I recently started my daily quiet time on the Book of Acts. I'll probably still comment on Luke in future posts, since I've already jotted down blogging ideas about the Gospel in my notebook. But I'll also talk about Acts when I feel like doing so.
One thing that stands out to me as I go through Acts is this: there's a lot of emphasis on the apostles being witnesses to Jesus' resurrection. Where this really hit me was in Acts 1:22. The apostle Judas has died, and the church sees a need to replace him. Acts 1:21-22 quotes Peter as saying:
"So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us-- one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection" (NRSV).
I'd always misread this. I thought the passage meant that a person had to have witnessed the risen Jesus in order to become an apostle. While this was indeed a requirement for the office, that's not what the passage is saying. Rather, it's talking about the very function of an apostle, which is to bear witness to Jesus' resurrection. According to Acts, the disciples beheld the risen Jesus, who showed them he was alive through many convincing proofs (Acts 1:3). Their role as apostles was then to testify to what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20).
There are a lot of things that went through my mind as I read this. First of all, I thought about cessationism. Cessationism is the belief that God no longer does miracles through human beings. According to this view, the purpose of miracles in the first century was to confirm the truth of the Gospel (as signs), thereby jump-starting the church. Now that we have the Bible, however, we no longer need miracles, as far as cessationists are concerned.
I am not a cessationist, for I believe that miracles did more than function as signs. Jesus also healed people because he had compassion for them (Matthew 14:14; Luke 7:13), or because he wanted to free them from the power of Satan the devil (Matthew 12:28-30; Acts 10:38). Who's to say that Jesus isn't in that kind of business anymore? Did his kingdom pack up and go on vacation after the first century?
But I think that cessationists do well to stress the uniqueness of the first century, for that was the only time in which there were actual witnesses to the risen Jesus. Evangelicals talk a lot about "witnessing" today, but how many of them in this day and age are real witnesses? They can tell moving stories about Christianity and how it's changed their lives, but they haven't actually seen Jesus in his resurrection body. There are things about the first century that simply do not apply today.
So what do we have? We have the Bible. I realize that many historical-critics will laugh at that answer, since they don't view the New Testament as historically reliable (at least not completely). And I remember one struggling friend who said to me, "How come people back then got all these miracles, but all we get is a book?" But, when I read Scripture, my impression is that it's trying to leave us with eye-witness testimony about Jesus. The apostles couldn't be around forever, after all!
Luke-Acts is big on eyewitnesses. Luke told Theophilus that much of what he was writing down was "handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word" (Luke 1:2).
Paul said that he and other eyewitnesses had seen the risen Lord (I Corinthians 9:1; 15:3-8).
The Gospel of John says, "This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true" (John 21:24). To the person who wrote that little sentence, the Gospel contained eyewitness testimony.
And I John 1:1 has, "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life."
And so the New Testament presents itself as a depository of eyewitness testimony.
Second, I wondered why Jesus only showed himself to his disciples after he rose from the dead. Why didn't he appear to everyone, including the Jewish leaders who had opposed him throughout his life? That would have convinced them he was telling the truth (one would hope)!
The New Testament is not oblivious to this question. Peter says in Acts 10:40-41: "but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear,
not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead."
John 14:22-24 states: "Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, 'Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?' Jesus answered him, 'Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.'"
For some reason, God chose to limit the privilege of seeing the risen Jesus to the first century church. Others in that time could know indirectly that Jesus rose--through the empty tomb, the Hebrew Scriptures, apostolic testimony and miracles, Saul's changed life, the courage of the apostles, etc., etc. But only the early church had direct, first-hand knowledge of Jesus' resurrection.
On many occasions, God chooses to hide himself, in the sense that he doesn't make the truth obvious to each and every person. Rather, he wants us to seek, dig, draw conclusions, and arrive at a choice. That's not necessarily blind faith, mind you, but it's faith on the basis of something other than hard proof that's immediately accessible. This kind of faith requires a lot of character--a putting aside of one's ego in a sincere search for goodness and truth.
I also think that God wanted the apostles to have a monopoly on the message about Jesus' resurrection. If Jesus had appeared to everybody, anyone would have been able to come up with a possible interpretation of what he had seen. "Jesus is alive! He's ascended to the heavens as one more prophet among many," some could say. After all, people had a variety of ideas about Jesus while he was still on earth (Matthew 16:13-14)! But God wanted a select group of people to convey the significance of Jesus' resurrection: that God has exalted Christ to the status of ruler and Messiah, and that Jesus will one day judge the living and the dead (e.g., Acts 2:36; 17:31). Therefore, the risen Jesus only appeared to the first century church.
There may be more to this than I conveyed, but hopefully I'll learn more as I go through Acts and get feedback from others.