Always Starving Bible Reading Day 14: Acts 1:4-11; 2:1-4 ESV
Ten Days of Waiting / First Day of Witness
Acts 1:4-11
This book begins with the ascension of Jesus and His commitment to bear witness to the world through the leadership of His twelve chosen disciples. He had been trying to explain the Kingdom of God to them, but as this chapter will reveal, the first disciples were coming to understand the arrival of the Kingdom in the Person of Jesus rather slowly (1-4). Due to their slowness to pick up how the witness and the rule of Jesus would spread to the entire world (6), Jesus warned them not to fret about when events would occur (7). Instead, Jesus urged them to remember to wait in Jerusalem to receive one of the first promises they had heard: they were to be baptized not just in water but with the Holy Spirit (5). This baptism, unlike John's water baptism, would be the force that would take what they had witnessed of Jesus to the whole world (8). They learned from the beginning that it was not their own ability that introduced the new King and His new Kingdom into the world.
The Ascension of the Lord (9-11)
As they listened and watched, Jesus was lifted up and then cloaked and made unseeable by a cloud (9). As previously, the Lord went before His people in a cloud; as always, Jesus was in that cloud (Exodus 13:21; Daniel 7:13). This was Christ's eleventh appearance, and the whole event took place on the Mt. of Olives (12). Two angels, we assume, appeared to them as men in white robes (10), lightly rebuking them for gawking into the heavens and not getting up and obeying Jesus by waiting in Jerusalem. They needed not to worry about Christ; He would return the same way He left (11).
Acts 2:1-4
This chapter moves to the tenth day since the ascension of Jesus, the very day of the feast of Pentecost and when the great witness of Jesus through His church began.
The Power to Witness (1-13)
On the Day of Pentecost, when all 120 were together in one place, the world changed. Pentecost was the feast of first fruits, celebrating fifty days after Passover, and was commemorated by Israelites bringing the first of their harvest and giving it to the Lord (1). On this particular day, Jews and proselytes (9-10) from all over the world were gathered in Jerusalem, bringing their first-of-the-year offering. What they were unaware of was Jesus; He was going to receive a first fruits of souls into the Kingdom on this very same day.
As was common to God's physical presence, a deafening storm entered the room where they all were. Paralleling the event of God giving the Law at Sinai, fire was mixed in with the storm and suddenly divided, and tongues of fire appeared to rest on everyone's heads (2-3). Immediately, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in languages understood as being native to other nations (4-6).