Introduction
Let’s go ahead and read just the first verse and then I’ll give some relevant background information that will help us as we study this book. The author says,
In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach
Right off the bat we see that this is part of a two-volume work, at least two volumes. There is a previous book that he is assuming that we have already read by the time we are reading this one. Fortunately, we have this previous volume, as you can see, the book of Luke, the into to this is very similar and we are certain that these two books were originally written together. If you look at the book of Luke, two books before the book of Acts, in chapter one he says,
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. (Luke 1:1-2)
You can see that right here this is the account not just of events that happened in our midst but he is saying that these are events that were fulfilled, things that were set into motion before the beginning of time, things that God knew were going to happen, things that God predicted would happen, and praise God that we get to be the witnesses, the people who are alive and see these events unfolding, things that would leave the entire human race changed for the better. He says that they were handed down from those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. This was not something that happened in some secret, secluded corner somewhere, but this is something that lots of people saw. There were eyewitnesses, people that could share what they heard. Some people saw pretty much the whole thing, but a lot of people saw bits and pieces and could share their story. There were lots of eyewitnesses who saw what happened.
Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:3-4)
There is that same guy again. He probably interviewed these different eyewitnesses who had seen the events that had happened surrounding the person and the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the events that followed. He says that he thought it would be good to write out everything that has happened, an orderly account, because there might be some conflicted stories kicking around. Apparently Theophilus had heard some things, had been taught some things, maybe he was a little bit confused on some points and had heard conflicting accounts. Our author is attempting to set everything out, to interview everyone, and to get to the heart of what actually happened in Jerusalem and Israel in the first century B.C.
Author, Date, Audience
Our author is Luke the physician. We know this partly just because they named the first book Luke. That’s usually a pretty good clue as to who wrote it. The early sources that we have, there is really no dispute as to who wrote this book. He doesn’t actually name himself, but there are internal clues to identify that Luke is the author of this book. We will see as we do this study that they author Luke is saying “they did this, and they did that” but then we come to certain points in the narrative where he says “we got on the ship and went somewhere, and that we went there, and then we say this.” The author is no longer reporting on events that he heard, but events that he saw and witness firsthand. He joins the scene and 4 different points in this story. These are called, creatively enough, the “we passages.” Really anyone who is named in the book of Acts of the book of Luke, we know that they were not the ones that wrote it, because otherwise he would have said “I.” That eliminates almost everyone in the New Testament that we know about. By process of elimination we can narrow this down to Luke the physician as our author. He shows up several times, he was often a traveling companion of Paul. He is mentioned at the end of three or four different books in the New Testament as being present with Paul as he is writing a letter. This is by Luke; he wrote both of these volumes.
We know that the date was around 62 AD. We know this because the of the action in the book of Acts, it covers a lot of ground, but when the story ends, the last half is focused on a guy named Paul, the apostle Paul. When the story ends, Paul, with Luke, have travelled by boat to Rome, Paul is under arrest for various allegations and charges and he has travelled to Rome, because as a roman citizen he has the privilege of being able to have the court tried in Rome instead of the local biased courts in Israel. He is able to appeal to Caesar. We know that they arrive in Rome around 60 AD and then they spend two years there under house arrest awaiting trial. These two years almost certainly would have been the time when Luke and Acts would have been compiled and put together. Luke would have been interviewing various people while awaiting Paul’s trial in Israel, and they would have been working together, under Paul’s authority and completing this around 62 AD.
This is to Theophilus. We don’t know too much about this guy, except the title ‘most excellent’ gives us a clue that he would have been a guy of wealth, honor, power and prestige. The term is actually used to describe a could of different Roman officials later on in the book of Acts. That leads some people to think that he may have worked for the Roman government. There is one theory that says that he may have been involved in Paul’s trial as a court official or as his attorney. If that is the case, Luke would have been compiling this as a legal brief, as evidence in Paul’s trial. All these eyewitnesses that Paul has been talking about can’t afford to travel to Rome and hang out until the trial happened, but their testimony written down can make the trip with Luke. This can be exhibit A and exhibit B in Paul’s trial. If that is the case it would explain all his emphasis on careful investigation and eyewitness accounts. It would also explain why he goes out of his way to show that the Christians, Paul in particular, they never did anything wrong, anytime that he ever went before a judge he threw the case out because the charges were so ridiculous, they never started a riot, they were good law abiding Roman citizens, they were faithful Jews who were really just following God on into the next phase of God’s plan. There is nothing wrong here, because really, it wasn’t just Paul that was on trial, Christianity was on trial. Judaism was legal, they were allowed to practice that, but there were only certain religions that you were allowed to practice. If Christianity was determined to be different than Judaism, it could be outlawed and that would create a lot of problems for the Christians. What they were arguing was that this was really just people being faithful to the teachings of the Old Testament and carrying right on into everything that it predicted would happen.
The Purpose and Relevance of Acts
Maybe you are sitting here tonight, and you can kind of relate to Theophilus. Whether you are a Christian or not, maybe you have heard some things about Jesus Christ and Christianity and church and what it is supposed to be, maybe you have read some conflicting perspectives and you just find yourself thinking that all these people say all these different things, and I kind of wish I could just sort through all of the different opinions and strip away two thousand years of various things that human beings have added to Christianity and recover all the things that they had conveniently forgotten and see what it was that Christ really said and did and what is it that he really launched. Obviously, something happened with Jesus and his death in Jerusalem around this time, but what really happened? I can’t think of a better thing to do than to go right back to the original sources, the eyewitnesses, the original document that is probably strong enough to stand up in a court room setting and to hear from them what actually happened.
This kind of leads up to the purpose of the book of Acts. What is the point? Maybe a better way to think about this is to imagine what the bible would be like without the book of Acts. You have your Old Testament which records the Jewish people and their theological preparation for the coming of the savior, the coming of the Messiah, and then you read on into the New Testament, the first four books, and you get complementary accounts of the life of Jesus Christ. You see something that looks pretty similar to the Old Testament. You have a Jewish savior with Jewish disciples, ministering almost exclusively to Jews, following the Old Testament rituals and practices. He is bringing new teaching, certainly, but it really fits in pretty well with the things that have been taught and predicted all along. And then, if the books of Acts wasn’t there, you’d get to the end of the life of Christ, you would read about his death and resurrection and then you would turn the page and start to read the book of Romans. Which begins, ‘Hi this is Paul, I’m an apostle of Jesus Christ, I am in prison and I am writing to the church there at Rome and I have some instruction for you.’ That would be totally confusing. First of all, who is Paul? And why is he pretending like he is one of the apostles? I have never heard of this guy before. It seems like he has hijacked Christianity. Why is he in prison? What is a church? Why is there one at Rome? How did so many believers in Jesus get so far away and why are there so many non-Jews mixed in with them? It’s like you are looking at a different religion. It’s like an encyclopedia of religions, one ended and another started. It’s hard to see how these two connect with each other. That is the purpose of the book of Acts, to explain how we got here from there. How did we get from and Old Testament religion centered on the Jewish people to this thing that we are reading about throughout the pages of the New Testament? It chronicles and tells about the transition, how they went from Jesus and his small band of disciples to a movement that spread out over the entire know world at that time, the entire Roman empire was being infiltrated by Christianity by the time the book of Acts is done.
This is very relevant for us. If you are a Christian here, no matter how many times you study the book of Acts, you need to regularly return to it to get your perspective renewed, your vision refreshed, to be reminded of what it looks like when God decides to do something new. Come and see what the early church looked like. The basic, bare naked church without everything that has been added onto it over the years. To see what true New Testament church looked like; a community of believers full of the Holy Spirit and radically committed to one another and to God above all else. Come and listen to the early preaching of the gospel, the good news about Jesus Christ. It’s so simple. They don’t have the thousand-dollar suits, and the sound system, and the market research and the giant stadium and all the make-up. They just kind of got up and started talking. These really messed up men and women would just start telling people what they saw and what they experienced with regard to Jesus Christ and this thing just swept throughout the Roman empire like wildfire. Person after person, really family after family, for the first time ever came into contact with forgiveness and joy and hope and love and had their lives transformed by it. They have problems, and we’ll read about those problems, Luke goes into great detail on those which is refreshing because otherwise it can get pretty depressing when you look at your own situation. Yet in spite of all the problems and setbacks, what comes through loud and clear here is that God is doing something new, something that is unlike anything he has done before and is far superior to what had been happening already. I urge you to allow this book to break your paradigms and your preconceived notions and to get in touch with what it looks like to see the movement and the power of the spirit of God. Super relevant for our lives and I think we are really going to enjoy this study.
So, Luke writes,
In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.
So that is what Jesus began to do and teach and this is what he is going to continue to do and teach. In fact, the title of the book is the Acts of the Apostles, but I think it would be better named the Acts of the Holy Spirit, or the Acts of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. That is what the book is really about, this huge plan that is moving forward and finally is launching into full gear.
After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.
Jesus had died and if you read the gospel accounts, his disciples did not expect this at all. They kept wondering when he was going to get down off the cross, and he didn’t. He died, pretty fast actually, he was the first one who died of all the guys who were crucified that day. They were despondent, dejected, they went back, some of them just started to go home, numb with shock and grief. All of a sudden, a couple of days later, Jesus started showing up to one there, and two there, and to some women over there and then to all of them. They didn’t expect him to die, but they certainly didn’t expect him to come back to life. I think that was an even bigger surprise. It was such that Thomas was like, ‘look you show me a guy who has got a bunch of holes in him and then maybe we can talk. I want to stick my fingers in the holes where the holes where the nails were.’ He just didn’t want to get his hopes up. It was the point where he would show up and would kind of appear almost out of nowhere at times, and they would get freaked out by it, understandably. He had to prove to them that he was actually alive by appearing to different people, sometimes he would be like, ‘why don’t you give me some fish to eat, because ghosts can’t eat so that should be proof that I am alive.’ Part of the proofs were not just showing him that he was able to eat and hold things, but also showing them the teaching of the Old Testament that argued that this is the way that it had to be. This was predicted. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke to them about the kingdom of God. There was a variety of different teaching that Jesus was doing during time. We can read in Luke 24,
He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. (Luke 24:44-45)
Boy, I can’t imagine being a part of a bible study like that, where God himself is standing there explaining the scripture to you. He is saying that throughout the Old Testament, every part is predicting Christ in various ways. Some were more obvious and direct, direct predictions about what he was going to do. Some were a little bit more hidden; you couldn’t tell if it was talking about him or someone else. You also had different example of people doing things a little bit like what Jesus would do. We studied the book of Ruth and saw this picture of redemption through this guy named Boaz. You see the sacrifices prescribed where an innocent animal dies in the place of a guilty human being. All of this is predicting and pointing towards Jesus Christ. It wasn’t really until after his death and he put the pieces together for his disciples that it started to become clear. And even then, as we’ll see, they were pretty confused.
He told them, “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. (Luke 24:46-47)
This is no longer going to be just a Jewish thing. It’s going to start there but it is going to go to all the nations. That was always God’s plan.
On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
This notion of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that is a big subject and that is referring to an event that is going to happen next week when we study Acts 2. I am not going to go into that much at all here. You’ll have to come back next week to study that. But you can see at least the core of his instructions are; don’t go anywhere, wait here for the Holy Spirit, and then at that point you are going to know what to do. Then Luke (in Acts) goes on to narrate their final interaction with Jesus on Earth,
So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
They are asking the question that is on all of their minds, one that had been asked of Jesus through his ministry, really. They expected him to come and set up a kingdom. And they were like, ‘okay is now finally time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ They expected him to set up a political kingdom, to throw off the Romans. ‘Is it now? Now that you have died and come back to life? Are we ready yet?’ And Jesus says to them,
He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.
He is not denying that he is going to do this, he just says that they don’t need to know when that is going to happen. The father is in control, he’s got a plan, don’t worry about that. That is really Jesus’s job. He has a job for them though.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Jesus gives them, again, basically the same instructions. To wait in Jerusalem, they are going to receive power, and be his witnesses. He is giving them their final instructions for this mission that he is sending them on. They have their parachutes on, he is loading them into the plane. ‘Okay boys, you are getting ready to take off here, but don’t just jump whenever. If you just jump when you feel like it, you’re going to land in the wrong place and the parachute won’t work.’ They need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon them, and that is when they spring into action. They will know, they aren’t going to wonder if it’s time yet. It’s going to be obvious to everyone. Not just them, but everyone in Jerusalem.
They are probably thinking to themselves, “So, home base is Jerusalem, that makes sense, Jesus is going to work through us, we will go out and report back to him, he is like the CEO and we are kind of like his chief officers.” And then he starts to levitate, he starts to rise up off the ground and up towards the clouds.
After saying this, he was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him.
Right at the key moment in the plan, Jesus just takes off, literally. They’re all just standing there, thinking to themselves, “I can’t believe that just happened” wondering if he is going to come back! “You guys watch this way, I’ll watch this way,” standing there, slack jawed, on this hill east of Jerusalem, the mount of Olives.
As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them.
Two angels show up looking at these guys staring into the sky.
“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why are you standing here staring into heaven?
“Well Jesus just….”
Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!”
Jesus was not the first astronaut ever or something ridiculous like that. He probably went out this way because over the forty days he had been appearing and disappearing and reappearing and this was kind of him saying that this time is different, and this time he isn’t coming back for a while. It was closure to the whole thing. Not only that, but there was also an element of predictive prophecy here, that the way that he left up into the clouds is going to be similar to the way that he will come back, on the clouds. Earlier he says,
Luke 21:27 – “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
Jesus is saying, “You know that kingdom I’ve been talking about? I’m going to do that when I come back. I am going to be coming on the clouds and everyone will know that I am here and I am ready to do my thing, but until that point I have a mission for you to do.” They start to realize that the mission that they had been given, to go to the ends of the earth, that was going to be accomplished without Jesus there. At least without the literal bodily presence of Jesus right there in their midst. What they were going to get was even better.
While Waiting
Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, a distance of half a mile. When they arrived, they went to the upstairs room of the house where they were staying.
This might have been the same place where they took the last supper.
Here are the names of those who were present: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James (son of Alphaeus), Simon (the Zealot), and Judas (son of James).
Luke’s very historically precise mind springs into action listing all of the disciples, minus one, Judas Iscariot who had betrayed them, betrayed Jesus and by now was dead. There are eleven disciples.
They all met together and were constantly united in prayer, along with Mary the mother of Jesus, several other women, and the brothers of Jesus.
It wasn’t just the eleven disciples but there was a group as big as 120 that were in Jerusalem who were believers in Jesus who were just waiting there in prayer, because what else were they supposed to do? It is interesting that Jesus’s family was there. If you read the account of Christ’s life, his brothers did not believe in him. They would mock him. You can imagine if your brother shows up and claims to be the Messiah, that wouldn’t have gone down that well. The brothers of Jesus were not believers in him, but we read in 1 Corinthians 15 that one of the appearances that Jesus made to people after the resurrection, he specifically went out of his ways to show up to his brother James. You can imagine the disbelief on their faces when Jesus comes walking in the door a week or two after his death. They became believers pretty quickly after witnessing that.
During this time, when about 120 believers were together in one place, Peter stood up and addressed them.
Peter stand up to give a speech.
“Brothers,” he said, “the Scriptures had to be fulfilled concerning Judas, who guided those who arrested Jesus. This was predicted long ago by the Holy Spirit, speaking through King David.
Judas was one of us and shared in the ministry with us.”
Luke gives a little parenthetical insertion at this point.
(Judas had bought a field with the money he received for his treachery. Falling headfirst there, his body split open, spilling out all his intestines. The news of his death spread to all the people of Jerusalem, and they gave the place the Aramaic name Akeldama, which means “Field of Blood.”)
This narrates the tragic, gory death of Judas Iscariot. Some people are a little confused at this point because in Matthew it just says that Judas bought a field and hanged himself and then the chief priests and Pharisees used the blood money that they had used to bribe Judas to sell out Jesus. After Judas sold out Jesus, he felt guilty and threw their money back at them and went away to hang himself. It seems at first contradictory to the account here, but we are really just getting two different perspectives on the same thing. Probably what happened is that Judas went away somewhere, found an isolated field, hung himself, and they found him hanging there after several days, maybe the limb that he was hanging from broke and he fell down. After the body was dead for several days and everything gets swollen and he might have landed on rock. After hanging himself and being dead for quite a while he might have ruptured, and all of his guts fell out. Or maybe, the Pharisee’s had bought a field with this money, they didn’t feel like they could put it back in the temple treasury because they didn’t want to defile the temple, but it was ironic because it was money used to have a man murdered and they felt like, ‘oh we can’t put this in the temple treasury because it would defile it…” They bought a field to be used as a place to bury strangers and criminals, people who would just turn up dead, they didn’t know who they were, they had to have a place to put them. It’s also possible that Judas burst open when they tossed him into that field. Regardless, Judas’s blood money was used to buy this field, and this is where he met his resting place.
You can kind of see that on the one hand there is some sorrow here, there is some grief from the apostles, Judas was one them, he served with them, but at the same there is a little bit of understated glee here, that in the end, Judas really got his. And he died a gory death. I don’t think they were too upset about seeing him come to a pretty tragic end.
Peter continued, “This was written in the book of Psalms, where it says, ‘Let his home become desolate, with no one living in it.’ It also says, ‘Let someone else take his position.’
They were using their newfound understanding of the Old Testament scripture to see that the whole betrayal was predicted and the felt like it was saying that they needed to replace Judas.
“So now we must choose a replacement for Judas from among the men who were with us the entire time we were traveling with the Lord Jesus—from the time he was baptized by John until the day he was taken from us. Whoever is chosen will join us as a witness of Jesus’ resurrection.”
It had to be someone who had seen everything, who was qualified to testify as a witness.
So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they all prayed, “O Lord, you know every heart. Show us which of these men you have chosen as an apostle to replace Judas in this ministry, for he has deserted us and gone where he belongs.”
i.e. probably talking about hell. They go through the selection process, they study the scriptures, they pray and then it says,
Then they cast lots, and Matthias was selected to become an apostle with the other eleven.
Casting lots, that was the Old Testament equivalent of flipping a coin. It seems little out of place after all this scripture reading and prayer and consultation with the community and then it’s just like, “okay Matthias, call it in the air.” It’s a little weird. This was a prescribed was in the Old Testament of making decisions. Casing lots was the way that God said was one option they could take if they had a tough decision the make and God would determine the roll of the dice. You see this throughout the Old Testament, but you never see it again after this point in the book of Acts. It’s hard to know what to make of this whole story of them choosing another apostle. Was this the right thing to do? Matthias never shows up again, but most of the apostles don’t show up again. Maybe there was symbolism thing, twelve apostles to twelve tribes. I think the main reason Luke includes this is to set up a clear contrast between the old way of doing things, the Old Testament approach to things, what’s called the Old Covenant, the old agreement with God and the New Covenant, the new way of doing things. Starting in chapter two, the very next verse, that is when the new way begins. From then on out, when they need to make a decision, they are not rolling dice or flipping coins, God’s spirit is clearing directing them, clearly showing them the next step to take. Sometimes they don’t even ask, he just intervenes and tells them what to do. This really highlights the contrast between the old way (this was really the last event under the old paradigm) and the new way, which is coming just a few days from now.
If we zoom back out and look at this narrative, that is really what this is about. It’s about the final instruction from Jesus, the final preparation, getting the final pieces in place to get ready for this new program to be launched.
God’s New Program
The key verse here for this chapter and really for the whole book of Acts,
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1:8)
The elements here just keep coming up over and over again. He says you will receive power. This is not a superpower like heat vision or superhuman strength, this is power for a very specific purpose. It is power to be Christ’s witness. He is saying that the Spirit will come upon you and you are going to be doing things and saying things that you never thought that you would do or say. You are going to become a different person; you are going to become unrecognizable. People are going to be confused when they see the things that you are doing because you have changed. You are going to be different when you are empowered by the Holy Spirit.
They are witnessing and testifying to this new thing that God is doing. We need to take a farther step back to think about what God was doing before. What was he doing before? What was the old way?
God’s Rescue Plan
If you look at God’s rescue plan, what he is doing in scripture, there is a key event way back at the beginning of the bible, in the third chapter, known as The Fall. The Fall is where human beings threw off God’s leadership, decided that we didn’t want God to be first in our lives, decided we wanted to be God. God allowed us to do that, but when we did that it caused a number of really bad things to happen. This is when death, evil, suffering, sin, relational brokenness, natural disasters; all these bad things entered the world. This all happened at the Fall. God was not content to leave us in this broken state. He had said, “in the day you rebel against me, you will die.” Anybody who disobeys and who falls short of his standard of perfection deserves death. But God loved us too much to leave us there.
As time goes on, God begins to work and put together a plan. God selected Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation. God chose him and said, ‘I will make you into a great nation, through you all the people of the of the world will be blessed.’ And Abraham began to grow into a large nation, the Jewish people. Then, a guy named Moses came along. The Jews were enslaved in Egypt and Moses led the people out of slavery and into the land that God had prepared for them. Finally, they are a nation with their own land. Then another guy comes along, a guy named David who became a great king. God made a promise to David that one day, one of his descendants would rule from an eternal throne. They called this descendant King Messiah. Prophets begin to enter the picture and they made predictions about this King Messiah and what God was doing to rescue the human race from the mess it had gotten itself into.
When you look at the Old Testament what was God really doing here?
First of all, in the Old Testament God established who he is and what he is like. We have no idea what God is like. God says, “Here is who I am: I am perfectly just, I am perfectly loving, I am perfectly fair, I am perfectly truthful. I am a God that loves, that has emotions, that has a will, that intervenes in history, that is relational.” God is explaining what he is like and that is really important. Without the Old Testament we would have no idea who God is.
Second, God selected a people to incubate this knowledge. It’s not enough to randomly reveal himself at different places in time, he needed a people who would record his revelation and who would be meticulous and would keep track of it. They would keep a written record of who is he, what he is like, and what he has done.
Third, he had to construct a protective structure around these people. He had to keep them from assimilating into the other cultures around them, from adopting all the religious perspectives of their neighbors and inserting that into what he had revealed. There is a lot of God trying to protect his people from getting tainted and messed up by the people around them. There were times when foreigners would become Jews and worshipers of God, but the focus was more of a huddle and protective posture.
Fourth and finally, he recorded his revelation and pre-authenticated the Messiah. It’s not that hard to come along and claim to be the Messiah. A lot of people have done that throughout history. What is hard is to show up and have 1500 years of scripture predicting every single aspect of your life. Where you are born, what you are going to do, how you are going to die, the fact that he will rise again, the mission that he was sent to accomplish, the lineage and family he would come from…. There are all these different elements that God is predicting to pre-authenticate the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
He is recording this, protecting this, and delivering this to the Jewish people. This is all going along until we come to the cross. Jesus Christ finally fulfills all these predictions and all the symbolism 1500+ years of authentication and foretelling finally comes to a head at Jesus Christ. After Jesus Christ dies on the cross for the sins of the human race and rises from the dead, we start to see this community begin to form and things get pretty fast paced. Lives are changing, authorities are being threatened, people are being beaten and persecuted, excitement is growing. There is a buzz, a movement happening. It is growing and growing, it is stretching at the seams and then finally it explodes out into the entire Roman Empire. This written revelation that God had recorded, by the time of Christ this had been distributed all throughout the known world. There were copies of the Old Testament all over, and each one of these was an explosive that God had planted there so that when the message reached that city, BOOM, it would go off. People would say, ‘well this is what we have been waiting for, this is the good news.’ And they would believe.
There is a huge explosion right at the center of the Jewish nation, of Jerusalem. There is a chain reaction exploding throughout the Roman empire, spreading everywhere. What’s cool is that the book of Acts covers this explosion. It starts right after the resurrection of Christ and give us the next 30 years of history. It’s pretty remarkable. We are going to do some travelling over the next several months as we study this book, all over the Mediterranean and ancient Rome. We’ll see how God is working in each of these particular cities.
And so, he says,
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
This is a geographic progression that becomes the online of the book. Jerusalem in the first seven chapters, then it expands farther out to Judea and Samaria (the countryside around Jerusalem) and by the time you get to chapter 11 all the way through the end of the book is just non-stop. Ship travels, travel over land, they were reaching the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8 gives us what the book is all about and the order that we are going to do it in.
Old Covenant vs New Covenant
Let’s think a little bit about the differences between the old way God was working and the new way. Otherwise known as the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
Under the Old Covenant, like we said, it is for a political nation. This was what the apostles were expecting, it’s why they were asking Jesus about setting up his kingdom. Israel was a political nation, it still is. The New Covenant is a body of believers. It’s not a nation with ambassadors (at least not in the sense that we think). It’s a group of believers, it’s actually called the body of Christ. It’s a living organism, not a nation state.
In the Old Covenant there is an ethnic identity to the people who were a part of it. They were genetically descended from Abraham. In the New Covenant there is a spiritual bond and a spiritual identity. We are connected to one another not by blood, but by the blood of Christ. We have all been forgiven, we have all been bonded to Jesus, we have obtained the perfection and perfect standing in the place before God that he has.
The Old Covenant emphasizes separation. Let’s keep away, let’s not get entangled with other nations. Whereas the New Covenant, as we can see, emphasizes going out to the ends of the earth. We are not just holding back and trying to play it safe and keep from getting defiled or unclean. We are going out, we are rubbing shoulders with people who don’t know God and we have the power to do this now thanks to the Holy Spirit.
In the Old Covenant, the focus was on obeying the Law of God. The Law was what prescribed casting lots. Spiritual growth was focused on the rules and trying to obey them. In the New Testament there is a completely different approach. We are depending on the Holy Spirit. God comes to live inside of us where he changes our desires, where we want to do the things that we are supposed to do. Not that we have to or that we are obligated to, but we actually have a desire. Our desires begin to change.
In the Old Covenant, the emphasis was on personal holiness. God says, ‘be holy like I am holy, different like I am.’ In the New Covenant, God says, “Love one another like I have loved you.” The emphasis shifts away from personal holiness to radical love. Love like the love Christ showed us and poured out into our hearts. That’s the kind of thing God wants for us now under this new way.
Finally, the OC was predictions, shadows, of the things to come. Under the NC the fulfillment of that is here. The real deal has finally showed up. We are privileged to be able to be a part of this.
Why do they need to wait?
Even thinking about the timing of this whole thing, there is an aspect of fulfillment even in that. You might thing, why was he telling them to wait just a few more days? The cross is done, the resurrection is done, the instruction is done, Jesus is gone. Why are we waiting around? What are we waiting on? Let’s get this show on the road! There is one additional aspect of this predictive authentication that Christ was going to do. It has to do with these festivals that were being celebrated right around the time that Jesus died and was resurrected.
Jesus died on Passover. Passover was a famous day in the history of the nation of Israel that is still celebrated by Jews today. They were enslaved at the time and through Moses God led the people out of slavery in Egypt and eventually into the land that he had prepared for them. On this day God had told the people, ‘I am going to send my angel of death and he is going to visit each household and if you want that angel to pass over your household you need to kill a lamb and to smear his blood onto your door post. The angel will see that a death has already occurred and will pass over to the next house.’ Jesus actually died on Passover at the very moment when the lamb was being slaughtered. Very clearly showing that Jesus Christ is the true fulfillment of that Passover lamb. The true lamb that would be slain to cause us to pass out of death and into life.
Passover was followed by the feast of unleavened bread which lasted seven days. Whenever the Sabbath fell during the week, the next day they would do the offering of the first fruits. This was a time when the barley harvest had already started to ripen. They would go out and take some grain and offer it to God. That was basically saying, ‘The first ones are starting to pop out, we know that there is more coming,’ and it was a way to thank God for the harvest that he was already beginning to provide and it was a guarantee that we were going to get a full harvest.
Finally, forty-nine days later, after that presentation of the first fruits, we have what became known as the festival of Pentecost (that’s just a Greek word that means fifty) and this was when the harvest was done, the grain was in, and they were ready to have a big party. Again, they would offer some of these blessings up to God to thank him for what he had done, to thank him for the full harvest that he had brought in.
There is a powerful symbolism that was predicted and fulfilled by Christ. First of all, like we said, the death of Christ took place on Passover, right when they were slaughtering the lamb whose blood would, symbolically, take the place of the death of the human being. The first fruits? Well the year that Christ died, his resurrection actually took place on the day when the first fruit offering was given. You can see why Paul and later on in 1 Corinthians 15 says that, ‘Jesus Christ is the first fruits of those who have resurrected.’ He is the guarantee that not only will he conquer death and will live after his physical death on earth, so will all of us who have come to believe in him. It is a guarantee that just like Christ conquered death, we also will. Finally, Pentecost was the day that the Holy Spirit was given. And when the full harvest (as we’ll see next week) was brought in, three thousand people from all different nations placed their faith in Christ and became believers. We see the harvest begin to be gathered in right here on the very day that the Holy Spirt was given. Even the festival system predicted the coming and the work of Christ.
All of these different pieces from a mosaic. One piece describes the festivals and the things that they were supposed to observe in connection with the harvests, there are the prescribed sacrificial offerings pointing to Christ, predictive prophecies about the Messiah (what he would do and how he would reign and rule but also how he would die and suffer for the human race, taking the place for their sins). As you see this mosaic begin to come to light, as Jesus Christ puts the pieces together you see it all points to him. It was not the blood of animals that paid for human sins, it was the blood of Christ. The festivals were not arbitrarily picked in connection with the harvest, it was teaching something about what Christ would one day do. All the predications, they all come together perfectly in the fullness of time in Jesus Christ. Now, after his death and resurrection God is finally able to move on to the next phase of his plan, a phase that every single one of us here is privileged to be living in.
In summary, what is pretty obvious is that something new is happening. God is doing something new right here in the book of Acts and he continues to do something new here in our midst. Will you get on board? Jesus Christ says that he, ‘stands at the door and knocks. Anyone who opens the door, I will come in and dine with him.’ Jesus is offering forgiveness and all you have to do is to respond to his offer. To open the door and allow him to come in. At that point you will receive forgiveness and you will become a part of God’s plan, a plan that will be taken to the very ends of the earth.