Acts 1:6

Come together. That is, in Jerusalem, in obedience to the Lord’s will (v. 4) and by agreement with one another. Jesus Himself was with them, though no unexpected, supernatural appearing is mentioned. This was the last meeting of the disciples with their Lord, for it was the day of His ascension (Mark 16:19; Luke 24:50, 51; 1 Cor. 15:7).

They asked of him. The Greek suggests that they asked Him repeatedly.

Wilt thou at this time restore? Rather, “Art thou restoring at this time?” The disciples did not yet understand the nature of Christ’s kingdom. He had not promised the sort of restoration they were anticipating (see on Luke 4:19). They thought Jesus “should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24:21), that is, from the Romans. Peter and the other disciples found a different redemption at Pentecost (Acts 2:37-39). The ascension, and the Pentecostal experience which followed, gave them new understanding; they finally realized the spiritual nature of their Master’s kingdom.

The Jews were eager with Messianic hope. In the Psalms of Solomon, an apocryphal work written shortly before the Christian Era (see Vol. V, p. 90), repeated expression is given to this idea. The following prayer is typical: “Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of David, at the time in which Thou seest, O God, that he may reign over Israel Thy servant. And gird him with strength, that he may shatter unrighteous rulers, and that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample (her) down to destruction.... And he shall purge Jerusalem, making it holy as of old: so that nations shall come from the ends of the earth to see his glory, bringing as gifts her sons who had fainted, and to see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her” (The Psalms of Solomon 17:23-35; cited in R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, pp. 649, 650). Such thoughts may very well have led the disciples to hope that the time had arrived for establishing the promised dominion, and prompted their question.

Israel. Even yet the disciples had not grasped the concept of the spiritual kingdom from all nations (Matt. 8:11, 12), composed of the true Israel of the circumcised heart (Rom. 2:28, 29). Nor did they realize that when the Jewish nation rejected Jesus, it cut itself off from the root and stock of the true Israel, into which the Christian converts, both Jew and Gentile, were not to be grafted (see Rom. 11). Obviously they still expected the Messianic kingdom of David to be set up in the royal nation of Judah, among the literal Jewish people. See Vol. IV, pp. 26-36.

The disciples’ use of the term “Israel” to mean “Judah” offers no difficulty. It is true that “Israel” often means the northern tribes in contradistinction to Judah. But it is also often applied to the whole twelve tribes and even to Judah in particular, as well as to the chosen people of God without tribal designation (see, for example, on Isa. 9:8). The context must indicate the usage in any given case. Therefore it is not surprising that we find the NT consistently applying the term “Israel” to the Jewish nation. Although the Jews of that time were predominantly of the tribe of Judah, they were in the direct and legitimate line of succession not only from the postexilic province of Judah (which was the continuation of the earlier kingdom of Judah) but also from the original united nation of Israel.

The Jews of Christ’s day were the heirs of the old theocracy that had been governed by the divinely appointed Davidic dynasty, centered in the divinely prescribed Temple worship, and founded on the national covenant between God and His chosen people. Paul called his fellow Jews “Israelites,” to whom, after the flesh, pertained “the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came” (Rom. 9:4, 5; cf. v. 3; see also chs. 3:1,2; 11:1).

These disciples, therefore, were not unreasonable in their belief that the prophecies and promises given to early Israel belonged to the Jews as the successors of the old Davidic kingdom — not to the “Israel” of the ten tribes that had seceded from the house of David. For those tribes had separated themselves not only from Judah, but also from the Temple and the true worship of God, and hence from the national covenant. To the fact of Judah’s royal heritage was added the fact that the southern nation had, from the time of the division under Jereboam, included numerous members of the northern tribes who wished to remain true to Jehovah (2 Chron. 11:13-16; 15:9; cf. ch. 16:1). These facts explain the repeated use of the term Israel for both the kingdom of Judah and, after the Captivity, for the Jewish community reconstituted as the province of Judah, to which belonged all those, of whatever tribe, who returned from exile (see Ezra 2:70; 3:1; 4:3; 7:7, 13; 8:29; 9:1; 10:5; Neh. 1:6; 9:1,2; 10:39; 11:3,20; Eze. 14:1,22; 17:2, 12; 37:15-19; Dan. 1:3; Zech. 8:13; Mal. 1:1).

Further, the Jewish nation of Jesus’ day represented the other tribes of Israel not only in population (see Luke 2:36) but also in territory (Vol. V, pp. 45, 46). It was referred to as Israel by John the Baptist (John 1:31), by Simeon (Luke 2:32, 34), by Jesus Himself (Matt. 8:10; Luke 7:9; John 3:10), by the disciples and others in Judea (Matt. 2:20-22; 9:33; Luke 24:21; Acts 1:6; 2:22, 23; 3:12; 4:8, 27; 5:31; 21:28), by Gamaliel (Acts 5:35), by Luke (Luke 1:80), and by Paul (Acts 13:16, 17, 23, 24; Rom. 9:4, 6, 31; 11:1; 1 Cor. 10:18; 2 Cor. 11:22; Phil. 3:5).

Thus the Messianic reign prophesied for Israel was still sought by these disciples as a restoration of Jewish national sovereignty. Indeed, the Messiah’s kingdom would have belonged to the Jews if they had not forfeited it by rejecting the Son of David because He came offering a kingdom of universal righteousness instead of Jewish conquest. The nation’s rejection as the chosen people, a status that had been conditional from the first (Ex. 19:5, 6; Jer. 18:6-10; Matt. 8:11, 12; 21:33-45), was too recent for the disciples to understand. They well knew that the old northern kingdom of Israel had severed itself irrevocably from the true Israel of the covenant except as its individual members might choose to rejoin the chosen people. What they did not yet see was the fact that the Jewish nation likewise, having rejected the rule of the Son of David, was the chosen people no longer, although individual Jews might be grafted into the stock of true Israel, the church of Jesus Christ (see Vol. IV, pp. 25-38), in whom there is no distinction of race, nationality, or position (Gal. 3:28, 29; Col. 3:11).