Attacking the Gates (Part A)

Without the Holy Spirit, the power of God, we have nothing.

We don't have to see the dead raised. We don't have to see the lepers cleansed to realize there's still the miracle of preaching the gospel and converted souls. To convert a soul is a miracle.

You can't do it and I can't do it. No human being can convert a soul to Jesus Christ. However, almost exclusively, God uses human beings so that he can convert them. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of Acts chapter 2 as he begins his message, Attacking the Gates.

So Acts chapter 2, the Acts of the Holy Spirit, the Acts of the Apostles, the Acts of the Church after the ascension of Christ. 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 Yahweh 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 Christ to sit on his throne. He, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh seek 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. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, Yahweh said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.

It would be nice to go to verse 37 too, but we cannot, because that's going to tell us what the result of this sermon is, attacking the gates. By phenomena, the church was inserted into the world, and by phenomena, the church will be removed from this world, as we know as the rapture. The church is the assembly of believers, of true believers. The apostate church will be left behind and the apostates along with them, but the true believers will be taken away. Now, the apostles at this point, when the Holy Spirit made this dramatic entrance and they began to speak in tongues and were understood in other languages, which clearly is a miracle, they were falsely accused of being drunk.

It's nine o'clock in the morning. Peter then, of course, refutes that and launches into a counter-attack, because it was an attack. It was Satan influencing some in the audience to say, this has nothing to do with God, this has everything to do against God. These men are on the temple ground, it's likely where this is taking place, and they're not even sober, and Peter was not going to stand for that. He does stand, but he stands to launch this attack using reason, truth, and scripture.

A lot of lessons fly off the page for us as Christians. That's what I want to use when I'm sharing the faith, when I am defending the faith by attacking the fortifications of the enemy. It was to Peter that Jesus said, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

Well, Peter is carrying that out right now. He is attacking the gates of hell, and Jesus spoke of hell's gates metaphorically to get us to understand spiritual fact that hell has fortifications, that hell makes war plans, that hell will execute those war plans, and that we better be ready, and that we should prevail, and that if we're going to prevail, we have to attack. Now if you look at it culturally, the gates of the city was where the rulers were, where the war council and war plan took place, where they were put in place, but to us we think of the gates of this barrier, this fortification. And as we listen to Jesus say, the gates of hell shall not prevail, taking both meanings, that puts us on offense, because the enemy doesn't attack carrying gates to us. We have to go to the gates if we're going to prevail. We have to beat their plan on the battlefield and continue to attack until their position is overrun by us. When the church has done this for centuries or else we wouldn't be here. Now we do this through truth and love and scripture.

City gates, the place where war plans were made. Satan's war plans according to the metaphor of Christ. Jesus promised their collapse. If the righteous attack, if the righteous do what Peter is doing here, they started this, Peter is going to finish this. It is the church militant, the church on the move, ever intolerant of Satan's influence, of Satan's work. Richard Wambrandt in Tortured for Christ, he's now with the Lord, and if you haven't read his book, Tortured for Christ, I encourage you to get it and read it. He writes, wars are won only by offense, never by defense strategy. That's true throughout scripture.

In the New Testament, Paul and the apostles got out of Jerusalem and they went out into the Gentile world and they took the gospel with them. They went on the attack, attacking the gates. Our attacks on Satan's influence must be directed by the Holy Spirit. He is our field marshal. He points to which direction we go, when we go, and it is our responsibility to be ready. What good is having a field marshal if the troops have no ammunition, if the troops have no courage, if the troops have no faith?

We have our responsibility. God will certainly fulfill His if He can. He cannot do it if we're not ready to go. What we're going to see in this section of scripture is Peter hurling scripture verses at his audience because he was ready, he was armed.

He did not know this was going to happen. He went up with the apostles to meet together and praise the Lord and then he finds himself face to face with scoffers and hungry souls and goes right to work. You've got to love this kind of stuff if you are a believer. If you're not born again and filled with the Holy Spirit, you may have a nonchalant response to these things, a reaction, but if you're filled with the Spirit, you've got, I want a piece of this.

I want God to use. We were just singing, pass me not, O gentle Savior, while on others thou ought calling, do not pass me by. Before God blessed me with a church to pastor, he called me to ministry. And then he let me sit for over a decade and it was very painful because I would see others unwrapping their gifts. I would see others who were called and were not passed by and I felt passed by from time to time. And all I did was study, just load up. I'd take my books in my car and drive to the worksite, get there two hours early and study the word of God.

Confident that he was going to one day use me. Those were painful days. Let's stop talking about it. So anyway, this is Peter and this is a lesson for us all. In verse 22, 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. The church at this time will remain predominantly Jewish for almost 30 years. And the Gentiles will pour in, but it was again a very difficult thing to take place, to come with this New Testament that God had spoken of. Born-again Christians. Born-again Christians love Israel.

I think, you know, if you say you're a Christian and you don't have a heart for Israel, even for the Jewish people, you need a reality check from the Word. Something's missing. Something's not right.

You're not falling under a proper influence. Psalm 130 verse 8, and there are other places in the scripture, but this is the sentiment that God wants to communicate to his people. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. God has not given up on Israel.

He's not replaced them. He certainly has raised up the church, but the church is made of those who are no longer Jew and no longer Gentile. They're people of God. And when the church is confused about this, she is confused. And whenever we are confused, we are weaker than what we could have been had we not been confused.

Hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, the man tested by God to you, by fact, by profit, and by God. That's how Jesus has been. The fact is his audience understood who Christ was.

They knew the story. They just couldn't put it together yet, and Peter's going to get them to do, many of them, to do just that. But the prophets spoke of these things from which Peter will draw, and God is the one that is overseeing it all through his Holy Spirit. To eliminate the supernatural from Christianity is to have nothing left that is vital.

I'll put it this way. Without the Holy Spirit, the power of God, we have nothing. We don't have to see the dead raised.

We don't have to see the lepers cleansed. To realize it's still the miracle of preaching the gospel and converted souls. To convert a soul is a miracle.

You can't do it, and I can't do it. No human being can convert a soul to Jesus Christ. However, almost exclusively, God uses human beings so that he can convert them. This is the gospel message. This is why we have something to do when we come to Christ other than wait to go to heaven. We are to take the gates. We are to go on the offensive. We are to attack.

We are to be ready to attack. This doesn't make us rude, forcing our opinions on others, because we wait for the Holy Spirit to open the door, and then we enter into dialogue, as Peter is doing here. He's not running around the temple ground with a sandwich board, you know, repent, the end is near. He says, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you, by miracles, wonders, and signs. We are in the age of grace, not the law, the law of Moses.

John the Baptist, Jesus said, was the last prophet of the law. We're in the age of faith, according to the truth of the word, not the age of miracles. We're not running around waiting for some Elijah to come up and do miracles so that we can believe. Miracles, that is power in action. Now Satan is capable of doing miraculous things too when granted by God. The story of Job teaches that. Antichrist will come with lying wonders, signs and lying wonders, lying in the sense that they're going to mislead people, those who want to be misled, because the deciding factor with Antichrist is he's going to be unrighteous.

He's not going to be a decent person, so anything he does is disqualified, but those who will fawn over him, that won't matter, indecency won't matter. Sodom and Gomorrah should have been preserved, according to their, the mindset of those who will be around Antichrist and many today. The signs, first the miracles, that is the power in action and the wonders. The wonders are the effects of the miracle. They're experiencing that here in Acts chapter 2. With the mighty rushing wind, with the tongues, they were experiencing something that was not normal.

There was spiritual, this spiritual activity taking place and Peter will let them know that spiritual activity is from heaven, not from hell. The signs here are the value of the miracle. The effect is the wonder. The sign is supposed to create a response. This is not to be wasted. It's meaningful.

It's connected. It's connected to God's word, not outside of God's word. Miracles today, they are still granted. They're just not as widespread or dramatic as in biblical times, much of biblical times, because there are periods in the Bible when miracles were not pronounced either. But miracles tend to breed a craving for more miracles.

Okay, you've seen a miracle, now you want another one. And God will not be reduced to that and he gives us a special beatitude on this very subject. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. It's the age of faith. It's disappointing when people try to tell you that you're going to be healed when you're not going to be healed.

When you're not going to suffer this or that and you are going to suffer this or that. That's not what we're supposed to do. We don't know the mind of God. It would be quite presumptuous on many things to just insert into somebody's life what God is going to do for them. What happens when he doesn't?

I've seen this so many times. We are here to subject ourselves to the will of God because we cherish him. And we cherish him because we know who he is. We know what he is about.

We know where he's taking us and we know where we are going. And we are not apologizing to anybody for this and we're not backing away from it either. Apostates, they will come. That's them. That is them.

That is not me. And you've got to have that foundation in your heart. Are you two going to leave? Where are we going to go? You have the words of life. Well, coming back to this and I'll quote that again from Peter. We've only got the first verse so far.

You guys got to hurry up. Verse 22 is where we are. He says, God did through him in your midst as you yourselves also know. Well, Jesus was well known to this crowd. John chapter 12 verse 19, the Pharisees therefore said among themselves, you see that you are accomplishing nothing?

Look, the whole world has gone after him. Yeah, those miracles up in Galilee and Syria and Jerusalem and Judea were just a word that was spreading all over the place about Jesus. Peter knew that they knew. And he was going to take advantage of that to their edification. They knew the character of Christ. Even if they never saw him, they heard. They knew about the sermons and the miracles and the murder. They heard of his resurrection also. Peter is about to bring to them right up close these facts.

He's going to back them up from the Bible and they're going to be converted. The signs were evidences made necessary in order to grab their attention, the sign of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Those signs never produced conviction. They stayed lost.

They had the signs. They saw the miracle, but they still were lost. This was the case in the days of Christ. It was the case in the days of Paul.

It is the same way to this day. Miracles are not enough to convert a soul. Just ask Judas Iscariot, but you can't ask him because he became an apostate. Peter's preaching, his witnessing of the truth with reason, produced conviction. Look with me at verses 37. Now when they heard this, they were cut to heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? How do we fix this? You've convinced us that we are guilty and that's conviction.

Felons are convicted when found guilty. Verse 23, him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death. What is boring about this kind of preaching? Peter, do you know that Stephen's going to do the same thing and they're going to kill him for doing this? Peter points out here what he says in verse 23, him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God. He's pointing to the mystery of sovereignty and free will in human choice. But God's decided will, him being delivered by the determined purpose. God decided how he was going to deal with our sin. Jesus became the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

According to other passages then, Revelation 13 8 which says it just like that, the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. God the Father delivered Jesus Christ to the cross that we could be delivered from the judgment upon ourselves because of our sin. Now this crucifying of Jesus did not absolve those responsible for their ghastly crucifixion simply because God had purpose to deliver humanity by delivering Christ to the cross. The Lord used what he had and what he had were guilty people who many of them opted to remain guilty. In Luke's gospel, Jesus speaking to the nay-saying religious leaders essentially said to them, you got plenty of religion, you have plenty of culture, but you're going to hell anyway because you don't want to believe the truth. Luke 13 28, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and yourselves thrust out.

Because you'll have no one else to blame. And the fact that they will be gnashing their teeth indicates they will be angry at God for having the audacity to be God and to judge them for their wickedness even though God had offered them salvation. Jesus, forsaken by his Father for not abandoning us to sin, taking our sin upon himself according to his Father's will, according to the will of Christ. Every time you see the cross of Christ, remember it was no accident.

Whether you see it on a piece of jewelry, whether you see it on a roadside altar, whether you see it in the church, on a church, wherever you see the cross of Christ, it was not a mistake. It was planned by God, him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God. Isaiah 53 10, yet it pleased Yahweh to bruise him, he has put him to grief when you make his soul an offering for sin.

And that has happened, it's done. Not when Isaiah wrote those words, it was still over 700 years away. Even in the millennial age, according to Ezekiel, what Christ achieved for us on the cross will be commemorated with bloodless sacrifices. They will act out the crucifixion because there will be people born in that age that really don't understand it.

And they're going to get a lot of help with that and some will still reject in the end. The foreknowledge of God, first of all, all knowledge with God is foreknowledge. It is almost a redundancy, God knows everything, he cannot learn. This foreknowledge of God, A.W.

Tozier really just lays this out so wonderfully. He says, before man sinned, the remedy had already been provided. Before paradise was lost, paradise had already been regained. Because Christ was crucified before the foundation of the world and in the mind and purpose of God, Christ had already died before he was born. In the purpose of God, Christ had already died before Adam was created.

In the purpose and plan of God, the world had already been redeemed before the world was ever brought into being. You've been listening to Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply visit crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at crossreferenceradio.com or simply search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Acts, right here on Cross Reference Radio.