Ask what power it was that catapulted the early Christians on to the stage of world history, and Luke will unhesitatingly reply: the resurrection of Jesus, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Ask again for what purpose the early Christian community came into existence, and Luke will once more reply: to witness to the resurrection of Jesus. Luke everywhere insists on this basic historical fact. This was the task, he tells us in his very first chapter, to which the risen Lord appointed his disciples (Acts 1:8). This was the purpose for the election of Matthias: to ‘become with us a witness to his [Christ’s] resurrection’ (Acts 1:22). Thereafter, time and time again, he repeats that the prime function of the Christian community was to witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.4
This is both remarkable and significant. Ask Buddhists, for instance, what the source of their religion is, and they will say: ‘Gautama Buddha and his Enlightenment’. But at [p 10] the time of his death, the Buddha denied that he himself was the means of salvation. It was his teaching that was all important. And the purpose of his followers has always been to practise and propagate that teaching.
The early Christians, by contrast, give a very different account of themselves. When Jesus died, they still possessed his wonderful ethical teachings. But, in spite of that, they felt that Jesus himself was a failure. He was not the deliverer that they thought he was going to be (Luke 24:19–21); and they cowered together in a bolted upper room for fear that they too might be arrested and executed.
What transformed them? Not a new insight into the value of Christ’s ethical teachings. It was his resurrection that did it! And when they confronted the public, it was not primarily Christ’s ethical teaching that they preached—there is scarcely one sentence from the Sermon on the Mount in the whole of Acts—it was the resurrection of Christ and all its glorious implications.
Now the Christian Church is a fact of history; and, from an historical point of view, its origin has to be accounted for. Obviously it did not arise causeless and purposeless out of nothing. If we refuse to believe in the resurrection, and therefore reject the only cause and purpose that the early Christians themselves give for their own origin and existence, it leaves a gaping hole in history that no other suggested cause can convincingly fill. Without the resurrection, the Christians would have lacked the courage to confront the world; and, on their own confession (1 Cor 15:1–20), they would have had no gospel to confront the world with.
As it is, what they preached was the good news about Jesus of Nazareth: ‘that Christ died for our sins in accordance [p 11] with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures’ (1 Cor 15:3–4). Now the resurrection of just any man at all, no matter who he was, would certainly be a startling piece of news; but it would not necessarily be gospel for the whole of mankind! The resurrection of Jesus is both credible and gospel for the whole world, because he—though certainly human like the rest of us—was not just any man at all: he was the climax of the age-long process of God’s self-revelation to mankind.
In his first major sermon (Acts 2:25–31), the apostle Peter identifies him as the descendant of Israel’s ancestral king David, and, in his second (Acts 3:12–26), as a physical and spiritual heir of Israel’s patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Before we dismiss these identifications as irrelevant for the purpose of defining a universal gospel, we should notice the prominence with which other New Testament writers advertise these facts. Matthew informs his largely Jewish readers that Jesus Christ was the Son of David, the Son of Abraham (Matt 1:1). More remarkable still, Paul, in his masterly explanation of the gospel written to the Christians in Rome, capital of the imperial Caesars, insists on identifying the gospel as good news ‘concerning [God’s] Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh’ (Rom 1:1–3).
What apparent incongruity is this? The Roman Empire was still young when Jesus was born. After the convulsions of the civil war that brought the Roman Republic to its end, Augustus had managed to establish an empire that had largely pacified the world and was destined to last for a thousand years and more. It must have seemed ridiculous, [p 12] if not offensive, to be told that not the Roman emperors but Jesus of Nazareth from the apparently defunct royal house of a tiny and sometimes troublesome nation on the edge of the empire, was God’s appointed Saviour of the world!
Nonetheless, the early Roman governors and emperors were nobly tolerant of Christianity, as Luke himself in all fairness points out, even if sometimes they mocked Christians, as Festus mocked Paul, claiming they were mentally disturbed religious fanatics. As Christianity spread, however, later emperors—imagining that it was subversive of the State and contrary to its ideologies—tried to suppress it, making persistence in Christianity a capital offence against the State. The more brutal of them fed Christians to the lions.
And yet history has taught us its undeniable lessons. The great Caesars and their mighty empire have long since disappeared. None follows them now, none obeys them. Yet Christianity has proved irrepressible, underlining the truth of the advice that Gamaliel gave to his fellow counsellors on the Jewish Sanhedrin, during their first attempt to suppress Christianity:
Keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. (Acts 5:38–39)
To this day, regimes which have neglected this advice, and have tried to suppress Christianity, have one by one either disappeared or have had to be dismantled. Yet [p 13] increasing millions gladly bear allegiance to Jesus as the living Lord.
But there was another scandal attached to the Christian gospel which only the resurrection could overcome. Christ, while he lived, certainly claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of David. At the same time, he forewarned his disciples that he would not immediately ascend to his triumphal throne. He must first die and rise again. They found it incomprehensible. For they, like us, found it difficult to take in what they did not want to hear. Their concept of a Saviour was modelled on an inadequate understanding of King David, more in line with the comparatively recent exploits of the Maccabean freedom fighters. They looked for a Messianic king who would expel the hated imperialist forces of occupation, champion the poor, and eliminate the quislings who had exploited the Roman tax system for their own gain.
So, a Messiah who, instead of conquering his enemies, allowed himself apparently to be defeated by a corrupt and evil political system, was a contradiction in terms. When Jesus was arrested, they forsook him and fled, and when he was crucified their hopes were shattered (Luke 24:20–21). But the resurrection of Christ not only restored their faith in him: it infinitely enlarged their concept of salvation. Up to that point their analysis of the human problem had been far too shallow.
In the first place, it had been limited to their own narrow Jewish nationalistic interests; whereas Jesus was to be a deliverer for all mankind from whatever nation. Secondly, they had overlooked the fact that political activism and human warfare are very blunt instruments for [p 14] putting right the injustices of the world. Great revolutionary movements have rarely managed to eliminate only the evil and leave the innocent unscathed: usually it has been the reverse. Moreover, professed campaigners for justice have sometimes eliminated millions on the basis of ideologies whose inevitable demise has betrayed the horrific cost in human lives at which their empires were built. If justice is ever to be done to these innumerable millions who have died, then death itself must be overcome.
The resurrection is God’s triumphant proclamation that death is not the end, that the injustices of the past are not forgotten, that evil will not for ever triumph. As Peter points out to the crowd (Acts 2:33–36), King David himself had foreseen the necessity of this: if Messiah, like all other men, were to be abandoned permanently to the grave, then there was no ultimate end to the injustices of earth except one eternal, indiscriminate, appallingly unjust grave. In raising Jesus Christ from the dead, God has given advance notice and assurance to all men that death is not the end, that injustices will not for ever triumph. God will one day judge the world in righteousness by that same Jesus Christ (Acts 17:31).
Peter, in fact, began his sermon by pointing out that the prophet Joel, along with all the other prophets, had fortified his hearers with the promise of that day of universal judgment: the ‘great and glorious Day of the Lord’, he called it (Acts 2:20). The resurrection of Jesus Christ confirmed that promise, and Peter preached it as gospel to the nation.
There is, of course, an understandable objection to this claim, and it goes like this: If all this is true, why has it not happened yet? Why has evil been allowed to run unchecked [p 15] so long and to rise to such monstrous proportions in our own century? The answer once more is to be found in what Peter pointed out to the crowd. The programme that God originally gave through David, the ancient king and prophet, had never been that the Messiah, after his death and resurrection, would proceed immediately to put down evil by force throughout the whole world. He would ascend to God’s heavenly throne, and be there until, at his second coming, all his enemies would be put under his feet (Ps 110:1–2; Acts 2:34–35).
And we ourselves can see why this had to be so. The promise of a coming judgment is not unqualified good news for us all. For while we have all been sinned against, we have all personally sinned, and that not only against other people but against God. And if no remedy can be found for this, then the coming judgment would spell disaster for us and for the whole human race.
It is this that gives universal significance to Luke’s next identification of the gospel. Isaiah the prophet had long since indicated that the Messiah had another God-given role to fulfil. Before he came as king to judge the world, he was to come as God’s Servant who would not only suffer innocently at man’s hands, without retaliation—that would have left evil forever triumphant, and would have saved nobody—but who would take on himself the penalty of the sins of the world, suffer and die as a sacrifice for sin, so that men and women might be forgiven, justified, and accepted with God (Isa 52:13–53:12).
It was to this that Jesus himself referred, when he remarked to his apostles: ‘The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many’ [p 16] (Matt 20:28). It was to this that Peter referred when, to the very men who had shouted for Christ’s crucifixion, he preached Jesus as God’s perfect servant through whom they might find forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation with God.5
But how were Peter’s hearers to know that it was all true? They had not seen the risen Lord, as the apostles had. They could, of course, have gone to the tomb and found it empty. They could have investigated all the other evidence, both material and human. But, on top of that, there was evidence of another kind.
Luke tells us that it was nothing less than this: the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ had opened the way for that unprecedented invasion of the Holy Spirit of God into our world, that Joel the ancient prophet had predicted 800 years before. The evidence for it was at two levels. At one level, it was already assailing the ears of the polyglot crowd, drawn from all over the world to Jerusalem on the occasion of the Jewish Feast of Pentecost. For the Holy Spirit on that occasion had empowered the early Christians miraculously to speak in foreign languages which they had not learned, and did not understand, in such a way that those in the crowd who were native speakers of those languages could understand what was being said. The point and the purpose of that unusual miracle was clearly to demonstrate that both the message which the apostles preached, and the convicting power by which they spoke, came from God himself.
At another level, the effectiveness of the evidence depended on their willingness to conduct a personal [p 17] experiment. They were, as Peter pointed out, being offered the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). The reception of him into their hearts would open up vigorous personal fellowship with God, that would provide incontrovertible evidence that Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, was indeed the Saviour for the world. For this there were terms and conditions of course; and of that we shall speak in our next chapter.
Notes
4 See Acts 2:32; 3:15; 5:30–32; 10:39–41; 13:31; 17:3, 31; 26:16.
5 Acts 3:13—the Greek should be translated ‘servant’, and not ‘son’.
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