Painting Revelation Blog

The Book of Acts

Before I became a Christian, I was perplexed as to how the Bible could be the best selling book of all time, when I found it totally boring, repetitious, disjointed, irrelevant, and incomprehensible. I had heard bits of it in Sunday School and during the liturgy at church. I passed the mandatory classes on Old and New Testament at boarding school, and even took theology courses from the Canon of the Exeter Cathedral when I spent a year of college in England. But the Bible remained dry and lifeless.

I was shocked when one day while I was staying at a place called L’Abri, high in the Swiss Alps, as I opened my Bible and almost “saw” people walking around in the pages. I carried a pocket-sized New Testament and Psalms in my backpack during that year overseas, not for inspiration, obviously, but more as a talisman, or to impress attractive, spiritually-minded men I might meet. Out of curiosity I attended a prayer meeting at t L’Abri and encountered faith for the fist time. As I listened to people’s prayers, I felt a burning in my bones (Jeremiah 20:9) and knew something new was happening in me. So the next day I pulled out my little Bible and opened to the book of Acts. I didn’t know at the time that Acts was really Luke Part 2, the continuation of Jesus’ work on earth through the Holy Spirit. As I began reading, the Apostle Peter and the other people with him were moving around in the story as if it were a tiny movie. I was engrossed by how real and important and alive they seemed to be.

Now it’s decades later, but I still love the book of Acts and believe that the experiences of the very first Christians are crucial to Jesus’ followers today. For the last year I’ve been studying the book with the help of some commentaries and reference materials, and as I studied I sketched the scenes. Then this fall I put all 100 scenes into one large painting. It’s been great fun but also an enriching learning experience to be able to view the entire book—which spans about 25 years—in one place. I color-coded all the characters so I can see when they enter and leave the narrative. I hope to figure out a way to share what I’ve learned with others.

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