13 January 2026
Starting a new year of studies, Harry pulled the camera back as far as it would go, tracing the single storyline that runs from the opening verses of Genesis all the way to the day of Pentecost. The session set out to show why Acts does not begin the story of God and His people but completes it — and it left the class with the question of what, exactly, had been promised all along, and how it finally came to be kept.
Editor's note: This article is a written summary based on the substance of Harry's Bible study on this passage. It is not a verbatim transcript, and while it aims to reflect the heart of the teaching faithfully, it cannot fully convey the warmth, care, and encouragement of the class itself.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word and for the privilege of gathering together in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask that your Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and soften our hearts, that we might hear your voice, grow in the knowledge of you, and be equipped to live and speak for Christ. We commit this time of study into your hands, in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Harry began, half-jokingly borrowing the line from The Sound of Music — "let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start" — and took the class back to Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." God made Adam and Eve, with Adam standing as the representative head of the whole human race, and His creation was perfect. That perfection did not last: Adam and Eve sinned by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3), and were banished from God's immediate presence, though the Lord continued to communicate with them (Genesis 3:23).
Harry drew particular attention to what happened next. Adam and Eve tried to cover their own nakedness — a picture of their sinfulness — by sewing fig leaves together (Genesis 3:7), but this self-made covering did not satisfy the righteousness of God. Instead, He made coverings for them from animal skins (Genesis 3:21), a foreshadowing of the ultimate sacrifice of His Son, since, as Hebrews puts it, "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin" (Hebrews 9:22). From the very first pages of Scripture, Harry noted, the pattern is set: human beings cannot cover their own sin, and God alone provides what is needed.
With Adam and Eve cast out of God's immediate presence, humankind was in a sense left free to do as it chose — and did. Harry read Genesis 6:5–7, where "the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time," to the point that He regretted having made humanity and sent the flood. Only eight people — Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives — survived.
But the flood did not solve the underlying problem of sin. Harry pointed to the Tower of Babel that followed as another expression of humankind's own efforts to reach heaven under its own steam (Genesis 11:4) — and, again, it failed. The pattern of the earlier chapters holds: left to itself, humanity cannot fix what is broken.
It is at this point, Harry explained, that the Lord begins to reveal His eternal plan, choosing one man — Abram — through whom He would bless all peoples on earth. Abram came from Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11:27–32), and although God had called him to leave his father's household for the land God would show him (Genesis 12:1), his father Terah took the family only as far as Harran and settled there instead (Genesis 11:31–32). Harry noted that this detail is confirmed in Stephen's speech before the Sanhedrin: "The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Harran… So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Harran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living" (Acts 7:2–4).
Harry then read the heart of the promise itself, Genesis 12:1–7, in which the Lord tells Abram, "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you… and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you," and Abram sets out for Canaan, where the Lord appears to him again and confirms, "To your offspring I will give this land." Even though Israel went on to sin against the Lord repeatedly in the centuries that followed, Harry stressed that the promise held firm regardless — if anything, Israel's failures only underlined how much the fulfilment of God's promise depended on Him rather than on them. The Lord went on to reaffirm and expand the same promise to Abram at later points in Genesis (chapters 17 and 22).
Because of Israel's waywardness, Harry explained, the Lord gave the Law to Moses. Galatians 3:19 explains why: "Why, then, was the law given?… It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come." Sinful human nature needed restraining, but Harry noted the Law had a further purpose too — to act as a "schoolmaster" or guardian (the Greek paidagōgos, referring to the servant given charge of a boy's life and morals) to lead a person to Christ, as Galatians 3:24 puts it: "So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith." Harry likened this to the role John the Baptist would later play, preparing the way with his call to "Repent!" — and offered a homely illustration of his own: speed limits and warning signs do not stop everyone speeding, but they curb it, especially where there are penalties for breaking them.
Harry made a point of the Law's timing — it came 430 years after the promise to Abraham (Galatians 3:16–22) — and stressed that this order matters: the Law does not set aside the earlier covenant or the promise attached to it. He illustrated the difference between law and promise with a simple picture: if he told the class he had put £1 million into their bank account as a gift, it would only be theirs if they believed it and used it; but if he said he would give them £1 million after twenty-five years of work for him, that would not be a gift at all. The Law is something we must do; the promise is something we must believe, and God's blessing, being given by promise, must be received by faith. Far from being opposed to the promise, Harry explained, the Law complements it — Galatians 3:21–22 makes clear that no law could impart life, and that Scripture "locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe." There was nothing wrong with the Law itself — Romans 7:12 calls it "holy, and… righteous and good" — the problem, Harry said, was the same problem that has existed since Eden: sinful human nature. He read Romans 8:1–4, where what the Law was powerless to do because of the flesh, God did by sending His own Son as a sin offering, so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fully met in those who live according to the Spirit.
Harry then traced how God gave further insight into His promise through the prophets. Through Ezekiel, God promised, "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). Through Jeremiah, He promised a new covenant: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jeremiah 31:33). Harry showed how Hebrews 8:7–13 picks this up directly, explaining that the first covenant was not faultless, which is why a second, better one was needed — one in which God's laws would be written not on stone but on minds and hearts, making the old covenant obsolete.
All of this, Harry explained, would be made possible through the death of the Suffering Servant described in Isaiah's prophecy. He read the whole of Isaiah 53:1–12 to the class — the servant despised and rejected, "pierced for our transgressions… crushed for our iniquities," bearing the punishment that brings peace and healing, "led like a lamb to the slaughter," yet through whose suffering "he will see his offspring and prolong his days," bearing the sin of many and making intercession for the transgressors.
Only having laid all this groundwork did Harry bring the class to Acts itself: Jesus has died, been buried, and on the third day risen again; after forty days He ascended to heaven, where He is seated at the Father's right hand, and from there has poured out His Holy Spirit on the Church. He read Acts 1:1–11 in full — Jesus' forty days of appearances, His instruction to the apostles to wait in Jerusalem for "the gift my Father promised" (Acts 1:4), His promise that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on them and will be His witnesses "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8), and His ascension before their eyes, with the two men in white promising He will return "in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
Harry drew the thread tight here: the suffering and resurrection of Jesus, and His command to wait for what the Father had promised, were themselves part of the fulfilment of the original promise to Abraham — that all peoples on earth would be blessed through his seed. He then read Acts 2:1–13, the day of Pentecost itself — the sound like a violent wind, the tongues of fire resting on each of them, the disciples speaking in other languages as the Spirit enabled them, and the bewildered crowd of God-fearing Jews from every nation hearing the wonders of God declared in their own tongues, some amazed and others mocking that the disciples "have had too much wine."
Harry's real aim in this session was to stop the class reading Acts as a fresh start and get them to see it instead as a payoff, decades and centuries in the making. Every thread he pulled — the covering God made for Adam and Eve, the promise to Abram, the Law as guardian rather than rival, the new heart promised through Ezekiel and Jeremiah, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 — was there to show that Pentecost is not a new plan but the same one, kept. The point was not simply historical: if the whole of Scripture has been building toward a moment when God would write His law on human hearts and pour out His Spirit on His people, then what happens in Acts 2 is not incidental to faith but its intended destination — and the promise Harry wanted the class to sit with is the same one given to Abram, that through this seed, God's blessing was always meant to reach them too, received not by what they could achieve but simply by faith.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you that we are gathered here in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Father, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open up our hearts and our minds that we might understand your words in the Scriptures and get to know you more, that we might live holy lives, and that we might share the Good News about Jesus in the power of your Spirit, for the building of your Church and the extending of your Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, in and through Jesus Christ, Amen.
