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I. THE WORK PRESCRIBED BY THE SAVIOUR. The end of this work is, that sinners should be saved. This practical end we must ever keep in view.

1. The means here prescribed is preaching — preaching repentance and remission of sins. This ordinance of preaching, even in the general sense of public religious teaching, is all but peculiar to the religion of Christ.

2. The power indicated in our text is the power of truth, of the true Word of God. And here we see the ultimate source of our strength, in the revealed will of God. The so-called crusaders, in their wild enterprise for the recovery of God-forsaken Palestine from the infidels, were animated and sustained by the battle-cry, "God wills it." In seeking to win the lost world to its life in God, from the bondage of sin and death and hell, we have to cheer us and sustain us the Bible truth, "God wills it." For the work which He has ordained shall certainly be done (Isaiah 55:10-13). This glorious work the gospel is fitted instrumentally to achieve by its nature as true and Divine, "the Word of God."

3. Not only the gospel is true and Divine; its Teacher is true and Divine. It is ordained in this Will that the preaching shall be "in the name" of Jesus the Christ.

II. THE ORDER IN WHICH THIS WORK IS TO BE UNDERTAKEN: "BEGINNING AT JERUSALEM." Not passing by Jerusalem, nor coming to her in the last place, but "beginning at Jerusalem": so runs the Will.

1. They are the nearest, most easily reached.

(1) In place. To the apostles elect Jerusalem was literally the nearest point of Judaea, and Judaea of Palestine, and Palestine of the world. And even beyond Judaea and Palestine, in every important city of the Gentile world, there was a Judaea and Jerusalem, a Jewish quarter and synagogue, more accessible and convenient for public religious teaching and discussion than any other quarter and temple. This is one of his points of resemblance to the Scot — his nation, far more than ours, is the ubiquitous nation. All the world over, the Jew is nearest in place.

(2) They are nearest in mind. The wood has first to be hewn in the savage forest, and the stones to be quarried from the bowels of the earth, before the heathen mind can furnish as much as an altar for our faith to be laid on. But in the mind of the Jew the altar is built to our hands; the wood is there upon it, ready to be kindled to a blaze.

2. They are, when found and saved, fitted to be the most precious, as instruments of diffusing the gospel to others. I have already referred to their lot of ubiquity, showing that they are by position an army in actual occupation of the world. I might add that they have a natural gift of tongues, being familiar with the languages of all the nations among which they are dispersed. And we have seen that they have a theological knowledge, derived from Old Testament revelation, such that they need only to know Jesus as the incarnate Word in order to be ready-made preachers of Him in the gospel.

3. They are the worst. They are the chief of sinners, peculiarly the children of the devil (John 8:44). No other nation has sinned as they have sinned, so long and deeply and desperately, against the light of God's offered mercy, first in "Moses and all the prophets," then in the person of Jesus the Christ, and finally in the apostles and evangelists throughout the new dispensation of the Spirit. Therefore we ought to preach the gospel of salvation "to the Jews first." For, first, in so doing we act in the spirit of the gospel as a dispensation of healing mercy: we illustrate the abounding grace of the great Physician, who hastens to go first with His remedy where the malady is deadliest. And second: when Jerusalem has yielded at last, and believed and repented for salvation, what shall her actual salvation be but spiritual resurrection to the world? For she will love much because she has been forgiven much.

(J. Macgregor, D. D.)

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KJV: And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

WEB: As they said these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, "Peace be to you."