter: he was entrusted with the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Peter was given the special responsibility of the Lord to unlock this new realm and let people in. He fulfilled this commission for the first time on the day of Pentecost when he gave a fiery speech in Jerusalem: the first evangelistic sermon through which thousands of Jews were led to faith and introduced to the new Christian realm through repentance and baptism (Acts 2:38-41).

Peter used these keys a second time in Acts 8, where he opened access to the Christian realm for believers from Samaria by laying hands on those who had been baptized by Philip so that they might receive the Holy Spirit.

In chapter 10, after a special preparation, Peter is the instrument to open the door to believers from the nations for the first time. No, Peter did not add anyone to the assembly of God. Only the Holy Spirit could do this work: He formed the assembly of God on the day of Pentecost, and He also added to it in the time that followed by sealing people who believed the gospel of grace. This also included Cornelius and his relatives. It became obvious to Peter through the outward sign of speaking in tongues. After recognizing what was initially incomprehensible to him – the fact that God had given people from the nations "the same gift as us" – he once again used the keys entrusted to him to enable believers from the nations to enter the Christian sphere (through preaching and baptism). This is why he can later say: "Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe" (Acts 15:7).

 

Paul

It was God's special wisdom that He used the apostle of the circumcision (Peter) to open the door for believers from the Gentile nations into the new realm, the realm of Christianity. This was demonstrated at the so-called Apostles' Council. However, God had chosen another instrument to spread the divine message of salvation among the nations – the greatest persecutor of the first Christians: Saul of Tarsus. This man was a chosen vessel for God. He was God's designated apostle and teacher of the nations (1 Tim 2:7; 2 Tim 1:11), and he was also the minister of the gospel and servant of the assembly in a special way (Col 1:23, 25).

This man is particularly prominent from chapter 13 onwards. God used him to proclaim among the nations the gospel of the grace of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. He proclaimed the great fact that God has overlooked the times of ignorance for the nations and has now also chosen people from the nations to be co-incarnates, co-heirs, and co-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel (Eph 3:6). They, who were far away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ and, together with the Jewish believers, have been created into one new man and reconciled to God in one body (Eph 2:15, 16; cf. Acts 2:39).

Paul proclaimed this message on three major missionary journeys to various places in the Gentile world. His ministry resulted in numerous assemblies, some of which the apostle visited several times and in which he worked for long periods. His first journey took him with Barnabas via Cyprus to Asia Minor, today's Turkey, where he successively visited the cities of Perge, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe (Acts 13; 14), sometimes under severe persecution.

On his second journey, which took him to Europe for the first time, he visited the believers in Pamphylia and Pisidia by land and traveled on to Greece via the west of present-day Turkey (Acts 16). There, he visited the cities of Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth. After a short stay in Ephesus, he then traveled by sea via Caesarea to Jerusalem (Acts 16-18,21).

From there, Paul returned to Antioch, where he began his third missionary journey, which included a long stay in Ephesus (Acts 19). At the end of this journey, which also marked the end of his public ministry in Asia Minor, he gave a moving speech in Miletus: a farewell address to the elders of Ephesus, in which he announced the decline that would occur in the post-apostolic era (Acts 20:17-38). But Paul can encourage them: God and the word of His grace are lasting sources of help, even in times of decline and decay.

 

Outlook

And how does the work of this faithful servant end? What is the continuation of this great work of God, the beginnings of which Luke describes? The book of Acts tells us nothing about it. The account in Acts is limited to the early days of the Church, the time of the apostles. It ends with the journey to Rome and Paul's ministry as a prisoner in this city.

Paul had wanted to visit this city for a long time (cf. Rom 15:22). However, he was not allowed to see the Roman saints as a free man "passing through" in order to share "some spiritual gift of grace" with them (Rom 1:11). He came to Rome as a prisoner "in the fullness of Christ's blessing."

It was indeed the case that the two-year period of his first imprisonment in Rome, with which the Acts of the Apostles ended, was a very fruitful time from which we still benefit today. On the one hand, Paul devoted himself intensively to preaching, preaching both the gospel and the kingdom of God, and teaching with all boldness the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 28:30, 31). His imprisonment proved to be beneficial for the gospel so that it reached the higher circles of the Roman government and even entered the house of the emperor (cf. Phil 1:12, 13; 4:22).

On the other hand, Paul devoted himself to the written ministry. Thus, not only did the believers in Rome benefit from the "fullness of Christ's blessing," but it has been preserved for us to this day in the apostle's inspired writings. His letters to the Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, and Philippians bear witness to this. Even if Paul leaves the "stage" of the Acts of the Apostles as a bound man, God's word is not bound. The content of his preaching has remained with us to this day.

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