Acts 3:17

Acts 3:17

The Danger and Results of Unbelief.

Consider:

I. How St. Peter came to have a right to make allowance for the Jews. When the Apostle states that what the Jews did, they did through ignorance, he must be considered as conveying the idea that they were not acquainted with the actual character and dignity of Christ. They did not crucify Him as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, but as one who pretended to be the Messiah, and who blasphemed in calling Himself the Son of God. But were the Jews, then, innocent in this their ignorance? We may not venture to say this; we may not venture to think that St. Peter implied this; for this would evidently impeach the whole course of Christ's ministry on earth, representing His miracles as defective credentials, inadequate to the establishing of the character which He claimed to Himself. The Jews, beyond all question, if ignorant, were to blame for their ignorance. They might have known, they ought to have known, that Jesus was the Christ, and ignorance can only be an excuse when we do not ourselves cause it, whether through wilfully neglecting means of obtaining information, or cherishing prejudices which bar out the truth. It was not in crucifying Christ, but in rejecting the final evidence afforded by the descent of the Holy Ghost, that they perpetrated the sin for which they were cast off.

II. Contrast the case of the modern unbeliever with that of the Jews and judge whether it be an exaggerated charge which would fix on the latter the far greater criminality. The Jew crucified Christ whilst His appearance was that of an ordinary man; we crucify Him afresh when He has assumed the glory which He had from the beginning with the Father. It was the Son of Man on earth who was crucified by the Jew; it is the Son of God in the heavens who is crucified by ourselves. Christ had not then given the most touching proof of His love and His compassion. He had not yet died for His enemies; neither was it understood, even by His disciples, and much less by His adversaries, that the death which He was willing to undergo was to serve as a propitiation for the sins of the whole world. The Jew, at the time, and in the act referred to in our text, had not the power of sinning such a sin as any one of us sins, when, through not believing in Christ, he crucifies Him afresh. It is Christ's having been once crucified in the flesh, which gives such immeasurable heinousness to His being crucified again in the spirit.

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1498.

References: Acts 3:17. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 170. Acts 3:17; Acts 3:18. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 462.Acts 3:19. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiv., No. 804; J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 8; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 8; W. Hay Aitken, Around the Cross,pp. 33, 49. Acts 3:19. J. H. Thorn, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ,2nd series, p. 105.Acts 3:19; Acts 3:20. R. S. Turner, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 264; H. W. Beecher, Ibid.,vol. ii., p. 172; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xix., p. 115.