In Jesus the Messiah has come, the messianic prophecies are fulfilled and the new age has dawned. The early Church had a tremendous sense that Jesus was the hinge of all history; that, with his coming, eternity had invaded time; and that, therefore, life and the world could never be the same again.
(3) The kerugma went on to state that Jesus had been born of the line of David, that he had taught, that he had worked miracles, that he had been crucified, that he had been raised from the dead and that he was now at the right hand of God. The early Church was sure that the Christian religion was based on the earthly life of Christ. But it was also certain that that earthly life and death were not the end and that after them came the resurrection. Jesus was not merely someone about whom they read or heard; he was someone whom they met and knew, a living presence.
(4) The early preachers went on to insist that Jesus would return in glory to establish his kingdom upon earth. In other words, the early Church believed intensely in the second coming. This doctrine has to some extent passed out of modern preaching; but it does conserve the truth that history is going somewhere and that some day there will be a completion and fulfilment and that people are therefore in the way or on the way.
(5) The preaching finished with the statement that only in Jesus was salvation possible, that those who believed on him would receive the Holy Spirit and that those who would not believe were destined for terrible things. That is to say, it finished with both a promise and a threat. It is exactly like that voice which John Bunyan heard, as if coming from right behind him, demanding: ‘Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or wilt thou have thy sins and go to hell?’
If we read through Peter’s sermon as a whole, we will see how these five strands are woven into it.
GOD’S DAY HAS COME
Acts 2:14–21
But Peter stood up with the eleven and raised his voice and said to them: ‘You who are Jews and you who are staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and listen to my words. These men are not, as you suppose, drunk; for it is only 9 am. But this is what was spoken by our prophet Joel: “It will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out from my Spirit upon all men, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. And I will pour out from my Spirit upon my men servants and my maid servants in these days and they will prophesy. I will send wonders in the heaven above and signs upon the earth below, blood and fire and vapour of smoke. The sun will be changed into darkness and the moon into blood before there comes the great and famous day of the Lord. And it shall be that all whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” ’
THIS passage brings us face to face with one of the basic ideas of both the Old and the New Testaments – that of the day of the Lord. Much in both the Old and the New Testaments is not fully intelligible unless we know the basic principles underlying that belief.
The Jews never lost the conviction that they were God’s chosen people. They interpreted that status to mean that they were chosen for special privilege among the nations. They were always a small nation. History had been for them one long disaster. It was clear to them that by human means they would never reach the status they deserved as the chosen people. So, bit by bit, they reached the conclusion that what they could not achieve for themselves God must do; and they began to look forward to a day when God would intervene directly in history and raise them to the honour they dreamed of. The day of that intervention was the day of the Lord.
They divided all time into two ages. There was the present age, which was utterly evil and doomed to destruction; and there was the age to come, which would be the golden age of God. Between the two, there was to be the day of the Lord, which was to be the terrible first signs of the new age, often described in the same way as labour pains before a birth. It would come suddenly like a thief in the night; it would be a day when the world would be shaken to its very foundations; it would be a day of judgment and of terror. All over the prophetic books of the Old Testament and in much of the New Testament are descriptions of that day. Typical passages are Isaiah 2:12, 13:6ff.; Amos 5:18; Zephaniah 1:7; Joel 2; 1 Thessalonians 5:2ff.; 2 Peter 3:10.
Here, Peter is saying to the Jews: ‘For generations, you have dreamed of the day of God, the day when God would break into history. Now, in Jesus, that day has come.’ Behind all the old imagery stands the great truth that, in Jesus, God arrived in person on the scene of human history.
LORD AND CHRIST
Acts 2:22–36
‘Men of Israel, listen to these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God to you by deeds of power and wonders and signs, which God, among you, did through him, as you yourselves know – this man, delivered up by the fore-ordained knowledge and counsel of God, you took and crucified by the hand of wicked men. But God raised him up and loosed the pains of death because it was impossible that he should be held subject by it. For David says in regard to him: “Always I foresaw the Lord before me, because he is at my right hand so that I should not be shaken. Because of this my heart has rejoiced and my tongue has exulted, and, furthermore, my flesh shall dwell in hope, because thou wilt not leave my soul in the land of the dead nor wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption. Thou hast made known to me the ways of life. Thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.” Brethren, I can speak to you freely about the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried and his memorial is among us to this day. Thus he was a prophet; and because he knew that God had sworn an oath to him, that one of his descendants should sit upon his throne, he spoke with foresight about the resurrection of the Christ, that he would neither be left in the world of the dead nor would his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and all of us are his witnesses. So then, when he had been exalted to the right hand of God, he received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father and poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend up into heaven, and yet he says: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit upon my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool for thy feet.” So then let all the house of Israel certainly know that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified Lord and Christ.’
HERE is a passage full of the essence of the thought of the early preachers.
(1) It insists that the cross was no accident. It belonged to the eternal plan of God (verse 23). Over and over again, Acts states this same thing (cf. 3:18, 4:28, 13:29). The thinking found in Acts safeguards us from two serious errors in our understanding of the death of Jesus. (a) The cross is not a kind of emergency measure flung out by God when everything else had failed. It is part of God’s very life. (b) We must never think that anything Jesus did changed the attitude of God to men and women. It was by God that Jesus was sent. We may put it in this way: the cross was a window in time allowing us to see the suffering love which is eternally in the heart of God.
(2) Acts insists that this in no way lessens the enormity of what those who crucified Jesus actually did. Every mention of the crucifixion in Acts is loaded with a feeling of shuddering horror (cf. Acts 2:23, 3:13, 4:10, 5:30). Apart from anything else, the crucifixion shows supremely how horrifyingly sin can behave.
(3) Acts is out to prove that the sufferings and death of Christ were the fulfilment of prophecy. The earliest preachers had to do that. To the Jews, the idea of a crucified Messiah was incredible. Their law said: ‘anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse’ (Deuteronomy 21:23). To orthodox Jews, the cross made it completely impossible that Jesus could be the Messiah. The early preachers answered: ‘If you would only read your Scriptures in the right way, you would see that all was foretold.’
(4) Acts stresses the
