Acts 2:22-36 You men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs… St. Peter's way of accounting for Christ's resurrection is the first apostolic statement on the subject. And certainly, even if the point were only one of antiquarian interest, it would be full of attraction to know how the first Christians thought about the chief truths of their faith; considering the influence which that faith has had and still has on the development of the human race. But for us, Christians, concern in this matter is more exacting. Our hopes or fears, our depressions or enthusiasms, our improvement or deterioration, are bound up with it. "If Christ be not risen, our preaching is vain, your faith is also vain." I. St. PETER STATES THE FACT THAT CHRIST HAD RISEN FROM THE DEAD. "Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death." He is preaching in Jerusalem, the scene of the death and resurrection, and to some who had taken part in the scenes of the crucifixion. Not more than seven weeks have passed. And in Jerusalem, we may be sure, men did not live as fast as they do in an European capital, in this age of telegraphs and railroads. An event like the crucifixion, in a town of that size, would have occupied general attention for a considerable period. It was then to persons keenly interested in the subject, and who had opportunities of testing its truth, that St. Peter states so calmly and unhesitatingly the fact of the resurrection. He states it as just as much a fact of history as the crucifixion, in which his hearers had taken part. Some twenty-six years later, when St. Paul wrote his first letter to Corinth, there were, he says, more than two hundred and fifty still alive who had seen Jesus Christ after His resurrection. The number of witnesses to the fact, to whom St. Peter could appeal, and whom his hearers might cross-question if they liked, will account for the simplicity and confidence of his assertion. In those days men had not learnt to think more of abstract theories than of well-attested facts. Nobody, it may be added, who professed to believe in an Almighty God, thought it reverent or reasonable to say that He could not for sufficient reasons modify His ordinary rules of working, if He chose to do so. St. Peter then preached the resurrection as a fact, and, as we know, with great and immediate results. But how did he account for it? II. HE SAYS THAT CHRIST WAS RAISED BECAUSE "IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE THAT HE SHOULD BE HOLDEN OF" DEATH. Thus St. Peter's first thought about this matter is the very opposite to that of many persons in our day. They say that no evidence will convince them that Christ has risen, because they hold it to be antecedently impossible that He should rise. St. Peter, on the other hand, almost speaks as if he could dispense with any evidence. In point of fact, he had his own experience to fall back upon (Luke 24:34). But this evidence only fell in with the anticipations which he had now formed on other and independent grounds. It will do us good to consider the reasons of this Divine impossibility. 1. It was not possible, "for David speaketh concerning Him." Prophecy forbade Christ to remain in His grave. As to the principle of this argument there would have been no controversy, between St. Peter and the Jews. When once God had thus spoken, His word, it was felt by Jews and. Christians, stood sure. It could not return empty; it must accomplish the work for which God had sent it forth; since it bound Him to an engagement with those who uttered and with those who heard His message. Obviously enough, the true drift of a prophecy may easily be mistaken. God is not responsible for eccentric guesses as to His meaning. But where a prediction is clear, it does bind Him who is its real Author to some fulfilment, which, in the event, will be recognised as such. And such a prediction of the resurrection St. Peter finds in Psalm 16., where David — as more completely in Psalm 22. — loses the sense of his own personal circumstances in the impetus and ecstasy of the prophetic spirit, and describes a Personality of which indeed he was a type, but which altogether transcends him. The meaning of the Psalm was so clear to some Jewish doctors, that, unable as they were to reconcile it with David's history, they invented the fable that his body was miraculously preserved from corruption. David, however, was really speaking in the person of Messiah. And his language created the necessity that Messiah should rise from the dead. Observe, here, that St. Peter had not always felt and thought thus. He had known this Psalm all his life. But long after he had followed Jesus, he had been ignorant of its true meaning. Only little by little do any of us learn God's truth and will. And so lately as the morning of the resurrection, the apostles "knew not the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead." Since then the Holy Spirit had come down, and had poured a flood of light into their minds and over the sacred pages of the Old Testament. And thus a necessity for the resurrection, which even Jews ought to recognise, was now abundantly plain. 2. A second reason lay in the character of Christ. Now, of that a leading feature was its simple truthfulness. He was too wise to predict the impossible. He was too sincere to promise what He did not mean. But Christ had again and again said that He would be put to a violent death, and that after dying He would rise again (John 2:19; Matthew 12:40; Matthew 16:21; Mark 9:31; Mark 10:32-34). Thus He was pledged to this particular act — pledged to the Jewish people, and especially to His own followers. He could not have remained in His grave — I will not say without dishonour, but — without causing in others a revulsion of feeling such as is provoked by the exposure of baseless pretensions. It may indeed be urged that the resurrection foretold by Christ was not a literal resurrection of His dead body, but only a recovery of His credit, His authority; obscured as these had been for a while by the crucifixion. The word "resurrection," according to this supposition, is in His mouth a purely metaphorical expression. Socrates had had to drink the fatal hemlock; and the body of Socrates had long since mingled with the dust. But Socrates, it might be said, had risen, in the intellectual triumphs of his pupils, and in the enthusiastic admiration of succeeding ages; the method and words of Socrates had been preserved for all time in a literature that will never die. If Christ was to be put to death by crucifixion, He would triumph, even after a death so shameful and degrading, as Socrates and others had triumphed before Him. To imagine for Him an actual exit from His tomb is said to be a crude literalism, natural to uncultivated ages, but impossible when the finer suggestiveness of human language has been felt to transcend the letter. An obvious reply to this explanation is, that it arbitrarily makes our Lord use literal and metaphorical language in two successive clauses of a single sentence. He is literal, it seems, when He predicts His crucifixion; but why is He to be thought metaphorical when He foretells His resurrection? Why should not His resurrection be preceded by a metaphorical crucifixion; a crucifixion of thought, or will, or reputation — not the literal nailing of a human body to a wooden cross? Surely He meant that the one event would be just as much or just as little a matter of fact as the other. Those who cling to His human character, yet deny His resurrection, would do well to consider that they must choose between, their moral enthusiasm and their unbelief; since it is the character of Christ, even more than the language of prophecy, which made the idea that He would not rise after death impossible for His first disciples. 3. Not that we have yet exhausted St. Peter's reasons. In the sermon which he preached after the healing of the lame man, he told his hearers that they had "killed the Prince of Life, whom God raised from the dead." Remark that striking title. Not merely does it show how high above all earthly royalties was the crucified Saviour in the heart and faith of His apostle. It connects his thought with the language of his Master on the one side, and that of His apostles St. Paul and St. John upon the other (John 14:6; John 5:26, 40; John 1:4; Colossians 3:4). What is life? We do not know what it is in itself. We only register its symptoms. We see growth, movement; and we say, "Here is life." It exists in one degree in the tree; in a higher in the animal; in a higher still in man. In beings above man, we cannot doubt, it is to be found in some yet grander form. But in all these cases it is a gift from another: and having been given, it might be modified or withdrawn. Only the Self-Existent lives of right. He lives because He cannot but live. This is true of the Eternal Three, who yet are One. Hence our Lord says, "As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself." Thus, with the Eternal Giver, the Eternal Receiver is the Fountain and Source of life. With reference to all created beings, He is the Life — their Creator, their Upholder, their End (Colossians 1:16, 17). This then is the full sense of St. Peter's expression, "The Prince of Life." How could the very Lord and ,Source of life be subdued by death? If, for reasons of wisdom and mercy, He subjected the nature which He had made His own to the king of terrors, this was surely not in the course of nature; it was a violence to nature that this should be. And therefore when the object had been achieved, He would rise, St. Peter implies, by an inevitable rebound, by the force of things, by the inherent energy of His irrepressible life. From St. Peter's point of view, the real wonder would be if such a Being were not to rise. The pains of death were loosed — not by an extraordinary effort, as in your case or mine — but because it was impossible that He, the Prince of Life, should be holden of it. III. THIS NECESSITY, WHILE IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM STRICTLY PROPER TO HIS CASE, POINTS TO KINDRED NECESSITIES WHICH AFFECT HIS SERVANTS AND HIS CHURCH. Note — 1. The impossibility, for us Christians too, of being buried for ever in the tomb in which we shall each be laid at death. In this, as in other matters, "as He is, so are we in this world." To us as to Him, although in a different way, God has pledged Himself. In Him an internal vital force made resurrection from death necessary; in us there is no such intrinsic force, only a power guaranteed to us from without. He could say of the temple of His body, "I will raise it up in three days": we can only say that God will raise us up, we know not when. But this we do know (Romans 8:11). The law of justice and the law of love combine to create a necessity which requires "a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust." Death is not an eternal sleep; the tomb is not the final resting-place of the bodies of those whom we have loved. The empty sepulchre at Jerusalem on Easter morning is the warrant of a new life, strictly continuous with this, and, if we are faithful, much more glorious. 2. The principle of moral resurrections in the Church. As with the bodies of the faithful so it is with the Church. The Church is, according to St. Paul's teaching, Christ Himself in history (1 Corinthians 12:12; Ephesians 1:22, 23). But the force of this language is limited by the fact, equally warranted by Scripture — that the Church has in it a human element, which, unlike the humanity of Christ, is weak and sinful. Again and again in the course of her history large portions of the Christian Church have seemed to be dead and buried. But suddenly the tomb has opened; there has been a moral movement, a new spirit of devotion, social stir, literary activity, conspicuous self-sacrifice; and, lo! the world awakes to an uneasy suspicion that "John the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that mighty works do show forth themselves in him." The truth is that Christ has again burst His tomb and is abroad among men. So it was after the moral degradation of the Papacy in the tenth century; so it was after the recrudescence of Paganism by the Renaissance in the fifteenth; so it was after the triumph of misbelief and profanity in the seventeenth, and of indifference to vital religion in the eighteenth. 3. What is or ought to be the governing principle of our own personal life? If we have been laid in the tomb of sin, it ought to be impossible that we should be holden of sin. I say "ought to be," because, as a matter of fact, it is not impossible. God only is responsible for the resurrection of the Christian's body, and for the perpetuity of the Christian Church; and therefore it is impossible that either the Church or our bodies should permanently succumb to the empire of death. But God, who raises our bodies whether we will or not, does not raise our souls from sin, unless we correspond with His grace; and it is quite in our power to refuse this correspondence. That we should rise then from sin is a moral, not a physical, necessity; but surely we ought to make it as real a necessity as if it were physical (Romans 6:4). 4. A real resurrection with Christ will make and leave some definite traces upon life. Let us resolve this day to do or leave undone some one thing which will mark a new beginning: conscience will instruct us, if we allow it to do so. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: |
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