Speaking About the Kingdom (2 of 2)

The Question Jesus Did Not Answer

Acts 1:6–8 is one of the most instructive exchanges in the New Testament because of what Jesus does not say in it.

“So when they had gathered together, they began to ask him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you are restoring the kingdom to Israel?’ He told them, ‘You are not permitted to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the farthest parts of the earth.’”

— Acts 1:6–8 (NET)

The disciples’ question is still carrying the old misunderstanding: political restoration, national sovereignty, Israel’s kingdom over the nations. Forty days of Kingdom teaching and they are still asking it.

Jesus does not rebuke them for the question. He does not answer it directly. He redirects it — not by correcting their theology of the Kingdom’s nature but by correcting their concern about the Kingdom’s timing. “It is not for you to know the times or dates.” Stop asking when. Start asking where — Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, ends of the earth. Stop asking what the Kingdom will look like. Start being the Kingdom’s presence in the world as witnesses.

This redirection is one of the most important pastoral instructions in Acts. The disciple who is absorbed in eschatological calculation — when the Lord will return, what the sequence of end-times events will be, whether current events signal the beginning of the tribulation — has not heard Acts 1:7. The timing is not your concern. The Father has set those dates by His own authority. Your concern is the power you are about to receive and the witness you are commissioned to give in the specific geography of your life — Jerusalem first, then expanding outward.

The enemy is well served by eschatological obsession. The disciple who spends his Kingdom energy calculating the rapture’s timing is the disciple who is not spending it being a witness in his Jerusalem. Jesus knew this tendency would exist in every generation. He addressed it directly in the last extended conversation before the Ascension.

The Curriculum and the Disciple Today

The forty days’ curriculum is not historically sealed. The same risen Jesus who opened the disciples’ minds in those forty days is the same risen Jesus who is alive at the right hand of the Father today, interceding for the disciple, sending the same Spirit to lead the disciple into all truth.

What Acts 1:3 establishes for the contemporary disciple is this: the Kingdom of God is the primary subject of Christian discipleship. Not personal salvation as a private transaction. Not the management of moral behavior within institutional religion. Not the preparation of the soul for a future heaven that has nothing to do with the present earth. The Kingdom — the present, advancing, Spirit-powered, all-nations-reaching, enemy-displacing, creation-restoring Kingdom of the risen King.

Volume I of this handbook trained the soldier in the practices of that Kingdom. Volume II is establishing the theological ground on which those practices stand. And the ground is not the Sermon on the Mount alone, not the Upper Room Discourse alone, not the Verily statements alone — though all of these are essential. The ground is the resurrection. The Kingdom is not a vision for how humanity might improve. It is the present advance of the Kingdom of a King who has already defeated death, who is already seated at the right hand of all authority, and who will return in the same way He left. That is the Kingdom the disciple is advancing. That is what the forty days were about.