Who Killed Jesus? (Acts 3:11-22)
The explosive growth of the 1st Century Church was anything BUT 'seeker sensitive'
Today’s church has polite rules. Committees. Consulting Groups. And a detailed blueprint of reasonable steps you take place to build a church. God’s way in the first century played by very different rules.
Start a riot? Pick a fight with the religious leaders? Get the locals so riled up that they’re ready to throw you in prison (or kill you stone dead) just to stop you from saying dangerous truths that cannot be contained in a tidy little religious box?
All that and more.
The Pharisees were the Guardians of God’s Book, you see. They were the ‘good guys’ who had ‘Learned Valuable Lessons’ from history. (They’d tell ya, just ask them!) They stood vigilant against the idolatry that led to the nation being (first) split in two and (later) sent into Assyrian and Babylonian captivity, before being kicked back and forth between rival kingdoms like some kind of a geopolitical hockey sack.
Lesson learned. (Or so they thought.)
They were walking a fine line between keeping the People from forgetting God, and keeping Rome from cracking skulls like they did that time Herod heard there was a baby born in Bethlehem. They were very sensitive to the parade of wannabe messiahs who kept popping up like mushrooms after the rain. They got so good at protecting the status quo that when the one their own prophets promised showed up in the flesh, they went to their defensive crouch and did what must be done to get rid of the troublemaker.
But this Jesus was an altogether different kind of cat. His disciples claimed that he didn’t stay dead. They started performing the same kind of miracles as their Teacher. When the religious leaders called them out demanding to know by what authority they performed a very public miracle…? The didn’t cower and grovel. They answered with a bold kind of confidence.
The answer they got in reply was NOTHING like what they were expecting. Most preachers today wouldn’t have the cojones to say it.
Instead of grovelling to them, the religious ‘leaders’ were called out as criminals and worse. Not JUST for their crime of murdering an innocent man, that would be bad enough. But they twisted the knife right at the heart of their religious perfectionism: as ‘holy’ and ‘righteous’ as they imagined themselves to be, they failed in their most basic religious leadership role.
They hadn’t a sweet clue that the One whose death they orchestrated, demanding the release of a guilty man in place of the righteous, was no less than the Author of Life Himself.
What makes this story so interesting — and one the modern Christian would do well to learn from — is the impact those words had when they landed.
Doug’s latest book is’Biblical Badasses: The Old Men‘
When God gets geared up to bring about a reformation, he green-lights the dream machine in us old farts. Yep, the prophet Joel says that when God‘s afoot flipping a nation from filth to faith, he doesn’t just use the young ‘uns, but he gives fresh dreams to the old dudes. Indeed, it is not just young peeps. It’s young and old. It’s a holy mashup of the green behind the ears and grey within the ears. That’s right, old man … God’s not finished with you yet. The ten men spotlighted in this spicy tome were probably way older than you when God lit their world of fire with fresh vision and purpose. If you’re hungry for more of God, then you should expect the Lord to do the same with you.
This is a great book for the rowdy 60+ Christian. It’ll shoot adrenaline into your soul. It hit #1 on Amazon in less than twenty-four hours. Get your seniors reading this in their group bible study. The devil will not be happy…