He Said It In That City

He had assumed it for about twenty years without ever once examining the assumption.

The assumption was distance. Not consciously. It sat underneath, the way these things do, and it went roughly like this: a story like that gets going somewhere far away from where it is supposed to have happened, told to people who cannot go and look, and by the time it reaches anybody who might check, it has been running for long enough that checking is not possible.

That is how it works with almost everything. He is not a cynical man and it is not a cynical thought. It is just how a claim usually travels.

And in the spring he was reading through Acts, straight through, not looking for anything, and he got to the second chapter.

And he stopped, and read it again, and then got up and walked around the yard for a while.

Because Peter is standing in Jerusalem. Not in another province. In that city, weeks after, in public, and he is talking about a tomb.

And the specific thing that got him, and has not left him since, is that Peter appeals to a grave everybody in the crowd can go and visit, and then says the thing about the other one.

He is fifty-one and he has believed this since he was thirty-one and he had never once looked at where it was first said out loud.

The first public statement was made in the same city

Let me be fair to twenty years of the assumption before anything else, because it was not laziness.

Almost everything does work that way. Distance and time are how claims survive, and a man who assumes that is a man who has been paying attention to the world. You were not being faithless. You were applying a rule that holds nearly everywhere.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a discovery: the rule does not fit this one, and the account itself tells you where it started. That is not my kind reading of a spring afternoon, it is what stands written in the second chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that yard with you.

Read what he does with a grave.

Fellow Israelites, 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. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it.Acts 2:29-32

His tomb is here to this day.

He points at a grave in the city he is standing in. He uses the fact that it is still there, and still occupied, as part of his argument.

And then, in the same breath, he makes the claim about the other one.

Now think about where he is doing this. Jerusalem. Weeks after. In front of a crowd that includes people who were in the city at Passover, within walking distance of the place, in a town small enough that everybody knows where everything is.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a re-examination of twenty years: distance was not doing the work, because the written word puts the first public statement in the same city with a grave used as evidence, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the account records the location rather than leaving it vague.

And the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim and you would notice at once.

That is not a proof. A claim made locally can still be false, and people believe things in their own cities constantly, and a serious person will say so. There are arguments about how quickly all of this was written and what the crowd would have been able to check and how, and those arguments are real and ongoing and you should expect to find them.

What it does is remove one assumption. The one you were carrying for twenty years, that this got going somewhere safely far away. It did not. It started where it could be contradicted fastest, and that is written into the record rather than argued for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who had it set down with the place named.