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 Even a Christ who became alive again is not enough, if He has so withdrawn Himself that in His absence He cannot help us.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 Our Christ is not out of reach; withdrawn as He is from sensible contact with matter, into that spiritual world which on every side encompasses and perhaps touches this earthly life of ours, Christian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.
The Church's witness for Christ:
I. Christ hid in heaven needs a body as well as a spirit by which to manifest His living rule. He needs a body through which He may make Himself intelligible to men, and even to unbelieving men; make Himself felt, certified, effective, enduring. This body He must have, and that body He has with pain secured Himself. And now into that prepared body His Spirit issues from Him, to gather it up into organised life, to inhabit it, to unify its capacities, to regulate its aims, to quicken its impulses, to fix its offices, to direct its gifts, to build up its intercourse, to feed and govern its entire frame. The Church is the witnessing body: it proves Christ's case, it testifies to His victory: and this it does first before God the Father. It manifests His glory by justifying His method of redemption; it bears witness before God that He has not sent His Son in vain; and secondly, it has to witness in the face of men, to prove, to convict, to convince, that even an unbelieving world may believe that the Father did send the Son.
II. And in accomplishing this conversion of the world it has two points this Church to prove and testify first, that Christ is alive and at work now today on earth, and that He can be found of them that believe, and manifest Himself to those who love Him; and secondly, that He is so by virtue of the deed done once for all at Calvary, by which the Prince of this world was judged and the world was overcome, and man given access to God. What proofs can the Church offer for these two points? It has three proofs to give. (1) Its own actual life. This is its primary witness that Christ is now alive at the right hand of God the Father. Its one prevailing and unanswerable proof is, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Christ is alive, otherwise I should not be alive as you see me this day. (2) This personal life of Christ in His Church verifies and certifies to the world the reality of that old life on earth, of that death on Calvary, of that resurrection on Olivet. The living Church bears a book about with it, the Gospel book, the Apostolic witness, the witness of those who so beheld, tasted, handled the Word of Life. (3) Again, the body carries with it a third witness, not only the Apostolic record, but the Apostolic rite, the act commanded by the dying Christ to be done for ever as a memorial and a witness until His coming again. The present life, the unshaken record, the memorial act these are the three prevailing witnesses by which the body testifies to the resurrection of the Lord.
H. Scott Holland, Family Churchman,June 30th, 1886.
References: Acts 2:32; Acts 2:33. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p 189. Acts 2:33. Bishop Barry, First Words in Australia,p. 195.Acts 2:33-36. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 480.