Summary:

Peter and John gave a lame man a new life when they healed him at age 40 (v. 22).  40 is the number of testing (Ex. 24:18; Num. 14:33,34).  So the healing of this 40-year-old means Israel was being tested to see if they’d accept the Spirit through the message of the Spirit-filled disciples (Acts 2:4).

The lame man lay each day outside the temple, but didn’t have the strength to enter (Acts 3:2), a type of the nation Israel, who was just outside the kingdom, but didn’t have the strength to enter it.  But the only reason the people of Israel were being tested is because they failed to receive the Lord’s offer to escort them into the kingdom, typified by the lame man that He healed (John 5:1-8).  He was lame 38 years; the apostles healed a man “above forty,” or 41.  That three-year difference symbolized the Lord’s 3-year ministry.  They could have been offered the kingdom 3 years earlier!

Peter told the Jews to save themselves from that generation (Acts 2:40) just like the Jews in Moses’ day had to be saved from the generation that died in the wilderness (Num. 32:13).

Most Christians today would pray, “Lord protect us from the rulers who are threatening us,” but the apostles didn’t.  They started their prayer by acknowledging God was creator of all things and could save them if He wanted (Acts 4:24), just like Hezekiah did when the King of Syria threatened him (II Ki. 19:15). But they didn’t ask for deliverance like he went on to do, for they knew where they stood in God’s program.

We know that because they quoted Psalm 2 (Acts 4:25,26). This shows they knew they were living in the time when the rulers of the Jews would get together with the kings of the Gentiles to kill the Lord.  They call Him God’s “child” (4:27) to emphasize the enormity of Israel’s crime.  Only a monster kills a child! They were telling God they understood why He was about to judge the world, as Psalm 2 went on to predict.

The Lord had to die one way or another, as they point out in Acts 4:28, but God wanted them to recognize their messiah and execute Him in faith, not crucify Him in unbelief.  That didn’t give the Jews or Gentiles any excuse for crucifying Him though, any more than it excused Judas (Luke 22:22).

The disciples asked God to notice the threatenings of the leaders for the same reason Hezekiah asked Him, to get Him to do something about it (Acts 4:29 cf. Isa. 37:17,20). So why didn’t they ask for deliverance like he did?  It was because, like him, they knew where they stood in God’s program.

Hezekiah lived under the law, which said that if Israel was good, God would save them from their enemies.  They’d been good, so he asked God to keep His promise, and He did (Isa. 37:26).  But the apostles knew the Lord had said it was time for them to be killed (Mt. 24:3), not delivered.

Of course, not all believers will die in the Tribulation.  So why didn’t they ask to be among those who will be delivered?  It was because they knew it was more important to ask for boldness (Acts 4:29).

God hasn’t promised to deliver you from anyone’s threatenings either.  In fact, the apostles were wrestling with their earthly rulers while we wrestle with the fallen rulers of Satan’s unseen kingdom (Eph. 6:12) who teach “doctrines of devils” through preachers (I Tim. 4:1).  So we should ask for the same boldness Paul did (Eph. 6:18,19).

As we read on, we see the disciples still called the Lord “child” (Acts 4:30) because they preached the resurrected Christ, and resurrection is a new birth (cf. Acts 13:33).  It was their way of saying they were thinking like God, that the slate had been wiped clean, and Israel was being given a fresh chance to receive the “child” mentioned in Isaiah 9:6.

The apostles prayed for miracles to help them be bold (Acts 4:30) because the Lord had promised to give them (Mark 16:17-20).  Do you see the importance of praying according to God’s will?  If not, notice that when the Lord was threatened He prayed, then chose the 12 (Lu. 6:11-13). That means He probably didn’t pray to be delivered from them. Since He knew He had to die, He likely prayed for help choosing the 12 as Isaiah 8:14-16 told Him to do after they rejected Him.

Video of this message is available on YouTube: Life Begins at Forty – Acts 4:22-31

Summary:

“Boldness” (4:13) means courage, the thing the apostles were showing when they went right back to preaching Christ after being jailed for preaching Christ.  Just 40 days earlier they weren’t so bold (Mt. 26:56).  But the Lord had told them that if He rose, they’d rise too (John 11:25), so they no longer feared death. We don’t have to fear death either (II Cor. 4:14).

Why did Israel’s religious leaders marvel that “unlearned and ignorant” apostles could be bold?  To answer that, we have to figure out what they meant by “unlearned.”  They called the Lord unlearned (John 7:14) because He hadn’t been to their schools.  But people said He was bold (Jo. 7:25,26) because He was able to use the Bible against leaders who claimed to be experts in the Bible (John 7:23).

And that’s what the apostles did too (Acts 4:10,11).  The Jews would know what the psalm they quoted meant.  They knew God promised to lay the foundation stone of Messiah in Israel (Isa. 28:16) for them to build the kingdom church on.  But they also knew from Psalm 118:22 that God predicted they wouldn’t build the church on Him, but that God would make Him the cornerstone of the church anyway.

And when the apostles quoted the same psalm the Lord did to answer the rulers (Mt. 21:23,42), the leaders knew they had “been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).  Nobody since Him had been able to tie them up in knots using their own Bible like the apostles were doing here!

Not even the Lord’s enemies could say anything against the healing of the lame man (Acts 4:14), for they knew it was a legitimate miracle.  Compare that to modern “healings” you see on TV, where you don’t know the person being healed, so you don’t know if he was really sick or injured.

Israel’s religious leaders decide to have a closed-door meeting (4:15), in which they confessed they didn’t know what to do with the apostles (4:16), for they had performed a “notable” miracle, and everyone in town knew it.  So they decide to tell them to stop preaching Christ (4:17).  Obviously, nothing had changed since the Lord’s day, when those same leaders refused to believe, and didn’t want anyone else to believe either (Mt. 23:13).

After the private meeting was done, Israel’s leaders called the apostles back in (v. 18).  But how did Luke (who wrote the Book of Acts) know what they said in that closed-door meeting?  The Spirit could have told him (cf. II Kings 6:12), but it is also possible that some of those leaders later got saved (Acts 6:7) and told Luke.

Now since Israel was a theocracy, those religious leaders were also their civil leaders, and God’s people are always supposed to obey our civil leaders.  But Peter and John refused to (Acts 4:19), for they knew that we have to draw the line and say no when our leaders tell us to disobey God (Ex. 1:15-17; Dan. 3:18; 6:10).

Notice that neither Daniel nor his three Hebrew friends need-ed to do what their leaders said to do.  They didn’t need to go behind closed doors to talk over whether or not they should obey the command to disobey God.  Obeying God had become like second nature to them.  How?  By learning God’s precepts (Ps. 119:104).  If you’ll learn God’s precepts, obeying God can become like second nature to you too!

Peter went on to tell the leaders that even if God hadn’t commanded him to preach Christ, he couldn’t help but speak about the lame men he’d seen the Lord heal, etc. (Acts 4:20).

Fear of the people saved the apostles from these leaders (v. 21), just as it had the Lord (Mt. 21:45,46).

The man they healed hadn’t walked in forty years (Acts 4:22).  We don’t have miracles like that in the dispensation of grace.  But what we do have is examples of men who haven’t walked with God for forty, fifty, sixty years or more—and then get saved and begin to walk with Him.

If you’ve been saved many years but haven’t been walking with God, why not start now?  You’ll be eternally glad you did.

Video of this message is available on YouTube: Apostolic Boldness – Acts 4:13-22

Summary:

It was the job of the priests (4:1) to teach the people (Lev. 10:8-11), so they didn’t like it when the apostles taught them.  “The captain of the temple” (4:1) was supposed to keep everyone but priests out of the temple (II Chron. 23:1-9), but the leaders in Israel used them and their weapons as “muscle” to arrest the Lord (Lu. 22:52) and the apostles here (4:2).  So the captain didn’t like the apostles preaching Christ, for it made him look bad for arresting Him.  And “the Sadducees” didn’t like it when they preached “the resurrect-tion” (4:2) because they didn’t believe in the resurrection (Acts 23:8).

When the Lord was here on earth, most of His grief came from the Pharisees, because they sat in Moses’ seat (Mt. 23:2), and they preferred Moses to the Lord (Jo. 9:16,28).  So the Pharisees led the way in arresting the Lord (Jo. 18:3).  But when the apostles preached the resurrection of Christ, the Sadducees took over as God’s chief opponents.

Resurrection “from” the dead (4:1) is when one is raised from among the dead and the rest of the dead stayed dead (Jo. 12:1).  Resurrection “of” the dead comes when a whole group of people are raised (Jo. 5:29).  That shows how carefully and accurately the Bible is written.  By the way, men don’t like to believe in resurrection, for it means they’ll be judged (Acts 10:40-42; 17:30,31).

The arrest of the apostles was the response of Israel’s leaders to Peter’s offer of the kingdom (Acts 3:19-21).  But the apostles weren’t surprised, for the Lord had warned them this would happen (Jo. 15:20), unless they could figure out a way to preach the truth without making men mad.  But that would have made them greater than the Lord, for He couldn’t figure that out, for it can’t be done!  Men hate the truth!

But I’m sure the apostles didn’t care they were arrested after they heard 5,000 men alone believed (4:4).  That large group, plus the 3,000 that believed earlier (2:41), means they were getting way more results than the Lord got (1:15), something the Lord also predicted (Jo. 12:24).

This is just a sample of the awesome victory God will win over the devil because of what Christ did. He will “spoil” the devil (Isa. 53:11) of his captives (49:24,25 cf. Mt. 12:28,29).

Annas and Caiaphas (Acts 4:5,6) were both high priest at that time (Lu. 3:2), perhaps because they were related (Jo. 18:12) and the office was in transition.  When they asked the apostles by what “power” and “name” they healed the lame man, that shows the word power here means authority (cf. Ro. 13:1).  They were the authority in Israel, and they knew they hadn’t given the apostles authority to heal anyone.

You’ll notice they asked by what authority the apostles did “this” (4:7), afraid to charge them with healing a man!  But Peter called them on it (Acts 5:8,9)!  He was filled with the Spirit when he spoke (5:8) just as the Lord promised (Lu. 12:11,12).  We can’t speak with the Spirit inspiring our every word as he did, but we can speak graciously (Col. 4:6) which is just as important as speaking accurately. 

Peter knew they didn’t like hearing that their Messiah was from Nazareth (4:10 cf. Jo. 1:46), and that they had killed Him, and that God had raised Him, but he said all those things anyway (4:10) to bring them under conviction.  He then quoted Psalm 118 (4:11), the same verse the Lord quoted when they asked Him by what authority He did what He did (Mt. 21:23-42).  The Jews knew God promised to send a foundation stone that they were supposed to build the kingdom on (Isa. 28:16).  They refused Him, but God made Him the cornerstone of the kingdom church anyway.

Now when Peter concluded his message by saying that the name of Jesus was the only name by which men could be saved (4:12), we use that verse to say men can’t be saved by Buddha or Mohammed, etc.  But the Jews wouldn’t have thought salvation was in the name of Zeus or any of the other false gods of the day.  No, the leaders had asked the apostles by what “name” they’d healed the lame man, so they responded by saying the name of Jesus healed him and saved him.  The Lord did what they could see (heal his lameness) to prove He could do what they couldn’t see (save him) as He did in Matthew 9:5,6.

Video of this sermon is available on YouTube: Enter the Big Shots – Acts 4:1-12

Summary:

To convince the Jews that Jesus was their Christ, Peter calls Moses to the witness stand (3:22) because the Jews loved Moses (Jo. 9:28).  But in clinging to Moses and rejecting God’s new prophet, they were making a dispensational error.  You’d think they would have followed the Lord, since their favorite prophet Moses predicted His coming, as Peter says here, but they didn’t.

Of course, it was mostly Israel’s rulers who didn’t believe the Lord was a prophet.  Many of the people did(Mt. 21:11). And they knew he was a prophet like Moses for He too could heal leprosy (Ex. 4:5-7 cf. Mt. 11:5).

Moses was a type of Christ in many ways, ways that we’ll consider when Stephen talks about them in Acts 7, when we get there in our study.  But here, notice that Peter said that Moses predicted this prophet would arise from “your brethren,” speaking of the people of Israel.  This means He’d be Jewish, and everyone knew the Lord was a Jew!

But the Lord was also like the Prophet that Moses said would come in that Moses said of Him, “Him shall ye hear in all things.”  Now, we know he didn’t mean all the Jews would hear Him, for Moses also said what would happen to the Jews who didn’t hear Him (Acts 3:23).  Having your soul cut off from among the people meant physical death if you disobeyed Moses (Lev. 23:30 cf. Num. 15:32-36).  But it also meant spiritual death, for the Jews had to obey the law to be saved.  And not hearing the Prophet like Moses also meant spiritual death, of course.  But it also meant physical death.  Remember, had the dispensation of grace not interrupted prophecy, those who didn’t hear the Lord would have died at the Second Coming of Christ (II Thes. 1:7,8).

Peter didn’t quote the part where Moses explained that he made that promise “according” to the time when the Jews feared to hear God’s voice, so insisted Moses hear it for them and relay God’s Word in a less scary way (Deut. 18:15,16 cf. Deut. 5:17-28).  Moses did, but he did it again when he died and came back, so to speak, in the Lord, the Prophet like Moses.  The Lord was way less scary (Isa. 42:1-3).  The Jews were used to the idea one of their leaders could return (Mal. 4:4,5)

But did Elijah return personally?  The Lord said he returned in John the Baptist (Mt. 17:12,13).  The apostles asked about Elijah cuz they’d just seen a vision of Elijah (Mt. 17:1-5), and wanted to know why the Lord had come (the prophet like Moses) but Elijah hadn’t, if Elijah was to come “first.”  But Elijah had come, and so had Moses—in Christ!

On the mount of transfiguration, God was recreating the scene when the Jews feared to hear Him (Lu. 9:30).  He was saying, as it were, “Here’s the Moses you asked for, hear Him.  He’s the one I said you’d hear!”  Peter quoted Moses, knowing that the Jews he was speaking to would remember all that, and would know that God sent them Jesus in answer to their request.  Everyone knew that prophecy (Jo. 1:45)!

Moses was also a king (Deu. 33:4,5) and a priest (Ps. 99:5,6), making him a prophet, a priest and a king—like the Prophet God raised up like him!

The Jews at Pentecost weren’t the literal children of the prophets (Acts 3:25).  Ephesians 2:3 calls unbelievers “children of wrath” partly because they’ll be the recipients of God’s wrath, and the Jews at Pentecost were the recipients of the prophecy the prophets made of those days (Acts 3:24), the days when they’d be offered the kingdom (3:19-21).

They were also “the children of the covenant” God made with Moses (Gen. 12:1-3), the covenant where God promised to bless the world with salvation through Israel.  But Israel had to “first” be saved, and have their sins turned away (Acts 3:26), because God intended to use Israel to reach the world with salvation, and He insists that His representatives be saved!  That’s why the angel said that the Savior was born to Israel, but that was good news for all people (Lu. 2:10,11).

And someday, that’s how it will go down.  God will save Israel, and the nations will be blessed with salvation through the people of Israel (Zech. 8:13-23).

Video of this sermon is available on YouTube: A Man Like Moses – Acts 3:22-26

Summary:

“Wot” (3:17) means to know (Gen. 21:26).  But where’d Peter get the idea the Jews didn’t know what they were doing when they killed the Lord?  From the Lord! (Lu. 23:34).  They could have known they were crucifying their God, the prophets described Him so well, but they didn’t.  So Peter reduced the charge against Israel from murder to man-slaughter (cf. Deut. 19:4-6).  Murderers had to die (Num. 35:16) but manslayers could flee to a city of refuge (35:10-30).

Israel’s people didn’t know He was God because they didn’t know their Bibles (John 7:25-27 cf. Micah 5:2).  Israel’s rulers didn’t know He was their Christ because He was from Galilee, and they thought no prophet could come from Galilee (John 7:52).  But Jonah did (Jonah 1:1 cf. II Ki. 14:25 cf. Josh. 19:13-16 cf. Mt. 4:15).

If rulers sinned through ignorance, they too could be spared (Lev. 4:22ff), and if the whole congregation sinned through ignorance, the priest could offer a sacrifice for them as well (Lev. 4:13).

Peter said that God fulfilled the prophets in killing the Lord (Acts 3:18) because in early Acts here God was assuming responsibility for their guilt.  That’s how He could offer this manslaughter charge.  But when they rejected His offer, Acts 13:27 says that the Jews fulfilled the prophets in killing Him.  That’s similar to how God imputed our sins to Christ on the cross (II Cor 5:19), but will impute them back to unbelievers if they don’t get saved (cf. Rom. 4:8).

“Ye” (Acts 3:19) is plural.  Peter offered salvation to individual Jews in Acts 2:38, but here he is offering salvation to the nation.  Remember, the nation of Israel had to be saved before God’s plan to reach the other nations could continue (Acts 1:8), because God planned to use Israel to reach the Gentiles, and He insists His representatives be saved.

As further proof the nation needed to be saved, when the nation didn’t get saved, Paul reminded them that Isaiah had predicted that the nation wouldn’t get saved (Acts 28:24-27).  Paul also told them what God was doing about it, turning to the Gentiles (28:27,28).  See that word “convert” in Acts 28:28?  That’s what Peter was asking the Jews to do in Acts 3:19, but they didn’t repent.

Peter is still talking to the nation when he extends God’s offer to blot out their sins (Acts 3:19).  That’s what individuals get when they get saved.  If they don’t, their sins aren’t blotted out or covered (Neh. 4:5), but if they do, their sins are covered (Rom. 4:7).  But God dealt with Israel as a nation, and the nation won’t get their sins blotted out until “the times of refreshing” come (Acts 3:19), i.e., the kingdom.

We see types of this when God forgave Israel every time they fell (Num. 14:19).  If they sinned so badly that God let them be taken captive, they were to “repent” and He would forgive them (I Ki. 8:46-50).  They didn’t repent in Peter’s day, when they were in captivity to Rome, but they’ll be in captivity again after the Rapture, this time to the antichrist.  If they’ll “repent” in that day (Acts 3:19) God will forgive the nation.  We see a type of that when they repented during the Babylonian captivity (Ps. 85:1,2).

But before the kingdom can come, something else had to come first.  Peter was speaking on the day of Pentecost, but the feast of the Day of Atonement followed Pentecost.  That didn’t stand for Christ’s death; Passover stood for that.  The Day of Atonement stood for the day Israel would get the benefit of Christ’s death.  We get that benefit when we believe (Rom. 5:1,11), but Israel won’t get that as a nation until they believe as a nation.  When will that happen?  At the Second Coming of Christ (Rom. 11:26,27).

The kingdom is called “the times of refreshing” due to verses like Isaiah 35:1-10 and Zechariah 14:20.  The heaven “received” the Lord (Mark 16:19) and will continue to receive Him “until” then (Acts 3:20,21). “Restitution” (v. 21) means to restore what’s lost.  Adam lost the right to live in paradise on earth, but the Lord will restore man’s right to do that.  All the prophets spoke about this (Acts 3:21), but none of them spoke about God taking us to heaven in the rapture.  That was part of the mystery given to Paul (Rom. 16:25).

Video available on YouTube: Murder or Manslaughter? – Acts 3:17-21