Scripture Reading: Luke 24:44-49; Mark 16:15-16, 19-20; Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 1:1-2
With this message we begin the Life-study of the Acts of the apostles. As we come to the book of Acts, we need to realize that both this book and the Gospel of Luke were written by the same person. Luke 1:3 says, “It seemed good to me also, having followed all things accurately from the first, to write to you a consecutive account, most excellent Theophilus.” The first two verses of Acts indicate that this book is the continuation of Luke’s Gospel: “The first account I made, O Theophilus, concerning all things which Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which He was taken up, having given command through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom He chose.”
Before we go further, let us review some of the things that were covered in the Life-study of Luke. In this Gospel we have the Man-Savior, and we see that our Redeemer, the Savior, is the God-man. Luke gives us a clear record not only of the Man-Savior’s birth but also of His conception. Luke describes the Lord’s conception, birth, youth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. Therefore, the Gospel of Luke has a broad span covering all the matters of the wonderful Person of the God-man from His conception to His ascension.
We may say that the Man-Savior’s conception was His coming down not only from the heavens but also from God the Father. Likewise, His ascension was His going back not only to the heavens but also to the Father. The Man-Savior’s conception was His coming down to earth, and His ascension was His going up to the heavens. By this coming and going the Lord Jesus became a wonderful Being. Through His conception and birth He became a Person who is both divine and human, both God the Creator and man, a creature. According to Luke 2:13 and 14, the angels exulted at the birth of the Man-Savior for our salvation. The angels praised God and said, “Glory in the highest places to God, and on earth peace among men of His good pleasure.”
As such a wonderful Person, the Lord Jesus lived on earth as a man with all the human virtues expressing the divine attributes. This was the way He lived and ministered. Whatever He lived, He ministered, and He ministered what He lived even unto death. The Man-Savior suffered death, walking into, through, and out of death. After making a tour of death and Hades, He came forth in resurrection. On the one hand, the Lord raised Himself up; on the other hand, He was raised up by God. Therefore, He entered into resurrection, and in resurrection He ascended to the heavens. Now this One, the glorified Man-Savior, is in the heavens. This is a brief extract of the crucial contents of the Gospel of Luke.
The Lord’s ascension was not the end of His activity. Rather, the Man-Savior’s ascension was another initiation. As we pointed out in the Life-study of Luke, Christ’s ascension was His inauguration, His initiation, into His heavenly ministry. The Lord’s conception was His first initiation, and His ascension was another initiation. His conception was the initiation of His life and ministry on earth; His ascension was the initiation of His living and ministry in the heavens. Hence, Christ’s ascension was not the termination of His activity; instead, it was His initiation into further activity — His ministry in the heavens.
The first book written by Luke, his Gospel, describes the Lord’s first initiation and His life and ministry on earth. Now there is the need of the second book, the book of Acts, to tell us into what kind of living and ministry the Lord has been initiated through His ascension. Therefore, Luke had the burden to write a second book to unveil the living and ministry of the ascended Christ. In Acts we see how the Lord lives and ministers in His ascension.
We would emphasize the fact that, according to the Gospel of Luke, the Lord lived on earth. That life and ministry were initiated by His conception and concluded by His resurrection. Then after His resurrection the Lord Jesus ascended to the heavens. This ascension was not a termination but another initiation. This initiation brought Him into a new realm, that is, into the heavens, where He now has another living with another ministry. This living and ministry are carried out not by the Jesus who was merely conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin and born in Bethlehem; it is carried out by the ascended Christ. The resurrected and ascended Christ is now living in the heavens and ministering there. The Lord’s living and ministry in the heavens are the content of the book of Acts. May we all be impressed with this picture at the outset of this Life-study of Acts.
My burden in this message is to point out the position of the book of Acts in the arrangement of the contents of the Scriptures. We need to ask this question: where does the book of Acts stand among all the books of the Bible? The book of Acts is between the four Gospels and the Epistles, which include the book of Revelation. Hence, the book of Acts is a dividing line. Before Acts, we have the four Gospels as the continuation of the Old Testament. After Acts we have the Epistles with the book of Revelation as a conclusion.
The book of Acts can be compared to the backbone in the human body. The backbone divides the human body into two parts, the right side and the left side. Many problems in the body are caused by weakness in the backbone. If a person’s backbone is weak, he cannot be strong. We may say that the book of Acts is the backbone of the New Testament dividing it into two parts: (1) the Gospels and (2) the Epistles with the book of Revelation.
When some hear us say that the book of Acts is the dividing line and “backbone” of the New Testament, they may say, “In the past you divided the books of the New Testament in a different way. Now you are arranging the New Testament books in another way.” We should not be bothered by this, since there are many different ways of dividing, or arranging, the books of the Bible. We should not be limited to one way. The present way of dividing the New Testament books emphasizes the crucial importance of the book of Acts in the New Testament.
The four Gospels speak of the Lord Jesus on earth. But where is Christ in the book of Acts? In this book Christ is in the heavens. Acts does not unveil to us a Christ on earth; it reveals a Christ who is in the heavens. Concerning the Lord’s ascension, we do well to consider the following stanzas from Hymns, #132:
Lo! in heaven Jesus sitting, Christ the Lord is there enthroned;As the man by God exalted, With God’s glory He is crowned.
He hath put on human nature, Died according to God’s plan,Resurrected with a body, And ascended as a man.
God in Him on earth was humbled, God with man was domiciled;Man in Him in heav’n exalted, Man with God is reconciled.
Lo! a man is now in heaven As the Lord of all enthroned;This is Jesus Christ our Savior, With God’s glory ever crowned!
How wonderful that Christ is now in heaven as the Lord of all enthroned! In Him God on earth was humbled, but now, also in Him, man is exalted in heaven. This is the Christ revealed in the book of Acts, the book that stands between the Gospels and the Epistles.
In the Gospels we have the unveiling of a wonderful Person. This Person is the eternal God, the One called by the name Jehovah in the Old Testament. He is the Creator of the entire universe and of man. In Genesis 3:15 He prophesied that one day He would become a seed of woman. That promise went unfulfilled until the expiration of the first four thousand years of human history. Then the Lord Jesus came as the seed of the woman. He came as the very God conceived in the womb of a human virgin. We all need to realize this, and we have emphasized this in the Life-study of Luke.
The almighty God, the eternal Jehovah, the Creator of the universe, was conceived in the womb of a virgin and was born of that virgin to be a Person with two natures — the divine nature and the human nature. This means that He was born as the God-man, the One who is both the complete God and a perfect man. In Him we see God with His divine nature and attributes. In Him we also see man in the human nature and with all the human virtues. Therefore, in this one Person we can see both the complete God and a perfect man.
As the God-man, the Lord Jesus lived a life that was the life of a man. However, this man lived by God and with God. We may even say that He lived God; He expressed God in His humanity. In the book of Luke we see a man living on earth full of the human virtues, yet He expressed the divine nature with the divine attributes. With this One God was expressed in a human being, for the life He lived was the mingling of divinity and humanity. His life was a blending of God with man.
No one before the Lord Jesus had ever lived such a life. This kind of life had never been in existence. Therefore, the Lord’s life was unique. In this life we see the blending, the mingling, of God and man. The Lord Jesus lived this kind of life, and in this life He ministered. Actually, His ministry was simply His living. His living was His ministry to accomplish what had been prophesied and typified concerning Him in the Old Testament.
Having lived on earth for thirty-three and a half years, the Lord Jesus knew that it was necessary for Him to go to Mount Moriah and accomplish His all-inclusive death. The Lord did not die an ordinary death; on the contrary, He died an extraordinary death. This extraordinary death was all-inclusive, and it accomplished everything God required to clear up the universe, terminate the old creation, and bring the old creation with Him into His tomb. Therefore, the entire universe was buried with Christ in the tomb.
After terminating the old creation, the Lord, on the one hand, rested in the tomb. On the other hand, while He was resting in His fleshly body, He was working in His spirit in Hades (1 Pet. 3:18-20). In Hades He proclaimed God’s victory over His enemy, Satan. Then, after accomplishing in full God’s purpose through His all-inclusive death, Christ walked out of death and rose up from the tomb. In this way He became the resurrected Savior and Redeemer. Furthermore, in His resurrection He became the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). As we have pointed out in the past, the Lord has shown us from the Word that this life-giving Spirit is the ultimate consummation of the Triune God reaching His redeemed people. In His resurrection Christ became such a One.
In John 20 we see that in His resurrection Christ as the life-giving Spirit, the ultimate consummation of the Triune God reaching His redeemed people, came back to His disciples in an excellent and mysterious way to breathe Himself into them. The Lord breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). These disciples were the representatives of the Lord’s Body. Into these representatives He entered as the life-giving Spirit.
On another occasion the resurrected Christ told the disciples, “And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My Father upon you; but you, stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). Then “He led them out as far as Bethany, and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came about that while He blessed them, He parted from them and was carried up ” (Luke 24:50-51). Before His ascension to the heavens, the Lord charged His disciples, who had already received Him as the life-giving Spirit within them as life essentially, to wait until, after His ascension, He would pour Himself out upon them as the all-inclusive Spirit economically.
In a brief way we have presented the complete revelation of Christ in the four Gospels. We need to see such a view in our spirit. We need to see that Jesus Christ was prophesied and typified in the Old Testament, that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, that He was born of a virgin to become the God-man, that He lived a life of expressing the divine attributes in His human virtues, that He passed through death and entered into resurrection, becoming the reaching Spirit, and that in resurrection He breathed Himself into His disciples as the life-giving Spirit. Then, having charged them to wait for Him to pour Himself out upon them economically as the Spirit from the throne of God, He ascended to the heavens.
We have seen that the Lord Jesus was conceived, that He was born and lived on earth, that He died and resurrected, and that now in His ascension He is in the heavens. It is impossible to describe this wonderful One with a few sentences. We need a great many words to portray the One who is now on the throne in the heavens.
Different terms are needed to describe the ascended God-man. He is the eternal God, Jehovah, and He is the almighty Creator of the entire universe. One day He was conceived in a virgin’s womb and born of her to become the God-man. Then He lived on earth a life that was the mingling of God with man. After accomplishing eternal redemption, He came forth out of death, and in resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit. In His resurrection He breathed Himself into His disciples essentially. Then economically He ascended into the heavens. Therefore, economically the Lord Jesus is now in the heavens as the glorified One, and essentially He is in His disciples as their life. Hallelujah for the One who is both within His disciples essentially and on the throne in the heavens economically! May we all have such a view of our wonderful Savior.
Where is Christ today? The way to answer this question is to say, “Essentially Christ is in us, and economically He is on the throne in the heavens. Our Savior is the essential One and also the economical One.”
Many of today’s Christians do not realize that our Savior is both the essential One and the economical One. As the essential One, He dwells within us. But as the economical One, He is sitting in heaven. We have quoted the line of the hymn that says, “Lo! in heaven Jesus sitting.” The Lord Jesus is sitting in heaven not essentially but economically. Simultaneously, He is within us essentially. How wonderful! This is the revelation that precedes the book of Acts.
We need to see this revelation as we come to Acts. This means that as we study Acts we need to have the view of the Lord Jesus as the One who is on the throne economically and within us essentially.
Following Acts we have the Epistles. If we would understand the Epistles, we must have a thorough study of the book of Acts. If we do not have the proper understanding of Acts, we shall not be able to understand the Epistles adequately. Many readers of the New Testament do not have the right understanding of the Epistles, because they do not have a clear vision concerning Acts. Therefore, we look to the Lord to open this book to us and give us a clear view of what is revealed in it.
