Clough Acts Lesson 10

Peter’s Second Sermon – Acts 3:12-4:4

We continue our study on Peter’s second sermon. Now in these sermons that we’ve been studying in Acts I’ve spent some time going through, emphasizing the fact the way these men used the Old Testament, for the reason that although Acts cannot be used as a simple model of how to operate in the Church Age, there are some principles that carry over and one of several of the principles that we have seen are principles that are not being observed in our own circles, in our own fundamental evangelistic circles. The kind of approach to society that is used here is one that I have harped on year after year and no one ever seems to listen in the major areas of evangelism in this city. And that is that they used trained people. This business of every idiot Christian getting out in the front lines and sharing Christ is nonsense. Now every Christian can be a witness in a limited way, but most Christians aren’t trained, they get in the way instead of doing a good job.

And you will notice here in the early chapters of Acts that the Holy Spirit picked out men who were trained. Peter and John were the two best equipped men for the job at hand and it was precisely those two men that the Holy Spirit used. He didn’t send to them an all day seminar and then turn them loose. Peter and John had been trained for forty days with the Lord Jesus Christ and during those forty days the Lord Jesus Christ gave them intensive studies in Hebrew exegesis; He taught them how to use Psalm 16, Psalm 110, Isaiah 53, Joel 3, Deuteronomy 18 and other passages. They studied these passages in great detail from the original text. Christ filled them in on the theology of the Old Testament, Christology, soteriology, eschatology, all these great doctrinal areas. And these men were equipped so when they got up on the day of Pentecost and when they took advantage of these other situations such as Peter takes advantage of here in Acts 3, they were trained people who knew how to present the issue.

A second thing that you’ll notice from the text so far is how they relied upon the Holy Spirit to arrange circumstances. They didn’t knock on every door in Jerusalem. They didn’t use all sorts of gimmicks to get people’s attention; they took advantage of situation. There might come a situation, for example, like Pentecost, or the healing of the lame man and because of their tremendous training in the Old Testament and because they had the divine viewpoint framework they could quite naturally, without any pressure, without any artificial, you know, getting all up tight about how to do it, they just simply flowed in a relaxed way from the situation over in to Bible doctrine, over to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was a natural transition and it could be natural and they could transition this way because they knew enough doctrine to be flexible.

Now in this chapter we are going to watch the rise of persecution. We’re going to watch these trained men do such a tremendous job that Satan becomes threatened. They make such a penetration into the kingdom of darkness that a counter attack is called for, and so thus arises persecution. And this second invitation of the gospel of the kingdom is accompanied by the rise of persecution and every time the Word of God is let loose in society you can expect persecution. People hate the claims of Scripture. And in this part of the country particularly you have to watch it because people give you that glad smile and nod, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah when you say the Bible is the Word of God, oh amen brother; and the Bible ought to be applied to every man, amen! And they you begin to apply it in their backyard and oh no, no, we don’t want it here. We have people teaching in geology and biology and they are all for the Lord and everything else and then you raise the issue that the Genesis text might have some authoritative to say in their field, oh no, no-no, we believe in neutrality and objective academic endeavors, etc. A person studying economics, oh yes, I like the morals of the Christian system, oh yes, Jesus is very impressive. Well then did you know that Jesus was against inflation. Oh well, we just don’t take the Biblical economic view, that’s all. So everybody is playing a little game; we accept the Bible for everyone else but as far as my personal backyard, no. If you ask a politician how he believes about a certain thing, some of them get uptight about it, they don’t like that because they haven’t been asked those questions in the last 500 years. So because of that people get bent out of shape but just expect it and keep on rolling and do it anyway, whether they like it or not.

And this gets into an issue of suffering and we want to review the six reasons why Christians suffer or doctrine of suffering. There are four reasons why non-Christians suffer and six reasons why Christians suffer. Christians suffer for more reasons than non-Christians and two reasons, basic reasons why all men suffer, is because of the fall of man. God did not create the universe with suffering, sorrow, death, and physical destruction and decay in it. These came in at a point I time with the historic fall of Adam and Eve. So with this fall you have the rise of problems, of pressures and suffering.

A second reason, both Christian and non-Christian alike is rebellion, continued rebellion against God’s creation laws is going to reap a reward. In spite of what every politician is promising you, unless the United States goes back to a sound currency, unless we learn to balance our budget and not just to promise to balance our budget, as long as we are in a place like this we are involved in a violation of God’s eight commandment, “thou shalt not steal.” This is not blaming the politician as such because basically we American citizens are for it, we want everything now and we’ll pay for it later, and we have elected men that are simply doing this for us and we are violating the eighth commandment because when you inflate the currency you are stealing from someone who is holding that currency and storing that currency as a storehouse of value and you have just stolen from him because you have lowered the value of his storehouse and you’ve done it by government edict but nevertheless it’s government theft and it’s a moral issue. So we have this problem; rebellion will always reap it’s reward. God said in the Bible when you start thieving and rulers do not care, particularly for the widow and the orphan, and the widow would be analogous to the person today who is the widow or widower who is on a flat pension and they can’t get food, they can’t get the amenities of life because their savings accounts have been wiped out by government sponsored theft and all the hippies trot down with their food stamps and get steaks, and they sit at home in honor because they realize that’s not the answer either and go malnourished and so on. We have this attitude that we can get away with rebelling against God’s laws.

So, the fall, rebellion, and then we have association with other people who are suffering in the divine institutions. For example, a person may be married to someone else who’s out of it spiritually and this person is being disciplined by God and so because they share the second divine institution with another person being disciplined by God they suffer. We may be in for national suffering because we live in a nation of clods who insist on these policies and we are going to suffer with them.

The fourth reason why believers suffer is because they are identified with Christ in Satan’s world and it’s that fourth category of suffering that God the Holy Spirit points out in the book of Acts. In fact, we’re going to see the rise of that category four type suffering in Acts 3. The non-Christian suffers, ultimately, because of the lake of fire and rejection of Jesus Christ.

Then we have the Christian also suffering in order to learn and suffering also to be a witness.

Of all of those sufferings two categories represent areas where suffering is undesirable; actually suffering is unnecessary. In category two, rebellion, and in category five, learning, we often have unnecessary suffering. People suffer because they are learning a lesson that should have been obvious years ago; it has been taught clearly in Scripture but they didn’t pay any attention whatsoever and so now they suffer. And recently you have heard me from the pulpit say often that the missionary operations in the foreign fields are breeding unnecessary suffering on the part of believers because of asinine policies and I’m going to take a few moments to give you an illustration of which I am speaking, and that is the nation of Chad. Chad is a country in the middle of Africa and in the TEAM recent missions magazine they have a very, in one sense discouraging, postmortem of the two years of horrible persecution against Chadian Christians. The persecution arose through several reasons which they were oblivious to at the time and in 1973 the President of Chad, Tombalbaye, decided that he was going to get rid of western culture and he started what now has started several times in China, a cultural revolution. And this cultural revolution was to purge Chad of all western influence, including Christian influence, and he was going to replace this with initiation rites out of their native paganism. So every male was required to submit to pagan initiation and the basic idea behind this initiation was the concept of rebirth. The initiate was taken into seclusion for three months on the average. During this time he went through uma [sp?], meaning a place beyond the grave where he was supposed to be dead to all his past life. Whatever experience he had, including his new birth in the Christian faith he had to renounce, and when he came out of this process he was a new man bearing a new name. While being initiated he binds himself under oath never to reveal the secret of the initiation. This went on and the Christian men refused this initiation ceremony because it amounted to worship of demonic powers, it amounted to an invasion of their rights. And the government of Chad decided that he was going to force all the fundamental Christians to obey the rite of initiation, and wherever the Christians refused the initiation, they sent in soldiers and killed them. So hundreds of Christians lost their life in the land of Chad because of this asinine policy that got started.

This missionary analyzer goes back and he says what went wrong; what went wrong with this thing, how could this happen. And he comes to two conclusions; I’m going to spend a few moments dealing with his conclusions because it substantiates what you’re about to see in Acts 3. In Acts 3 you watch well-trained believers operate under a pressure situation. And I have said over and over again that missionaries are not doing the job as a whole, there are many fine exceptions, because they are not trained themselves properly and deeply enough in the Word of God, and they’re going out into native cultures and they’ve been used to some slapstick comedy in their local church and they go out and reproduce this thing out in the field and the result is that out in the field, the natives who are won to Christ, who have far less Christian background than the average American, they don’t even get to first base on this kind of a diet. So this man goes back and points out that in 1971 a campaign of saturation evangelism was launched. Prayer cells formed in local churches all over the team area. For several months Christians gathered daily. Their faithful persistent prayer bore fruit. Backsliders returned to the church, and so many unbelievers came to Christ that in less than two years the number of congregations increased… now this is not the number of converts, this is the number of congregations, increased by 35%. That’s a phenomenal increase, nothing like we’re about to see in Acts 3 but by modern standards a phenomenal increase. But, he says, there were flaws in the foundation of this superstructure. The Church, he says, was not well enough grounded in the Word of God to cope with a large evangelistic campaign. Hampered by a lack of missionary staff and adequately trained nationals the Christian education program had not effectively penetrated the grass roots level. Some teaching was done but very minor. As new converts flooded the church Christians were asked, in vain, to love and teach them. They could not because they were not trained; they lacked the essential knowledge and the spiritual strength for the task. As converts multiplied and new churches were established to accommodate them there weren’t enough trained pastor-teachers to serve, even the churches that existed before the campaign, leave alone the new churches.

It goes back to my point over and over again, you cannot do anything without trained pastor-teachers. So when a large number of new churches sprang up simultaneously the resulting crunch should have been expected. As the heavy hand of Tombalbaye descended upon believers who refused to undergo initiation the churches soft spots became apparent. The death of the first 14 martyrs terrified believers all over the country into submission. The trumpet of the top church leadership sounded a very uncertain note in the area where team missionaries worked. And the resulting confusion, districts and individuals went their own ways; many believers did take a strong stand at great personal risk but the rest and by far the majority wavered and acquiesced. In a few villages every Christian man went to the initiation. These Christians simply did not have the spiritual strength, the knowledge of the Word of God and the experience and fellowship with the Lord to put their lives on the line for their faith, and with the succumbing of so many church members the future of the cause of Christ in Chad seemed bleak indeed.

And then what happened? Finally in 1975 Tombalbaye had sent his infiltrators into one of the top underground churches. By this time the Christians had an underground church established and he had infiltrated it, and slowly, each Sunday his men would stand there and watch who was there and they’d start memorizing names and he developed this big long list of names and he circulated the names to the soldiers and one night the raid was scheduled to take out all the soldiers simultaneously would hit every Christian home and kill the men who refused to undergo this initiation. At that time, as the order was passed down through the ranks there was one Christian general [can’t spell name] who was one of their top generals, and he hadn’t been in on this because he was defending a frontier situation, but he was called back by Tombalbaye to handle this little operation that he had. And Tombalbaye forgot that this man was a Christian, apparently, who knew doctrine, and so he got in there and he got the order and he promptly saw this order and he said okay, I reverse the order, we will kill Tombalbaye and so he took over in a coup d’etat, and that was the end of Tombalbaye. Now that was a good Christian man who did his job as unto the Lord and killed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and if it ever comes down to it in this country I hope some of you will do the same thing. This is a situation where we have Christians who’ve got into the military, got in high rank, and knew how to kill when the time came and they took care of this little operation. So that was how it stopped.

But now the man goes on to describe what else happened. You see, one of the principles that was violated was believers weren’t trained; that’s a common thing and people hate to be trained and they’ll give you every excuse under the sun, I’ll get fat if I take too many Bible classes, or this is too dull for me, or I can’t understand this. Fine, when you first started studying math you didn’t understand it either, you started with 2+2 is 4 and work up, and that’s the way you do with the Word of God. Most of the excuses against training are just laziness, that’s all. Now he found out besides this lazy rebellion against training, he found something else and to me this is even more significant than the lack of training of individual believers. Here’s what he said; this is quite an admission for a high up official in one of the world’s largest evangelistic organizations, TEAM is large, it’s in the ballpark with Wycliffe. It’s a large, large evangelical operation.

He says: our failure to adequately ground believers in the Word of God and equip them to communicate their faith was seriously exposed. We missionaries knew that Biblical education should have taken a very high place. Now we’re calling immediately for a new pastor’s training college at a higher education level in our present school and an extension program designed to train Sunday School teachers, youth leaders, pastors, evangelists and elders in every local church. These are the ways we believe we can best hasten the rebuilding of a stronger, purer church in the republic of Chad. We now realize that the better educated believers, now notice this one, in the past widely mistrusted and little used, constitute an untapped reservoir in many places. Less tied to tradition and more accustomed to thinking for themselves they take an independent stand more easily than the less educated. We should train and utilize them fully. After the government closed the Chadian church in the area served by Baptist Mid-missions it was the school teachers, the civil servants and other educated men who dared to set up an underground church; they mimeographed and distributed clandestine Sunday School materials and formed an action committee which maintained the medical work and cared for the families of the martyrs and exiles.

So there you have it, by one of the top executives of one of the top evangelistic organizations saying again what we have said over and over and over and over again, there is no substitute for training believers. We cannot have every nincompoop believer on the front line; they don’t belong on the front line. They belong sitting in the pew under the teaching of the Word of God, for years, before they are going to be ready to be out. That goes for some of you; some of you are miserably trained and you’ve been floating around in Christian circles for half your life and you still don’t know what end of the Bible begins with Genesis. It behooves us to be trained and it also behooves us to take people who are in the power structure, such as this Christian general, who knew doctrine and when that order came down he knew that was the point, that was when the straw broke the camel’s back, I will not obey, I obey God rather than men and I will not be in a position of slaughtering believers, and he had the courage, and he probably had a few say, oh, general, you can’t do that, doesn’t the Bible say obey all the authorities and all the other arguments that are often used in these situations. So understand from this little sorrowing situation in Chad, here we had believers suffering because of category two and five in the doctrine of suffering. All of that suffering was unnecessary, if the believers in the missionary organizations had trained men like Tombalbaye who was a graduate of a Christian school, if they had trained these men properly on the role of the Word of God in culture, you wouldn’t have it. You wouldn’t have had hundreds of men lose their lives, but you did. You had tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy; you had Christian boys and girls have to watch their own father slaughtered in front of their face. You had families that were forever ruined because of this stupid policy of the missionaries. And it is all because the Word of God is not being respected. And everywhere we have this thing we have an attack against the teaching of the Word of God in the local church. It’s always something else, it’s always let’s do this and let’s hustle and let’s go out visiting, knock on doors and everything under the sun except the one thing that counts. If persecution were to hit you today are you going to go out and knock on doors; is that really going to be the edifying thing? Are you just going to say oh, my Lord, my heart is so strengthened because I knocked on 45 doors last week? This gives me such reservoir of strength that I can withstand this persecution. Nonsense; it’s a lot of froth. And every once in a while God just backs off on his common grace and he lets Satan have at us to trim off the fat. And this kind of thing is spiritual fat and it’s in fundamental circles, where everything except the teaching of the Word of God, over and over and over and over and over and over.

Let’s turn to Acts 3 and let’s see how Peter handled the situation. Peter responds to this situation, he sees the people gathering, and he says, [Acts 3:12, “And when Peter saw it, he answered the people, Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this?”] “Or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or our holiness we had made this man to walk.” Now Peter starts out by challenging the human viewpoint of hearers. Peter understands the difference between fact and interpretation of fact. Peter understands that these people have seen this lame man healed, there’s no debate over the fact; the debate is over how you interpret this fact. Is this healing of the blind man due to some cosmic forces; Peter and John, maybe they’ve taken a course in TM and maybe they’ve been able to manipulate certain cosmic forces, maybe there’s inherent power in the human psyche, that when they go around there’s sort of a radiation field that heals the lame; maybe that’s the explanation for this fact. So Peter explicitly starts by denying this. He says why do you look as though it was our power that did this, it wasn’t our power. And then he has another denial, he says, nor was it our holiness, and that attacks the idea that these men were just spiritual giants. See, this is a religious person, the fires denial is for the… kind of the mystical person and the second denial is for the religious person who believes because they have had this experience and that experience, therefore there is within their glorious little heart so much spiritual power that they can cause the lame to walk. And Peter denies that, he says that’s not the point either.

Now in verse 13 he gets to the point and you will notice that when Peter approaches his audience he moves from man to God. Immediately in verse 13 the divine viewpoint interpretation of the fact is theocentric. Peter says it is not the assets of man, not at all, it starts with God. So he hits the two opposite interpretations. Either you interpret all of your life in terms of human resources or you interpret the things that are happening in your life in terms of God and His Word. It’s one or the other and all of you are doing it right now whether you like it or not you basically are doing this. You are interpreting life in one principle or the other principle; you can’t escape it any more than you can escape breathing, and maybe you breathe bad air or good air and so spiritually you either you interpret poorly or you interpret correctly. So Peter in verse 12 wipes out the man-centered interpretation.

It is not human resources that are responsible for this kind of thing, God is responsible for this kind of thing. And he starts then with an attribute of God, particularly the attribute of sovereignty, Acts 3:13, he says, “The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob,” that’s the covenant name. He goes back to the Abrahamic Covenant. Let your eyes go down to verse 25 for a minute and notice what he says and how he concludes his talk, Abrahamic Covenant isn’t it. Well, what is the Abrahamic Covenant. When we went back in our divine viewpoint framework and we studied the various events of Scripture and the doctrines associated with those events and we got to the call of Abraham, what doctrine did we say in your mind’s eye can easily be identified with that historic act of calling Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeas? The doctrine of election. And what does the doctrine of election say? God is the author of history. So Peter starts in his interpretation of the fact with the God of the Scriptures. Now how different that is from a lot of evangelism that starts something like this: do you lack purpose and meaning in your life? Do you have problems? Well, why don’t you accept Jesus and everything will be fine. Now that’s all right to start, by pointing out that people have problems in their life, that’s all right, but don’t jump from there to Jesus; you’ve got about five other steps in between; don’t go so fast, you go from there to the divine viewpoint reason of why there are problems and it is because of man’s sinful rebellion against God’s authority; that has to be communicated before you come to Jesus. Only after the issue of God’s nature and the issue of what sin really is, and not just an existential despair over sin, but what sin really is, then we can discuss redemption. But to even raise the issue of Jesus that soon is wrong. Peter doesn’t; Peter is not going to discuss it until he gets the concept of God first and so that’s why he starts, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he doesn’t start out with Jesus, he’s going to get to Jesus but that’s not where he starts.

Then he says, “[the God of our fathers,] He has glorified His Son, Jesus,” now I’m going to take you to the Old Testament passages that he’s using, this does not read… it says “He,” God, “has exalted His servant,” (comma) “Jesus.” Now this phrase, “exalted His servant,” is borrowed from one of the most famous Old Testament passages on the Messiah, Isaiah 52 and 53. Turn to Isaiah 52:13, see Peter is very, very well-trained in the Old Testament; his hearers know this so when he begins to preach Christ crucified he doesn’t use the words “Christ crucified,” he starts out with words they know, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” do you think every Jew that heard Peter that day outside the temple knew what the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was? You bet. Now he uses the next thing, this God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has raised up His servant. Raised up His servant? Exalted His servant? That was something that was repeated within Jewish circles and it was repeated from this passage. “Behold, My servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted” there’s where Peter got the phrase, he is using the Messianic passages of the Old Testament to present Christ to this congregation, this audience. “… and extolled, and be very high.” So there’s one thing that he does, the servant, the Messiah.

Now today if we did this from Isaiah 52 and 53 the objection would immediately be thrown into our faces, oh, but Isaiah 52 and 53, says the modern Jew, must refer to the nation Israel, this doesn’t refer to Messiah, why Jewish rabbis don’t teach that Isaiah 52 and 53 refers to Messiah; they teach instead it refers to the nation. Ah, but they didn’t always do that; the Jewish ancient tradition spoke not of the nation but of Messiah; this servant, is He Messiah or is He the nation. He is Messiah; proof that the older Jews, the Jews of bygone era, proof that they were teaching Messiah can be very easily shown and Arnold Fruchtenbaum has in his book, Jesus was a Jew, when he points out that the targumim, which were commentaries written the Targum of Jonathan, when it comments on this passage speaks of Messiah being in this passage and the Christians did not write the Targum of Jonathan. Another proof, the Talmud, when it refers to Isaiah 53 and 53 refers to Messiah and the Christians didn’t write the Talmud either. The Yom Kippur of Musar prayer discusses atonement in terms of this, in terms of a personal Messiah. And Christians didn’t write the Musar Prayer of Yom Kippur either. So it is not true that ancient Jewish tradition held to that interpretation, the idea that this suffering servant here is the nation and not the Messiah is a late idea, it started in 1100 by a man by the name of Raschi and ever since then the Jewish people have held to that but it’s simply because they got pushed with their backs to the wall by the Christian apologists who argued from this text, this is talking about Christ, it’s not talking about the nation. Notice in Isaiah 53:4, “Surely He has borne our griefs,” well, if you’re going to make the “he” in verse 4 the nation, then who are the “our”? Whose griefs are those? See, the idea that the suffering servant is the nation Israel doesn’t fit. In verse 4, “the Messiah has borne the nation’s griefs, and we esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. [5] He was wounded for our transgressions,” well, who’s the “our” if the “He” is the nation?

Now while we’re here in Isaiah 53 I want to look at verse 11 and I want you to see another title of this suffering servant. “He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied; by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; [for He shall bear their iniquities.]” So another title that Peter is going to use very shortly in his sermon is the just one, or the righteous one. Now that isn’t just Peter sitting there thinking of words to describe Jesus. Peter is using deliberately calculated language, language calculated off these prophetic portions of the Old Testament so all he has to do is say the name and the people get very well Peter’s point; they know what he’s saying, when he says, you know Jesus, He’s the righteous one. Now that doesn’t mean anything to you and to me but it would have meant something to someone who knew this passage of Scripture. And while we’re at this point in the Old Testament, one further passage, Psalm 16:10, we want to pick up one other title that Peter is shortly going to use. “You will not leave My soul in hell, neither will You suffer Your Holy One to see corruption.” Look at that word “Holy One.” Another signal, another title of Messiah, and another tool for Peter.

Now come back to Acts; Peter continues, “The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has exalted,” not His Son,” the original Greek means “has exalted His servant, Jesus,” so with this sentence he takes the divine viewpoint framework of the Old Testament, here’s the divine viewpoint framework; what do we mean by the divine viewpoint framework? We mean he understands the word God, and his hearers understand the word God. He understands the word sin, his hearers understand the word sin. He understands the word redemption and his hearers understand the word redemption. He goes into and describes how all these things are organized by the Abrahamic Covenant and his hearers understand that all these are organized by the Abrahamic Covenant. He goes into showing why the prophets foretold of a future ongoing program in history culminating in this redemption in Christ and his hearers understand the ongoing program. With all of that background, now he drops in the word “Jesus.” See, he didn’t start with Jesus; it’s not like some of these people that evangelize little children and tell them about Jesus. Don’t tell children Jesus stories; they can’t understand Jesus stories. Teach children God stories, and stories about man’s problem with God and then get to Jesus. But don’t start with Jesus. The Bible doesn’t start with Jesus; God doesn’t start with Jesus and there’s a reason, the same reason you don’t begin a math class with differential calculus.

Let’s go to the end of verse 13, “He has exalted His servant, whom you delivered up,” and those of you with a Greek text will notice that it’s the second person plural pronoun, emphasized, “whom you delivered up and denied Him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let Him go.” See, accusation, he’s making an accusation against that generation of the nation Israel who had a chance to accept Messiah and rejected.

Acts 3:14, “You denied the Holy One,” that comes from Psalm 16:10, “and the Just one,” that comes from Isaiah 53:11, “and have desired a murderer be granted unto you. [15] And you killed the Prince of life,” and he uses a Greek word, archegos which is used of a pioneer who would go out into the islands of the Aegean’s and set up a colony, he was called an archegos. And so he says Jesus is the pioneer of life, He is the one who went out and started it. He says, “Him whom God has raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses.” Now in verses 14 and 15 Peter deliberately selects antonymic expressions, that means opposite expressions. Look at how he does that. Notice what he says, “You denied the Holy One and the Just One,” there’s a power in what you’ve done, the very One who represents righteousness, that’s the One you’ve chose to deny; what’s the matter with you people, he says. And then he contrasts “the Holy One and the Just One” with a murderer; see, it’s antiphonal and he’s using strong antonyms in her sermon here.

In verse 15 what does he say, “You killed the Prince of life,” again strong antonymic structure. And then he says, “God raised Him from the dead,” so you’ve got death, life, resurrection, one, two, and this is the way he moves in his sermon because he’s seeking to convict these people of particular crime. Notice in verse 15 what he says, one of our theme songs in the book of Acts, witnesses. And notice the witnesses; the witness here in Acts, it occurs in Acts 1:22, in 2:32, everywhere you have the word “witness” it is tied to resurrection. The witnessing that is done in Acts was not primarily the great things that Jesus did two inches above your navel. It was what Jesus did in history, not what Jesus does in your heart. Now it’s true that Jesus does things in your heart, but that isn’t what is emphasized in the early church and I suggested the early church knew more about what they were doing in this area than we do. They emphasized the historic facts of the Christian faith.

Now there is a book written during this time which is a false book in the sense that it purports to be what it isn’t, it’s called The Pseudo Clementines, it’s a volume of books written about the early preaching of the church, and it’s not instructive in the sense of telling us exactly what happened but it’s instructive in showing us the techniques that were used in this early day. And I found one section in one of these books describing a preaching situation like Peter here and I want you to notice how they witnessed. We use the word “witness” so much that the word is lost. Forget the word “witness” for a moment, of course we can’t because we use it in a courtroom but in a courtroom what would you think of if… [tape turns] … I think of a courtroom situation or a witness in a courtroom, the witness isn’t being asked how he feels about something; if it’s an automobile wreck and somebody was an eyewitness to it they’re not saying oh, I saw that wreck and it just gave me this feeling in my heart. Is that what the court’s interested in or are they interested in what happened out in the middle of the street at such and such a time. Obviously they’re interested in objective facts and that’s what the witness would be.

Here’s what happened; this man had gone down to the city of Alexandria and he tells us what it was like to hear early Christians preaching: I went with this person, I came and I stood listening to his words with the crowd that stood around him. I could see that he was speaking the truth, not with any great skill, but he was setting forth simply and without preparation what he had heard and seen of the manifested Son of God.” Now the next sentence is the one that shows how these early Christians witnessed. Picture the scene, you’ve got a crowd, maybe a hundred people, milling around out in the market place of the city of Alexandria, and on the side of the market stands this Christian, we don’t know who he is, the book says he’s Barnabas but we don’t know. And he gets up, maybe he’s elevated off the street a little bit to project and he begins to tell the people about Jesus of Nazareth and the fulfillment of prophecy and so on and he’s in the middle of this and gets to the resurrection, he gets to describing all these things that Jesus did and people are naturally going to say oh, cut it out, nobody did that. So listen to the next sentence: “And even from the crowd, who stood around him, he produced many witnesses of the miracles, teaching and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Do you know what they’d do? They’d get up and they’d preach and people would start to heckle, say oh, it never happened, never happened. And they’d say, oh John, would you get up and tell, what did you see Jesus do on the Sea of Galilee? And John would get up and say well, I saw him do this, I saw Him do this. Mary, would you tell them what happened outside of Jerusalem that day at the tomb of Lazarus. And Mary would get up and she’d tell what happened. That was how they witnessed in that day. Eyewitnessing to the historic events of Scripture. So when you see the word “witnesses” in verse 15 it refers to that sense of witnessing. Just like you would have it in a courtroom; witnessing to the factual revelation of God.

And in Acts 2:16 Peter interprets the lame man; he’s prepared his listeners with the divine viewpoint framework and now he says people, you’re wrong, I didn’t do this by TM, I did this “through the name of Jesus Christ,” so he says His name, “through faith in His name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know; yea, the faith which is by Christ has given him,” the lame man, “this perfect soundness in the presence of you all.” So he says your human viewpoint interpretation of this miracle is wrong; the name of Christ, the word “name” of course equals authority, and when you see “the name of Christ” in Acts it refers to His authority as the One who sits at the Father’s right hand. But then he’s going to do something else. You notice he’s emphasized name, but by verse 26 he’s going to make an astounding claim that I don’t think, probably, at this point Peter himself fully realized what he was saying. But I want you to notice something in verse 26 because it’s tied with this business of I healed this blind man in the name of Christ. Now we Americans will think of that and we’ll think of well, Peter just went up and pronounced Jesus over him, but that’s not what Peter is talking about. It’s different than that.

Here’s what I mean when I say that the name healed him, and so he describes in Acts 2:26, “Unto you first God, having raised up His Son, sent Him to bless you,” now you know, it’s very interesting but you can read that and you’d swear if you read it quickly that what that verse is talking about is the sending of Jesus to the nation Israel. You would think as you read verse 26 that that’s talking about Jesus coming and preaching with John the Baptist and so on. But you know that’s not what it’s talking about. The sending, the verb “sent” in verse 26 cannot refer… cannot refer to Jesus earthly ministry. Why? Because ahead of that verb is aorist participle that refers to the resurrection. Notice that; be careful to see what he says. Jesus, he said, rose, then He was sent to the nation Israel. Now how could Jesus be sent to the nation Israel after He rose from the dead and went to be at the Father’s right hand. Answer: He was sent through Peter and John that day when he healed the lame man. The sending now of Jesus is identical to the sending of his believers. There’s a one to one relationship.

Now you see later Paul takes this and he develops it and if we were serious about it we would too. See, we use the word body of Christ and all this and fail to understand what we’re saying. Everyone of you who is a Christian, you are in the body of Christ. Now that’s more than a phrase; that means if you’re on the job, in the dorm, in your neighborhood and you go into somebody else physically, into their presence, Jesus is being sent to that person. Now here’s where that idea got started. Peter doesn’t develop it and I’m sure Peter wasn’t think of it all this way in this detail, but Paul did later. But the sending of verse 26, coupled with verse 16, means that when they saw that lame man sitting by the gate and Peter reached down and he grabbed him off the pavement there in front of that gate, that the hand that reached down and grabbed the lame man, though it was Peter’s physically, it was also Christ’s. So that’s what it means, the “name” in verse 16, not only means just Christ’s authority, but it means Christ’s authority physically present. They conceived, these early Christians did, they conceived of Christ’s presence with them in a physical geometrical way so that where they were Christ was.

And notice what else he says in verse 16, Peter is mature enough to reflect on this incident and he walked in here and he and John have thought about this and he said you know, there’s something else that strikes me very interesting about this event; this lame man that was healed, you all know, don’t you. God didn’t choose to just heal anyone, and there were thousands of people that needed healing, by the way, at this point and there were thousands of people who were never healed but this man was healed because he was one that you knew. So Peter is a mature Christian, he says okay, I know the Holy Spirit put me in this situation, let me look around, what have I got here. I see the Holy Spirit’s done this, I see the Holy Spirit’s done this, I see the Holy Spirit’s picked out this guy, He’s put him here, everybody knows him; now I know what I’m going to do. So Peter reads the signals in the situation of what the Holy Spirit was doing, and so here’s the Holy Spirit working, here’s Peter working; they’re working in a team because Peter is a mature trained believer who can see what the Spirit’s doing in that situation.

He goes on, Acts 2;1;7, “And now, brethren, I know that ye through ignorance did it, as did also your rulers.” This harps back to something else, turn back to Luke 23:34. When Christ was dying for your sins and mine on the cross, He said, “Father, Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Now Christ, contrary to the maudlin sentimentalist who reads that passage and says ah, what that says is you forgive and forget, that kind of thing. That’s true but that’s not what he’s talking about here. What he’s talking about is the crime of crucifixion was officially removed from the record of Israel at this point. At this point while Christ hung on the cross, “Father, forgive them” who’s the “them?” The people who crucified Him, not everybody, just the people who crucified Him. “Father, forgive them,” why, “because they know now what they are doing,” that is, they’re crucifying Me. It’s one particular sin, one particular group of people and it was this prayer that you see that started at that time, moving in time forty years, so the nation Israel had forty years of testing; forty extra years to consider the claims of Jesus Christ. Had Jesus not prayed this prayer on the cross, when God caused the heavens to become dark and the judgment came down upon the cross, God probably would have erased the nation Israel right off the map at that point.

But if you take the sequence of when Jesus prayed this prayer, it wasn’t toward the end of His cross work; it was not toward the end of the cross work. In fact, if you look at verse 33 Jesus apparently prayed this prayer shortly after He was nailed to the cross, shortly after they shoved the cross sin the upright position, before the main work of the cross began, it was then that Christ said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do, because Jesus was anxious that His Father, seeing this from heaven, wouldn’t damn the whole place. So He said now Father, judge the sins but don’t hold this one to their account. So as a result of one prayer that Jesus Christ prayed there came into existence forty extra years of history; forty years in which the nation Israel could now think again, think through what they ought to do with Christ.

Back to the apostle Peter, [17] “I know that you did this through ignorance, and your rulers, [18] But those things, which God had shown by the mouth of all His prophets, that Christ should suffer, has so fulfilled.” Now verse 18 is discussing another problem that Christians had. What about this cross? See everywhere the Christians went they were embarrassed by this counterclaim that said oh, Jesus your Messiah, well now isn’t that strange; do you mean to tell me that Jesus is your Messiah? Well who’s Jesus? Jesus is some carpenter that’s convicted of the crime of blasphemy and He’s executed; you mean to tell me with a straight face that you are going around all over the world saying some executed criminal is the Messiah? What sense does this make. Understand that that was a key problem that the early Christians had to face. How could an executed criminal be the Messiah.

So they had to have an explanation for it and that’s what Peter is dealing with in verse 18. “These things,” that includes the crucifixion, “These things,” said Peter, “which God before showed by the mouth of all His prophets,” (quote) “‘Christ should suffer,” so Peter says far, far from being a liability this thing is an asset. Yes, our Messiah is an executed criminal. You know why? He was executed for your crimes, that’s why. So Peter takes an attack against the faith, He turns it right around and uses it back; this very thing that you people say is a supposed disqualification of Jesus from the Messianic claims is precisely what makes Him Messiah; after all, Peter would add, were it not for the death of Christ, were it not for His suffering on the cross, would it not be true that Isaiah 53 wasn’t fulfilled. You see, the very execution of the criminal is what proved that Jesus was the Messiah on the basis of Isaiah 53. So Peter says no, it was all shown by the prophets.

So now Acts 2:19, the invitation, the invitation is an invitation to repent and be converted, “Repent, therefore and be converted,” notice it is parallel to Acts 2:38 but baptism isn’t mentioned for the reason that baptism isn’t important, it’s the repentance that’s important. “Repent, therefore,” the word “repent doesn’t mean emotions. All of us have intellect, will and emotions, if you want to use those categories and they’re sequenced. You can’t come to Christ if you’re going to wait until you feel like coming to Christ any more than you could say, when you first learned to drive a car, you might have been scared of the thing. I’ve seen some girls in my driver’s education class that were so scared they wouldn’t know what the front wheel was. But they knew that they wanted to drive and so they made the choice whether their emotions were for it or not and after they started learning how to drive then they got comfortable with it. And their emotions came on.

But you see, accepting Christ and what Peter is talking about here, these people ought to change their whole attitude to the Messiah, he says look, I’ve told you information for your intellect, you know the issue, so don’t tell me that you don’t know the issue, you sure do know the issue. And will, it’s up to you now; Peter does not address the emotions. The verb “repent” has nothing to do with emotions. In the original Greek it’s metanoeo and the word meta means change and noeo means think; change your way of thinking; it is an address to your volition and your intellect, not to your emotions. Some of these people would have been terrified to identify themselves with Christ; if they identified themselves with Christ that means they would have been water baptized, id they’d been water baptized they’d been thrown out of their Jewish home. Emotionally they were afraid to accept Christ; emotionally they were scared, trembling some of them, but they chose and then God took care of the emotions. And that’s the point, don’t you make decisions in your life, particular the decision to become a Christian because someone manipulated your emotions, because someone sang 40 stanzas of Just As I Am and everybody in the pew went forward and there you are, and you don’t know what to do. Watch out for that because that is nothing more than crowd manipulation and any good non-Christian orator learns the gimmicks of moving crowds. There are books written on it. And it’s nothing identified with the Holy Spirit, it’s just a good technique of group dynamics, it’s sheer human psychology and any person who has had a few hours of training in public speech and homiletics particularly knows the techniques. And if he’s smart he’ll never use them.

“Repent, therefore, and be converted that your sins may be blotted out, in order that,” two purpose clauses now, “in order that the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.” Let’s look at this. Here is Peter, the nation has crucified Christ. Peter says if you’ll go on positive volition at this point, and you will change your mind about Jesus Christ, then the millennial kingdom and the kingdom can come; the millennial kingdom on into the eternal state, that whole thing can start, but it can’t start until you as a nation corporately say, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.” And do you know that this invitation in verse 19 is still good. Do you realize that the return of Jesus Christ still awaits the fulfillment of this command? Do you realize that Christ cannot come tomorrow or the next day, a week from now, a month from now, years from now, centuries from now until the nation Israel is gathered together and officially says “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.” That’s why Israel is a key to world peace; there cannot be world peace, there cannot be a time when we are to throw away our military, to disarm, to throw away all our guns before the return of Jesus Christ; it is foolish. We fight, we fight for our survival physically, as well as spiritually, until He comes and He’s not going to come until this decision is made on the part of the nation Israel; then the times of refreshing will come from the presence of the Lord.

And the second reason, Acts 2:20, “So that He can send Jesus Christ, who has been elected for you.” The word “preached” isn’t preached, it means appointed or elected, He has been chosen for you. Verse 21 amplifies the person of Christ, “Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.” Now notice the word “restitution of all things.” It reads “restoration of all things.” Now where did that come from? That’s a word that Peter uses every once in a while. Do you suppose there was a time in Peter’s life when he heard our Lord use this word one way. Yes there was. Matthew 17, Peter was walking with Jesus one day and he heard Him say this. In fact he may have been one of the disciples that asked the question. It was after the Mount of Transfiguration; remember Peter and John got up on the mountain and what did Jesus tell Peter and John? What did Peter and John want to do? They saw the Lord transfigured… oh, Lord, let’s start a building program, we’ll put a monument over here, one for myself and one for John and we’ll have a little church up on the Mount of Transfiguration. Jesus said don’t do it, He denied them. So what has the church done? You go on the Mount of Transfiguration in Israel today and there’s one church over here and one church over here; men don’t pay any attention to the text of the Word of God. Matthew 17:11, “And Jesus answered and said to the disciples, Elijah truly shall first come and restore all things.” There’s where Peter go it; that’s a quotation from Malachi 4, it’s an Old Testament concept; it’s talking about at the beginning of the millennial kingdom all nations will be restored to their lands, wealth will be restored and you’ll have that. There’s where Peter got the idea. Back to Peter and we’ll finish.

So Peter says that when Christ comes back from heaven, then “the times of restitution of all things,” those are all promises, “which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets since,” not “the world began,” those of you with a Greek text will see aionos is there, “since the dispensation began,” “since the age began,” what dispensation or what age? The age of Israel. And when did the age of Israel begin? The age of Israel began in 1440 BC. And with whom did the age of Israel begin? With Moses, so the next verse deals with Moses. Acts 2:22, “For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord, your God, raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all thigns, whatever he shall say unto you. [23] And it shall come to pass that every soul, who will not hear that prophet shall be destroyed from among the people.” Moses predicted that there would eventually come the great prophet, we’ll call him GP, the great prophet, and that great prophet would be so great that when He walked the face of the earth any person who disobeyed that prophet would be killed.

Now this prediction, obviously has reference to heaven and hell in the larger sense, but in this immediate sense it has reference to an historic example. Remember what it was? What happened in history that fulfilled that? What did Jesus, in His last hours when He addressed the nation, over in the Mount of Olives as He looked over at the wall of Jerusalem He said, officially to the people, “Jerusalem, I would have gathered you, like a hen gathers their chicks, but you would not.” So Jerusalem, there shall not be a rock left upon it, and He warned the people of Jerusalem; He said when the armies come, when you see them come around this city get out of here, Pray that it not be on the Shabbat or the Sabbath because if it is there’ll be travel restrictions and you can’t get out fast enough. You women, you’d better pray that you’re not going to be pregnant or you’re not going to be nursing your children because you can’t move, it hinders your movement. Pray that that not happen while you’re pregnant because you’re going to have to move and you’re going to have to move quickly out of here. That was the last word of Jesus to the people in Jerusalem.

And in 66 AD after the revolt broke out the armies of Rome came around the city, and in the city of Jerusalem there was one group of people that patiently waited, particularly on the eastern wall during the siege; they waited to have an opportunity to apply what Jesus said, get out. They saw the army surround the city, they couldn’t get out of the city, and then for a historically unexplained reason the Roman commander thought that he didn’t have enough forces to continue the siege so he broke siege of the city of Jerusalem, went down to Bethel and down over in to the Aijalon valley and out to Joppa, and as he retracted his forces one group of Jews left the city of Jerusalem. Do you know who they were? The Hebrew Christians; they left. And then within months the Roman armies came back and they put their noose around the city and they destroyed every Jew in the city, or took them into captivity, so thus it was fulfilled, every soul who did not listen to the great prophet, the GP, was removed.

Now the prophecy of the great prophet, of course, refers to the line of prophets up to the GP and the first one was Samuel, on down through to the end of the age of silence and then John the Baptist. And so this is why in verse 24, “Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those who follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days. [25] You are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant,” see, it refers back to the plan of history, to “the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed.” There’s promise number three, worldwide blessing. [26] Unto you first, having raised up His Son, sent Him to bless you,” today he is saying, with this healing of the lame man, “in turning every one of you from his iniquities.” God is addressing the nation, this is not just simply an evangelistic service. Now the chapter has actually four more verses because the chapter ends in the original with verse 4 of chapter 4.

Acts 4:1, “And as they spoke unto the people, the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them, [2] Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. [3] And they laid hands on them, and put them in the hold [custody] until the next day; for it was now evening. [4] However, many of them who heard the word believed; and the number of males was about five thousand.”

Now these four verses go back to how we started today, on the note of category four suffering; because Peter’s invitation was so powerful, because the Word of God had gone forth in such an effective way, Satan had to move. Suppose that this crowd accepted Christ; just suppose, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and during this interim of grace, suppose the nation went on positive volition and said hey, you know what, we did make a mistake about Jesus, Lord, we confess, we erred, and now we bow our knee to Messiah. Now just suppose that happened; what would that do to Satan and his hold on the world? It would cause Christ to come back and end it, so Satan knows that he’s got to do something and here you have the counterattack of Satan and the beginning of the tremendous angelic conflict that goes down to this very hour in history. The forces of Satan, the demonic powers, stirring up persecution against the church. So as they do so, notice not the Pharisees this time but the Sadducees come. The Pharisees are the legalists; the Sadducees are the liberals, and as all liberals always are in their great open-mindedness, they call the police to crush the opposition. And the captain of the temple happens to be the jailor, he’s the head of the Levite, they have a Levite police force around the temple and they are afraid it’s going to degenerate into a mob, plus the fact that verse 2 tells us the real reason why the liberals call the police, because the liberals were afraid of the doctrine of the resurrection; after all, you can’t have miracles in the universe, it might imply God is there.

So in Acts 4:3 “the laid hands on them,” and that laying hands is a theme of Luke; from now on you’ll notice this, Luke has this little way he has of writing the book of Acts, preach the Word, jail; preach the Word, jail; preach the Word, riot; preach the Word, more jail; preach the Word, persecution. It’s the theme song and it starts here. So that’s telling us something. Notice it was evening in verse 3, and for that reason they could not hold trial; it was illegal under Jewish law to hold trial, that verse also tells us something else; it was 6:00 p.m., that’s when the new day starts, evening; the Jewish day starts at sundown. And so since the first verse tells us the whole thing started at 3:00 p.m., the ninth hour of prayer, how long did Peter speak? Three hours. And some of you are worried right now, I’ve gone over 12:00 and you’ve got a steak in the oven, what would you do with Peter, who has three hours of teaching. Of course Peter is getting far more results than I or anybody else is getting.

By the way, before we leave verse 3, this is why Christ’s trial was illegal. Remember Christ, they hauled Him in and they immediately tried Him and it was illegal under Jewish law to have a trial in darkness. And how interesting of the Lord to do that, to have His own Son tried in darkness. You see, the very physical circumstances of Christ’s trial show how men must judge the Son of God. They don’t dare face Him in the light; the only way Jesus can be handled by depraved beings is in darkness, and so He’s tried in darkness. But here they did follow their law, the refused to trial until the next morning.

In Acts 4:4 the results, five thousand males believed; now multiply it by two for all the females that believed and so you have about 10,000 Christians at this time in history. Now that figure probably doesn’t speak too much to some of you. Let me just write down next to it how many people lived in Jerusalem at that time. 30,000 people; what does that tell you about the effective evangelization in the city of Jerusalem in a few short weeks. One-third of the people in the city of Jerusalem accepted Christ. Now do you understand why Satan had to pull off the persecution. He had to crush this movement because if Jerusalem went with the Messiah then his kingdom was doomed. And so to bring those figures to life let’s multiply them by six; Lubbock has a population of roughly 180,000 or so, multiply this by 6, that would mean an equivalent of 60,000 people trust Christ in this city in a few short weeks. Now ask yourself something to be honest and frank: do you think that God the Holy Spirit could pull off this in the city of Lubbock with the condition of Christianity in this city? Do you really think that He could do this? Of course He could; there aren’t enough trained believers to follow this up; 60,000 people accepting Christ in, say, even two months, that’s a thousand people a day. Three times… this auditorium holds about 250 people, four times this auditorium becomes a Christian every 24 hours. That’s the rate of evangelization that was going on in the book of Acts, so Peter did something right.

Let’s conclude with some of the principles that they used that we can apply.

First, they used trained believers; as we said last time, John and Peter were the best trained believers. Second, they did not arrange and manipulate situations, they let the Holy Spirit keep the situations and let Him bring them to pass. Third, they made such fantastic penetration into the kingdom of darkness that Satan had to counterattack; category four suffering is now about to begin. Next week we’ll details of that.