Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one is about Acts.

If you made me name my favorite book of the Bible that isn't Matthew, it would be Acts.

I did a whole series on the book of Acts.

It's my very first thing that I ever did on the internet back in the day.

I did a video series on Acts, like 90 episodes long.

It took me forever to get it done.

And I was just in love with this book because the historian, part of me, couldn't get enough of how much this perfectly overlapped with first century history.

But the other reason I love this book is because it's the very necessary story of the message of Jesus,

the life and the work of Jesus' death and his resurrection, actually playing out in the larger world,

basically the whole world, as it was known at that time, in a way that is compelling.

It's one thing to come out of the Old Testament and be like, wow, it's crystal clear that this whole God thing is meant for everyone.

And that the prophets all predict that this is going to go to the ends of the earth and that everybody's going to come and worship the one true God and that God is going to use his chosen people to see this through.

It's all there, but what's that going to look like?

And now, yeah, you and I live in the age of globalism and mass marketing and everything's connected by the interwebs,

but a global religious movement in the first century AD was unthinkable.

People didn't conceive of religion this way.

They didn't conceive of, they're being one God who was for everyone with one family of faith, this kingdom, this collection of people that just lays right over the top

of political secular history that said, acts is the second half of a two part volume by Luke, now Luke and acts technically are anonymous documents, but there's not really any competing theory for who wrote these two books.

The early Christian leaders all agreed that it's Luke, but additionally, there's all kinds of internal evidence throughout the New Testament that says it's Luke.

Paul specifically names a traveling companion, a physician named Luke, and if we look at the places where Paul and his letters talks about that guy, it lines up perfectly with the places in the Book of Acts where the language changes from then those people did that and those people did that to first person language, then we did this, then we did that.

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