After Peter’s explanation of God’s amazing grace to the “circumcision party,” where they responded to Peter’s speech by glorifying God for granting repentance that leads to life for Gentiles, Luke then flashed back in his narrative by resuming the events of what occurred when the severe persecution in Jerusalem caused a great dispersion of Hellenistic Christian Jews, who traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch.
While most of these dispersed Christians shared the gospel only with Jews as they fled from Jerusalem, some of them (originally from Cyprus and Cyrene), preached the gospel indiscriminately in Antioch, preaching the Lord Jesus to both Jews and Gentiles who had some level of connection with the Jewish synagogues in the city. The hand of the Lord was upon these men as they boldly proclaimed His gospel, and many hearers believed and turned to the Lord in repentance and faith.
When news of this overwhelming response to the gospel in the pagan city of Antioch reached the church in Jerusalem, the church selected Barnabas (the son of encouragement) to go to Antioch to evaluate what is going on and to exercise a level of leadership over this missionary movement. When Barnabas arrived in Antioch (300 miles from Jerusalem), he saw manifest evidence of God’s saving grace in these new believers, both Jews and Gentiles. This filled Barnabas with great joy, and so he exhorted these new believers to stay faithful to the Lord with devoted, loyal hearts, all while living in a rampantly pagan society. This good exhortation came from the heart of a good man, because he was full of the Holy Spirit and faith!
As Barnabas interacted with and continued to teach the people, Luke records that a “great many people were added to the Lord” (Acts 11:24). Recognizing a tremendous need for help in discipleship, Barnabas traveled to Tarsus to search for his friend Saul. Upon finding him, he and Saul returned to Antioch and spent an entire year teaching a vast number of Christian disciples, instilling in them fundament doctrinal truths of the faith. It was here in Antioch that the outsiders dubbed these believers Christians … the Christ-people. Christianity was beginning to have an identity of its own, no longer viewed as a totally Jewish identity.
During this year of teaching, a prophet named Agabus came to Antioch and foretold that a severe famine affecting the entire Roman empire would take place. Recognizing that the believers in Jerusalem would be very harshly affected by such desperate conditions, the new Christian believers in Antioch determined to gather and send relief to their Christian brothers who lived in Judea. They followed through on their commitment and expressed their gratitude and love for the Christians back in Judea sending relief to them by the hands of Barnabas and Saul. Such a generous gift was a report in and of itself back to the Jerusalem church, showing how the grace of God had been richly poured out on these people in Antioch!
You can listen to this teaching on Acts 11:19-30 by clicking on the following link: Preach The Lord Jesus
