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I. The Mission

A. The Argument of the Book

In the previous lesson, we saw how Luke’s Gospel painted a picture of Jesus Christ as the perfect Son of David, King of Israel.

After writing the story of Jesus’ life, Luke turned to the sequel: the establishment of Christ’s Church in the world. We call this second book the Acts of the Apostles.

Since in his Gospel Luke had painted Christ as the perfect fulfillment of the Davidic king, in Acts Luke naturally paints the Church as the perfect fulfillment of the Davidic kingdom. The Kingdom will be the theme of the book - a theme laid out by Christ himself.

It will also be the key to the message the Apostles have to bring to the world - the message that the Church is built on. And to spread that message, the Apostles need some preparation.

The kingdom theme begins almost immediately in Acts. For forty days after the Resurrection, Luke tells us, Jesus taught his disciples about the Kingdom (see Acts 1:3).

"Lord," his disciples ask him, "are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" (see Acts 1:6).

Perhaps they still expect something mundane from the Kingdom - something that involves expelling the Romans and setting up an Israelite civil authority. Or perhaps, after all Jesus’ teaching, they are beginning to understand that the Kingdom Jesus proclaims "does not belong to this world" (see John 18:36).

But Jesus does not give them an answer. It is not their business to know exactly when things would happen, he tells them. They will "receive power" when the Holy Spirit comes. As for when the Kingdom will be restored - that is what they will spend the rest of the book finding out.

What He does tell them is that it will be their business to restore the Kingdom. They will be His witnesses

· in Jerusalem,

· throughout Judea

· and Samaria,

· and to the ends of the earth (see Acts 1:8).

As we’ll see, this forms a kind of program for the whole book. Just as Jesus said, the spread of the Gospel begins in Jerusalem, then moves to Judea and Samaria, and then to the rest of the world.

But more than that, it’s also a map of the ideal Davidic kingdom - the kingdom that was promised to the Son of David, but was never fully realized until the coming of Christ.

B. The Ideal Kingdom

After David had made Jerusalem his capital (see 2 Samuel 5:6-10), he contemplated building a temple to God (see 2 Samuel 7:1-3). But the prophet Nathan brought him an amazing message.

David would not build a temple (see 2 Samuel 7:4-7): that work would be left for his son (see 2 Samuel 7:12-13). But God promised him a greater destiny than he had ever dreamed of.

Instead of David building a house for God, God would build a house for David (see 2 Samuel 7:11). That is, He would promise David that his son would rule after him, and the kingdom of the sons of David would be established forever (see 2 Samuel 7:16).

Psalm 89 puts the covenant with David in poetic terms. The Davidic king will be "Most High over the kings of the earth," God has promised (see Psalm 89:28), and his throne will last as long as the sun and moon (see Psalm 89:37-38).

For a while it had looked as though the promise would be fulfilled very quickly. David himself ruled over Judah (the Judea of the New Testament) and Israel (the Samaria and Galilee of the New Testament), and he conquered large outside territories (see 2 Samuel 8:1-13, 10:6-19). His son Solomon ruled over a considerable empire (see 1 Kings 4:21-24).

C. The Promise Forgotten?

Yet in Psalm 89 the psalmist wrote almost in despair. Things were going very badly for the kingdom (see Psalm 89:39-46). God seemed to have forgotten His promise (see Psalm 89:50). Instead of an exalted position higher than all other kings, the Lord’s Anointed bore the insults of all the nations (see Psalm 89:51-52).

The ideal and the reality seemed to be poles apart. God had promised an eternal kingdom to rule over all the kings of the earth; instead, David’s descendants ruled over a tiny buffer state that was constantly in danger of being overrun by the mighty empires around it (see, for a few examples, 2 Chronicles 32:1-19, 2 Chronicles 33:11, 2 Chronicles 36:3-4).

Bit by bit, the sons of David lost everything: the outside territories (see 1 Kings 11:14-25), Israel when the northern tribes rebelled (see 2 Chronicles 10:16-19), then most of Judah, until finally the son of David was shut up in Jerusalem (see 2 Kings 25:1-3). Finally, Jerusalem itself fell (see 2 Kings 25:4-10).

David’s kingdom had collapsed like an old hut. Yet it would not lie collapsed forever (see Amos 9:11).

The prophets foretold the destruction of Israel (see, for example, Isaiah 3:1, Jeremiah 15:1-4), and their prophecies came true. But they also foretold a time when the kingdom would be restored.

Isaiah foresaw a time when all the earth would acknowledge the God of Israel (see Isaiah 45:22). Israel would return from exile (see Isaiah 48:20-21). The King of Israel really would rule to the ends of the earth (see Isaiah 49:6-7).

With this history in front of us, we can see now what Jesus had commanded the Apostles to do. He had sent them to restore the kingdom: starting in Jerusalem, then taking back Judah, then Israel, then the ends of the earth, undoing all the destruction since the death of Solomon, until the promise to David was fulfilled completely, as the prophets had foretold that - against all odds - it must be (see, for example, Isaiah 2:1-4, Amos 9:11-12, Zechariah 14:16).

That is exactly what Luke will show the Apostles doing in the rest of the book.

Continue to Section 2