What Does Acts 1:3 Mean?

(3) **After his** **passion.**—Literally, *after He had suffered.* The English somewhat anticipates the later special sense of “passion.” **By many infallible proofs.**—There is no adjective in the Greek answering to “infallible,” but the noun is one which was used by writers on rhetoric (*e.g., *Aristotle, *Rhet.* i. 2) for proofs that carried certainty of conviction with them, as contrasted with those that were only probable or circumstantial. No other New Testament writer uses it. **Being seen of them forty days.**—St. Luke uses a peculiar and unusual word (it occurs twice in the LXX.: 1Kings 8:8, and Tobit 12:19) for “being seen,” perhaps with the wish to imply that the presence was not continuous, and that our Lord was seen only at intervals. This may be noted as the only passage which gives the time between the Resurrection and the Ascension. It had its counterpart in the forty days of the Temptation in the wilderness (Luke 4:2), as that had had in the earlier histories of Moses (Exodus 24:18; Deuteronomy 9:9; Deuteronomy 9:18) and Elijah (1Kings 19:8). There was a certain symbolic fitness in the time of triumph on earth coinciding with that of special conflict. If we ask what was the character, if one may so speak, of our Lord’s risen life between His manifestation to the disciples, the history of the earlier forty days in part suggests the answer. Then, as before, the life was, we may believe, one of solitude and communion with His Father, no longer tried and tempted, as it had then been, by contact with the power of evil—a life of intercession, such as that which uttered itself in the great prayer of John 17. Where the days and nights were spent we can only reverently conjecture. Analogy suggests the desert places and mountain heights or Galilee (Luke 4:42; Luke 6:12). The mention of Bethany in Luke 24:50, and of the Mount of Olives in Acts 1:12, makes it probable that Gethsemane may have been one of the scenes that witnessed the joy of the victory, as it had witnessed before the agony of the conflict. **The things pertaining to the kingdom of God.**—This implies, it is obvious, much unrecorded teaching. What is recorded points (1) to the true interpretation of the prophecies of the Messiah (Luke 24:27; Luke 24:44-45); (2) to the extension of the mission of the disciples to the whole Gentile world, and their admission to the Kingdom by baptism (Matthew 28:19); (3) to the promises of supernatural powers and divine protection (Mark 16:15-18); (4) to that of His own perpetual presence with His Church (Matthew 28:20).