Church Voices

Then Peter said, “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked Peter to stay with them for a few days. The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.
Acts 10.47-11.1

If you paid attention in Sunday school you know that the answer to the question “what is the word of God” has two proper answers: the Bible, and Jesus. You can write those down and move on to the next question.

Here’s the thing though, neither one of those answers are appropriate for what happened in Acts 10 and 11. These Gentiles didn’t receive a Bible (neither the Old Testament, nor the yet unwritten New Testament), and while you can argue they received Jesus in the sense of having faith in him, its not the same sense as “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”.

So what is the word of God?

Sometimes I come across someone who has a particular issue that has swollen so large in their mind that they can’t see or think of anything else. No matter what particular scripture they read, no matter what they are praying about it all comes back to that issue. The issue might be something like instruments in worship, worship style, once saved always saved, end times, pre-destination, or any other number of theological hot button issues that have occupied people through the years. When this happens invariably you end up with verse after verse being pulled out in defense of the scriptures, lots and lots of words spill out and phrases like “its right there in the Bible” pepper the fire-hose like stream of consciousness.

No matter how much scripture is found in this situation, there’s no word of God in it. Because the word of God isn’t just particular words written by prophets and apostles (and James) it is the core message of Jesus sometimes called the gospel. What the apostles and the brothers recognized as the word of God is what brought the Holy Spirit, and baptism:

You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached— how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.

“We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message.

What this means is that you can spend a whole lot of time quoting a whole lot of scripture, and still not have the word of God.