Welcome to the NECK Bible Podcast episode 39, Acts 2, verse 42 through 47.

I'm your resident, Elaine, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser.

How are you doing?

Pretty good. How are you doing? Again, I'm doing good. So we're going to wrap up Acts 2 today.

Yep. Yep. We will indeed look and forward to it.

Alright. So we will, again, get through the rest of the book of Acts today and then I think as we'll find out at the end,

I think we're planning on an episode of Q&A. So we'll say something about that at the end, but for today,

let's just jump into the last several verses of Acts chapter 2. This, believe it or not, this little section is surprisingly controversial.

And if it's not immediately familiar to you, I think by the time I read through it, here in the next few minutes,

you'll see why it's controversial or might, you know, sort of tip something off in your memory as far as what could be done with these,

you know, five or six verses of Scripture. So beginning in verse 42, we read, they, again, the,

the fledgling church there in Jerusalem, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the

fellowship to the breaking of bread and prayers and awe came upon every soul and many wonders and signs

were being done through the apostles and all who believed were together and had all things in common.

And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need.

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes,

they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.

And the Lord added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved.

Now this passage, as you could probably tell, if you paid close attention to it, has been used by many people,

scholars or otherwise, to defend socialism or communism or some sort of politically utopian society.

As though one of those political economic systems is the biblical, quote unquote, biblical form of government,

or that it has some sort of theological superiority over any other system.

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