Acts was written by Luke between 63 and 65 A.D. It is a history of the first thirty-three years of Christ at the right hand of the Father. It is a sample of the supernatural life of the sons of God carrying out the will of their seated Lord. It is the only unfinished book in the New Testament.
Not a man is seen in it. The Holy Spirit is given His place as the governing, ruling personality of the new creation.
Luke was led to Christ by Paul and had lived with him for fifteen or eighteen years. He knew the revelation that the Father had given to him of Jesus and of His finished work; and yet you cannot see either in the gospel of Luke or in this book a single indication of it. Luke wrote as he was moved by the Holy Spirit. If he had written as a man, as a historian, he would have eulogized Paul.
But Paul moves through the book of Acts as a common man. His weaknesses, his strength, his failings, and his successes are recorded without any apology.
Jesus’s name has its place. It isn’t the first place. It has a place all its own. It has within it the authority that Adam lost in the garden.
There isn’t a thing that Jesus did in His earth walk that the name will not do today in the lips of the new creation.
This book is a revelation.
Demons yield to the authority of the name. The dead are raised; men are baptized into it; the sick are healed by it. Men preached it. The Sanhedrin feared it. The name took the place of the risen Christ just as the Word took the place of the risen Christ.
SOME FACTS ABOUT THE WORD THESE MEN PREACHED
It ruled their private lives.
It was magnified.
It increased; it grew, a living power.
It multiplied.
Men were mastered by the Word.
Men proclaimed the Word.
Men gathered to hear the Word.
The Word grew mightily and prevailed in heathen cities.
The Word of grace is the revelation of the ability of God to build Himself into the lives of men.
THE WORD PERTAINING TO THE BOOK OF ACTS
In the book of Acts no one is using the New Testament as we use it today. (It was in course of making.) The Pauline Epistles were written between the period of 54 and 65 A.D. They were not in circulation until the second century. They were not bound together until even later than that, so the Word that we have in the book of Acts is the spoken Word.
Jesus was the Word Incarnate. The four Gospels are what the Holy Spirit has to say about the incarnate Word; and they have the record of the word spoken by the incarnate One.
The book of Acts is a record of the Holy Spirit taking Jesus’s place on the earth for the thirty-three years. It is a revelation of God in the infant body of the new creation. It is a record of the effect of eternal life upon the heathen world, upon the apostate Jewish nation.
God’s people of the old covenant had repudiated the God of the covenant. There was no substitute for the Word in that day.
During those thirty-three years there was no organization of the body of Christ as we see it today. The Word held the first place.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, drops out of sight. John, who leaned on Jesus’s bosom, is but one of the witnesses. Peter stands in the foreground for a bit, but the Word is greater than Peter.
The Holy Spirit takes the precedence over any of the apostles. The Word alone gave faith. The Word alone gave the new birth. The Word alone gave healing. The Word alone bound the disciples together. One might almost say the Word is Christianity.
That spoken Word that we see in the book of Acts was the manna of God for the recreated human spirit. It still is.
You can’t find in the book of Acts or in the book of Luke even a suggestion of the finished work of Christ, of His great substitutionary battle—except in that first sermon that Peter preached, and in Acts 13:33 where Paul says, “That God hath fulfilled the same unto our children, in that he raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”
Here he is speaking of Jesus’s being born again and His resurrection after He had been made sin.
It is very important that we recognize the power of this spoken Word and the written Word.
Acts 6:2, 4: “And the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not fit that we should forsake the word of God, and serve tables. …But we will continue steadfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the word.”
In the seventh verse: “And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem exceedingly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.”
They were not speaking of the Old Testament, but of the Word of God that came to the apostles by revelation. It tells how this Word increased and dominated the people.
Acts 8:4: “They therefore that were scattered abroad went about preaching the word.”
In the fourteenth verse, we read, “Now when the apostles that were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John.”
Our hearts must grasp the significance of this: that the Word had taken Jesus’s place; and it was the Word that was being born in the hearts of those early Christians.
Acts 11:1: “Now the apostles and the brethren that were in Judaea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.”
They had not received a creed or doctrine but just this unwritten Word.
Acts 12:24: “But the word of God grew and multiplied.”
In the sixth chapter, it had increased. Now, it multiplied. It was gaining the ascendancy rapidly. It was having a tremendous influence upon men.
Acts 14:3: “Long time therefore they tarried there speaking boldly in the Lord, who bare witness unto the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.”
It was the “word of His grace,” of His love. It was the Word of the ability of the unseen God.
It is what we get in Ephesians 3:20: “Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power [or ability] that worketh in us.”
It is according to the ability of the Word that is at work within us.
That early church lived in the Word. The Word lived in them. The Word was a revelation of what they were in Christ; but the “in Christ” truth had not yet gripped them. If it was preached, there was no record of it in the book of Acts.
You see, preaching the Word was preaching Jesus. It is preaching what Christ was to them and what He meant in their lips and in their lives. They lived in the Word. The Word lived in them, so they grew to be like the Author of the Word.
It is important to know that the real Word preacher is the one in whom the Word has made good. His testimony is what the living, saving, healing Word has done in him and through him. It is the real Word of faith. It is the faith-God’s Word.
Paul said, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). In essence, “For me to preach is for Christ to preach through me; to live is for Christ to be reproduced among men.” Strong language, wasn’t it? He says that Christ lives in him. “I live because He lives in me. Christ’s life and my life are one life. I am a branch of the living Vine.” That is the language of Paul.
Today, doctrines have taken the place of the Word. Sense knowledge rules the body of Christ.
Acts 19:20: “So mightily grew the word of the Lord and prevailed.”
And yet, it wasn’t written. It was the living, spoken Word. Today, Christ may absorb one, and one may so absorb the Word, that what one says will be the living Word. One can be so dominated by the Word that the words of one’s mouth, and the meditation of his heart, will be pleasing to the Father.
In Ephesus, the Word had gained such authority that we read in Acts 19:17–18: “And this became known to all, both Jews and Greeks, that dwelt at Ephesus; and fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. Many also of them that had believed came, confessing, and declaring their deeds.”
Mind you, they didn’t confess their deeds until after they had accepted Christ. Many of them were spiritualists, and many of them that had done this brought their books and burned them. They counted the cost and it was thirty thousand pieces of silver. The Word had prevailed.
Paul’s personality hadn’t prevailed. Paul’s philosophy hadn’t prevailed; but the Word had prevailed.
That Word is the Logos; the Logos is Christ. You can’t separate this living Logos from the living Christ. It heals the sick; it breaks the power of demons over lives, and fills those lives with fearless confidence so that persecution, even death, did not daunt them.
In Acts 20:32, Paul is saying goodbye to the church at Ephesus: “And now I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you the inheritance among all them that are sanctified.”
He said to those elders,
I coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me. In all things I gave you an example, that so laboring ye ought to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. (Acts 20:33–35.)
He lived the Word. His preaching would have little effect had not the Word governed his life.
The church will never exercise the divine authority that belongs to it until the Word becomes a part of our daily lives.
That unwritten Word had more authority over the lives of these men than the written, living Word has today. That is wrong. This Word should govern us today. Our lips should be filled with it.
We have substituted physical sense evidence for the Word. We have substituted education and organization for the Word. They are all of them failures.
The Word in the lips of faith, filled with love, filled with the very life of God, has as great authority and ability as it ever had in the history of the church.
We must realize that He and His Word are one; that man’s word is a dying word; and that God’s Word is a living, abiding Word. The most cultured and beautiful sermon is dead as soon as it is given unless it is filled with the Word.
The Word is the sword of the spirit. That is, the Word is the sword of the recreated, human spirit. The Word in the lips of the man that is filled with love will be as effectual today as the Word was in the lips of Jesus, or Stephen, or Peter, or Paul. These words become a healing, saving, present-tense reality.
The Word is actually Christ. Write out Jesus’s words in John 6:63:
We were made alive by the Word. We are kept spiritually alive by the Word. We have fed on the Word; and the words of Jesus in John 6:53 become a reality: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.”
The body and the blood of the Lord are in His Word. It is not the bread and wine. That is but a symbol. It is in this living Word.
The Word is a dead word in the Bible on the table. It only takes on life as we begin to act it, as we give it place, as we practice it in our daily conduct.
The word “righteousness,” as the Pauline Revelation gives it, is hardly mentioned in the book of Acts, yet they lived in the reality of it. Nothing is said about the Holy Spirit in them, but the whole book breathes of the indwelling presence of the One who came on the day of Pentecost. They knew nothing about the new creation as the Pauline Revelation gives it to us, but the new creation was the living fact that was overturning the Roman government.
They preached the name and saw it demonstrate the reality that Jesus had declared was in it. They knew nothing about the Lordship of Jesus as we see it unveiled in the Pauline message, but they recognized it; they lived it.
The first fifteen years of the early church was lived in the sense realm altogether. They didn’t have the written Word. They only had what was spoken by the apostles on the day of Pentecost.
They heard the sound of that rushing wind. They saw the tongues of fire on the heads of those 120 men and women. They heard them speak in those strange tongues. They saw the mighty miracles take place.
The Jewish nation was shaken by the physical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. The Word slowly but surely gained the ascendancy over the senses; but God dealt with them as only a wise parent could deal with His children. There came a constant unveiling through the spoken word, the living Word that unveiled Jesus to them.
The contrast between God’s truth and God’s Word and man’s truth and man’s word startles us. Man’s word is a dying word. His Word, spoken two thousand years ago, is living, life-giving, a mighty thing. The reason is that the Word is a part of God Himself, just as man’s word is a part of himself. God’s Word is like its Author. My word is like me.
God’s Word is full of love, for God is love. It is full of divine ability. It is full of creative ability.
We have the Word, the sure Word, this living Word; and our hearts can depend on that. The new convert must feed upon this recreating Word. The old believer must feed upon this life-sustaining and strength-giving Word.
It is the prevailing Word that is needed today. It is needed to prevail over our thinking, to prevail over our diseases, to prevail over our weakness, to prevail over our fears, to prevail over our doubts. It is the prevailing, living Word of our Master.
HOW MUCH DO YOU REMEMBER?
- Why is man not mentioned in the book of Acts?
- Give at least three facts about the Word as it was preached in the book of Acts.
- Explain the statement, “And the word of God increased.”
- In what form did the Word exist in the book of Acts?
- Explain Acts 14:3.
- What is the difference between speaking the Word and giving an experience?
- What gives the Word authority and ability today?
- What is revealed in John 6:53?
- Explain the difference between God’s truth and man’s truth.
- a. What place must the Word be given in the life of the babe in Christ?
b. In the old believer?