Acts 3:26 To you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities. Notice — I. THE BOLDNESS AND LOFTINESS OF THE CLAIM WHICH IS HERE MADE FOR JESUS CHRIST. 1. Long ago Peter had said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." And as long as Jesus Christ had been with them none of them had wavered in that belief; but the Cross shattered all that for a time. "We trusted that it had been He that should have redeemed Israel." There had been plenty of pretenders to the Messiahship (Acts 5:36), and death had disposed of all their claims. And so it would have been with Christ, unless He had risen from the dead. But the faith and hope in His Messiahship which had died with Him on the Cress, rose with Him to newness of life — as we see from such words as these. 2. Now the characteristic of these early addresses contained in chap. 2.-4., is the clear decisiveness with which they put forward Christ as the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy. The Cross and the Resurrect el poured a flood of light on the Old Testament. Almost every word here has reference to some great utterance of the past, which now for the first time Peter is beginning to understand. (1) "God, having raised up His Son Jesus." The reference is not to the resurrection, but to the prediction in ver. 22. Now that prediction, no doubt, refers to the prophetic order, and the word, "a prophet," is a collective, meaning a class. But the order does not come up to the ideal of the prophecy. For the appendix to the Book of Deuteronomy is plainly referring to the prophecy, when it sadly says, "And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses." The prophetic order, then, was a prophecy by reason of the very incompleteness of the noble men who composed it; not only by their words, but by their office and by their limitations, they pointed onwards to Him who not only, like the great law-giver, beheld God face to face, but from the beginning dwelt in the bosom of the Father and therefore declares Him perfectly to men. The manifold methods and fragmentary portions of the revelations to the prophetic order are surpassed by the one final and complete utterance in the Son, as noonday outshines the twilight dawn. (2) "His Son Jesus" means, literally, a "boy" or a "child," and like our own English equivalent, is sometimes used with the meaning of "a servant." For instance, we talk about "a boy," or "a maid," or "a man," meaning thereby to express the fact of service in a graceful and gentle way; to cover over the harsher features of authority. So the centurion in Matthew's Gospel, when he asks Christ to heal his little page, calls him "his boy," which our Bible properly translates as "servant." The reasons for adopting "servant" here rather than "son" are these: that the New Testament has a distinct expression for the "Son of God," which is not the word employed here: and that the Septuagint has the same expression which is employed here as the translation of Isaiah's, "the Servant of the Lord."(a) Now it is interesting to notice that this. expression as applied to Jesus Christ only occurs at this period. Altogether it occurs four times in these two chapters, and never again. Does not that look like the frequent repetition of a new thought which had just come to a man and was taking up his whole mind for the time? The Cross and the resurrection had opened his eyes to see that the dim majestic figure that looked out on him from the prophecy had had a historical existence in the dear Master whom he had lived beside; and we can almost perceive the gladness and surprise swelling his heart as he thinks — "Ah! then He is 'My servant whom I upheld.' Of whom speaketh the prophet this? Wonder of wonders, it is of Jesus of Nazareth, and we are His witnesses." If you turn to the second half of Isaiah's prophecies, you will find that they might almost be called the biography of the Servant of the Lord. And whilst I admit that the collective Israel is often intended by the title "the Servant of the Lord," there remain other parts of the prophecy which have distinctly a person for their subject, and which cannot apply to any but Him that died and lived again. For instance, is there anything which can correspond to the words, "when His soul shall make an offering for sin He shall see His seed"? Who is it whose death is the birth of His children, whom after His death He will see? Who is it whose death is His own voluntary act? Who is it whose death is a sacrifice for others' sin? Who is it whose days are protracted after death, and who carries out more prosperously the pleasure of the Lord after He has died? (b) But that name on Peter's lips is not only a reference to prophecy, but it is a very beautiful revelation of the impression of absolute perfection which Christ's character made. Here was a man who knew Christ through and through; and the impression made upon him was this: "All the time that I saw Him there was never a trace of anything but perfect submission to the Divine will." Jesus asserted the same thing for Himself. "I do always the things that please Him": "Which of you convinceth Me of sin?" Strange claims from one who is meek and lowly of heart! Stranger still, the world, not usually tolerant of pretensions to sanctity, has allowed and endorsed the claim. (c) So the claim rises up into yet loftier regions; for clearly enough, a perfect and stainless man is either an impossible monster or something more. And they that fully believe that God's will was absolutely and exclusively done by Jesus Christ, in all consistency must go a step further and say, "He that perfectly did the Father's will was more than one of us, stained and sinful men." II. THE DAWNING VISION OF A KINGDOM OF WORLD-WIDE BLESSINGS. 1. Peter and all his brethren had had their full share of Jewish prejudices. But I suppose that when they found the tongues of fire sitting on their heads they began to apprehend that they had been intrusted with a world-wide gospel. The words before us mark very clearly the growing of that consciousness, while yet the Jewish prerogative of precedence is firmly held. "Unto you first" — that was the law of the apostolic working. But they were beginning to learn that if there were a "first," there must also be a "second"; and that the very words of promise to the father of the nation which he had just quoted pointed to "all the nations of the earth" being blessed in the seed of Abraham. If Israel was first to receive the blessing, it was only that through Israel it might flow over into the whole Gentile world. That is the true spirit of "Judaism," which is so often spoken of as "narrow" and "exclusive." There is nothing clearer in the Old Testament than that the candle is lighted in Israel in order that it might shed light on all the chambers of the world. That was the genius of "Judaism," and that is Peter's faith here. 2. Then, again, what grand confidence is here! What a splendid audacity of faith it is for the apostle with his handful of friends to stand up in the face of his nation to say: "This Man, whom you hung on a tree, is going to be the blessing of the whole world." Why, it is like the old Roman story of putting up to auction in the Forum the very piece of land that the enemy's camp was pitched upon, whilst their tents were visible over the wall. And how did all that come? Was all that heroism and enthusiasm born out of the grave of a dead man? The resurrection was the foundation of it, and explains it, as nothing else can do. III. THE PURELY SPIRITUAL CONCEPTION OF WHAT CHRIST'S BLESSING IS. What has become of all the Jewish notions of the blessings of Messiah's kingdom? That had not been the kind of kingdom of which they had dreamed when they had sought to be first in it. But now the Cross had taught Peter that Him hath God raised up a Prince and a Saviour to give — strange gift for a prince to have in his hand — "to give repentance unto Israel, and remission of sins." 1. The heart, then, of Christ's work for rice world is deliverance from sin. That is what man needs most. There are plenty of other remedies offered for the world's ills — culture, art, new social arrangements, progress of science and the like, but the disease goes deeper than these things can cure. You may as well try to put out Vesuvius with a teaspoonful of cold water as to cure the sickness of humanity with anything that does not grapple with the fundamental mischief, and that is a wicked heart. There is only one Man that ever pretended He could deal with that, and it took Him all His power to deal with it; but He did it! And there is only one way by which He could deal with it, and that was by dying for it, and He did it! So He has conquered. "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?" When you can lead a crocodile out of the Nile with a bit of silk thread round his neck, you will be able to overcome the plague of the world, and that of your own heart, with anything short of the great sacrifice made by Jesus Christ. 2. The secret of most of the mistaken and partial views of Christian truth lies here, that people have not got into their hearts and consciences a sense of their own sinfulness. And so you get a tepid, self-sufficient and superficial Christianity; and you get ceremonials, and high and dry morality, masquerading under the guise of religion: and you gel Unitarian and semi-Unitarian tendencies in churches. But if once there came a wholesome, living consciousness of sin all such mutilated Christianity would crumble. 3. So I beseech you to put yourself in the right place to understand the gospel by the recognition of that fact. But do not stop there. It is a matter of life and death for you to put yourselves in the right place to receive Christ's richest blessing. You can only do that by feeling your own personal sin, and so coming to Him to do for you what you cannot do for yourselves, and no one but He can do for you. 4. And notice how strongly the text puts the individuality of this process. "Every one" — or rather "each one." The inadequate notions of Christianity that I have been speaking about are all characterised by this amongst other things: that they regard it as a social system diffusing social blessings and operating on communities by elevating the general tone and quickening the public conscience and so on. Christianity does do that. But it begins with dealing with men one by one. Christ is like a great King, who passing through the streets of His capital scatters His largesse over the multitude, but He reserves His richest gifts for the men that enter His presence chamber. Even those of us who have no close personal union with Him receive of His gifts. But for their deepest needs and their highest blessings they must go to Christ by their own personal faith — the flight of the solitary soul to the only Christ. (A. Maclaren, D. D) Parallel Verses KJV: 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. |
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