In Acts, we see picture after picture of what it looks like to be the type of person through whom the Spirit flows. It looks remarkably like Jesus, which makes sense because Luke calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Jesus (Acts 16:7). This post is a collection of notes on places where the Spirit empowers the apostles in Acts to live and speak in ways that look like Jesus.

Peter

After the Spirit is poured out upon the church, Peter tells a crippled person to “rise and walk” (Acts 3:6). That’s the same words Jesus used in Luke 5:23.¹ Luke explicitly connects the work of the Spirit through Peter to the “name of Jesus”:

And his [Jesus’s] name strengthened this man whom you see and know—by faith in his name … (Acts 3:16)

In Acts 9:34, Peter does the same: He heals a paralyzed man by telling him to rise and make his bed.

Peter’s ministry is summarized in a way that sounds like Luke’s summary of Jesus’s ministry:

Acts 5:14–16

And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them. The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed. (ESV)

Luke 6:17–19

And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all. (ESV)

In Luke 7:14, Jesus raised someone from the dead, and Peter does the same in Acts 9:40. The dead person in Luke 7:15 immediately sat up (ἀνακαθίζω) and so did Tabitha in Acts 9:40 (ἀνακαθίζω).

Stephen

Stephen, in Acts 6:15, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration like Jesus. When Stephen, like Jesus, is brought to trial for false charges, for supposedly speaking against the law and the temple and blaspheming, his face appears like the face of an angel.

Stephen’s death is clearly on analogy to Jesus’s death (Acts 7:54–59). Both he and Jesus pray, “Forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60).

It’s striking that after Stephen is killed the church is scattered with persecution (Acts 8:1). This series of events sounds similar to the way the disciples were scattered when Jesus was arrested. Jesus explicitly cited Zechariah to warn his disciples that they would abandon him in his suffering: “Strike the shepherd and the sheep with flee” (Matt 26:31; Mark 14:27). But the narrative analogy requires comparison and contrast. The persecution of Stephen led to a scattering of the church, but in a good way. The church doesn’t flee because they are empowered by the Spirit of Jesus.

Philip

Philip’s ministry is summed up in a way very similar to Jesus’s — preaching the word, casting out demons, healing sickness (Luke 9:1–2; Acts 8:6–7).

After baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch, the Spirit acts upon Philip after rising from the water, similar to the situation at Jesus’s baptism (Luke 3:21–23; Acts 8:39).

Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God (Luke 9:2; Acts 1:3) and so does Philip in Acts 8:12.

Paul

Paul experiences the exact response from the religious leaders as Jesus. Luke 22:2 says that the religious leaders plotted to kill Jesus; they do the same thing to Paul here in Acts 9:23. Matthew 26:4 even uses the same verb συμβουλεύω to describe the religious leaders’ plotting to kill Jesus.

In Acts 13, there is a clear analogy between (a) the relationship between Jesus and his disciples in Luke and (b) the relationship we see between between the Spirit, Paul, and Barnabas. I explain here.

There’s repeated mention of Paul teaching and preaching about the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22, 19:8, 20:25, 28:23, 31), like Jesus.

In Acts 19:9, Paul responds to opposition like Jesus: He withdraws and teaches in disciples (Matt 4:12; 12:15; 14:13; 15:21).

In Acts 21:12 (and 21:4, 11), Paul experiences the type of misunderstanding and lack of support that Jesus experienced when he was walking into suffering at the end of his life. Philip and the locals in Caesarea encourage Paul to not go to Jerusalem because the Spirit has clearly indicated that he will be arrested and suffer there. Paul understands this, but he is constrained by the same Spirit to do it any way (Acts 19:21; 20:22). The Spirit is leading Paul in to a deep (uncommon) one-to-one type imitation of Jesus’s pattern of life.

In Acts 21:36, the angry crowd cries out against Paul “Away with him!” (αἶρε αὐτόν) just like they did with Jesus in Luke 23:18.

Jesus’s life is clearly told by the NT authors on analogy to Joseph’s. Because Paul possesses the Spirit of Jesus and Luke wants us to see the deep one-to-one parallel to the way of Jesus, in Acts 24:27 Luke portrays Paul’s life on analogy to Joseph’s. Like Joseph, Paul was left in prison for years. Paul was favored during his prison years, regularly conversing with Felix, but he was left there when Felix was replaced, similar to the way the chief cupbearer forgot Joseph (Gen 40:23).

Festus, at Paul’s trail, sounds like Pilate at Jesus’s trail. Concerning Jesus, Pilate said, “I find no ground of complaint in this man” (Luke 23:4). Festus says of Paul, “I found that he had done nothing worthy of death” (Acts 25:25).

Paul’s magisterial speech in Acts 26 is a testimony to the fact that he was living out exactly what Jesus told his disciples in Luke 21:12–15.

• They laid hands on Paul, delivering him over to prison (cf. Luke 21:12).
• Paul is brought before kings and governors for Jesus’s name sake (cf. Luke 21:12).
• It’s an opportunity for Paul to bear witness to the gospel, which he does (cf. Luke 21:13).
• Agrippa is ready to release him. His wisdom is not able to be opposed (cf. Luke 21:14–15).
  

In his time of testing and suffering, Paul is allowed to receive care from his friends (Acts 27:3), similar to the way Jesus is ministered to by an angel in Gethsemane (Luke 22:43).

Paul takes bread and eats at the end of Acts (Acts 27:33), like Jesus at the end of Luke (Luke 24:30). Much more on the way Paul’s story in Acts 27 echoes that of Jesus in this post. What’s remarkable about the narrative analogy between Paul in Acts 27 and Jesus in Luke 24 is that Paul stands in the place of Jesus. The Spirit of Jesus works through Paul such that he does what Jesus did.

When Paul finally makes it to land, in Malta, the sick flocked to him and he healed them all (Acts 28:9), like Jesus repeatedly throughout the Gospels.

Just as Jesus explained how the Law and Prophets pointed to him in Luke 24, Paul worked day and night in Rome to convince them that Jesus was the ultimate frame of reference for understanding the Law of Moses and the Prophets (Acts 28:23).

Finally, Paul quotes Isaiah 6:9–10 to explain the nature of the his generation (Acts 28:26–27) just like Jesus did (Matt 13:14–16; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10).

Conclusion

In Acts, the Spirit of Jesus enables his disciples to move through the world in a way that deeply resembles Jesus’s way in the world. In one sense, it’s scary to see how being a conduit of God’s Spirit looks so much like Jesus. The lives of the apostles were filled with hardship and suffering, just like his.

At the same time, I know that living a life that looks like Jesus is the definition of the good life. I pray for it with fear and trembling. Surely this is related to what Paul meant when he said “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12): Press through your fear and trembling over the idea of suffering and death, and pray for more of the Spirit of Jesus so that you can live like him. After all, “it is God who works in you both to desire and to bring about what he delights in” (Phil 2:13).

Footnote

1. NA28 encloses ἔγειρε καί in brackets. THGNT includes the words, but SBL GNT omits them, along with the NIV. Metzger comments, “It is difficult to decide whether the words ἔγειρε καί are a gloss, introduced by copyists who were influenced by such well-known passages as Mt 9:5; Mk 2:9; Lk 5:23; Jn 5:8, or were omitted in several witnesses as superfluous, since it is Peter himself who raises up the lame man (ver. 7). A majority of the Committee considered it more probable that the words were present originally; in deference, however, to the strong combination of witnesses that support the shorter reading (א B D copsa), it was decided to enclose them within square brackets. (Bruce Manning Metzger, United Bible Societies, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition a Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament 4th Rev. Ed. [United Bible Societies, 1994], 267.)
   Even if the words were added later, the addition testifies to the fact that ancient authors saw a connection between what the Spirit empowered Peter to do in Acts 3:6 and what Jesus did in Luke 5:23. ↩