The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Luke, in his Chronicles of the Acts of the Apostles, wrote a most remarkable and historically accurate account of this spread of Christianity from Judea to Rome and the provinces that lay between. And now, the end of his work draws near.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Luke's book narrates more than the spread of Christianity; it chronicles the power of the gospel that would transform the world of his day and in the ages that would follow. Listen now as Dr. Boice concludes his study of Acts and shows us that the purpose of Luke's account was not so much to record the lives of great men of the faith, but to chronicle the power and the spread of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Dr. James Boice: We come to the very end of the book of Acts, a book which we've been studying for quite a while. I don't know if you've counted the number of studies that we have had of this book, but if not, I can tell you that there have been 49 of them, and this is the 50th. With a nice round number like that, we come to the end of what is by any measurement a most remarkable book.

Some of you may have read F.F. Bruce's little volume, *The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?* and if you have read that—it's very easy reading—if you have read it, you would know that he has a section in there in which he deals particularly with the works of this great historian, Luke. Luke is responsible for two of our New Testament books: the gospel that bears his name and Acts, the continuation of the story of the expansion of the gospel which we've been studying.

Bruce does a remarkable study of this remarkable historian. He evaluates him, first of all, in terms of his plan or the scope of his work. He points out that here was a man who set out to write a rather remarkable document, a document that would chronicle the expansion of Christianity from a very small beginning in Judea, a distant province of the Roman Empire, to the point where it had expanded literally throughout the entire Roman world and become a major force in literally every Roman city.

Moreover, in documenting the expansion of Christianity, he has done it by relating it also to the major events and personalities of the time. In other words, he has not just written a story that stands off by itself somewhere, but he constantly brings into his history those personages that would be known to his contemporaries. He is, for example, the only one of all the New Testament writers to mention a Roman emperor. None of the others do. But Luke not only mentions an emperor, he mentions three of them, and he alludes to a fourth.

The fourth being Nero, the emperor Caesar to whom the apostle Paul appealed and so was transported to Rome. He mentions hosts of other personalities. In every city to which Paul traveled, he seems to allude to the person who is the chief magistrate in the place. And what is more significant, not only does he allude to them by name and get their names right, he even gets their titles right, which varied from place to place depending upon the nature of the community and, moreover, which changed from time to time.

Bruce points out that Luke not only writes a book of that scope and relates it in a brilliant way to the history of his times, but he did it in an age when there were none of the helps that we might normally have available to us if we set out to write a similar historical narrative. We would go to the library and look up the *Who's Who*, and there you'd find the names of important people and their backgrounds and where they served and their birthdates and that type of thing.

If a particular event was fuzzy in our minds, we could look up on the microfiche, going back into the various pages of the newsmagazines or chronicles or documents of parliaments or congresses and find exactly the data that we wanted. None of this was available in Luke's time. All there were were a few libraries and a few places, in Rome for example, and there'd been a great one in Alexandria in Egypt. But these were not generally available to normal men and women, and certainly the books that were found there were not circulated.

There were no newspapers. There was just no way for a normal person to get the kind of information you would need to write the history. Now, Luke wrote it accurately, of course, because he was of a very accurate disposition and had an acute mind. He says himself in his introduction to these books that he inquired very carefully after the origin of these things. No doubt he made notes. And in some of the situations, three of the passages that we have in the book of Acts, he indicates by the use of the personal pronoun that he himself was along.

He traveled with Paul during those periods. And again, we must assume he made notes. So here you have a man who has written a remarkable volume, beginning in Judea, ending in Rome, which shows accurately and in a way that would certainly commend itself to the readers in his time, the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ to infuse and eventually to transform the world. Not only that this is a remarkable historian and a remarkable book, this remarkable book even has a remarkable ending, which brings us to the point at which we find ourselves.

Did you ever come across a book that ended in this way, a book that has to do so much with the apostle Paul—his ministry, his persecutions, his successes, his imprisonment—and then, at the very end, when you're expecting to know how it all turned out, the story of Paul's life is abandoned? All you read is that for two years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.

I say that's a remarkable and unexpected ending, but it is certainly not one that Luke threw in without thought. That's exactly the way Luke wanted his book to end. Because you see, in the final analysis, no matter how fascinating we may find the histories of Peter or Philip or Paul, whose strong personality dominates literally the latter half of the book, the subject of Luke's narrative is not the lives of these servants of God. What Luke is concerned about is the gospel.

He wants to show it expanding. And so when we get to the very end, we find that that's what's happening. There in Rome, the very heart, the center, the capital of the Roman Empire, Paul is preaching. And in those days, for a period of time at least, the gospel went on without hindrance. All sorts of hindrances if you look at it only from a human point of view. Persecution is a hindrance, and Paul had experienced plenty of that. Paul was in prison, and that was a hindrance; it kept him from moving about.

He had opposition from his own people, and there was indifference on the part of the Roman authorities. All of those were hindrances. But you see, in spite of the external, material, physical hindrances, the gospel itself was not hindered because the word of God is not bound. Isn't that a wonderful thing? You and I need to apply it—we're going to do that as we go on through our study—but we certainly need to apply it in this way: When we talk to people, we're very conscious often of the hindrances—in us, for example.

We don't seem to have the answers to their questions. We wish we could present the gospel more wisely. We wish we had more experience to draw from. And there are hindrances in them; people are hostile or indifferent. They don't want this gospel today any more than they wanted it in the time of Jesus Christ or the time of the apostle Paul. And although there are hindrances, you see, the word of God itself is not hindered. And our task is to make it known.

The God for whom all things are possible will take it and will bless it because he has promised to do so. He says that when his word goes forth out of his mouth, it is not frustrated but it accomplishes that for which he sent it. Now, we turn to these last verses beginning with verse 17, and we find that they describe two things: two meetings that the apostle Paul had in Rome. It would seem that very shortly after he arrived there—three days, it says, that is after he got settled, apparently rented a house with his own means and was able to begin thinking about his presence in the city and the impact he wanted to have—he sent out for and called together the leaders of the various Jewish communities in this large city.

There were a number of synagogues in Rome at the time. We have records and remains of some of them, at least three and perhaps many more than that. Undoubtedly, he got in touch with the leaders of the synagogue and the rabbis and the chief men of the Jewish community. He called them together because he wanted to explain to them—it was a very political maneuver on his part, a wise one—why he was there, what he had been charged with, and why the accusations had been false.

When we read this, we find that he made three points in his meeting with these leaders. Number one: He was not guilty of any offense against Israel. He wanted that to be clear. It was true that he was there because of charges brought against him by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, but he was not guilty of any offense against Israel. It's very important for him to be able to say that to the Jewish leaders in the capital. Secondly, the Romans had been ready to release him and had wanted to because they recognized that he had not committed any crime worthy of death.

That's not necessarily the same thing that is involved in the first statement when he said he was not guilty of any offense against his nation. That in itself would not be a crime as the Romans would look at it. He could have offended his nation in some way, religiously, and the Romans wouldn't care about that. But he's actually making two points, you see. From their point of view, as they would look at it spiritually or in terms of the traditions of Israel, he had done nothing against his people and also, from the point of view of the Romans, in terms of their civic law, in terms of disturbances and insurrections and all of that, he had done nothing that would offend the Romans.

As a matter of fact, the Romans were ready to release him except for the difficulty that he had because of the opposition of the Jewish leaders. And then he makes a third point, and his third point is this: In spite of the fact that he had been charged falsely, as he maintains, by the religious leaders in Jerusalem, he had not brought a countercharge against them. We should very well understand how that operates because that is a traditional legal maneuver today. Somebody sues you for something, you countersue immediately because what you want to say is that they're the ones that are guilty, not you.

But Paul says in his case he didn't do this; he had not brought any charges against his people. Now, at that point and perhaps also preceding it, the leaders in Rome were most discreet. They denied on the one hand that they had heard anything about him. It's hard to believe that that was not the case, but no doubt it wasn't for some reason or another. Some historians speculating on the fact that Paul may very well have been released here after two years assume that the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem simply didn't pursue him with their charges.

So, after a period of 18 months or two years had expired, Paul was simply released because of the lack of a formal charge. That may have been. It may have been that they were quite content having already had him out of their hair for three years—two years in prison in Caesarea and one year's journey to Rome more or less—that they really weren't worried about him anymore. As long as he was in Rome and in custody and it would take two years before he was released, that gave them five years of grace; perhaps they didn't care.

At any rate, the leaders in Rome said to him, "We don't really know anything about your case," but they said, "We have heard something about this sect of the Nazarenes, and we must tell you quite frankly everything we hear about it is no good." Well, said Paul, this was what he was leading up to anyway, why don't we all get together at a future time and I will explain my teaching? Now, they were serious in this. This really was a very distinguished group of men.

They said, "Yes, it would be our duty to hear that; we would like to hear it," and they gave intention of their sincerity by fixing a date for the larger meeting. And then that brings us to the second instance. After we have the time when he met with the leaders themselves, a very politic thing to do as I've indicated, they fixed the date and then they had the larger meeting. And a lot of people came. It indicates that. That would mean not only the leaders themselves but perhaps others who were distinguished or perhaps people who were just very interested from the various synagogues and Jewish communities roundabout this great city.

Now, what we're told is that on this occasion, instead of speaking about himself and the charges that were against him and his innocence as he had done on the former occasion, Paul preached the gospel. Moreover, he preached it all day long. It says that explicitly: began in the morning and he went on to evening, declaring the kingdom of God and preaching Jesus. That's a sermon I would like to have had recorded. I'd like to have had it videotaped.

But not having videotapes in those days, I would have settled just for a little cassette recorder. Paul preached this great sermon. I don't think this means that it was a monologue. Certainly, Paul would teach, as he did in other places, but in this kind of a company, he would have been answered again and again by the rabbis who had questions. These would be astute minds. If he gave an interpretation of an Old Testament prophecy, they would challenge it. And they'd pursue it as only rabbis can do. And this went on all day long.

As I say, I wish we had a recording of it or we knew what Paul preached, but I don't think it's all that difficult to surmise the gist of what he might have said. Because the very next book in the New Testament is the book of Romans, and you'll recall that Paul had written that three years earlier when he was in Corinth in order to explain his gospel. Now he had come, and we're right to suppose that he followed more or less the general outline of what he had said in that great letter, that greatest of all the Pauline letters.

It would have begun by speaking of our obligation to know God and to worship him and to love him with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds. He would have had a point of contact there with his Jewish hearers because, of course, that's absolutely true; it's what the Scriptures teach. But as he would also have gone on to point out, none of us has done that. We've all fallen short of that standard, and he would have explained why.

His explanation would have been something like what we find in the early chapters of the book of Romans. The fact that the Gentiles, in their rejection of the knowledge of God entirely, have gone their own way and have fallen into all kinds of debased moral practices. The Jews in Rome would have known what that meant. They only had to look out their window to see how debased pagan society had become in that time. But then he would have said, "We Jews have missed it too," and he would have gone on to explain that because he would have said, "What we have done, you see, as Jews, is substitute a kind of self-righteousness for true righteousness."

Forgetting the matters of faith and trust which are so prominent in the Old Testament, we have brought along with that a kind of official ceremonial religion which we use as a substitute for a true heart relationship with God. I don't know the hearts of those to whom he was speaking, but if they were sensitive men, as perhaps we have every right to believe they must have been, something in their hearts must have acknowledged that that was true. Which of us, if we have any sensitivity at all, even after we come to know God through Jesus Christ, isn't aware of a coldness of heart toward Almighty God?

We know we should love him, but we find ourselves like Luther saying, "Generally we do not." We find barriers between ourselves and God, our sin, so even our prayers seem to be unheard and often are unanswered. These Jewish men must have acknowledged that as Paul unfolded the need. And he must have concluded by saying, "You see, it's not a question so much of being Jew or Gentile; it's just a question of being sinners, and that is what all of us are. There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after God."

That's not something that is only said in Romans; Paul quotes that from the Old Testament, from the book of Psalms where you find it twice. And that must have had an echo in their hearts. And then he went on to talk about Jesus: the hope of Israel, the Messiah who Paul maintained had now come. Oh, here's the point at which he would have gotten opposition. "We're expecting a Messiah all right, but not this despised Nazarene." And Paul would have begun to go back to the Old Testament, all of the prophecies that speak of him.

The kind of things that we find in the Gospels, in Matthew's Gospel particularly, because Matthew was written to Jews. All those texts in which Paul would have begun to show how it was that Jesus of Nazareth, a particular man in their own time and in that place, fulfilled the prophecies and was the Messiah. And moreover, had done what the Messiah had to do, though they had missed it in their reading of the Old Testament. They had read the Old Testament in terms of the glory of Israel, and they were looking for a day when God through the Messiah would re-establish Israel as the dominant nation in the world.

With the Messiah on the throne of David. And of course, those prophecies are there. But what Paul would have tried to show them is that before that happened, it was necessary that the Messiah die to provide salvation not only for them but for the Gentiles as well, because God does not show favoritism. He doesn't show concern for one nation rather than another, but he cares for all men and all women equally. And Jesus died to be their savior.

Well, we're told that they began to disagree among themselves. Some of them believed that, apparently, were convinced by his reasoning. Most of them apparently were not. And the reaction was so strong that Paul was led to this great text from Isaiah, the sixth chapter, it's verses nine and 10, where he said to them, "The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when he said through Isaiah the prophet: Go to this people and say, You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving."

"For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and I would turn and heal them." When we get to that point very close to the end of this book, we're tempted to ask ourselves, was Paul puzzled by this reaction? Was he discouraged by it? I don't know whether Paul was discouraged by it. Certainly, when you preach the gospel, even under the most adverse circumstances, you preach it optimistically.

You're expecting God to work, and you hope that he will. And when he met with this great resistance, it may well be that in a certain sense, humanly speaking, Paul was discouraged or at least downcast. But what I know is that he was not puzzled. And the reason I know he was not puzzled is that this was a problem that he had worked through previously and, as a matter of fact, had worked out in detail in the middle chapters of the book of Romans. You see, for Paul this must have been an enormous, enormous problem.

Paul was a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, he was the Messiah of the Jews, and he had done everything that had been prophesied in the Jewish Scriptures. Now, the messengers of the gospel who were Jews initially came along and preached to Jews and, for the most part, the Jews were rejecting the message. It's true that the message was sent into the whole world, and they went into the whole world as well. And as they went into the Gentile world, the Gentiles, surprisingly it would seem, began to come to faith.

What a puzzle that was, you see. How can this be that that one who is the Messiah of Israel would be rejected by Israel? And the Gentiles who had always been, at least in the thinking of Jews, an afterthought, seemed to be the ones that were responding. Anybody could see—Luke certainly could see as he wrote the book—that the church was becoming increasingly Gentile and less and less Jewish. And Paul would have asked the same question any thinking Jew would have asked, and maybe Gentiles too: Has God really cast off his people?

Is he proving that he's unfaithful to the promises that he has made to the Jewish nation? And so Paul began to work that out. I don't want to take great time to deal with it, but if you turn to what Paul says in the ninth, 10th, and 11th chapters of Romans, you find that he not only works it out but he works it out in a very thoughtful way. Point by point, he goes through the various things that need to be said when you deal with this important question.

The first thing he says is that when persons are saved, back in Abraham's time or any other time, it was always by the electing grace of God. Nobody's ever saved in any other way. So the choice is always with God. And what follows from that is that if God elects in one period of history to save a lot of Jews and not many Gentiles, well, that's God's business. And if in another period of history God elects to save a lot of Gentiles and not many Jews, that's all right too. That's God's business.

It's always by election. It's God's choice. Any Jew would know that, and there were all the quotations from the Old Testament to show it. Secondly, again in the ninth chapter of Romans, he said that this rejection by a large portion of Israel is only something that God had already promised in the Old Testament. In other words, it wasn't at all unexpected. God had said it would happen. He quotes a number of passages there—Exodus 9:16, Hosea 2:23, Hosea 1:10, and two great texts from Isaiah, Isaiah 10, verses 22 and 23, and Isaiah 1, verse nine.

The point of those passages is that God promised always that only a remnant would be saved. In other words, the majority would not be. So all of that was prophesied in the Old Testament. The third thing he says in those chapters is that although it was prophesied that the majority would reject the Messiah when he came, the rejection was nevertheless not God's fault. We always tend to think of it that way. We say, "Well, if salvation is by election, and if God prophesies that most will not be saved, then it's God's fault that they're not saved."

And Paul says that that is not true. The reason they weren't saved was their own fault, and that has two parts: They pursued their salvation apart from faith and the necessity for it was taught in the Old Testament, but they didn't like that idea. And secondly, they pursued their own righteousness, preferring that to God's righteousness. In other words, they wanted God to pat them on the back and say how well they did, and that error of the Jews is exactly the error that people make today.

You talk about salvation being by grace, by what God does for us in Jesus Christ, the number one reaction you will get is this: "I don't want anything like that; I want to do it for myself." Now, of course, that's just what the Jews were doing. So Paul says it's their own fault; they didn't come in the way God had maintained they should come and even the way their own Scriptures taught. Then in the fourth place, Paul says that although it is true that many were rejecting the Messiah, nevertheless not all were rejecting him.

And as a case in point, he brings forward himself. He says, "I too am a Jew. I am of the tribe of Benjamin. I'm a Hebrew of the Hebrews." And yet God by election reached me, so there are Jews believing. Moreover, he said—this is the fifth point—this is nothing new in this time and age. It's always been that way. You go back into Old Testament history, to the time of Elijah, for example, you'll find that in Elijah's time, there were only 7,000 among the Jews who had not bowed down the knee to Baal and thus become apostate.

Of course, when God said that to Elijah, it was meant to encourage him. Elijah said, "Even I only am left," and God said, "No, you're not alone; there's 7,000 that'll stand with you." And that was good from Elijah's point of view. But if you think of it in terms of the masses of the people, 7,000 was not very many. Just a remnant. So Paul said, "You see, in the time of Elijah, even under the ministry of as great a man as that, there were still only a remnant who were saved."

The sixth point he makes—he does this in the 11th chapter—is that although it is true that God is moving in this age primarily among the Gentiles, this in the final analysis is itself for Israel's good. He speaks there of the conversion of the Gentiles provoking the Jews to jealousy. As long as they had it all wrapped up, you see, so that all Jews were saved, nobody but Jews were saved, and anybody who wanted to be saved had to become a Jew, well, then they could be quite content in their own righteousness and perish because they really were not trusting the Messiah.

But when the gospel began to spread to Gentiles and the Gentiles believed and entered into the blessings of God, this provoked some to jealousy, and so the end effect, according to Paul's teaching, was a good one. And then finally, as seven points to these three chapters, because the end effect is good, the end itself is good, and Paul says the end will be the salvation of the nation. His exact words are, "And so all Israel will be saved." I believe that teaches that there is to be a future time of great Jewish blessing when many, the masses of Jewish people, are going to turn to Jesus as their Messiah.

Now, I say all of that by way of background in order to make the point that when Paul preached in Rome on this momentous day to all the leaders of the Jewish communities and others besides, it certainly did not puzzle him or surprise him, though it may have disappointed him, that for the most part they rejected his message. And he indicates it this time, not by quoting the passage that he does quote so well in the book of Romans, but by quoting the sixth chapter of Isaiah, verses nine and 10, which I have read.

Well, someone has said, speaking of God's leading in our lives, that God never closes one door but that he opens another one. I suppose that's true. I don't know how you would demonstrate that that is true. You'd have to examine all the closed doors and all the open doors, I suppose, to demonstrate it in a scientific fashion. But generally, I think we do find that is true. God closes one door, but it's that he might open another. And certainly, that is what happened here in Rome.

Here was a door to the Jewish community, as it would seem, closing. It doesn't mean that there were never any Jews that believed. Certainly there were, because when Paul wrote to the Romans in the 16th chapter and begins to list all the people that he knew that were in the church of Rome, there are Jewish names. So certainly there were Jews who were believers. But for the most part, that door was closing. The Jewish community was shutting him out. They were rejecting the message. They left.

But it does say nevertheless the door was opened to the Gentiles. Paul himself said it, you see. He said, "I want you to know that God's salvation has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will listen." And it's on the basis of that that the book ends, saying for two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him, mostly Gentiles, you see, and boldly and without hindrance he preached to them the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you see that that door to the Gentiles at least, and perhaps now in a new way in our day to the door to the Jews, is open today as well? That's why the book ends the way it does. Isn't that clear enough? Here Paul is experiencing an open door to the Gentiles. That door is open. The book ends that way because throughout this entire age, until Jesus Christ returns or there are new interventions of God in history, that door to the Gentiles is open.

As long as that door was open, Paul was going to preach through that open door to the Gentile community. And if he was going to do that, well, then we must do it as well. That's our opportunity. If God opens a door to the Jews for you, preach through that door as well. If God opens a door to your neighbor, preach through that door as well. Wherever it may be, here or there, high or low, whoever it is who will listen. Because this is the day of Christian proclamation, and it is the preaching and teaching and sharing of the word of God that God honors.

I want you to notice just these few brief points as we close. The gospel that Paul is preaching here in the 28th chapter of the book of Acts is the same gospel that was preached by Peter at the beginning. It's not a different gospel because it's a different person. It's not a different gospel because it's a different period of history. It's not a different gospel because it's a different city. No matter who's preaching or when he or she is preaching or in what city or place the person is preaching, it's the same gospel.

It's the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ, and that is our gospel today. Secondly, the results of the gospel are the same. That is, when it's preached, some reject it and some respond to it. It was that way when Peter preached at Pentecost. It's that way when Paul preached at Rome. It is that way when we teach people about Jesus Christ today. Some will listen, and God will open their hearts and melt their resistance and draw them to Jesus. Others will resist it.

We're not to think that if we experience rejection or resistance that we are any different than any of those who have preceded us. And then here's the third point. Not only is it the same gospel, not only is it the same effects, but Christ's plan for the expansion of the gospel and the founding of his church is not frustrated. You see, at this point where we read of the preaching of the gospel at Rome, it really is right to go back to the first chapter.

In Acts, this version of the Great Commission, find the Lord Jesus Christ saying to his disciples, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth." And that is what has happened as the book closes. We may be frustrated; we often are. But Jesus is not frustrated and his plans most certainly are not. Someone, I guess, will say at this point, "Well, all of that is nice, but whatever happened to the apostle Paul?"

Historians are divided on that. I think generally the opinion today is that he was released after these two years. Luke doesn't write about it because Luke wasn't with him at the very end. Paul probably did travel to other places. The last books he wrote were the Pastoral, Second Timothy especially, and he indicates in those books in some places things that probably had not been able to happen in the history that Luke gives us in the book of Acts. So presumably he traveled, he did other things, he may have gotten to Spain, he certainly went to Crete and other things.

The tradition in the church, Eusebius tells us about it, though we don't have any New Testament evidence, is that he went back to Rome later, after the great fire of AD 64. Rome had been set on fire, perhaps by Nero in order to clear it and rebuild it. There was such an outcry from the people that Nero blamed it on the Christians. Paul came back shortly after that, a period of great hostility toward Christians, was arrested and eventually was martyred. Presumably, that's the history.

But you see, the point of this book is that from God's perspective and from the perspective of the gospel, there is a sense in which that doesn't matter. Of course, what happens to his servants does matter to God. It does say, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." And what happens to you, your life is precious to him. But there is a sense, you understand I'm saying this in a certain way, there's a sense in which what happens to us is irrelevant to the greater story, which is the expansion of the gospel.

And then what that means is, you see, one of us in a particular period of history may have great success in what we do. And there are people like that, great evangelists in times of the moving of God's Spirit who preach and many respond and everything seems to go well. And then there other periods of history, perhaps more like our own, when response to spiritual things is superficial and the gospel is preached perhaps even with the same energy or the same blessing of the Spirit, but the response is poor and people are hostile.

You see, in a sense that doesn't matter. What does matter is that we are faithful in the calling to which God has called us. And whether in good times as we see it or bad times as we see it, whether in ages of spiritual blessing or ages of spiritual non-blessing, the plan of Jesus Christ nevertheless goes forward. Because he said this gospel must be preached throughout all the world to all peoples and then the end will come. That end is not yet come.

And you and I therefore still have the task of preaching it. Will we do it? That's the message of the book. The word is not hindered. We are the messengers. Will we take it? If we will, God will accomplish with it what he chooses to accomplish, to the praise of the glory of his grace. Let us pray. Father, bless our study of this book to our hearts and do so, we ask, in practical ways. This is a practical book.

It's not a book filled with great theological mysteries. It's a book that has told us of the expansion of the gospel as people just like ourselves, men and women, took it to their neighbors and told them about Jesus. Our Father, that's what we need to do. Would you help us to do it? Give us an urgency in that task to get on with it and then bless us in it to the degree that you choose. And we will give you the glory for it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

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