Peter's Faith - Acts 5:12-16

In the work of running Christ’s church in his absence, Peter and the other apostles spent a lot of time in the temple, teaching the gospel of Jesus. Peter and John specifically had already been arrested once by the chief priests, but released with the command to not teach about Jesus anymore. The apostles chose not to follow that command and continued to teach the gospel and to heal and perform miracles for any who would believe. The people loved the apostles and were experiencing a massive amount of conversion, “and believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women.” The word “added” is cross-referenced with Acts 2:47 which says describes the apostles as “praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.”

There are a couple of interesting points here, the first being that “Jesus” was the one adding people to the church, not the disciples. The apostles might have been the ones speaking the words but the Savior was the one who had the ability to heal their hearts. It’s like the question they ask missionaries when they first go out into the field, “how many people are you going to convert?” The only correct answer is, “none, only the Holy Ghost converts.” The second interesting thing is that the apostles were very vocal about their relationship and belief in Jesus with them “praising God.”
The third interesting point is that they had “favour with all the people.” Now, “all” is an inclusive term, and while we can clearly see that they didn’t have favor with “all” the people, because the chief priests and Sanhedrin were very much against them, the common people were very much enamored with them. Part of the reason that they gained favor was because the Holy Ghost was now found among the people and he could teach the people and testify of the truth of the apostles’ words. Another part of their popularity was the great miracles that they were performing for those who believed, “insomuch that they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.”
This is a throw back to when Jesus would walk the streets and people would flock to him for healing. I feel that there is a distinct different between a man who claims to be the Son of God performing a miracle and regular people performing miracles through the power of the man who claimed to be the Son of God. I might have mentioned this before, but Jesus was so amazing and so perfect that it’s possible that many people didn’t relate to him on a personal level. People down themselves at Jesus’ feet, because he’s so much better than us, but they don’t do that for the apostles because they are just regular guys like the rest of us. God’s power to perform miracles can be life changing coming from the Savior, but the moment a regular person like me is able to perform miracles of the same caliber, the perspective changes from “well of course God can do it” to “God’s power is strong enough to work through someone just as flawed as me.”
The IM quotes Elder Jeffrey R. Holland as teaching, “faith in Peter’s faith brought the sick into the streets on their beds of affliction ‘that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.’ One wonders if there is a single written line in any other record that stands as a greater monument to the faith and power of one mortal man bearing the holy priesthood of God… With his own sense of urgency, Peter aggressively defied the injunction not to teach in the name of Christ and he returned again and again to the temple, where his safety was never secure. President (Spencer W) Kimball pictures him there in the house of the Lord ‘the number one man in all the world,’ stretching to his full height and speaking with power to those who could imprison him, flog him, even take his life from him. With ‘courage superior and integrity supreme,’ Peter testified plainly, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men… We are his witnesses of these things.’ Imprisoned and beaten, forbidden to speak, Peter was as irrepressible as Abinadi of old. He and his brethren rejoiced that they were ‘counted worthy to suffer shame for his name. And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach of Jesus Christ.’”
The phrase “faith in Peter’s faith” was very powerful for me because I think so often we focus on “faith in the Savior” which is very important and crucial to our own testimonies, but we don’t live in a world where we get to choose the faith that Peter and the other disciples had that got to live with Jesus. The world we live in is a “faith in Peter’s faith” type of world. I’ve also thought previously that the pinnacle of faith was to have Jesus appear to you, but the more I’ve learned about the apostles and their experiences, etc. the more I’ve determined that faith is not a wish to see Jesus, nor is seeing Jesus the prize that we are seeking with our faith.
Those who lived with Jesus and followed him 24/7 during his ministry, the disciples, and even those of his own family, his brothers, did not understand his mission or really believe in him fully until after the Holy Ghost came. If we are to go by that standard, we should see that the pinnacle of faith is not seeing Jesus, but knowing him and having a relationship with him through the Holy Ghost. The gift of the Holy Ghost is a large part of what made the difference between the 120 disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem after the ascension, and the 10,000 converted just a few weeks later. Multitudes followed Jesus because they wanted to see miracles, but they followed the apostles because the Holy Ghost testified of Jesus’ divinity and the truth of the apostles’ words.
I just had an insight into why the Holy Ghost wasn’t around when Jesus was in mortality. With the apostles’ testimony and the Holy Ghost, more than 10,000 people were converted in only a few weeks. With Jesus alone, there were a couple of hundred converts.  But if Jesus were to have the Holy Ghost testifying of him at that point, then the conversion rate would have been in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. That would have caused a huge problem for Rome and definitely would have caused a war between Rome and the disciples of Christ, resulting in the political kingdom of Jesus being established on the earth, but it wasn’t time for that. Jesus had to perform the atonement at this point, that was the purpose of his mortal mission, and Satan had to be able to dictate all the terms for his torture and death, but the circumstances for that wouldn’t have been available without the Romans. It wasn’t time for that yet.
In our world today, we, or at least most of us, don’t have a sure knowledge of Jesus Christ or of his gospel. We believe in the bits and pieces that we have experienced, and we believe in the beliefs of others. We have our own faith, our own trust, but then we are strengthened by the faith or sacred trust of others. Sometimes we rely on the faith of others, and sometimes others rely on our faith. A clear example of this is General Conference. I know that it’s been speculated that all the apostles have seen Jesus, and that might be true, but even if it is, they still don’t have a perfect knowledge of all things, they still live on this mortal world like the rest of us, they are still tutored by the Holy Ghost like the rest of us, and they are still imperfect like the rest of us. They might be further along on the journey of conversion that others, but when they speak to us, I don’t believe that they are speaking from a place of sure knowledge of all things. I believe that when they address us, they are testifying of what they believe, but are still sure of, meaning that they do not have all the knowledge in the universe, they do not know all or have all knowledge available to them.
The apostles and general authorities have access to only the same knowledge sources that the rest of us do, the Holy Ghost, the scriptures, and their own willingness to learn. This, I feel, is the essence of “faith in Peter’s faith.” Peter didn’t know everything definitively, he didn’t understand the gospel enough to ask Jesus all his clarifying questions, he had to learn and grow his testimony with the same resources the rest of us have, the Holy Ghost, prayer, scripture study, etc. But it was strong enough to be a positive influence for others, and it was strong enough to wield the power of God to work miracles.