📖 Acts Intensive — Unit 5: The Hand of the Lord at Antioch (Acts 9:32–12:24)

I. Peter on the Move

The last time we saw Peter in any extended scene he was preaching at Pentecost. Then Stephen died, the church was scattered, Saul was converted, and Luke turned the camera on the new convert. Now Luke turns it back to Peter, who is on the road. Acts 9:32 says simply, "Now it came to pass, as Peter went through all parts of the country, that he also came down to the saints who dwelt in Lydda."

At Lydda, on the coastal plain, Peter found a man named Aeneas who had been bedridden with paralysis for eight years. Eight years of being lifted from one corner of the room to another. Eight years of family members carrying him to the privy. Eight years of nobody asking his opinion because the answer was always going to be the same. Peter walked into that room and said, "Aeneas, Jesus the Christ heals you. Arise and make your bed" (Acts 9:34, NKJV). Notice the verb tense. Not will heal you. Not can heal you if you have enough faith. Jesus the Christ heals you, present tense, fact already accomplished. The man got up. He did not need a long course of physical therapy to teach his legs how to walk again. The Lord who made the legs in the womb can repair them in a sickbed in two seconds. Luke notes that the inhabitants of Lydda and the surrounding plain of Sharon, seeing him, turned to the Lord. One healing converted a region.

Then word came from the seacoast town of Joppa, a dozen miles to the west. A disciple named Tabitha — her Greek name was Dorcas, both meaning "gazelle" — had died. Luke pauses to tell us that this woman "was full of good works and charitable deeds" (Acts 9:36, NKJV). When Peter arrived, the widows of the town were weeping in the upper room and showing him the tunics and garments she had sewn for them while she was alive. Read that detail. The widows did not eulogize Tabitha with a list of her accomplishments. They held up her clothes. Some saints leave behind clothes that other people are wearing. Some saints leave behind nothing but a tax return. May the Lord let us be the first kind.

Peter put them all out, knelt down, prayed, turned to the body and said, "Tabitha, arise" (Acts 9:40, NKJV). The Aramaic original would have been Tabitha cumi — two syllables off from his Master's Talitha cumi in Mark 5:41. Peter was not freelancing. He had watched Christ raise a girl from the dead and he was repeating, almost syllable for syllable, what he had seen done. She opened her eyes. She sat up. He gave her his hand and she stood. The widows got their seamstress back, and many in Joppa believed on the Lord.

II. The Centurion in Caesarea

While Peter was still in Joppa, lodging at the house of one Simon a tanner — a man whose trade kept him ceremonially unclean by traditional Jewish standards, which is one of Luke's quiet little setups — God was already at work thirty miles up the coast in Caesarea. A man named Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian Regiment, was praying in his house at three o'clock in the afternoon. Luke tells us four things about this man before he ever meets Peter. He was "a devout man and one who feared God with all his household, who gave alms generously to the people, and prayed to God always" (Acts 10:2, NKJV). Devout. God-fearing. Generous. Prayerful. He was a Gentile in every blood-cell, but he was a Gentile who had sought after the God of Israel as far as a Gentile could without circumcision.

An angel appeared in his house and called him by name. "Your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial before God" (Acts 10:4, NKJV). What a sentence. Cornelius had been praying in his villa in Caesarea, perhaps for years, wondering if anyone in heaven was listening. Heaven was listening. Heaven knew his street address. The angel sent him to Joppa to fetch a man named Simon Peter, lodging by the seaside at the home of Simon the tanner. The Roman officer dispatched two of his servants and a devout soldier from his personal staff. They were on the road by morning.

III. The Rooftop in Joppa

About noon the next day, while the messengers from Caesarea were still on the road, Peter went up to the flat roof of Simon the tanner's house to pray. He was hungry. While dinner was being prepared, he fell into a trance and saw a sheet let down from heaven by its four corners, full of every kind of four-footed beast, reptile, and bird the Mosaic dietary laws had spent fifteen centuries forbidding. A voice said, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat" (Acts 10:13, NKJV). Peter recoiled. "Not so, Lord! For I have never eaten anything common or unclean" (Acts 10:14, NKJV). The voice answered, "What God has cleansed you must not call common" (Acts 10:15, NKJV). The vision came three times. Three times the unclean menu was lowered. Three times the voice corrected him. Three times the sheet went back up. While Peter was still trying to figure out what on earth the vision meant, the men from Caesarea knocked on the front gate.

The Holy Spirit told him plainly: go with these men, doubting nothing, for I have sent them. The next morning Peter and six brothers from Joppa traveled to Caesarea. Cornelius had filled his house with relatives and close friends. He met Peter at the door, fell down at his feet to worship him, and Peter pulled him up with the line every visiting preacher should keep on the inside of his collar: "Stand up; I myself am also a man" (Acts 10:26, NKJV). Then Peter walked into the room of Gentiles and said the line that broke five hundred years of separation: "You know how unlawful it is for a Jewish man to keep company with or go to one of another nation. But God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean" (Acts 10:28, NKJV). The vision had not been about food. It had been about people. The dietary code had been a fence keeping the holy people pure for the Messiah. Now the Messiah had come, and the fence was being taken down.

IV. God Shows No Partiality

Peter began to preach. The opening line of his sermon is one of the most important sentences any preacher has ever spoken. "In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him" (Acts 10:34–35, NKJV). The Greek phrase translated "shows no partiality" literally means God is not a face-receiver. He does not pick favorites by ethnicity, passport, or pedigree. The same gospel is offered on the same terms to every person on every continent. The Jew has no genetic advantage over the Gentile at the foot of the cross. The Greek has no philosophical leg up over the Hebrew at the foot of the cross. We all come the same way and we all leave the same way.

Peter preached Christ — His baptism, His ministry, His death, His resurrection, His command to preach forgiveness in His name. He had not finished his sermon. Luke says, "While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word" (Acts 10:44, NKJV). The Jewish brothers who had come with Peter were astonished — Luke's word — that the Holy Spirit had been poured out on Gentiles too. They heard them speaking in tongues and magnifying God. Peter said the only thing left to say. "Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" (Acts 10:47, NKJV). And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. The first wholesale Gentile conversion in church history happened in the living room of a Roman officer, and the Roman officer's whole household was saved with him. The Andrew Principle is loose in Caesarea: the man who comes to faith in his living room brings his living room with him.

Peter went back to Jerusalem. The brothers there were waiting for him with their arms folded. "You went in to uncircumcised men and ate with them!" (Acts 11:3, NKJV). Peter explained the whole thing in order. The trance, the sheet, the messengers, the sermon, the falling of the Spirit. He closed his explanation with a sentence that should silence every theological argument that pretends to know better than God. "If therefore God gave them the same gift as He gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?" (Acts 11:17, NKJV). The Jerusalem brethren had no answer. "They became silent; and they glorified God, saying, 'Then God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life'" (Acts 11:18, NKJV). The hardest theological mile in church history was just walked.

V. The Hand of the Lord at Antioch

Now Luke pulls back to a wider angle. Remember those scattered believers from Acts 8 — the ones the Stephen-persecution flung out of Jerusalem? Some of them had run all the way to Antioch in Syria, three hundred miles to the north, the third largest city of the Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria. At first these scattered Jewish believers had only spoken to Jews. But some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, started speaking to the Greeks too. And Luke writes the verse that has launched a thousand revivals: "And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord" (Acts 11:21, NKJV).

The hand of the Lord. That is an old Hebrew anthropomorphism — the hand stands for power and might. The hand acts. The hand strikes. The hand heals. The hand had moved in Acts 4 to extend the apostles' boldness, and now the hand was moving in Antioch to convert Greeks. Wherever the hand of the Lord shows up, three things show up with it. They showed up in Antioch in AD 42, they showed up in Wales in AD 1904, and they will show up in any town in any century where the Lord chooses to put His hand.

One: the hand of the Lord produces conversions. A great number believed and turned to the Lord. C. H. Spurgeon used to say that those who do not like numbers usually have none to report. Luke counted. Luke noted three thousand at Pentecost, then five thousand, and now "a great number" at Antioch. Numbers are not the only mark of revival, and a small church can be full of the Spirit while a large church can be empty as a tomb. But where the hand of the Lord is moving, the room fills up.

Two: the hand of the Lord produces commissions. When the Jerusalem church heard about Antioch, they sent Barnabas — the Son of Encouragement, the Cyprus levite, the same Barnabas who had vouched for Saul. Barnabas walked into Antioch, "saw the grace of God, and was glad, and encouraged them all that with purpose of heart they should continue with the Lord" (Acts 11:23, NKJV). Then he did a thing that ought to be commemorated in stained glass. He realized this revival had outgrown one preacher and went to find help. He took the long road north to Tarsus, hunted up Saul, and brought him back to Antioch. For an entire year these two men taught a multitude. From that taught multitude went out the first organized cross-cultural missionary effort in the history of the church. Antioch sent Paul. The hand of the Lord that produces conversions also produces commissions.

Three: the hand of the Lord produces celebrations. Barnabas, watching Greeks repent, was glad. Heaven, watching Greeks repent, was glad. The angels were running up and down the streets of gold over Antioch. Where the hand of the Lord is moving, there is rejoicing. Sour congregations are not Spirit-filled congregations. Glum churches are not awakened churches. The hand of the Lord brings joy with it as surely as fire brings light.

VI. Wales, 1904, and the Pattern That Repeats

Read what happened at Antioch and you have read what happened in Wales. In February 1904 a pastor named Joseph Jenkins stood up in front of his young people's society in the village of New Quay. He asked them one question. What does Jesus Christ mean to you? Embarrassed silence. They were nice young people. They opened in prayer. They sang hymns. They had treated the meeting as a kind of church social club. One brave boy, to fill the silence, said, "He is the hope of the world." Jenkins said, "That is not what I meant. What does He mean to you?" Dead silence again. And then a timid girl named Flory Evans, three weeks converted, stood up and said one sentence. "I love the Lord Jesus with all my heart." She sat down. Within weeks the village was on fire. By the time it had spread to a young coal miner named Evan Roberts — twenty-six years old, a layman who had been praying eleven years for revival — the Welsh churches were filled night and day. One hundred thousand people came to Christ in five months.

Conversions, commissions, celebrations. The Welsh judges were presented with white gloves — the old custom for a court session with no cases to try. Drunkenness was cut in half. Crime fell so far the police had nothing to do, so the constables organized themselves into Gospel quartets and went around singing in the churches. There was an energy shortage in the coal mines because the converted miners stopped cursing at their pit ponies, and the ponies — accustomed only to obscene commands — could no longer understand what was being asked of them. Illegitimate births dropped forty-four percent in several Welsh counties. The same revival swept Korea in 1907 with seventy-nine thousand converts in one year. The hand of the Lord is the same hand in every century. He has not changed. He has not retired. He is not waiting for our committee meetings. He moves where He is welcomed.

VII. Christians for the First Time, and a King Eaten by Worms

Luke drops one of the most consequential parentheses in the New Testament. "And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch" (Acts 11:26, NKJV). The Greek Christianoi originally seems to have been a slight bit derisive — little Christs, Christ's people, the way you might call Lincoln's followers Lincolnites. The pagans of Antioch, watching these believers go about town, noticed that they kept talking about, dressing in, smelling like, sounding like Christ. So the city stuck the label on them. They wore it forever. May people who watch you and me ever feel the need for that label.

Acts 12 picks up the story in a darker key. King Herod Agrippa I — the grandson of Herod the Great, the nephew of the Herod who beheaded John the Baptist — decided to score political points with the Jewish authorities by going after the church. He killed James the brother of John, the first apostle to be martyred, with the sword. James, son of Zebedee, the man Jesus had nicknamed Boanerges along with his brother John, son of Thunder. The first to follow may also be the first to fall. When Herod saw it pleased the Jews, he arrested Peter too, intending to bring him out to the people after Passover.

The church was praying for Peter without ceasing. An angel woke Peter in the prison cell, knocked off his chains, walked him past two guard posts and through an iron gate that opened by itself, and left him standing on a Jerusalem street in the small hours of the morning. Peter, thinking he was still seeing a vision, came to himself and went to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, where the prayer meeting was still going on. He knocked at the gate. A servant girl named Rhoda came to the door, recognized his voice, was so overjoyed she forgot to actually open the gate, and ran back inside to announce, "Peter is standing at the gate!" The praying believers told her she was crazy. They said it must be his angel. Peter kept knocking outside on the street. (Honest preachers admit the truth: many of us pray for things and then refuse to believe it when God answers.) Finally they opened the door and were astonished. One apostle killed, one apostle freed, in the same chapter. Luke does not tell us why; the Lord is sovereign over both, and the church kept praying.

Herod was not done. He went down to Caesarea, gave a public oration in royal robes, and the assembled crowd shouted, "The voice of a god and not of a man!" (Acts 12:22, NKJV). Acts tells us what happened next, and why. Josephus the Jewish historian records the same death from the outside; Luke records it from heaven's side. "Then immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he did not give glory to God. And he was eaten by worms and died" (Acts 12:23, NKJV). The Roman appointee who had killed an apostle with the sword was now himself eaten by worms. "But the word of God grew and multiplied" (Acts 12:24, NKJV). Herod is dead. The church is alive. That is the verdict.

VIII. Take These Three Lessons Home

First, God is not a face-receiver. The same Christ died for the centurion in Caesarea and the fisherman in Galilee and the housewife in Chapala. Repentance unto life has been granted to every nation. Stop ranking sinners on the scale of how easy they ought to be to convert. Cornelius was easier than Saul, Saul was easier than Stephen's executioners, and yet the Lord saved them all.

Second, where the hand of the Lord moves, conversions, commissions, and celebrations follow. Watch for them in your own ministry. If your church has none of the three, ask whether you are leaning on a method when you should be leaning on the Lord. Wales did not begin with a marketing campaign. It began with one timid girl saying she loved the Lord Jesus with all her heart.

Third, kings die and the word grows. Acts 12 ends with one of the great contrasts in Scripture: a worm-eaten despot at Caesarea and a multiplying gospel from one end of the empire to the other. The next time the cable news depresses you, read Acts 12:23–24 in succession. The Herods of every age go down. The word of God always grows. He buries His undertakers.

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