Week 8, Day 3 (Acts 26:12-32)

In Acts 26, Paul is defending himself before King Agrippa. Starting in verse 12, he recounts his conversion experience, when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Jesus says that he appeared to Paul to appoint him to be two things: a servant and a witness (v. 16). I want to focus on the second of these roles: witness.

I did a quick word study, and discovered that “witness” appears 20 times in Acts (in the ESV). Of these, 13 occurrences refer to a group of people (or a single person, like Stephen) as being witnesses for God in some way. Of these 13 occurrences, 6 refer specifically to people being witnesses to Jesus’s resurrection (1:22, 2:32, 3:15, 5:32, 10:41, and 13:31). I think it’s safe to say that being a witness to his resurrection is a consistent theme of Acts.

But what does it mean to be a witness to Jesus’s resurrection? I reckon it’s a lot more simple than I usually think. Few people dispute that Jesus once lived. But we get the privilege of saying, “Hey, guess what? You know that man, Jesus, who changed the course of human history more than any other? Well, he wasn’t just a man, and he’s not actually dead. You can actually know him. In fact, he wants you to get to know him, to talk to him and ask him things. How do I know? Because I know him, and he’s told me this.”

Then, like Paul, we may be called crazy (v. 24). But we know the truth, and we can say, with Paul, that we are “speaking true and rational words” (v. 25). This wonderful foolishness of God is life to those who are perishing. Jesus does all the heavy lifting, all the wrestling with sinners’ hearts. All we have to do is to say, “Take it from me: Jesus is alive!”

-Jeff Terrell