Acts 4:5-12. After having John and Peter jailed for a night, the rulers, scribes, and elders call them forward and ask by what power or name they are doing these things. Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replies that if he and John are being questioned about the healing of the lame man, be it known to them and to all that the man was healed by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who the leaders had crucified but who God raised from the dead. Peter says Jesus is the stone that was rejected by the builders which has become the cornerstone. "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

After giving the two apostles and the people of Jerusalem who were flocking to them a night to "cool off," the leaders are now questioning Peter and John. The leaders don't seem to remember Jesus all that well, so they don't know what is really happening. It is hard to fit the miracle that the apostles just performed into their mental framework of having solved the problem they thought they had solved by killing Jesus. Maybe they thought they just had a little bit of cleanup to do, but not nothing much, and now that Jesus is gone, that should be relatively easy.

Little do the leaders know all that is happening under the radar, but here we can see that maybe they are beginning to wonder. Peter expresses himself so boldly and assuredly and points squarely to Jesus Christ, the man they had crucified, as the answer. That may have started some alarm bells, or at least niggles, in their brains, but guilt will try to silence those alarms, as it always does.

This is how our commitment to goodness is tested. When we realize, or start to realize, how bad we've been, do we double down on the badness, or do we repent and ask forgiveness?