²⁶”Brethren, sons of Abraham’s family, and those among you who fear God, to us the message of this salvation has been sent. ²⁷For those who live in Jerusalem, and their rulers, recognizing neither Him nor the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled these by condemning Him. ²⁸And though they found no ground for putting Him to death, they asked Pilate that He be executed. ²⁹When they had carried out all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the cross and laid Him in a tomb. ³⁰But God raised Him from the dead; ³¹and for many days He appeared to those who came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, the very ones who are now His witnesses to the people.

Paul himself gives a summary of the consistent message that he preached wherever he went, as when He wrote to the Corinthians:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. (1 Cor. 15:3–4)

And so he did in this first recorded message in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch. It is a message of salvation—not political, but spiritual salvation from sin. The greatest irony of all time is that the people to whom God sent this message completely missed it, particularly those Jews in Jerusalem. Although thousands had received Christ, that was a small percentage of the Jewish population.

Though they prided themselves in the study of the Law, they completely missed the message of the coming Messiah. In fact, because of their ignorance, they became the inadvertent means by which the prophecies of the suffering Messiah would be fulfilled! It was like a chess game in which a person studies hard to become a winner, and in his most important game aggressively goes in for the kill, only to discover himself checkmated.

Paul rehearses the salient facts of Christ’s death, pointing out that the accusations against Him were groundless, even by the admission of the Jews. The basic facts included that Jesus was crucified and buried in a tomb, and that God raised Him from the dead, the reality of which was witnessed by his followers. And those followers are now spreading the testimony of what they saw as personal eyewitnesses. This, in a nutshell, is the Christian message and the method—giving personal testimony of our experience of the Savior who was crucified for our sins, and raised again to life. No wonder Paul could write, “I preach Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23, 2:2). And so should we!

Lord, help me be a faithful witness to what I know about Jesus, my Savior.