Clough Acts Lesson 1

Introduction – Luke 24

Before we begin we have a feedback card: What is the status of a person who is declared dead but is revived by artificial means through electric shock or heart massage; has the soul actually left and returned? We don’t know because the Bible actually doesn’t say, we have a tradition associated in Israel with a three-day waiting period, that from the time the last breath was taken, because that’s the sign of the presence of life Scripturally, but it’s from the time that the last breath was taken a person had to have their body lie in state un-embalmed and untreated for three days. The idea was that the soul could come back into union with the body any time during that period. Now whether it was… it was view apparently, the human spirit, as though it were in some local region around the body for a time period. Apparently that belief came about because of the fact that people were revived, even in that day; we can’t tell. We do know that Christ accommodated Himself to this belief because when He waited for Lazarus to die, He waited to raise Him on the fourth day, and the reason He did so was to prove to the people that Lazarus, in fact, had died and he wasn’t just resuscitated by natural means. The passage we’ll study this morning has also reference to the third day concept. That’s all the Scriptural data that I know of that pertains to that issue.

This morning we begin a study in the book of Acts. The book of Acts is the most misused book of all Scripture. Every nitwit that ever came along has used Acts to grind his axe and the result has been that Acts is very confusing; to interpret Acts is very confusing, and oftentimes Christians who are not acquainted with the book of Acts handle themselves extremely poorly when they meet some of these fanatics. Two illustrations of how Acts is misused today, we have the charismatic group with their little pick and choose methodology, picking what Scriptures they want and then dismissing the other ones unfavorable to their cause. And the book of Acts we often has someone just climbs in chapter 2 or chapter 8 or chapter 10 and they pull out this little pearl and they make this the eternal norm and standard for the entire Church Age. That’s wrong, it’s the wrong interpretation of Acts and I hope at least after this morning you’ll be forewarned about that little operation. Another example of the misuse of Acts are the Campbellites camp on Acts 2:38 and 22:16, ignoring the fact there are about 998 other verses in this book. And therefore water baptism in this view is necessary for salvation. We will see that there again that they pick and choose methodology.

Finally in our own camp we have naïve sentimentalists who for nostalgia sake always want to get back to the church at Acts. Now the Church in the book of Acts was a child, a little infant. And anybody who wants to go back and return to their childhood, there’s something wrong with them. Anybody that wants to get back to the Church in Acts also has something wrong with them because the Church in the book of Acts is very poorly developed doctrinally, there are lots of mistakes, they have people who are seeking to establish the way and their practices are discordant with other practices we know. So don’t take the book of Acts as some ideal model of the Church Age. It isn’t. Never was intended to be that.

Today we are going to spend time getting straightened out in the book of Acts before we begin a verse by verse approach. And we’re going to go to the companion volume of the book of Acts. Luke, who is the author of Acts wrote another book, the Gospel of Luke, and together these were a two volume set on the origins of the Christian faith. So we’re going to go back and look at Volume 1, Luke 24, a little incident back in the end of that first volume before Acts began. Remember originally when these books were written Acts was connected to Luke. So you go through and you read the book of Luke and then it was intended that you read the book of Acts right away.

In Luke 24 we have an incident that Luke picks out and again you want to understand something, that when you look at a history book in the Bible, such as Acts, Kings, Chronicles, Genesis, don’t read it as just history. The object of the author is not to give us unadulterated history; the object of the author is to pick and choose those events in history that are important and just discard the rest of the unimportant ones. So even your history books in the Bible do have an argument, and the book of Acts is an argument. It’s not just history, it’s an argument. Luke is out to prove a point and we misread the book of Acts if we don’t read it as an argument. So in order that we may understand what the argument was all about we go to Luke 24 because here in Luke 24 he records an incident that happened that becomes typical of the entire set of believers after Christ rose from the dead. When Jesus Christ died there was a tremendous shock that reverberated throughout the believing community. Even believers who had walked so closely to Jesus Christ were unprepared for the brutality of His end. When Jesus Christ hung on the cross the only people that stayed at the foot of the cross were some women; all the men took off. It was out of shock and it was out of fear. Some could argue the women were too stupid to be afraid but nevertheless, they were the ones that stayed there, not because they were too stupid but because they had security insights in their male counterparts at that point in history, much as that damages the male ego. But the women caught on and the men did not.

Now in Luke 24 we are going to look at this event and I want you to think of what this event stands for; it’s a real literal event, it really happened, but Luke picks this out among many other events to stand for something. In Luke 24:1, “Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain other things with them.” These are the women, they are coming to the tomb of Jesus. And as the text goes on to say they discovered the tomb empty and angels standing by. Now in that day and age, before women’s liberation, women’s words were not taken for too much, and so it’s understandable that by verse 11, after the women have come back to the men and have said, hey, we saw an empty tomb and two angels, they said what hour of the morning is this. Well, where have you been girls? “And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.” That’s the current battle of the sexes of the Church Age. The women reporting the facts and the men not believing what the women said about the facts simply because it came from a woman’s mouth and not a man’s mouth.

Then the men have to go check and now we come to our incident beginning in verse 13. “And, behold, two of them who were going that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs,” that’s about seven miles west of the city of Jerusalem. This road that they were going on is a road is a road that’s still there today, the Tel Aviv highway, the Jaffa Road, comes inside the city of Jerusalem, it’s the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. It’s a main highway, if you read the novel, O Jerusalem, about the 1948 war for independence will remember the great battles that were fought along this highway. The petition of the land in 1948 gave the Arabs the hills on the north side of the highway and the hills on the south side of the highway but gave the highway to the Jews. And during the war of 48 the city of Jerusalem was under siege, and the Jews were trying to hold out inside the city of Jerusalem and they couldn’t hold out without supplies; the Jews had no airplanes to supply the city and so the city had to be supplied by that one highway; it was a main artery linking the city of Jerusalem to the coast. And because they could not control the high ground on the north side and the high ground on the south side they were subject to ambush time and time and time again. Finally it got so that the young people put armored plates on buses, and they’d try to drive these buses up the road, the problem was that by the time they put the armored plates on the bus it was thick enough to stop bullets, the bus weighed so much it could only travel five miles an hour and it’s a beautiful sitting target for people who want to pick you off. So the young people volunteered, it’s a very heroic chapter in the history of Israel, teenagers would volunteer to drive these buses up the road with food and ammunition in them and most of them were killed in route. And today when you drive that highway into Jerusalem on the west sides the Israeli’s have taken some of the shot up buses and painted them and you can still see them on the side of the road to remember the price that was paid to open up this highway to the city of Jerusalem.

That road is the same road here and the fact that Luke picks up this event to tell us something tells us that he had something else in mind. I said that this is not some simple episode but this is an episode that stands for something throughout church history and what it stands for is… here’s the city of Jerusalem, here’s the coastline. Those disciples are moving on the very road that in a few decades would be used by the apostles to spread the gospel from Jerusalem into the Mediterranean world. That road then didn’t go to Tel Aviv, it went to Jaffa, which was the main seaport, and so this event takes place in kind of anticipation of the fact that disciples one day will in mass be coming down that road to spread the Word of God into areas beyond Israel.

Luke makes use of various verb tenses here. The word “went” in verse 13 is imperfect tense; he uses this quite often to get across a vividness to this event. The imperfect tense in the Greek means continuous action in time past, most of the time. And so you would read it, “two of them were going that same day to a village and they’d gotten about seven miles,” they’re about seven miles outside of Jerusalem. Apparently they walked by Emmaus and kept on going.

Luke 24:14, “They were talking together of all those things which had happened. [15] And it came to pass while they communed and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.” Now the picture that is being drawn here of the incident are two men engaged in quite a ferocious dialogue, it looks kind of peaceful here but in verse 15 the original verbs are a lot more than just they talked. The first one says “they communed,” but the second one says they “reasoned,” and it’s the word to mean vigorously question each other, back and forth. And you can imagine these two men walking down the road, well, what do you do about this, here He died on the cross, He said He was going to be Messiah, He said the kingdom was going to come, and what do we make of this. And the other guy is saying about this, well, what do you think about this report we got this morning because this occurred on Sunday morning, what do you think about that report this morning, those crazy women coming, they said they saw angels in an empty tomb, what’s that all about? So it’s a picture of a deep, in depth discussion, a discussion that is grounded on the facts of history. But also notice, and it will become evident as time goes on in this text, that Luke wants us to notice the two levels of thought. You can think of one level of pure fact but on another level the interpretation of those facts. These disciples had the facts, but they didn’t have the framework to interpret the facts. Those facts stymied them, those facts frustrated them; the facts made them sad because they didn’t see the facts and they didn’t interpret them in the right way.

So they are engaged in this in depth conversation, facts are going through their mind but they’re having trouble interpreting them. And then Luke, very skillfully, he pictures “they were communing and they were questioning one another,” process of time. The advantage, by the way, of walking some place, you can talk and have an in depth discussion while you’re walking instead of driving a car and have to worry about some idiot pulling in front of you. In those days they could have a nice good conversation. This is what they were doing. And it says “Jesus had drawn near,” see, prior to His talking He had drawn near and they hadn’t seen Him; they obviously hadn’t seen Him because they were involved in this quite vigorous controversy. You see two Jews discussing something you know what I mean. And here they were involved and they didn’t notice the third man; they don’t notice where He came from; apparently He appeared but they weren’t looking back at the road to see how He suddenly materialized, because remember now Christ has His resurrection body, He has a body that appears and disappears, and they didn’t see it appear; all of a sudden they heard this person in back of them. And it says “Christ began to go with them,” the imperfect tense. The first time they notice anything is there’s this third person walking with them; where did he come from, I don’t know where he came from, he’s just here now.

It says in Luke 24:16, it’s a commentary and you’ll see why they say this later on, “But their eyes were holden,” imperfect tense, they were continually shut, “that they should not know Him.” Why do they say this? Well, after this conversation goes on for a while these disciples kick themselves for not realizing, why didn’t we think of this earlier, why did it take us, apparently three hours, to understand that this person who was walking with us was Jesus Christ. Where are we, what’s going on. So in retroflection, reflecting back on this thing they think boy, our eyes, it’s just like we had blinders on, we didn’t see the obvious in front of our face and I think some of you have often had that experience, where you’ve been near something, the answer has been staring you in the face and you never saw it and then you wonder what was wrong with me it took me so long to see that. This is the same kind of situation.

So as this third man quietly draws up to them the conversation begins, Luke 24:17, “And He said to them, What manner of communications are these that you have one to another, as you walk?” Now I’m sure the Lord has a sense of humor and Jesus has one here, He’s going to play with them a little bit. Just to see if they’re sharp believers or not. And He doesn’t ask what are you talking about, it’s interesting. He says “what kind of conversation are you having?” Jesus knows what they’re talking about and He knows that they’re acquainted with the facts. But the emphasis, and Luke is deliberately setting us up for Acts with this incident, the emphasis is not on the facts. The emphasis is on how they’re looking at those facts so Jesus doesn’t ask what facts are you discussing gentlemen; He asks how are you discussing the facts? What kind of conversation are you having about these events in Jerusalem that happened? Death of a Messiah, empty tomb, they’re all facts, but gentlemen, how are you speaking about these facts? And the King James is wrong in the end, literally it says, “and they stopped sad.”

So the picture is they walk along, they walk along, they walk along, Jesus walks along with them for a while, He says this and then they stop and they turn, and they’re sad. And these two disciples picture the hundreds and hundreds of other disciples and other believers in that era of history as Acts is about to begin, their stymied; they know the facts but they’re sad. Why are they sad? We’ll see why they’re sad in a moment, but this is the context in which the book of Acts was written, a group of disheartened, sad believers, let down and discouraged by what had happened. And Luke writes Acts to show that out of this motley discouraged group of people you had the greatest force that has ever been launched in the world. How did it all happen? Acts is going to tell us.

Luke 24:18, “And one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering Him said, Are you only a stranger in Jerusalem, and you’ve not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?” Luke is doing something very clever in verse 18; by reporting this Cleopas he’s drawing our attention to something, he’s saying to his readers, look, Jesus Christ was not crucified privately, this wasn’t something that nobody knew about, as some skeptics every once in a while walk up to you, well, the resurrection isn’t mentioned any other place. That’s true, Tacitus has a reference to it and Josephus has a reference to it but you could challenge those references if you wanted to. But the point is, the New Testament is a document and the New Testament reports that at this time other documents existed to this fact. And it was a well-known fact, there was a big holiday blast in Jerusalem, it was Passover, everybody came to the parties and so on at Passover. And so this is the end of the big long weekend, everybody is going home; instead of going home on a Monday they’re going home on a Sunday because their weekend centered on the Shabbat, the Saturday. And so they’re coming home from this weekend; they know everything’s happened, and notice what he says; it’s unusual to have anybody walking outside of the city of Jerusalem not aware of the death of Christ, and not aware of that rumor that happened a few hours ago that the women had seen the empty tomb. That rumor also, the rumor of the empty tomb, was spreading like lightening throughout the mobs in the city of Jerusalem. Oh yeah, a lot of people knew the facts of the case, but very few people could interpret the facts of the case correctly.

So they ask Him, “are you a lone traveler,” literally, the word “stranger” in verse 18 is one who walked to Jerusalem by himself. See, most people didn’t walk to Jerusalem by himself, they had a big holiday weekend, you went down with your village because the village was the tribe, you had whole families dominate villages. Like I’m becoming aware in the small towns of west Texas, they’re all related. We have culturally a very similar situation in west Texas in some of the small towns that they had in Israel and that is when the city of Bethlehem went down to Passover uncles, aunts, great aunts, great-grandfathers and everybody else, it was one big caravan. To show you how big those caravans were, remember the incident about Jesus getting lost in the temple? How long did it take his mother to find out that she didn’t have her son in the caravan? A whole day. So it took Mary a whole day to go up and down the caravan trying to find out is he here, is he here, is he here. The fact that she had a whole day also shows you something else; see, they’re all relatives, he could have been riding in aunt so and so’s little group here, or uncle so and so’s mule or somebody else, it could have been any number of places that Jesus was lost. So it took Mary some time to check out every relative in this caravan where he could have been.

But this person, they say in verse 18, was a lone traveler, he didn’t travel in any caravan, and of course this is another one of those little ironic statements in the Gospel. Christ doesn’t travel in man’s caravans anyway, but that’s just a little statement that Luke has, it’s kind of the Monday morning quarterback view of the thing.

Luke 24:19, “And he said unto them, What things?” Of course again, you have Jesus sort of playing with the believer, trying to stimulate, do you understand, I want you to understand, do you understand? “What things.” And then they told Him two things, things “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who became a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.” Now there’s something deficient in their understanding in verse 19; the word is ginomai in the Greek, it doesn’t mean he was, he “became,” and it’s the word of a very, very low naïve undeveloped Christology or doctrine of Christ. The early believers in Acts did not have sound doctrine. They were extremely naïve and these people do not have a healthy view of Christ. It took the Church almost three hundred years of thinking about Christ before we finally were able to state the teachings of the New Testament correctly. It takes a long time to back off and get a perspective on who this person was and so they’re deficient in their doctrine. This is going to get them in trouble.

Luke 24:20, “And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and have crucified Him.” Now verse 21, here’s the issue and it’s this issue that permeated the early believing community; it was one that the Christians had to fight everywhere they went, all the Jewish communities, from Turkey to Greece to Italy had the same problem with this issue. So these two disciples on the Emmaus road have the problem but they stand for the problem that was all over the society, and here’s the problem. It’s imperfect tense, “We were trusting that it had been the person who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today is the third day since these things were done.” “We were trusting,” constantly we were trusting that Jesus would be the One who would redeem Israel. Redeem Israel?

What do we mean redeem Israel? Their view of the word “redeem” isn’t the full view. Their view of the word “redeem” means free it politically from Rome and they have an idea of the kingdom of God. Their idea of the kingdom of God is one that is wholly social and political. That’s their view of the kingdom of God. As we’re going to see, that’s not entirely wrong; it’s only wrong because that’s all the viewed the kingdom. And they think this is the source of their [can’t understand word]; this is why they all foul up in how they interpret the facts, why they can’t understand what God the Holy Spirit is doing here, they’re all bent out of shape because this political, social, kingdom didn’t happen. Why are they so anxious? Because they were suffering, they are politically oppressed people. Like so many people they want liberation now and if Marx will give it to us, then we’ll take Marx, we don’t care, we want liberation now! And this is the same mental attitude in the early days of Acts. The Jews want a liberation, whether it’s going to be Messiah’s state, we don’t care, we want liberation. And that’s a wrong attitude. And in history Jesus Christ works with the Church for some forty years to show them that first things must be first and first you must change man before you can have liberation. So this is their misinformation.

Verse 21 at the end they say “today is the third day,” in other words, He’s really dead, nothing’s happened, He hasn’t revived, unlike Schonfield’s Passover plot, He didn’t swoon and then resuscitate from the grave and then walk around. Then verse 22 they even go on to report some more of the facts, they say look what happened this morning, “Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, they were early at the sepulcher; [23] And they found not His body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that He was alive. [24] And certain of them who were with us went to the sepulcher, and found it just as the women had said,” big surprise, “but Him they didn’t see.” So they go on and they narrate not only the death of Christ but the resurrection. The Christians knew the facts; the facts of the death and the facts of the empty tomb. Now the problem was, what do we do with those facts. And now Jesus starts, and He’s going to teach these two disciples, and the way He teaches those two disciples is a microcosm of the way He teachers the Church its doctrine and becomes a model that anticipates the whole deal in Acts and the epistles.

First of all He says idiots and slow of heart, [Luke 24:25, “Then He said unto them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart….”] Now both words used, one for “idiot” or “fool” and the other for “slow of heart” means that they do not think, they are unthinking. He’s not getting at them because they don’t know the facts. They know the facts, but they don’t pull it together and that’s what makes Christ mad. This is kind of a sarcasm and it’s angry, angry at believers because He said you should be able to put this together. It’s like today, oh, I can’ stand that deep stuff; what deep stuff can’t you understand. If you are born again in Jesus Christ you have the equipment aboard to understand it or God would never have put it in the canon. Now if you have trouble understanding it may be you haven’t used your equipment in the last 20 years correctly and so it’s a little rusty. But don’t blame God; get in shape.

If you sat around all your life and you walked vigorously three blocks you’re going to be out of breath because you’re all out of shape because of your miserable lifestyle. It’s the same thing here. A lot of people get bent out of shape because of their miserable lifestyle, absorbed with the boob tube or something, and don’t learn how to think. And the schools don’t help; one local elementary school raises the grades of the kids so we don’t insult the poor little morons that don’t get proper grades so we’ll just give everybody a letter grade higher; that little thing goes on in the Lubbock schools. We don’t do that in athletics; it’s a very strange thing, when we come to putting out a football team do you ever see the coach take the classroom approach, why let so and so play, he isn’t a very good football player but we’ll give everybody a chance. Why is it that the methodology that seems to be so legitimate in academics isn’t used in athletics? You discriminate against the kid who can’t play well in athletics; then why don’t you discriminate a person who is lazy and won’t think in the classroom. It’s inconsistent application of principles. What we apply in the field we don’t apply in the classroom; if we did half the class would flunk. We ought to have a first team in the classroom, that’s the only way you get quality. True, there are some people who can’t think but that’s not the problem with most people, most people won’t think, it’s not that they can’t. You’d be surprised what you can do if you have to.

And this is a little exhortation that Christ is giving to the disciples, He expects Christians to put it together and stop this floating around in never never land some place hoping that the Holy Spirit is going to do your thinking for you; He isn’t! The only way you are ever going to learn is the way other people in this congregation have; other people in this congregation have come in here and they had to buy a dictionary to find out what the words meant; that’s all right, and they learned and gradually put it all together and finally week in week out, month after month, year after year they got there; they didn’t get here because they rolled down the aisle and hit the communion table and had some sort of an ecstatic experience. They did it by the hard labor of day in day out day in day out work. That’s the way the Church did it, in spite of all this flamboyant work of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts, the real doctrinal maturity never came until all this stuff was gone. Now how come? Because that kind of stuff doesn’t edify you; what edifies you is the Word of God and that edification proceeds slowly and you have to be patient with yourself, you have to be patient with the Holy Spirit and be patient with the Word. You cannot learn it overnight, but because you can’t learn it overnight doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. It’s just that very few of us have ever been exposed to a normally intelligent person in our life. That’s the problem. And because we have not been exposed to normally intelligent people in our lives we have a very sub standard idea of what we ought to be like; we have no great models to pattern our lives after. I sometimes wish we could take a time machine and go back in the streets of Boston in 1770 or 1760 and read some of the political handbooks that were out. Today people would pick that up and say what is this, a PhD dissertation? No, it’s a propaganda tract that was being passed out in the streets. And everybody was able to understand and read it.

Jesus says, “fools and slow of heart to believe,” and notice what He makes a point of, He says, “fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” “ALL that the prophets have spoken!” So He’s not accusing them, when they have this social political idea, the kingdom of God, he’s not saying like the amils keep telling us that oh, that’s all wrong boys, Jesus never really meant to bring in a social political kingdom. No, He says that’s all right, that’s not the problem, the problem is there are a lot of other things that you haven’t put together with this thing. So you’ve failed to believe “all that the prophets have spoken.”

Then in Luke 24:26 He goes into the two themes and these are the two themes that the Christians had to face everywhere they went. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?” The idea there is that as Jesus Christ was predicted to be glorified, predicted to be the Messiah of the kingdom, Jesus Christ should not have died, if you just take that one line of prophecy. But there was a second line in the Old Testament, that Messiah was the suffering servant, and it was that line that was totally overlooked and they didn’t pull it together to get a coherent picture of Christ.

So now in Luke 24:27 begins what has to be one of the greatest Bible teaching lessons in the world. We don’t know how long this lesson took; we do know that, if we estimate say it began shortly after lunch we know it ended at sundown, about 5:00 or 6:00 o’clock, so about a four or five hour lesson. “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, Jesus expounded unto them, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself.” Now how long do you suppose that took Him. Thank God He didn’t have some of you people around or you’d be looking at your watches, hey Lord, cut it out, it’s 11:55. We’d be halfway through Deuteronomy and we’d have to turn it off, we’ve got to stop for lunch. Jesus didn’t believe in that because you see, Jesus put the Word of God first. And He started, notice, at the beginning of the Old Testament and this is the norm.

Verse 27 is telling you not just how Jesus taught the two disciples on the road to Emmaus but it’s also telling you how Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, taught His Church; how gradually as these men drew to Moses and the prophets and they looked at Isaiah carefully and they looked at Jeremiah carefully and they looked at Ezekiel carefully, the Holy Spirit would teach them these things concerning Christ. So what Christ is doing to the two disciples the Holy Spirit later would do to the Church. “…He expounded to them in the Scriptures,” that means every book… every book of the Old Testament came up for discussion. Now can you imagine what a fantastic Bible class that was. I wish they had cassettes then.

Luke 24:28, As he was going on “they drew near unto the village and where they were going, and He made as though He would have gone farther.” Now that’s a neat little characteristic of the Lord, and He’ll do this with you, and that is, He tests us to see whether we’re that interested in the Word. He’s a gentleman and He won’t push Himself on you. And what He’s doing to these disciples, they walk by, they’re coming to the village where they’re going and as they kind of stop to go down the road to the village Jesus walks on and He’s testing them. He’s given them four or five hours of teaching of the Word of God, now He’s testing them. Do you want more, because if you don’t want more, that’s all right, I’ll just leave you and you can take what you have, you’ve learned some of the Word, go apply it, and I’ll leave you and go teach someone else. But if you want more of the Word I’ll stay and we’ll do that do. So fortunately these disciples in verse 29 “constrained Him, saying, Abide with us,” but you notice Jesus gave them the choice of whether they wanted to continue in the Word or they wanted to flake out and they continued in the Word. “…for it is toward evening, and the day is well spent. And he went in to wait with them.”

Now in Luke 24:30 is a dramatic instance of what happened when He turned aside to them. It’s brought out by Luke with verb tenses. All the verb tenses in verse 30 are aorist or past tense except the last one, and the last tense is imperfect tense which means continuous action. Here is the way it should read: “And it came to pass, He sat down at meat,” now that word means to recline at a table, like this. That’s how some kids sit at the table. This is the way Jesus and the people in that day… they didn’t have chairs so they reclined at the table, so that’s the first thing, they all got down, had the food on the table, “Jesus took bread,” which means that Jesus assumed command of this meal, see He was invited to their home but no sooner had they set the table and began to eat but Jesus began to assume authority over the serving and the food. And so “He took the bread, and blessed it, and broke it,” and now, “as He was giving it to them, [31] their eyes were opened….” Now consider what’s just happened. They’ve come into the house, they’ve prepared the meal, they’re lying down to eat the meal at the table, Jesus breaks the bread, He gives thanks for that bread and He begins to hand it to them and as He begins to hand it to them suddenly something clicks, now we know who He is.

Now what had Jesus just done by all this, that He had done shortly done within 72 hours before? The last supper; the first communion. It was so similar to the first communion they couldn’t forget it, and so we have what reminded them of Christ was the procedure of that meal. And the book of Acts, the meal that is often repeated, is the last supper, over and over and over and over. The Church revered communion, the last supper, because it reminded them of Messiah, it reminded them of Christ. And so in the middle of the meal, suddenly then they said, oh, we know who He is, and looking back on it they say why couldn’t we have seen this before. That’s why they say in verse 32, “And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?” Now every verb tense in verse 32 is not past simple, it’s not an aorist, it’s an imperfect. It should read, “did not our heart keep on burning within us, while He kept on talking with us, while He kept on opening to us the Scriptures?”

For four hours as they walked down that road from Jerusalem to Emmaus as Christ went from book to book there was some sort of a response in their heart to the Word of God. And they looked back on it and they remember having the response but it never dawned on them who it was that was teaching them. Now that response, that burning of the heart, while Jesus opened the Scriptures, Luke is using this event to teach us something. In the book of Acts the Bible was expanded. It starts out with just the Old Testament, and then we have letters written, the New Testament epistles, and we have the Gospels written and we have Acts written. The question is how did the Christians know enough to add these new Scriptures to the old Scriptures to make one complete canon of Scripture. And the reason has never been really cleared in church history, nobody has said pick that book, don’t do this, it was just a common receptivity on the part of believers that this is God’s Word. And that’s how the books and the literature of the New Testament was chosen. When Paul wrote his letters Christians read those letters and their hearts burned within. There was a subjective response to the external Word of God. And so this burning sensation that’s described in verse 32 is actually the mechanism that would be used later on to verify and validate the New Testament canon.

That again is the same mechanism that the Holy Spirit would use throughout the book of Acts, opening to men the full interpretation of the Old Testament, things they’d never seen before about Messiah; gradually, a little here, a little there and a little over here, gradually the Church suddenly it dawns on them, why of course that’s over there in the Old Testament, why didn’t we see this before; the same blindness as those two disciples on the Emmaus road.

So with verse 32 we end this little sequence to introduce us to Acts and we’ll go on to something else. This little sequence, the two men on the road to Emmaus, in a microcosm pictures all that will happen in the book of Acts. It starts out with discouraged, sad believers and it winds up with believers that are [can't understand word] because Christ has appeared to them and they are confident that God’s plan goes on, that the Word of God is growing and we are confident of this, we’ve got it all together.

Let’s look at the major theme of the book of Acts. The major theme of the book of Acts is transition. We will show this chart again and again as we study the book of Acts. First we have the gospel period. During that gospel period the kingdom of God is proclaimed and offered. Remember John the Baptist, “the kingdom of God is at hand,” and that includes the social and the political. But the social and the political fruit of the kingdom are contingent upon first the people conforming and accepting God’s spiritual prerequisites, which are the reception of Messiah. And so over and over again Jesus and over and over again the apostles would say Israel, your kingdom is here, just accept Messiah and you can have your kingdom and you can have your political freedom, and you can have your ideal economic conditions and all the rest of it, all that is yours if you’ll accept Christ and bow your knees to Him as the authority. And so the kingdom was offered time and time and time again.

Then, in the first chapters of the book of Acts the kingdom of God was reoffered to the nation Israel. This is something you want to be careful because Acts 2 and Acts 3 are not evangelistic sermons. It is not a simple evangelistic sermon that Peter gets up on the day of Pentecost and preaches. What he is doing is not only preaching the gospel but he is reoffering the kingdom to the nation and that’s why he says believe and you’ll have the promise of the Holy Spirit and the times of refreshing. That’s the millennial kingdom. He’s officially confronting the nation on its official capital grounds, the city of Jerusalem. And yes, you’ve crucified Christ, yes He has gone to be at the Father’s right hand, but heaven has received Him until the time of the restitution of all things. And that time can come if you will accept Him.

So in the early chapters of the book of Acts the kingdom is offered again and again it’s rejected. This is why the book of Acts spans a 40 year period. For forty years God gave the first generation of Israel a time of testing, would they or would they not accept His law, the prerequisite of the kingdom of God and for forty years he gave them an option, and for forty years they rebelled until the new generation came along. God always works in terms of forty, the number of testing. And so on the day of Pentecost when Peter got up and he offered the kingdom to the nation again he offered the nation forty more years to decide, what are you going to do with Jesus Christ? Are you going to accept Him or are you going to reject Him? The kingdom remains in abeyance waiting for your decision. And at the end of those forty years the nation rejected and what happened? The Romans destroyed the temple and that was the end of the nation Israel.

So the book of Acts is a book of transition. Now on the day of Pentecost, we can look back on it now but remember we are Monday morning quarterbacks looking back on it. We can look back on it now and say yes, the Church began on the day of Pentecost; on the day of Pentecost though the Church was in existence few knew about it. It hadn’t become a reality yet; in fact, it didn’t dawn for decades until Paul finally came around and straightened everybody out as to what really happened back there on the day of Pentecost. It took time for those early disciples to understand that they were living between one age and another. And they were transitioning, and so the Church grew and grew until finally now in the epistles the Church is fully revealed and the Church fully replaces that prior offered kingdom. As the book of Acts goes on you have less and less of the spectacular and more and more of the teaching of doctrine. You have less and less emphasis on the kingdom and more and more emphasis on the Church. Why is that? Because the book of Acts is a book of transitions. And this is what’s so wrong and so foolish about people that go into the first part of Acts and they say look at those miracles, why the reason we don’t see miracles today is because we’re people of so little faith and if we had more faith we’d see more miracles. Bologna! The absence of miracles has nothing to do with faith. Do you know why? Elisha and Elijah pulled off the greatest set of miracles in a totally unbelieving generation. So the frequency of miracles is not related to the faith of a generation. The frequency of miracles is related to what God’s program is, regardless of the faith of any given generation.

Now I said from this chart that the major theme of the book of Acts is this transition. I want to break this down and give you four ways in which the transition is occurring. We’ll trace these four transitional themes through various verses. All of this is to help you when we get into Acts so you won’t lose the forest for the trees and you’ll interpret passages in the overall framework and not lose it, and get all stuck and hung up on one or two verses. Remember Acts is an argument; Luke is proving the point, he’s not just teaching history.

One aspect to this transition: there is a transition in teaching or doctrine; there is a transition in doctrine. Two examples: when Acts begin the believers know nothing of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ; this is an issue, they know Him personally but they don’t know that much about Him personally. They’re saved, yes, but they don’t have an appreciation for who He is. The doctrine of who Christ is slowly develops through the book of Acts. So who wants to get back to the naïve childish understanding of the first chapter in the book of Acts? I don’t.

The second doctrine that develops in the book of Acts is the doctrine of the atonement. It is not clear in the book of Acts at the beginning as to what Christ did on the cross; somehow He dealt with the sin problem but it’s not really pinned down as to what was going on on the cross; that is developed as we go through the book of Acts. So first about the major theme of transition and that is there’s a transition in doctrine, a development from the naïve simple to the more mature and complex.

The second shift is a social shift; besides your doctrinal transition you have a social transition. At the beginning of the book of Acts you have the Christians as part of the Jewish community; they are a sect inside of Judaism. By the end of the book of Acts Christianity is a movement on an equal or greater par than Judaism. It has divorced itself from the Judaistic community and now is another community in competition with it. And so you have a social transition and it doesn’t happen easily; there’s bumps and there’s hurts and there’s bruises as this transition occurs between a community inside Judaism and a community outside of Judaism. Social transition.

A third transition besides the doctrinal and social is a transition in emphasis from kingdom to Church. Turn to Acts 1:6, at the very beginning of the book of Acts the disciples still are imbued with the idea of that social and political kingdom. Christ has died, yes; Christ has risen, yes, but where’s the kingdom. Where’s the kingdom? The kingdom, that’s the issue. And so in Acts 1:6, “When they, therefore, were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord, will you at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” So they are still thinking in terms of the kingdom. But Christ answer them in verse 7, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in His own power. [8] But you shall receive authority, after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you; and you shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” What Christ is doing in verses 7-8 is saying I say to you that that kingdom will come but don’t you get all bent out of shape waiting for it right now; the kingdom is not the issue, the kingdom is what strange work the Spirit does today and the work the Spirit does today has nothing to do with that kingdom directly, so just put the kingdom out of your mind boys and let’s just concentrate on what the Spirit is doing today. He doesn’t say the kingdom is never going to come; He just says the kingdom right now isn’t the issue, right now it’s a work of the Holy Spirit.

What is this work of the Holy Spirit and how does Luke mention it? He has a phrase every time. Turn to Acts 6:7. Time and time again throughout the book of Acts Luke takes us back to this same old slogan, this same old phrase and it’s to pinpoint the fact of the work of the Holy Spirit. “And the word of God increased, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem.” Turn to Acts 12:24, “But the word of God grew and multiplied.” Acts 13:49, “And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region.” It doesn’t mean they had a printing company. Acts 19:20, “So mightily grew the Word of God, and prevailed.” What strange thing is this that’s happened? The kingdom hasn’t come but God’s Word goes out. Why this difference? This reason, and here is where you see the link between the Church and the kingdom.

Now I’m a dispensationalist and I’m frequently accused as a dispensationalist of making such a violent division between the Church and the kingdom they never get together. Now just listen; the dispensationalist simply points to these verses; there are two movements going on but they’re not absolutely disconnected, they’re joined and they’re joined in this way. The Church or the body of Christ becomes the royal family of the kingdom. The Church functions as the royal family and the temple in the coming kingdom. The Church does have a place in the coming kingdom; the Church is connected to the coming kingdom, but before that kingdom can come there must be a nucleus of people trained to be loyal to Jesus Christ, first, without any fringe benefits, without these pleasures of dwelling in the King’s kingdom. We must learn to be loyal to the King while we’re not in His kingdom. We must be loyal to the King of light while we dwell in the kingdom of darkness. And that’s the lesson for the Church, and that’s why the Church precedes the kingdom, because we must be trained that we make the Word of God the issue, plus nothing else. We don’t get any benefits right now politically and socially directly from the kingdom because that’s in the future. The only reason, thinking of Job’s loyalty to God in the face of Satan’s accusation, well God Job’s loyal to You because You bless Him. Job’s loyalty to you God is because you keep him from getting cursed. And what did God say? Go ahead and curse him and see if Job isn’t loyal to Me. And so during the Church Age we have a time of tremendous angelic conflict, and the issue is being battled out and thrashed in the invisible realms around us; are we as believers loyal to God and His Word. Satan says we’re not; he says you’re not, he says God if you give them enough pressures they’ll spit in your face, they won’t be loyal to you. And God is betting that we are going to be loyal and that we’re going to respond to His Word. And then out of this loyal nucleus, then will come the kingdom, a kingdom grounded upon loyalty that has been developed in the character of the people, not in the character of the institution.

We have a fourth thing; we’ve had the transition of doctrine, the transition of social, it’s a social transition, we’ve had the transition from the kingdom to the Church, and now we have the geographical transition, the transition from Jerusalem to Rome. Physically the Church moved, it became one of European religion instead of one of Oriental religion. How come? And Luke is answering that. Over and over again, for example, if you turn to Acts 5:35 you’ll see how Luke presents this. What I’m doing now is to show you why Luke picks certain things to put in Acts. Many of you have read over Acts but you’ve never put it all together as to why certain events happen the way they do and why Luke put these events together. Luke is not writing history, Luke is making a point in an argument and his point is dealing with this transition geographically. He’s got to solve this problem because people can argue against the Christian, why, if this is a genuine work of the Spirit of God it would stay in Israel; if it were a genuine work of the Spirit of Jehovah of the Old Testament it wouldn’t be in Rome, Rome is the center of apostasy.

All right, so watch how Luke handles this. In Acts 5:35 he reports to us a discussion of the Pharisees, Gamaliel, he even points out one of the highest theologians of the day couldn’t condemn Christianity, he advises, “Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do [as touching these men.]” He quotes some false messiahs and then in verse 38 he says, “Now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nothing. [39] But if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it.” The argument on the part of the highest Jewish authorities was let the Christian movement go on because if it’s of God it will keep on going; if it’s not it will phase out. Notice that there’s this attitude in the highest authority of neutrality to the Christian faith.

Now let’s look inside the movement. Turn to Acts 9:3; every time the Christian faith expands in the book of Acts it is done against the natural inclination of people. That’s the theme of Luke; did you ever notice that when you’ve read the book of Acts. It is not a picture of the great loyal believers going out with the Word of God, from Jerusalem to Samaria to the uttermost parts of the world, all by their own little volition. Not at all. Every one of those stages from Jerusalem to Samaria to the uttermost parts of the world has to be fought over. Every time they make a transition God has to say do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, and they say no, no, no, no, no, no, and it starts with Saul, the theologian that will lead the movement into Rome in the Gentile world, and what has to happen to him? He has to go on the road to Damascus and get smashed. God has to meet him with a crisis before Saul wakes up. So how did the Church’s key theologian get started? Because he was such a great man who was so positive to the Word. Not at all; because God had to come down in a confrontation with him to straighten him out.

In Acts 10:13, the problem of evangelizing the Gentiles; was this done because the believers are so hyper spiritual in that first century church, they just floated off into the wild blue, carrying the Word of God with them in one mighty evangelistic crusade. Not at all, they wanted to stay in Jerusalem, and so in Acts 10:13 God has to have a confrontation with Peter to get him to move, “Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. [14, But Peter said], “Not so, Lord.” So again was it because of the great spirituality of the Church. Not at all. Who was responsible for the movement from Jerusalem to Samaria, to the uttermost parts of the world? God or men? Luke’s argument is this movement from Jerusalem to Rome happened because time and time again God intervened, God intervened and changed us and forced us to keep moving out and out and out and out and it did not come naturally; we had to be led to it by one severe crisis after another. And that’s theme that goes along with this transition, a sub theme of it.

Notice in Acts 16:9, a major point of Luke, the Macedonian vision; many of you have heard about this in light of evangelism but have you ever thought about this historically? Do you know what this is, in Acts 16:9, this Macedonian vision? This is what turned Christianity into a European western religion. It’s God’s will that Christianity be a religion of the West. And why did it become a religion of the West? We don’t apologize because we’re European backgrounds and it came out of Europe, it’s God’s will that it came out of Europe and here’s why. “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: there stood a man of Macedonia,” that’s across the Bosporus Strait, “and prayed to him, saying, Come over to Macedonia, and help us.” And so with this God’s Spirit moves again and the gospel goes to Europe and this becomes the bridge that Christianity as an Oriental religion dies and is reborn as a religion of the West, and it’s by God’s Spirit and God’s movement. The reason is, we’ll get into an analysis of why when we get to Acts 16 but I’m just showing you these transitions.

Again, the major theme; transition from kingdom to the Church shown doctrinally, shown socially, shown in the emphasis from kingdom to Church and shown in this geographical movement from Jerusalem to Rome.

Now there is one minor theme in the gospel of Luke; this doesn’t play much of a doctrinal role but it will explain many passages and tie these together for you. This is something else to watch for as you read. You’ll see that time and time and time again Luke goes into almost abnormal lengths describing the reactions of high government officials to the Christian faith. Here’s why. In Luke’s day the Jewish religion had been offered special privileges under Rome. It goes back to the book of Daniel. The reason why is that the Romans had the Parthians on their eastern frontier and the eastern frontier of Rome was always vulnerable and the worst place to be, to have these hothead Jews in between the Parthians and you. This was a potentially very unstable area. Plus the fact Rome had come to power and had gone into Israel right after the Maccabean problems and they knew boy, if you go in and start trying to get those Jews to integrate with your religious culture you’re going to have a war on your hands and we can’t stand having a war on our eastern frontier with the Parthians just beyond. So the political and historical pressures of Judaism forced Rome to compromise at this point and the Jews, wherever they went were allowed to have their kosher laws and they were allowed to worship Jehovah as the only God and refuse to worship Caesar on the coin. They were the only group in the empire that had this privilege.

Now here’s the question that Luke had to grapple with and this is a minor theme of the book of Acts. The Christians came out of the Jewish community? Do the Christians share the same position vis a vis the Roman government. So there’s a political question being dealt with all through the book of Acts: does the Christian church share the privileges of Judaism within the Roman Empire?

This is why you’ll see such passages as these; turn to Acts 18:12; there are many passages in the book of Acts like these, I’ll just show you two or three samples. “And when Gallio was the deputy of Achaia, the Jews made insurrection [an attack] with one accord against Paul, and brought him to the judgment seat, [13] Saying, This fellow persuades men to worship God contrary to the law. [14] And when Paul was now about to open his mouth, Gallio said unto the Jews, If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness [crime], O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you. [15] But if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, you look to it; for I will be not judge of such matters.” And so you have a high government official refuse to intervene and distinguish Christianity from Judaism; hands off, that’s a religious issue, we Romans can’t be bothered with those fine points.

Next passage similar to this one is Acts 19:31, here Paul is in danger, “And certain of the chief of Asia, who were his friends, sent unto him, desiring him that he would not adventure himself into the theater.” These are Roman officials and they say Paul, for heaven’s sakes, don’t go in there. [32] Some, therefore, cried one thing, and some another; for the assembly was in confusion;” he was right in the middle of a big riot, and verse 35, “And when the town clerk had appeased the people, he said, Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not that the city of the Ephesians is a worshiper of the great goddess, Diana…” and so and so on. [36] “Seeing, then, that these things cannot be spoke against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rashly. [37] For ye have brought hither these men, who are neither robbers of churches [temples], nor yet blasphemers of your goddess.” So you have again a high official saying Paul has not violated any law worthy of our criminal procedures; vindication.

And we could go on and on, Acts 23, Acts 24, Acts 25, Acts 26, and Acts 28 all contain similar encounters with Roman authorities; same theme, and it’s a minor complement to the major one. The major theme of Acts: transition. The minor theme is Christianity has a right in the political empire to political respect; we are not undermining Roman authority, we are living peacefully within the system. Now it’s true, theologically they would tear it down but it wasn’t done by violence and it wasn’t done by mob action; it was done theologically and that’s Luke’s argument; Christianity has a right in the sun because of its position.

Shall we stand and sing….