Acts 1:1-11 deal with the forty days between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension.
These verses emphasize the history of Christianity, the presence of Christ, the great commission, and Christ’s return. Acts is a short name for the Acts of the Apostles; it might more properly be called the continuing words and deeds of Jesus by His Spirit through His apostles
First we find an emphasis on the historical basis of Christianity. Luke tells Theophilus that he is going to continue the history that he began in his gospel. In Luke's earlier book, he said he had very carefully investigated the details of the life of Jesus Christ and had written them down only after this investigation. So Luke wants to continue that procedure and acts; he wants to be very careful and continue to investigate and make sure his facts are correct.
The things he wrote in the first book concerning all that Jesus began both to do and teach until the day which He was taken up, as he declares in Acts l:1-2…these things are going to continue in the church by the power of the Holy Spirit. When Luke writes in Acts 1:3 of Jesus’ resurrection, he says that Jesus presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs being seen by them during forty days.
That is a very important sentence because it indicates that Jesus did not merely give His disciples certain ideas that they were then to carry into the world. They knew He had died and then He appeared to them as one who had risen from the dead—much greater impact than just actually seeing the death of Christ.
This and other similar experiences are what Luke had in mind when he wrote of infallible proofs. In essences he was saying, “I am going to chart the spread of Christianity, but I want you to know at the very beginning that this is a religion based on historical facts including the amazing matter of the resurrection.”
There is a second thing to see about theses opening verses; that is the dominate presence of the living Christ.
Did you notice the dominate presence of the living Christ in those verses? Verses 1-3 are all about Jesus, and He speaks about the kingdom of God in reference to God the Father. In verse 4, Jesus states that they heard of the Father's promise from Him. Verse 5 mentions baptism with the Holy Spirit which is done by Christ. Verse 6 refers to Jesus as the Lord. In verses 7-8, Jesus told them that knowledge of the future falls under the Father’s authority, and they shall be witnesses to Christ in Jerusalem. In verses 9-10, Christ was taken up, and the end of this section is especially important. In verse 11, the angels are talking about Jesus. “This same Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will return in like manner.”
It is impossible to separate the Christ of faith from the Jesus of history; the Christ of faith that Christ presented to us in the pages of the New Testament is the Jesus of history, and there is no other. This is what Luke says as he begins both his gospel and Acts.
The Lord Jesus Christ who is and has always been the object of the faith of Christians down through all the Christian centuries is the Jesus who really lived, who was crucified, and who rose from the dead. He is the Messiah who always glorifies God the Father.
The disciples who were with Jesus in the days between the resurrection and the ascension, still had old fashion Jewish ideas, and one of these, as we know from the gospel, was that the kingdom of God was going to be established by political earthly power. This is what the Jews believed, and the disciples still had that in the back of their minds—the idea of the Messiah with the soldier like Judas Maccabeus, also known as Judas the hammer. And in their minds, the Messiah was going to be strong enough to drive out any occupying military forces. The Jews were looking for a Messiah who would expel the Romans and set up an earthly kingdom of David; … . . .
Forty days had passed and the resurrected Christ had been right there before them proclaiming the Kingdom of God and all that He fulfilled in the law and the prophets! But they still did not get it. Their hearts may have burned when He was in front of them, but they still were not fully grasping things.
They merely saw Him as the leader of a physical revolution that fell far short of what the Father and Son actually had in mind—the real change God wanted was to turn the whole world upside down (Acts 17:6).
