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No.7.
pp. 131 - 136
We saw in our last study that, after the resurrection, the Lord Jesus Christ expounded
the O.T. Scriptures and we have the record in Luke 24: 45 "Then opened He their
understanding that they might understand the Scriptures". He gave them divine
understanding. And then, in the opening verses of the Acts of the Apostles, written by
the same writer, Luke, He shows Himself for forty days and gives them further
instruction from the Scriptures. He shows and speaks of things pertaining to the
Kingdom of God and, because of that, which is the meaning of the word "therefore" of
verse 6, they ask Him a question. As a result of all this teaching they say to Him "When
will you restore this Kingdom?" So the Lord must have been talking about the Kingdom
and its restoration, which naturally led to this question. He did not say that such a
question was wrong, or that the restoration of the earthly Kingdom and its realization was
impossible at that time. What He did say was, "It is not for you to know the times or the
seasons which the Father hath put in His own power". There was a very good reason
why the Lord could not tell them when it was going to take place. It was because God's
longsuffering was yet going to be lengthened out towards the people of Israel for
something like 35 years; and they were going to be once more commanded, through the
lips of Peter speaking for God, to repent and turn again. This was not an offer of the
Kingdom, but a definite command to repent and turn again, with wonderful
consequences, but we find them disobedient once more and they remain so right until the
end of the book.
The next thing we find in this opening chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is that the
eleven are concerned to make up their number to twelve because Judas the betrayer had
fallen out. Christ had chosen twelve men and now there were only eleven. One may ask,
is this important? The answer is "yes", because the Lord Jesus had said: "When the Son
of Man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones judging
the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matt. 19: 28). That is one reason at least why the Lord
picked twelve apostles, because they were going to be the judges of the twelve tribes, but
the falling out of Judas would have made the realization of this promise impossible. So it
was important whether there were twelve apostles or not, and this is why, at the
beginning of the Acts they are so concerned about it, so they ask the Lord for guidance so
that the right one may be chosen.
There is another reason, too, which we must not pass by; there was the question
of witness. The Lord had said to them that they should be witnesses unto Him,
"eye-witnesses", that is, they had to have seen the things that happened. Let us see this in
Acts 1: 21. Peter is saying to those assembled: "Wherefore of these men which have
companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning
from the baptism of John", that is, the beginning of the Lord's public ministry, "unto that
same day that He was taken up from us" (the Ascension), "must one be ordained to be a
witness with us of His resurrection". It must be someone who was with them at the start
and went right through to the end and saw it for themselves, an `eye-witness' in other