Clough Acts Lesson 27
Baptism
in Acts – Acts
In Acts 10 we’ll study the final episode in the Cornelius situation. Again remember that the great commission was given in three stages and the Holy Spirit superintended, unknown to individuals in the Church, the Holy Spirit sovereignly brought about the Church’s obedience all three stages of the great commission. And the argument of the book of Acts is that as the gospel went to Jerusalem and then it went to Judea and Samaria and then went on to all the world, that we have here a clear indication of the confidence that you can place in the guiding ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life. It is proved, or He has proved Himself, by what He did for the Church in its origin and founding, getting over some of those earlier barriers, chief of which occurred when He moved the Church from stage two to stage three.
In stage three the Jews would have to take
the Word of God out to the Gentiles; it’s meant that they would have to live
with the Gentiles, they would have to eat with the Gentiles, and then would
arise the old problem of the quarantine laws that God had placed around the
nation Israel, to protect that nation, all during the time it was developing
the doctrine necessary for worldwide evangelization. Visualize the nation
But now the time has come at this point in
the book of Acts for those sheep who have trusted in Jesus Christ, who have the
Word of God, to take that Word out into the world. To do so the fences now have
to be broken down so the sheep, who have now the reigning Christ at the
Father’s right hand, will be in a place where they can effectively communicate
the Word of God. Acts 10 as we have said before, is the answer to the modernist
tendencies to knock missionary activity. From time to time you’ll read of this
in news magazines, newspapers and so on, because it’s getting more and more the
thing to do, and that is to pronounce prohibitions against all missionary
activity; examples would be in
Of course this whole thing and this whole argument assumes one thing from the very start that no one ever seems to point out, and that is it assumes that there is not a God of Scripture to guide the process. It assumes that the God of Jonah cannot once again intervene and correct Jonah’s cultural biases so he would be free to teach the Word of God to the Gentile Assyrians. It presupposes that the God of Peter no longer operates in history, the same God who kept Peter free from his cultural biases so he could minister the Word of God to the heathen. Because such sociologists and anthropologists from the very beginning presuppose that the God of Scripture isn’t there, and isn’t operating, and presuppose there is no absolute truth that judges culture B and judges culture A, because there’s no absolute truth, no God of the Scripture, no historic revelation, then of course if you start with that assumption you’re going to wind up with the obvious conclusion, that there can’t be legitimately any such thing as missionary work. Missionary work presupposes the opposite of the modern anthropologist and socialist. It presupposes that God is there and He can do today what He did here with Peter.
Last time we stopped at verse 21; Peter had
his dream, he saw the clean and the unclean animals. God said eat; Peter, hesitatingly decided to
obey, and today we begin in verse 21. Peter goes down to his door, the men have
come up the walk, they’ve knocked at the precise exact timing of the Holy
Spirit’s work. Acts
Once again
in verse 22 we have the man Cornelius, the man whom God sovereignly chose to be
the archetype of Gentile converts; the man who, as many missionaries would tell
you, the first convert in a native culture has usually been very, very
carefully prepared by the Holy Spirit for months, maybe years ahead of
time. Cornelius is no exception. As a Roman he stands as a symbol of the
Gentiles incarnate; not only as a Roman but as a Roman soldier. Wherever the Roman standard with it’s eagle
and SPQR went, went Roman power. And so
Cornelius represents the Roman soldier.
Not only the Roman soldier but Cornelius comes from
But more than that, the Spirit is very careful to mention in verse 22 Cornelius the officer, the centurion. We said when we developed Acts 10:1 this officer would correspond in our modern military to anywhere from a captain to a lieutenant colonel; captain, major or lieutenant colonel. This put him field grade and above, it put him in a position where he was an experienced soldier and it reminds us that there are four times, maybe six depending on how you harmonize the passages, where centurions are mentioned in the New Testament, and in every case, they are mentioned, without exception, favorably. The question rises why? Is this just change that every time you have a military officer presented in Scripture he is presented favorably. It is always these military officers who play key roles in the disposition of the Word of God. As I said before, I think there is a reason why that occurs. And the reason is the same reason I have recognized when I have urged young men who are seeking to go to Dallas Seminary or other seminaries, go into the military first, then go to seminary. Every young man, barring some reason for business and so on, and special training, ought to have some time in the service and the reason is because it is there where you finally learn what authority is, and you test whether you really can take authority, whether you really can endure someone giving you an order and you can’t stand the person that gives you the order and you don’t like the order and you can sit there and say “Yes, Sir,” and carry it out. When you have passed that test you become a man. And until you can pass that test you are not fit to lead anyone in any other group. So there’s the reason why young men should be in the service, they understand authority.
Cornelius, as well as the other centurions in the New Testament were men who understood authority and it was very easy, therefore, for them to respond to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was the man of inherent authority. Jesus didn’t refer to any authority outside of himself, unlike Buddha, unlike Confucius, unlike Bahaullah, unlike all the other great religious leaders of history, Christ said I am my own authority, and therefore Christ was the most authoritative leader the world has ever seen. And it took people, and it still takes people, who understand authority to respond correctly to Jesus Christ. If you’re kind of a flaky individual that wears your feelings on your sleeve and you can’t stand somebody with an obnoxious personality who has truth, then you’re out of it and you’ll have a hard time responding to things you see in the Bible. You’ll have a hard time because you have never understood what authority is.
So it’s important that when we begin with the Church Age, the Gentile part of it, you see a man who submits to authority. This is going to come out several times in the passage; you will see the Holy Spirit prepared him quite carefully for this. Notice in verse 22 he was “a just man,” that means he was a man who followed standards, not perfectly but he was a man who was stable. And that’s another picture of preparation for the gospel, a person who realizes that the source of stability must lie outside of yourself in some absolute. This probably is why Cornelius, who must have PCS’s all over the Mediterranean area, he must have had some tours of duty up in Turkey, tours of duty in the Italian Peninsula, tours of duty near the Aegean, tours of duty in North Africa as well as in the Palestine area. In every case where this man went on his tours of duty he was exposed to the mystery cult, the Oriental religions, Gnosticism in its early form, he was exposed to one religion after another. This is not some naïve individual who just believed the first religious claim that he came to. This man had been exposed to many different religious claims and after being exposed to many different religious claims concluded that only Judaism had a God of sufficient authority.
Now there’s a little textual note as we go on in the story that convinces me that that’s what attracted Cornelius to the Christian gospel, was that it alone provided for adequate authority. The way Cornelius is going to describe the Lord Jesus Christ, the way he is going to describe his spiritual experience tells you that here is a man who responded to authority. He recognized a good authority to start with and having recognized it, went on with what that authority wanted. It says he was “one that feared God,” the word “fear” means to respect. It doesn’t say in verse 22 that he is one that emoted, that he was one that was infatuated with the five-lettered word “Jesus,” and repeated it ad nauseum until he got every one else high including himself. It was not just some emotional orgy that went on in his mind and in his friend’s minds when they worshiped God. They were responding, sometimes with emotion, yes; sometimes with very little emotion because emotion is not the way to respond to God; it is your appreciator of your soul and of course it’s going to be involved in any time that we respond to God, but that’s not the center of the response; the center of the response is bowing before God’s absolute Word; not a church, not a minister, not a sacrament, not anything else but the Word of God.
And so
Cornelius was a man, therefore, it says in conclusion, “of good report among
the entire nation of the Jews,” he had a tremendous testimony for one who
respected the teachings of their Torah.
Now since verse 22 is being told by a soldier, who along with the
servants, went to Peter from
This is why here we stress teaching; we live in a day which has been called the day of cool transmission, and that is a technical use of the word for content versus emotion and communication. And the point there is that as television and other medium has increased, other than the printed page, the emphasis more and more is upon impression rather than engaging your mind. And you can be passive and watch an audio-visual presentation because you don’t have to expend effort in understanding it. But when we read the Bible, and this is what’s so deadly about a day when the communication becomes cool instead of hot, full of content. You become passive and when you become passive you cannot understand what you read. Talk to a school teacher who knows what she’s doing, who’s trying to do a good job in the system and ask a school teacher, maybe by 8th, 9th or 10th grade, ask her how the children are reading these days; ask her how are your students comprehending what they are reading, what is their level of reading; can they read a five syllable word and understand it? We’ve come a long way and it’s been down.
And this is why we who are the fundamentalists, we who say we believe in this, who say that this is God’s inerrant Word, who say that this is one way of salvation, if we really believed what we say we believe, it seems there can be only one tactic that we can use; one major strategy that we’ve got to employ and that is we have got to emphasize content like we haven’t all the rest of the 20th century up to the present hour. We have got to come down harder, twice as hard as we used to have to on content because we know that the average person has much higher resistance to absorbing content than he ever has before. And the only way you can solve the problem is to bear down even harder. So this is why we do that, we follow what Cornelius wanted; he wanted words, he didn’t want a sweet testimony, he wanted some facts, he wanted some information, he wanted some content from Peter.
So Peter
calls this party in, he lodges with them, [23, “And on the morrow Peter went
away with them, and certain brethren from Joppa accompanied him.”] and then they go to
Now why is that little circumstance put in there? Because all these people are going to shortly be regenerated, be born again, integrated into the Church and what do you have ready made, with an instant of the work of the Holy Spirit? The first Gentile congregation. So Cornelius has gathered his friends and we’ll see the development of the first congregation. By the way notice, verse 25, as Peter walks in the room what happens? “And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and falls down at his feet,” present tense, it’s a historic present; Luke is so impressed by this he wants to make it very vivid in our eyes, he says look, see, here’s the Lieutenant Colonel out of the Roman Legion bowing on his face to Peter, “he fell down at his feet, and worshipped him.”
Now verse 25
is one of the three times in the New Testament where men are worshipped. I am going to give you the other two verses
besides Acts 10:25 to copy down and remember next time you are dealing with the
issue who is Jesus Christ. These three
verses will teach you to have a backdrop to handle that kind of a problem,
because inevitably you’ll say well see, Jesus was worshipped. They say so what, that’s what they did in the
ancient world, they worshipped great men and see, they worshiped the great man
Jesus and they worshiped Him more and they worshiped Him more and finally Jesus
who was originally a great man became inflated in the minds of the populous as
a god. Wrong? These three verses show conclusively that
worship of men was not tolerated in the ancient world, at least in
Now in light of these three verses whenever you see people worshiping Jesus like Thomas in John 20, “My Lord and my God,” when you see for example in Luke 5 Peter himself falls down at Jesus’ knees and worships Him, when you see passages like those, there’s only one way to interpret them. Jesus was permitting, against the grain of the culture, against His Judaism, He was permitting worship of Himself. And to that you can only respond in one of three ways: Jesus was a liar, Jesus was a lunatic, or Jesus was the Lord. There are not any in betweens, not in this culture, not if you have your glasses on and you’re reading the text correctly. The people who read the text at 60 miles an hour and feel their way through Christianity don’t catch the force of this but this one of the evidences for Christ claiming and doing what he did.
So Peter tells him to get up and again it’s kind of a funny little detail here, it says [26] “But Peter took him up,” it’s kind of ironic that Peter, the little Jewish fisherman, maybe he’s not so little but at least in social stature, Peter the Jewish fisherman reaches down and picks up this commander up off the floor, and he takes him up, that’s how striking it is; he takes him up off the floor, “saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man.” Here’s the first married pope forbidding worship of himself.
Acts
The idea here is that they’re showing up as males and that’s the answer to people who say wait a minute, you know in that passage in Genesis 6, it talks about the “sons of God went in to the daughters of men” and produced a race of giants. And apparently the angels materialized in physical bodies before the flood, had sexual intercourse with human females and produced a cross-breed of these gigantic people. Now that is remembered in the mythology of the world. If you study Hercules and Achilles and many of the Greek myths you’ll notice something very interesting about those myths. Most of those heroes came from human females and the gods. That, we interpret Scripturally, as a residue in man’s historical memory of this event described in Genesis 6. And usually fundamentalists object to it and they say it couldn’t happen because angels don’t have this sex; this passage to the contrary, angels do. And when they materialize the eat and they have bodies of a certain sex. That’s why aner is used.
So Cornelius says, “a man stood before me in bright clothing,” that doesn’t mean special clothing, it just means the clothing that he had just kind of had a shimmer to it. It caught his attention. [31] “And said, Cornelius, thy prayer is heard, and thine alms are had in remembrance in the sight of God. [32] Send therefore to Joppa, and call hither Simon, whose surname is Peter; he is lodged in the house of one Simon a tanner by the sea side: [who, when he cometh, shall speak unto thee.]” and now Cornelius gives us a hint of his military background and the way influences thought. He says, [33] Immediately therefore I sent to you,” notice the quick response. Cornelius is a man of decision, he recognizes an authority has spoken and he responds to that authority, “Immediately I have sent to you, and you hast well done that you have come.” That shows you as an officer he not only did things, he not only requested things of people, but he knew that the cost and the effort that would be required in the men who carried these orders out. So when he says you did well in coming, that tells you that Cornelius sympathized with all that Peter had to go through. He’s saying in this short phrase, Peter, I understand it was a big mess for you, a Jew, to come to me, a Gentile. I understand, Peter, that you even threatened your own social status before your fellow Jews by walking in this door just now. I understand that Peter and I’m deeply thankful to you for it. He didn’t slobber all over him but he recognizes and respects Peter’s integrity and his effort. And that’s another hallmark of the great leader and officer Cornelius was.
Then he goes on to say, “Now therefore are we all here present before God, to hear all things” and the next verb is the verb used to pass a military order from a superior to an inferior, the Greek word is prostasso and it is used in the writings describing military operations, and he says, “we have come to hear what God has ordered.” So you see how Cornelius thinks about God and His relationship to God; Cornelius probably is a man who doesn’t have much of… say an overt emotional pattern. He’s a man who has had to develop discipline over the years, who therefore really finds it, maybe difficult, to express his emotions. He’s a man who, as a lieutenant colonel, has had the horrible experience of having to order men under you into a combat situation and watching those men die trying to carry out your order, and this is a very aging and sobering experience to have to go through. Cornelius has been through that; Cornelius has had to keep his head in many a combat situations; when everything was breaking loose he had to gather those soldiers up, he had to keep the soldiers in the line, he had to hold things to the orders.
This man comes to Christ in what we would call in a non-emotional, almost cold way. And I’m emphasizing this because it’s so hard in some evangelical circles for people to accept the fact that you can have someone walk into a building, hear the Word of God, trust in Christ and not froth at the mouth, and not go through some paroxysm, and yet fundamentalist after fundamentalist will say well, they can’t be a Christian, they didn’t sign a card, they didn’t raise their hand, didn’t do anything; can’t be a Christian, don’t believe it. You’d be surprised who can become Christians in their own way fitting their own personality and here you have Cornelius doing this; he just simply very coldly and calculatingly says okay, I’m ready for the order, give me the order.
So now we
have Peter’s discussion of the gospel.
And from Acts 10:34-41 we have part of his message, a message that if
you stopped to outline this, would correspond to one, in a remarkable way,
would correspond to one of the four Gospels.
The very sequence. Just look at
it for a minute, verse 34-35 form the introduction; verse 37 the first part of
the message, it “began from
That sequence that you observe in these verses is exactly the sequence followed by the Gospel of Mark. Now the Gospel of Mark is believed to have been under the auspices of Peter; it’s written actually by Mark, because Mark was a young boy whose mother owned the home in which the Christians met, and as a young boy he hung around the apostles, and then he went out on a few missionary journeys with Paul and got all fouled up out in the mission field and came back home, Paul fired him, and he looked like he was a washout, and then later on Barnabas took him back again and he went on to Rome, finally in his closing days to write notes on the apostle Peter’s sermons, and he’d sit there as Peter preached and he write notes, he’d write notes. Peter, according to extra Biblical tradition never preached in Greek, he always preached in Aramaic and he always had someone sitting next to him interpreting, either Peter was lazy or he just never felt confident in the use of the Greek language, so he always taught through an interpreter, and Mark may have been his interpreter. But at least we know that Mark sat down and took notes, note after note after note of Peter’s preaching. And he finally compiled it and that’s your Gospel of Mark; that’s where the Gospel came from.
And there’s a few human interest features to the Gospel of Mark because if you take all the embarrassing things that ever happened to Peter, Matthew talks about them, Luke talks about them, and John talks about them, and it’s interesting that Mark doesn’t dwell on the embarrassing times, you know, operation foot in mouth, that kind of thing. That isn’t mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, it’s very easy on Peter and you can see why—if it’s a case of Peter he’s not going to go around teaching people all the idiot things that he did. So there’s a lot of converging evidence to show that Peter is behind Mark. And here is a piece of that evidence that indeed Peter used to preach this way.
Something else about this before we get into the details. Do you notice, and this is a summary please understand, Peter probably spent an hour, maybe two hours teaching. So what you’ve got here is a sequence summarizing what Peter taught. But do you notice that to Gentiles he didn’t say God loves you, you’re a sinner, Christ died for you, okay five minutes, sign the card. He is spending time to develop the Word and the content so when these people do believe they’re going to believe out of their personal conviction. It’s not going to be forced, nobody is going to embarrass them, there’s no pressure on them, they’re free to accept or reject. But if they do, they’re going to do it with knowledge.
Peter does something else in this passage. I have said that the book of Acts emphasizes sermons; I said that Luke seems to have a big hang-up about this, he wants us to see how the early church taught verbally, so in Acts 2 you have a sermon; Acts 3 you’ve got a sermon; Acts 4 you’ve got quotations, oral prayer petitions. Acts 7 you’ve got Stephen’s great sermon and now we come to the fourth great sermon of the text, Acts 10. And in all of these sermons I’ve encouraged you to take a light colored pencil and underline the portions of the sermon or shade over the words very lightly the portions of those sermons that are quotations out of the Old Testament, just to show you how much in the early church they relied on the Old Testament and they didn’t just spout off Jesus stories that no one could understand without Old Testament background. This is what’s wrong, we’re always talking about Jesus, you talk about Jesus too fast if you haven’t prepared your people first by going to the Old Testament.
So let’s go through very quickly and I’ll check off the Old Testament citations so I won’t have to do this as we go through the detail. In verse 34, the clause, “God is no respecter of persons,” that’s a citation out of the Old Testament. In verse 36, “the word which God sent” is a citation out of the Old Testament; “preaching peace” is a citation out of the Old Testament. In verse 38, “God anointed with the Holy Spirit” is a citation out of the Old Testament. Verse 39, “hanged on a tree” is a citation out of the Old Testament. You see, Peter expected his hearers to at least have some basic understanding of the Old Testament and the context of these citations.
As we go through verse by verse I will direct you to the context of these citations and hopefully as we do this, though we only have a few verses which represent many hours teaching, you’ll see the titanic claims that Peter was making about Christ, and hopefully if there are some here this morning who have swallowed the argument that the deity of Christ and (quote) “Christianity,” developed very slowly over time and that back in those early days they really didn’t buy this Trinity business, they really didn’t buy the deity of Christ, that was just later accretions added to by the Church. If you swallow that argument I hope to challenge you by this early sermon of Peter because those quotes later [can’t understand word] are all here in this very sermon.
Acts 10:34,
“[Then Peter opened his mouth, and
said,] Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons,” that “of a
truth is literally “upon the truth,” which testifies that Peter still had some
doubts up to this point and now it clicked with him, so he says, “of a truth,”
I understand now, “God is no respecter of persons.” Now what do we mean by “respecter of persons.”
Let’s look, the “respecter of persons” refers to God’s attitude toward the
nation’s outside of
Another
reference, 2 Kings 5:1, we have God working with
Acts
If you want
a good evidence of this just simply do the exercise I’ve mentioned many times;
two crayons, map of the world. Take one
color crayon and color in all the areas that have had progressive republic type
government, where there’s been constitutional liberties and freedom. Then with the other color go over the same [can't
understand word] of the world and color in the areas where the Word of God has
been preached extensively and you will notice a most remarkable correlation of
the two colors on your map. That is not
an accident; that is a historic cause/effect of history. If they’re having trouble, for example, in
South America with dictatorship and they’re having trouble with democracies
beginning it’s not due to the fact that people in South America are
incompetent; it’s due to the fact that the Word of God has not gone in South America
as it has in North America and therefore the norms and standards aren’t there
to develop a stable democracy and a stable republic. When we got through
fighting the Vietnam war what happened?
The only people in
So then we
have God being not a respecter of race, Peter recognizes the Old Testament
principle and then in Acts
I’ll show you in the New Testament where that thought comes out: Hebrews 11:3, here is what Peter had on his mind. He is doing a little bit more than just talking about Bible stories. I just go through saying that communism was a Christian heresy; the reason we say this, you can prove it for yourself, is that Karl Marx got his idea of history from Hegel and Hegel got his idea of history from the book of Daniel, Daniel chapters 2 and 7. So we have an irony here in history that the power of communism with its might faith in progress, progressive victory, is a barren apostate Christianity. And in Hebrews 11:3 we have the answer to the communist [can’t understand word] Marx said that the ages of history have been framed by the law of the economic determinism. But in the Bible it says, “Through faith we understand that the ages,” not the world, “the ages of history have been framed by the Word of God, so the things which are seen,” that is the things that come to pass in history, “were not made of things which do appear,” that is, there’s always an unseen hand guiding history. Do you really think that the death of Mao Tse-tung is an accident, that it happened just at this time; it is the unseen hand of history that you are reading on the front pages of your paper. And the particular personality of the Godhead whose hand it is is the Second Person, God the Son. So here we have God the Son, Hebrews 11:3, the Word of God, God the Son, who is the architect of history, the rise and fall of nations.
It is that word that Peter refers to in Acts 10:36. “The Word of God was unto the children of Israel,” that means God the Son was preached to the nation Israel, God the Son’s plan for history was taught to the nation Israel. And he describes it with that last appositional phrase, “preaching peace by Jesus Christ,” that’s a quotation from Isaiah 52:7, it’s a quotation of the gospel, which says that in the future there would be peace in history when Messiah would come. The word “Jesus Christ” remember “Christ” is not His last name, His last name is Ben Yoseph, Yeshua Ben Yoseph would have been the way he’s called, but Christ is His title and Christ is the word for Messiah, which in turn equals the word for anoint. So what it’s saying is, “Preaching peace by Jesus the anointed,” and Peter recognizes that the person of Christ fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 52:7 and stands in that great vision as the One who will bring peace on the earth. Then he adds quickly the parenthesis here, that’s in the Old Testament text, he adds that to show a point, and that is, “(he is Lord of all:)” He is Lord of all; that means he recognizes here that Peter has claims to Gentile as well as Jew, to all the nations.
Acts
Now look at that sentence, hold the place and turn to Isaiah 61:1, this is where Peter got it from, he didn’t just make this up speaking from his heart. Before you read Isaiah 61:1 let your eye slip up to the verse just ahead of it, the last verse of Isaiah 60 and ask yourself as you read that verse who is doing the speaking, “A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation; I, Yahweh, will hasten it in its time.” So who’s doing the speaking? Jehovah God is doing the speaking. Continue with the text because there were no chapter breaks in the original Hebrew. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tiding unto the meek; He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them who are bound, [2] To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD….”
Now one Sabbath day in Jesus career He walked into the synagogue for one of their services. It was customary that a Jewish man would be called up out of the congregation and given the scroll and it’d be said, read a section of the scroll. In that day, Jesus sitting there in the congregation of the synagogue was called upon to come forward and read the scroll. Jesus picked up the scroll and He opened up to this very passage and He began to read; He began reading at verse 1, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tidings,” and He continued His reading until He got to the middle of verse 2, He said, “To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD,” and then He stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and He rolled up the scroll, handed it to the scroll keeper and sat down and said, “This day this has been fulfilled in your eyes.” And by that time, of course, there was a breathless shock that had been sent through the congregation because they understood very well what He had just said. First of all, notice He stopped in the middle of verse 2. Do you know why He stopped in the middle of verse 2? Because the last part of verse 2 deals with Christ’s Second Advent; the first part of verse 2 deals with His First Advent. Christ exegeted prophetically the Scriptures, cutting one part of the verse away from the rest of it and this is an acceptable way of interpretation. That’s an interesting note but it doesn’t compare to what we’re going to see now.
Look at the sentence in verse 1; compare it with the sentence of Peter’s quotation. Notice what it says: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,” so God’s Spirit… so we’ll put a check here, the anointing is with the Spirit, that checks out completely with what Peter’s quoting in Acts 10. What else does it say, “it is upon Me,” who is the “Me” in Isaiah 61:1? It isn’t Isaiah; you find out who the “Me” is by looking at the previous verse. The previous verse said, “I, Jehovah, will hasten it in its time.” So then, in place of Jesus in Isaiah 61:1 is Jehovah; Jehovah is anointed with the Spirit of God. Now drop back to 61:1, “because Jehovah has anointed Me Jehovah,” and who is doing the anointing? Jehovah. The word anoint is identical. So now let’s look what we’ve got.
“Jehovah anoints Jehovah with the Spirit of Jehovah.” Do you understand what that verse has just said? This is a verse, one among two, that explicitly refers to the Trinity in the Old Testament. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are here taught in the pages of the Old Testament. That is why Jesus is going to this passage; that is why the apostles would cite this passage again and again and again to describe the ministry of Jesus Christ.
Now turn to Peter’s sermon, Acts
Deuteronomy 21:22, this was a problem among the early Christians; it’s hard for us to understand it, we have to work a little bit in our head to get back and empathize with the problem that our brothers and sisters had in the 1st century. “If a man has committed a sin,” this is in the criminal code of Old Testament Law, “If a man has committed sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, thou will hang him on a tree.” Sounds like capital punishment. And after the capital punishment would be given, the body of the criminal would be staked out for the rest of that day along the road. They didn’t have billboards, they had bloody bodies hanging by the side of the road so as you drove by you could have your scenery; they didn’t have the environmental protection agency worried about the environmental impact of corpses hanging on fence posts near the highway. But they did so because in those days capital punishment was authorized and was demanded by God, and was given to deter crime. Now wouldn’t you sort of expect that is somebody tried to kill you and they got stoned to death, and by the way, these bodies were very nice, because the way they killed most of them was by crushing their chest with a four or five hundred rock, they didn’t stone them with little pebbles, they dropped the guy off a wall and then squashed him with a rock and then if he was still kind of … after his chest and heart had been crushed they took 50-60 pound rocks and wiped him out, broke his skull and so on. And they’d take this pulp and they’d strap it onto a tree and hang it next to the road, and you sort of got the impression that you ought not to do those bad things, after this deterrent was placed along for billboards, human billboards.
But the reason for the hanging on the tree was a particular message for the billboards and that’s given in verse 23, “His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall in any way bury him that day,” parenthesis, “(for he who is hanged is accursed by God),” what was the purpose of hanging human pulpy flesh on a tree next to the highway? To show as the people drove by there is the wrath of God poured out upon evil; there is God’s justice. Ah, said the non-Christian in the first century; you Christians say your Jesus is the Messiah do you, okay Christians, what do you do about this? You say Jesus is God-pleasing, and yet Jesus is hung on a tree, the cross being the fulfillment of this, and you Christians don’t go around saying He’s good; don’t you know your own Hebrew law code; anybody that is hung like this is a display of Jehovah’s wrath, not His pleasure, His wrath, His anger, His hatred, His justice.
Well what did the early Christians do about this? They turned it around and they said you bet, both truths are true because Jesus hanging on the cross, bloody pulp so to speak, fulfilling the prophecy of Deuteronomy, when He hung on that cross He was absorbing the wrath of God, was He not. Wasn’t he taking your sins upon Him and mine? And therefore at the moment that Christ was hanging on the cross He was a sign of the cursing of God, “He became sin for you and for me,” it was a real judgment. That’s why they got Him off the cross and He rose from the dead.
Let’s go back to Peter and watch how he finishes his sermon. After referring to this, then drawing the conclusion from it that Christ died for your sins, he said, [Acts 10:40,] “Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly; [41] Not to all the people, but unto witnesses” those are the post resurrection appearances, if you are an informed Christian you ought to understand the text of 1 Corinthians 15, if you know it, someone asked you how many people at one time saw Christ? What’s the maximum number of people that ever saw Christ after He rose from the dead? Answer: five hundred at one time, so it was not a hallucinatory experience. Then Peter adds in verse 41, these witnesses “[chosen before of God, even to us, who] did eat and drink with Him after he rose from the dead.”
Now why is that there? To
avoid Docetism, the belief that Jesus just appears, some sort of a creepy
ghost, he floated through the door if you didn’t lock it, and therefore he
scared people. But rather you have to
say Christ had a body, He does have a body today. This morning at the Father’s right hand Jesus
has fingernails; that’s what we mean when we talk about Jesus in His
resurrection body. There are some people
whom I’ve met in
So it says that we are commissioned to preach, [42, “And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead.”] And verse 43 is the end of it because it is interrupted by the Holy Spirit coming upon these people.
Then in verse 47, “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Spirit as well as we? [48] And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then prayed they him to tarry certain days.” Acts 10 at this point gives you a third model of how the Holy Spirit came upon people in the book of Acts. Next time you hear someone say in the book of Acts the Holy Spirit came upon someone before they were Christians and that’s a sign of their salvation. Really now; in Acts 2 we have people water baptized, then they are baptized by the Spirit, no laying on of hands. In Acts 8 we have people water baptized, plus the laying on of hands, Spirit baptism. In Acts 10 we have Spirit baptism, then water baptism and no laying on of hands. Now people, with three elements you can’t possibly get more divergence than that. I ask you, which one are you going to take for your model? Acts 2, Acts 8, Acts 10; it’s up for grabs, use the roulette wheel and your dice and pick one. Now obviously you can’t use any of them for a standard model of the Church Age, they weren’t intended to be models of the Church Age, they are intended to be reports of what happened in that age of transition. And if you want a model for the Church Age you don’t go to Acts, you go to the epistles. You do not get doctrine through historic literature. You get doctrine from didactic literature, which is the New Testament epistles.
And so Peter recognizes that these people have been saved at this point, they have personally trusted in Christ, the sign of their total complete conversion was the giving of the Spirit, and then he water baptizes. The water baptism here obviously is not saving them because they were saved before they got it, as evidenced by the possession of the Holy Spirit. And then finally, it says that Peter stayed with them.
To conclude let’s look at one further verse in Acts 15 to explain why Peter stayed with him. Peter is trying to explain this, by the way, this is the story for the next 2 or 3 months that we’ll be in Acts, Peter gets criticized and criticized and criticized for this one incident in the next four or five chapters. The Church cannot get over this, Gentile Pentecost.
Acts 15:7, “And when there had been much arguing, Peter stood up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, you know how that a good while ago God mace a choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe. [8] And God, who knows hearts, bore them witness, giving them the Holy Spirit, even as He did unto us.” Now watch verse 9, keep in mind Peter’s vision of the clean and unclean food, “And put no difference between us and them,” verb, “cleansing their hearts by faith,” and there is how Peter finally analyzed what came off in Acts 10, but what you had was a spiritual cleansing and that the clean and unclean boundaries that God had set up in the Old Testament were typological, they were only physical illustrations of what one day would spiritually come to pass and therefore here Peter says yes, now I understand, it is a spiritual cleansing, it has nothing to do with whether a guy’s a Gentile or Jew, a Hottentot, whether his skin color is black, white, red or yellow, it doesn’t make any difference, the issue is whether he has personally trusted in Christ.
Now with the conclusion of this section of Acts, this Acts 10 incident with Cornelius, you have the finishing off of the preparation of the early church for worldwide missions. And you have the triumph of the sovereign Holy Spirit taking Christ’s command to every nation. Therefore shall we stand and sing together….