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You Will Be My Witnesses

Acts 1:1–26

Is there an event or a season in your life that you can look back on and say, “That changed the course of my life”? I can think of a number of those events or seasons in my own life.

The first chapter of Acts covers a period of fifty days—fifty days that changed the course of the lives of the 120 followers of Jesus who spent these days together. Most significantly, it changed the course of the lives of the twelve apostles of Jesus, who were among those 120 people. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that what took place in those fifty days also had a significant impact on the course of your life if you are a follower of Christ.

• The resurrection of Jesus, which happened on the first of those fifty days, is what gives you hope that this life is not all there is, and that you follow a living Savior.
• The forty days Jesus spent with the apostles, opening their minds to understand how to rightly read the Old Testament and preparing them to explain it in the pages of the New Testament, is what provided the gospel witness that the Spirit used to draw you to Christ.
• The fortieth day, when Jesus ascended to the right hand of God the Father in heaven, where he rules over all things, is what gives you confidence that everything that happens in your life is purposeful and working together for your good and for his glory. His promise as he ascended that he will return the same way situates your life in a grand story of future glory.
• The selection of a replacement for Judas so that there were twelve apostles provided the foundation for the new community in which you find your home and identity as a partaker of the new covenant.

What took place during those fifty days is significant, not just for those we read about in the pages of Acts, but also for us. So let’s work our way through Acts 1 to get a better sense of it.

Jesus Continued to Do and Teach

In Luke 1, Luke said that he was writing “an orderly account” of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus based on eyewitness testimony so that his audience, Theophilus, could have certainty about the things he had been taught. He summarizes the content of the Gospel of Luke in the first verse of Acts:

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. (1:1–2)

This implies that what he intends to present in the book of Acts is a fully reliable account of all that Jesus continued to do and teach. Though Jesus has ascended to heaven, Luke wants Theophilus and the rest of his readers, including you and me, to know that Jesus has not stopped working and teaching his people. In this book Luke is going to tell us what Jesus continued to do and teach from his throne in heaven.

Jesus Appeared to Them Alive

Luke writes that Jesus “presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking about the kingdom of God” (1:3). That word alive is significant. The apostles are not merely to be witnesses to his ministry, his teaching, and his death. He wants us to know that they saw him alive after his death. He did not simply appear to them as a ghostly figure or spirit. He’s human. And he’s alive. Over forty days Jesus presented “many proofs” of the genuineness of his resurrection that filled them with confidence. These followers were privileged to see and hear and touch the physical body of the resurrected Lord Jesus.

Jesus Taught Them about the Kingdom

Luke writes that during the forty days he appeared to them, he was “speaking about the kingdom of God.” They were enrolled in a course of study, The Kingdom of God 101, taught by the King himself. In some ways these early verses of Acts overlap with the final verses of Luke’s Gospel, where he gives us a bit more detail about the syllabus for this Kingdom of God 101 class.

The text for the class was the Old Testament. How do we know that? From what we read about these forty days at the end of Luke’s Gospel:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44–47)

And they couldn’t help but understand it like never before because their teacher “opened their minds to understand” the ways in which what they read in the Old Testament was about Christ, specifically about his death and resurrection. He even opened their minds to see how the task he was about to set before them—proclaiming this good news to all nations—had always been a part of God’s plan according to the Old Testament.

In “speaking about the kingdom,” perhaps Jesus pointed to the kingdom of Israel that took shape in the writings of Moses and throughout the History Books of the Old Testament, and explained the ways in which the nation of Israel was a preview or precursor to a far greater kingdom that will be made up of people from every nation. Surely Jesus must have talked about the fact that he was the promised Son of David, and how many things David wrote about in the psalms were most profoundly about him, because we’re going to hear Peter interpret two psalms that way later in Acts. As Jesus worked his way through the prophets who wrote about what the kingdom would be like when God’s king would come and establish his rule on the earth, surely Jesus connected those kingdom realities of peace and provision, security and authority, to the previews he had given to them in the miracles he had performed during his three years of earthly ministry. And surely he talked to them about the future of his kingdom, when what he taught them to pray for—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)—will become the reality we will live in for all eternity.

Jesus Told Them to Wait for the Promise of the Father

Over those forty days, as they grew in their understanding of the kingdom of God, I imagine that there must have been a sense of “What do we do now? How do we get started?” And, fortunately, Jesus told them exactly what they needed to do. They needed to wait. Luke records:

And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” (1:4–5)

What are they waiting for? They’re waiting for “the promise of the Father.” What had the Father promised? The prophet Joel described a day when God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28). God’s people had longed for that day. Indeed numerous Old Testament passages indicated that the Father’s gift of the Spirit would be an indication of the arrival of a new era when God would establish his king and kingdom (Isa. 32:1; Ezek. 39:29; Joel 2:28–29).1 The night before he was crucified, Jesus had said to this same group, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).

This is what the Father has promised: the pouring out, or the baptism, of the Holy Spirit. Up to this point in redemptive history, the Spirit had been among his people and had occasionally filled a particular individual for a particular task. But God was promising something different. The Spirit’s work and power in and among his people, which had been like the trickle of a stream throughout the Old Testament era, would become like Niagara Falls.

The forty days of listening to Jesus speak about the kingdom of God must have made all who were enrolled in the class long to live in that kingdom and experience this power more than ever before, which led them to ask Jesus a question:

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (1:6)

What did they mean by “restore the kingdom to Israel”? It could be that they were simply longing for Jewish autonomy from the Romans. Certainly that was the expectation of the Messiah that a majority of the Jews shared. But these disciples have just spent forty days immersed in the writing of Moses and the prophets, so it seems more likely that they were longing for the kind of kingdom restoration that the prophets wrote about. The prophets...