On the Pentecost after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, His church was born by the power of the Holy Spirit. As I wrote last week, without the Holy Spirit, there is no church. The Holy Spirit drew the crowd and provided an important opening to Peter’s sermon. At the end, the promised Holy Spirit was the gift given to those who responded.
However, the heart of Peter’s Spirit-inspired sermon was not about the Spirit. It was about Jesus of Nazareth. Those who heard Peter already knew something about Jesus. Most of them had seen and heard Him in the Temple courts, a mere 50 days before. Some of them likely joined the mob shouting “Crucify Him!”
At this point, I need to pause and reflect on what crucifixion meant from a Jewish point of view. We know that the Romans utilized crucifixion as a tortuous public execution. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, powerfully conveyed the torture Jesus endured. Our term excruciating is taken from the same root word. Crucifixion was made public so people would know that they should never mess with Rome. For the Jews, however, there was more. Deuteronomy 21:22-23 says:
22 If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is executed, and you hang his body on a tree,23 you must not leave the body on the tree overnight, but you must be sure to bury him that day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance. (NIV)
That Paul speaks of this in Galatians 3:13, suggests to me that in Paul’s previous life as a Pharisee, he could not have accepted the thought that the Messiah would ever be crucified. Now, as one confronted by Jesus, Paul sees that in His crucifixion Jesus bore God’s curse for us!
At Pentecost, Peter’s message was that God made Jesus, though crucified, both Lord and Christ. These titles are important. Romans proudly proclaimed, “Caesar is Lord.” From the beginning of Luke’s gospel, Jesus is contrasted with Augustus, and then Tiberius. Drawing from his quote from Psalm 110:1, Peter now proclaims that Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. The title “Christ,” it seems, has lost its profound significance. “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name! “Christ” means that Jesus is God’s anointed Messiah. Jews hearing this come to realize that they had a part in putting their own Messiah to death. But now, Peter tells them, in spite of being crucified, Jesus is now exalted at the right hand (place of authority) of God.
How could they and we know all of this is true? God raised Jesus from the dead in accordance with the Scriptures! The apostles were witnesses to the resurrection and Psalm 16 and 110 both point to it (also see 1 Corinthians 15:1-8).
On that day, the Spirit convicted the crowd through Peter’s message and the message was Jesus. The Restoration Movement, in which I was raised, and for which I am grateful, has had as its goal to be the New Testament church. Yet, the New Testament church didn’t preach about itself. It preached Jesus! It was not “Look at us!” It was that God’s eternal purposes have been fulfilled In Jesus. Our message to the world should be the very message Peter gave. If we preach Jesus and call on the Spirit to move through our words, we may find that people will still be “cut to the heart,” and ask us what they should do. If they ask that question, we, having centered on Acts 2:38, certainly know how to answer.
Tim Kelley