Posted by: Clayton Fopp
on 7 April, 2010
This coming Sunday we return to the book of Acts after a brief Easter detour into volume one - Luke’s Gospel. We return to find the early church facing troubles not only from outside, but also 
from within. If you’ve joined us at Trinity in the last few weeks and missed the introduction to Acts last month, here are a couple of brief reflections to help you understand where we’re up to in time for Sunday.
Although he seems to have written more of the New Testament than any other human author, Luke is mentioned by name only three times in the Bible. On each occasion, he is mentioned as accompanying the Apostle Paul. The major theme that Luke conveys in volume two of his work is that of the ongoing work of the risen and exalted Jesus, through his witnesses who are empowered by the Holy Spirit. Luke focuses especially on two of the messengers of the early church, Peter and Paul. He demonstrates how what God is doing through these two men and their fellow believers is a continuation and a fulfilment of what God has been doing for generations. In Luke’s understanding, the church is the fulfilment of God’s centuries old promises to draw people to himself, through his Messiah.
One of the potential dangers we face when reading Acts is to assume it is, in every episode, prescriptive – that is, prescribing patterns, structures and behaviour for today. But Luke did not intend for those Christians who came after him to imitate the Apostles and the other early Christians in every aspect of their life and ministry. For one thing, no one living today (or in the last nineteen hundred and something years) witnessed Jesus’ resurrection. We are therefore unable to exercise the exact ministry that the Apostles did which was to testify of their personal experience of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection (Acts 1:21 – 22). As one scholar has observed Acts is no more a blueprint for how to do missions or how to set up a church than it is for how to act when you are threatened with shipwreck.
Our ministry is a derivative ministry, an extension of the Apostles’ ministry. We have their witness and their words and we learn from these and use them to speak to others of Jesus life, death and resurrection. We have their example, we have the same Spirit of God dwelling in us and we have the very Word of God which was spoken to the church in the first century and which speaks to the church today!
Posted by: Clayton Fopp
on 17 March, 2010
“Silver and Gold I do not have…” Peter said to the crippled man, who lay begging at the Beautiful Gate of the Jerusalem temple. The rest of Peter’s sentence shows he has something even more valuable than silver or gold, faith in the powerful Lord Jesus Christ, and of this he is willing to give.
Scholars and archaeologists love to pore over excavations and historical records to identify the various locations described in the Bible. Sometimes their efforts are complicated by the fact that, as with the Beautiful Gate, no known sources other than the New Testament documents use a particular name. Nevertheless there is some scholarly consensus that the gate called “Beautiful” in Acts 3 should be identified with the Nicanor Gate, which was paid for by an extraordinarily wealthy Jewish man from Alexandria.
Unlike the other temple gates which were overlaid with silver and gold, the Nicanor gate was either constructed from, or covered with, sheets of Corinthian bronze. Items made out of Corinthian bronze were considered priceless, even more valuable than those made from silver and gold. The Roman historian Josephus recorded that the Nicanor Gate “far exceeded in value those plated in silver and set in gold.”
