Podcast: How the Extraordinary Church in Acts Applies to Ordinary Believers Today (Iain Duguid)

July 28, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Message of Acts for the Church Today

In this episode Dr. Iain Duguid talks about the first few chapters of Acts and how the book of Acts is centered around Jesus. Dr. Duguid gives an expert perspective on some of the confusing chapters and how we can ask the right questions when studying the book of Acts.

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Turning the World Upside Down

Turning the World Upside Down

Iain M. Duguid

In this practical, winsome guide, Iain Duguid explores the continuing work of Jesus after the ascension in Acts 1–8, encouraging believers today toward gospel-driven, Spirit-filled mission.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:51 - Acts Is Not a Book About Us

Matt Tully
Iain Duguid serves as professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He’s planted churches in England, California, and Pennsylvania, and is also the author of a number of books and commentaries, including new with Crossway, Turning the World Upside Down: Lessons for the Church from Acts 1–8. Iain, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Iain Duguid
You are very welcome.

Matt Tully
Early in this new book, this new commentary that you’ve written (or something close to a commentary) where you’re walking through the first eight chapters of the book of Acts, early on you point out that the book of Acts is really about the continued work of the risen Christ, the risen Lord Jesus, through the power of the Spirit. It’s not first and foremost a book about Christians or the church. Really, the main character is Jesus working through the Spirit. How would you say that that conviction, that approach to the book as a whole affects how you go about reading it and interpreting it?

Iain Duguid
I think we naturally tend to read the Bible as if it’s about us. With any kind of narratives, we identify with characters. Typically, we identify with heroes. We imagine ourselves in the hero’s position, and so we naturally tend to think the Bible is a book about us. And it’s not that we don’t show up in the Bible, although we typically pick the wrong character to identify with. We’re not the bold leader standing for Jesus most of the time; we’re the guy on the sidelines who doesn’t want to commit. But the book itself flags us that it’s not primarily about the apostles in a number of ways. Firstly, many of the apostles hardly appear beyond the opening couple of chapters. We hear nothing about Thomas or Andrew or many of the apostles. And in the opening of book itself, Luke, the author, is telling his reader, Theophilus, "In my first book I told you about what Jesus began to teach and do." And so the subsequent book is what Jesus continues to teach and do, obviously now through the power of the Spirit. And so the pouring out of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 is of pivotal importance. With Christ having risen from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father, does that mean that we’re now left on our own to struggle by ourselves? No, because the risen and ascended Christ pours out his Spirit upon his church, and then you see the Spirit active in the lives of not just the apostles but also in the lives of ordinary Christians as well.

Matt Tully
You mention in the book that we don’t even hear about some of the main apostles. Obviously, there are a few of the apostles that do play pretty prominent roles, and there are other figures that are pretty prominently mentioned. But a number of the apostles never show up again. And one of those is Matthias. And Matthias is this interesting example. He is appointed to replace Judas after his betrayal and death. I know some Bible scholars and some Christians look at that story and the fact that Matthias is not mentioned again in the rest of the book of Acts or I think the rest of the New Testament, unless I’m mistaken, and they would actually say that the apostles moved a little bit too quickly. They kind of rushed to find a replacement, and maybe they should have waited until after Pentecost. They just didn’t do things right, and that partially explains why we never hear from this guy again. Do you agree with that? What do you think is going on with the appointing of Matthias?

Iain Duguid
So many of these Bible stories are tantalizing because they don’t answer the questions that we have, which usually means we’re asking the wrong questions. The Bible answers the questions that are important for us. So, maybe that’s not such an important question. However, since scholars spend the time majoring in questions that are not important questions, I think it’s appropriate for us to talk about it. I don’t think there’s anything in the narrative that suggests that they’re doing something wrong in drawing lots at this point. They have two candidates, both of whom meet the qualifications of having been with Jesus, both have exemplary lives, and how are they to choose between them? Well, you could have a vote. That’s what we do in electing church elders, and that has its place too. But in this context, I think casting of lots is a way of passing that decision onto the ascended Jesus, giving him the decision between these two apparently equally qualified men. After all, the Old Testament tells us that the lot is cast into the lap, but it’s every decision is from the Lord. And so I think we should see this as an exemplar of that. This is an example of the Lord directing his people in a situation where there’s no moral question at stake. There are two apparently equal options. And of course at this point, the Spirit has not yet been poured out. Once the Spirit is poured out, then seeking the Spirit’s guidance through prayer will typically be how we proceed in this. We don’t need to continue to use lots as a means of discerning the Lord’s will.

05:47 - Discerning What Is Prescriptive vs. Descriptive

Matt Tully
And I think this touches on one of the challenges that we often face when it comes to reading narrative portions of the Bible, especially the New Testament. The book of Acts is such a unique case where it is describing the early church and early Christian practices in a way that’s a little bit unique in Scripture. One of the things we can struggle with with these narratives is just knowing which of this is just descriptive of what happened (and maybe it shouldn’t have happened or maybe it should have happened) versus what is prescriptive for Christians and for the church today. That’s just going to be a perennial question that we have to wrestle with as we walk through the whole book of acts. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that initially. As you approach this book, what are some principles for discerning what’s prescriptive versus what’s just describing what happened at the time?

Iain Duguid
That’s a great question, because if we get it wrong, then we’re going to be regarding as prescriptive things that were never intended to be guides of our behavior, like Paul getting bitten by a venomous snake and surviving and shaking it off so that now you have snake handling cults. Or we’re going to regard simply as descriptive things that are intended to be prescriptive. Again, as with all biblical narratives, there are often clues in the narrative. There are ways in which the narrative encourages us to see particular behaviors as good. For example, the early church in Jerusalem in Acts 2 right after Pentecost clearly is a model community of believers. They’re devoted to the apostles’ teaching. They are committed to fellowship with one another and breaking bread together. That’s the church everybody would like to be part of. People say, "Well, we want to be a New Testament church." And I often wonder which New Testament church they have in mind— Corinth with all the sexual immorality; Galatia with all the Judaizers; Laodecia that was party hot, partly cold. The one exception of that is that church in Jerusalem during that brief period immediately after the pouring out of the Spirit, where we all look at that and say wouldn’t it be great if the church was like that? And so I think the narrative itself sets you up to recognize that while recognizing that as we go further on through the book of Acts, not everything that you see going on in church is the way it should be.

Matt Tully
But even with that Acts 2 narrative which is, as you said, often held up as a really incredible model for how the church was meant to function and how it was functioning early on, but there are things like meeting in each other’s homes on a regular basis, selling their possessions and belongings and giving money away to anyone in the church who had need. I do think we still wrestle with maybe the disconnect between that little picture that we get of what it seemed to look like and how our churches often function today. We don’t typically meet for church "in homes." We meet in a building, a dedicated space. We may be generous with our belongings and our money, but we aren’t selling our stuff to then give to people in our church who have need. Even the breaking of bread and prayers where it seems like they were sharing meals together and maybe celebrating the Lord’s Supper around a meal, whereas in our churches today, we often are using a small cracker and some wine or some grape juice (grape juice for those of us who are maybe from Baptist backgrounds, like myself). How do you think about that? How do we use the timeless principles that we see here even in the end of Acts 2 but then not get too stuck on the particular expressions that we see there?

Iain Duguid
Well, if they’re timeless principles, they’ll show up elsewhere in the Bible. And partly, the rest of the book of Acts gives us context. We don’t see everybody throughout the book of Acts selling everything they have and becoming ecclesiastical communists, where you have no private possessions. Later on we have Lydia, who’s a dealer in purple, which is high-end handbags, which is the equivalent in the ancient world. She’s the Birkins and the Coach stuff. And there’s nothing about her selling her house. In fact, that’s where Paul learns to abound. In Philippians he talks about learning to abound and learning how to abase. Well, it was right there in Lydia’s house in Philippi that Paul was learning to abound. So, we need to read the Scripture as a whole and see all the individual parts together. Now, we do see the early church celebrating the Lord’s Supper as part of a communal meal together in Corinthians. One of the reasons we see that is because the Corinthians have messed it up, and it had become all about the meal, and they’d lost the Lord’s Supper in the process. I sometimes wonder if in today’s church we’ve flipped the script and we’ve just reversed the sin of the Corinthians. We’re busy having the Lord’s Supper, but we’ve lost the meal aspect. When I was planting my first church, I asked counsel from all the experienced ministers I could find, and one older Anglican sat back in his chair and he said, "Everything goes better with food." What is that? But the more I thought about it, I thought that really is a biblical principle, that eating together is a context in which profound relationships are built. And so that’s something we put into practice in all of the different churches we planted. We would regularly eat together. And it is an extension of our communion. Communion is not just a me-and-Jesus moment; it’s the one body. It’s us together as a community. It’s not just a private, religious experience. And so the fellowship meal together that we would celebrate regularly after our worship service was an extension of that communion—an opportunity to develop the kinds of relationships that we see in that early church, where people are giving sacrificially. That’s the piece that continues. Paul, when he goes to write to the Corinthians, talks about them setting aside their money regularly. And what are they setting aside for? They’re not setting aside simply for the needs of the local church; they’re setting aside so they can gather money together to help the church in Jerusalem, which is now undergoing a famine. And so I think there is a challenge there as to what we’re using our church budget for and the place that our ministry to the poor has in that. That’s important in Acts, it’s importance in Paul’s writings, and that’s a significant part of what the deacons do. They take care of the poor. I think there is a challenge there. We kind of have lost that. We may give sacrificially to our church, but often we’re spending that on perhaps other priorities than the ones the book of Acts may encourage us towards.

Matt Tully
It’s such a helpful nuance that even as we seek to be careful readers and appliers of the Bible so that we don’t take things as prescriptive when they aren’t intended to be that way, on the flip side, I think we need to have a category for being confronted by what we see in the book of Acts. Perhaps sometimes our practices, both as individuals and as churches, are not always going to be in alignment with the pattern that we see laid out in a book like this. And so I think that’s just a good nuanced way of thinking about that.

Iain Duguid
Any god who never disagrees with us is not real. It’s like somebody who says to you in counseling, "Oh, my wife and I never disagree." You think, Boy, that’s a red flag. You do not have a healthy relationship with your wife if she can never disagree with you. So too you do not have a healthy relationship with God if your God can never disagree with you and confront you and say, "This is wrong." And he does so through his word. So yeah, we should anticipate that.

13:20 - Don’t Undervalue the Ascension

Matt Tully
Let’s go back a little bit now to the very beginning of the book of Acts. One thing I’ve always been kind of intrigued by is the way that the book opens. Luke finishes the Gospel of Luke with Jesus’s ascension. He leaves, he’s gone, and now we’re into the church age and Jesus’s work through the Spirit. But we see in Acts that opens with his ascension again. It goes back and we see the ascension, we see the promise of the Spirit, and then the book continues. What’s the significance of Luke beginning the book of Acts with the ascension?

Iain Duguid
I think we undervalue the ascension. We talk a lot about Jesus’s death and resurrection, and in many cases we don’t talk very much about his ascension. It used to be part of the church calendar. Now, of course, there’s a lot of debate about the value of the church calendar. But one value of the church calendar would be to highlight certain events in redemptive history that don’t get the attention they otherwise deserve. The churches, historically, would’ve celebrated an ascension Sunday when they would’ve focused their attention on that. And that’s something that’s disappeared out of our calendar. And sadly, in many cases, it’s disappeared out of our vocabulary and out of our thinking that Jesus doesn’t simply rise from the dead and then disappear; he ascends to the right hand of the Father, the place of power and authority where he’s now interceding for us as our great high priest. He’s now reigning and ruling, and through his Spirit, he is at work in this world. And Luke recognizes the critical importance of that and the significance of that for the church. And in the process, he also shows us that the disciples don’t yet get it. The question that they’re asking, "Jesus, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?"—John Calvin says there are as many mistakes in that sentence as there are words. They don’t get it. They’re still thinking in terms of an earthly kingdom. And part of the reason for the ascension is to redirect their attention from this earthly kingdom, this renewal of physical Israel to the heavenly kingdom of which the Old Testament Israel was always typological. And so now Jesus is ascended to the right hand of the Father, which means that our focus has to be far more lifted up to where Jesus is than obsessed with what’s going on around us. We’re often overly focused on what’s going on in the church, whether that’s good or bad. If it’s good, we’re overly triumphant. If we’re struggling, we’re overly downcast and easily forget that what really counts is what goes on at the right hand of the Father, where we have an advocate who is already seated. He’s not scrambling, desperately trying to make his will happen. He’s seated, and the Spirit is at work, and Christ’s purposes are being accomplished.

Matt Tully
When you were just talking there, it sparked in my mind the realization that the apostles had quite the whiplash effect, I would imagine, over the course of these last number of weeks before Jesus’s death. For a long time, they seem to accept him as Messiah, but they think he’s going to come in as this political ruler. There are whole expectations for that. And then he dies. He’s captured, he’s tortured, and then he dies. And they’re obviously thrown into this kind of dejection and fear. And then you have the resurrection, where he miraculously comes back and they encounter him and are amazed. And then he says, "Now I got to go. Now I’m going to leave." I just imagine what that must have been like for them—not understanding, as you said, ultimately what his mission was and how it was going to play out. Do we have any indications that they were struggling to reconcile what he was saying and doing with what their expectations were?

Iain Duguid
We see it anticipated already in what Jesus has talked about at the last supper. In his upper room discourse he talks freely and says, "I’m going to go away, but I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m going to send the Holy Spirit, an encourager for you." Parakletos. And that’s what we see working its way out in these opening chapters of Acts. We see Jesus ascended, certainly, but also ascended in order to pour out the Spirit who is the one through whom Christ continues to be present with this church. Matthew 28: "Lo, I’m with you always, even to the end of the age," but that "with you always" is not a physical presence; it’s now a spiritual presence through the Spirit. Which means that he can be spiritually present with all his people at the very same time.

17:55 - What’s Happening at Pentecost?

Matt Tully
Let’s turn, then, to Acts 2, the beginning of that chapter, and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit. We all know that this is a really important, pivotal moment in the history of the church and the history of salvation that God is working. But I think it can also be a somewhat confusing passage for many Christians today. It feels odd in different ways. Some of the things that happen feel random. I wonder if you could just boil it down for us. What would you say are a few things that Bible readers today should understand about what’s going on at Pentecost, why it’s happening, and why it matters?

Iain Duguid
Well, the first thing is—and I’m an Old Testament professor, so I say this a lot—but we don’t understand the New Testament if we don’t understand the Old Testament. Often, when we understand the Old Testament, all kinds of things pop into place in the New Testament that otherwise are puzzling. And so too we talk about Pentecost as if Acts 2 is the beginning of that concept. But of course Pentecost is simply the Old Testament Feast of Weeks, which happened around the same time as the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. And it’s also a harvest festival. And you see both aspects. You see the aspect of Sinai, with the noises and the voices and the fire, and that’s all Sinai imagery now associated not with the giving of the law but with the giving of the Spirit. The problem with the giving of the law was that we couldn’t keep it. There’s nothing wrong with the law; the problem was with us. And so throughout the Old Testament, we have this promise that God is going to change his people. He’s going to pour out his Spirit on his people and give them a new covenant. Not like the old covenant that they broke because they were the sinners, but a new covenant that will be unbreakable ultimately because, of course, Christ has fulfilled all of the demands of the law. And so now with Christ having fulfilled the demands of the law, he now pours out his Spirit on his people. So, you have that whole dimension in the background, but then you also have this harvest imagery that’s very much part of the Feast of Weeks. It’s seven weeks since the Feast of First Fruits, which occurred on the day when Jesus rose from the dead. He is the first fruits from the dead, and now seven weeks later, we have the, as it were, the full harvest happening at Pentecost. And so this is the beginning of that full harvest that starts then and continues on from Jerusalem, spreading then to Judea, to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth, just as Acts 1:8 had anticipated. And so that harvest theme is significant in terms of the tongues that take place on Pentecost, because back in Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel, that’s where tongues got confused in the first place. Up until that point, everybody had spoken a common language, and then because of the curse after the Tower of Babel, languages are confused and cultures are confused, and so it’s hard to communicate with people. People are divided into different nations. Now, what we see at Pentecost is a reversal of the Tower of Babel so that now all these people have come from all different places. If you look carefully, almost all listed in Genesis 10 are the Table of Nations. This is not a random selection of people. This is a collection of Genesis 10 people gathered together and now all hearing the gospel in one language. Again, on some level, it is so redundant. Greek works fine to preach it, because most people could get by in Greek. But on this first day of the harvest, in order to establish the principle that now the gospel is coming to the nations, it comes to them in their own tongues. And so that’s the significance of this, that now the gospel is going to the Gentiles. Whereas previously, even up to the time of Jesus’s ministry, the gospel was for the Jews. Now it’s going out to the Gentiles as well with the pouring out of the Spirit.

Matt Tully
I want to return to that idea in just a minute, the idea that now the gospel can go out—the good news and the kingdom is extending out rather than merely calling people to come into the nation of Israel. But one quick question about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. Oftentimes we think of Pentecost as the moment when now the Spirit has come, and now all who believe are indwelled by the Spirit. They have the Spirit directly. And Pentecost kind of represents that change from the Old Testament system. But then we read in Acts 8 about the Samaritans who had believed and even been baptized, but they hadn’t yet received the Holy Spirit until the apostles came and laid hands on them in person. What was going on there? That can be a confusing little side note that just doesn’t fit the pattern that we seem to have established in Acts 2.

Iain Duguid
What happens is that the Pentecost itself a multi-stage event, and so it comes first to Jerusalem and then more broadly to the nearby Gentiles. And it’s important that when the Spirit is poured out in Acts 10 on Cornelius that the apostles see it, because it proves that the Spirit has come to the Gentiles. It’s there in theory in Acts 2, but it starts to be worked out in Acts 10 with Cornelius and then later on in Ephesus with those far away Gentiles who’d been baptized with John’s baptism but not with Christian baptism. They too then received the Spirit. So, you see that the Spirit is at work not just within the bounds of Israel, as would’ve largely been the case up until this point. But paralleling the spread of the gospel, the Spirit has, as it were, gone ahead of them and prepped away for them.

Matt Tully
And I think today as Christians, especially as Gentile Christians (like probably most of our listeners are), we just assume some of these dynamics about the gospel. we just assume that of course the gospel is for the whole world. And of course, the Spirit is available to all who believe, not just Jewish people. But that was a major distinction, a major new thing that was predicted and was hinted at throughout the Old Testament, but was nevertheless a big change for those early Christians. And one of the things that you note in this book that you emphasize is the way that after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, Christians are now sent out into the world as lights. I think the biblical word that comes up a lot is the idea that they were scattered throughout the world. And that kind of reverses the Old Testament model, where people had to come. The nations came to Jerusalem, they came to Israel. I wonder if you could just speak a little bit more about the significance of that reversal, as you call it, and how that might affect the way that we view ourselves as Christians today.

Iain Duguid
In the Old Testament, there’s nothing stopping Gentiles becoming members of God’s community. And you see a handful of people, like Ruth and Rahab, who revoke their citizenship and their previous nation. Ruth says so beautifully: "Where you go, I will go. Your God will be my God; your people, my people. Where you die, there I will die and I will be buried also." There’s no greater commitment in antiquity than to be buried in somebody else’s land. That’s really permanently sealing your commitment to them. But those were very few, and the vast majority of God’s people were native-born, physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And even in terms of the vision of the future, the eschatological vision is often portrayed in terms of the nation’s coming to Mount Zion and learning there how to walk with this God. Now, there were times when God’s people were scattered into exile, and so there they came in contact with more outsiders. But still the gospel remained largely for those who were physically descended from Abraham. But of course what happens with the coming of Christ, as himself embodying now this new Israel, is that if you want to be part of Israel, now it’s not found through physical descent through from Abraham; now it’s being a spiritual descendant of Abraham, as Paul puts it in Romans 4, which means being united to Christ as one of the branches in that new vine, that new Israel itself. And so that’s how people become incorporated into the new Israel, which now then, through the work of the Spirit, spreads out. And it’s interesting to see that the apostles are not the first ones to lead this working out. Even though they’re the ones who Jesus tells in Acts 1:8 that the good news has to go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth, they don’t go to the ends of the earth right away. And I get that. They planted a church, they’re just trying to keep their heads above water, they’re under persecution, they got a lot of pressure. And so spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth is not high on their agenda. And then in the beginning of Acts 8, we read about great persecution. All of a sudden it’s ordinary Christians who decide, "This is not the healthiest place for me and my family. I’ve got to go somewhere else." And it’s those ordinary believers who are the first ones to bring the gospel to other places. The first Gentile church in Antioch starts sort of spontaneously, and then the apostles in Jerusalem, when they hear about it, say, "We’ve got to figure out what’s going on here." And so they send Barnabas. Fortunately, they send Barnabas. His name means "son of encouragement," and he really lives up to that name. But the apostles are still playing catch-up at that point. And then Barnabas makes the seemingly strange move of going to get Paul. Would you really have thought a former Pharisee would be the best person to bring the gospel to a Gentile church? You might not, but of course Barnabas and Paul have a track record. When Paul came to Jerusalem after his conversion, at first it’s a big surprise. Nobody wanted to associate with him because how sure are you this guy’s really changed? And it’s Barnabas who brings Paul into the circle there at that point. And so it’s Barnabas who goes to get Paul to help him in Antioch, and the result then is that the foundation of what becomes the first mission-sending church, as Barnabas and Paul have then sent out from there to begin their missionary journeys, which is when the gospel-spreading process really becomes more organized.

27:59 - Why Is Martyrdom Part of God’s Plan?

Matt Tully
We see Paul (or Saul) mentioned in the very beginning of chapter 8 of Acts. It’s where he first comes in, and he’s actually there at the stoning of Stephen. Stephen gives this incredible speech, tracing the story of Israel and the story of the Messiah, and then ultimately he calls out his listeners. It was some pretty strong language. Luke mentions that Saul was there, and he approved of his execution. Without getting too far ahead into the later chapters of the book of Acts, which you’re going to be addressing in two subsequent volumes in this trilogy of commentaries, I wonder if you could help set up Paul (or Saul) in his context. Who was he, and why do you think Luke mentions that he has his presence here at this really pivotal scene with Stephen?

Iain Duguid
But when he first enters the story, Saul is the spearhead of the persecution of the church. He is the one who’s driving this initially there. Yes, he’s holding the coats while the stoning of Stephen takes place, which in itself is an amazing picture to think about. But we’re not told that that changes his heart at all. Even while Stephen is saying, "Father, forgive them what they do," (he’s echoing the words of Jesus there) Saul’s next move is to turn around and ask for letters of authority to go to Damascus and arrest Christians there. So, Paul is not immediately changed by that. It’s not until Paul meets the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and has that experience of being confronted and blinded by it. Which of course itself is a fulfillment of a deuteronomic curse—this blindness of mid-day and being led by the hand. That’s all Old Testament background that Paul would’ve known very well and would’ve appreciated the significance of this. Suddenly, he’s confronted with the fact that the church that he’s been persecuting is identified with the Lord that he’s trying to serve. And that Lord is Jesus himself. And it’s at that point that Paul is transformed through the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s the most dramatic conversion story that there could ever be. And then of course alongside that, he’s confronted with the reality that the rest of his life is going to be a pattern after the life of Christ in terms of his sufferings. He will suffer much in order to spread the gospel.

Matt Tully
It’s interesting how you emphasize and you show in this commentary just the way that the gospel spreads. We’ve talked about how it starts in Jerusalem and then it goes to the rest of Judea and Samaria, and then eventually, in the book of Acts, we see it going to the ends of the earth, as predicted. But we kind of see here in the beginning of Acts 8, when it talks about Saul and this persecution, you get the sense that Saul and other Jewish people with him were doing their best. They were seeing the spread of this message, the spread of this probably cult in their mind, and they were doing their best to stamp it out. But it was getting beyond their reach. It says a great persecution arose in Jerusalem, and people were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria, and that they were going house to house, dragging people into prison. Do we have any indication from other passages in Scripture of the way that initial persecution even affected the church? Are there any other glimpses that we might get into how the apostles and other followers of Jesus might have experienced that?

Iain Duguid
Well, this was not the only time during the New Testament period when persecution was a significant part of the church’s experience. You see James in 1 Peter addressing the issue of suffering trials for the name of Jesus. This was very much part of the early church’s experience, and of course very much part of God’s design for the early church. We often think of martyrdom as this unfortunate reality, but in the book of Revelation, when the martyrs under the throne cry out, "How long, oh Lord, before you avenge our blood and bring things to an end," we tend to assume the answer is there’s going to be more time for the spreading of the gospel—until the full number of the elected are brought in. And that’s not a wrong answer. That’s the answer 2 Peter gives us. That’s not the answer given to the martyrs. The answer given to the martyrs is, "There must be more time until the full number of the martyrs is complete." There’s something about martyrdom that uniquely glorifies God. When you think about it, it’s not too hard to see. We’re called to glorify God in all kinds of ways, but there are very few things I could ever do to glorify God more than giving up my life, than saying life itself is not precious to me compared to my love for God. That’s a unique way of glorifying God. And so the Lord uses martyrdom as a means of glorifying himself and of strengthening the church. The old saying of the early church was "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." As people watched the way these Christians suffered and died, they saw the reality of their faith. Apart from John, it appears that none of the apostles died from what we would call a natural death. Almost all of them died horrific deaths, which serves to buttress their testimony. If you made up this story about Jesus rising from the dead, then why would you die in such a horrific way for it? There’s no way to account for that except for the fact that they were really convinced that Jesus had risen. They’d seen him themselves, they’d handled him with his hands. They could not deny the reality of the resurrection.

Matt Tully
As you say, martyrdom is, in a mysterious sense but in a very real sense, it is part of God’s plan. I am just struck by how counterintuitive Jesus’s kingdom is in so many different ways. A kingdom that includes the martyrdom of the citizens of that kingdom in service to the king is just a very different thing than what the initial apostles expected or were planning for, but I think it’s also different than what we, as a church today, often expect or plan for. And I wonder if you could just reflect on that. After this incredible defeat of sin and Satan and death at the cross and in the resurrection, why then transition into this extended 2,000 year history of God’s people, seeking to serve Christ and bring his kingdom to fruition and to bear in this world, but there’s no ultimate victory yet? It’s an extended kind of process. That was probably surprising to the initial followers of Jesus, and it can be surprising to us today as well. Any thoughts on why God set it up this way?

Iain Duguid
Certainly, it was surprising to the apostles at first. Their first discussions with Jesus on this topic are, "Okay, who’s going to be first in the kingdom? We want to sit at your right and left hands." And Jesus’s response to that is, "Can you drink the cup that I’m going to drink? Can you be baptized with the baptism I’m going to be baptized with? You can’t endure the things that make someone first in the kingdom. But really, being first in the kingdom," Jesus said, "is being a servant, because the Son of Man himself came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." Now, if that’s true, if that’s what Jesus’s mission was, to serve and to give his life the ransom for many, what does it mean for us to be made into the likeness of Christ? We often use that language lightly, without really thinking about what it means to be conformed to the likeness of Christ. Paul in Philippians 3 talks about being conformed to the sufferings of Christ. And he was somebody who knew a bit about being conformed to the sufferings of Christ in his life. We toss around the slogan "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life," which is fine so long as your definition of a wonderful plan can include suffering, martyrdom—the things that Paul went through—shipwrecks, being stoned and left for bed, being beaten up, being imprisoned. These are ways in which we are counted worthy of being conformed to the sufferings of Christ. That’s how the early church thought about these things. And yes, it’s very different from the way that often we think and offer people the gospel. We talk to people as if the gospel is a means to living a fulfilled and happy life. And yes, it is, but part of that calling is also a calling to be increasingly conformed to the likeness of Christ in his sufferings now, so that ultimately we can be conformed to a likeness of Christ and glory subsequently.

36:16 - What We Can Learn Today from Ananias and Sapphira

Matt Tully
Iain, thank you so much for talking with us today. Maybe as a final question, I mentioned already a little while ago that this book is the first in a trilogy of books walking through the entirety of the book of Acts. You needed three books to do it because Acts is such a pact book of the Bible. So much happens—so many really important pivotal events in the history of the church. Limiting your choice down to Acts 1–8, which is what this first book covers, do you have a favorite verse or a favorite passage? And I wonder if you could just reflect on what that is. Read that for us, and then just share why that stands out to you as you think about reading through this incredible story.

Iain Duguid
In terms of a favorite verse, I think Acts 1:8 is probably the place to go for that because it is so pivotal in terms of laying out the pattern for the book of Acts. So, this is right before Jesus’s ascension: "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." And so that’s not only commissioning to go to the ends of the earth, but also the promise, as in Matthew 28:20, of the power of the Holy Spirit, that it enables God’s people to do that. In terms of a favorite passage, it’s weird, but I really have found the interaction with Ananias and Sapphira fascinating. Maybe favorite is not quite the right word, but certainly a fascinating passage, because we all ask the wrong question. We all ask the question, Why did God kill Ananias and Sapphira? Instead, we should be saying, Why is anybody left alive in our churches? If God is going to judge people because they’ve lied to the Holy Spirit, why is it we don’t need a burial committee along with our flower committee? And the answer, of course, is that God’s grace is sufficient for us, and that God, in his grace and mercy, is able to take sinners and forgive us our sins and bind us into a community of his people and preserve us by his faithfulness through the Spirit. And yet left to ourselves, that warning is there of Ananias and Sapphira. One of the things the book of Acts will not let you do is simply regard Jesus as a good teacher. Either he is the Lord of the universe through whose death alone we can be made right with God and through whose grace alone we can be able to enter God’s people and ultimately be with him in glory, or he’s a liar and none of this stuff is true, and we should go and do something else. There’s no middle grounds here. The book of Acts is very confrontative about the uniqueness of Christ as the only way to fellowship with this God.

Matt Tully
Iain, thank you so much for walking us through some of the key stories here in these first few chapters of the book of Acts, and we look forward to engaging further as you keep working on the second two volumes in this trilogy. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Iain Duguid
You’re very welcome.

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