Acts 9: Strengthening Peter's Faith with Tabitha--the Kindness of the Lord
It seems counterintuitive that a death would represent the Lord’s kindness to Peter. But that is what happened in Chapter 9. The Lord was kind to Peter in the raising of Tabitha. And through that kindness, God was able to strengthen Peter’s faith in a way not possible without Tabitha’s death.
As you know, the Lord had just healed a lame man, Aeneas, in Lydda. To proclaim “Jesus makes you well” and to watch the man walk and leap and rejoice had to further establish Peter’s deep and growing conviction in the Risen and Ascended Lord beyond what a similar healing had accomplished at the Beautiful Gate in Jerusalem. Healing the lame man at the Beautiful Gate was not an isolated event after all.
Aeneas was walking. And this healing of Aeneas was not evidence to any of the Jewish leaders; this was more an affirmation of Peter’s walking around, by faith, and instructive to Peter of what walking by faith looks like after Christ has ascended and poured out His Spirit.
I don’t want to minimize a lame man walking. I’ve not seen it in my lifetime. I have never said, “Jesus makes you well” to anyone or ever been in the position Peter was in with Aeneas, as far as I know. But I would think that a dead woman presents a dilemma of a different order of magnitude.
I can see where Peter might conclude: “The lame have walked, I have seen it. Been a part of it; but raising someone from the dead? I have neither the faith nor the power.” And yet he goes to Joppa at the request of Tabitha’s friends.
I want to show you what the kindness of the Lord was. But we first have to consider what the Lord’s aim was. It was not to make Peter a mighty man of God; it was not that he would be mightily used of God. It wasn’t for Peter to use the talents God gave him. That is all the silly, counterproductive, humanist way we think. The Lord’s aim is to grow Peter into the image of His Son. That aim is not so concerned which doing as it is in believing (which has its own constituent acts). And the ultimate end is for the Father to glorify the Son; and for the Son, through these events, to bring many sons into glory. See Hebrews 2:10.
Peter had to grow in faith in Christ. In other words, he had to believe just as Martha did: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” John 11:40. That is a tall order when staring at Lazarus’ tomb or at Tabitha’s body.
God knows that this is a big ask. So He helps Peter believe, to gain greater certainty, that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. John 11:25 And that declaration of who Jesus is must mean something in practice, not theory, now that He truly rose from the dead.
Knowing Peter must grow in faith under these circumstances, the Lord is very kind to Peter and repeats the circumstances of Jesus’s raising of Jairus’ daughter, who had likewise died. The parallels of the two stories are striking, and those parallels could not have gone unnoticed by Peter. (I recommend you go back and read that account.)
Like Jesus, Peter receives a report of a death, witnesses the profound grief of those close to Tabitha, and he clears the room of the mourners. All of this is intimately familiar to Peter; he has been here before, but as a witness to the word and power of Christ Jesus—and the compassion He had for a heartbroken mother and father. The question for Peter (and for us) is whether Jesus is there in that upper room with Tabitha’s dead body as He was visibly present with Jairus’ daughter. Was Pentecost, and the early fire associated with it, a closed event, or was it a divine spark that ignited an ever-expanding fire stoked by the wind of a present Holy Spirit?
He needed to know—and so do we—that Jesus has not gone anywhere, so to speak. He abides, decidedly so, with us through His Holy Spirit. He needed to know that the various earlier expressions of the power of the Holy Ghost did not dissipate or exhaust the glory of God in any way; this was not like Moses’ veiled face, which waned. These acts in Acts were God himself moving in response to, and the furtherance of, the glorification of Jesus Christ, and unto even further glorification of the Son until He comes again.
Peter had to learn that God is here—Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection purchased that much. Did that mean a dead woman could live again? That Peter had been in this setting before (albeit in Capernaum) must have certainly opened up the possibility that she could live again.
Notice the similarities between what Jesus said, Talitha koumi (which translates from Aramaic: little girl, arise), and what Peter said, Tabitha arise. She rises just like the little girl did. Jesus gave the little girl to her parents. Peter gives Tabitha to her friends. The story is complete; Jesus repeats it through Peter, through the Holy Ghost. He is the Christ! He is the resurrection and the life—not as a theological or doctrinal construct, and not as something to look forward to in the future when He comes again, but He means that truth to be lived in the present.
That’s a stunning lesson given to Peter. And I very much appreciate the way in which the Lord chose to teach it to Peter. Very gentle, and yet a very powerful lesson in seeing Jesus Christ is the “I am.”
Not many of us have had to go to this school to learn this faith lesson. Yet I do not put much credence into the suggestion that the lesson was only for Peter.
Luke never writes like that. He is not commending, or elevating anyone who performs a miracle, much less Peter. He does commend godly character like Stephen’s or Barnabas’, but as for God’s power in signs and wonders, Luke places the emphasis where it belongs on God himself. Even so, Luke is instructing us—this present generation of God’s people—what it means, or must mean, to walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh. (see Romans 8:1 and Galations 5:16)
