"Sacred Roots: The Book of Acts: Descriptive or Prescriptive?" by Finny Kuruvilla

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Hello and welcome to Strength to Strength. It's good to have you back on again, Brother Finney. We had a part one of this this morning, and we took a look at Acts and the beginning of the church. And just to review a couple points there, I believe I caught all of them, with basically trademarks of the kingdom, which was launched—well, the kingdom wasn't launched; church was launched in Acts. The kingdom was a continuation, as we heard this morning.

So the first one was wait and pray, and they faced a lot of opposition, and there was unity, especially in leadership. The church was multi-ethnic, and he touched on the kingdom in relation to Israel and how the church is a continuation of the prophecy and God's work with humanity.

And the word of God spread, and it grew and multiplied, and it had a lot of words personifying the work of the work of the word. And he talked about the kingdom has a temple, which is the believers, and contrasted the existing temple before it was destroyed with the new temple. And he brought out how money was also a theme in Acts, and they—the final one, I believe, was through suffering, the kingdom spreads.

And did I cover all those? I believe that was all. That's great. Yeah. Great. So this afternoon, he's going to share with us his Acts descriptive or prescriptive. And I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say this afternoon. And this is both this morning and this afternoon are installments in our Sacred Roots series, and that's our effort to re-tether and consider the historic faith and to study it with humility and realize that we aren't the first disciples of Christ, but we come after a long line of godly brothers and sisters, and we can learn a lot from them. So before we get started, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father, we thank you that we can study your word and we can allow it to shape our lives along with the direction of the Holy Spirit. I pray that you would be with Brother Finney as he shares this afternoon. Give him wisdom and courage to speak plainly so that we can understand, and may our hearts be prepared to hear the truth. May your name be glorified in all that is said. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Go ahead, Brother Finney. All right. Well, thanks, everyone. It's good to be with you for part two here. This will be building on what we did this morning, but even if you missed it, it's okay. I'll try to catch you up, and hopefully you can go back and listen to part one later.

So yeah, as you heard, the topic for this afternoon session is Acts: is it descriptive or prescriptive? So let me first explain what this means in case you're not familiar with this debate.

To set the stage here, there are definitely some passages in the Bible that are simply historic and not for us to follow. So I would give as an example the Virgin Birth. That was a very unique one-time event that there is no expectation that I think we should have that we would have such an experience, any of us or our wives have such an experience.

Walking on water, if you go back and look in the Old Testament, that was intended to be one of the signs of divinity where God was subduing the sea. And so these are kind of one-time historic passages that we shouldn't have a reasonable expectation to somehow reenact or have happen to us. There are some passages that just describe what happens in the Old Testament that we definitely should not follow.

There are passages, for example, in the Bible where it will describe, say, a king who has many wives. There have been people who have misused these passages and said, "Well, see, here's a king, and the Bible doesn't say it's wrong, and it's described, and so I can have many wives as well."

These are clearly ways of interpreting scripture that is unhealthy and incorrect. And so we want to remember that there are certain passages and certain events that are descriptions. The first few verses of Genesis where God's creating the world, I mean, those are important descriptions, but those are one-time events that are not going to be replicated. There are other passages that are prescriptive. And by prescriptive, you can think of a doctor writing a prescription for you. It's an order or something that you're supposed to do. So an example here would be the Ten Commandments when it says, "Honor your father and mother." That's something that we're supposed to do now. They were supposed to do in the Old Testament.

That is a prescription. Loving our enemies, speaking kindly to one another, forgiving. These are all different prescriptions. There's many prescriptions that are given in the Bible. And so one of the questions that we have is, okay, there are these descriptive passages that are just describing, and then there are prescriptive passages that are challenging us, exhorting us to act in a certain way.

What about the book of Acts? How do we think about the book of Acts? Is that an unrepeatable historic description of events to establish the church, or does it contain prescriptive teachings that are for us today? Or potentially, is it a mix of both? So that's basically what we're going to be talking about in this afternoon session.

I do want to point out that everybody believes that Acts is at least a description. And so even in this shorthand that you'll often hear, or people will say, "Oh, is it descriptive or prescriptive?" That's not really the two sides. It's descriptive on one side versus descriptive and prescriptive on the other. So both sides, of course, agree that Acts is describing events from the past, and that's important, and there's historic value there. But the real question is, is there additional value that comes from Acts that is exhorting us or enjoining us to act and behave in a certain way? So that's what we're going to be exploring today.

This is an incredibly important issue, and the issues are far-ranging here. So let me just give you some examples of why this issue is important. How often should you take communion? Okay, so in Acts, I think almost everybody agrees that they were taking it at least weekly based on Acts chapter 20 and Acts chapter 2. But is that for them only? Is it for us? How do we think about that? That's an important question. Some churches will say once a year or twice a year.

Others will go more frequently, and they'll say, "We should do this because of the book of Acts. How do we understand that?" Meeting in homes or in a small setting, is that just an incidental detail that was just for them, or is it something that is intended to be more far-ranging? Speaking in tongues, is that something that was just a one-time event for the people in the book of Acts, or is that for us today? Healings, how do we think about that?

Are there still prophets? And then should a church's governance model look like the one that is found in Acts? So I hope you can tell that these are very important issues. There are certainly others, but these are some examples of where there are descriptions in Acts. And the question is, does that confer upon us a certain exhortation or challenge to our lives that we're supposed to be imitating?

I will point this out that there is a tendency that many people have today to take prescriptive passages and actually make them descriptive. So it's actually going the other direction. So there are a number of people. I was myself raised in churches that didn't practice things like the Holy Kiss or foot washing or head covering, and they would say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that was prescriptive for the first century, but that's not for us today." And so they actually try to go the other direction here. I point that out as just an FYI to know and to be aware of this as a category. It's not going to be the topic of what we're covering today, but it's something that we should be aware of.

And this tendency is certainly alive and well today.

I want to begin first with a classic verse that probably all of us have heard on the call, but I want to ask the question, what is the purpose of scripture? And there's a classic passage from Second Timothy chapter 3, verses 16 to 17.

This is Paul writing where he says, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Okay, so this passage is important because it's alerting us to the fact that scripture is given by inspiration of God. It's God-breathed, and it has value for these categories that are listed here. And these categories are ones that are quite active. They help us to know how to behave in the world. They help us to know how to act, whether it be reproof or correcting, instruction, and righteousness. This ought to help us to at least be attuned to the fact that every passage in scripture, even passages that are purely descriptive, we can probably read those and gain some value that's going to help us to serve God better.

And I want to emphasize this point, and I bolded all scripture here because we don't ever want to fall into a view, and I trust that none of us are here, where scripture is for our entertainment or for our intellectual stimulation. None of these are what are listed here.

Scripture is intended to be forming us and shaping us and discipling us.

We can go a little bit further here, also from one of Paul's letters, from First Corinthians. And here he's talking about the Old Testament, and he said, "Now these things took place as examples for us that we might desire evil as they did. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the ages has come." So here, Paul is saying that even negative examples are supposed to be instructive for us. They're supposed to be cautionary for us so that we learn that we can be instructed from that and profit from the good and the bad of the Old Testament. Okay, so this is, again, these are, I think, our good level-setting expectations for us as we begin here to think about what the purpose of scripture is and how frequently examples are appealed to for our own benefit.

Okay, I want to take a big picture step back here because I think this is a good point for us to stop and ask, okay, as we think about making applications from the Bible, I mean, this is a big deal as we think about how we interpret the Bible. I want us to think about what I'm going to call covenantal warrant. Okay, what do I mean by that? Covenantal warrant is a concept where we are reading a passage in the light of where we are situated, where that particular passage is situated in the covenant that is relevant there, and first ask the questions of what was that original audience, that original author intending and drawing from this?

How did they make applications from the covenant that they were living from? And then after we answer that question, then I think we can make much more responsible applications for us. So let's give an example here. Let's use one of the most famous stories in the whole Bible, David and Goliath story that we've heard many times.

And we've all heard the story of David and Goliath in ways that aren't necessarily wrong, but you'll hear things like, "I need to conquer the Goliath of financial debt," or, "I'm out there to find a job, and I need to conquer my Goliath to get the job," or, "There's someone who's being mean to me at work, and I need to deal with that Goliath, hopefully not by throwing rocks at them."

But this level of thinking is one where we're typically the David, and then there's some problem out there that's the Goliath. And David hurls the stone at Goliath and kills the giant, and so we too can be triumphant over our financial debt or the bully or whatever it is.

And I get nervous when I hear that style of reasoning here. And I want to try to first identify what the covenantal warrant that David was operating under. So when David walked out onto that battlefield and he heard Goliath roaring out to the people of Israel, challenging them, what was David's logic? What was it that prompted David to step up and to say, "I can beat this guy"?

There's actually two or three elements in that, but the one that he says the most frequently, that David says the most frequently, is David says, "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who defies the armies of the living God?" And there's so much packed into that, but let's just think for a moment about what he's saying there. He's saying, "Uncircumcised Philistine, somebody who's not part of the Mosaic and Abrahamic covenant, somebody who is a Canaanite, who defies the armies of the living God." The armies of the living God had a mandate from Sinai, from Moses, from God himself, that they were supposed to drive out all of the foreigners that were there in their midst.

And so when David is standing there saying, "Who's this uncircumcised Philistine who defies the armies of the living God?" He's almost certainly thinking about the book of Deuteronomy. He's almost certainly thinking about Exodus. And he knows that God had promised that if they go into that land, that God would give them success to drive out these enemies. And so David was simply standing on prior revelation that came from Moses, that came from Sinai to say, "I don't care how big this guy is. He's defying the armies of the living God, and we have covenantal warrant because God gave us promises at Sinai that we could defeat these people, these uncircumcised people who are on our land."

And this is why he is unflinching in his courage here because he's standing on a promise before. It's not that Goliath is just some random person who has, I don't know, maybe said something unkind to Jesse. None of that. This is not anything personal between David and Goliath. It's because Goliath represents a person who is a clear example of what God wants to do for the Israelites in that place. Okay, so if that's the case, and I think it almost certainly is, and a careful study, I think, would bear that out. Well, then when we step into this passage and ask, "Okay, what are valid applications that we can make?" Again, I get nervous when it's like, "There's the Goliath of debt or something along those lines."

It's just, how are you getting that? How's any person getting that? The real way, the best way to read this covenantally is, of course, to realize that David is a type of Jesus, and we need to let go of our hero complex and say, "Maybe Jesus is the one here who is defeating Goliath." And who is Goliath in the typological sense? It's the devil. It's the one who comes to steal and to kill and destroy. It's the sin in my life. It's the way that the devil is ravaging the people that I'm around. And all of a sudden, there we start to get much closer to the kind of logic that is animating David at the time.

I think the equivalent verse for David and Goliath is from Colossians 2:15, where it's speaking about Jesus here, having disarmed principalities and powers. He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it. So that scene where David cuts off the head of Goliath, this is the equivalent of what Jesus is doing through his defeat of the powers on the cross and what he continues to do, seated at the right hand of the Father.

It is so important that we read the Bible contextually, covenantally well, so that we can have the correct understanding of how we are to behave, how to pray, how to act. I'll give another example here. I'll be much briefer on this one. Romans 7, people read Romans 7, and it's this man who says, "Oh, what I want to do, I don't do. What I don't want to do, I do." And they quickly often will say, "Well, that's me, and I'm stuck here, and this is how I'm going to live for the rest of my life."

Well, is that actually what Paul is doing there? Absolutely not. If you read it carefully, we don't have time to go through this. But Paul is taking Adam and Israel and personifying them as this man who is caught in the dilemma of being unable to overcome sin. And Adam and Israel, under the old covenant, were unable to defeat the sin that was all around them, and they fell. Pray to that. However, in Romans 8, thanks be to God, who delivers us from our sins, and he is the one who enables us to triumph. And so if we read Romans 7 with the correct covenantal warrant, because we're in the new covenant era, we won't consign ourselves into perpetual disobedience and into defeat because we're reading this chapter incorrectly.

Romans 7, if you read it well, if you read it with careful exegesis and accurate interpretation, you will find that it's actually a very hopeful passage. So these are just two examples of how using covenantal warrant is really important for us. And I'm going to apply these as we move in a little bit to the book of Acts.

A lot of people will even go as far as saying, when they come to different commands that are given to the apostles, they'll say, "Is that for us today? Maybe that was just for that age, for the first century, and maybe we're not supposed to go out and do all the evangelism and these kinds of things." And again, there's all kinds of confusion about covenantal warrant and where do we stand with respect to that? Well, this should be very easily answered by Jesus himself in the Great Commission. In the Great Commission, a very well-known passage, Jesus says that he has all authority, and he commands the disciples to go out baptizing, teaching people to observe all things that I've commanded you, and lo and with you always, even to the end of the age.

Okay, so what do we learn from this passage besides Jesus having all authority and him giving particular commands to the disciples? We learn that what he taught the disciples is supposed to be for us, teaching them to observe all things that I've commanded you.

And then when does this terminate? Not until the end of the age. So there is supposed to be a command; the set of commands for the apostles is commanded to us according to the Great Commission, and it should establish a chain of apostolic teaching that goes on and on until the end of the age. And so when we see something that's given a command to the apostles, we can say, "That's for us," according to Jesus here in the Great Commission. Okay, so again, I want us to really think clearly about how do we make applications and how do we not get ourselves confused on these topics.

What a lot of people do is they will go to the epistles. Epistle is the fancy word for letter. So those are books like First Corinthians and Philippians, books like that. And what they'll do is they'll say, "Oh, that's where I get my prescriptive teachings." And a lot of people will see the Gospels and Acts mostly as description, and they'll see the epistles as mostly prescription. Okay, this is extremely common in Protestant settings. It's becoming more and more common in Anabaptist settings as well. And this is a very important decision because a lot hangs on how you read Jesus. A lot hangs on how you read the book of Acts. If you neglect Jesus, if you neglect the book of Acts, your theological system will be quite different compared to if you incorporate them, or if you don't incorporate them.

So this is a crucial hermeneutical, a crucial interpretive step in how we are to read the Bible. So because of this, people struggle with knowing how to read the Gospels and Acts. They think, "Okay, there's just a bunch of stories here. What's the relevance of those stories for me?" They don't really know. Writing somewhat cynically and ironically with tongue in cheek here, Jonathan Pennington writes, "Those with some training in hermeneutics will waive us off the Gospels' runway because of the all-important principle that narratives are descriptive, not prescriptive." Now, he disagrees with this, but he points out he's a Southern Baptist, and he says that in the Protestant and Southern Baptist world, people are discouraged to invest themselves in the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount, in all of these stories of Jesus, the stories of Acts, because, "Oh, that's just descriptive."

And so this is a very common dilemma that people are in. Now, I think this is something where it's just extremely shallow, and if we think deeply, we can overcome a lot of the issues here. So just to point out something that should hopefully be obvious here, but Paul's epistles are embedded within the book of Acts. So if you read the whole book of Acts and you are very careful with it, you can identify when Galatians was written and when Romans was written and First Corinthians. And all that we find in the epistles, it presupposes that the reader knows what's happening in the book of Acts so that they have some context to interpret what Paul is saying, for example.

And in addition, the epistles, especially Paul's epistles, they appeal to a particular model of discipleship. Okay, so here's from First Thessalonians chapter 1. Paul says this, "And you became imitators of us and of the Lord." I want to stress that, "us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction with the joy of the Holy Spirit so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia." Okay, so I bolded here the word imitators and example. So right at the outset of this letter, he's saying, "You became imitators of us and of the Lord." Okay, so if we didn't know who Paul was, if we didn't know the story of his life, this would be a meaningless statement.

If we just had First Thessalonians and we didn't know who this guy was, we would think, "Okay, whatever. I don't know what to do with that." But because we know the story of Paul's life, this is actually a more meaningful verse.

And he's saying, "You imitated us and the Lord. The Lord here is Jesus." And it's interesting, they received the word in much affliction. That fits with what we talked about this morning, with the joy of the Holy Spirit. I love that paradox. So that you became an example to all the believers. And so they themselves become examples to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. That's northern and southern Greece. So this model here that Paul is advocating is one where he is telling the audience that's receiving the Thessalonian letter and consequently to us that imitation and example are important for us. So the epistles presume both the Gospels and Acts.

There are many, many examples of statements that only become meaningful in the light of these narratives.

This is a concept from someone named Gary Shogren, who I've appreciated his writings. There is a word called mimesis. Mimesis is the word by which we get our English word imitate or a mime. I think we've seen mimes before. There's several words in English that are based on that mim root there.

And mimesis is basically imitation or following someone's example. And so Shogren says this. He says, "One cannot appreciate the distinctive contribution of the Thessalonian letters without a basic understanding of the apostles' method of teaching/learning." Mimesis is literally the imitation of the teacher who, for his or her part, provides a model or pattern. Tupos is the Greek word. Mimesis was especially suitable to a culture where few were literate. Pastors could not ask their people to read a guide to discipleship and then fill in the accompanying workbook. Rather, the teachers lived out the qualities of the well-rounded disciple, giving a pattern of character, behavior, and skill sets. So in a world where few people could read, few people had books or access to books, the substance of discipleship was imitation, was mimesis.

And this concept is one that courses throughout the New Testament. Okay, so this should not surprise us. What does Jesus say? "Follow me." He says it several times. And his basic model of discipleship was one where he wants the disciples to imitate him.

Listen to how Paul expresses this in First Corinthians 4. "In Christ Jesus, I have begotten you through the gospel. Therefore, I urge you, imitate me." Okay, so here we have, and catch this, we have a prescription in the epistle.

And how can we imitate Paul? How can we actually fulfill this command that we see? And it is a command here in First Corinthians 4. The only way we can fulfill this command is by knowing the description of Paul's life that we have in Acts.

So I hope you understand what I'm getting at here is that you can't even separate the prescriptions from the descriptions. It's a dichotomy that's a false one. In order to be able to fulfill this particular command, we have to be able to know Paul's life and understand his description so that we can imitate it. And then this is another famous one. "Imitate me just as I also imitate Christ." And so there's really this whole chain, this whole web of mimetic relationships that form what today people are starting to call life-on-life discipleship. So here's another quote from Shogren who says it well.

"Mimesis is not the same as an instructional video, which asks the viewer to imitate a skill set without concerning themselves with the moral character of the instructor. Mimetic discipleship is the imitation of the pattern holistically, and the pattern is in theory always on duty. Today, mimesis has largely fallen out of favor in Western education, which tends to encourage students to discover their own personal style. Nevertheless, imitation of a master is widely used to teach such divergent skills as cooking, art, gardening, home renovation, tennis, the martial arts, golf, aerobics, and even surgery.

The church often looks at this potent method, which can be employed to teach the basic skills of prayer, Bible study, teaching methods, and others." Okay, and a lot of you are in trades or an occupation where somebody can't go to it from zero to 60 by reading a book. They've got to be alongside you, watching, imitating.

My field of medicine, this is absolutely how it functions, where you have years where you are apprenticed under somebody who is more experienced and senior to you in order to be able to responsibly handle lives. So this is right at the heart of what discipleship looks like in the Gospels, in Acts, and in the epistles.

Okay, so hopefully now I've convinced you, or at least challenged you, to say that reading this Gospels and Acts for description alone breaks down. There's nothing mimetic remaining. You can't even begin to fulfill some of the teachings that we see internal to the New Testament, like imitate me, follow me, those kinds of things. And so this proves to be, in the end, a false dichotomy.

Okay, I want to also hearken back now to something that we talked about earlier this morning, which I think is one of the absolute keys to read Acts. We looked at this in the last session. We won't go through it in the level of detail we did, but I cited John Stott, who proposed this title for the book of Acts, "The Continuing Words and Deeds of Jesus by His Spirit Through His Apostles."

That Acts has a main character who is Jesus himself. Acts is all about Jesus' heavenly ministry. Volume 1, the Gospel according to Luke, is about Jesus' earthly ministry. And Jesus continues to speak and to act by His Spirit through His apostles.

And so we are watching Jesus at work in the book of Acts. He's the head. The apostles and other Christians are the body. And Jesus is at work there. It's a beautiful concept. The Christian is supposed to view himself or herself as a member of the body of Jesus continuing His ministry.

Because Jesus is the same as He was in Acts. In Hebrews, it says that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. It's the same Jesus. When we watch how Jesus operates, when we watch how He moves in the book of Acts, this should be the grounding. This should be the basis of our continued extension in His ministry until the end of the age.

I had mentioned this before as well. I'll just quickly talk about this for those who weren't there from this morning. Paul and Barnabas see themselves as Jesus continued. This is an astonishing thought, I think, and an absolutely amazing thought. They quote from the book of Isaiah, chapter 49, and it says in Acts 13, "For so the Lord has commanded us," us being Paul and Barnabas, "I have set you as a light to the Gentiles that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth." And this command is, or sorry, this promise is given to Jesus.

I should say this vocation is given to Jesus in Isaiah 49. And Paul and Barnabas see that as a command that is given to them. And Barnabas isn't even one of the 12. I mean, he's a more regular person here. And he sees himself as receiving the promises of Jesus.

Okay, this is what it means to be in Christ. You know, this is one of the most popular expressions that Paul uses, for good reason, to be in Christ. The promises that are given to Jesus, the vocation that is given to him, is given to us if we are indeed in Christ. So this is crucial to how to correctly interpret the book of Acts.

I want to spend a little bit of time now talking about the issue of continuation versus cessation. And so let me just briefly define these terms, and then I'll show you some hopefully helpful slides on this. So these two terms, in case you're not familiar, are basically a reference to the ongoing nature of miracles, the ongoing nature of, say, prophecy, of those who can do the supernatural in some sense.

And those who advocate for a continuationist perspective believe that that type of function, miracles, prophecy, potentially speaking in tongues, those kinds of things will continue until the end of the age. A cessationist believes that those terminated in the first century with the apostles.

So those are the two views there. Now, it is very important to realize that this is much more of a graded scale than a black and white issue. This is a table that I got from somebody else. There's a lot on here, and I'm not going to go through this in any level of detail. But I just want to point out that there is a tremendous range of how to think about this continuationist versus cessationist perspective. So at one extreme is saying all the gifts have ceased and not even a miracle has occurred since New Testament times.

Some of you know Warfield Gresham Macon, a very influential scholar of the early 20th century. There are people who have advocated this kind of position, that miracles indeed have completely stopped. And then you have, on the other extreme, the more Pentecostal view, which emphasizes the speaking in tongues.

Glossolalia is this speaking in tongues. It's the fancy Greek word or English word based on Greek there that you'll see sometimes as the initial evidence of spirit baptism. And there's whole denominations like Assemblies of God that are built on this.

And you can see some of the names here. But then you have a continuum, and you have, say, in the middle, open but cautious, where somebody says scripture doesn't indicate a cessation of gifts, but they look around at the modern practice and they think, "Ah, that doesn't really look too much like what I think the Bible is saying." And so they're open, but they're not excited about what they're currently seeing. A lot of people are in this camp.

Some people maybe lean a little bit more continuationist here. Signs continue, but they don't like some of the extreme labels here. They're not as into tongues. And so you can see some of the names here, John Piper, Francis Chan, others that are somewhat reformed might be here. So again, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this other than to say that it's a complex issue. There's more of a graded scale here. And because it's one of these issues in which there are gradations, this isn't a black or white issue, I do think that we have to have a lot of mercy and understanding here as people land in slightly different positions along this spectrum.

All that being said, I want to point out another observation here, which is a fascinating graph here that was done by someone named Joel Arnold. And so he tallied up how many miracles happen in the Bible. And according to his work, there are 265 of these. And what he does, and I know this is really small, you may not be able to read it here with the Zoom transmission, but what he does is he plots these miracles by a book of the Bible. So you probably can't read it, but it says Genesis, Exodus, and then all the way over to Acts, Romans, Hebrews, Revelation here.

And when you plot these 265 miracles here, what you notice is that there's clusters. And there are especially three clusters that stand out. So by the way, this first hump here is just creation itself. So I would agree that's miraculous. So I think we can say that that's safely in that category. But the first major cluster is the Exodus. And think about the 10 plagues and all that happened with going from Egypt into the promised land. So many miracles there. And so that's this peak here.

And then there's another peak that happens here with Elijah and Elisha. So again, for reasons that we don't fully understand, miracles just break out at that time. And we see this cluster almost like a constellation of stars that are closely grouped together.

But you notice there's a lot of periods here where there's very little. You know, I was thinking earlier when I was preparing, I was thinking, "Okay, can I think of good examples of miracles in the life of David?" And I was struggling with that, you know, because, I mean, you could construe the David and Goliath as a miracle maybe, but it's not necessarily supernatural. I mean, I think God favored him, of course, but you know, the kinds of physics-defying miracles that we see with parting the Red Sea or manna falling from heaven, you know, it's harder, even with David, who's the man after God's own heart. And there are these relatively dry periods there. The third cluster, of course, happens here with Jesus.

And here with Jesus, we see that Jesus and the apostles, we see another cluster. And so these clusters, these three major clusters, and there's other minor ones, to be sure, that happen that we won't get into here, but they indicate that even if you are a continuationist, it doesn't necessarily mean that there will be miracles happening constantly at every week, at every turn of event that happens there. That's not necessarily a responsible reading of scripture here. It is, I think, probably more fair to think of them as stars in the sky with being clustered in these constellations. There may be times and reasons that we can't possibly understand why God favors that if you are a continuationist.

I want to look a little bit at some of the hermeneutics of this. And I want to look at a letter here from Paul, who is writing this in prison. He's in prison in Rome. And it's a very beautiful and very important passage where he says, "I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with long suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace." It's a major theme of Ephesians, is unity.

And then he lists seven ones, seven ONEs. There is one body, one Spirit, just as you were called, and one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all.

But to each of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, he says, when he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men. And then down in verse 11, he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some shepherds and teachers for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. And notice the termination point. Till we all come to the unity of the faith, there's that word unity again, and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a perfect man. Notice the word perfect. To the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.

Now I will put my cards on the table, so to speak, and say that I am a continuationist. I do advocate that position, and I respect those who are in different places. But one of the reasons for that is simply looking at passages like this and asking, okay, well, he himself, Jesus, gives these individuals, let's take prophets as an example.

Until what point? Until we come to the unity of the faith, knowledge of the Son of God, to be perfect, to the fullness of Christ. Do we need prophetic witness in order to get there? Yeah, we do. We need prophets in order to achieve that status that we have not yet attained. I think all of us would agree that we are not yet at this termination point yet. And so it is looking at passages like Ephesians, which again is embedded in Acts. Okay, so this passage is given, is written by Paul when he's in a Roman prison in Acts chapter 28. And so we ought to visualize him being there. And Paul is saying that Jesus is giving these individuals for this purpose until this goal is reached.

I think it is a reasonable position that until that goal is reached, we can safely assume that Jesus will continue to provide for his church until that goal is reached. Another way to think about this is to ask the question and to answer the question, are we supposed to, as the church, express the fullness of Jesus?

And I hope we would all answer yes. We are supposed to be expressing Jesus to the world around us. Was Jesus an apostle? Yes, he's called an apostle in Hebrews. Was he called a prophet? Yes, he is the prophet according to the fulfillment of prophecy from Deuteronomy. Was he an evangelist, the greatest evangelist of all time? Was he a shepherd? He says, I'm the good shepherd. Was Jesus a teacher? That's the most common title that people address Jesus with. I put these out there to ask the question, we as the church, and no one individual can do this, but we as the church ought to be manifesting these as a way to express the fullness of Jesus to the world around us.

These are some of the arguments that are made by the continuationists. Now, what I want to do is I want to make an appeal not just biblically, but also historically. And so we're going to look at the early church and the early Anabaptists as well.

Both of those groups were also continuationists, which may or may not surprise you if you've looked into the issue, and we can discuss why. And then I want to return to Acts and how to read Acts in the light of all this. So continuationism in the early church, there are a number of authors who speak to this. The Epistle of Barnabas in the early second century, he, Jesus, personally prophesies in us and personally dwells in us. Justin Martyr here speaks about one person receiving spirit of understanding, counsel, strength, healing, foreknowledge.

Very interesting here that he's mentioning healing and foreknowledge. He's saying the prophetical gift remains with us even to the present time for numberless demoniacs throughout the whole world and in your city. Many of our Christian men have healed and do heal these demoniacs.

Irenaeus, I'm not going to go through this in a lot of detail here, but he talks about people in his day, which is now the second half of the second century, who are doing miracles here in the name of Jesus, exhibiting foreknowledge, seeing visions, uttering prophetic expressions, healing the sick, laying hands.

And he even claims that the dead have been raised up and remain among us for many years. Hold that thought, but that's a bold claim. And he's also claiming that the prophetic gifts are lasting Tertullian. And now around the turn of the third century, what is nobler than to tread underfoot the gods of the nations to exercise evil spirits, to perform cures, to seek divine revelations, and to live to God? These are the pleasures. These are the spectacles that befit Christian men. Origen similarly talks about doing exorcism, cures.

He says that the prophetic and miraculous gifts are not with the Jews anymore, but with the Christians. And he's saying, "I have witnessed these myself." I will point out, if we want to talk about this in the Q&A, it's a topic that I'm very interested in, that tongues for him are human languages.

And I have drawn great intrigue from this. I was raised in charismatic churches myself, and I have a lot of attraction to Origen's proposal for reasons we can talk about if there's interest. Let's jump to early Anabaptism here, just very briefly.

And we're going to talk both about how they read Acts as well as this continuationist idea. The early Anabaptists were renowned for taking this concept of the imitation of Christ much further than their peers. They criticized the Protestant of their day for missing what they saw to be essential to discipleship. So they saw in Jesus and in Acts much to be imitated. And this became almost a signature of early Anabaptism.

They very much saw themselves as being in continuity with the church in Acts and took descriptive passages as prescriptive. And I want to look here at a primary source of early Anabaptism, which is one of the most important early sources, which is a document that is called the Congregational Order. So this circulates with the Schleithan Confession. We don't know a lot about it. Michael Sattler is thought to be the author of Schleithan. He may have composed the Congregational Order as well, but it, like I said, it's a document that was basically stapled to, in colloquial terms, stapled to Schleithan here. And I want you to read this with me and see if you detect anything from the Gospels or from Acts as we read this.

Okay, so number one, the brothers and sisters should meet at least three or four times a week to exercise themselves in the teaching of Christ and his apostles, and heartily to exhort one another to remain faithful to the Lord as they have pledged.

When the brothers and sisters are together, they shall take up something to read together. The one to whom God has given the best understanding shall explain it. The other should be still and listen so that there are not two or three carrying on a private conversation bothering the others. The Psalter shall be read daily at home.

Let none be frivolous in the church of God, neither in words nor in actions. Good conduct shall be maintained by them all also before the heathen. Number four, when a brother sees his brother erring, he shall warn him according to the command of Christ and shall admonish him in a Christian and brotherly way as everyone is bound and obliged to do out of love. We're going to read the whole document here. There's only one more page.