Acts 1

1 Dear Theophilus I wrote to you before about all the things Jesus did and the things he taught to people.

2 He kept doing these things until God took him up to heaven. But before God took Jesus up to heaven the Holy Spirit helped Jesus tell his close followers the things they had to do.

3 It is like this, Jesus died, and then he came alive again, and his followers saw him a lot of times in the next 40 days. Jesus showed them that he really was alive, so they are really sure that this is true. He talked to them too, and told them a lot of things about God’s family.

4 At one time Jesus was eating some food with his followers and he said to them, “Don’t leave this city called Jerusalem yet. I already told you that my Father promised to give you the Holy Spirit. Well, wait here until God does that.

5 Do you remember John the Baptiser? He baptised people with water, but God will baptise you with the Holy Spirit very soon.”

6 After that some of the close followers of Jesus met together with him. (At that time the Roman government people were the bosses over the Israel people.) The followers asked Jesus, “Sir, are you going to fight the Romans at this time and beat them, and give us back our own country, Israel, with our own boss?”

7 Jesus said to them, “My Father controls all these things. He knows the time that all these things will happen. You don’t need to know that time.

8 But the Holy Spirit will come to you and he will give you power, and then you will tell people about me in Jerusalem, and all over Judea country and Samaria country, and you will go to people everywhere in the world and tell them about me.”

9 Jesus told them this, then God lifted him up to heaven. His followers were looking at him as he was going up. Then a cloud came in front of Jesus and his followers couldn’t see him any more. They kept looking up into the sky, and suddenly 2 men wearing white clothes stood next to them.

10 They said, “Hey, you men from Galilee, why are you standing here looking up into the sky? God took Jesus up into heaven, but he will come back again. You saw him go up into heaven and he will come back in the same way that you saw him go.”

11 Then Jesus’s followers left that place, the hill called Olive Trees, and they walked about a kilometre back

12 to Jerusalem, and then they went upstairs to the room where they were living. These were the close followers that came back from Olive Trees Hill – Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James (his father was called Alphaeus), Simon (he used to be one of the mob that wanted to fight the Roman people), and Judas (his father was called James).

13 All these men met every day to pray together. Some women met with them too. One of those women was Mary, the mother of Jesus. And his brothers came to pray with them too.

14 After a few days these people that believed in Jesus had a meeting. There were about 120 people in that meeting. Peter stood up and talked to them.

15 He said, “Listen, friends, a long time ago the Holy Spirit talked to David about Judas, the son of Iscariot. David wrote the story in God’s book, and now that story has come true. Judas used to be with us and he worked with us. He was one of us close followers of Jesus. But the Jewish leaders paid Judas to take a mob of bad men to catch Jesus.

16 After that the Jewish leaders used that same money to buy some farm land. Judas fell down in that place and his belly split open, and all his guts fell out, and he died.

17 Everybody that lived in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that place Akeldama in their language. That means the Farm Land of Blood.”

18 Peter kept on talking, he said, “God’s man called David wrote about Judas a long time ago, and it is in God’s book, in the part called Psalms. He wrote, ‘Empty out his house, God, and let nobody else live in it.’ And he also wrote, ‘Let somebody else have his job.’”

19 And Peter said, “So now we need to pick somebody else to be one of us 12 close followers, that have that job. He will help us tell people the true story, that Jesus is alive. Yes, Jesus died, but then God made him alive again. The man we pick has to be one of the men that went around with our leader Jesus here, and he has to be one that was with us all those 3 years, from the time that John baptised Jesus, right up to the time that God took Jesus up into heaven.”

20 So they all talked together and found 2 men that did all those things. One man was Joseph Barsabbas. He also had another name, Justus. The other man was called Matthias.

21 Then the close followers of Jesus prayed. They said, “Judas left his job, and went his own way, and now he is dead. He went to that bad place. And God, you really know everyone, and you know the way they are thinking. Please show us the man that you want to take the place of Judas, to do his job, and to be a close follower of Jesus.”

22 So the close followers put the names of the 2 men into a jar and one man shook it. Then he closed his eyes and took out one of those names. That name was Matthias. So Matthias joined the 11 close followers, to work with them.