Читать книгу The Acts of the Apostles - William Barclay - Страница 20

GOD’S DAY HAS COME

Acts 2:14–21

But Peter stood up with the eleven and raised his voice and said to them: ‘You who are Jews and you who are staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and listen to my words. These men are not, as you suppose, drunk; for it is only 9 am. But this is what was spoken by our prophet Joel: “It will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out from my Spirit upon all men, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. And I will pour out from my Spirit upon my men servants and my maid servants in these days and they will prophesy. I will send wonders in the heaven above and signs upon the earth below, blood and fire and vapour of smoke. The sun will be changed into darkness and the moon into blood before there comes the great and famous day of the Lord. And it shall be that all whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” ’

THIS passage brings us face to face with one of the basic ideas of both the Old and the New Testaments – that of the day of the Lord. Much in both the Old and the New Testaments is not fully intelligible unless we know the basic principles underlying that belief.

The Jews never lost the conviction that they were God’s chosen people. They interpreted that status to mean that they were chosen for special privilege among the nations. They were always a small nation. History had been for them one long disaster. It was clear to them that by human means they would never reach the status they deserved as the chosen people. So, bit by bit, they reached the conclusion that what they could not achieve for themselves God must do; and they began to look forward to a day when God would intervene directly in history and raise them to the honour they dreamed of. The day of that intervention was the day of the Lord.

They divided all time into two ages. There was the present age, which was utterly evil and doomed to destruction; and there was the age to come, which would be the golden age of God. Between the two, there was to be the day of the Lord, which was to be the terrible first signs of the new age, often described in the same way as labour pains before a birth. It would come suddenly like a thief in the night; it would be a day when the world would be shaken to its very foundations; it would be a day of judgment and of terror. All over the prophetic books of the Old Testament and in much of the New Testament are descriptions of that day. Typical passages are Isaiah 2:12, 13:6ff.; Amos 5:18; Zephaniah 1:7; Joel 2; 1 Thessalonians 5:2ff.; 2 Peter 3:10.

Here, Peter is saying to the Jews: ‘For generations, you have dreamed of the day of God, the day when God would break into history. Now, in Jesus, that day has come.’ Behind all the old imagery stands the great truth that, in Jesus, God arrived in person on the scene of human history.