Utumishi Blog

How do the apostles and other disciples preach the Prophets in the book of Acts?

• They preach Christ crucified – Peter’s expository sermon on Joel (and a passage from Joel that seems at first sight to be more about the Spirit than Christ) begins, “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth… crucified” (Acts 2:22-23). Philip picks up on Isaiah 53 and “beginning with this scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35).  It may be true that less that 2% of OT prophecy is specifically Messianic in the direct sense of Isaiah 53 but the apostles have got the message of Luke 24:26-27 that the prophets’ business was preaching the sufferings and glories of Christ (Acts 3:18; 10:43; 26:22-23).
• They hold out the OT hope of the resurrection – Paul sees his message as completely consistent with the hope of the prophets and their hearers through the centuries. It’s focus in the resurrection day which has now been guaranteed and begun in Christ (Acts 24:15,21; 26:6-8). Paul and the apostles are not trading in cheap quick worldly hopes but holding out an awesome Christ-centred eternity.
• They transpose certain OT themes and imagery into a NT key – We have discussed before how the OT curses and blessings are racketed up and these are massively important when it comes to handling the prophets (see Acts 3:26).  Other themes include the land, the Temple, Jerusalem and Israel which are seen through the lens of Christ as prototype or synecdoche for the New Creation, Christ and the Church. E.g. look at Acts 15:14-17 in context where the days of the restoration of the Davidic ‘tent’ are understood as the days of the church.  As we were reminded at ‘Raising the Bar’ in February the way you know when to make these sort of transpositions is simply by knowing our Bibles better – there are no short cuts. We need to know the whole Bible story more and more in all its scope and detail and gradually see more and more of how and why the NT makes its myriad connections and allusions to the OT.
• They don’t over-allegorise – The apostles don’t go to the extreme of reading gospel meanings in every single word of the prophetic texts. They understood that sometimes the prophets use poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes they are speaking to a specific historical context, sometimes they are making more shadowy and distant prophecy.  It’s interesting to compare how Stephen (Acts 7:42-43) and Qumran (esp. CD 7:14-15) interpret the same passage – Amos 5:25-27. Qumran uses all sorts of linguistic tricks to read the ‘tent’, the ‘star’ and the ‘images’ allegorically as referring to their righteous community being persecuted and forced into exile – the complete reverse of the passage’s meaning. Stephen takes the plain sense and historical reference of Amos seriously as talking about the idolatry of Israel in the wilderness and the unstoppable slide from there to the Babylonian Exile.
• They argue from the text – You see Paul reasoning, explaining, proving from the Scriptures in Acts 17:2-3 and again at the end of Acts we find “from morning to evening he expounded to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus from… the Prophets” (Acts 28:23). He wasn’t just shouting at them. He wasn’t just using emotive anecdotes.  He was appealing to the minds of his hearers, attempting to show them from the words and clauses and arguments of the Prophets that Jesus really was the one they promised.