The Word Spreads

Acts 8:4-5, 12, 14 & 25

Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ.

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

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God . . . .

Now when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[P]art of the agenda which Jesus set for his followers, at the start of Acts, [was] that they should be his witnesses not only in Jerusalem and Judaea, but in Samaria—and on, to the very ends of the earth (1.8). Like many things in Acts, [the disciples] don’t seem to have had much of a plan for how to achieve this, and they don’t seem to have thought out in advance what such a plan might look like if they did; but it began to happen anyway, as we have seen, because of the persecution in Jerusalem and the scattering of people who were eager to talk about Jesus to anyone they met, whether they were proper Jews or not (128).

Aaron Orendorff

In many ways, the book of Acts is a story about “the word of the Lord.” Here in Acts 8, as the gospel first begins to spread beyond the bounds of traditional Judaism, what Luke stresses is the declarative elements—i.e., the preaching and the proclamation—of the good news of Jesus and the kingdom. The haphazardness of it all is striking. As Wright points out, “Like many things in Acts, [the disciples] don’t seem to have had much of a plan for how to achieve this.” Basically, what they have is the message—God’s word—and an inability to keep quite as they go.