Clough Acts Lesson 2

Last Instructions and Ascension – Acts 1:1-11

 

Turn to Acts 1; remembering that the major theme of the book of Acts in light of our introduction in Luke 24 is transition.  Transition socially from a cult within Judaism to a separate group called Christianity; a transition spiritually from a kingdom oriented program to a Church oriented program; a transition doctrinally from naiveté to maturity and a transition geographically from Jerusalem to Rome.  All misuse, or at least most misuse of the book of Acts stems directly from the simple mistake of failing to recognize the act is transitional, it’s a transition book.  And people always want to stop, but on the brake, halt the movement and make Acts the norm for the rest of the Church Age.  And it’s wrong; the Church is an infant in the book of Acts.  And I would no more like to go back to the Church in the book of Acts than go back to my crib.  And that’s exactly what people who want to (quote) “get back to the Church in Acts” want to do; they want to go back to the crib, go back to the nursery.

 

The minor theme in the book of Acts that isn’t so strong as the major one but it’s there, it’s an apologetic that Luke is doing, is that Christianity deserves the support of the civil authorities.  He’s interested in showing that Christianity is not a subversive movement, it’s kingdom is not of this age, Christianity is not trying to cause civil disobedience to governmental authorities.  Of course he doesn’t add that Christianity is going to transform the Roman Empire but it does so peacefully and in submission to authority. 

 

And so we come to the outline of the book of Acts, actually given in verse 8. The first chapter of Acts is the prelude and the introduction.  Acts 2-7 deals with the activities in and around Jerusalem; Acts 8-9 deal with Judea and Samaria; and Acts 10 and following deals with the gospel as it goes out to the Gentile nations.  That in a nutshell is how Acts moves; Acts moves outward and shows its transitory nature.

 

Acts 1:1, “The former treatise I have made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began to do and teach.”  Now we don’t know who Theophilus was; we do know that Theophilus in this place, in this part of the book, takes the position, in literary form, of a man who would take the position in secular publications as the publisher.  In other words, when a works such as Josephus’ work was put out in the ancient world there’d obviously have to be someone to pay for its publication.  I always am amused, some people say where’s the second framework pamphlet, the first one, the third one, they just require about two thousand bucks a piece to print and of course some it never seems to dawn on some people that they don’t appear ex nihilo, it’s not a waving of the wand in the office  and suddenly the framework pamphlet appears.  There’s a process that goes on and Luke had the same problem, somebody had to pay for it. 

 

So guessing on the basis of literary analogy, we guess, and that’s what it is, it’s just a guess, that Theophilus is the man who paid for the scribe that wrote the first couple of manuscripts of both Luke and Acts.  Theophilus personally was interested in the Christian faith; if you turn back to Luke 1 which is volume 1 of the work you’ll notice what Luke says to Theophilus.  Luke gives him what the proper concept of faith is in the Bible.  Luke 1:1, “For as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,” verse 3, “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,” then he says why; verse 4, purpose clause, “That you may know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed,” showing once again our theme songs here is that you cannot believe if you are not sure.  And that is why asking a person to come down the aisle, raise their hand, be baptized, join the church, go through some rigmarole before they are convinced of the validity of the Christian faith is wrong.  Nowhere in the Bible do we have any such precedent for that kind of activity.  It’s wrong because it is forcing someone to believe against their conscience and that is unbiblical.  The point is that you wait until you have digested the facts and the Holy Spirit has opened  your eyes to see them in their proper interlocking connections, then you can believe without strain and you can believe with that deep satisfaction of soul knowing that whoever you talk with, knowing that wherever you are no one is going to bring up facts contrary to your faith.  So remember this; there’s a certain Biblical view of what faith is and it is tremendously different from most people’s view of faith.  J

 

To review our doctrine of faith under four points: faith scripturally depends upon the divine viewpoint historic foundation.  And that is proved for us in Hebrews 11:3; the universe has to be structured the way the Bible insists the universe is structured.  And if you don’t share that view of the world and that view of nature and that view of man as the Bible says man is, you can’t believe.  I don’t care who you are and I don’t care how many times you stand on your head and contemplate infinity, you are not going to believe.  And you can go through all the lotus position and yoga that you want to and you’re still not going to believe because your soul is not designed to believe unless it can believe what is true and you can’t believe what is true if you don’t start in the right place.  So a divine viewpoint foundation is necessary for faith plus the fact you have to have some revelation of God.  Not only do you have to believe the universe is created in a certain way, it fell at a point in time and this is why we have evil in the universe, but you’ve also got to have God speaking to you in history: words and works.  You’ve got to have that or you can’t believe. 

 

If God just spoke words to you and never did anything you couldn’t check His words to make sure that He kept what He told you.  If God only did things and He never spoke to you, you couldn’t believe either because you couldn’t interpret His works. That’s what’s wrong with neo-orthodoxy, the theology of a lot of liberal clergymen that you hear.  They always talk about the great acts of God and God does this and God does that and God does something else.  How do I know God and not Satan is doing it?  No way, unless I have words also in addition to the acts to interpret those acts.  So I must have historic revelation, Romans 10:17, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”  You have to have both of these things or you can’t believe. 

 

The second thing in our doctrine of faith is that faith cannot be measured by a microscope X-ray machine or anything else; it can only be measured from the outside by the modification of behavior.  Behavior mod, not Skinner type but this is the idea of just changing a person’s value system and so on.  Like, I can tell that a lot of parents who give nominal lip service to Scripture aren’t interested in Scripture and don’t believe the Scriptures, and it’s very evident by their attitude of sending their children to family training program and they sit down sipping coffee at the corner drugstore some place.  Obviously that shows their attitude that they are not trusting in the Word of God.  So behavior modification; behavior mod is the only sign of faith in Scripture. 

 

Then we have the third point in the doctrine is the fact that resting and doing are twin elements of faith.  All true faith will manifest itself in a resting sense; it will also manifest itself in a doing sense.  Example: a person can be told by a promise of the Word of God that nothing can happen except God allows it to happen and therefore in this situation there is nothing he can do so he rests; he zips up his mouth, he sits in a place and waits.  God will ask you to do that at times, and to shut your mouth and to sit down and relax is a sign that you believe.  At other times it is exactly the opposite.  At other times it shows your faith to do; for example, Noah: For 120 years had to conduct a global evangelistic ministry as well as contract to build one of the largest structures that the world has ever seen in naval architecture.  All that he had to do in that 120 year period and he was a very busy man.  So he showed his faith by what he did.

 

And finally in our doctrine of faith we always want to remember that faith is orientation to grace.  In faith we hang by the thin thread of God’s grace; always look in your relationship with the Lord this way, it doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been a Christian, it doesn’t matter how much doctrine you know, you still must approach the throne of God on a grace basis.  It does not depend on who and what you are, you grand accomplishments in the past or lack thereof, who you know, what you know or anything else, it depends upon God’s gracious attitude towards you at that point.  All right, there’s faith.

 

Now turning back to Acts 1 we see why he says certain things to Theophilus.  He says “In the former work, I, Theophilus, wrote to you, all that Jesus began both to do an teach.”   Now the word “began” is very important in verse 1 because that tips us off as to how Luke views the rest of Acts.  If everything that Jesus did from His birth through His death, His resurrection and His ascension, if all that is recorded in the four Gospels, it’s just the beginning of Jesus’ work, what’s the finishing of Jesus’ work?  And the answer is the finishing of Jesus’ work is the Church Age.  The Church finishes the work that Jesus began and so there’s a continuity between the Gospels and the Church.  Jesus began to do and he began to teach and now the apostles continue to do and they continue to teach, there’s continuity.   Notice in verse 1 the two things that Jesus does; He does and he teaches, there are the works and the words, the two necessary components of revelation. 

 

Now he says in Acts 1:2, He did all this, and counted it only the beginning, “Until the day in which He was taken up,” verse 2 is translated a little wrongly in the King James, it should be translated “having commanded the apostles whom He chose by the Spirit.”  The prepositional phrase, “by the Spirit” goes with the verb “choose,” not with the verb “command.”  And there’s a reason for that.  In the book of Acts there is a heavy, heavy emphasis upon the root and the foundation of the Church.  And the root and the foundation of the Church is the apostles.  This is why throughout history many groups in the Christian church have correctly confessed The Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in the holy catholic and apostolic church,” I believe in the holy church because it’s set apart unto God; I believe in the catholic church because the word “catholic” means universal and I believe in the apostolic church because it is grounded on the teaching of the apostles.  So Luke then says that the ground and the center of the Church is the apostles.

 

Today we would speak of it differently, we mean the same thing but it comes across in the 20th century, we believe that the Bible, the New Testament is the absolute authority and norm and standard for the Church; it’s not what a group of church leaders get together and decide to believe, it is what the Word of God says.  So I believe in the apostolic foundation of the Church.  So Luke emphasize this and Jesus chose the apostles by the Holy Spirit; it adds authority to those apostles.    And it says He had given commandments to those apostles.  What commandments?  Turn to Luke 24:44; what did Jesus do during those forty days?  What was His teaching?  What were some of the topics He emphasized.  “And He said unto them, These are the words which I spoke unto  you, while I was with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, [concerning Me]” the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible, the whole third division is called Psalms even though it has more than just the Psalms in it.  Today we call it Torah, and then the middle, the Nabiim, the Prophets, and the Kethubim, the Writings.  But here it was just called Moses, prophets and psalms.  It means in other words that Jesus Christ conducted Bible classes on the Old Testament; over and over and over and over and over and over and over again He taught the Old Testament.  He did not want the Church to be led by a group of New Testament Christians.  He wanted people to lead the Church who had their feet solidly planted in the Old Testament.  Verse 45, “Then He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, [46] And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day, [47] And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” 

 

Now we can summarize this passage as well as several others by saying that Christ emphasized these elements in His forty day ministry.  First, He wanted to explain to the disciples the cross.  He had to explain this, this was kind of difficult, to have your leader, a convicted criminal, executed, marvelous that we didn’t have people saying that capital punishment was a cruel and unusual punishment in Christ’s day, if the had He never have been crucified.  Jesus Christ had to explain His execution.  He had to explain it so that it would take away and fit with the true picture of what He had done on the cross.  For us we don’t feel this problem but those disciples felt it very heavily because of the enigma of the cross. The second thing that Jesus emphasized was the worldwide proclamation of the gospel; this is something new, that this gospel is not just going to sit here in Israel but it’s going to be transmitted across the face of the earth.  That is new.  And finally He emphasized His future coming in judgment. 

 

Now notice in Acts 1:3, Luke emphasizes the apostles by saying, “To whom also He showed Himself alive,” now Jesus showed Himself alive to many people beside the apostles.  He showed Himself alive to the women that first Sunday morning they went to the tomb.  But they’re not mentioned here in verse 3.  He showed Himself alive to many other people; they’re not mentioned in verse 3.  The reason they’re not mentioned is because Luke’s theme is the apostles saw Him, the apostles, the foundation of the Church, they have been exposed to this truth, so “To the apostles He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs.”  The word “proofs” in verse 3 is related to the word “work” or “treatise” in verse 1. 

 

The idea is that… say in Plato, a good example, there’s two words, logos and then there’s this word muthos, these were two Greek words used for two different kinds of history that you could write.  One was a logos kind of history and the other was a muthos kind of history.  The muthos kind of history would be mythical history that never really happened and we have doubt over; logos history was the real stuff.  So when Luke starts out his work in verse 1, “the former work,” he uses “the former logos history,” that is volume one of my logos history, it’s not a myth.  If Luke wanted to say he wrote myth he had a perfectly good Greek word to use for it; myth, and it was available to him in the corpus of his vocabulary; he didn’t use it, he used logos, he intended this history to be taken literally.

And then in verse 3, following out this use of the word logos history, he says Jesus appeared “by many infallible proofs,” and that word “proof” is used in the philosophers to show certainty, but here it’s not a philosophic proof, it’s a historic proof.  What is a historic proof?  Turn to 1 Corinthians 15:4.  In 1 Corinthians 15 we have the catalogue of the resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ.  If you want to remember, log this away, maybe even write it in the front of your Bible because here you’ve got a list of the evidences of Christ’s resurrection; it’s all conveniently put together in just one passage.  Paul used this list of evidences many times in his ministry. What are those evidences.  “He was buried, and he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures.”  Evidence number one, fulfilled prophecy… fulfilled prophecy!  The resurrection is not an isolated miracle, it is the fulfillment of prophecy.  Verse 5, evidence number two, “He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve,” all twelve men saw Him, these are the twelve men, the twelve minus the one, Judas, plus the one that replaced Him in Acts; “He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve.”  So evidence number two all the apostles saw Jesus after His resurrection. 

 

Now the clincher is verse 6, evidence number three.  I know a few people who really seriously ever thought about verse 6, “After that, He was seen of five hundred brethren at one time, of whom the greater part remains unto this present, though some have fallen asleep,” in other words, Paul says there are 500 eye witnesses that Christ appeared to at one time and if you doubt me, go talk to them.  The most powerful evidence of verse 6 is that last part, if you doubt me, go check it out yourself.  And this is what the first Christians were able to do to silence their opponents.  If you doubt us, check the records, they’re still available.  Today those records aren’t available but that’s all right because at this time they were available and could be consulted.  Verse 7, “After that He was seen of James; then of all the apostles.  [8] And last of all He was seen of me also, as one born out of due time.  [9] For I am the least of the apostles, that am not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”  All right, that is a list of the evidences of the Christian faith.

 

Turn back to Acts 1; notice what Jesus talked about, “He showed Himself alive after many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days,” by the way, it was fifty days from His resurrection to the coming of the Holy Spirit.  So, between this period, if this is forty days obviously from the end of Acts to Acts 2 is a ten day interval, a week and a half of time elapsed between Acts 1 and Acts 2, that’s all.  Jesus “showed Himself alive … being seen of them forty days,” and what did He do all during these forty days? “speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”  Not the Church, the kingdom of God. 

 

Now what’s the difference between the Church and the kingdom of God.  Let’s go back to our chart on the divine institutions.  All of reality, all of your life is controlled by a series of law principles.  First we have the first divine institution which is human responsibility.  That means that all men are responsible for their acts.  This is doubted sometimes in some circles but the institution is there.  The second institution is marriage; the third institution is family; the fourth institution is state; the fifth institution the tribal diversity of man and finally the area where grace is operating.  Now today in history the Holy Spirit operates into history by means of that area of grace; He operates on the divine institutions by means of Christians. 

 

So  you have the Holy Spirit working from the Church to develop in society a sense of responsibility; from the Church to develop an idea what marriage ought to be; from the Church to develop the position of what authority ought to be; from the Church to develop an idea of law, order, crime and punishment; from the Church for an idea of what ought to be done in the international realm, always out of the Church toward the other institutions.  That’s the way the Holy Spirit works today, but when the kingdom of God was functioning in the Old Testament before its demise in Ezekiel, and when the kingdom of God comes again in the future with the Lord, that’s not going to be the way the Holy Spirit works.  In that day the Holy Spirit will work directly on all of these institutions.  He will not move from one to the other; He will move directly, “all the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God,” and that means that he will work directly with the institution of marriage, He will work directly with the state, and He will also work in the area of worship.  But He’ll work across all the areas directly and that’s the kingdom; the kingdom encompasses all of those areas; the Church encompasses only one and that’s the difference between the Church program of God and the kingdom program of God. 

 

Today the kingdom program of God is not occurring.  This is why, as I said last week, time and time again in this series I will show you the chart of transition in the book of Acts, that Acts, as a transition book, begins with a kingdom program and terminates with the Church program.  The two are side by side in the book of Acts and you must be careful to distinguish them.  Here when the whole thing begins the topic is kingdom, kingdom, kingdom, kingdom, all areas of society, all areas Jesus says are under My rule and My law, and I offer you the kingdom, through Israel I offer the world the kingdom. 

 

Acts 1:4, “so being assembled together,” the word actually means they were preparing a meal together, they were eating, Jesus always liked to do this because He knew in history there would be a group of people who would raise the same old heresy time and time again, it’s technical name is Docetism. Docetism said that Christ only appeared, just a vision but not the real physical appearance.  And to deny the Docetists their claim Christ constantly, everywhere He went after He rose from the dead He ate.  Why?  So people would see there and they’ listen to the crunch as His teeth chewed the bread and the crumbs may have dropped out of His mouth, they knew that it was physical, it wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t a spirit, it was a physical resurrection.  You say that’s not important; it’s all important to the world because if Jesus Christ did not physically appear we have no salvation because there was no physical sacrifice.  And so cults like the Baha’i faith, for example, who are Docetists and others today in our own generation deny the physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and hence deny the possibility of salvation to man. 

 

Christ then, “being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem’ but wait for the promise of the Father,” sometimes you may have heard this verse interpreted as meaning that what one has to do to get the Spirit is to tarry and wait, go into your closet and psyche yourself up and then after you do this and agonize, then suddenly the Spirit comes.  Now Christ did not tell the people to stay in Jerusalem to agonize in the closet and carry on this circus.  Jesus Christ told the people to stay in Jerusalem so that when the Spirit came they would be in the right place to do the ministry.  Look, if it just meant tarrying in one place they could have gone to Galilee and tarried in one place.  That’s not the point; the point is the geographic location where they were staying; they had to perform a ministry because Jerusalem was the center of God’s program and when the new program began it had to begin on that geographical point, the city of Jerusalem.  So that’s the reason why they are to wait in Jerusalem.  And He says, what is “the promise of the Father?”  The baptism of the Holy Spirit. 

Acts 1:5, “For John truly baptizes with water; but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days hence,” literally ten days hence.  Now the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a complicated subject, we’ll develop it in Acts 2 so for now I go over it without developing what the baptism of the Spirit is.  We’ll save that for later.  Suffice it to say in these first five verses we have the general introduction by Luke to his second volume because verse 6 begins with an oun that Luke uses, this is a particle in the Greek, he uses to introduce verse 6 as the first verse of his real narrative.  This is just kind of like a title page and kind of a preface. 

 

The first thing that Luke discusses in Luke 1:6-11 is the first great climactic event in Acts, the ascension.  For years some of you have been looking at the front page of the LBC bulletin never realizing that on the cover of that bulletin you have the three great events in the life of Christ; the death, the cross; the empty tomb, the resurrection; the throne, His ascent to be with the Father at the right hand.  Those are the three key events in Christ’s life.  Many Christians are familiar with the death of the cross; many Christians are familiar with the resurrection from the dead; few are familiar with the ascent into heaven.  So let’s look and study carefully this famous event, how it happened and what went on.  I’ll be able to show you some slides of the place where Christ ascended to heaven that we visited last year and then we’ll work with how Christ ascended to heaven; did He got like a Cape Canaveral launch, or did He just disappear. We’ll deal with that problem as we get to it.

 

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.”  Notice again their minds are not Church centered, their minds are kingdom centered, and notice too they are impatient.  In verse 6 it’s the imperfect use of the word “asked,” in other words, they kept on asking.  Mathew asked Him look, Jesus, are You going to restore the kingdom?  And before Jesus could answer Matthew, John said Jesus, are You going to restore the kingdom?  And He turns to John to answer him and then somebody else, Jesus, are you going to restore the kingdom, and this keeps on going and He can’t get a word in edgewise; that’s what’s Luke is saying.  In other words, he’s saying the disciples were very anxious over getting this question answered and answered right: will the kingdom of God come now.  The question is not is there going to be a kingdom of God.  The question is not has the kingdom changed its form from political, social to spiritual.  That’s not the question.  Read the question again; the question in verse 6 is: when?  It is a question of time and the more Jesus answers it in verse 7 as a question of time, not if it’s going to happen but when it’s going to happen. 

 

Acts 1:7, “And He said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in His own power.”  The times or the seasons.  This has a rebuke to it; verse 7, there are two rebukes in the passage.  One is in verse 7 and you get it because it’s just sharp in the original language; He’s quite sharp with His people, they kept asking Him, asking Him, asking Him, asking Him and finally He says “It’s NOT for you to know!”  That’s the way He says it.  Now why do you suppose that Luke records this sharpness; after all, weren’t the disciples just trying to find out a point of doctrine, why is Jesus so sharp with them at this point?  Frequently when you have these sharp remarks of Jesus recorded in the Gospel, remember who wrote the Gospels?  The Holy Spirit.  He’s recording these for our warning; He’s recording it because down through history there’d be a tendency for Christians, always wanting to know when is Christ going to come back, always wanting running to a calendar to set a date that Christ is going to return by such and such a day.  Christ is going to come at such and such a time.  And Christ’s answer to the people in the 1st century and His answer to the people in the 20th is “It’s NOT for you to know!”  So stop wasting your time.  In the 19th century we had a group of people called the Millerites in New York state, they went up in the Adirondacks, got on white robes, sold all their property and sat up there waiting for Jesus to come in 1844.  Obviously Jesus didn’t come and so the Millerites drifted around and became the source point for several well-known cults in our own lifetime.  We have had other groups that have always tried to set dates, such as the Russellites have set dates and they had the argument that Jesus Christ was going to come in 1914 and somehow 1914 came and went and no Jesus, and then we have readjustments to the prophecy so now Christ is going to come at some other time. And even in our own camp we have certain people that write books on prophecy that Jesus dogmatically is going to come in this generation.  And to all of them Jesus it is not for you to know!  So be warned, beware of people who sets dates; this is your passage direct from Jesus, it is not for us, for an author of a book, for a teacher, for a religious leader to know the time of the coming.  That is a military secret and it’s God’s.

 

Now Acts 1:7 besides asserting that we are to avoid the Russellites, the Millerites, and their modern day counterparts, verse 7 also teaches a profound fact about human history and that is that history is not under man’s control, it is under God’s control. We don’t add things to God’s Word.  This is what the Reformation was all about; often you read that it was just Martin Luther objecting to the indulgences sold by Friar Tetzel  and it was just the fact that he offered you so much and you could have your sins remitted, come, put your money in the pot and that was the big fight. That wasn’t the fight that Luther had; Luther saw something behind the indulgences and that angered him.  It wasn’t the fact that you could pay Friar Tetzel for remission of sins but it was the very fact that you could determine the remission of your sins that angered Luther.  It is not for us to control God, we don’t push a dime, put a nickel in the slot and out comes forgiveness; that’s man who turns the buttons on the machine and God has no buttons that man turns.  If there are any buttons they’re on man and God turns them but man doesn’t push God’s buttons and that was the Luther-Tetzel discussion and that’s what led off as the bomb that blew up into the Reformation: who controls history, man or God.  At that time in history the professing Christian church had got to the point where the Church controlled history; it was an outcome of what the Church said. 

 

Today we have the opposite error, today it’s the state that controls history.  The state now determines what day we shall celebrate a certain holiday; the state determines time itself; the state determines value.  You put a dollar bill in your wallet Monday afternoon, you wait a month and the same dollar bill is worth less, presto-chango, government has done its work by inflating the currency and destroying its value.  So you have government trying to destroy standards, government trying to alter nature and that is heresy; it’s as much a heresy as what touched off the first Reformation.  Who shall control history?  God or man?  And Jesus says in verse 7, “It is not for you to know,” My Father controls history, you don’t, so hands off. 

 

Acts 1:8, says, and this is the promise of the Holy Spirit, “But ye shall receive power, after 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 parts of the world.” There are four, not five, divisions in the text in verse 8.  It is not “in all Judea and in Samaria,” it is “in all Judea and Samaria, all one, considered logically a coherent unit.  The word “power” in verse 8 is different from the word “power” in verse 7.  In verse 7 the “power” means legal authority; the Father has put in His legal authority the times and the places in His sovereign will.  But in verse 8 “power” means ability, dunamis, the ability to accomplish certain things and therefore the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the Church Age is the fuel that makes us able to fulfill the Word of God.  The Holy Spirit is the source of power. 

 

Now some of you who have been in Christian circles for some time have heard many sermons on Acts 1:8.  I am going to refrain from bothering you with that kind of approach this morning because I’m going to let the rest of the book of Acts show you what verse 8 means, that when it talks about the Holy Spirit coming upon you it’s not talking about the glub, glub, glub kind of thing and then all of a sudden you kind of radiate power as an individual believer.  No, it is the Holy Spirit shall come upon all of you, plural, as a group, and you, as a group, shall be witnesses.  This is talking about the corporate ministry of the Holy Spirit so time and time again in the book of Acts you have men in weakness, they don’t feel powerful.  When Peter is faced with a problem of going down and talking to a Gentile does he glub, glub, glub, I’m getting powerful?  Is this the way he feels?  Not at all.  Peter feels like he’s a stumbling uncoordinated spastic individual, where am I going to…what’s the…that’s the picture you get of Peter, typical believer and it’s comforting to know.  So the power of verse 8 isn’t something subjective inside you; the power in verse 8 is the Holy Spirit’s working on the Church to bring her into contact with more and more of the kingdom of man.  So therefore you have the Church, the Holy Spirit works on Peter and convinces Peter, Peter, time to hit the Gentiles.  And very timidly Peter says okay, and he goes down and he talks to the Gentiles. 

 

So the picture of power is not subjective at all; the picture of power in the book of Acts is that the believers are weak and don’t have power; it’s a picture of the Holy Spirit working through external circumstances to promote the expansion of the Church, the Holy Spirit working through the state, the Holy Spirit working through all sorts of instruments to edify the Church.  That’s the picture of power, not this internal glub, glub, glub thing. 

 

Acts 1:9, here we get involved with the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, a very startling scene.  “And when He had spoken these things,” He just finished this, “while they were still beholding Him,” they were looking at Him, He’d stopped talking, “He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”  Now for years I read that verse and I wondered about something; this thing occurred on the east side of the city of Jerusalem; I’ll show you in a minute, it’s very obviously public, it’s visible to the whole city of Jerusalem, and what I often wondered about was well, good night, didn’t anybody see Jesus going up, wasn’t it unusual seeing a man just go up like that, and He’s only a half a mile from the city wall of Jerusalem, how come nobody else saw this kind of thing.  Well, when I started to study the text I understood why.  This ascension didn’t happen quite the way the classic picture is of Him kind of rocketing off from the earth. 

 

The picture is that both of these clauses are parallel in verse 9, “while they beheld, He was taken, and a cloud received Him,” those are two parallel actions.  The picture isn’t that He went up as a man, the picture is here’s the ridge line of the Mount of Olives; Jesus Christ is standing on that ridge line and there appears a cloud around him on the ridge line, then the cloud goes up.  Probably it was a cloudy sky and the cloud just kind of descends.  Some of you have climbed mountains and you’ve been on high hills, you’re aware of how quickly a fog can form on a high hill, simply because of the motions of the air, turbulent motion around a high obstacle will cause condensation and you can get instant fog.  That’s what’s so dangerous about mountain climbing at times; men have been stranded and die on top of mountains only a few feet away from rescue because it just happened so fast they got trapped on the trail and they lost their bearings and they couldn’t get off the thing.  The men that were up on Mount Ararat looking for the ark and all of a sudden a thunderstorm comes up; well the thunderstorm didn’t happen and come toward them; it the thunderstorm had come toward then they’d have gotten down off the mountain; the thunderstorm formed on the mountain and John Morris and some other guys got hit with lightening; they ducked, they got down in the rocks, but the lightening when you’re inside a thunderstorm starts going horizontally so it’s not just a case of getting hit from above, you can get hit from 360 degrees.  So mountains can be a very dangerous thing.

 

Now I’m not saying the Mount of Olives is one big all mountain but I’m just simply saying that on a ridge line like this with low clouds they can hang in on the ridge line.  So the picture you want to have in your mind of the ascension is the Mount of Olives with clouds on top of it.  That’s what happened.  Certain things happened here and you have to have a little background for why these things are happening.  First, the cloud; in the family training we dealt with the problem of the Shekinah glory.  The cloud in the Bible pictures the presence of God.  And so we have the cloud, it’s a special cloud, for all intents and purposes it looks like any other cloud but the cloud shows up at the birth of the nation at Mount Sinai and in the wilderness wanderings.  The cloud shows up many other places in the Old Testament, always as a sign of the presence of God. 

 

Now there was something that happened to the disciples not long before just kind of like this thing, and I want to set the stage for a remark that’s going to be made in the text, so kind of use your imagination with me.  Here is what went on in the mind of the disciples; not long ago they had been up on the Mount of Transfiguration; the same thing had happened.  Jesus was on the mountain, they were talking, and then suddenly there’s a cloud and Jesus in the middle of the cloud.  They could see because the cloud kind of opened, Jesus is transfigured before them, He has this kind of glory about Him which is basically a cloud, and you have Moses and Elijah appearing.  Now if you had been on the Mount of Transfiguration and then you were here watching this, what would you have thought of?  I know what I would have thought of.  I’d say well, the cloud… this is going to happen again, we’re going to see a vision here, Christ is going to transform Himself and then it’ll be all over and He’ll come back to us. 

 

So you see, don’t read this from the Monday morning after.  We say oh yeah, Jesus is going to ascend into heaven.  It wasn’t clear to the disciples that He was going to ascend into heaven.  This is what explains their behavior; they just suddenly were walking there on the ridge line and they were encased with a cloud and it must have recalled the Mount of Transfiguration happening again.  And so they would have waited for the thing to pass over.  Well, it didn’t, and this is why later on you’ll see in verse 10 they kept on looking toward heaven, imperfect tense, they kept on, kept on, kept on, they just kind of…mouth open, hey wait a minute, the cloud didn’t go away this time, instead it took away Jesus.  So there’s a shock to them; here they were talking with Him and unlike the Mount of Transfiguration Jesus disappears and the cloud disappears, that didn’t happen before, that’s something entirely new. 

 

Well, this same cloud is going to occur three times again in history.  The first time it occurs is going to be at the rapture.  Again some of you have the idea that at the rapture Christians are going to shoot up, just going to launch, multiple rocket launch all over the place and again that picture is popular but it’s not quite Scriptural.  In 1 Thessalonians 4 it says, when it describes the rapture, “we shall be caught up with,” or by means of, “the cloud,” and what it means is the day the rapture occurs there’ll be an unusual cloud formation of some sort that will either suddenly appear, but will be there and Christians will be absorbed into that cloud just as Christ is absorbed into the cloud on the top of the Mount of Olives.  That’s the first time it’s going to appear in the future, 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

 

The second time it appears in the future is halfway through the tribulation when the two witnesses are removed from the earth; it says in Revelation 11:12 that the cloud again suddenly appears and suddenly absorbs those two men, the great spiritual leaders of believers during the tribulation, and they disappear in the cloud.  And then finally in Matthew 26:64 you have Christ coming again and He comes in the cloud; the heavens darken and the sun stops its light, the moon stops it’s light, obviously because the light is impeded by some sort of cloud formation, and you have this thickening cloud that develops across the face of the globe and men see the sign of the Son of man in heaven, and that sign of the Son of Man includes this gloriful cloud, and out of that cloud comes Christ.  As the angel says here He’s going to come back to the earth the same way He left the earth.  He didn’t go ssvffftt  and he’s not going to ssvffftt back, He’s going to appear in kind of this connection with this cloud that appears.

 

So they’re on the hill, and the reason why nobody in Jerusalem, Bethany or Bethpage when they looked up on the Mount of Olives saw anything unusual at all, they just looked up there and the low clouds, they just hang in there on that ridge line so no problem, just a low cloud was all, low stratus, just kind of a formation that many would have associated it with. 

 

So he says in Acts 10, “And while they were looking [steadfastly] toward heaven the cloud started rising,” while they looked toward heaven, and if you want an idea how fast clouds can change, if you go out in the spring, with showers, in April or May when we get one of these dark rolling cumulonimbus clouds that comes in occasionally, look at the base of that cloud and just stop; the best way of looking at a cloud is to stay in one position and site on something, say a telephone pole so you can watch the motion relative, otherwise you’re going to track the motion and you won’t see what it’s doing.  Pick a stationary point and look over the stationary point at the cloud and you watch how fast those cloud omens change; you’ll see them changing up and down, crisscross, all sorts of things, tremendous turbulence.  The same kind of thing happens in this kind of situation.  Don’t make this too supernatural is what I’m trying to tell you.  From all intents and purposes if someone saw this a quote would be a natural thing, just clouds on the Mount of Olives. 

 

And so they were looking toward this heaven as He was going up, and since their attention had been caught on this cloud they didn’t notice something.  Something like that Luke 24 passage last week, they were so intent on what they were doing they failed to understand and to get this point across  Luke points out that the two men had been standing there, perfect tense, for some time these two men were standing there and the disciples never noticed them because they were looking at the cloud, and all of a sudden out of the corner of their vision they saw hey, two more people here than there were here five minutes ago.  What happened?  And not only do they turn around ant look at these two people that are here that are new they notice something very peculiar about these two people.  It says in your Bibles these “two men stood by them I white apparel,” but the literal word is shimmering apparel.  They don’t have wings, they’re not flapping, they are just two men dressed in the normal dress of the day, just standing there looking at them but their clothes shine, kind of from within the fibers they shine, and this catches their attention, so they turn around and before they can say anything these two men speak together.

 

Acts 1:11, “[Who also said], “Ye men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven?”  Second rebuke that Luke records at this event.  Verse 7 was Jesus’ rebuke, don’t sweat the time of His coming, just relax and do what He tells you to do and forget when He’s going to come.  And the second rebuke in verse 11 is stop standing here gazing around, what are you doing this for?  Don’t, in other words, sit there totally in despair because Jesus has left you; that’s a wrong attitude.  Notice what the angels say, something very assuring and it should be very encouraging to believers.  Here are two angels, and I don’t know what goes on in your mind but what goes on in my mind if I sat there and I saw two angels I’d say boy, I’d like to discuss some little point with you, and think of all they know and think of the fact that my gosh, wouldn’t you love to know what they know about history. 

 

And what do these two angels turn around and how do they address the Lord?  Do they address the Lord as the King of Kings and the glorious coming One.  Instead of that the angels address Jesus by His common earthly name.  “This same Jesus is going to come back the same way.”  Which should tell you something.  If you’re not in the rapture generation and you die and go to be face to face with the Lord, Jesus is going to be the Jesus of the Bible, He’s not going to be some 8th dimension spooktified thing that’s going to be so radically different from the pages of Scripture.  He’s going to be the same Jesus Christ.  And so the angels to communicate this refuse to call Jesus even by Kurios, even by Lord, though they obviously accept His lordship, they choose to call Jesus by His most familiar human name, Yeshua.  “This same Yeshua,” the same person that you ate food with yesterday, the same person that you were out in the boat fishing with, the guy that you know on a first name basis is coming back.  And here you have these cosmic figure of the universe, angels, talking about Jesus in terms of man’s language; not angelic language, not a holy language but just our normal every day conversation. 

 

“This same Jesus, who is taken up form you into heaven, He shall come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven,” and that means He’s going to come back with cloud and all.  He’s going to come back, moreover to this exact place.  The prophecy in Zechariah 14:4 says that He will come exactly again exactly on this spot.  [12] “Then they returned unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, the Mount of Olives or  Olivet.”

 

I went there last summer and took some pictures of the area and I would like to show you some of these pictures to give you an idea of what this whole scene looked like.  This is a map of the modern city of Jerusalem; in some ways it’s kind of shocking, when you go to Jerusalem you build up all these images in your mind of these great Biblical earth shaking events and then you come there and see what’s there today; down underneath Cavalry is an Arab bus station; you go to the pool of Siloam and the little Arab kids rip you off of your ball point pens so there are these rather mundane things that occur.  The modern city of Jerusalem, at the center of the picture is the temple area.  As you can see by the cluster of streets the modern city of Jerusalem is off to the west; this area is called the old city, including that small area of the temple.  Cutting through this picture from the north to the south is a long valley; the valley of Kidron.  It was deeper in Jesus’ day than today because the debris of many centuries has fallen down into that valley.  Here is the ridge line, the Mount of Olives.  The Mount of Olives is not a mountain individually, it’s a ridge line, and this road today, you can drive right down the ridge line on the very top of the Mount of Olives.  Here’s Bethany, that’s the place where Jesus stayed, it’s two miles from this point to this point so Bethany is very close.  Jesus ascended by tradition where you see that dot.  Modern Biblical scholarship would place His ascension further east a couple of hundred yards, that’s all. We are sure, basically where Jesus rose from the dead; right in this area. 


Now it turns out there’s a very comforting thing to all this because the very place where his most well-loved people were, were at Bethany.  Bethany extends up the side of that hill; Jesus, in other words, chose for His ascent to heaven the backyard of the area where those women had cared for His needs.  Jesus favored those who had spent time with Him of letting them see this great event.  So the scenario for Acts is that the disciples have been over here, they have walked with Jesus from Jerusalem over to here; it’s ¾ a mile, and that’s a Sabbath days journey, that’s as far as you could walk.  So there they were up on this mountain.  Now we’ll start the pictures from here looking across the Mount of Olives, then the Mount of Olives and then Bethany and look behind the ridge line.  [He continues showing pictures]. 

 

Next week we’re going to begin at verse 13 with what happened after the ascent.  The thing to remember from this passage of Scripture, this area of the ascent into heaven, is the assurance of those angels to the believers, don’t worry about it, history is in God’s hands and the same Jesus that you know, that walked with you, that talked with you, that you ate bread with, He’s the One who is at the Father’s right hand.