The Word Spreads Everywhere

So, by heavenly power and help, the saving word suddenly lit up the whole world like a ray of the sun. At once, as the divine Scriptures had said, the voice of its inspired evangelists and apostles went out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. [a] In every city and village, churches of countless thousands, crowded like a full threshing floor, sprang up all at once. People whose souls had been shackled by the ancient disease of superstition about idols, which had come down to them from their ancestors and from age-old error, were freed by the power of Christ, through the teaching and the miracles of his followers, as if from cruel masters, and found release from the harshest chains. They spurned every kind of demonic polytheism with contempt and confessed that there is only one God, the Maker of all things. Him they honored with the rites of true piety, through the inspired and sober worship that our Savior had sown in human life.

But now the grace of God was being poured out on the rest of the nations as well. First, at Caesarea in Palestine, Cornelius with his whole household received faith in Christ, through a revelation from God and the ministry of Peter. After him a great many other Greeks at Antioch believed, to whom those scattered by the persecution over Stephen had preached. The church at Antioch was just then flourishing and growing, and very many prophets from Jerusalem were there, with Barnabas and Paul among them and a crowd of other brothers besides. It was there that the name of Christians first sprang up, as from a flourishing and fruitful spring. [b] Agabus, one of the prophets who were with them, foretold the famine that was coming, and Paul and Barnabas were sent off to bring relief to the brothers. [c]