Study Desk

“This Moses, whom they rejected when they said, Who appointed you a ruler and a judge?—this one God sent as a ruler and a deliverer through the angel who appeared to him in the bush.

“This is the Moses who said to the Israelites: God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers and sisters.

God turned away and gave them up to worship the stars of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets:

You took up the tent of Molochand the star of your god Rephan,the images that you made to worship.So I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.

Our ancestors in turn received it and with Joshua brought it in when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before them, until the days of David.

He found favor in God’s sight and asked that he might provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob.

Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven. He saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

He said, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”

They all paid attention to him, from the least of them to the greatest, and they said, “This man is called the Great Power of God.”

But when they believed Philip, as he proclaimed the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, both men and women were baptized.

When the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.

But Peter told him, “May your silver be destroyed with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!

You have no part or share in this matter, because your heart is not right before God.

[And Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart you may." And he replied, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."]

Immediately he began proclaiming Jesus in the synagogues: “He is the Son of God.”

He was a devout man and feared God along with his whole household. He did many charitable deeds for the Jewish people and always prayed to God.

About three in the afternoon he distinctly saw in a vision an angel of God who came in and said to him, “Cornelius.”

Again, a second time, the voice said to him, “What God has made clean, do not call impure.”

They said, “Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man, who has a good reputation with the whole Jewish nation, was divinely directed by a holy angel to call you to his house and to hear a message from you.”

Peter said to them, “You know it’s forbidden for a Jewish man to associate with or visit a foreigner, but God has shown me that I must not call any person impure or unclean.