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Rh the spiritual contents which the apostle found in his Christ. For those to whom he preached there was a hideous contradiction in the very idea that one should be the Christ who had died the accursed death of the Cross, and in so far as Peter's sermons are apologetic they deal with this difficulty. He meets it in two ways. On the one hand, the death of Jesus was divinely necessary; He was delivered up by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God. The evidence of this divine necessity was no doubt found in the Scriptures (Acts 223; I Cor. 153); and when we notice that in describing the death of Jesus Peter twice uses the Deuteronomic phrase 'hanged upon a tree,' which to Paul was the symbol of Christ made a curse for us (Acts 530, 1039; Deut. 2123; Gal. 313), it is perhaps not going too far to suggest that the atoning virtue of Christ's death was an idea as well as a power in the primitive Church. But however that may be, it is certain that the difficulties presented by His death to faith in the Messiahship of Jesus were practically annulled by His Resurrection and Exaltation. It was this which made Him both Lord and Christ, and in this character He determined for the apostles and for all believers their whole relation to God. To Him they owed already the gift of the Holy Spirit; and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter argues elsewhere, is the sufficient and final proof that men are right with God (Acts 1115 17, 158). To His coming again, or rather to His coming in His character of the Christ, they looked for times of refreshing, nay for the consummation of human history, 'the times of the restoration of all things whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been from of old' (Acts 321). Much stress has been laid on the eschatological aspects of the primitive faith in Jesus as the Christ, and they are not to be ignored; but neither may we ignore the spiritual 2