Acts 1:1-5
Jesus Teaches Us About Eternal Life
1 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
Everyone of the Gospels write about the Resurrection of Jesus at the end of each of the four Gospels...And you would think that since all the Gospels end their Gospels with His resurrection that almost all the followers and His Disciples would have believed that Jesus had risen from the dead...Yet, as we read the four Gospels, we see that even the Disciples who knew Him best did not believe that He had risen from the dead at first...Jesus had told them many times that He was going to die and was preparing them for His future death...Jesus knew His death would be a shock to His Disciples...By telling them beforehand, He hoped to soften the blow and help them better understand the significance of His sacrifice for mankind...His resurrection emphasized the importance of His mission...Jesus' death wasn't an accident; it was central to His purpose in coming to earth...Talking about His future death reinforced the idea that He came to serve humanity through His suffering on the cross and become our Mediator between God and Himself...Jesus telling His Disciples would foreshadow His resurrection...Interestingly, Jesus also often mentioned that He would rise again after three days...This helped them later connect the suffering with the ultimate His victory over death as they visited with Him over His final forty days on earth...
He proved finally after His death and the forty days He would spend with them after His death, that He was alive...At first it was hard for them to identify Him...He must have somehow looked a little bit different, maybe it was their mourning, grieving, and Great Surprise of Him Being Alive that cause their confusion...Even two of His apostles on the road to Emmaus did not recognize Him...Even when He came to ten of the Disciples and Thomas wasn't there, the Doubting Thomas famously says: "Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into His Side, I will not believe."...He would not even believe his ten friends and the other Disciples...But the Disciples and the two on the road to Emmaus and then others came to see and believe that He was alive and would live on the earth for another forty days...And Thomas too, would believer after touching His Glorious Wounds...There was much learned in those last forty days on earth with Jesus...
After Jesus' death and suffering on the cross, He presented Himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that He was alive...He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the Kingdom of God...On different occasions, He would eat with them...He ate bread and even broiled fish with them after His death...He told them that John baptized with water, but in a few days they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit, as would all of us who believe...The Holy Spirit takes up permanent residence in believers...The Holy Spirit is described as a Helper, a Mediator for our Sins, a Comforter, and a Guide...Its presence is believed to transform a believer's character, convict them of sin, and empower them to live a Christ-like life...
When you believe in Him and have faith in Him and that He rose from the resurrection you can believe in Eternal Life for yourself...Then you are a child of God...Even though there are pain and tragedies and great hardships on earth, which make it hard to believe in Eternal Life, Jesus says it is so...So believing in Eternal Life is difficult, maybe because we have seen family and friends die before us, and seeing the great troubles of this world...But Jesus did tell His Disciples and friends that: “Do not let your hearts be troubled...You believe in God; believe also in Me...My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I AM going there to prepare a place for you?...And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I AM...You know the way to the place where I AM going.”...He is talking about Heaven and taking His Disciples and us to Heaven after He left earth and is at the right hand of His Father...And He tells us that this is Eternal Life: "Now this is Eternal Life: that they know You, the Only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent."...So Eternal Life exists...
Bishop and Theologian N. T. Wright says this of Easter and that earth is now the start of Eternal Life and a beginning of God's New World, after Jesus' Resurrection: “Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message...The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right...We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth...It doesn’t mean, “So there is a life after death.”...Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that...It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical...The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an “end.”...They are about a beginning...The beginning of God’s new world...The beginning of the kingdom...God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven...And God’s “being-in-charge” is focused on Jesus Himself being King and LORD...The title on the cross was true after all...The resurrection proves it.”...
Author Philip Yancey writes this about how He looks at Easter: “There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded...One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy and death...From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the Name of God...That gives some solace, although I confess that when my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an after-life seemed somehow thin and insubstantial...There is another way to look at the world...If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom He LOVES, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality...Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.”...“Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.”...
The Importance of the Resurrection is the most important fact in human history...We are children of God, because we are the Easter People...This is a beautiful statement!...The Easter People, through the helping of others and loving their neighbors, spread joy in the world...The phrase "We are the Easter people", which is often associated with Pope John Paul II, captures the essence of what Easter means for many believers...