Acts 1:6-8

6 So when they met together, they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

7 He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."


Dig Deeper
My family recently had the opportunity to spend almost a month in Southern Africa traveling around, teaching from the Bible and gathering together with disciples from various different places in the Southern part of that great continent. My wife and I have been there several times now and our eldest son was returning for his second trip, but our youngest son, our seven-year old, was going to go for the first time. Needless to say he was quite excited to go and couldn’t wait for the day to arrive when we would leave, although to be honest, I don’t know if his initial excitement was greater for the actual experience of being in Africa or the specter of nearly twenty hours of uninterrupted video game playing and movie watching on the plane. He would constantly ask if it was time to go on our trip yet and each time we would patiently explain to him when we would be leaving. Then about a week before the trip, we had a smaller out-of-town trip that would be overnight so we packed our bags and prepared to go. This put our son in a near-fever pitch. Surely the time for our trip had finally come. This must be it. He was ready to explode. But, we once again had to temper his excitement. This wasn’t yet the time but it would be soon.

At first glance, this short section of Scripture might seem quite similar to the above example, and in some ways it is. The apostles were like many other Jews who were expectantly waiting for the kingdom of God to come. In their understanding that would be the time when the promises of God, given through the prophets, would be fulfilled. It would be the time when the Messiah would finally set up God’s people to be the exalted people through whom the whole world would be blessed. Israel, they believed would be exalted among the nations, with God himself returning to rule the entire world through his people. All the nations would be judged for their rebellion against God and their persecution of his people, but yet they would somehow be blessed through the rule of God’s kingdom as well. In short, all of God’s promises would be fulfilled. Although Jesus’ answer is, in some respects, similar to ours to our son. It was not yet time although it would be soon. Yet, in a very real way, the answer is much more complicated than that.

Isaiah’s great prophecy, among many other similar Old Testament prophecies, would finally be fulfilled they hoped: “In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths’. The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Isa. 2:2-4). To be honest, when I first came across this passage, I found it confusing. Isaiah spoke of all nations coming to the Lord and laying down their instruments of war and turning them into instruments of peace, but the world has been full of war since the coming of the last days (the time time between the coming of the Messiah and the onset of the Resurrection Age). Then I realized that I was making the same mistake that Jesus’ disciples were making. I was looking at things from the wrong angle. This passage doesn’t promise that when the Messiah comes, people of all nations of the world will come to peace. This passage isn’t about the so-called end-of-times at all. It is a promise that when the Messiah comes, people will come to the new Temple (the place where God’s presence is found on earth). It is a promise that people from all nations will come to be part of God’s people and they, who were formally at war with one another would now live at peace as one people, one family. It is a promise about what God’s kingdom and family will look like. It will be one people of all nations who live in peace with one another.

Despite Jesus’ many attempts to explain the kingdom to them and their role within it, there were still a few misconceptions that needed to be cleared up. The kingdom would not be what most Jews of their day were expecting. They would have to let go of those ideas once-and-for-all in order to fully and finally grasp what Jesus was really up to. They were still under the impression that, although Jesus was a different Messiah than they had expected, that he was going to restore Israel according to their expectations. His crucifixion had thrown a wrench into that and made them think that perhaps they had gotten it all wrong. It caused them to begin to ponder if he was not the one and this was not the time. But his incredible and unexpected resurrection had changed all of that. Resurrection was what was supposed to happen, according to the prevailing Jewish belief, when God’s presence flooded the earth and his kingdom had finally come. So what were they going to do with all of that? They seem to have thought that perhaps Jesus’ ascension or his promise of the coming baptism of the Spirit would finally be the time when all of those nationalistic expectations had been fulfilled.

But they were seeing things from the wrong angle. First of all they needn’t worry about times and dates because the answer to when the kingdom would come is not simplistic enough to sum up with a specific time. All of that is up to the authority of the Father anyway. But if they wanted to know when the kingdom would come they needed to change their viewpoint. When the Holy Spirit came, which would be soon enough, then they would finally have the ability to be his witnesses. The nation of Israel had been called to be God’s witnesses to the nations (Isa. 43:10; 44:8) but they had failed in that task. The task that Israel had faltered in had been taken up by Jesus under the authority of the Father that had been given to him, and he had subsequently shared the power to complete that mission with his disciples. God’s plan was always to have a people, one family that would draw people from all the nations. These people would be a light for the whole world so that God’s salvation would “reach the ends of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). This was the mission that was about to begin through Jesus’ disciples (v. 8; see also Acts 13:47).

The answer wasn’t as simple as when exactly would the kingdom come. Nor was Jesus’ answer as simple in content as many still today would like to make it. Jesus’ response was not to rebuke the disciples for their eagerness in wanting the time to have finally come and to tell them that they had it all wrong, that it wasn’t going to be an earthly kingdom but a heavenly one where they should just go about and prepare people to escape this world and go off to heaven one day.

They were waiting for a specific moment when God’s kingdom would come, when the presence of God would flood the earth, Israel would rise above the nations as a light to the world and would rule over the world as God’s true people, the promised family. From one perspective they had it all wrong but from another perspective, it would all come into focus if they would just change the angle from which they were looking. It all hinged on the resurrection of Christ, the very thing that they would be witness to. When Jesus walked into death and strode out of it, defeating it, he was the embodiment of the age to come. The resurrection had come through Jesus Christ as the firstfruits (1 Cor., 15:20) guaranteeing that the rest would come one day. And God’s presence would flood the earth through his Holy Spirit who would serve as a deposit guaranteeing that God’s full presence would come one day (Eph. 1:13-14). The kingdom would come not through calling people out of this world but by witnessing that the future had broken into the present. Those who entered into Christ would enter into the age to come, guaranteeing them to be there when the fullness of God’s age to come does come. They would begin to bring the physical realm under the rule of heaven, one person at a time. They would call out people from all nations to become the promised family of God (Rev. 5:9-10), a family that would be God’s witnesses, that would be a light to the ends of the earth, and would prepare themselves for the day when the fullness of God’s salvation, and kingdom, being stored up in heaven, flooded the earth and finally brought the realms of heaven and earth together for eternity (Matt. 19:28; Eph. 1:10; Rev. 21:1-5; Col. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1:3-5; Acts 3:21).

The kingdom was coming soon but the coming of the kingdom would also be a long way off. The resurrection had already happened in Christ, but the resurrection of believers would be a long way off. Salvation was coming to all people, but the final salvation would be a long time off. In the meantime, Jesus’ new family would live in the unique time between the coming of the kingdom when it had broken into the present age through the resurrection and ascension of Christ and the final and complete coming of the kingdom. His disciples would be those who live by the values and reality of the coming age and show the world what it looks like. They are those who are living as though it is daytime because they know that the day is coming even though the world is entrenched in the darkness of the night (see Rom. 13:11-14; 1 Thess. 5:4-11). They were being given the power of the Spirit and a mission that will serve as a model of sorts for the rest of the book of Acts. They were to go Jerusalem, which will be covered in chapters 1-7; to Samaria as will be outlined in 8:-11:18; and then the mission to go to the ends of the earth is picked up for the remainder of the book. Yet the description of the formation of God’s promised family ends rather strangely in chapter 28. In fact, the books of Acts has no proper ending at all. As we continue on through the remainder of the book of Acts, see if it doesn’t become clear why that is.

Devotional Thought
On a smaller scale, it has been pointed out that each Christian family, wherever they are at, should have the same focus of their immediate community (their Jerusalem), the surrounding area (their Samaria), and the ends of the earth. Spend some time praying today for each of those areas for your local Christian family and then be active in that mission.