11 November 2025
The class opened with the whole of Acts 1:12–26 read aloud — the return to Jerusalem, the upper room, Peter's speech, and the casting of lots for Matthias. But Harry spent the entire session on the first of those verses, tracing why the naming of the Mount of Olives matters to the prophets, why the distance the apostles walked home was itself governed by an entire legal tradition, and what both threads reveal about the difference between genuinely waiting on God and merely managing the letter of his commands.
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 with the deceptively simple statement that opens the passage: "Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city" (Acts 1:12). He noted that this sits at a precarious moment — Jesus has gone, and the Spirit has not yet come — a genuinely vulnerable time for the apostles. Yet by this point they had learned to believe and obey Jesus' words, and so they prayerfully waited exactly as he had told them to. Their return to the city, Harry suggested, hints at a new kind of obedience: Jesus had instructed them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait there for the gift his Father had promised, the baptism in the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49). Harry illustrated the point with a story from his own week: with a gas engineer due to make a final inspection before he and his wife could move house, he had turned down a request from Johnny for a lift to work, simply because he didn't want to risk being out when the engineer called. In the same way, he said, the apostles needed to make sure they were in Jerusalem and not somewhere else when the gift of the Father arrived.
Harry argued there is real significance in the text naming the Mount of Olives specifically, tying it back to the angel's words at the ascension: "This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). He linked this directly to Zechariah 14:3–5, where the Lord's feet stand on the Mount of Olives on the day he goes out to fight for Israel, splitting the mountain in two and opening an escape valley for his people. While acknowledging there wasn't time to explore Zechariah in depth, Harry read through a chain of related passages: Zechariah 12:1–9, where Jerusalem becomes an immovable rock that injures any nation that tries to move it, and the Lord shields even the feeblest of its inhabitants; Zechariah 12:10, where the Lord pours out a spirit of grace and supplication on the house of David, and the people "look on me, the one they have pierced," grieving as for a firstborn son; Zechariah 13:1, where a fountain is opened to the house of David to cleanse them from sin and impurity; Zechariah 14:6–11, describing a unique day of continual light, living water flowing out from Jerusalem in both directions, and the Lord becoming king over the whole earth; Zechariah 14:12–16, the plague that strikes the nations that attacked Jerusalem, and the promise that their survivors will go up year by year to worship the King at the Festival of Tabernacles; and finally Zechariah 14:20–21, where holiness spreads so completely that it is inscribed even on the bells of the horses and on every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah, and "there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord Almighty." Harry drew out that Zechariah closes with a picture of holiness moving outward — no longer confined to the priesthood and the temple building, but characterising the whole city and region. He connected this forward to Revelation, where John's vision of the new Jerusalem contains no temple at all (Revelation 21:22), because everything the temple once symbolised — God's presence and rule — is now realised throughout the city itself: the "Holy City, the new Jerusalem" (Revelation 21:2), which Harry identified as the bride of the Lamb, the church.
Harry then turned to the phrase "a Sabbath day's walk," explaining it as the furthest distance a Jew was permitted to travel on the Sabbath without breaking the Old Testament command to do no work on that day (Exodus 20:10). He was careful to note that the specific distance was Jewish tradition rather than actual Old Testament law: it was fixed at 2,000 cubits, roughly 0.6 of a mile, a figure drawn partly from the measurements given for Levitical pasture-land in Numbers 35:4–5, and traditionally rooted in Moses' instruction that no one should go out to gather manna on the Sabbath (Exodus 16:29). Harry explained that the original intent behind the limit was a noble one — to protect a quiet, unhurried Sabbath and to keep worshippers centred on the place of their worship — but that in practice it hardened into what he called barren legalism. He described how later rabbis found ways around their own rule: selecting a tree or stone at the boundary, placing food there, and declaring "let this be my residence," so that a fresh 2,000-cubit allowance could then be measured from that new point; or taking a bag of worthless possessions, carrying them 1,000 yards away, and declaring, "This is my Sabbath home, I can go another 1,000 yards" — a loophole that in the end let a person travel as far as he wished while still technically keeping the rule. Harry tied this straight to Jesus' words in Mark 7:8: "You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the tradition of men."
Harry set these two threads side by side quite deliberately. On one hand, the apostles' quiet obedience — going back to Jerusalem and staying there, prayerfully waiting through an uncertain in-between season for the gift Jesus had promised, the way Harry himself stayed home rather than risk missing the gas engineer. On the other, a religious tradition built to guard exactly that kind of Sabbath faithfulness, which had curdled into rule-gaming — technically honouring the boundary while using clever tricks to go wherever the heart actually wanted to go. His point was that real obedience isn't measured by whether you've satisfied the minimum letter of what God asked while your attention has drifted elsewhere; it's measured by whether you've actually stayed present, in the place and posture God has called you to, for as long as it takes for his promise to arrive. The apostles didn't game their instructions to wait — they simply waited, in Jerusalem, until the Spirit came. That, Harry wanted the class to see, is the obedience worth aiming for.
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.
