Week 26—Tuesday Acts 2:1-4
Acts 2:1-4
THE HISTORICAL BECOMES THE EXPERIMENTAL
Luke was the one writer who chronicled for us the account of the Word become flesh in his Gospel, and then the Word become flesh in the Acts of the Apostles. The Word became flesh in Jesus, and then the Word became flesh in his followers. Luke saw and interpreted the connection, and it was not a literary connection—it was a life connection. The Acts was an extension of the Incarnation, of the Word become flesh. For if it had ended with Jesus, it would have ended. It had to be universalized or it wouldn’t have been universal.
So Luke in the first five verses of Acts sums up what he had spread out through twenty-four chapters in his Gospel, and the five verses are these:
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father . . . “you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 1:1-5)
These verses are the pivot upon which the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of experience—the historical becomes the experimental. And before Luke describes the fact of that transition, he pauses and sums up the essential facts involved in that redemptive impact.
The first was the Word become flesh—“all that Jesus began.” The gospel begins with Jesus, the Incarnate. If you don’t begin with Jesus you don’t begin—you don’t begin anything except roads with dead ends. We know little or nothing about God, and what we know is wrong, unless you begin with Jesus. If you do not see God in the face of Jesus, you see something other than God—and different.
O Lord Jesus, you are the express image of the Father, and unless we see the Father in and through you, the Son, we see a caricature. We can be satisfied with no caricature—we want to see the Father. We thank you that we do—in you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If the Historical became the Experimental in the Apostles, am I not an apostle, one sent?