The Testimony of God's People

Last week we introduced our study of the book of Acts by comparing the opening few verses of Acts with the opening few verses of the Gospel of Luke. We saw that Luke’s 2-volume work is written to both comfort and challenge disciples of Jesus as they take their place in the common life of the Christian family.

Now, as we start studying the book of Acts, I think it is important that we get some more preliminary things in place, things that Luke tells us about here in the introductory verses of Acts. The first 14 verses of Acts are introductory in that they both remind us of a few things we were told at the end of Luke’s Gospel and set the stage for what we are going to be told about in the rest of the book of Acts. I’d like to cover these 14 verses this week and next.

Today, let’s look at verses 1-8. These eight verses are foundational, telling us about the testimony we bear as disciples of Jesus. They remind us of the resurrection of Jesus and its implication (vv. 1-3), speak of the importance of the Holy Spirit for the Christian community (vv. 4-5), and set out the primary objective of Christian disciples (vv. 6-8). In other words, here we find the Christian message, mark, and mission. And here we learn that disciples of Jesus are identified by the presence of the Holy Spirit who also empowers them to succeed in their witness to Jesus’s resurrection and everlasting reign.

The Christian Message

First, our message, in verses 1-3. What is the content of our testimony as Christians, as those who claim to be the people of God?

The Life of Jesus

Luke begins volume 2 of his work by reminding his audience that volume 1 was all about what “Jesus began to do and teach.” So, the message of Christian witness is all about the life of Jesus. Specifically, his deeds and his words. What Jesus did, and what Jesus said.

Our message is about one who at the very least has to be in any list of the most consequential persons in history: Jesus of Nazareth. So his life was a worthy subject for Luke to write about. He wasn’t the only one who did so. Luke knew there were other writers who had done something similar to what he had done. He was no doubt aware of at least some of the other Gospel records. And because Jesus was such a consequential person, no surprise that we find him mentioned in other ancient writers whether Roman, Greek, or Jewish.

The Christian message is centered here, on a real person in history who left his mark, who started a movement. How much more clarity we might gain in our witness as Christians if we kept Jesus at the center. I wonder what difference it might make if our witness did not begin with “Do you know where you will go when you die?” (which usually leads to speculations about the unprovable mysteries of the afterlife) but rather with “What do you know and believe about Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Jew who lived and died in the first century A.D.?” Since that message is about one of the most consequential persons in history, it is a message that is relevant for our lives at this very moment—and, yes, to be sure it offers hope and comfort for our lives when we find ourselves on our deathbeds, too.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Because, here’s the thing. Luke doesn’t stop his work on Jesus when he has finished writing about the life of Jesus. He has now written a second volume—the book of Acts—because he believes that the movement of Jesus has continued on after Jesus.

After Jesus? Well, yes. No one was claiming that Jesus was still around. Everyone knew that Jesus had suffered the death of Roman crucifixion, and the Romans were quite good at crucifying people. That is to say, if you had been crucified by the Roman Empire, you were dead.

But Luke keeps on writing, not because he wanted to say that Jesus had somehow survived his crucifixion, but because he was convinced by the evidence that something remarkable had happened. This Jesus who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, was alive. Alive? How could that be? So, he did somehow survive his crucifixion? Oh no. Get the message straight. Jesus died all right. He was dead, dead. But now he was alive, alive. The only appropriate category for what we are talking about here is resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth had gone straight into death and—he did not come back from death. He went straight on through it and out the other side. That’s what resurrection means.

This is a mystery, to be sure. But because it is critical to our message we best be as clear here as possible. No one else in all of history fits the category that we are saying Jesus fits in. To be raised from the dead does not mean that Jesus experienced some kind of disembodied consciousness after death. It is not uncommon today to hear someone say about a person who has died that they are “alive in heaven” or something like that, and then appeal to the resurrection of Jesus as some kind of proof for “life after death.” But this is to introduce a massive confusion to our message. If a person’s body is lying there in a coffin, in a grave, or in an urn, the accurate thing to say about that person is not that they have “passed away” from life here to life somewhere else. I mean that is an entirely appropriate pagan thing to say about them, but it is not accurate. The accurate to thing to say about a person who has died is that they are dead.

So, when Luke says about Jesus here in verse 3 that “he presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God,” he is talking about something different than “life after death.” He’s talking about resurrection, about life after life after death.[1]And that is the Christian message. That is our testimony.

The Kingdom of Jesus

If we get that straight then we are in a much better place to also be clear about what the resurrected Jesus himself wanted to be clear about. Verse 3 says that the subject the resurrected Jesus spoke regularly about was “the kingdom of God.” It had best be the subject we speak regularly about, too.

Many Christians are taught that the message we have to proclaim is “the gospel.” But gospel means “good news,” so we need to specify what “good news” we are supposed to claim. It is the “gospel of the kingdom” that constitutes our message, the same message that the resurrected Jesus spoke regularly about.

The kingdom of God is not a new message. It is what the entire Old Testament scriptures were looking for. The promise of God that one day God himself would return to Israel and reclaim his rule over the entire world (indeed, over all creation) through the Davidic king of Israel. It would be a kingdom that would never, ever end.

What is our message? It is that this kingdom of God, the hope of all creation, has indeed begun. The resurrection of Jesus is our evidence that it is so, even though now we must reform our expectations about what the kingdom of God looks like and how it advances in the world today.

The Christian Mark

It also requires us to reform our perception of who “Israel” is, the people of God through whom God extends his rule. This is a major development in the book of Acts and  it is part of our testimony. How are God’s people—citizens of his kingdom—to be identified. What is their mark? The answer is signaled to us in verses 4-5.

A New Baptism

Luke reports Jesus’s instructions to his disciples to stay in Jerusalem, waiting for the promise of the Father which he had told them about, because, he says in verse 5, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

The mark of God’s people will be some sort of new baptism.

Jesus was not refuting John’s baptisms. What John the Baptist was doing out there, baptizing people with water, was hugely significant. He was reenacting the Exodus story, when Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea while the Egyptians were drowned by those same waters. That event was a marker: God’s people were there “baptized” by passing safely through the sea (1 Cor 10:1-2). John’s baptisms were in preparation for a new Exodus moment that he said was at hand as God’s people were looking for God to deliver them from oppression once again, as he had long promised to do.

So this is what baptism is. It is a mark. It is a sign and a seal, an identifier. Those who are God’s people, given God’s message, are marked by baptism.

The Holy Spirit

The contrast Jesus makes here with John’s baptism is not to negate what John was doing. John the Baptist himself said exactly what Jesus says here in verse 5. John said in Luke 3:16, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming . . . . He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” So John’s baptism was preparatory. Those who received it were being marked as those who were ready for God’s return, ready to receive God’s kingdom. But the baptism of Jesus is the sign and seal that one has in fact received and entered into God’s kingdom.[2]

Baptism has four parts: the one who does the baptizing, the one who receives it, the element with which it is done, and the purpose for it.[3]Verse 5 only mentions two parts of this baptism, but the rest can be filled in from what we find elsewhere in Scripture. The baptism “with the Holy Spirit” is an act that Jesus himself performs. The “element” he uses is the Holy Spirit. The purpose for it is to incorporate the subjects of this baptism into “one body,” the “body of Christ,” the family and kingdom of God. And that means that the objects of this baptism, the ones who are baptized by Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, into his family, are all his people without exception. If you have never received this baptism, you are excluded from his people, his kingdom, his family. First Corinthians 12:13 says it most succinctly: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”

So, have you received this baptism?

This might trouble some of you, but it is actually meant to bring assurance, not doubt. Of course, Luke is soon enough going to tell us more about this baptism with the Holy Spirit, but suffice it to say for now that this is what indeed has happened to all who believe in Jesus and are committed to him and his eternal rule and reign. You may not remember this ever happening to you, but Christian baptism with water is a gift of grace to us for this reason, as something you can remember, something you can look back to as that which is meant to say, “You are, indeed, one of God’s people.”

Table Fellowship

And if you are one of God’s people, then you belong to the family of God, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. You belong at God’s table.

Luke wants us to understand that the disciples saw and spoke with Jesus for no trivial amount of time following his resurrection. In fact, these frequent meetings were part of the evidence that the disciples were not hallucinating, that this was really happening. These appearances gave them “many proofs” of what it was they were experiencing here.

Think of it. It must have been disorienting. The disciples were not expecting Jesus to be raised from the dead, in spite of the fact that he had told them plainly it would happen. They were, like us, skeptical; probably more accurate to say they were confused. Jesus must have been speaking in some sort of metaphorical way. Resurrection? When Jesus spoke like that, the disciples were usually left pondering “what this rising from the dead might mean” (Mk 9:10).

But now they knew. His frequent appearances to them was their evidence, as was the consistent conversations about the kingdom of God—what his resurrection implied for that very important subject.

But Luke also says in verse 4 that during this time Jesus was “staying with them,” a very interesting choice of words. Because the verb Luke uses here means literally “to eat salt with,” which is why the NIV says, “while he was eating with them.” Some scholars say that Luke is indeed wanting us to think about the common meal as the frequent context in which Jesus made himself known.[4] In Acts 10:41, Peter says that Jesus did not appear to everyone after his resurrection, but only “to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” And of course at the end of Luke’s Gospel there’s that very interesting story of two disciples of Jesus who encountered him unknowingly on the road to Emmaus. They had no idea who he was until he was made known to them “in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:35).

And indeed table fellowship, eating together, will be an important theme in Acts, one of the ways in which we see the marks of God’s people. Why? Because it is there that God himself, by his Spirit, communes with us in ordinary but profoundly formative ways.

The Christian Mission

But we must move on now to the Christian mission, in verses 6-8. These are very critical verses to the entire book of Acts.

Is It Time for the Restoration?

In verse 6, the disciples ask Jesus this question: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Now when you look at Jesus’s answer in verses 7-8, how do you say he answered them? Yes? No? Does he completely dodge their question?

You will see that the question they asked was a question of timing. “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” So his answer to that question is quite clear: “It is not for you to know times or seasons.”

What Jesus does not do is roll his eyes and say, “Boys, boys. You’re still thinking about Israel and kingdom? Come on! Put that off to the side and let’s get on with the more important things I’ve been trying to tell you about.

He doesn’t rebuke them for the question, because it is the right kind of question. After all, remember, he’s been talking to them about the kingdom this whole time. What they have asked him is not off topic.

Yes, there will come a time when the kingdom will be restored to Israel, but Jesus’s disciples are going to have to learn some things along the way about this kingdom and about this Israel. So, apparently, must we.

By the way, the Apostle Paul deals explicitly with this subject in Romans 9-11, which ends in part by him showing not when “all Israel will be saved” but the way in which it will all happen (Rom 11:26). It is “how” God is saving and restoring his people Israel right now through Jesus and by the work of his Spirit in his church that is explained to us, both there in Romans but also throughout the book of Acts. Once again, it will require us to see who “Israel” is in a brand new light.

The Power of the Spirit

What is not to be our concern is when it will all be done. That is God’s prerogative. We should hope for it and pray for it, but we have work to do until the time has come.

It will not be easy work. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” Luke has now mentioned the Holy Spirit for the third time in his introduction to Acts, wanting to headline for us from the outset that the work he has given us to do will succeed because of the Holy Spirit. Luke has brought the Holy Spirit into the conversation so many times right at the beginning of Acts because it will be the Holy Spirit who will be the “key figure in Acts for the church’s mission.”[5]

The Mission of Witnessing

What will be that mission? “You will be my witnesses.” Witnessing is the mission. Witnessing to Jesus starting in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. And that is in fact how the book of Acts is structured and how the mission goes forward.

Many Christians have had some kind of formal evangelism training. Let’s let the book of Acts instruct us, teaching us how can best be Jesus’s witnesses. After all, we who have been marked as God’s people have such good news to share.

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[1]This is N. T. Wright’s way of putting it. See his The Resurrection of the Son of God, (London: SPCK, 2003), 108-109.

[2] Darrell L. Bock, Acts, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, ed. Robert Yarbrough and Robert H. Stein (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 57.

[3]John R. W. Stott, Baptism and Fullness: The Work of the Holy Spirit Today(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1964), 40.

[4] C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, International Critical Commentary, ed. John Adney Emerton, Charles E. B. Cranfield, and Graham Norman Stanton (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 1:71.

[5] Bock, Acts, 54.