Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest,

serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started in just a second,

we're going to be picking up in Acts of the Apostles

Chapter 10, verse 1.

As I always mention, by the time people are hearing this recording,

the recording of the first Bible study on the book of Acts will be available for people to listen to too, so you can go back and listen to my introduction to the book.

But to sort of get us caught up to where we are right now, in the Acts of the Apostles, where we were picking up. We had read about how originally

St. Luke starts by again telling us the story of Christ's ascension into heaven. And he

says to the disciples that they're going to be as witnesses in Jerusalem and then in all Judea

and then Samaria and then to the ends of the earth.

And so we've seen already how that's sort of the plan that's been sort of unfolding in Acts as we go.

Most of the early chapters of Acts took place just in Jerusalem itself, even though the community was sort of growing and successful

there. It hadn't really expended much beyond Jerusalem other than people who had come to Jerusalem

heard about Jesus and then gone back home, of course taking it with them. But then we saw the episode where St. Stephen, one of the first deacons, had been

stoned to death for his faith by the chief priests and the rulers of the people.

And after he had been stone to death, that persecution that broke out sort of caused people

to scatter a little bit.

So a lot of people then left Jerusalem.

And that had the side effect, even though the intent, of course, the people persecuting

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