acts 29

For the next two years, Paul lived in Rome at his own expense. He welcomed all who visited him, boldly proclaiming the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ. And no one tried to stop him. (Acts 28:30-31 NLT)

One reason reading novels by James Michener or Larry McMurtry is different than regular novels is that they just stop. They do not tie up any loose ends, but instead, just stop.

That is how life is. It just stops. Loose ends are rarely tied up. Relationships change, people die, people move to other places, stuff happens and life goes on.

Things also happen in their books that make you mad. Someone you like all of a sudden die. No warning or even any good reason. They just die.

In Centennial, one of my favorite books, one of my favorite characters, an orphan girl named Ellie goes on the Oregon Trail with a young Amish man who had been ostracized from his group because of a lie a girl told.

Ellie and Levi, the young man, become happy being married and even before long she is pregnant. She is a person that everybody likes, sweet, even tempered, loving – enjoying the life she never dreamed she could have: full of adventure and a man who grows to love her.

They are on the trail and she is gathering wood and a rattlesnake jumps out and bites her and she dies. It is that quick. One moment she is a vibrant young woman and the next she is a corpse.

It made me mad enough that I stopped reading for a while. Then I realized that if you get mad with every vagary that a book tosses you, or life in general for that matter, you will be mad all your life. So I read on. And life went on without her. the specter of her presence and her love remained, of course. People talked about her for years. Levi remarried, had kids, a life and finally died himself in a rather odd accident. But life went on.

In Larry McMurtry’s books, people will suddenly die from disease or something else. The same thing happens. Life goes on.

Yes, the people involved are full of grief. It is one thing for an old person, like my father, to die. It is another for someone’s child or husband or wife who is young.

But life goes on.

In the book of Acts, the last chapter ends in the passage above. And no one tried to stop him.

Then what? How did he die? Where did he go next? What happened to him?

One thing the Bible never does is try to satisfy our curiosity. The things in the Bible were written for our encouragement (Romans 15:4), but not to satisfy our curiosity.

With the apostle Paul, life went on. He may have died – church tradition says he was beheaded – but we do not know. Church tradition is just that: church tradition. It is not inspired or anything. It is just what a bunch of people decided to believe.

The book of Acts ends with Paul having friends over for dinner and preaching all he wanted to. That’s it. No grand finale like in a Rachmaninoff symphony or anything. Just people over to the house and Bible discussions.

So what happened next? The church grew.

Acts ends with an ellipsis instead of a conclusion because of the simple fact that we are still living in the days of the Acts. The church is still here and it is still growing.

I would imagine that the way it is growing and the way church is done in general would surprise the fire out of the apostles and the others that were involved in the Acts of the Early Church, but even so, we are still in that book.

There was a group called Acts 29 a while back that were a singing group. Taking their name and applying it to us is absolutely applicable.

We are in Acts 29 right now. We are still standing and the church will stand forever.

Or at least until God tells Jesus to come back.