All of the apostles are present with Jesus before he ascends into heaven as they spend time with him. One of the most interesting things about the apostles to me is that they are a very curious group of individuals. And we see this continuing in the first passage in acts as they ask Jesus, “Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” What is even more interesting to me about the apostle’s curiosity is that once they are baptized in the Holy Spirit, we see none of the curiosity that is know to us from the Gospel of Luke. When the Apostles are filled, they take on a God like confidence in who they are as believers. The Bible even says that went forth after preaching the Gospel with extreme confidence, and this is because the Lord was walking before them. This ties into the book of Luke perfectly because it paints a perfect picture of what it is supposed to look like for us to be filled with the spirit. Before we take on the Holy Spirit, we are fearful and worry about what other people think about us. But when we take on the Holy Spirit, we are able to go forth and preach the Gospel with extreme …show more content…
This stuck out to me, because the story of Noah and the ark found in the book of Genesis states that when God flooded the earth, he made it rain for forty days and forty nights. And I believe that God took forty days with the disciples because it takes forty days to prepare us for a great work that the Lord wants to do in us. So many times we want the Lord to do a great work in us right now, but we don’t realize that cultivation has to take place in our hearts before the Lord does something through us. The fact that both of these stories have an emphasis on the forty days is for a specific reason. And that reason is because he wants to do a work in us, but needs time to make sure we are ready for it. Another thing that stood out to me that ties into the old testament is that Jesus ascended into a cloud. When we looks at the story of Moses and the Israelites being led out of Egypt, we see that the spirit of God taking the form of a pillar of a cloud. This cloud represented Gods presence, and rather than Jesus being took up into the atmosphere to heaven somewhere, it was more so him being sucked into Gods presence. Heaven is not necessarily somewhere in the clouds. But it is a place where Gods presence rests and where we find complete rest in him