God’s Providence in the Death of Jesus Christ (Part 1 of 2)

Why did God's plan, from all eternity, have to involve the sacrifice of His Son? On Truth for Life weekend we are preparing ourselves for Easter by taking a closer look at the mystery of the cross. And today we'll consider Jesus' death from God's perspective. Alistair Begg is teaching from the book of Acts. We're looking at chapters 2 and 4.

The Bible is still open. Those words from Acts chapter 2 are then followed by a significant response to this first sermon. I don't know that any of us have ever had such a reaction to a sermon. Some 3,000 people apparently believed and were baptized.

It must have been quite an encouragement for him when he went home for his supper. And then we have the healing of the lame man and all the confusion that emerges from that and the response of religious orthodoxy to it. And in the imprisonment of Peter and John, we'll pick it up from verse 23 of chapter 4.

They are then released, and when they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them? Who through the mouth of our father David your servant said by the Holy Spirit, Why did the Gentiles rage and the people's plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed. For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.

And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. Simon Peter was by no stretch of the imagination a straight A student in the school of the Lord Jesus Christ. The rest of the group were not, I think, any better than himself, but he was masterful at immediate advances and then colossal reverses.

His pilgrimage was a series of bursts of enthusiasm, followed by chronic inertia. He was masterful on the one hand of getting questions right, like, Who do you say that I am? And he said, Well, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And as he was basking in the glow of having been successful in that class, he was then assigned to the dunces seat with the words of Jesus, Get behind me, Satan, because you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. That's a quick reversal. He's a great encouragement to me, as I think about not only my school days but also my Christian life.

And then, of course, he's good at doing it in reverse, isn't he? You, Jesus, will never wash my feet. Jesus says, Well, if I don't wash you, you have no share in me. Oh, then, he says, not just my feet but also my hands and my head. Jesus, you should know that if even everybody else bails out on you, including some of my friends here, you can count on me.

I'll be with you through thick and thin. And while he was warming himself at the fire, the rooster crowed, and his eyes met Jesus. Now, I begin there because it serves to show us how remarkable this transformation truly was in the life of Simon Peter and, indeed, of his colleagues. Because the promise of Jesus had been made clear to them, although it is obvious from reading the Gospels that the clarity of Christ's words were not matched by the clarity of their understanding. Jesus had to prepare them for the fact of his departure.

They couldn't understand why he who had been their teacher and their guide and their Lord and Master would be able to say that it was better for them if he went away. And as they were trying to get their heads around that, Jesus is teaching them. When the Spirit of truth comes, he says to them, he will guide you into all the truth. And in that upper room discourse, which is there in the heart of John's Gospel, Jesus labors to make this very, very clear.

Let me quote to you just another brief part of it. But when the Helper comes, he's referring to the Holy Spirit, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me, and you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning. And it is in that context, after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, that the real manifestation of God's intervention in this way is not so much in the revelation of various languages and tongues, as it is in a remarkable sermon. That the Holy Spirit is poured out in fulfillment of the promise of Jesus, and here we have Peter himself declaring with masterful clarity, and with a comprehensive grasp of the history of the dealings of God, the wonder of what has been done. And at the very heart of that, we find that in this first sermon, dealing with the person and work of Jesus, as Howard Marshall observes, we immediately confront the paradox of divine predestination and human free will in its strongest form. This is not something that is tucked away in some obscure passage of the Old Testament. Here we are in the very birth, as it were, and the expansion of the church, and in the very first sermon that is preached, this matter of the providence of God is now being worked out.

And, as it was read for us, you will notice the language and the verbs. This Lord Jesus Christ, he says in verse 23, is delivered up for us. Men of Israel, hear these words. As you yourselves know this, Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified. Now, you have the exact same thing as we read it in Acts chapter 4 and in verse 28, as he quotes from the Old Testament, and he says, The fulfillment of this Old Testament psalm you have seen manifested among you in Herod, and representing the kings, and Pontius Pilate, the rulers, and so on. And these things have unfolded, he says, as a result of them doing whatever your hand, Father, and your plan had predestined to take place.

Now, if I may just belabor this one moment longer, Peter's explanation in Acts 2 in his sermon, the believers' affirmation upon their release from prison in Acts chapter 4, has to be understood in light of Jesus' resurrection appearance and that masterful Bible study that we have provided for us in Luke chapter 24. I don't know if it struck you in the same way as it struck me. I'm a simple soul when it comes to these things, but I often wondered why in that great drama on the Mayist road, as you have this amazing irony unfolding as Jesus in his risen person who walks alongside the two disconsolate disciples and basically says to them, So how are you fellows doing? And they said, Well, not so good. Oh, really?

Yes. Well, and they say to Jesus, Are you the only person that doesn't know what has been happening in Jerusalem? Which is one of the great ironic questions of all time. And at that point, Jesus doesn't go, Hey, Shazam, it's me.

It's me. What are you talking about? Look, why doesn't he do that? Well, of course, we're not told why he doesn't do it, but it would seem to me with a moment's reflection that it is entirely purposeful that he turns his disciples to the scriptures, for the confidence of heaven is in the scriptures, that the Spirit of God brings the Word of God home to the people of God. And were it not for the fact that they were given this panoramic unfolding of the history of redemption, then they presumably would just have gone hastening back to their colleagues to say simply, We saw him, we saw him, we saw him.

But they don't say that. They say that their hearts were stirred and moved within them, their lives were transfixed as a result of the things that he unfolded to them from the scriptures as he showed to them these things concerning himself. It's lovely that that was taking place. And indeed, Luke then goes on to tell us, and incidentally, I always feel a little sorry for these fellows, when they go running back, and they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem and they found the 11 and those who were with them gathered together. And they were saying, The Lord has risen indeed.

That's kind of anticlimactic. They went flying back there in order that they could tell him that. But they actually knew the story. And as they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace to you.

But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. You see, they're not really making much progress to this point, are they? What a hopeless group. If you're kind of disappointed with your elders, relax, look at this. And he said to them, What a miserable group you are. I should have got rid of you a long time ago.

No. He says, Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet.

This is I myself. Touch me and see for a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you see that I have. This was a literal physical resurrection for the dead. If Christ be not risen, your faith is futile. Those who have died are dead and gone and buried and for good. And we have no basis upon which to preach a gospel to a world such as our own.

It is at a very crisp, at the very epicenter of it all. Look at me, he says, I am alive from the dead. And having shown them that, he says, And by the way, can we get something to eat around here? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them.

And then he said to them, Here we go. These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you. In other words, I don't have a new story for you. This is what I was telling you all along. What was I telling you? That everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

Then, I will study again. He opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sin should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning with Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Then he led them out. Then and only then.

For were they to go before then, they would have been as clueless as they had been in the earlier days. Here, he says, is the explication of the purposes of my Father from all of eternity. And in a moment or two, the Holy Spirit will descend upon you.

And when he comes, then all of these things, the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that have somehow or another not seem to fit together, even when you take the front and look at the picture on the front. When all of this comes together, then, he says, you will be able to speak and to preach as you should. And so, Peter, in the fulfillment of that, explains to the gathered crowd in Acts chapter 2, I know some of you think that the bars have been opened early and the people are completely plastered, but the fact of the matter is, this is nothing other than what the prophet said of old. Where did he get that from? From Jesus.

He should have known it in the first place, but there again, so should you, and so should I. How patient the Lord Jesus is with us. How kind and gracious to teach us again and again, to say remember, remember, remember. And as I say to you, when he preaches, and this brings us of course to the reason for our topic this morning, he confronts us with the doctrine of providence in the life of Jesus, at the very center of the life of Jesus. When you have a difficult doctrine, or when you find, when one finds a doctrine difficult, one of the questions to ask to try and navigate our way to some semblance of understanding, is to ask of this particular area of theology, how does this, or how did this play out in the life of Jesus? And because we can almost with certainty say, if it doesn't work in the life of Jesus when we consider it, then we must be thinking wrongly about it, because ultimately all the promises of God find their yes and their amen in the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore we ought to expect that that would be the case. Says Calvin, in relationship to this, we must not follow the lead of many clever types who, when they talk of God's providence, engage in circumlocutions and in obscure and tedious speculations.

It's even hard to pronounce most of that, thereby removing myself from any of the clever types. Now, Calvin is saying that we must look to the Lord Jesus Christ, because he says, in Jesus we find the true mirror in which to contemplate God's providence. I found that a very helpful sentence when I discovered it.

He said, you know, Jesus is the true mirror by which we contemplate the providence of God. And so, lest I be guilty of that same circumlocution which Calvin warned us against, I want to tell you that I'm going to give you the outline of someone else's sermon. If you do that, make sure it's no one who's alive, and I have that covered, and make sure if you do that you mention it, otherwise they'll come and chase you down for plagiarism.

And if you do that, make sure you choose somebody good. I think I probably am guilty, along with many of my colleagues, of dabbling a little with Charles Haddon Spurgeon. You know the old dog girl about Spurgeon? There once was a preacher called Spurgee who really detested liturgy. But his sermons are fine, and I use them as mine, and so do most of the clergy. But I'm not going to preach someone else's sermon, but I found this outline in Flavell where he says, when you quote sources, that's research for goodness sake.

You understand? He says, quoting a grave divine. He doesn't identify the grave divine. He says, I'm quoting a grave divine. And then he's got these three little phrases. And when I found these phrases, I said, that's fine.

That's as good an outline as I could possibly come up with if I spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out. So, it's from a Scotsman, I'm convinced. I think it is an outline from a sermon of John Knox. Providence in the death of Jesus.

Number one. In respect of God, Christ's death was justice and mercy. Now, at this point, as Peter preaches on the day of Pentecost, clearly Saul of Tarsus is still Saul of Tarsus. He's not Paul the apostle. We don't have his theological treatise in the book of Romans.

Therefore, we have yet to await a more unfolded, extrapolated, explained doctrine of the atonement. We're not at the point where, as Paul says in Romans chapter 4, that he was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Remember that in the Gospels, Jesus is revealed. In the Acts he is preached. In the Epistles he's explained. So that by the time you get to the Epistles, you have the explanation of that which is described for us in the Gospels and which is preached in Acts. So Peter is preaching here in Acts, and he says that this event that has taken place here in the death of Jesus is an account of the fact that God delivered him up.

And the terminology there is, worthy of your further consideration, I leave it to you. In other words, there is already, on the part of Peter, as a result of the instruction of Jesus and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, an understanding that through the death of Jesus, the purpose of God was being worked out. A purpose that is rooted in eternity, a purpose that was unfolding throughout the pages of the Old Testament. And when you ponder that, and you think in terms of Jesus giving this study to those who were listening, you have to wonder whether, as Luke says, he explained to them all the things in the Bible concerning himself. It's hard to imagine that he went through the entire Old Testament, he may have done, I suppose. And I often wonder, where did he stop? You know, where were his points of emphasis?

What did he use? When he went to Isaiah 53, surely he went to Isaiah 53, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? But I wonder, did he stop on verse 10?

It would fit with this, wouldn't it? Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief when his soul makes an offering for sin. In respect to God, the providence that is revealed in the death of his Son is an expression of justice and of mercy.

What does that mean? Well, it means at least this, that Christ's death was not something that was contrived in time in order to fix a defect in a theological system. But rather, it was that which was conceived from all of eternity. Theologians talk about the covenant of redemption, trying to peer, as it were, back into the eternal counsels of God. And putting together the fragments of things in such a way as to be able to conclude that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit entered into a covenant of redemption, that the Son was assigned a task to accomplish, and the Father would glorify him in return. So that when Jesus prays to his Father again in John 17, he prays exactly along those lines, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you. We're recommending that addresses the sensitive subject of hurt that can take place within a local church.

And unfortunately, it's not that uncommon. Many have been emotionally injured by people in their church community. If you're struggling with issues like a strained relationship or feelings of rejection or isolation at church, let me recommend that you request a copy of the book, Sighing on Sunday, 40 Meditations for When Church Hurts. The book, Sighing on Sunday, explains why you should continue to trust God, even when church is a place where you've had a bad experience. As you read this book, you'll learn how you can work through your pain and why it's so important to keep showing up for worship. For more information about the book, Sighing on Sunday, visit our website at truthforlife.org. Thanks for studying the Bible with us today. Next weekend, we'll conclude today's message by considering Jesus' death from man's perspective, as well as from the perspective of Jesus himself. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.