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Think again of the two on the road to Emmaus, who say ‘We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’, with the implication – he was crucified, so he can’t have been the one. In that scheme, when the disciples ask, ‘Is this the time for you to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ Jesus’s answer is ‘No, but’: no, it’s not the time for that yet, but you have a job to be getting on with meanwhile.īut I have been convinced for many years that the correct answer is ‘Yes, but’. That would mean that the disciples’ witness ‘to the ends of the earth’ is a temporary fill-in, ahead of that eventual goal. For that point of view, popular not least in dispensationalism, ‘restoring the kingdom to Israel’ is a further goal, some way down the road. So to the key question posed in verse 6: is this the time to restore the kingdom to Israel? What is Jesus’s answer? Many have assumed that Jesus’s answer is ‘no, but’.

But, Acts has as its bookends 1) Jesus explaining about the kingdom here in chapter 1, and then 2) Paul in Rome speaking about God as king and Jesus as Lord ‘openly and unhindered’. Since that had been the central theme of Jesus’s public career, it might come as a surprise that it isn’t referred to that often in Acts.

The teaching of the risen lord in the short period before the Ascension was ‘the kingdom of God’. Everything in this book hinges on Jesus’s resurrection, not simply as an odd dramatic miracle that God did for Jesus, but as the launching of God’s New Creation in the person of his son. Luke insists, of course, on the bodily aliveness of Jesus after his death. Verse 3 tells us the ground upon which the rest of the book will stand: the resurrection and the kingdom of God. He is alive, active, directing, speaking, and performing deeds of power. Jesus is not now a mere figure either of the historical past or of the theological, heavenly present, though he is both of those as well. But Jesus’s involvement isn’t limited to those explicit moments. Many times in Acts we are told that the Lord spoke to someone – often Paul – or stood by them on a particular occasion. The ‘doing’ and ‘teaching’, in other words, didn’t stop. The crucial thing here, which determines how Luke wants us to read the whole book, is the mention of all that Jesus began to do and teach. As the disciples said on the Emmaus Road, Jesus was a prophet mighty in word and deed. There he had set out what Jesus had done and taught. This dedication matches the one at the start of Luke’s Gospel, ‘the previous book’ as he says. Luke follows the frequent ancient custom of addressing his work to a named individual who may be a patron, or simply a friend, or even a generic name for any well-intentioned reader – since Theophilus might mean ‘god-lover’. And, as we shall see, many first-century hearers of this work would already recognize in the claims of Jesus a clear, if implicit, challenge to those of Caesar. Indeed the idea of the ‘message’, the ‘word’, doing its own work – which is obviously a way of speaking of God being at work through the ‘word’ – is itself a major theme in this book. Since all roads lead to Rome, all roads also led from Rome once the message was there, it would go out in all directions. They are to bear witness to him in Jerusalem, Judaea, and Samaria – that’s the first twelve chapters – and then ‘to the ends of the earth’, which is chapters 13-28. This corresponds to Jesus’s commission to the disciples in 1:8. The one major division which you may want to keep in mind is that the book naturally divides at the end of chapter 12. Some of those themes are powerfully relevant in the challenging life and work to which you and I are called today.ĭuring this event, we’ll proceed through the chapters of Acts four at a time, focusing on particularly illuminating passages. The danger is that we then miss themes that emerge in a more over-arching way.

It’s easy for us to cherry-pick parts that seem to speak to us more directly.

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Thirty years or more of early church history flash before our eyes, full of lessons to be learned and characters to ponder. We hope we’ll see you there! Īcts is a page-turner. Wright graciously shared some thoughts from his preparation for the event, which you can read below. Want some more information about what we’ll be learning about together? Prof. This year’s Summer Intensive, Acts: New World, New People, is sure to be full of profound insights and connections with fellow believers.