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 get started in just a moment.

We'll be starting in Acts, the Apostles, Chapter 9, verse 1.

And I'll say again what I usually say, which is by the time people are hearing this recording,

the first Bible study on the Book of Acts will be a bit recording will also be available to be listened to, but to get us caught up to where we're going to be picking up here in Acts chapter 9.

There have been a couple of things happening in the last few chapters.

The main thing for our purposes tonight that we need to remember is the fact that we read about the martyrdom of St. Stephen where St. Stephen was killed,

he was stoned to death, sort of mob justice led by the chief priests and the religious authorities

in Jerusalem, who he was brought in front of

kind of untrumped up charges, but then he proceeded to preach to them, both defending himself

and accusing them of having killed their Messiah.

And as we remember, these were, we're right now in about 35 AD, so it's not people like you or your ancestors who did this.

These were the actual people who had convicted Jesus, you know, a couple of years before

who St. Stephen said this to.

And so they did not take kindly to that.

And so they drug him outside the city.

And at that point, he was stoned to death.

And that then caused sort of a more general tide of persecution

and ill will toward the sort of nascent Christian community in Jerusalem and that led to the

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