Acts for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 13-28 (The New Testament for Everyone)

Christ clarifies and specifies the nature, aim, and trustworthiness of all God’s dealings with us because Christ is where those dealings with us come to ultimate fruition.

5:21 forms the climax of a three-chapter build-up of sustained exposition of the nature of apostleship as the embodiment of the gospel, the gospel of God's faithfulness in the Messiah, and also the climax of a thrice-repeated sequence of just such a double statement about the Messiah's death on the one hand and the apostolic ministry on the other.

It is Luther who, drawing from Paul’s words in Galatians and Romans, is credited with making justification “by faith alone” central.8 Much of Protestantism, following Luther, has asserted that the righteousness of the human agent is always a foreign righteousness.9 It comes from nowhere inside human willing or acting but is bestowed upon the human

membership. Jesus’ exchange with this one young man thus contained several central aspects of his kingdom-story, which is no doubt why the synoptic evangelists all give it such prominence. It focused on to one particular person and incident three features: the implied eschatology (the age to come/‘eternal life’), the place of Torah (fulfilled stran