Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
The question about the kingdom, and the ascension
Acts 1:6-11
6 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, are you now restoring the kingdom to Israel?” · WEB
The disciples ask when the kingdom will be restored and are given no date, but a commission and a power — and then the promise that he returns as he left.
The question is usually treated as a lapse, and the text does not treat it that way. They have just spent forty days being taught about God's Kingdom, and they ask about the kingdom. Their expectation of a restoration to Israel rests on a large body of prophecy, and the answer does not correct the expectation. It corrects the timetable, and only the timetable: It isn't for you to know times or seasons which the Father has set within his own authority.
That sentence withholds a date. It does not withhold the subject. The Father has set the times, which means there are times set; what is denied is the disciples' access to the schedule, not the reality of the thing scheduled. The refusal is also specific to what they asked. A question about the hour of restoration receives no answer; the very next words hand them something else entirely to be occupied with.
But you will receive power. The reply substitutes a task for a calendar, and the task is described in a geography that the rest of the book will walk. Jerusalem, then all Judea and Samaria, then the uttermost parts of the earth. Chapters one through seven stay in the city. Chapter eight leaves it for Samaria. From chapter nine the road runs outward and never returns. The verse is a table of contents that nobody in the room could have recognized as one.
The word for what they are to be is witness. It is a legal term before it is a religious one, and it defines the job by its limits: a witness reports what he has seen and is useless for anything else. This is why the forty days of proofs came first, and why the replacement of Judas in the next paragraph turns entirely on having been present from the beginning.
Then he is taken up, and a cloud ends the visible part. The two men in white ask a question with a rebuke inside it — why do you stand looking into the sky? — and answer it with the one piece of information about the future the disciples are actually given. He will come back in the same way as they saw him go. Not the date, but the manner: personally, visibly, bodily, as they watched. The sky-watching is interrupted not because the return is doubtful but because staring at the point of departure is not what the interval is for.
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