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.

In just a minute, we'll be picking up in Acts of the Apostles chapter 5, verse 12.

And I'll say my usual that by the time people are hearing this on the internet,

the first Bible study on the Book of Acts will be also available there.

So you'll be able to go back and listen to that if you want to hear my introduction to the whole book.

To get us caught up sort of to where we are now, we're still in the very early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles.

What we've been reading about most recently has been sort of the way of life of the early Christian community. We've seen that the life of the early Christian community in Jerusalem is a continuation of the life of Christ,

the way that St. Luke is presenting it. Remember at the very beginning of Acts 1, he said that in the previous book he had talked about

all that Jesus had begun to do and teach, and so now the apostles and the early Christian

community are sort of continuing.

And that's been in both good and bad ways.

So we've seen since the coming of the Holy Spirit, we've seen the apostles doing miracles like the miracles that Jesus did.

We've seen them teaching, even in the temple the way Jesus taught.

And we've also seen the Jewish authorities who had previously put Jesus to death also beginning to come after the apostles as they were

hauled before the Sanhedron. And so it's a continuation in both of those ways. And this is what

Jesus promised would happen, remember? Most recently when we were going through the gospel of

John, remember Jesus said to his disciples,

you know, if the world hated me, it will hate you.

You know, if they persecuted me, they'll persecute you.

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