Acts: A 14-Day Devotional For MenSample

The Trustworthiness of Jesus Christ
Acts 2:22–24

Air travel is, by far, the safest way to travel. There are famous exceptions, of course. But they are famous because they are exactly that, the grand exceptions. By and large, 99.99 percent of all pilots succeed in bringing their passengers safely to their destination. We willingly entrust our lives to these pilots because they are required to have a rigorously proven track record before they fire up that jet engine with hundreds of people on board. 

In Acts 2:22–24, Peter is making a similar claim about Jesus. He is saying that Jesus can be trusted. But this claim is not based on mere sentiment. It is based on a past track record. It’s based on personal history. And there is one past deed in history that proves that Jesus is wholly and completely trustworthy: the resurrection. 

For Christians, resurrection isn’t just a way of expressing a spiritual truth. We believe that, in the first century, a man actually physically died; he was buried in a tomb for three days; and then he actually physically was raised back to life, never to die again. 

If this really happened, it means that Jesus’ claims about himself are trustworthy—that he can forgive our sins (Luke 5:24), that his death was not fruitless but was a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), and that in him we see God himself (John 14:9). These claims are not just something to read about and nod in agreement with. Believing them changes everything. It means that, even though we may always struggle with sins we can’t conquer, or pasts that come back to plague us, or disease and death, God is bringing a different reality to light. 

Christianity doesn’t stand or fall on subjective feelings or pragmatic how-tos, but rather on facts of history. There is no middle ground with what Peter is saying here. He is appealing to facts of history as a foundation for his audience to repent of sin and have the assurance that Jesus is able to save them. For people of the past, flying in an airplane was something one could only imagine. In the same way, Jesus underwent something that seemed impossible in order to show that his claims are by far the safest way to travel. 

His resurrection paves the way for all those who trust him to look forward to a resurrection like his.

It all stands or falls on the resurrection. Do you believe it?—Justin S. Holcomb