The first Christian Apology
I. The audience which St. Peter addressed were familiar with the main outlines of Jesus' life as recent and notorious events. We assume them also. For the truth of the theory that Christ was God the Church offers one test-proof the resurrection. Virtually, St. Peter does so in these early sermons of his. If God Almighty did raise the Lord Jesus from the dead into glorified and unchangeable life, as no other man ever was raised, then Jesus was the Son of God as He claimed to be, His life as Divine as it professed to be, His miracles genuine, His teaching true, His pretensions valid, His death innocent, His passion propitiatory and atoning. But if, which is the only other alternative, the alternative of unbelief, if God did not raise this Man, the Christian advocate throws up his case, our faith is false, our fancied Saviour an impostor, and we are in our sins like other men.
II. Even a Christ who became alive again is not enough, if He has so withdrawn Himself that in His absence He cannot help us. A Christ removed out of reach of men were as good as no Christ at all. Our Christ is not out of reach; withdrawn as He is from sensible contact with matter, into that spiritual world which on every side encompasses and perhaps touches this earthly life of ours, Christian faith feels herself more really near to Him now than when He was present to sight. It is because the Spirit of power, and purity, and peace flows into her, from her no longer accessible Head, that the Church exists, and possesses the unity of a spiritual organism, and does effective work as the bearer of a regenerating Gospel. Her word, her work, her very being, hinge on the fact that the Holy Ghost inhabits her. We have here an advantage over an apologist so early as St. Peter. In proof that his newly-departed Master had sent down the Holy Ghost, Peter had nothing to appeal to but one unique and startling phenomenon just happening in his hearers' presence. He had the rushing noise, the flames of fire, the foreign tongues. We have the gathered spiritual experience of eighteen centuries. Christianity is not so small or so new a thing that it should be hard for any man who tries to track its working in detail on innumerable men, and gather up even its secret fruits. The Gospel is not a dead history, but a living power. It is not far off, but nigh us. God's breath is in it, and moral miracles attest the perennial contact with our sunken race of a strong Divine hand a hand more strong than sin's always at work to uplift and to heal.
J. Oswald Dykes, Sermons,p. 1.
References: Acts 2:21. Outline Sermons to Children,p. 214.Acts 2:22. G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 83.Acts 2:22-24. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 321.Acts 2:23. C. J. Vaughan, The Church of the First Days,vol. ii., p. 95.