Acts 1:6 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
On this verse, Calvin comments:
“Their blindness is remarkable, that when they had been so fully and carefully instructed over a period of three years, they betrayed no less ignorance than if they had never heard a word. There are as many errors in this question as words.”
And yet, in Christian history since, is there any doctrine or idea that is more reluctant to be put to death than the one that God's real plan for this age must be for his people to dominate on the earth?
No matter what form the idea is pursued in, collapsing sooner or later under its own weight of contradictions, it emerges again with new branding and marketing.
If Jesus intended us to understand that the Christian life would be one lived under the cross, if he had wanted to communicate that to gain resurrection life we must lay this life down, if his meaning was that the focus of believers looking for justice and their reward is his second coming, then what words would one use to communicate that? Would they be any different to the ones he did use?
If the meaning of the apostles was that the sufferings they spoke of before glory would in fact largely pass away, and that there would be a different way of experiencing and pursuing Christian discipleship once the time of the dominion of God's people on earth begins, before Christ's second coming, then where, precisely did they teach anyone about this new mode of discipleship? Where is the slightest scrap of evidence that such a new epoch is anything other than imaginary?
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