Two Mistakes the Disciples Made—and We Still Make—About the Kingdom of God
The Disciples’ Need for Teaching
In the first chapter of Acts, during the transitional period between his resurrection and his ascension into heaven, we find Jesus involved in one central task, that of teaching the disciples, especially about the kingdom of God.
The need that the disciples still have for a great deal of instruction about the task that lies ahead of them can be seen from their question in Acts 1:6: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Teachers may have told you early on in school that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but that is plainly false. Everyone who is an expert in anything knows that there are some questions that are just plain dumb or at least demonstrate a total lack of understanding of the field. No one who knows about sewing asks, “Which end of the needle am I supposed to use?” Similarly, no sports buff asks, “Why don’t they run the football?” when it is fourth and twenty-seven with eight seconds on the clock. Those would be dumb questions—and this, too, is a dumb question. John Calvin comments that there are nearly as many errors in the disciples’ question as there are words, which is quite an achievement.1 The verb “restore” shows that they are still thinking in terms of a political kingdom, like the old kingdom of David. The noun “Israel” shows they are still thinking of a national kingdom made up of Abraham’s descendants. Meanwhile, the phrase “at this time” suggests that they expect the coming of the kingdom to be an immediate, or at least an imminent, event. Jesus corrects each of these mistakes in verse 7; here we look at the content of Jesus’s teaching in response to each of these mistakes in turn because it would be easy for us to fall into similar mistakes today.
Turning the World Upside Down
Iain M. Duguid
In this practical, winsome guide, Iain Duguid explores the continuing work of Jesus after the ascension in Acts 1–8, encouraging believers today toward gospel-driven, Spirit-filled mission.
Mistake #1: Expecting a Political Kingdom
In his answer to the disciples’ first mistake, Jesus points the disciples to the spiritual nature of the kingdom: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). God’s kingdom is not a political kingdom that can be established by force or political intrigue, as most earthly kingdoms are. It will not come as the result of a coup or a democratic vote or a great marketing campaign. The church is not a business whose function is to maximize the number of its customers. On the contrary, it is a spiritual kingdom; its function is to bring together those worshipers whom God is calling to himself.
There are a number of ways in which we might fail to see the spiritual nature of the kingdom. On the one hand, we may be overly concerned about numbers. We may get excited when new people show up to church or discouraged if the turnout is low. But the numbers of people attending worship services may actually be a poor indicator of what God is doing by the power of his Spirit in the hearts and lives of individuals. Sometimes services with only a few people present may be of crucial significance in the life of an individual, while at other times there might be thousands present but no great work of the Spirit. Remember, we serve the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep on the hillside in search of the one lost sheep (Matt. 18:12–13). That’s not necessarily good sheep management practice if your interest is maximizing the size of the flock. But it is the way God governs his kingdom: every single lost sheep matters to him and should likewise matter to us.
We might also spend too much time focusing on techniques to win people. There’s certainly nothing wrong with studying how to present the gospel more clearly or thinking about what questions and presuppositions our society has that make it harder for people to hear the gospel. But in the end people are not converted by our understanding of apologetics or our mastery of the latest evangelistic strategy, helpful though those things may be. They are converted by the Holy Spirit. That should give us great boldness to speak even a simple word to our neighbor, trusting God to use it as he sees fit. It should also give us great motivation to pray for the Lord to set divine appointments in our day with people in whose lives he is already at work. I know that often I’m far too worried about whether I have the right argument to convince someone and not nearly confident enough in God’s power to open closed ears and soften hard hearts. As a result, I say nothing, instead of speaking up and leaving the outcome to the Holy Spirit.
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Another way to lose sight of the spiritual nature of the kingdom is to be overly obsessed by political process and influence. Certainly Christians should be responsible citizens and should vote wisely for the candidates who seem most likely to pursue justice and righteousness once elected. It is good that Christians should run for office and serve in various government positions, both locally and nationally. But our hope does not finally rest in who holds the power in Washington or Beijing or the Kremlin. Our hope rests in what Jesus is continuing to do from his exalted heavenly throne, from where he rules over the affairs of men and nations. He governs the decisions of unbelievers as well as believers: as Proverbs 21:1 reminds us, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; / he turns it wherever he will.”
Jesus’s kingdom will be established here on earth not through a moral majority taking back our culture but through men and women testifying about him in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings the church into existence and maintains her by empowering ordinary people to testify to Christ. In fact, this work of the Spirit is a major theme of the book of Acts: when the Holy Spirit comes, men and women receive power to witness, and the result is that a community of people who recognize Jesus as their King is established. That’s ultimately always how real and lasting (positive) cultural change occurs: through the conversion of individuals who then live out their faith in all the different spheres of life, including politics. The primary mark of the presence of the Spirit of God in the book of Acts is not speaking in tongues or prophecy or signs and wonders but rather power to witness. When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer for God’s kingdom to come (Matt. 6:10), we are praying for him to pour out his Spirit on us so that we can be his witnesses and so that his church may be established and may grow.
A healthy church has a unity that is humanly inexplicable.
Mistake #2: Expecting an Immediate Kingdom
Jesus also corrects the second mistake of his disciples by pointing to the international nature of God’s kingdom: Jesus says, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This verse is a miniature summary of the structure of the whole book of Acts: first of all, we see the apostles bearing witness in Jerusalem, then the message spreads to Judea and Samaria, then it heads to Antioch and the eastern Mediterranean, and finally the message comes to Rome itself, which was “the ends of the earth” from the perspective of Jerusalem.
The international character of the church may not seem like very surprising news to us in our modern era, but it was a revolutionary idea for the apostles. It was hard for them to grasp the fact that Jesus’s kingdom would include not only Jews but also Gentiles and “halfbreed” Samaritans. It has been said that in the Old Testament, we find concern for the nations but not the idea of a mission to the nations. Old Testament believers asserted that the nations would surely come to Israel’s God (Isa. 2:2–4), but they would have been rather astonished by the idea that they should go to the nations and win them for Israel’s God. Yet we have to ask, Is that attitude really so different from the actual practice of many churches and individual Christians today? We believe that God will save people from all over the world, perhaps, but do we expect this salvation to come by means of God bringing them to us here in church rather than by us going out to them and sharing the good news about Jesus? Perhaps you are hoping that God will do a mighty work in your church, but have you considered how that will happen except by you getting to know some of the people who live around you so that God can speak to them through you? Are you merely “concerned” that many people around you don’t seem to know God, or do you see yourself as a missionary empowered by God’s Spirit to bring the gospel to them?
What is more, how broad is your vision of the people God desires to reach? Sometimes we think the church’s main task it is to make us comfortable and ensure that we are surrounded by the right kind of people—usually people just like us. On the contrary, Jesus constantly sends his disciples to those who are not like them, to pursue people who are not easy to like. After Jerusalem and Judea, they were to go to the hated Samaritans and then to the filthy Gentiles. Perhaps that was why there needed to be persecution in the early church, so that the early Christians would be forced to run for their lives and take the gospel out with them to new areas (Acts 8:1–4). Today, too, God sends us to the outcasts and the downtrodden, to the poor and the discriminated against, and to people who are going to make us feel uncomfortable. And he sends us both locally and to the ends of the earth. The healthy church does not have a unity that comes from everyone being alike, with common backgrounds and shared interests; it has a unity that comes from the gospel and the common salvation that we share in Christ. Indeed, a healthy church has a unity that is humanly inexplicable, given the diversity of backgrounds that are represented, yet a unity that comes naturally when a body of people are welded together by the power of the Spirit.
Notes:
- John Calvin, The Acts of the Apostles 1–13, trans. John W. Fraser and W. J. G. McDonald, Calvin’s Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Eerdmans; Paternoster, 1965), 29.
This article is adapted from Turning the World Upside Down: Lessons for the Church from Acts 1–8 by Iain M. Duguid.
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