In the beginnings of stories, we are exposed to what is important, what is the point, what is fundamentally true, though later events might make the truth less obvious. In the beginnings we’re given indicators of where the story is going, what will happen later. Acts is the story of the beginning of the church, so we’re going to learn a lot about the nature and mission of the church throughout this book. And at the beginning of the book – man, every detail especially matters!
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3 He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
In the gospel that he wrote, Luke wrote about the beginning of Jesus’ work and teaching ministry. In his second volume, the book of Acts, Luke continues the same topic, though now Jesus will be working and teaching through the Church. But the important thing to note is: Jesus’ biography continues.
Between his resurrection and ascending to heaven, Jesus gave commands to the apostles through the Holy Spirit. Adding that through the Holy Spirit emphasizes that Jesus’ instructions pertained to the great Spirit-empowered work of dismantling and rooting out the devil-led rebellion against the Creator and turning all the creation into a harmonious union of heaven and earth, where the Lord of heaven and the lords of earth are friends, partners, in the same family. This Spirit empowered enterprise of reconciliation had decisively secured success when Jesus rose from the dead, yet there were still things that had to be done. The Lord gave commands to the apostles and the apostles listened, obeyed what they could then, and later wrote down those commands so down the road the church could continue to learn to do all that Christ commanded.
During the 40 days after the resurrection Jesus proved through many and various appearances that he was, in fact, ALIVE. ALIVE! He proved this fact to the apostles in such a way, to such an extent, that if they were after to disbelieve that he arose, they would be at fault for disbelieving. It is ok to expect evidence for the resurrection, it would have been ok for them initially to be skeptical, but it would not have been ok for the apostles to continue disbelieving after the Lord had given them sufficient proof.
Of course, these apostles didn’t sin in this way, they were convinced by the many and varied proofs of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. And these eyewitnesses eventually relayed to others what they had witnessed…talking and writing to individuals and groups about what they had seen and heard which added up to proof of the Resurrection.
So convinced were they by Jesus’ proofs, so excited were they by the vitality of Jesus’ new life, that a few decades into the 1st century, the apostle’s report went viral and a change swept through the world, a change that went all the way down into the structures of human consciousness …but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ll just summarize with a simple point: God decided to build everything that He was building on the eyewitness testimony of a few souls, these “apostles.” So much so that, this thing he was building, called Christianity, is foundationally an apostolic faith. We are trusting God who has revealed himself in Christ, so we are trusting Christ. But we learn Christ through the accounts of Christ relayed by the apostles. So we are believing their eyewitness accounts in order to trust Christ in order to know God. We become Christians not through having a private, emotional, “spiritual” experience…but rather as we hear/read of these apostles’ eyewitness accounts and find them to be credible and important.
4 And while staying with [the apostles], he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
Even with Christ-provided commands and proofs, the apostles weren’t ready to advance the Kingdom of God. As their Lord didn’t begin his work until the Holy Spirit alighted on him, so they would have to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so with us who are built and building on the foundation of the apostles…that was the theme of the message a couple weeks ago.
6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 9 And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, 11 and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
The last thing we have the apostles saying to the Lord in the flesh is a question: Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? It’s a natural question for a couple reasons. Their country had been under a foreign power for 600 years, so simply as patriots of their native land they longed to be a free people. But more than that, there were sentences and passages in the Old Testament that seemed to say that God would make Israel the head over all the nations and that this promotion would signify the end of history. As one example, Isaiah 2:
The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be lifted up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
3 and many peoples shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.
But the Lord doesn’t answer the apostles’ question! Bible interpreters fall into two broad camps in commenting on Jesus non-answer. Some say that it’s important to notice that, while Jesus doesn’t respond directly to their question, neither does he say that it’s wrong-headed…it was still a good question. So, national or ethnic Israel becoming the center of Kingdom operations is something still in the future. Broadly speaking, folks that take this position are called dispensationalists. At the heart of dispensationalism is the belief that many of the prophecies to Israel have yet to be fulfilled.
So, that’s one understanding behind the apostles’ question. The other broad understanding is summarized in John Calvin’s comment on their question: there are as many errors in this question as words. This view believes that this question displays a fundamental misunderstanding of Old Testament prophecy and misses that the promises to Israel were mainly fulfilled in Jesus, the King of Israel who – as the kings of Israel before him – embodied Israel’s mission and destiny. What happened to him is what happened to them.
I think that as we go through the book of Acts we’ll start to see where the truth lies, either more on the side of the dispensationalists or the non-dispensationalists. But this morning we’re just reading this passage, and the next thing – Jesus’ response – is the important thing to sit before today. He says to the apostles and through them to the Church they’re built upon: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.”
Jesus doesn’t directly answer their question, for one reason or another. But hear what he does say: it is not given to the church to fathom what or when are the crucial moments or when in the providence of God one great era is giving way to the next.
The Church has always struggled with the unfortunate tendency to claim that this event or this personage heralds the absolute end. Throughout the history of the Church, there have been times when Christians called so-and-so pope the anti-christ whose reign meant the end was here. Or the end of all things was heralded by the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell, or the birthmark on the forehead of Mikhail Gorbachev, or the Bubonic Plague, or this or that massive war, or that new low of morality etc etc…all have been interpreted as the sign that we’re in the very last days of the last days.
And Jesus’ message is: NO. Brothers, we could be in the very infancy of church history, and 30,000 years from now the Church will still be waiting for the Lord. Point is, we just don’t know. and we don’t know because it has not been given us to know. So, don’t speculate… but rather focus on Spirit-empowered work.
Yes, what has been given to us is to continue the mission of the apostles who were eyewitnesses to the events of the first century. Jesus tells them that when the Holy Spirit is given to them they’ll be witnesses – official spokespersons telling of what they had seen – first in Jerusalem and then their message expanding into the broader region, then a little further out into Samaria, and then out into the known world.
Two observations about the apostles’ eyewitness reportage expanding: this Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, into the known world becomes a rough outline of Acts, which begins in Jerusalem, then expands, then expands, then expands.
Secondly, and to point out something quite obvious: gradual expansion is how verbal communication works. It comes out of the mouth of a person into the ears and mind of another, then from him to the next. The point is that the Kingdom advances, eternal life spreads, through a message containing nouns and verbs. Not through experiences or vibes or anything else! The word of the apostles telling and explaining – this is the way forward!
A minor point but worth bringing it because it continues an emphasis: Sometimes you hear Christians talk about witnessing to their friends and family, and that’s fine. But technically only those who were living during the crucial events of the gospel were witnesses. And the apostles were appointed to be official witnesses. They had heard and seen the things they reported and, importantly, had been trained for 2-3 years to interpret these events honestly and properly and, even more importantly, were given the Holy Spirit to recall, interpret accurately, and to communicate effectively the things they had seen. I’m bringing up the technical definition of witnessing to reenforce the point that the Church is tied to the apostles’ witness and then their communication.
We after the apostles aren’t witnesses, per se, but rather we are those who transmit the apostles’ eyewitness accounts after we ourselves have come to believe it.
After equipping the apostles for their foundational work, Jesus then ascends to heaven, to the Father’s right hand. Today, those churches who follow the church calendar more closely than we do (and probably should) observe the Lord’s ascension every year, normally around the middle of May. That’s easy to do because there is so much to say about it. This morning I’ll make only two observations:
Everyone point in the direction our Lord went. Ah, some of you wise guys didn’t point up because you thought, hey, he ascended from Israel and they’re around the globe from us, so from our perspective Jesus would have gone down. But here, I think, is where you’ve outsmarted yourselves: the Lord’s ascent was a historical event, yes. And the apostles, upon whom the Church is built, one structure all of us, saw him go up because he did, in fact, go up from him.
However, although it was an actual event it was also a symbolic event: heaven, the place where God dwells, isn’t spatially above them or us. You couldn’t hop into some Elon Musk contraption and launch and go find heaven. Heaven is (and here words fail us) a dimension, a spiritual place (which isn’t to say that it’s imaginary or flimsily transparent or anything such!). Jesus went up to show the apostles, and to teach the Church upon who they’re built through the Apostles, that our Lord has been exalted!
Jesus is the Power above all earthly and heavenly powers. The Power over China, over the power grid, over the demonic principalities governing America and the Ivy Leagues and Big Tech, over the lying spirits that have dropped moods of secularism and pleasure-seeking over much of the west, over the watchers that have gone out from God, over the Seven princes of hell, if those are a thing, over the four horsemen of war and famine and plague and death, over the incubi that attack humans in their sleep, over the divination gods of chance, over Cupid, over Eros, over Mazda, over Baal, over AI, over harvest, over fertility, over earth, water, wind, air, over whatever demon Mohammed was seeing or smoking…
Jesus is the Most High who is enthroned on the four-faced, fearsome guardians called Cherubim, themselves of a power that makes all the might of the US Military like unto a sniffle.
Jesus. JESUS. JESUS, the Terrible, the Dread Sovereign, the OMNISCIENT, THE OMNI- POTENT, THE LION OF ANY CATEGORY.
Church, the event-vision stuffed full of significance with which we are left and on the strength of which we are to go forward in mission is meant to fill us, the Church of Jesus, with great confidence. We see Jesus, exalted above all powers.
As individual Christians experience setbacks, smallness, face looming tasks, stare into the abyss of unbelief and apathy… remember the exaltation of our Lord. Yesterday morning my nephew ran the Hartford Marathon and had faltered (by his standards) missing out on qualifying for the Boston. We sat around at lunch afterwards and I could tell he was frustrated. I, on the other hand, had just been working on a sermon of Christ’s ascension, so I wanted to get two inches from his disappointed face and PROCLAIM – your Lord is exalted! The Loving and Wise and Loyal Christ is over the powers! It’s ok. No, it’s good stuff! But I thought he wouldn’t take that speech just then!
The Church should be comfortable with weakness because in it the power of Christ is given a full display. The Church should be comfortable with earthly power because their Lord is Lord of heaven and earth. The Church should be comfortable with the quiet life because their powerful Lord has obtained quiet and conditions ripe for productivity.
Above all, the Church should pray expectantly and specifically in the name of and to this powerful Lord!
The second observation has to do with those two men in white robes. These are obviously angels, appearing in a form probably both intended to relate to their hearers and also say something of the greatness of the realm they’re from. Anyway…angels are on the launching scene. ANGELS!
I want to put it this way: as the Church sees their leader leave into heaven, they are given an occult encounter, a visit from dwellers in supernature. These visitors are there to proffer advice to the apostles upon whom the Church is built.
A few years back from this scene, Jesus had said to one of the apostles: You haven’t seen anything yet. In the future you’ll see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Jesus is the God-established ladder between nature and super-nature, upon whom the heavenly dwellers enter and exit our world. He is always the DOOR, the PASSAGEWAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH.
We are living in a post-Christian world. And, having lived some decades in a part of the world that denies the supernatural, that claims what we can observe is all that there is, moderns are hungry for the paranormal, the mystical. The other day Marsha told me that the vendor next to her at a market was a Tarot card reader and people were lining up!
OK, one wrong way of thinking about Christianity is that it eradicates all that weird stuff. After all, we’ve just said we’re people not primarily of experience but of the book! We’re just taking in and passing down the written record of events. Yes, extraordinary events but those happened 2000 years ago. And it is true: we’re not promised any cool experience…and most of us never get one; rather we’ve just listened to what the apostles said happened… and believe. Then we commit ourselves to a specific group of Christians, we gather with them to learn what the old events mean, over time we find out what this risen Christ expects out of us, we teach our kids in this way, then grow old and die.
How stale all that might sound! How empty of the mystical and wonderful and weird. And the world looks on and say, Boring – bring on the tarot cards! At least give us some wood nymphs or sprites!
But the apostolic witness replies: this so-called ordinary life, as it is the life in-Christ, is lived at the busy intersection of heaven and earth, in both a seen and unseen realm, peopled by beings that aren’t all or even mainly human! The normal Christian life is an extra-ordinary existence lived among great powers. Being the Church, gathering as a Church is mysterious, praying as a Church: it is all supernatural, it is dangerous, it is beset, it is adventure. As I say in the first week of pre-marital counseling: you don’t have to bring magic in your marriage, it already is magical because of what God is relaying to the ancient powers through husband and wife living together. And the same can be said of the Church.
In light of this whole passage, listen to the writer of the book called Hebrews to Christians who were wondering if Christianity was really all that. Let the waves of wonder and weirdness roll over you:
You have arrived to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Christianity is a religion of the Spirit, of the Lord returned from Sheol and taken into the clouds, of angels ascending and descending – if you’re bored, well…then…keep reading the apostles!
AMEN
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