Judas Iscariot, the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate, and the mob in Jerusalem all contributed to the events at Golgotha. But there was yet another, without whom the crucifixion would have never taken place. By whose hand was Jesus sent to the cross? In this sermon, R.C. Sproul tells us the astonishing answer to that question, the answer that Peter gave on the day of Pentecost.

“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know— Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it. For David says concerning Him:

‘I foresaw the Lord always before my face,
For He is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken.
Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad;
Moreover my flesh also will rest in hope.
For You will not leave my soul in Hades,
Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
You have made known to me the ways of life;
You will make me full of joy in Your presence.’

“Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.

The Apostles’ Essential Message

In the realm of theology, we make a distinction between what we call kērygma and didachē, two words that come from the Greek language. When I was a college student preparing for the ministry, I joined a special fraternity named Kerux, coming from the Greek word for preaching or heralding. A derivative of that term is the word kērygma. When scholars speak of the kērygma, they are referring to the essential message preached by the Apostles in the early church.

The kērygma always contained certain things. It always pointed out that in the person and work of Jesus, there was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, as we began to see last week with Peter’s application of the prophet Joel to the day of Pentecost. But also essential to the kērygma was a brief recap of the life and ministry of Christ—how He was born of the seed of David, how He performed miracles through the power of God, and how He was crucified, buried, raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven. Those were part and parcel of the essential ingredients of Apostolic preaching, or the kērygma.

The didachē refers to the teaching that would follow the preaching of the gospel. After the gospel was preached and people responded positively and entered the church, they then received their catechism, their instruction, or what we call the didactic part of the Christian experience. But this morning, we want to notice not so much the didachē, or the teaching, as much as we want to look at the kērygma.

A Warning of Calamity

Also, before I get to it, let me remind you of how we ended last week, where Peter harkened back to Joel, speaking of the prophecy of the day of the Lord:

The sun shall be turned into darkness,
And the moon into blood,
Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord.
And it shall come to pass
That whoever calls on the name of the Lord
Shall be saved. (Acts 2:20–21)

Just this week, I was reading the life and work of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was basically saying that the gospel is never truly proclaimed unless it is proclaimed against the backdrop of the serious warning God Almighty gives of His judgment upon all who cling to their impenitent ways, never acknowledging their sin, and never coming to the cross.

In this day, many people look down on any preaching that smells of brimstone, that suggests hell, or that communicates the idea that God will give an everlasting judgment against unrepentant people. But beloved, every page of the New Testament gives that warning, and if I do not remind you of that warning, then the wrath of God is on my head.

So, it was not simply an insignificant postscript that Joel added to his prophecy by saying, “Whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” That invitation was made against the backdrop of God’s promise of a future calamity that would befall the human race at the time of the day of the Lord.

Attested by Miracles

After giving a warning and a plea, Peter addresses himself to those assembled from the Jewish community: “Men of Israel, hear these words: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know.” Let me stop there for a moment.

So often, we miss the central, vital significance of the miracles performed by Jesus in the New Testament. To be sure, there were immediate needs that our Lord addressed in compassion and ministry, by giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and so on. But beyond the local and immediate work of compassion that these miracles exhibited was a far deeper significance. It was what the philosopher John Locke called “the credit of the proposer,” that the claims Jesus made to being the Son of God were verified, authenticated, and demonstrated to be genuine by the miracles God performed in and through Him.

Remember Nicodemus when He came to Jesus at night, saying, “Teacher, we know that You are a teacher sent from God, or You would not be able to do the things that You have done.” That is the whole point of a miracle—God’s giving His sign of approval, His attestation that this One is speaking the truth.

Sovereign Concurrence

In his sermon, Peter appealed to the miracles of Jesus, which were well known to his audience. He said: “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves know— Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death.”

In this text, we see a marvelous example of the doctrine of concurrence, which is critical to our understanding of the providence of God, or how God rules over the world. We are told at the beginning of chapter three in the Westminster Confession, “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.” If He did not, He would not be God. If He did not, He would not be sovereign. The Confession then teaches that God’s sovereign foreordination of all things that come to pass is not carried out in such a way as to eliminate secondary causes or do violence to the will of the creature. That is, when God brings His will to pass, He works in, through, and by the real decisions of real people.

The classic example of concurrence is when in Egypt, Joseph’s brothers stood before him when they were reunited. They were in terror that Joseph would seek revenge against them, and he put them at ease, because he said of their atrocious act of betrayal against him, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). In that one and same act by which Joseph’s brothers, in their treachery, delivered him into slavery, God was working. It is supremely difficult to conceive of the greatness and majesty of God’s sovereignty to the extent that God can even bring His goodness to pass through my wretched sin.

While God does bring goodness out of sin, I cannot say, “Look at the good that God has brought out of my sin,” nor could Judas go and boast before the throne of God’s judgment and say: “Look at me! Were it not for my act of betrayal, there would be no cross; and without the cross, there would be no redemption. So, you owe it all to me for my wonderful work of bringing to pass your salvation.” No, the only intention Judas had was to get his hands on the thirty pieces of silver. But despite Judas’ bad intentions, God trumped his desires to bring to pass the cross.

This is what Peter was saying. Listen: “Him”—Jesus of Nazareth—“being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of almighty God. I’m talking about the One you have taken by lawless hands, crucified, and put to death. While you meant to destroy Him, you were working out nothing less than the eternal will of God. But before you take comfort in that, remember, your work was lawless, and you’re culpable for that.”

The Real Impossibility of Resurrection

Peter went on to say, “ . . . whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that He should be held by it.” Do you see what this text is saying? Peter was saying, “This Jesus, whom you delivered to the Romans, who was condemned by the Sanhedrin, and upon whom you carried out your evil with the help of Pontius Pilate, this Jesus was condemned by every earthly court you could think of, so you killed Him. You executed Him. But the verdict of the courts of this world was trumped by the heavenly court when the heavenly Judge responded to the greatest injustice in the history of the world by raising Jesus from the dead.”

Listen to this: “ . . . having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.” Throughout my lifetime, I have often heard skeptics say, “How can you believe in the resurrection of Christ?”

The resurrection of Christ is at the heart and soul of the Christian faith, as the Apostle tells the Corinthian church: “If Christ is not raised, our hope and our faith are in vain, we’re false witnesses of God, and we, of all people in the world, are the most to be pitied.” That is why I say to the unbeliever when he is hostile towards Christianity: “Don’t be angry at us. Pity us; feel sorry for us. We’re investing all our hope, all our lives in this single tenet: a man in Jerusalem was killed, and the grave couldn’t hold Him.”

The skeptics say: “That’s impossible. If we know anything, we know that when people die, they stay dead. You might resuscitate them after a few moments, but if they’re dead for a couple of days, there’s no more resuscitation. It’s over; it’s finished, and death triumphs.”

David Hume argued against the miracles of the Scripture based on probabilities, saying that the probabilities against the real resurrection would always outnumber the probability for it. I would say all things being equal, Hume was right; but all things were not equal. We are dealing with One who was sinless, and the Scriptures tell us that it is through sin that death comes into the world. The astonishing statistic is not that someone could come back from the dead, but that someone could remain sinless throughout His life. If that is true, then it would be morally unjust for God to allow a sinless man to suffer the curse that He assigns to sin.

Maybe that was what Peter had in mind when he said not only was it possible for Jesus to rise from the dead, but it was impossible for Him not to be raised from the dead. Perhaps that was what he had in mind. But maybe what he had in mind was that from all eternity, as the Old Testament predicted again and again, the Messiah of Israel would not be conquered by death, and that it is impossible for anyone or anything to prevent the determinate will of almighty God.

Life in His Hands

When people stumble before the resurrection, I sometimes ask them, “What kind of god do you believe in?” They often respond, “I don’t believe in God. I believe that life, motion, power, and all those things happened in serendipity, by that transcendent power we call chance.”

Talk about superstition. Talk about nonsense. People are trying to convince the whole world today that there was once a time when there was absolutely nothing and then poof—out of nothing came not just something but everything. Those who propose these kinds of things not only deny religion but every article of science there is.

The very fact that anything is at all screams of a transcendent being who alone has the power of being in His hands. Any being such as that, who has the power of life in His hands, has the power to take it away and bring it back. Job understood that when he said: “The Lord gives; the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Here was Peter, in front of a mob of people, saying: “You think it’s incredible that this Jesus was raised from the dead? How could it be otherwise, considering who He is? It was impossible for death to hold Him.”

The Spirit Poured Out

Peter then turned his attention not simply to Joel, but also back to David in the Psalms. He said:

I foresaw the Lord always before my face,
For He is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken.
Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad;
Moreover my flesh also will rest in hope.
For You will not leave my soul in Hades,
Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
You have made known to me the ways of life;
You will make me full of joy in Your presence.

About whom was David speaking? Many of David’s psalms are prophetic, and every Jew in Israel knew it. They knew that many of the psalms of David contained the coronation psalms that predicted the coming Messiah and what He would be like, and this was one of them. David was rejoicing in this promise to the Holy One of Israel, who will not be abandoned to hell, whose soul will not suffer corruption. Peter was asking the people: “Of whom was David speaking? Was he talking about himself?”

Listen to what Peter said: “Men and brothers, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, among the most honored men of Israel. David is dead. David is buried. If you go to the southern part of Jerusalem, you can see his tomb.” It’s similar to what I would say to a Muslim today: “Mohammed is dead. He is buried.” Along the same lines, Buddha died, and he stayed dead. Confucius died, and he is still dead. That is the point: “Go, look at David’s tomb.”

Peter continued:

Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.

Peter was explaining Pentecost. Last week, we talked about how God took of the Spirit that was upon Moses and distributed it to seventy. The same Spirit anointed the mediator of the new covenant. God took the Spirit that was upon Christ and gave it to the whole body of believers, to the whole church.

When he was explaining the significance of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, Peter took them right back to the life and ministry of this Jesus, who was raised from the dead, who was exalted to the right hand of the Father. After His ascension into heaven, this Jesus, along with the Father, poured out the Spirit that day.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.