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. So we'll get started here in just a minute,

and when we do get started, we're starting at the beginning of Acts of the Apostles Chapter 13.

As I always say, by the time people are hearing this on the internet the first Bible study on the book of

Acts will be available there too so you can hear my introduction to the book there

to give you an idea of the lag time today they posted the end of John chapter 17

so we're a little bit ahead the end of John chapter 17. Uh-huh. Wow.

So we're a little bit ahead of where the podcast is on the internet.

But at any rate, to get us caught up to where we are now.

Last time, we were talking about really the beginnings of the church in Antioch,

where St. Paul and Barnabas were ministering,

and we heard some about the further persecution of the church in Jerusalem under Herod, that Herod had killed St. James, the son of Zebedee, St. John's brother, and then had sort of gotten his comeuppance shortly thereafter when he was eaten by worms and died we are told in that order and so we've seen that this pattern that's developed already here in the first half of the book of Acts, where the

church is growing under the power of the Holy Spirit. It's also being persecuted by sort of the,

beginning with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem and now also Herod and now also others. But every time they attack the church and persecute it, they end up just spreading the church out more and the church grows more.

So there's a famous saying from later in church history describing all of the martyrdom in the

Roman Empire before St. Constantine that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.

That sort of, you know, as much as they tried to destroy it, it just blossomed into new

life and growth.

And so as we pick up here, again,

we also read about, after Herod had killed St. James,

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