'Unto you first God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless
you, In turning away every one of you from his iniquities.'--ACTS iii.
26.
So ended Peter's bold address to the wondering crowd gathered in the
Temple courts around him, with his companion John and the lame man whom
they had healed. A glance at his words will show how extraordinarily
outspoken and courageous they are. He charges home on his hearers the
guilt of Christ's death, unfalteringly proclaims His Messiahship, bears
witness to His Resurrection and Ascension, asserts that He is the End
and Fulfilment of ancient revelation, and offers to all the great
blessings that Christ brings. And this fiery, tender oration came from
the same lips which, a few weeks before, had been blanched with fear
before a flippant maidservant, and had quivered as they swore, 'I know
not the man!'
One or two simple observations may be made by way of introduction.
'Unto you _first_'--'first' implies second; and so the Apostle has
shaken himself clear of the Jews' narrow belief that Messias belonged
to them only, and is already beginning to contemplate the possibility
of a transference of the kingdom of God to the outlying Gentiles. 'God
having raised up His Son'--that expression has no reference, as it
might at first seem, to the fact of the Resurrection; but is employed
in the same sense as, and indeed looks back to, previous words. For he
had just quoted Moses' declaration, 'A prophet shall the Lord your God
raise up unto you from your brethren.' So it is Christ's equipment and
appointment for His office, and not His Resurrection, which is spoken
about here. 'His Son Jesus'--the Revised Version more accurately
translates 'His Servant Jesus.' I shall have a word or two to say about
that translation presently, but in the meantime I simply note the fact.
With this slight explanation let us now turn to two or three of the
aspects of the words before us.
I. First, I note the extraordinary transformation which they indicate
in the speaker.
I have already referred to his cowardice a very short time before. That
transformation from a coward to a hero he shared in common with his
brethren. On one page we read, 'They all forsook Him and fled.' We turn
over half a dozen leaves and we read: 'They departed from the council,
rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.'
What did that?
Then there is another transformation no less swift, sudden, and
inexplicable, except on one hypothesis. All through Christ's life the
disciples had been singularly slow to apprehend the highest aspects of
His teachings, and they had clung with a strange obstinacy to their
narrow Pharisaic and Jewish notions of the Messiah as coming to
establish a temporal dominion, in which Israel was to ride upon the
necks of the subject nations. And now, all at once, this Apostle, and
his fellows with him, have stepped from these puerile and narrow ideas
out into this large place, that he and they recognise that the Jew had
no exclusive possession of Messiah's blessings, and that these
blessings consisted in no external kingdom, but lay mainly and
primarily in His 'turning every one of you from your iniquities.' At
one time the Apostles stood upon a gross, low, carnal level, and in a
few weeks they were, at all events, feeling their way to, and to a
large extent had possession of, the most spiritual and lofty aspects of
Christ's mission. What did that?
Something had come in between which wrought more, in a short space,
than all the three years of Christ's teaching and companionship had
done for them. What was it? Why did they not continue in the mood which
two of them are reported to have been in, after the Crucifixion, when
they said--'It is all up! we trusted that this had been He,' but the
force of circumstances has shivered the confidence into fragments, and
there is no such hope left for us any longer. What brought them out of
that Slough of Despond?
I would put it to any fair-minded man whether the psychological facts
of this sudden maturing of these childish minds, and their sudden
change from slinking cowards into heroes who did not blanch before the
torture and the scaffold, are accountable, if you strike out the
Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost? It seems to me that, for
the sake of avoiding a miracle, the disbelievers in the Resurrection
accept an impossibility, and tie themselves to an intellectual
absurdity. And I for one would rather believe in a miracle than believe
in an uncaused change, in which the Apostles take exactly the opposite
course from that which they necessarily must have taken, if there had
not been the facts that the New Testament asserts that there were,
Christ's rising again from the dead, and Ascension.
Why did not the Church share the fate of John's disciples, who
scattered like sheep without a shepherd when Herod chopped off their
master's head? Why did not the Church share the fate of that abortive
rising, of which we know that when Theudas, its leader, was slain,
'all, as many as believed on him, came to nought.' Why did these men
act in exactly the opposite way? I take it that, as you cannot account
for Christ except on the hypothesis that He is the Son of the Highest,
you cannot account for the continuance of the Christian Church for a
week after the Crucifixion, except on the hypothesis that the men who
composed it were witnesses of His Resurrection, and saw Him floating
upwards and received into the Shechinah cloud and lost to their sight.
Peter's change, witnessed by the words of my text--these bold and
clear-sighted words--seems to me to be a perfect monstrosity, and
incapable of explication, unless he saw the risen Lord, beheld the
ascended Christ, was touched with the fiery Spirit descending on
Pentecost, and so 'out of weakness was made strong,' and from a babe
sprang to the stature of a man in Christ.