94-28 Impossible - Acts 2

Come on and celebrate. Thank you for all we can celebrate. This time we're going to rush.

And get our time. Strive to please the king. Give him the joy nothing else can bring.

We give to you our offering. A celebration of grace. Come on and celebrate.

Celebrate. Celebrate and sing. Celebrate and sing to the king.

Come on and celebrate. Celebrate. Celebrate and sing.

Celebrate and sing to the king. Come on and celebrate. Thank you for all we can celebrate.

This time we're going to rush. And get our time. Shout your praise to the king.

You give us joy nothing else can bring. We give to you our offering. A celebration of grace.

Come on and celebrate. Celebrate. Celebrate and sing.

Celebrate and sing to the king. Come on and celebrate. Celebrate.

Celebrate and sing. Celebrate and sing to the king. Christ is risen.

And risen indeed. Alleluia. Lord's work is done.

The battle is won. Where now our death is sure seen. Heroes again to rule and to reign.

Jesus our conquering king. Christ is risen. Alleluia.

Holy Satan was born. Every day now all will confess. Christ is risen.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. And risen indeed.

Alleluia. Tell it of God. Jesus is born.

Shout it and let your praise ring. Nothing remains. All's well for praise.

Worship is our offering. Christ is risen. Alleluia.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. And risen indeed.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. Alleluia.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. Acts chapter 2. And we pick up the reading at verse 22.

This is Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost. Verse 22. Men of Israel, listen to this.

Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge. And you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him, I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices. My body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave. Nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

You have made known to me the path of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence. Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day.

But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact.

Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Therefore let all Israel be assured of this.

God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, Brothers, what shall we do? Peter replied, Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call.

With many other words he warned them, and he pleaded with them, Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. God will add his blessing to the reading of his inspired words.

Let's pray to this Father God. Some of you are unaware of in terms of the personal dimension in your life. Let's pray to him that he will help us to understand something of the wonder of Easter.

The hope that there is because, well, his son died and has been raised again. All the promises God made to that first founder of the Jewish nation, Abraham, have come true in the Savior. God has declared that not just Israel, but all the sons of Adam, all the nations of the world, shall be enriched because of him and brought into the paternal care of the God of this universe.

So our Lord Jesus invited his disciples, and therefore by extension you and me, to pray that great prayer to the hour of Father. Let's do it together this Easter time. For some of you, I pick up premonitions.

The first time you've prayed this prayer, for many a long period, probably the only one you know, pray it. May God give you understanding as you do so. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

Loving Father, we've heard so much already today, many of us, about the significance of this particular time in the history of the Church. We don't make a fetish out of one day, but we thank you that this is a convenient day taken to remind us of the most dramatic act in the whole of the human story that affected people who lived before it in a miraculous way and affects people who live after the event. May something of Calvary, that bloody spectacle, and the empty tomb, that marvelous phenomenon, grip us right now.

So everyone shall go from this place thinking, Now I understand a little bit more. Now I do want, at least in my spirit, if not with my feet, to dance before this Father God who has given me peace and joy through forgiving my sins as a result of the work of His Son on planet Earth. Impossible that I should preach a short sermon.

No, but that is going to be the title of my address this evening because look at verse 24 of Acts chapter 2. I want to pick up on something I was sharing earlier today. Here is a great statement, a declaration of something that happened in time and space. But God raised Him, that is Jesus Christ from the dead, freeing Him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Him.

Who ought to be believed? Yesterday, for example, I was motoring at a very reasonable speed in Worthing and coming up the road, traveling on the right side for citizens of the United States of America, but the wrong side normally on our roads was a guy driving fairly fast and furiously towards me. It's amazing what you can think of in just a fragment of a second. My mind went back to Cleethorpes.

What was the substitute in our family for a visit to the Costa Brava or the Costa del Sol after the war? My brother and I would make a beeline for the dodgeons. The sixpence, you could have it for five minutes. And we would take great delight in getting the machines to go as quickly as they could and we'd belt one another as we came face on, time after time.

Now that was fun. Yesterday was a little bit nerve-wracking. I guess had the guy not suddenly come to consciousness, for it seemed as though he was a long way from concentrating on what he was doing, had he not done so in the last moment, then I'd have been involved in a very bad smash and possibly not even here today.

And assuming that Rowena, who was sitting in the back, because my mom was by the side of me, assuming she was all right, I guess if the police had wanted to know, or if you'd wanted to know just what happened, then she would have been the person to ask. Why? Well, she was the nearest to the event. Evidence becomes convincing.

Depending on the proximity in terms of space and also in terms of time. Now why do I say that? Because here is a man who's not a gifted preacher, at least not yet. He's beginning to discover a potential for preaching that he never realized that he had.

And it's his first address. Indeed, it's the first address ever spoken in this world about the resurrection. And the man who has the privilege of preaching, well, his name is Peter.

Eight weeks after Jesus died. And this is what he's saying. God raised him, Jesus Christ, from the dead.

A fact stated. Freeing him from the agony of death. A fact augmented.

Because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. A fact defended. God raised him from the dead? You know, if there's one thing that you can say about Peter prior to Jesus' resurrection, it is this.

He had a phobia about the cross. One lady theologian puts it very cleverly. She says about Peter, contrasting his attitude to Jesus, she said that Peter was at cross purposes with Jesus.

You see, our Lord had said to Peter that the day would come when he would be brutalized. When he would die in the most awful fashion that man ever devised to rob another of his life. And Peter didn't buy that at all.

Not for Jesus, nor for anyone. It was something utterly obnoxious to the Jew about being crucified. And Peter said no.

And Jesus said yes. And Peter says no. And Jesus says, Peter, you are at the moment the mouthpiece of Satan.

Now our Lord didn't generally use that sort of language. Not unless he was addressing hypocrites. But he squared up with Peter because Peter was trying to stop Jesus from doing what he knew was his life's purpose.

And from that moment, at a place called Caesarea Philippi, our Lord went on to tell Peter and the disciples time and time again, on a dozen and a half occasions, that within a matter of a few months he would be in Jerusalem and he would be crucified. But never once did Jesus mention death on the cross without turning over the event onto its flip side. And he spoke about resurrection.

As though the two were the differing faces of the same coin. Peter didn't understand. His heart was filled with uncertainty.

Those same doubts that stole across the breast of Peter were also shared by the rest of the disciples. Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdala, the women folk who had also been in attendance of the Lord Jesus during his earthly life, they too fully failed to comprehend what our Lord was saying. And for them, the cross was utterly inexplicable.

And then suddenly, so to speak, the penny dropped. And the apostle Paul, after the event, with hindsight, must have wondered what a chump I was. I mean, all the time Jesus had been telling me what was going to happen and that his death would lead into even the most remarkable phenomenon and I never fully comprehended.

Or at least if I did, I so dismissed the thought because it seemed to me to be completely irrational. When I was a kid, and maybe you've done this back down here on the south coast of England, back in the north, at Christmas we'd play charades and we'd try to make one another look idiots with a varying degree of ease. One of the charades was to try to teach somebody to speak Siamese.

And so this poor volunteer would sit down on a chair in the middle of the room and you'd give him some words, Owa, and he would say Owa. Then you'd supply him the next word of Siamese, Tana, and he would say Tana. And then you'd give him the capital, Siam, and he would say Siam.

And then you'd get him to say it again, Owa, Tana, Siam. Then you would get him to say it quickly. And by now the penny should have dropped.

Owa, Tana, Siam. I don't know whether that was in the vocabulary of Peter, but certainly it must have been at least descriptive of his reaction when he gave further thought to his fears, his phobias, his misapprehensions. I say that with perfect scriptural justification because in the third verse of the first letter that Peter writes, and the first chapter, he says, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. Kept in heaven for you. The authorized version in its good old-fashioned language says, It's a lively hope.

Something to live for. Peter here states a fact. This Jesus who's been handed over to the malevolent intentions of men who've always been opposed to him, the religious leaders and the political leaders, they've taken him, they've put him on the cross, they've hoisted it high.

It seems as though he's done with. But God raised him from the dead. And the only ones who really had any preconception that the death of Jesus must give birth to his resurrection were the angels.

Not so? I mean, it was they who said, Why are you seeking the living amongst the dead? It was they who in effect said to Peter, Why did you jog so quickly? He's got everything in control. He always had. He always has.

Now I'm not making this up because a couple of the disciples, you know what it is when you're terribly depressed and they had chronic depression. I mean, Peter possibly was even contemplating suicide. So what do you do when you're depressed? Well, either you go for a jog or you go fishing.

Most intelligent people would go for the former. Some of the disciples, well, they went for a walk, didn't they? They went from Jerusalem to one of the nearby villages and they were speaking about Jesus in the past tense. This is the man who we had hoped would have been the redeemer of Israel.

Past, past, past. And the disciples, they went back to their own home. As though if you filled your life with activity, then maybe it would lessen the degree of despair that was yours because, well, the man in whom you had placed so much hope, the man in whom you had given your confidence, had in one sense, although he wasn't to blame for it, he'd let you down.

And then they came to a realization. Far from let them down, with supreme bravery, he had performed the most wonderful act in the whole of the world. He had offered his life.

He was crucified. In order that, on the third day, he might be raised again. And the consequences of that for ordinary people like the disciples, like you and me, are utterly phenomenal.

God raised him from the dead. The fact stated. Freeing him from the agony of death.

When they looked at our Savior's body after he'd been raised from the dead, there were still the marks of crucifixion upon it. The scars that the nails had left, the gash in his side, but the agony was over. I went to listen to the Messiah across at the assembly hall on Friday.

About a third of the tab congregation were present. You can't do anything privately in this town. In the interval, I had a little time of caressing somebody.

Now, don't get overexcited. This is not a public confession of scandal. You see, there's a little baby by the name of Ruth.

She was there. She's a beautiful little child. I love babies.

Her mom saw me in the interval, and I finished it with a baby and the mom with a coffee. You know, quite a number of people seem astonished. I mean, here's this aging Paul fellow in the middle of the interval in the Messiah, the little baby close to him.

Beautiful little kid. I'll tell you something about that baby. The beauty of the baby, how does it sort of precondition the pains of childbirth? Why do I say that? Well, because you're never going to understand this particular expression unless you realize that Peter has in mind the labor ward and also the mortuary.

You see, that word agony, it actually means birth pains. And before the resurrection occurred, our Lord Jesus went through what is equivalent to birth pain. This is the reason why he shrunk from the cross at the human level.

All birth is preceded at the human level and at the animal level by pain. Sometimes the pain can be exquisite. And the thought is not just of the labor ward.

It's also of the mortuary. For it seems as though that bloody spectacle that is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ is going to go the way of all human bodies. And that is, it's going to decay.

And yet, that doesn't happen because God lifts him from the mortuary. The pain of death, very much like the pain of birth, becomes a setting which is a context for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You see, when the Savior came back from the grave, what also happened was this.

The church was born. The church was born. You remember some of you who were present this morning.

I was talking about the Redeemer. And I took you to an Old Testament passage in which you've got the story of Boaz and Ruth. And Boaz comes and he opens his heart in a literal fashion to this refugee from Moab.

And he acts as her guardian. He brings her into his family circle. And that's precisely what happened as a result of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And those who've put their trust in him and recognize him to be their Savior will understand what the writer to the Hebrews is referring to. When he says in that second chapter and the 13th verse, Here am I and the children God has given me. The 10th verse says, In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.

In other words, the resurrection of Jesus has made it possible for you and for me to come into his family circle. He is our Boaz. He is our Redeemer.

Here is the fact stated, God raised him from the dead. Here is the fact augmented, the fact developed, freeing him from the agony of death. Here is the fact defended, for it was possible, for it was impossible, for death to keep its hold on him.

What does that mean? Well, what happens when somebody dies? Do you remember when our Lord Jesus was on one occasion by the tomb of a beloved friend of his in the village of Bethany? Lazarus had been dead for some three days, and Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, were so disappointed that Jesus hadn't come along. And Jesus moves to the tomb. And he wants the tomb, the sepulcher, opened.

And the womenfolk say, No, why not? The NIV, in less forceful language than the authorized version, says, Lord, there'll be a bad odor. The authorized version says, Lord, it will stink. When the body dies, it decays.

John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave. But according to the mythology, his soul goes marching on. That might have been true of John Brown.

It's not true of Jesus of Nazareth. Here is the fact defended. It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

So Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who'd nipped down to the local body shop and got an enormous amount of perfume, would have done better if they had given the shekels elsewhere as opposed to the Anne Roderick of that day. And these womenfolk, who early in the morning go down to the marketplace and likewise buy some perfumes to supplement the work of the men, they too would have been better giving their shekels elsewhere. The reason being, Jesus' body does not need any preservative, for Jesus' body will not decay.

It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Peter's got a thing about decaying bodies, doesn't he? I mean by that that he makes further reference in the 31st verse. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay.

And it's not only Peter that's got a thing about this, it's the apostle Paul too. Because if you go over to the 13th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, you find him saying more or less the same thing. He talks about the Lord Jesus Christ and his death, and he says in the 31st verse, the fact that God raised him from the dead never to decay is stated in these words.

Verse 35, so it is stated elsewhere. You will not let your holy one see decay. And then in the 37th verse, just in case you didn't get it, the one whom God raised from the dead did not see decay.

His body did not go a-mouldering in the grave. It was impossible for this to have happened. Why? Well, because of his father's decree.

The father had promised the son this. I mean, in the book of Psalms, which our Lord would often have turned to when he went to the synagogue, and when he sang and perhaps danced in worship before the Lord his father, the psalmist says, thou wilt not leave thy holy one to see destruction. You will not allow his body to know corruption.

And it didn't. What is more, it was impossible for this to happen because of the son's discipline. Not just the father's decree, but the discipline of the son.

You see, Jesus has mastery of his own body. He's the only man who ever entered into the tomb with the power to get out again. It was not his weakness that took Jesus into the tomb, but his condescension.

Jesus said, no man can take my life from me. You can't say that. If you were to say the same sort of things as Jesus predicted, we would think that there's a tile loose in your mind.

We wouldn't believe you. Why did death and decay ever come into our world? Well, because of sin. Falling short of what God intended you to do.

You see, men were not intended. Women weren't intended to know the awfulness of a mortuary, a decaying body. Sometimes sinility can take a long time, and humans tend to lose their dignity as a result.

That wasn't the express purpose of God. That wasn't God's intention for Adam and Eve originally. It's not his best will for you and for me.

The reason for decay, the reason for looking in a mirror in the morning and getting less and less enthusiastic about the discipline, is because you have fallen short of what God wanted you to do and what God wanted you to be. But not our beloved Lord. He never sinned.

Never did a thing that was wrong. Never had to apologize. In his teaching, he often spoke about sin.

But always sin on the part of someone else. He never recognized sin on the part of himself. That's interesting, because he wasn't a pompous man.

But he was always an honest man. Which one of you convicts me of sin? And nobody could pick up the gauntlet and say, we do. Even Pontius Pilate's wife sends Pontius a telegram and says, this has nothing to do with Jesus.

Why? Because he's a righteous man. And his closest companions, the one who were witnessing the whole of his three years of public ministry, later when they wrote a record about him, said, in him was no deceit. He never engaged in double dealing.

You see, death had no hold on Jesus. Death only has hold on sinners. The body decays because the soul sins.

And the soul that sins, it will die as well as the body. And the Bible means eternal death. As it predicts the state of those who go to the grave.

Unforgiving. Unforgiven. But our Lord clearly was not like this, was He? He could not die.

Death could not have a hold upon Him because of His Father's decree, because of Jesus' discipline. And what's more, because of the law's discharge. I've really touched on this already.

You see, the law is those basics by which you are to live your life. You live your life by the law and there will be no decay whatsoever because the law is God's blueprint. That's why Mr. Major is right in telling us to go back to basics and wrong when he starts to neutralize his original charge to the nation.

No, this is what the Bible says about Jesus. Christ is the end of the law. In other words, Christ has kept the law.

Christ being raised from the dead, death no longer has dominion over Him. You see, if you've done everything that you were asked to do by the Heavenly Father, if you have kept God's law, then there is no way that you would know decay, that you would know deterioration, that we've all sinned and come short of the glory of God, but not Jesus. So you see, it was impossible for the grave to hold Him.

His death was voluntary. His death was an impermanent event. And on the third day, He's raised in the power of an endless life and the angels, they're not astonished at all.

It's ordinary mortals like you and me. So let's bring this to a conclusion. If this is a fact, as clearly it is, that God has raised our Lord Jesus from the dead, if this is the argumentation of the fact because it was freeing Him from the agony of death, and if this is the fact, defender, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Him, then what is the consequence as far as you and I are concerned? This world is under the condemnation of God.

And yet the Bible says that this human body, which is subject to decay, can actually know the phenomenon of ultimately being changed into a body like the body of our Lord Jesus. How does that come about? By acknowledging who Jesus is. The Apostle Paul says that our natural body is a vile body.

And some of us would agree more readily than others. But it does say this, when Jesus comes back again, those who have died before that event will be raised in newness of life. And those who remain will know their bodies transformed, metamorphosed at that particular point to a body like His glorious body.

Now when Jesus died, He was 32 or 33 years of age. That means forever and ever I'm going to be 33. I'll settle for that.

Just a moment, but to make my point serious. The only way that you will benefit through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ is by confessing Him personally as your Lord and your Savior. It means dying to the old way of life and being raised to the new.

It means saying, Lord Jesus, your death on the cross, the labor pain, that which was almost akin to the mortuary and the pain experienced before death as well as the pain experienced in birth. Concentrated, Lord, in concentrated passion. You went through that for me.

Now Lord, I offer you my apologies for the way that I've lived my life. I want to die. I want to be plunged into death.

I want spiritually to die and then I want to be raised to newness of life so that from that moment on, this moment on, I might live to your honor and to your glory. And that, my friend, is the message of Easter. That is the good news of the gospel.

It was impossible for Jesus to be kept in the tomb. That's why Christianity is a unique religion. Its founder was raised again.

And with the same certainty that you can embrace that truth, you can cling onto this parallel truth that those who confess Jesus as Savior likewise shall be raised at the last day and be prepared for entry into a new, regenerated heaven on earth to live eternally for the praise and honor of God. And that's made possible through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let's bow our heads in prayer and give you a moment to respond yourself to that good news.

How do you become a Christian? By saying something like this, Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that you came from the Father God to deal with the problem of my sin. I acknowledge that you were raised again for my justification. Allow your Spirit to come into my heart.

Cleanse me from all the wrong that I have done and make me your child. May this Easter be special and personal to me. Hear us as we sing Yours in glory and crown The Holy Name now Lift each heart and truth revealing Son of man on earth Heav'nly majesty concealing By your humble birth Yours in glory and crown The Holy Name Exalted Lord, deluded Victim, crucified Death is true, the cross defeated Sin justified Yours in glory and crown The Holy Name The eternal Name Name and Word