Zachary Peters

Acts chapter 28. Boy, this was tough. I don’t like endings. I haven’t finished the last season of The Office because I don’t like that it is the end. I’ve watched several episodes of the last season, but I haven’t watched the final few. I won’t do it. Oftentimes, I read The Lord of the Rings — or listen to it — once a year, and sometimes, I won’t finish it. I’ll get to the very last couple of chapters and think, I know what happens, but I won’t finish it. Similarly, I’m not necessarily excited about finishing the book of Acts. First of all, it is my favorite book of the Bible — that and Proverbs. And so I don’t want to leave it.

But also, this was not an easy passage to preach. This is Palm Sunday, but I won’t necessarily have a Palm Sunday message today. This is our last sermon in Acts for a bit — but who knows.

Paul has been sent to Rome. He has survived a shipwreck, and now, after spending the winter on Malta — about three months — they start their last leg of the journey to Rome.

This last section of Acts is very condensed. We miss the three months on the island. We miss a lot of the details we might have in other places in Acts — the final stops before Rome, the on-foot journey that would have taken a couple of weeks. We don’t know why it’s condensed. There are guesses, and we’ll touch on that in a moment, but it is condensed.

Right before they reach the city of Rome proper, Paul meets some fellow Christians along the way. This encourages him, and the word spreads that Paul is there. This is just a small side note, but it’s worth pausing on: we already know that there are Christians in Rome. We’ve seen it earlier in Acts and in some of Paul’s letters, where he talks about wanting to go see the church in Rome. I find it interesting that while Paul is held in high regard — along with Peter and others in the New Testament — there were clearly others, unnamed, who were doing the work of the gospel. That’s just encouraging to me. It’s not about a name in a book. It’s not about being famous or getting personal glory. Normalcy produced growth. Everyday people doing the right thing produced growth. That’s how the church got to Rome.

When they get into Rome, Paul is allowed to stay by himself in his own home, under house arrest. He has one guard with him at all times. That guard would have been chained to his wrist throughout the day, with guards rotating in shifts around the clock. It’s no wonder, then, that in Philippians we see the gospel becoming a talking point among the palace guard — they are spending all day with this man. It’s going to make an impression if you’re with someone like Paul, who’s talking about Jesus all the time.

After three days in Rome, he gathered some of the Jewish people to talk to them, briefly recounting how he had arrived from Jerusalem to this point.

The Scripture

Acts 28:20–31 (ESV)

For this reason, therefore, I have asked to see you and speak with you, since it is because of the hope of Israel that I am wearing this chain.

And they said to him, “We have received no letters from Judea about you, and none of the brothers coming here has reported or spoken any evil about you. But we desire to hear from you what your views are, for with regard to this sect we know that everywhere it is spoken against.”

When they had appointed a day for him, they came to him at his lodging in greater numbers. From morning till evening he expounded to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets. And some were convinced by what he said, but others disbelieved. And disagreeing among themselves, they departed after Paul had made one statement: “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet:

‘Go to this people, and say, “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed; lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.’

Therefore let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen.”

He lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

A Common Pattern

What we have here is a common pattern throughout the book of Acts. Paul arrives at a place, and the first thing he does is go to the Jewish community. He is Jewish, and so the most natural entry point for his gospel message is to go to the people who should have understood it best. There is some acceptance, and often there is plenty of rejection. From that point of rejection, he typically moves on to the Gentiles — who seem willing to listen, even though they don’t fully comprehend the history of the salvation story.

Of course, Paul quotes a relevant prophetic text here. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

A few contextual notes: everyone say context. Scripture is not useless without context, but if we’re talking about studying Scripture, context is everything — because people can make Scripture say almost anything when they tear it away from its surrounding structure.

The Jewish people Paul is speaking to here may have just been allowed back into Rome. We know from earlier in Acts that the Jewish people had been expelled from Rome — partly because of Christianity, since Christians and Jewish people were often seen as the same group with slightly different beliefs, and the whole community was kicked out. That’s actually how Paul first meets Aquila and Priscilla — he encounters them in Greece after they’ve just left Rome. By this point, several years later, the Jewish people have been allowed back in. But that may explain why this group seems somewhat uninformed about the Christian movement — they were going back and forth, ships passing in the night.

Paul seems to have had great success with the Gentiles in Rome. And notably, Acts doesn’t dwell on the Jewish people’s failure to hear the good news — it ends on the note that the gospel was shared with the Gentile people with success.

Don’t Waste the Waiting

Even with a relatively comfortable imprisonment — house arrest, his own space, relative freedom, people coming to see him — this was still a trying time. Two years is two years. And keep in mind, Paul wanted to come to Rome, but I’m sure in his mind it probably looked a little different than this.

But he’s not wasting time. This is a sermon unto itself, and we’ve touched on it before during other imprisonments of Paul: he doesn’t waste the waiting. He doesn’t stop doing what he’s called to do just because he can’t do what he thought he was going to do. During this time, he writes several of what are called the prison letters — Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon.

Tradition tells us, and there are some small hints of this in Scripture itself, that Paul was released for a time from this imprisonment. He’s held for two years in Rome, and then from some of his other writings and the writings of those who were supposedly his disciples, it seems he was released and continued ministering — he may have even made it to Spain. But eventually he was brought back. From that second imprisonment, we have the pastoral epistles.

Never waste the waiting. We all have goals and plans. We all have ideas of what we want in the future. Don’t waste those in-between seasons. There are never wasted moments with God. You can be productive right now, even if you’re not where you think you should be. Paul always was.

One Final Technical Note

Acts is commonly dated to around 65 AD — about thirty years after the resurrection of Jesus. It is one of the earliest circulating books of the Bible that we can date with confidence. And it is believed that Paul was martyred somewhere around 64 to 67 AD. This may explain why the ending feels rushed. From a practical standpoint, if you are Luke and you hear that Paul has been killed in Rome, it might inspire you to cap off what you’re writing and get it out there — to unify people in the wake of something stunning. That, to me, lends weight to the idea that this condensed ending is not an accident. There are practical, Spirit-led reasons for it.

What to Conclude About This Conclusion

Let me start with the hard thing. It shouldn’t be hard, but because of the day and age we live in, it is.

Of all the things Paul did after arriving in Rome, the one thing Luke focused on most was his witness to the Jewish people — verses 17 through 29. Luke doesn’t mention the witness to the palace guards that we see referenced in Philippians (Phil. 1:12–14). Luke, who was himself a Gentile, seems to have chosen — and been led by the Holy Spirit — to close this book with a focus on Jewish evangelism. It was an important theme to him, and it’s woven throughout the entire book.

While Paul certainly moved on from individual Jewish people and specific groups in his ministry when they became obstinate, he never gave up on the Jewish people as a whole. He lived with a constant ache in his heart over their unbelief (Rom. 9:1–3) and kept trying to do what he could to bring them to Christ.

Paul uses a familiar text here — Isaiah 6:9–10 — to explain Jewish resistance to the gospel. We also see Jesus reference this same passage when teaching in the Gospels. In Romans, Paul used two Old Testament texts (Deut. 29:4; Isa. 29:10) to convey a similar idea — that God gave a spirit of hardness in response to continued rebellion. In keeping with the general principle in Romans 1:18–32, the hardness of heart among the Jewish people is presented as God’s judgment for their ongoing rebellion. And yet in Romans, Paul also says that when the Jewish people see the blessings of God coming to the Gentiles, they will be provoked to jealousy and turn to God (Rom. 11:11–16).

In other words, Gentile Christians — us — play a vital part in the process of God drawing the Jewish people back to Himself. Your relationship with God, your testimony, is in part a symbol intended to provoke in them a return to their Savior.

Here’s the problem: that testimony is completely ruined when we let antisemitism run rampant and unchecked in the church. And unfortunately, in this day and age, people — including people our age and younger — increasingly find ways to villainize a people group that is no more evil than anyone else in the world. Guard your hearts against that attitude. It is a spirit of the Antichrist. Not the Antichrist himself, but a spirit the Antichrist will use to fulfill his purposes.

This temptation goes all the way back to Haman, to Pharaoh, and to Hitler wearing a cross. It is not new.

It should be beyond question, given the plain contents of the New Testament, that we should greatly desire — and even work toward — Jewish people coming to know their Savior. He is their Savior, by the way. They are not the enemy. There is no biblical or theological basis for antisemitism.

What the enemy does is take legitimate questions about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, about prophecy, about land, about what all of that means in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus — and twist them to create division in the church.

This is not about supporting or not supporting a government. This is not about politics or land. This is about understanding that our mission is to the Jewish people just as it is to the atheist at our office. God is not done with them. If we take seriously the plain reading of Scripture, we cannot selectively choose which parts we apply that to. And clearly, in the New Testament, God is not done drawing the people of Israel to Himself:

God wants them. Just like He wanted you.

The Old Testament and the New

“Testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets.”

Paul often does this — with Jewish audiences and Gentile audiences alike. He turns to Scripture, which for him was only the Old Testament, since the books of the New Testament hadn’t been written or collected yet. He was writing many of them. And he turns to these people, who should have known the Old Testament, and tries to help them connect the dots, which, to me, are fairly obvious.

I’m always stunned when I read the Old Testament and see how perfectly it connects with the New Testament. These documents are, at times, thousands of years apart in their formation. The Torah — the first five books of the Bible — was written and compiled thousands of years before the New Testament. Some of the other books were written hundreds of years before. And yet they are aligned. They point to the same thing.

When Jesus arrives on the scene, something happens to all of those older texts. He doesn’t abolish them — He unlocks them. Every connection gets rebuilt. The entire way we read the Old Testament is radically changed because of who Jesus is and what He did. He spent a good deal of His ministry re-aligning His listeners to the correct understanding of what those scriptures actually meant.

In light of the New Testament, we are called to step back into the Old Testament and see it in a brand new way — or at least the way God always intended. When we look at the sacrifice of Isaac, it meant one thing before Jesus. After Jesus, it means something richer and fuller. When we read about the parting of the Red Sea, it was a spectacular event — but because of Jesus, it means something more. The same with the Psalms, the Proverbs, any of the prophecies.

And here’s what’s remarkable about those prophecies in particular: they had immediate meaning for the people receiving them in the moment. But God’s sovereignty is such that they still have meaning two thousand years later, because of Jesus.

And this really only applies if you are saved and part of the church. And yet — despite all of this, despite this beautiful, unbroken thread of Jesus woven through thousands of years of Scripture — we somehow still find ways to doubt God. We still choose to live in fear and anxiety. We forget. We fail to remember who God is, what He has done, and what He is still doing.

He is still working. He is still moving.

And the world needs to know that. We have to proclaim it. Like Paul, we have to live it.

Share the Gospel

Now, while all of the above is important — to Luke and to us — it ultimately fits within the greater envelope of the entire book of Acts. That envelope is labeled: share the gospel.

The church grew because individuals took personal responsibility for carrying out the mission every single day. We see it with Peter and John. We see it with Philip, with Barnabas, Apollos, Silas, Stephen, and Paul. We see it in all the small Christian groups that emerge in places Paul visits — sometimes there are already believers there before he arrives. It’s a testament to nameless, ordinary people deciding that spreading the gospel is not someone else’s job. It’s not the pastor’s job to talk to your neighbor about Jesus. It’s not your dad’s job or your mom’s job. It is your individual calling.

Share the gospel. Share it at home with your children. Share it with your extended family. Share it with your friends. Share it at work. Share it at the gym. Share it with a Hindu. Share it with a Muslim. Share it with a Mormon. Share it with the woke lady who’s yelling at you for some reason you can’t quite comprehend. Share it when there might be negative consequences. Share it when it hurts. Share it when you hurt. Share it when it’s dark. Share it when it’s bright. Share it when things are good. Share it when things are bad. Share the gospel.

It is your divine calling. You don’t need Jesus to appear to you the way He appeared to Paul. You’ve already got it — in Scripture, as the word of God for your life. Share the gospel.

You want the church to grow? Not just this church — any church. It’s not about strategy. It’s not about the building. Those things have their place. But ultimately, growth comes from individuals taking personal responsibility for their calling — not to preach, not to teach, but simply to tell people there is a Savior who loves them and can transform their life.

The book of Acts ends. And I hate it. I want more. Where’s chapter 29? Where’s the epilogue? Where’s Acts, Part Two? We live in a society that loves a series — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight episodes, even when they get progressively worse. But we only got one book of Acts.

And while Acts ends physically, spiritually and theologically it is still going. You are a continuation of what happened in that book. Right here, right now. We have the same mission as the early church. We have the same connection to God, the same Savior, the same Holy Spirit, the same anointing, the same gifts, the same purpose. We ought to have the same passion and the same ability to walk into any situation believing that God can do something for His glory.

We’ve got to get to work.

I’ve been doing some studies recently — working on a couple of small books — and one thing that stands out is this: research suggests that somewhere between 86 and 92 percent of people in the United States believe in something beyond the material. Atheism grew for a while, but it’s leveled off and is actually shrinking. More people are moving toward a belief in something, even if they’re not sure what. In particular, among younger millennials, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha — they’re open. They may have wrong ideas about church. They may have some brokenness and broken ideologies to work through. But so did everyone Paul ever talked to.

Do you understand what Paul was walking into? He wasn’t walking into cities with established churches. He was walking into cities filled with temples. The people we rub shoulders with every day may know the term “Old Testament.” They might know something about a flood, or a man named Moses, or Adam and Eve — but they don’t have the foundational connection to Scripture that we might assume. We live in a post-Christian society. It is no longer the norm for people to understand the world the way we do. And we can either be frightened by that, or we can realize: the church has already been there before, and we’ve already had success there before.

The story is not over. Acts is not over. We still have the calling and the anointing to speak to people and connect them with a Savior they are already open to. They might not know His name yet. They might not understand what it means yet. But there are people who are hungry for something more. There are people who have everything materially and know it’s not enough. In the quiet moments — when they lay down at night and it gets still — there is an ache that tells them: there has to be something more.

And there is. And we have the answer. And we have to be passionate about sharing it.

Jesus Christ — our Lord and Savior, crucified and resurrected.

Let’s get to work.

One final note: I checked the downloads for the podcast recently, and apparently someone — or a group of people — in Germany has downloaded this podcast more than even people in my own hometown. To that random family in Germany (unless they’re using a VPN): reach out and let the church know you’re listening. We’d love to know who you are.