During the first few Sundays after Pentecost, we’re pausing in the early chapters of the book of Acts. Last week, I completed the Pentecost Sunday sermon by speaking from Exodus 19:5–6 about our lives as God’s people under the gift of the Holy Spirit—ownership, vocation, and character. This Sunday, we look directly at Acts 2 and Peter’s address on the Day of Pentecost. We’ll not read all of it, but the latter part, Acts 2:22–36.

The Church’s First Sermon: In the narrative of the book of Acts, Peter preached this sermon only ten days after Jesus had left them to go back to the Father and closer to the events of Good Friday and the Third Day than we are to Easter Sunday.

What should Peter say in this first public declaration about the Christian faith?

The Apostles’ Creed? No, no doctrines. A code of behavior? No, no ethics. Proofs of the Christian faith? No, no arguments.

We might say that this sermon has five short parts and is basically a list of events! This is the church’s message!

1.

A Man (v 22) The message centers on a specific person, Jesus of Nazareth, a real person living in our time and our world. He lived in a time that is recent, as recorded time goes, and he had a name and an address in Roman Palestine. He is as real as Pontius Pilate and Caesar Tiberius.

2.

A Killing (v 23) This man was killed by the Romans, yet in a death that is part of God’s long plan and large design. That Jesus died, even Josephus and Tacitus have told us, but that it was part of a divine plan, that is the Christian Gospel. If you know your theology, you know that Jesus’ death was for our sins, yet Peter says none of that: just that God planned it.

3.

A Raising (vs 24–42) God brought this man through death into resurrected life. Peter’s metaphor for this involves “the pangs of death” (v 34)—that is, Jesus’ death birthed him into the new creation. It was not a resuscitation, a “near-death” experience, but a resurrection, out of and beyond death forever. This is the sermon’s central point, occupying nine of this reading’s fifteen verses. The closest Peter comes to argument is right here: “We are all witnesses” of this (v 32). After the hideous death of crucifixion, hundreds of people have seen Jesus alive in the last seven weeks.

4.

An Exaltation (vs 33a, 34–35) But that Risen Man is now gone. This is obvious, and Peter adds what is not obvious: He sits at God’s right hand. He is the God-man, the divine Son, the one who carried our human nature up to the very throne of God, and so “opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.”

5.

A Presence (v 33b) Here, for the first time in this entire statement, Jesus is the subject of a verb. Everywhere else, he is in the accusative case, the One to whom things happen—pointed out by God, killed by lawless men, raised up by God, exalted by God—but now, the absent One receives and pours out the power and presence that will take his place, the “promise of the Holy Spirit,” and once more, he appeals to what any person can plainly see: “you yourselves are seeing and hearing” (v 33).

There will be many statements of the church’s message. We rejoice in the hard, factual nature of this one and in the redemptive power of these events.