The Great Sending, Chapter 31

Reverand Dr. Jon Diefenthaler

There is a connection between the words of Jesus in Acts 1:8 and the scope of God’s mission in Acts 8. While it begins with God’s chosen people in Jerusalem, this mission knows no boundaries. It extends to “the ends of the earth” and includes all members of the human family. While the apostles stayed in Jerusalem, Philip became the one who ventured into the foreign and forbidden territory of the racially and religiously mixed Samaritans. Jesus had already been there in John 4, when he transformed the life of the woman at the well in Sychar. So there was all the more reason for Philip to come to an unnamed “city in Samaria.”

Later in Acts 8, the Holy Spirit directed Philip to travel to Gaza in Judea, to meet with a black man from the foreign country of Ethiopia. This same man was also sexually compromised, a “eunuch” who according to the law of God in Deuteronomy 23:1 was not permitted to join “the assembly of the Lord.” With the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, however, the gospel breaks down barriers of race and sexual identity, and the mission of God that has become our mission must now include all members of the human family. Here again in Acts 8:38, it was Philip who demonstrated this truth when he baptized this Ethiopian eunuch.

According to Acts 8:1, one of the major factors that prompted Philip’s journey was a “great persecution” that broke out against the church in Jerusalem, one that precipitated a diaspora of many followers of Jesus “throughout Judea and Samaria.” Members of the body of Christ in today’s world can expect to find themselves at times on a road similar to the one Jesus took: they can expect to experience resistance, rejection, and a measure of suffering as we seek to carry God’s mission forward. At the same time, however, we can in faith persevere, believing that God is fully able in some way to incorporate the adversity we are experiencing into his grand design to save our broken world. The church father Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Ask any of today’s leaders from the fast-growing Lutheran churches in Africa, and they are more than likely to affirm this truth on the
basis of their own experience of persecution.

What just might happen, therefore, whenever we are forced to leave the familiar confines of our church-era Jerusalem and to open our eyes to the post-church world of 21st century America? If anything, Acts 8 gives us Philip’s example to consider. When he “proclaimed the Christ” in Samaria with what he did as well as said in one of its cities, people’s lives were changed for the better. All were liberated from the burden of their sins. Some of them were even set free from the demons that possessed them and the crippling disabilities that only could have made their daily lives incredibly miserable. As a result, Luke tells us that “there was great joy in that city.”

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