Acts 2:22-24 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)
22 “Men of Israel, listen to these words: This Jesus the Nazarene was a man pointed out to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through Him, just as you yourselves know. 23 Though He was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail Him to a cross and kill Him. 24 God raised Him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for Him to be held by it.
You walk into a room in a house. There is a twin bed against the wall, covered with an NFL bedspread. A shelf with books, arranged neatly is at the foot of the bed. On the shelves are three trophies from various little leagues. On the table in the corner are crayons and coloring books, ready to be used. All the toys are put away, and a quick look reveals that none of them are stuffed under the bed. The closet is arranged so that all the clothes can be found easily, the dresser has no dirty clothes stuffed into it and the floor is vacuumed clean. What can you deduce from these clues? There is a mother in this household. There can really be no other logical explanation. For only a mother will take such care of a little boy. Goodness knows the boy can’t and the father most likely wouldn’t.
In the same way, as a Peter stands to address the crowd, there are events in this world that can only be attributed to an act of God.
Peter’s address to these men of Israel emphasizes the work of God. God is prominent in this first section of his message. It is a Holy God and his word that they will listen to, and it is God’s son, Jesus of Nazareth, that he wants to point them to. To do this, he shows how Christ was attested to by God, delivered unto death by God and raised from the dead by God.
God performed miracles through Christ to attest to them that he was indeed the Messiah. The signs and wonders were done with the specific goal to point to something beyond the miracle, to the person behind the miracle. These were one way that God bore witness to them of the person of Christ.
It is Christianity alone, of all the philosophical systems and other religions in the history of the world that argues that God himself entered the world to redeem the world. He did this through the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The fact that Jesus of Nazareth had performed many miracles was not in doubt to them. Peter stated, “as you yourselves know.” No one in the audience would deny the fact of these miracles. Peter explains that these miracles were done as evidence of who Jesus was, the Messiah, the Christ. But this evidence seems to fall into doubt when one considers that Jesus was crucified.
Peter answers this question in their minds, before they ask it, by explaining the twofold nature of the crucifixion. It was the plan of God, foreknown and yet the fault of both the Jews and the Gentiles.
The tension of this twofold nature is not resolved, only illuminated. God , in his purpose, sent Jesus to the cross. It was his purpose and he knew beforehand that it would happen. God meant to send Christ to the cross to redeem men from their sin. And yet, recognizing that what took place was in the plan of God and part of his redemptive plan, the Jews and the Gentiles were responsible for the death of Christ. Specifically, he says lays the blame at their feet for enlisting evil men, the Romans, and nailing Jesus to the cross. But in general, we are all responsible, to blame, for the death of Jesus on the cross. It was our sin that led God to sacrifice his son on our behalf.
But God, in his infinite love for us, knowing all that Jesus would suffer, sent him anyway. He was not surprised by the cross, for he had seen it from far away. The miracle is that he still went to Golgotha.
So Peter explains, that the miracles were God’s attestation of the person of Jesus and that his death was not a mistake, but in fact the very plan of God. For it is the death of Christ on the cross that makes the greatest act of God possible.
For it was a dead, limp body of Jesus that was laid in that tomb, but a resurrected, powerful, glorified body of Jesus that came out of that grave. God raised him from the dead, showing that he is indeed the Christ, the one who gives life. Death couldn’t hold him down. He rose again. As much as people would deny that death, and as many stories as they would create to explain it away, the resurrection is the centerpiece of history and is as undeniable a fact as you will find.
Peter even says later that we can go visit David’s tomb, and see where he is laid, but Jesus’ tomb is empty. You won’t find his body there. It is that empty tomb that becomes a great problem for people to explain away. But do not think that the event of the empty tomb took place in a vacuum, away from history. In fact, the resurrection is the most attested to miracle in the Bible, and in history. We know more about how Jesus died than any one in history. We know more about how he was buried and how he was cared for in his burial than anyone else in that time.
That the tomb was empty and that Jesus was raised from the dead was not a question for Peter, it was a fact. He knew it as he knew his own name. It would’ve been easy enough for anyone there to prove Peter a drunkard who was speaking out of his head. For all that anyone had to do was show the tomb where Jesus laid. Anyone who did so would stop all the claims of resurrection made by the disciples. But you notice no one did that. They knew where he was buried, the priests had even sent a guard there. What they didn’t know, was what had happened to the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is clear from the history, Jesus must be the Son of God. As obvious as it must be that that bedroom was clean and neat because of the presence of a mother in that house, so even more we know that Christ is risen from the dead and so is the Savior of the world.
