Tuesday
Tuesday
Jesus’s Death
This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you … put him to death.
Acts 2:23
In this first Christian sermon ever preached, which we are considering this week, Peter moved straight from the life to the death of Jesus. The contrast is very marked, for “this man,” whom God had accredited by miracles, they had put to death. More remarkable still is the way Peter attributed the responsibility for Jesus’s death. On the one hand, Jesus had been “handed over” to them, not by Judas (although the same verb is used in the Gospels in reference to Judas’s betrayal) but “by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge.” On the other hand, they, “with the help of wicked men” (v. 23) (presumably the Romans), put him to death by nailing him to the cross. Thus the same event, namely the death of Jesus by crucifixion, was attributed by Peter simultaneously to the purpose of God and the wickedness of men.
No fully developed doctrine of the atonement is yet expressed; it was too early for that. Nevertheless, already important indicators have begun to appear, due no doubt to Jesus’s teaching about his death, which he would have given the apostles after his resurrection. Firstly, Peter already understood that in some way through Jesus’s death God’s saving purpose was being worked out.
Secondly, Peter had also begun to understand that human evil and divine providence were not incompatible with each other. God forwards his purposes even through the wickedness of men.
Thirdly, Peter describes Jesus as having been “put … to death by nailing him to the cross” (v. 23). Not long afterward, however, in Peter’s second speech, he will describe Jesus’s death not as being nailed to the cross but as being hanged on a tree (Acts 5:30). And that will be a profoundly theological statement, indicating that in his death Jesus bore in our place the curse of the broken law. As Paul was later to write, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law [that is, from the judgment that the law pronounces on those who break it] by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). Thus the apostles Peter and Paul are at one in seeing the cross as a tree, the place of a curse.
For further reading: Galatians 3:10–14