Acts 2:22-36
Jerusalem at the time of Jesus had a population of about 35,000 to 55,000 people. By modern definitions this was not a city, merely a decent sized town. To help you put this in perspective, Jerusalem was about the size of Chefchaouene and El Aïoun or perhaps as large as Azrou. During the three times of the year when the feasts were celebrated in Jerusalem, the population swelled by an additional 125,000 people, bringing the population to about 180,000.
In a town of that population, there are secrets. It is not like a town of less than 10,000 people where everyone knows everything that happens. But when big news comes, all the town knows about it.
What did Cleopas say to Jesus when he appeared to them after his resurrection? Cleopas and a friend were walking and talking about the death of Jesus and of the rumors the women had brought that morning of the appearance of Jesus to them in the garden.
As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; 16 but they were kept from recognizing him.
17 He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
The events of Passover that we now celebrate as Easter, had occurred only fifty days earlier. Did people remember what had happened?
Think about Azrou. What would happen if I went there and began to pray for people to be healed and they, were in fact, healed? People with cancer would be freed from their cancer. People who were lame and begged in the streets would stand up and walk and jump and run. People with goiters would not need to go for an operation but it would simply disappear. And let’s add an event. There is a funeral and on the way to the grave, I come up and pray and the corpse sits up and jumps out of the casket and greets and kisses the people who came to see him to the grave. Do you think that would be talked about in Azrou?
Not all the people of Jerusalem saw Jesus but I would bet everyone of them heard about him. They heard he was reported to have performed great miracles. They heard the rumors that he was intending to kick out the Roman occupiers and reestablish Israel as a great nation. And they heard the tragic end to the story, that he was taken to Golgotha and crucified. But was that the end of the story? Rumors that he was alive were spread. Was it just wishful thinking on the part of those who had been with him?
This was the background for Pentecost which was unlike any other Pentecost. An enormous sound like a powerful wind, disciples of Jesus speaking in the languages of all the world and now Peter stood up to address those who had seen or maybe just heard about these events.
In this first sermon of the church, Peter quoted the prophecy of Joel that what people had seen was the long promised coming of the Spirit in the last days. We looked at that last week. Now we get into the meat of Peter’s sermon.
What Peter talked about was Jesus.
People wanted to know about speaking in different languages and the noise that was like a wind and what Peter talked to them about was Jesus. The first sermon of the church was all about Jesus and when the people heard what Peter had to say to them,
they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
If Pentecost was the earthquake, this sermon was the first of the aftershocks of Pentecost.
In this morning’s text, we will look at four stages of Jesus in Peter’s sermon: his life and ministry in verse 22, his death in verse 23, his resurrection in verses 24-32 and then his exaltation in verses 33-36.
First his life and ministry in verse 22:
“Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.
Remember that Jerusalem was a town about the size of Azrou and in such a town, the miracles of Jesus would have been known to everyone. When Jesus healed a blind man on his way to Jerusalem, that was the talk of the town. When Jesus healed a paralytic or a leper or stopped the bleeding of a woman who for twelve years had suffered, those were stories that were told and discussed. There were even reports that Jesus had raised people from the dead.
Not everyone believed the reports were true, but all of Jerusalem had heard the reports and when the pilgrims came into Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, they too heard the reports. And perhaps some of those who came to Jerusalem were able to testify that it was true because their neighbor or friend or relative had been one of those healed by Jesus.
The critical phrase in this verse is a man accredited by God. With all those willing to testify that Jesus had healed them or delivered them from demons, it was hard to dispute that he did miraculous signs. But the question was, where did his power come from?
Once when Jesus was casting out demons, he was accused of doing this by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons.
The woman at the well went into town and told everyone:
“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”
Because of what Jesus was able to tell her about herself, she saw in him the power of God.
When Peter was fishing and Jesus stepped into the boat and had him cast out his nets in the deep water and the nets were full of an amazing catch of fish, Peter saw in what Jesus did who he was and said:
“Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”
Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to the Jews by miracles, wonders and signs. Jesus said this himself as recorded in John 10
Do not believe me unless I do what my Father does. 38 But if I do it, even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.”
Peter boldly proclaimed that the power behind what Jesus had done was in fact the power of God.
Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.
Jesus was a man through whom God performed the miracles, wonders and signs – as you yourselves know.
Everyone in the crowd had heard of Jesus. Some believed, some doubted but all had heard and now Peter made it clear that the miraculous events they had experienced that day at the feast of Pentecost were from the same Jesus who had been crucified just fifty days earlier.
From the life and ministry of Jesus, Peter moved on to his death in verse 23:
This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.
Why did Jesus die? Who was responsible for killing Jesus? Almost two thousand years after the event, this was asked once again when Mel Gibson released his film, The Passion of Christ. Peter’s answer to this question was that it was God’s purpose that Jesus die.
At the end of the first part of Luke’s record of Jesus, in Luke 24, Jesus made clear to the disciples that it was part of God’s preordained plan, that he should die.
He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. 46 He told them, “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
In God’s plan people still had choices to make. If Judas had not betrayed Jesus, Jesus would still have been arrested and crucified. The story would have been different but the outcome would have been the same. The Jewish rulers did not have to arrest Jesus and take him to Pilate. The Jewish mob did not have to shout to have Jesus crucified.
It was part of God’s plan, from long ago, that Jesus would have to be born and die. It was part of God’s plan but it was also the free choices people made to accuse Jesus, to go along with the process that led Jesus to be crucified at Golgotha. And Peter made it clear that his audience knew their guilt in the process that led to Jesus’ death. When Paul came along and helped develop the theology of the church, it became clear that we are all guilty of the death of Christ for it is because of our sinfulness that Jesus had to die. So Mel Gibson had his hand put in a cameo appearance in his film and it was his hand that held the nail that was driven into the hand of Jesus. Gibson, like Rembrandt who painted himself in the picture as the one pulling the cross of Jesus up from the ground, recognized that we all are the ones who killed Christ because it is our sin that drove him to the cross.
When Peter told the crowd that you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross, this was another of the aftershocks of Pentecost and at least 3,000 of the men standing there listening to Peter felt the shock of this accusation go deep into their hearts and minds.
From the death of Jesus, Peter moved to the good news of his resurrection in verses 24-32.
But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.
This first sentence is such a powerful one. The first phrase that catches my attention is: freeing him from the agony of death.
One of my many favorite lines of Woody Allen is this one. “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Most people are not afraid of death, it is dying that they want to avoid. Dying is not pleasant. Each week I visit Noreen Maxwell, a 91 year old Scottish lady. I have done this for the five plus years I have been in Morocco. We prayed together many times that God would take her to be with him before she lost her senses, but that has not happened. She is no longer able to walk. She is incontinent. Although she still remembers many things, she is often confused and cannot separate dreams from reality. She is often in a lot of pain because of injuries she sustained in WWII when she worked for British Intelligence.
I have visited people who are wracked with pain because of the cancer that is eating away their body. I have visited with people who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and had to be fed with a feeding tube. I have prayed many times with someone whose prayer request was that they die that night.
I sit with Noreen each week and watch her suffer and I see myself in another thirty or forty years or so. It is not something to look forward to. Dying is unpleasant for the person who is dying. It is agony.
Dying is also unpleasant for the ones who lose someone they love. Of all the funerals I have been to in my life, the most difficult have been the ones where parents lose their children. Death does not play by the rules. Children do not always outlive their parents. Parents do not always live to see their children as adults or to see their grandchildren.
Death is agony. It hurts physically. It hurts emotionally. It hurts.
But God raised Jesus from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death.
I have told my family that when I die, I want people at the funeral service to have helium filled balloons and when people step outside after the service, they will chant, “Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty Jack is free at last!” and release the balloons into the air.
The reason death can be celebrated is because God freed Jesus from the agony of death and because Jesus was freed, we who follow him are likewise freed from the agony of death.
God freed Jesus from the agony of death because
it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.
I love that word “impossible”. People stumble over the resurrection of Jesus but if Jesus was God in the flesh, the resurrection was the most natural and predictable event. The death of Jesus is much more difficult to understand.
Peter said it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Jesus, quoted a psalm of David, Psalm 16, and then said:
“Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. 30 But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. 31 Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. 32 God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact.
This reminded me of a joke I heard in my first years in Morocco, before the US fought a second war in Iraq. The story went that Saddam Hussein died and of all the nations in the world, only two wanted to have his body to bury him – Saudi Arabia and Israel. These two countries did not want to honor Saddam Hussein, they wanted to make good and sure he was dead. An international conference was held to negotiate which of these countries would have the right to bury Hussein and finally Saudi Arabia won that right. Here was their winning argument. “ When we buried our prophet, he stayed buried and is in the grave to this day. When you buried your prophet, three days later he escaped.”
In the words of Larry Norman:
Jesus told the truth, and Jesus showed the way
There’s one more thing I’d like to say
They nailed him to the cross and they laid him in the ground
But they should have known you can’t keep a good man down
The almost too good to be true news of the Gospel that Peter proclaimed in this first sermon of the church is that the grave could not contain Jesus. It was impossible to keep him in the grave and he broke free from the power of death, breaking the power of death over all those who would follow him and giving hope that like him, his followers would also rise to a new life.
Peter talked about the life and ministry of Jesus, his death, his resurrection and then in verses 33-36 he talked about the exaltation of Jesus.
Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. 34 For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,
”‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
35 until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’
36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
The phrase, Exalted to the right hand of God, is a figure of speech meaning that Jesus has been raised to sit in the most authoritative, sovereign position in the universe.
And now in this sermon, Peter finally gets to what happened at Pentecost. He said that it was this risen, exalted Jesus, the same Jesus some of them had seen and the same Jesus all of them had heard about; it was this risen and exalted Jesus who had sent the Holy Spirit who was poured out on the disciples and caused the behavior that drew everyone’s attention.
36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
An often repeated plot in books and movies is to have the prince or princess of a country live incognito. They get a job in a department store or wander through the streets of the country and get to know people and usually they fall in love with some ordinary, common person. And then it is revealed that this clerk in the store is really the royal prince or princess.
Jesus lived among the people of Palestine. People saw him walking on a dusty road. They saw him be thirsty. They saw him suffer beatings and crucifixion. And now he was revealed as the most authoritative, sovereign ruler in the universe. This Jesus is now Lord and Christ!
The consequence of the events of Pentecost, the pouring out of the Spirit and Peter’s sermon, was that 3,000 were added to the number of the disciples that day.
Dave Robey will be preaching from Luke’s account of the response to Peter’s sermon next week. But I want to talk about how we can respond to this message if we already made the decision to follow Jesus sometime in the past.
Twenty-eight years ago on May 29, I stood in front of a couple hundred people and said:
Annie, I love you and believing that God has brought us together, I take you to be my wife. I commit myself to love you, to care for you, to honor and serve you; and to daily encourage you in your walk with God, that you may become all that God wants you to be. With God’s help, I promise to be faithful to you as your husband, for as long as he gives us life together.
It has been twenty-eight years but we still like talking to people about how we met and there is something wonderful about being reminded of how fortunate we are. It is a bit uncomfortable reading the vow I made to Annie when we were married because I have not always been a good, supportive husband. I have not daily encouraged Annie in her walk with God. But in recounting our story, we are reminded that God has blessed us with twenty-eight years of faithful marriage to each other.
It is 34 years since I first said yes to Jesus and began to follow him. I have had my ups and downs. I have had periods of excitement and an energetic relationship with God and I have had periods of dryness when there seemed to be no relationship with God at all. I have not always been faithful to God but he has been faithful to me.
When I hear the sermon Peter preached and I dig into the meaning of what Peter preached, I am reminded once again of how wonderful it is to be in a relationship with this Jesus. What a privilege to be in a relationship with the Jesus Peter preached.
We need to be reminded of the story of Jesus over and over again because although life gets complicated from time to time, life is not that complicated. It is all about Jesus.
If you were not raised as a Christian and did not hear the Bible stories from infancy on, hearing about Jesus being God in the flesh seems preposterous. I have said many times that Muslims are right when they challenge Christians and say it is impossible for God to have a son. And then to go on and say that God in the flesh died on the cross? How could this be? It is a much better idea to say that it was Judas or someone else who died on the cross.
The whole story is so impossible that only the fact that it is true allows us to accept it by faith. We did not invent this story. God entered history and revealed his plan for our salvation.
This morning there may be someone who has heard this story of Jesus with their heart and mind for the first time. If so, then you have the wonderful opportunity to pray to God and say you want to submit to him and ask that you be filled with the Holy Spirit.
This sermon of Peter on which I preached last week and Dave will preach on next week, is an evangelistic sermon. It led to 3,000 people that day choosing to follow Jesus. It is entirely appropriate for you to join them in your response to hearing this message.
But if you are already in Jesus’ flock, then allow what you have heard this morning stir up in you a sense of the privilege that is yours to be part of what God has done in this world.
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
