The Resurrected King

Acts 2:22-24 & 36

“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[T]he resurrection of Jesus demands to be explained, not as an odd, isolated “miracle,” as though God suddenly thought of doing something totally bizarre to show how powerful he is. The resurrection of Jesus is best explained as the fulfillment of specific promises made by God through King David. And they show that the one who has been raised from the dead is the true son and heir of David. He, in other words, is the rightful king of Israel (36).

[T]he meaning of Easter is: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (37).

God’s plan of salvation, Peter is saying, was always intended to reach its climax with Israel’s Messiah undertaking his ultimate rescuing task. The anointed king would come to the place where evil was reaching its height, where the greatest human systems would reveal with greatest corruption . . . and where this accumulated evil would blow itself out in one great act of unwarranted violence against the person who, of all, had done nothing to deserve it. . . . God, knowing how powerful that wickedness was, had long planned to nullify its power by taking its full force upon himself, in the person of his Messiah, the man in whom God himself would be embodied (38-9).