Acts 2:47

Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.

Praising God, and having favour with all the people - their lovely demeanour attracting the admiration of all who observed them.

And the Lord - the Lord Jesus, as the glorified Head and Ruler of the Church. So Bengel, Meyer, and Alexander rightly understand the term here. The transition from "God," in the first clause of this verse, to "the Lord" in the clause, confirms this sense. Added, [ prosetithei (G4369 ), 'kept adding'] [to the church] - that is, the visible fellowship of believers; and as it was the exalted Lord that did this, the statement implies, that both their inward conversion and the courage which made this issue in their outward accession to the company of the believing was of the Lord's gracious operation upon their hearts.

Daily such as should be saved. This can hardly be the sense [which would require sootheesomenous]. The strict sense of the words is, 'those who were being (or getting) saved;' a form of expression suggested probably to the historian by what he had just said was the burden of Peter's entreaties - "Save yourselves from this untoward generation." 'And the Lord (adds the historian) sent this word so powerfully to the hearts of the people that there were daily accessions to the ranks of such as thus saved themselves.' It will be observed that we have bracketed the words "to the Church" [ tee (G3588) ekkleesia (G1577)] as being certainly of doubtful authority. [They are missing in 'Aleph (') A B C, etc., and in the Vulgate and most ancient versions; but they are found in D E, etc., and suppled by both Syriac versions. Lachmann rejects them, but Tischendorf inserts them. If not genuine, they were probably inserted first on the margin as an explanation of the sense, and thence crept into the text of those manuscripts that contain them.] Strong as is the external evidence against them, internal evidence pleads strongly for them: first, because we can assign a good reason for their dropping out of the genuine text-from the want of them in the corresponding verse, 41; and next, because of the abruptness with which the whole account of this Pentecostal transaction would terminate without them. So much so that all, or nearly all who reject the words "to the Church" make the first three words of Acts 3:1 to be the closing words of this chapter - "together" [ epi (G1909) to (G3588) auto (G846)] - as does the Vulgate. But this make very doubtful sense and questionable Greek.

Remarks:

(1) The reader will do well to observe, at the very outset, the strictly Jewish point of view from which the apostle of the circumcision here addresses his Jewish auditors. The same feature is observable in all his subsequent addresses. Nor is there any reason to suppose that this was done merely in accommodation to his hearers. The relation of the new to the old economy was naturally the first point to be settled by every devout Jew; and to the intelligent Jewish believer in Jesus the exposition of this feature of the Gospel would be invested with intense interest. The apostle's own mind was evidently filled with it, and probably it was to him the one all-engrossing aspect of it, until the vision which he had at Joppa and his subsequent visit to Cornelius enlarged the field of his vision.

(2) If under the Gospel "whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved," surely the perdition that shall avenge a despised and rejected Saviour is fitly bound up with the gracious offer. As "that great and notable day of the Lord," which swept impenitent Israel off the stage of the visible Church, avenged the crucifixion of the Incarnate, and the contemptuous rejection of the risen, glorified, and Heaven-attested Redeemer, so "the acceptable year of the Lord" will, to those who welcome it not, be turned into "the day of vengeance of our God." Jesus is to them that believe a chief corner-stone, elect, precious; but unto them that be disobedient, He is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned.

(3) When will Christians cease to regard the decrees of God as at variance with the liberty of the human will? If it be possible to make anything of human language, the 23rd verse of this chapter holds forth the death of Christ as the result equally of both. It is the difficulty of seeing the principle of reconciliation that causes any hesitation about receiving one or other of these, and holding both equally. But let us once begin to reserve our faith in the clear testimony of Scripture, until we are able to reconcile it with some known truth with which it seems at variance, and there is an end to faith, as such, in the naked testimony of Scripture, and the rationalistic principle of interpretation takes possession of the mind. Never in the present life will the harmony of the divine decrees and the freedom of the human will be demonstrated, or even clearly discerned. Whether even in the future state this will come within the range of finite vision admits of great doubt. But even though it should yet be cleared up in the present state, our faith in these truths is not to be suspended until then, nor even then yielded to either or both of them as a homage to demonstrated, but simply to revealed truth.

(4) The Messianic character of Psalms 16:1, with the apostle's argument from it, has occasioned much diversity of opinion among critics.

(a) The rationalistic school-whose criticism goes to the exclusion of all that is strictly supernatural and prophetic in the Old Testament-see in this Psalm only the poetic outpouring of a pious Israelite, who, toward the close of it, is confident he shall not be left to die by his enemies' hand, but be divinely protected and abundantly blessed. So Hitzig, Koster, and Ewald, who make no allusion at all the apostle's view of the psalm; while Hupfeld protests against being bound to follow the apostolic exegesis of the Old Testament (and perhaps he would have said the same of our Lord's too). Grotius-whose tendencies were in the same direction, though not developed to this extent-take the same view of the psalm, but admits a secondary application of it to Christ, as 'not remaining long under the power of death,' How the same language can be supposed to express one person's hope of not dying, and another's hope of not remaining long dead, it is not easy to see.

(b) Calvin, who is followed by some of the best modern critics-such as Hengstenberg and Tholuck, to whom may be added Alexander-views the entire psalm as meant of David himself, but regards the words of the 10th and 11th verses as expressing his assurance of safety, not from any temporal danger, but from the dominion of death and the grave-an assurance of eternal life and blessedness with God; and since this would have been a baseless expectation but for Christ's resurrection, Peter, according to them, only seizes on the deeper import of the psalm in viewing it as a prophecy of Christ's resurrection.

But however this may be thought to bring out the Messianic character of the psalm, it does not, at least, seem to be the apostle's way of viewing it. If words have any meaning, he lays down the following positions: That the speaker, in the verses under consideration, expected to rise from the grave without seeing corruption; that this was not true of David himself; and that, as it had been realized in one person, and one only-Jesus of Nazareth-the verses in question must have been intended by the prophetic Spirit to express His assurance of resurrection from the grave without seeing corruption. In view of this, Delitzsch-whose view of this psalm accords in the main with that of Calvin-contends (in language, however, not very intelligible) that 'David's hope has found in Christ its full objective truth, while for David himself it has in Him also a subjective truth, so that the truth of its lyrical subjectivity has its foundation in the truth of its prophetic objectivity.' The following, after much reflection, is the view which we have been led to take of the whole subject: That Messiah is the proper subject of the hope here expressed; and since the speaker is one and the same throughout, that Messiah is the primary subject of the whole psalm.

This was the view of probably all the fathers, and of most of the older orthodox interpreters, as it is of Stier in our own time. But it is not necessary to suppose, with most of the foregoing expositors, that David, in penning this psalm, thought of anyone beyond himself. Nor is there anything in it, until near the close, which might not have proceeded from any saint under the ancient economy. But on advancing to his hope of eternal life and blessedness with God; he expresses himself, under the power of that prophetic Spirit by which he "spake," in terms applicable only to his future Seed. In so doing the Psalmist does not pass out of himself into Christ, but only says of himself, and of all saints with him, what, being strictly true only of One Saint, becomes true of himself and of them only in its most comprehensive sense and at their own time. Or, to be more explicit, since the resurrection of David's Seed without seeing corruption is the foundation on which rests all assurance of ultimate redemption from the power of death and the grave, we may, in this sense, legitimately see both these truths expressed in the psalm. And whereas we have said that we regard Christ Himself as the primary subject of the whole psalm-since there is no evidence of one speaker in it giving place to another-we mean by this merely that Christ, who, in the days of His flesh, undoubtedly used the 'Psalter' as His manual of devotion, while entering into the earlier part of this psalm like any other saint, would of course find expressed in the latter part of it an assurance of resurrection exclusively His own. Nor does this in the least militate against the use of the entire psalm, in the sense already explained, by David himself, and all the saints of the old covenant, as it can now be employed, with a fuller apprehension of its meaning, by the whole Church of God. Stier throws out here a beautiful conjecture, which we cannot help thinking is well grounded; and if so, it throws an important light on the apostolic applications of Old Testament Scripture to Christ.

It is this, that as, on His way to Emmaus, the risen Saviour, "beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, expounded unto them (the two that accompanied Him) in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself;" and as the same evening He said to the assembled disciples, "These are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me;" and then opened their understandings, that they should understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:27; Luke 24:44-42) - they were from that time furnished, not only with the true key to the Messianic interpretation of the Old Testament in general, but with some of the choicest illustrations of it, and this very passage as one of them. And if so, we cannot wonder that Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, should, in this his first public address to his nation-and Paul afterward-fasten and comment so confidently upon so striking a prophetic expression of the resurrection of Christ.

(5) Those who hold that Christ has not yet taken possession of David's throne, nor will until the millennium-when He will set it up at its seat in Jerusalem, reigning there in visible glory over the restored tribes of Israel, and through them over the whole earth-seem to us to contradict the plain statement of the apostle here, that the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God, as both Lord and Christ, until His enemies be made His footstool, is the divine fulfillment of that prediction. No other interpretation of the apostle's language seems to us possible without violence.

(6) What a lively picture have we in the concluding verses of this chapter of primitive Christianity! Bound together by the common tie of a newborn faith in the crucified One as the Christ of God, and the joyful consciousness of life through His name-their faith strengthened, their views enlarged, and their souls fed from day to day through the apostles' teaching and their fellowship in the Supper and in prayer-their very meals were eaten with hearts running over with joy and love; while all-feeling that they were now one family, having one interest-threw their substance into a common stock for behoof of all. What should specially fix our attention here is not the particular steps which this new feeling prompted them to take, and which, in similar circumstances, might quite fitly be taken again. These met the great, the immediate necessities of the infant Church of Christ, but they are manifestly unsuited to an advanced stage of Christianity; nor even in the early Church do they seem to have been long acted upon. But what is so worthy of notice is the all-absorbing character, and the great strength, of religious conviction and spiritual feeling which could make such sacrifices possible. And since the Spirit of the Lord is not straitened, nor has ever been withdrawn from the Church, should we not unceasingly pray and confidently expect that these primitive days may be restored to us, when the Christian community shall be as joyous as in a new-formed world-as loving, as self-sacrificing as at the first; though manifesting it in forms more adapted to the maturity of the Church and of the world?