Acts of the Apostles (8)
Introduction
Jesus Christ was a murder victim, killed by the ungodly men who ran the ecclesiastical machinery of ancient Jerusalem. They thought that they had dispensed with the “Christ threat,” but He exploded their plans by coming back from the dead. Now this risen one had predicted that He would come back from the dead, as His enemies well knew (Matt. 27:63). This prediction had been fulfilled, as they also knew (Matt. 28:11-15). But in addition to this, He had also predicted that Jerusalem would be flattened within one generation (Matt. 24:34). This meant the city was now on death row, and the clock running down. The resurrection was therefore the guarantee that the destruction to follow was certain. They had killed a man whose predictions came true.
In this context, the great apostle Peter was offering the miscreants terms. He was giving them a chance to repent. Many did, but—in the teeth of the evidence—many others did not. And it was not a matter of a lack of evidence.
The Text
“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord; And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people. Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days. Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, and in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed. Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities” (Acts 3:19–26).
Summary of the Text
In the first half of this chapter, Peter has preached the objective facts of the gospel—the death and resurrection of the Christ of Israel. He now comes to an appeal for the subjective response to that gospel. He tells his listeners to repent, to be converted, with the result that their sins will be blotted out (including the egregious sin of crucifying Christ), and they will enjoy times of refreshing that will come straight from the presence of the Lord (v. 19). Notice that he says they must be converted, but a few moments later he also says that they are sons of the covenant. God will send Jesus Christ back to earth again, the same one just preached to you (v. 20)—but this Christ must remain in Heaven until the “times of restitution of all things” (v. 21). These times of restitution have been spoken about by God from the world’s beginning, and all through all of His holy prophets (v. 21).
Moses, for example, predicted that God would raise up a prophet like him, and the people were instructed to listen to everything He taught (v. 22). In Peter’s rendering, Moses also said that anybody who did not heed that prophet would be destroyed (v. 23). All the prophets, from Samuel on, were foretelling these days (v. 24). Those listening to Peter were children of these prophets, and they were children of the covenant that God made with their fathers (v. 25). This covenant was made when God spoke to Abraham, saying that in his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed (v. 25). This was a promise that had been made in Gen. 22:18. And so consequently God, having raised up Jesus, sent Him (through His apostles as messengers) to bless those who had murdered Him. That blessing would be in turning anyone from his iniquities (v. 26).
Faithful Prophecy
Prophecy should be understood as having two components. There is the forthtelling—where the prophet speaks to the people, in the name of God, telling them what their current spiritual condition actually is. But how can the people know whether this message is truly from God or not? This leads to the foretelling, the predicting. Fulfilled prophecy proves that the messenger of God is truly speaking on behalf of the God who is in full control of all history. They should listen to the evaluation of their moral condition because the one speaking is clearly authenticated by God. This is why Isaiah is able to taunt the idols. “Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: Yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together” (Isaiah 41:23).
Look at the showdown between Hananiah and Jeremiah (Jer. 28), revolving around just this point. The same was true of Micaiah and Zedekiah (1 Kings 22:15-25). “And Micaiah said, If thou return at all in peace, the Lord hath not spoken by me. And he said, Hearken, O people, every one of you” (1 Kings 22:28). False gods do not know the future, and the true God does. And because the false gods and their false teachers do not know what is going to happen in the future, it follows that they also don’t know what is going on in the present.
Immediately after the passage that Peter quotes, false prophecy is made a capital offense (Deut. 18:20). But how can we tell? the people ask. The answer is straightforward. “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him” (Deut. 18:22). People who play act at prophesy today look and sound nothing like this, and are just LARPing to a friendly audience.
This mastery of the future is a central qualifying characteristic of a true prophet. And Christ met that description.
The Great Unforced Error in Apologetics
A number of years ago, I traveled with the atheist Christopher Hitchens, debating him, and one of his arguments was that Christ thought the end of the world was going to happen . . . and then it didn’t. Christ was clearly mistaken, Hitch thought, and so why should we listen to Him? The atheist Bertrand Russell thought the same: Russell said this: “He certainly thought that his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that.”
But Matthew 24 was not about the end of the space/time continuum, but rather (very clearly) it was about the looming destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. “Your house will be left to you desolate” (Matt. 23:38). Not one stone will be left on another (Matt. 24:2). The disciples naturally ask when this was going to happen (Matt. 24:3)? Jesus says it will be within one generation (Matt. 24:34). People are confused because of the collapsing solar system word pictures (Matt. 24:29). But everywhere in the Old Testament that such imagery is used, it is always describing the destruction of a city, and never the destruction of the cosmos—as we discussed in the fifth sermon of this series, it is used of Babylon (Is. 13:10), of Edom (Is. 34:4), of the northern kingdom of Israel (Amos 8:9), of Egypt (Ezek. 32:7), and of Israel (Joel 2:28-32). Christ was predicting the military destruction of Jerusalem within one generation of His words, and that is exactly what happened. I have been to Jerusalem, and have seen Christless Jews praying at that very ruin—the Temple ruin that was God’s undeniable signature of authentication. Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the great prophet that Moses spoke of.
One of the great tragedies in the world of apologetics is that so many conservative believers have interpreted Matthew 24 in a way that robs Christ of His great vindication, and which robs Peter of the great and forceful point of this sermon. Listen to the prophet, and stand in awe, which is not the same as moving the fulfillment of His prophecy to the end of the world, well out of reach, and where no one understands it.
Christ the Faithful Prophet
So Peter is at pains to show that Christ was the prophet that Moses had predicted would come. For Moses truly said . . . this prophet would be raised up, and moreover, He would be raised up again. You must listen to Him about everything. And every soul that will not listen will be destroyed. Will you not come? Will you not believe? What more could you want? When God speaks to the people about the crying need for repentance, He does not traffic in ambiguities. There is nothing whatever that is ambiguous about the authority of the risen Christ. He is the one who predicted that He would come back from the dead, and He did. He is the one who ascended into the throne room of the Ancient of Days, and there was given universal dominion. He is the one who was told in the Second Psalm, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance.” He asked for them all, and having received that bequest, He took up the iron rod, also given to Him at that same time, and with that rod He shattered the Temple of God there in Jerusalem. You can still go there and look at the pieces. The shards of pottery are still all over the floor. And He did this so that all men might know that He is the promised Christ. He is the only one who can send times of refreshing, and forgiveness of sins.