Thursday
Thursday
Jesus’s Exaltation
Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.
Acts 2:36
Peter now jumps straight from Jesus’s resurrection from the dead to his exaltation to God’s right hand. From this position of supreme honor and executive authority, having received the promise from the Father, Jesus has poured out the Spirit.
Peter again clinches his argument with an apt Old Testament quotation. As he has applied Psalm 16 to the Messiah’s resurrection, so he now applies Psalm 110 to the Messiah’s ascension:
The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
Acts 2:34–35
David did not ascend to heaven any more than he had been preserved from decay by resurrection. Yet he designates as “my lord” him whom Yahweh had instructed to sit at his right hand. Jesus had already applied this verse to himself when he was teaching in the temple courts. He asked the Jewish leaders how David could call the Messiah “Lord” while at the same time he was David’s son (Mark 12:35–37). It is significant that both the apostle Paul and the writer to the Hebrews also applied Psalm 110 to Jesus some time later (1 Cor. 15:25; Heb. 1:13).
Peter’s conclusion is that all Israel should be assured that this same Jesus, whom they had repudiated and crucified, God had now made “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Not, of course, that Jesus became Lord and Christ only at the time of his ascension, for throughout his public ministry he was (and indeed claimed to be) both. It is rather that now God had exalted him to be in reality and power what he already was by right.
For further reading: Acts 2:33–36