Peter's Pattern for Preaching - Part 2

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are continuing in our little time warp. We went back in time to Acts 2. We’re going to continue with Acts 2:22, then after this, Lord willing, if we can get through Peter’s sermon we will get back to the future. That’s a really good movie title.

We’re going forward to the past.

Yes, we’re going forward to the past because this is a history podcast. It’s never too early to drop our tagline there.

Let’s look at the text then. Peter has stood up with the 11 and is going to explain what in the world is going on here. He has picked as his text a prophecy from the book of Joel, chapter 2. Joel doesn’t give us the time element exactly. Peter supplements by saying, “In the last days,” which for the Old Testament prophets was the equivalent of “in the future, when Messiah comes, in the age of the Spirit, when the old order collapses,” and these things are going to happen.

God is going to pour out His Spirit – ‘pour’ as opposed to sprinkle or little drops – upon all flesh, and that’s the thing he’s going to major on. He’s going to mention it here and he’s going to mention it at the end of his text, and then he’ll come back to it later. At first the text he picks seems like a bad choice, or I used to think so. “Why did he do this? I would pick a better text,” but he’s moved by the Spirit and he knows what he’s doing.

The nature of the Spirit’s coming is that he will come upon God’s people without regard to gender, status, age, function in life – again, upon all flesh, not just upon Jews, not just upon western Europeans, but upon all flesh.

We could even add all creation, because we think of Romans 8, that the whole creation is groaning and travailing and waiting, and the Spirit does uphold the creation as well. There’s a great totality in what’s happening.

The curse was on the earth in the beginning.

He gets to that by saying, “And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke.” These are the evidences of war. But he moves beyond that to “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood.”

This is a common figure in the prophecy. It means cosmic change, not cosmic in the sense that Alpha Centauri is going to explode or something, but that the order that God has instituted among men is going to change radically. It’s going to change with respect to how God’s people live on earth and how they approach him in heaven. “The old order changeth,” to borrow a line from Tennyson, and Arthur.

“The times they are a-changin’” – Bob Dylan?

Another favorite of ours.

“…before the great and notable day of the Lord come,” and then he comes to this in Joel.

And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

So the Spirit is going to come to all people with regard to earthly status and condition. The only thing that’s left here is that people actually have to call on the name of the Lord, and that’s going to become incredibly relevant when the crowds say, “And what shall we do?” “Call upon the name of the Lord?”

The word ‘saved’ – evangelical Christianity for a long time reduced that to the new birth, justification by faith, if they even used those terms, having a personal relationship with Jesus, going to heaven when you die. The biblical idea certainly includes that but it’s much, much broader. You spoke even of the salvation or redemption of the planet and the cosmic universe, redemption of the body. It’s putting right what once went wrong, to borrow another line from another TV show. That’s where he’s going with this.

This is a cosmic event, and although all they see is a bunch of Galilean fishermen standing up there talking with an accent in languages they had apparently never learned before, it’s so much bigger and deeper.

This is not the way world does things. If this were Broadway or Hollywood we would have special effects, we would have fireworks, we would have fly-bys by Air Force planes, or whatever else our technology was capable of. God picked a few fishermen to stand up and say, “Look guys, things are changing. Be ready for it.” So he turns to Jesus.

Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know…

He is speaking to a crowd assembled from many, many nations within the empire, possibly all of them, the text seems to say, but some of them, either because they had come for Passover and were around when this happened, or because they had been here long enough to hear the rumors, had heard about Jesus and what he had done, or perhaps they came during an earlier Passover or Pentecost or Tabernacles. So it’s not like Peter is speaking into a complete void. They’re not totally ignorant of who Jesus is. They’ve heard about him, but they don’t know what to do with that exactly, so he has to put it in divine context.

…Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God…

There’s divine sovereignty and predestination. God planned this. It’s not something God was forced into or stumbled into. “Well, Plan A failed. Let’s try, I don’t know, Plan B.” “What’s Plan B?”

This was the plan, and this is important for our understanding of the Old Testament, obviously. Classic dispensationalism in its worst form – not even classic dispensationalists believe this, but some of their leaders did and they wrote it – taught that God’s plan for salvation for Israel was to send Messiah as a ruling king, and when they crucified him God went to another plan that really wasn’t on his agenda. The cross became a temporary fix, and the church age a parenthesis in divine planning. The prophetic clock stopped ticking at Calvary, they say.

For that reason, anything that happened in the new covenant theoretically was unforeseen by the prophets. The prophets literally could not prophesy of that, because apparently God didn’t even know about it or didn’t want to admit it was there.

This is why so much of the Bible was closed off to classic dispensationalism. The church gets the Pauline epistles and maybe the gospels, not much else. The church too, like all other dispensations – the church age, the age of grace is going to fail. Jesus will come back, rapture the church, remove the Spirit, and then we pick up right where we left off with the Jews in Jerusalem with the temple and one more chance. That’s not what Peter is describing here remotely.

That’s just a wild take to me, considering all of Paul’s writings and how much he uses the Old Testament to teach us what God is doing now.

It’s exceedingly strange and I don’t know how that worked, because a lot of these guys and the churches they taught in very much loved their Bibles, and some of those old saints could quote it better than I can, but they lacked the ability to put pieces together sometimes. Their teachers were not giving them the tools, the framework for leading from one passage to another, so passages just kind of hung out there in midair.

I grew up listening to what was more or less mild dispensationalism on Christian radio, and it was great in that I heard the same verses over and over again until I memorized them. But I heard the same verses over and over and over again.

It was not the whole counsel of scripture.

Not so much. It was beneficial to me for sure, but there was a lot that was left out.

One of the principles of history is that it’s not quite fair to blame people for not thinking of something that no one said at the time; however, whole Bible theology has been around. This is not us taking potshots. This is, “Why weren’t you listening to the people who were telling you that Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament?”

Let me give you a different sort of example from that conflict. Because the church age was a surprise, there were literally no prophecies to be fulfilled, and thus Christ could literally come back at any time, and in that sense his coming was said to be imminent – that is, nothing preceding. That didn’t mean it was soon, although that’s usually how people thought of it. Imminent does not mean soon. It just means there’s nothing in the way. At least that’s how they understood the word, because the Old Testament didn’t offer any prophecies for the age of grace.

Despite that, and despite people constantly saying “The Lord could come at any minute. His coming is imminent,” they kept pointing to things as signs. “Is anything going on in Russia? Gog and Magog? Mussolini stirring up things in Rome? Oh, the revived Roman empire.” Someone was always looking for the meaning of the number of 666 in current affairs. “Things are getting so much worse. It means that Jesus is coming!”

How can it mean that when there are no signs? In fact, what they were saying was closer to what the Bible says. There are no signs of the coming. Jesus told us over and over again that things will be going on as normal when he returns. No one is going to have a heads-up.

But here again there’s a difference between what the system said and what the scholars who defended it defended, and what people heard, and what God preached in the average pulpit. I think in the average pulpit pastors still preach from the Old Testament. I benefited from this a little in the long run. They did look for types and images of Christ, even though there weren’t supposed to be any. They weren’t prophecies, they’re just pictures and images and types and figures.

One of my first introductions to biblical theology – and neither my pastor nor I knew what he was doing at the time – he explained the life of Joseph in terms of an image of Christ – sold by his brothers, sold as a slave, descends into the depths of the prison, is raised to the right hand of power, saves his people. It was very Christological, but he learned that as a Baptist fundamentalist, not as a covenantalist or Reformed Christian. I picked up on that, so when I ran into biblical theology eventually and actually saw it I said, “Oh, that? Well, yeah.”

Can we take a quick minute to define biblical theology? It’s been awhile since we’ve done that, and sometimes people hear the phrase ‘biblical theology’ and think we’re talking about theology that is biblical, whereas what we mean is tracing the story of the Bible and the images through the Bible. Can you help me here? You teach biblical theology. Give a better definition than I just did. That was lame.

If you say so. It wasn’t bad. You said the history, and I think that’s the key element. Generally biblical theology studies God’s revelation in the order it came to us, or nearly so, insofar as we can tell what that order is. We see how God himself over 4,000 years builds the picture of the coming Messiah through types and images and stories, so we fall into literary analysis as well because the Bible is literature, although it is historically true. We have to absolutely insist on that.

All the literary devices that we find in human literature work because they are something that God has done first with real history.

Yes, so that’s the thing. We look to see how God has actually communicated. My favorite example is if you pick up a book of systematic theology, which is the church trying to organize God’s truth in a grand pattern so that we can defend it and explain it better, you turn to the scripture index at the end and look for tree or water or gems.

Or bread. Well, bread could be complicated because people would argue about the Lord’s Supper.

About the only thing he would get is whether or not it has to be leavened or unleavened bread. You’re probably not going to get a discussion of what part bread plays throughout the old covenant. You’d be lucky if you get a discussion of what the sacrifices meant, or the festivals. But when you start with biblical theology and you start in Genesis, trees are all over the place. Gems are there, gardens, marriage, wives, brides, so we look at what God has singled out.

They need to coincide or we’re doing something wrong. We shouldn’t let one lead the other, except insofar – no, that’s not exactly true. We probably should let systematics do the leading or at least the guarding of the borders.

I’ve been told, or at least it’s been strongly hinted to me, that biblical theology just gives way to wild imagination. Well, you think Arius wasn’t imaginative when he came up with his doctrine of Christ? Imagination is fallen, whether it’s doing systematics or biblical theology, but the literary types, the historical development of covenant life is discussed very clearly in the New Testament.

The better pattern is the New Testament interprets the Old. So we go to the explicit statements of the New Testament just to make sure we got it right, and this often means that we glance at the systematic theologies to see how our fathers interpreted particular doctrines, because if our biblical theology is leading us into weird patterns that no one has ever thought before, the odds are we are wrong. It’s that simple.

Clear passages govern unclear passages.

Yes. This is basic hermeneutics and anybody should know this. We should be looking for things the New Testament already has told us, and we should be able to find them, but they shouldn’t conflict with what the New Testament has told us. So that’s biblical theology, reading the Bible as history and as literature, but not literature in the sense of it’s not real. It’s simply that God ordained history. He’s a storyteller.

He’s given us the things that he wanted to draw our attention to. He’s writing the story. He’s choosing what to put in and leave out.

And he ordained the historical events in story-like fashion because he’s a storyteller.

Where were we with Peter? I think we might have been defending Peter’s text choice.

We had gotten to foreknowledge, but I was going to insert myself because while we got off on one side on dispensationalism, I think an even more direct historical heresy that we need to address that relates to this particular verse would be the whole conflict over free will, foreknowledge, and our responsibility, which we could wrap up in some form of the Arminian debate. But I think this is one of the clearer passages where we can see the two – divine sovereignty and human responsibility – put side by side.

We also see the word ‘foreknowledge’ being used in the context of God determining what he’s going to do. It’s all within his plan and not because the next thing that’s going to happen. It’s not because they took him that God knew it, and just knew that that was going to come and happen. What God does precedes anything that we do, and yet what we do, or what these people particularly do, is called sin and they are fully responsible for it.

Peter doesn’t try to untie that knot for us. He just says, “Look, these things are both true.”

That’s our guide when we talk about these things. This is a perfect verse to pull up when we’re talking about it and say, “This is what the Bible says. This is what I believe. No, I do not know how that works, but God does and he has clearly determined all of that to be that way.” Therefore, we can be confident that nothing was outside of his plan.

I think one of the great comforts is that what happened to Jesus was the greatest sin and crime of history. Nobody ever suffered what Jesus suffered. No sin that is ever committed against any of us was ever as bad as what was committed against Jesus, and yet the greatest eternal good and the perfect plan of God was done in it. I think that can be a great comfort in suffering, but also a great admonition to people in sin, that you can’t stop the will of God, no matter how much you rage against him.

“But I was just predestined to do this!” No, you chose freely, and this is a difficult thing.

For our audience, in case this is a huge surprise to anybody, all three of us, if we engage in labels at all, we claim to be Calvinists. We subscribe to the Synod of Dordt and the so-called five points and all that.

The five points are such a distraction, though, for Reformed theology. It’s so annoying.

They are, for just about everything. I mean yes, man is sinful, God saves.

They weren’t called Calvinism at the time. They were five points because they were responding to a group’s five points, who had been taught by Jacob Arminius, and they called themselves the Remonstrance. They were bringing five points to the church and saying, “We think these things are true,” and the church was responding in order of no. Calvin was already dead.

So was Arminius by then.

Calvin never actually laid out these points but they did encompass things that he taught, and it was the heritage of his teaching in Dordt that they were solidifying in five points.

But nobody ever said it was the greatest summary of Reformed theology.

Or even a complete one in any respect.

Anyway, I said that to say this. Though we subscribe to these doctrines and absolutely defend the sovereign grace of God in Christ, that doesn’t mean we claim to understand it all. I have seen Calvinists try to rationalize it, to the point where man as man disappears. Francis Schaeffer in some of his books mentions such attitudes. “I don’t care if we lose man, as long as we keep God.” That’s not a biblical approach.

It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” The hidden things belong to the Lord, but the things that are revealed belong to us and our children, that we may learn to do all the words of his law. There are some things we can’t understand, starting with Genesis 1:1. How do you make something out of nothing? Tell me that and then we can go on from there, but there is no answer. We’re not God.

We affirm at every point what the Bible says, confident that the contradictions, though they may be apparent, are not real. God knows how it works. God knows how he can predestinate the course of history and the lives of men, and yet not be free from their sin or force sin upon them and hold them absolutely, wholly, justly accountable. He’s got it. He’s God. He can figure that out. We don’t have to, so there’s great confidence in that, and comfort, as you say.

As a result, Peter doesn’t spend a lot of time here. He simply says this was God’s plan.

Ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain…

“Your hands were wicked. You are responsible. You are accountable. You did wickedly.” Notice that he’s indicting everybody there, although not everybody there necessarily was present. They did it representatively. Their elders and priests did it, and by not renouncing their elders and priests in what they did, they are complicit – tacit consent. When you say, “Well, they did it. I really didn’t do it. As long as they did it, it’s okay.”

No, it’s not okay. Some things require a choice, and this is the thing in the universe that requires a choice. Was Jesus innocent or wasn’t he? You don’t get neutral ground here. You make a choice, and if you choose, “Well, no, not so much,” then you are guilty of his blood.

There’s another Bob Dylan song. “Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.” That’s from Slow Train Coming. That’s the album.

Moving on then.

…whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.

Notice at this point, Peter has simply called him Jesus of Nazareth, a man, a prophet of God who did miracles. He hasn’t got to his deity, and when he does it’s kind of indirect. Today that’s generally where we start, and we probably should, but he has a different audience with a different mindset and he wants to ingrain in them the prophetic significance of Jesus’ life, before he rushes on to the full implications of what that means.

“It’s not possible that he should be holden of it.”

“But it’s possible for death to hold anyone. What are you talking about, Peter? Why couldn’t death hold Jesus?” and Peter begins to quote from the Psalms, starting with Psalm 16.

For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved. Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

In other words, the body will not show corruption. Mary and Martha said on the fourth day “He stinketh,” so less than four days in the grave.

Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.

You can read the whole Psalm in context. He actually quotes quite a bit of it. So that’s what David said, and the immediate rejoinder is, “Well yeah, David said that he wouldn’t really die or see…uh…” As they all turn and look at David’s sepulcher, or look in its direction…

Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.

Somehow it survived the destruction of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar.

Well then, Peter, what do you do with that prophecy? “If he’s not talking about himself, of whom speaketh the prophet, of himself or of some other man?” is kind of the thing here, which you have to ask a lot in the Old Testament. Well, he answers.

Therefore being a prophet [David was a prophet, the psalms are prophecy], and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him [a covenant oath, it’s not called a covenant in 2 Samuel, but it is called such in Psalm 89, which celebrates that covenant no end], that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne [David’s throne].

So God had promised to David that David would have an everlasting kingdom, or more specifically that his son would, that David would be the ancestor of the Messiah, and the seat of David would reign forever over the house of Israel.

Again, using classic dispensationalism as a sort of backdrop on which to paint these things, classical dispensationalism and even some of the more recent forms have seen this as this is the Jewish hope, that Jesus will come to earth and reign from Jerusalem over the nations of the world, and that’s what God promised David.

I even heard some remark to that effect within the last 48 hours or so. I don’t even remember who it was. “So when Jesus rules from Jerusalem…” No. It’s very commonly believed, but let’s see how Peter interprets this.

“…of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.” Yes, Messiah is promised the throne of David, but what’s the nature of that throne, and what does it mean ‘raised up’ and where is he going to sit and what’s that all about?

He [David] seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

He was only in the tomb for three days and his body did not stay separate from his soul. He came back to life.

This is a good moment to remind people that if we’re thinking historically the way that those in the Old Testament could look forward into history, and could begin to put together some of the pieces of what God was giving them at that point in history, that when David speaks the things for example in Psalm 89 or Psalm 16, he is doing so, yes, by inspiration, but he’s also speaking from his own knowledge and his own capacity to take what God has said and reason.

He’s reasoning here, “If my son is going to live forever, he has to overcome sin and death, or someone has to overcome it for him. For some reason he needs to not die, or he needs to be raised from the dead.” We see that in Abraham, where he had the hope of the resurrection for Isaac if he had to kill them.

It’s just a reminder that the people of the Old Testament had some of these beginnings that we sometimes want to just ascribe to ourselves in the New Testament, ideas that are clearer in the New Testament, but when we’re doing things like biblical theology of the Old Testament and seeing that history, we should not presume their ignorance simply because it’s not as clearly stated as in the New Testament.

We can see David’s capacity to put two and two together, in a sense, even if he can’t see exactly what Jesus will be. He certainly has a better picture from the covenant God made with him than he would have before that.

The verses Rachel is referring to is the verse particularly, “He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ…” That’s him looking at a prophecy and saying, “But I’m going to die, so therefore, logical reasoning and deduction from the text, that means that I’m talking about my greater son, who I get to speak for on occasion,” and he does a number of times in the Psalms. “So he’s going to die. You will not leave his soul in hell, but he’s not going to stay dead.”

At this point we talk about the forever-ness of the kingdom. How do you beat death? The prophets are full of it and so is the law. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” Death is the penalty for sin, so if you’re going to beat death in any substantial way, not just for yourself but for the people you’re going to rule over – it kind of stinks to be the king of an empty world – you’ve got to beat sin.

The covenant with David is not a political covenant. It’s not primarily about politics and land, real estate and all that, it’s primarily the gospel, what Isaiah calls “the sure mercies of David.” Paul in his sermons will connect that with this. What is the mercy that God has promised David? That his son is going to beat sin, and therefore beat death, and therefore raise us to life, and hope and resurrection and eternal life are going to be in him. This Jesus God hath raised up.

You want to know why these people are speaking in different languages? He still hasn’t said it, but we’re getting closer. The smart ones among them are beginning to think, “Uh-oh. I see a problem coming here.”

I’m going to throw out here, too, on the tack that he’s kind of holding Jesus’ divinity in reserve. I think the language of John’s gospel, the way he speaks of the old covenant things makes it very clear that they’re expecting that Messiah, whoever he is, he has to be God. Those pieces are there. It’s like, “Of course he’s God if he’s Messiah.” So that is in the background for this audience. It’s not quite as obvious to us today, I think, but to that audience it was a little bit more immediate.

But for those who held Jesus simply to be a man, and a bad man at that, they would not necessarily see the connection, and not everyone understood that Messiah was God. Yes, God said it, but God said a lot of things that his people did not figure out. Jesus said to his apostles, “OK, I’m going up to Jerusalem, going to be betrayed, beat up, handed over to the Gentiles, die, the third day I’m going to rise from the dead…”

They’re like, “What’s this a metaphor for?”

“Yeah, what’s that all about? We don’t understand.” “We could ask him.” “No, we looked so stupid last time we asked him. Let’s just figure…” But this is what he does say –

Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear. For David is not ascended into the heavens, but he saith himself, the Lord [Jehovah] said unto my Lord [Adonai], Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool.

Jesus had already used this with the Pharisees when he’d asked them, “What do you think of Christ, the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

“Well, David’s, obviously.”

I think this speaks to the point you were making. For them it was obvious he was only the son of David. And Jesus said, “Then why did David call him Lord?” In Jewish thinking, the father is greater than the son, and you show respect to your fathers, not the other way around. And yet here is David looking at his son, many times removed as it turns out, and calling him Adonai, which is a divine title. He’s calling him Lord. Yahweh is saying to this Messiah, “Sit at my right hand.”

That’s the position of universal authority, and if we haven’t figured out that Jesus is God at this point, all the cards are on the table. If you don’t want to read them or you still can’t see clearly without your glasses that’s one thing, but there is no room here anymore to deny who Jesus has to be.

Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. [Adonai and Messiah]

That hits home. “So we’ve been waiting for Messiah, and he’s come and he’s poured this out, and we killed him. Oh boy.”

Have you seen the movie Mystery Men? There’s a moment where all the wannabe super heroes are getting together and trying to help kill the actual super hero, and it’s like, “Oh, you know what we could really use right now is a hero. Too bad. We had one and we just killed him. Whoops.”

Yes, whoops, except this of course is far worse – first because it really happened, and secondly because there was a self-consciousness or maliciousness about it. They didn’t accidentally push a button that killed Jesus. They conspired to kill him. So the crowd is cut to the heart.

Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?

Notice that Peter doesn’t give an alter call. There’s no need. They respond on their own. “We think you’ve left something out. What exactly are we supposed to do?” So he goes back now to the prophecy of Joel. “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even you with what you’ve done,” and that’s what Peter says in so many words.

Then Peter said unto them, Repent…

That is, acknowledge you indeed have done this evil, and other evils. Disassociate yourselves. Say to God, “I’m sorry, I was wrong. This was sin. I was a rebel. Please forgive me.”

… and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins…

Let’s pause there for a second…baptized. Notice nobody says, “What’s that?” They know what baptism is. It’s an Old Testament ordinance that was used for a number of things. Sorry friends, it is the sprinkling or pouring of water, and the Old Testament is full of such rituals. Messiah said to sprinkle many nations, and God promised to sprinkle clean water upon his people in the restoration, so they knew the word. Paul calls the crossing of the Red Sea a baptism. Peter calls the flood a baptism.

In fact, the writer of Hebrews says that the old covenant stood only in meats and drinks and diverse baptisms, washings. So when he says that, ok, that. And now they’re having to understand the context. “So you’re saying that we’ve been touched by death and need to be resurrected? That we’re like lepers who need to be cleansed, or that we’re common folk who need to be made priests before God?” Yes, all of those that baptisms were used for.

And all of it needs to be specifically in the name of Jesus. There are only a few things that you truly need for a baptism, but one of them is you have to have the name of Jesus, and you have to have water.

David’s dad tells a story, and I don’t remember where it was, but they were using some form of soda. Maybe it was a place where the water was kind of dirty, so they thought soda is more valuable.

And probably cleaner, and it does have water in it.

There was another one where somebody forgot to fill the baptismal of whatever they were using, so he had no water, and so he pretended in the service. The elders had to come back and be like, “No, you’ve got to do that again. That wasn’t real.” You get different things.

“Just send somebody to get more water. We’ll all stand there and wait. It is worth it.”

Yes, but it was one of those like let’s clarify. It’s not so symbolic that you can just do the magical motions and say the words. That’s one of the big things here is that they’re seeing their sin, and sin is both God cleansing us and us being identified with Christ, but also us turning from our sins. God does that cleansing visualization with real water, just like we eat real bread and drink real wine.

The worship ceremonies that Christ prescribes are incredibly simple, and the church over the years has added other things to them which are nice and sweet and cute, but they’re not biblical. “Let’s put them in white robes and have them fast the night before, and give them bread and honey afterwards.” I get the symbolism but that’s adding to scripture.

It’s really simple, and you’re about to have 3,000 people who are going to be converts. You want it to be really simple at this point.

I will add one more thing from David’s time in Nepal. They went to one area of Nepal and were teaching on how to administer baptism and the Lord’s supper properly. At first they had to kind of clear the air because one of the pastors had been gone from his church for one Sunday, and some random guy came in and was trying to preach and then started sprinkling the entire congregation with water, saying that he was baptizing everybody.

They found out he was a cult leader, but that idea that simply because somebody throws water at you also doesn’t make it baptism.

You might as well go around trying to put wedding rings on girls you’re interested in, and then hope…

Or force-feeding people bread and wine and saying, “Aha! You’re a part of the body of Christ.”

It’s simple, and yet in adult believers there is a voluntary act about it. “What about children?” We’re getting there. “So repent and be baptized, every one of you.” John had already started baptizing so it was well-known that there was a new form of baptism that somehow bound up the others, because John was a priest.

“…for remission of sins.”

That’s the language that John had used. We don’t say remission much anymore except with regard to cancer. It means a sending away, the forgiveness of sins. Baptism pictures the sending away, the cleansing from sins.

“…and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

Remember where this started. It started with the Spirit descending, so we’re now tying it up. He still needs to say one more thing in the next verse, but part of it is, “You see what’s happening? And I’ve told you what it is. The Messiah has ascended and he’s pouring out the Holy Spirit. If you repent and believe in him and receive his baptism, which is a figure of the giving of the Spirit, you too will have the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

Two things here. I think when we recorded this the last time I took a side trip into Galatians. I’m not going to.

I provoked it, sorry.

I commend to you Galatians 3, where Paul argues pretty much the same thing, that the blessing of Abraham is justification by faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit – in other words, justification and sanctification.

Also the fact that we are Abraham’s seed. That was one of the big things I was thinking of because when we did this originally David had just preached on Genesis 17, the covenant of circumcision and the inclusion of Abraham’s seed, and the curse on any seed that did not receive the sign of the covenant.

With Galatians we should rejoice to know that we are part of Abraham’s seed, and therefore we are included into that whole covenant from then to now as a part of that. Then as we read these next verses, read them as anyone would who understands the Abrahamic covenant moving forward.

We often use the word ‘blessed.’ We throw it around in Christian circles, and I often don’t know what it means. It means to have the favor of God, but particularly as Paul tells us in Galatians 3, that favor is manifested primarily in two things, or at least two things that are the fountain of everything else.

One is justification by faith. We have the righteousness of Christ and we never come under condemnation, so that we can be God’s friends, his adopted children and heir of all the promises on a legal basis. But then he also puts his Spirit within us to transform us and write his word in our hearts so that we progressively become new creatures until the resurrection, when we are wholly conformed to the image of Christ.

The apostles regularly talk about both of these things. It is not forgiveness apart from service, obedience, and love for God, but neither is it one plus the other. “We were baptized, we trusted in Christ, now let’s go out and do some good works.” The ability to walk with God is the gift of God in the person of the Holy Ghost, who’s a person and not a force. So that’s being laid out here, and then he says this –

For the promise…

He’s talking about the promise to Abraham, because that’s what he just described. The promise to Abraham, to be a God to believers and their seed after them, to bless all nations, to justify the heathen through faith, to grant the Holy Spirit…

… is unto you, and to your children…

There’s no way a Jew would read that except the obvious one. “Oh, our children are included in all this, as they always have been. This new arrangement is not cutting our children out of this. They too are heirs of the promise.”

I don’t know if this holds, but you could at least begin to make the argument that the promise is the promise of baptism. Baptism is the promise, the Spirit is the reality. Baptism is offered to those who profess faith, and to their children.

…and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.

Remember the original phrasing. “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” He turned it around. “Whoever the Lord calls…” is who will receive the gift of the Spirit and forgiveness of sins, and will then respond by wanting to be baptized, and will include his children because this is covenant living and it always has been.

Looking at the clock, I think we’re out of time. I’m hoping that we’ve already covered verses 41-47, but I wouldn’t count on it. We’ll find it.

I think we got through verse 39 because that one stopped us when we jumped to Galatians.

All right, we’re good. We’re back on schedule.

We’ll be out of our time warp next time. Let’s have some recommendations. I’ve got one. Physical therapy. It’s great. Sometimes you think, “I don’t know, I feel pretty good. My body works,” then something happens and you have to go and get physical therapy, and then you figure out all these new ways that you weren’t quite aware of, that your body is not quite working right. It’s great to get some help with that and it feels good. I recommend it.

I have one. I was telling Emily about this earlier. I think it was triggered by something she said. This is aimed more at younger people, but we all should listen. The book of Proverbs starts with relationships, first of all with God, then with our parents who we ought to fear and listen to, and then it moves quickly to friends.

Christian young people need to make godly friends who are older and wiser. They need to have sane godly counselors who actually know the Bible and can say, “You know, that’s not what the Bible says,” or “Jesus does not approve of that,” or “You know that that’s sin, right? You need to trust Jesus on this one. Come on, let’s pray.”

If you have young folks your own age who will do that, that’s great. I regularly ask the kids at school, “Do you have friends like that?” and they all say, “Oh, yes!” I disbelieve. I’m sure some of them do, but I look and see who their friends are and…hmm. Maybe things are happening that I don’t know. Maybe I’m being judge-y here, but it is something to push for, to have friends who actually know the Bible. That usually means someone older than you.

The Bible commends to us the wisdom of the saints, the elders, the people who have been there and done that and fought the battles. So I ask you to look around in your life and say, “Who’s the older man or older woman that I actually listen to?”

As I say this, I feel a little like, “Ok, who do I listen to?” There are some men I listen to, but probably could profit from listening to more and asking more pointed questions and asking for more pointed help. That’s my recommendation for today.

My recommendation is a podcast. I’ve been without my husband for about two weeks and go walking every morning with my son, so I’ve been trying to download podcasts to listen to while I walk. One I listened to recently was extremely helpful, encouraging, and also convicting. It was the podcast from the lady who goes by M is for Mama. Her most recent podcast was on “Spiritual Self-Talk, Preaching Truth To Yourself.”

It was a wonderful podcast because she is the mother of 10 and was very open about all the ways that her mind goes very quickly towards sin. She likened it to a racehorse jumping out of the gate, jumping and leaping immediately into wrong conclusions and things about other people, and a number of other things.

She was encouraging from her own experiences all the ways that we need to think and actually speak out loud truth to ourselves from the Bible, so that we can truly as women take every thought captive, because our minds tend to just be kind of chaotic and crazy. We often don’t even notice that we’re doing it because we feel justified or we’re just not paying attention.

It was a very encouraging and convicting episode, so if you tend to struggle with your mind running away from you as a woman particularly, I recommend the podcast.

That’s excellent. Kate is always saying, “You should be preaching sermons to yourself,” and it’s not a wholly female phenomenon. It’s human. This is off the cuff so someone can correct me, but I think with men it’s not as you describe the kind of crazy “I’m jumping this way and that.” It’s more of either, “Eh, whatever,” or a very subtle, “I’m right and everyone needs to get out of my face.” It becomes very deliberate, but not well-thought out and not researched in scripture.

We end up saying, “I did the obvious right thing,” but no, you did the obvious wrong thing, but you never stopped to ask anybody. You should have been preaching sermons to yourself. Good advice.

Yes. Thank you both so much. This has been, as always, a pleasure and delight. I look forward to next time.

Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, and a big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, dear listener, you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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