<p>1:8 <i>But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the remotest part of the earth<em>- </em></i>When the watchman of Is. 21:11 calls out &ldquo;What hour of the night will it come?&rdquo; (RVmg.) the answer is &ldquo;Turn ye&rdquo; (RV). This is when it will come- when Israel turn again in repentance. This is alluded to in Acts 1:7,8 and Mk. 13:28-33, where the answer to the question &lsquo;When will Jesus return?&rsquo; is basically: &lsquo;Preach to Israel; lead them to repentance. That&rsquo;s when the Lord Jesus will return&rsquo;.</p><p><em>The Gospel</em>&nbsp;was to be preached for a witness to all nations (Mt. 24:14); and yet &ldquo;<em>you</em>&nbsp;are witnesses...&nbsp;<em>you</em>&nbsp;will be witnesses&rdquo; (Lk. 24:27; Acts 1:8). The preacher of the Gospel&nbsp;<em>is</em>&nbsp;the Gospel; the man is the message, just as the very same word / message was made flesh in the Lord. Israel of old were taught this. They were to keep and do the commandments of God, and&nbsp;<em>this</em>&nbsp;would be the witness of their wisdom and understanding to the nations around them- who would thereby be brought to Israel&rsquo;s God (Dt. 4:6-8). The imparting of wisdom and understanding therefore didn&rsquo;t come so much through specific doctrinal exposition, as through living out those principles in daily life. But&nbsp;<em>marturion</em>, &ldquo;witness&rdquo;, can simply be a legal term referring to testimony or witness in a prosecution. Perhaps the sense is that judgment will come upon all the world once the Gospel has been witnessed to them; it is their receipt of that information which gives them the knowledge which makes them responsible to Divine judgment. For once this witness has been made, then the end comes.</p><p>The possession of the Holy Spirit in the first century was possessing &quot;the powers of the world to come&quot; (Heb. 6:5), showing that at that time there was a foretaste of the coming Kingdom. Thus in answer to the question about whether He would then fully restore the Kingdom of God, our Lord basically said: 'When, exactly, you can't know. But you will receive Holy Spirit power coming upon you (Acts 1:8 AVmg.) and will spread the Gospel world-wide from Jerusalem; which is tantamount to saying that in a limited sense the Kingdom is coming right now, although when it will finally be fully established is not for you to know'. Further support for this is found in our suggestion elsewhere that Kingdom prophecies like Is.2 were fulfilled to some degree in the spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem in the first century.</p><p>The record of the Acts is a continuation of all that Jesus <em>began</em> to do and teach as recorded in the Gospels (Acts 1:1). The preachers were witnesses <em>of Jesus</em> (Acts 1:8). The logical objection to their preaching of a risen Jesus of Nazareth was: &lsquo;But He&rsquo;s dead We saw His body Where is He? Show Him to us&rsquo;. And their response, as ours, was to say: &lsquo;I am the witness, so is my brother here, and my sister there. We are the witnesses that He is alive. If you see us, you see Him risen and living through us&rsquo;. In this spirit, we beseech men in Christ&rsquo;s stead. Just as the Lord strangely said that His own witness to Himself was a valid part of His overall witness, so our lives are our own witness to the credibility of what we are saying.&nbsp;</p><p>When we read of how we are to be &quot;witnesses&quot; to all the world, a look under the surface of the text shows that the Greek word 'martyr' is being used (Acts 1:8). We're all martyrs. Augustine said that &ldquo;The cause, not the suffering, makes a genuine martyr&rdquo;. That needs some reflection and time spent processing that profound observation. In his play <em>Murder in the Cathedral</em>, T. S. Eliot defines a martyr as one &ldquo;who has become an instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom&rdquo;. We can all enter into the definition of witness / martyrdom in this sense, insofar as we are 'in' the suffering Christ, even if in practice we may never be called to take a single blow to our body as the result of our witnessing.</p><p><em>Samaria</em> is perhaps mentioned specifically because of the earlier command not to preach there during the Lord's ministry (Mt. 10:5).</p><p><em>&ldquo;To the remotest part of the earth</em>&rdquo; need not be a reference to the great commission. It could be that this prediction had a specific, one-time fulfilment at Pentecost, where the Gospel was witnessed to Jews from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to Jews from the very ends of the earth / land promised to Abraham. If we understand the &quot;earth&quot; in a literal, global sense, then the Apostles didn't achieve this. They were told that the coming gift of the Holy Spirit would enable them to make this witness, and the most comfortable fit for the fulfilment of this is to simply read on in Acts and learn how the gift of speaking in the languages of the Jewish diaspora was given to them. They indeed achieved the intended witness on the day of Pentecost to Jews from the very areas predicted here in 1:8.</p>