The Progress of the Kingdom - The Coastal Mission

Christ had charged his disciples to take His gospel outward from Jerusalem into Judea, then to Samaria and ultimately the ends of the earth. Luke employed this sequence in structuring his Acts account, and so turned immediately from the Samaritan mission to the emerging Gentile mission. That mission began with a single man and an encounter with Christ in the former Philistine region of coastal Palestine. Luke carefully crafted his account of this episode, emphasizing God's precise, supernatural ordering of its participants as much as its circumstances. The reason for this divinely orchestrated encounter is revealed in the larger context of the section of Isaiah from which the Ethiopian eunuch was reading (ref. Isaiah 49-56). There the Spirit spoke of the future ingathering of the Gentiles as the fruit of the Servant's atoning and renewing work. Those who were formerly excluded from God's covenant household - here represented under the imagery of foreigners and emasculated persons - were to be brought into God's household and given an everlasting name. In that way, and in concert with a recovered remnant of Israel and Judah, Yahweh's house would become a house of prayer for all the peoples (Isaiah 56:1-8). This Ethiopian's saving encounter wasn't simply the first Gentile conversion; it precisely fulfilled the Isaianic promise and so heralded, as the firstfruits of that promise, the Gentile ingathering from the ends of the earth (Isaiah 54-55).