Acts 2:27

This verse comes from a speech delivered by Peter — one of Jesus' twelve closest followers — to a crowd in Jerusalem about fifty days after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. Peter is quoting Psalm 16, an ancient Hebrew song attributed to King David, who ruled Israel roughly a thousand years before Jesus. Peter's argument is that David couldn't have been describing his own experience, since David did die and his tomb was well known to everyone present. Instead, Peter claims David was actually prophesying about Jesus — predicting that God would not leave him in the grave or allow his body to decay. The phrase "Holy One" is Peter's term for Jesus. This makes the verse a central piece of evidence in the first Christian sermon ever preached: the resurrection of Jesus was not an accident or afterthought, but the fulfillment of an ancient promise.

God, abandonment is one of my deepest fears, and I'm not always sure I trust that you won't leave. Thank you that the resurrection is your answer to that fear — that you stayed with Jesus through the grave and came out the other side. Help me to trust that you will not leave me either. Amen.

There is a word in this verse that most people slide right past: abandon. Not "lose." Not "overlook." Abandon — a word that carries the weight of a deliberate choice, of someone standing at a threshold and deciding to walk away. Peter uses it specifically. God, he argues, looked at the grave where Jesus lay, in the silence after the crucifixion, and chose not to leave. That is the hinge point of the whole sermon. In a city that had seen hope crushed and reborn and crushed again, Peter stands up and says: this time, God stayed. Most people carry some version of the fear of being left — maybe from childhood, a marriage, a friendship that dissolved when things got hard. That fear has a quiet way of attaching itself to God too: the background anxiety that when things get bad enough, even God won't stay. And yet the very first sermon ever preached about the resurrection opens with this: God does not abandon. Not Jesus in the grave. The implication drifts quietly toward anyone willing to receive it — not you, either. Whatever you are in the middle of right now, that same faithfulness has your name on it.