Bible Difficulties (79 page)

The Interviews With the Assembled Disciples

Luke tells us that while the Emmaus travelers were finishing their report the assembled believers, the Lord Himself entered through the locked doors and appeared in their midst (Luke 24:36), much to the amazement of all those who had not previously seen Him risen from the dead. Graciously He greeted them with His customary "Peace be with you" (the Greek
eirene hymin
doubtless represents the Aramaic
selama' àmmekon
[John 20:19]).

Then He hastened to allay their fears by showing them physical evidence of His bodily resurrection and restoration to life. "Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your heart?" He asked (Luke 24:38), as He held out His pierced hands for them to see and removed His sandals to show the nail holes through His feet (vv. 39-40). He even uncovered the scar of the gash that the Roman spear had made in His side as He hung lifeless on the cross (John 20:20). "Look at My hands and feet," He said to them, "for it is really I. Feel Me and see, for a mere spirit does not have flesh and bones such as you behold Me to have" (Luke 24:39).

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How many took advantage of Christ's offer to touch Him, we cannot be sure. But numbers of those in the room found even this evidence too amazing to be believed; so He offered a yet more dramatic proof. "Do you have anything to eat?" He asked them. They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He proceeded to eat it as they looked on with wonder and delight (Luke 24:42-43).

Having thus demonstrated that He was none other than their beloved Master risen from the dead, Jesus proceeded to explain to them, as He had explained to the two on the road to Emmaus, that all the amazing occurrences of Passion Week were fully predicted in the Hebrew Scriptures--all the way from Genesis to Malachi. The portions referred to were threefold: Moses (i.e., the Pentateuch), the Prophets, and the Psalms. (Notice that by this period all the Old Testament books other than the Pentateuch and the Psalms were included under the classification of "Prophets"--including all the books of history, Daniel, and probably the wisdom books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as well, unless "Psalms" is intended to represent all five books of Poetry.) The entire Hebrew Bible is about the Son of God. But His particular focus was on those predictions of His ministry, sufferings, and death found in the Pentateuch (Gen. 3:15; 49:10; Deut. 18:15-18, and all the types of priesthood and sacrifice contained in the Torah), the Prophets (e.g., Isa. 7:14-9:6; 52:13-53:12), and the Psalms (esp. Ps. 16:10 and Ps. 22), which foretold all the events that found their culmination on this Easter Day (Luke 24:44-46). Thus He assured them that all the apparently tragic events of the last few days were in exact fulfillment of the great plan of human redemption that God had decreed from before the beginning of all time.

Instead of feeling intimidated and disappointed by the shame of the Cross, they were to see in it the greatest victory of all time; and they were to trumpet abroad the good news of salvation, which by His atonement He had purchased for repentant sinners everywhere.

This led Jesus quite naturally to the earliest pronouncement of the Great Commission.

He told the disciples that repentance was to be preached in His name to all nations for the forgiveness of sins, beginning from Jerusalem, and that they as eyewitnesses were under special obligation to carry out the proclamation of this message. But He recognized that in order to accomplish this mission effectively, they would need divine empowerment, the special dynamic that God had promised in His Work (cf. Joel 2:28-29). Then He concluded His exhortation with this formula of evangelistic commission: "As the Father has sent Me, so do I send you." Having said this, He breathed on them and said to them,

"Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22). Even in advance of the general bestowal of the Holy Spirit on the entire church at Pentecost, these apostles received Him as their permanently indwelling, sanctifying power. As temples for His residence, the apostles were entrusted with the awesome responsibility of conveying to the human race the knowledge of the Lord Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, without whom no one can come to God for salvation (John 14:6).

As prophets of God, therefore, preachers and missionaries of the gospel, empowered and used by the Holy Spirit, were to make available to lost sinners everywhere the benefits of Calvary. But since man cannot believe the gospel until it has been presented to him, the availability of God's forgiveness through Christ is practically limited to those evangelized by the faithful witness of His servants. In this sense, then, "if you forgive the 359

sins [
aphete tas hamartias
] of any"--that is, by presenting them with Christ-- "they have been forgiven them" (John 20:23, NASB). That is to say, they have been numbered among God's elect according to His foreknowledge and elective grace (the Greek perfect passive
apheontai
so implies); and through the agency of God's messengers of the gospel, they enter the ranks of the forgiven and redeemed. By the same token, however, those who remain unevangelized have no access to this forgiveness and salvation; and failure to get out the message to them seals their eternal doom. "If you retain the sins of any, they have been retained" (by God Himself, in His predestinative will), NASB. Christ had spoken of this solemn responsibility earlier, at the time of Peter's confession of His messiahship; and there Jesus had symbolized it as the "power of the keys" (Matt. 16:19).

It was at Pentecost, by his heart-stirring and conscience-piercing message, that Peter first used the power of the keys. With them he opened up the gateway to heaven to all the three thousand who believed.

John records that of the Eleven, there was just one who was not present. Thomas (whose Greek name was Didymus-- "Twin"). Perhaps it was providential that he had been absent during the initial meeting of the church with the resurrected Christ, for he might later have wondered whether he had not been unduly swayed in his critical judgment by the contagion of the enthusiasm of the others. Thomas was one who insisted on concrete, objective proof before he could be intellectually convinced. He had to be convinced almost against his will, for he firmly believed that once a man was dead, that was the end.

How could a buried corpse ever come to life again? An impossible, absurd notion if he had ever heard one! Therefore he would not lend credence to the most solemn protestations of his trusted fellow disciples, that they had actually seen and talked with their resurrected Lord (John 20:25). Surely they must have fallen victim to mere hallucination!

No one could ever expect Thomas to believe in anything so contrary to nature. Yet it was exactly one week later, on the Sunday following Easter, that Jesus appeared to the group for the second time (cf. John 21:14). This time Thomas was present, that stubborn skeptic who had declared, "Unless I see the print of the nails in His hands and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into His side [i.e., where the spear had entered His chest], I will not believe" (John 20:25). As Jesus entered the room, again passing through the closed doors, He gave them the same general greeting as before:

"Peace be unto you." Then He went up to Thomas and stood before him, saying, "Reach here your finger and look at My hands, and reach your hand here and put it into My side; and be not faithless but believing."

The very type of proof Thomas had demanded was now presented to him in a way that could admit of no other explanation: the same body that had been crucified on the cross now stood alive before him. All of sudden, as Thomas touched the scar and nail prints with his hands, all of his hard-headed skepticism seemed foolish and unworthy. All he could do was fall to his knees in repentance and adoration as he exclaimed, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28).

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We now pass to the third interview between Christ and His apostles subsequent to the Resurrection. By this time the disciples had left Jerusalem and had gone up to Galilee to keep their rendezvous with Him as He had bidden them (Matt. 28:10; Mark 16:7). This was a much less formal occasion, and only five of them were present--on the fishing expedition at least (Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, James, and John). It was Peter's idea to go fishing, for might help to relieve some of the tension of waiting for the Lord to appear to them. There is no good reason to infer, as some have done, that Peter was intending to leave his apostolic calling and go back to his old job as a fisherman. Even in our own day many a full-time pastor occasionally relaxes by following Peter's example. From Peter's scanty attire (John 21:7), we gather that it was a hot summer night; and may have been hard to sleep. At any rate, they all went out with Peter and caught absolutely nothing.

Finally, as the dawn mist came on them, they made out the form of a bystander greeting them from the shore. "Children," He called out to them, "You don't have anything to eat, have you?" "No", they answered Him. "Well then," the stranger shouted, "throw your net on the right-hand side of the boat, and you will have catch!" This seemed very unlikely, but they complied nevertheless. Immediately the net ropes began to jerk and pull about this way and that, and it seemed as if they had run into a whole school of unwary fish.

John immediately recognized that this was a special work of God; only Jesus could turn such dismal failure into thrilling success. "It is the Lord," he exclaimed.

The rest of the story is so well known, it is unnecessary to repeat it all here. But the important feature about the incident so far as John was concerned--and he makes it the final item in his gospel--was the correlation between love and service. "Simon, if you love Me, feed My sheep." Love for Jesus was absolutely foundational. Jesus compelled Peter to reaffirm his love for Him three times--corresponding to the number of times he had denied Him in the palace of the high priest. Nothing Peter might do for the Lord would satisfy or please Him unless it was based on an all-consuming personal affection and commitment to Him, in sincere fulfillment of the first and great commandment. But if that love was real, it had to express itself in loving outreach to all of God's people: Christ's lambs and sheep (both children and adults). In Peter's case, at least, Peter's faithfulness to Jesus would some day mean his death on the scaffold or cross (John 21:18-19). As a lover of Christ, Peter also would have to be willing to lay down his life for his "friends."

There may have been numerous other times of fellowship between Christ and His apostles during the remainder of the forty-day period between the Easter resurrection and the ascension of our Lord to heaven recorded in Acts 1:9 Luke simply indicates that Jesus was repeatedly seen (
optanomenos
) by His disciples over a period of forty days, and He taught them "concerning the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3). But the record of the Galilean retreat closes with a large assembly of Christ's followers--quite possibly the gathering included more than five hundred at that time (cf. 1 Cor. 15:6)--on some mountain in Galilee (Matt. 28:16), which though unnamed may have been Tabor, the highest and most impressive hill in Galilee. There Jesus issued a stirring appeal for lives devoted to evangelism. He assured His disciples that the Father had committed to Him as the risen Messiah all authority (
pasa exousia
) in heaven and on earth; and even after His ascension 361

to Glory, He would be with them always, to the very consummation of the age (Matt.

28:20). Their responsibility would be to go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Triune God, and teaching them to observe all of His commandments. Matthew 28:19-20 gives us the fullest form of the Great Commission.

The final day of Christ's postresurrection ministry did not take place in Galilee. That may have been the site of the largest assembly of His followers, as we have just seen; but His actual departure was from the crest of the Mount of Olives, not far from Bethany.

There was something especially fitting that this should be the point of His departure, since from the prophecy in Zechariah 14:4 we know that the Mount of Olives will be the place of His return in the day of Armageddon. As He sets His foot down there, a mighty earthquake will split the hill of Olivet into a broad valley running from west to east.

We have no way of knowing how many of Jesus' disciples gathered on the summit of Olivet for that last memorable interview with their Lord, on His final day of earthy ministry. Perhaps there were about 120 there, judging from the statement in Acts 1:15. It is conceivable that the "over five hundred brethren at once" (1 Cor. 15:6) were there rather than up in Galilee. Matthew 28:16 only mentions the Eleven as being certainly of that number; yet the Eleven may have simply been a core group, and a great many more may have gathered around them. On the other hand, if there were over 500 assembled at Olivet on Ascension Day, it is unlikely that 380 of them would have disregarded Christ'

solemn instructions and would have failed to tarry for the specified ten days until Pentecost (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4), when the Spirit would descend from heaven on them.

As the disciples gathered about Jesus to take their leave of Him before His departure to heaven, they asked Him one question of pressing importance: Will the kingdom of God very soon be established on earth? They were anxious to know what their Lord's plan was for the triumph of His cause and establishment of His sovereignty over all the earth. In response to this question, Jesus does not correct their underlying premise--that He some day will establish the kingdom of God on earth--but indicates that there will be intervening times and seasons in phraseology reminiscent of the Olivet Discourse (Matt.

24:5-14), with its clear indication that much would have to happen before the present age would draw to its close. It was unnecessary and inappropriate for them to know about the exact date of the Second Advent; their task was simply to carry out the Great Commission and spread the gospel to the very ends of the earth (Acts 1:7-8).

As His final gesture there on the hilltop near Bethany, our Lord lifted His hands to bless His disciples (Luke 24:50); and in that attitude He was suddenly lifted up from the ground, to disappear from their sight beyond the clouds. As they stood there looking up, transfixed with wonder, two angels suddenly appeared beside them (perhaps the same angels who had greeted the visitors to the empty tomb) and assured them that Jesus would some day return to earth in bodily form--in the same form as they had seen Him ascend to heaven. With this glad assurance ringing in their ears, they made their way down from Olivet in order to spend the next ten days in communion and prayer, until the outpouring of Christ's Holy Spirit came on them all at Pentecost.