Acts 2:24

Acts 2:24. Whom God hath raised up. ‘Resurrection.' Peter had been leading up all the time to this great fact the resurrection of Jesus; the remainder of his discourse (thirteen verses) dwells exclusively on this theme. So much hung on it. (1) It was the centre of that grand redemption scheme Peter and others were beginning to catch faint dim glimpses of. The Lord whom they had known on earth, was indeed risen from the dead and was ruling from His throne. (2) It was this pledge of man's immortality. Dimly, as through a glass darkly, the leading spirits of Israel, as we shall see in David's Psalm, looked on to an endless life with that God who loved them and held with them such intimate sweet communion; but the resurrection of Jesus, in the eyes of His first preacher, chased away all the mist and darkness which hung over the future, for they had seen one like themselves die, had seen him again, risen from the dead .

Having loosed the pains of death. A good deal of difficulty has been raised here on the question of the apparent inaccuracy of the LXX. rendering of an expression in Psalms 116:3. The Hebrew words, which probably St. Peter used on this occasion, חֶבְלֵי מָוֶח would signify cords (or bands) of death. St. Luke, in his report of the speech, gives the LXX. equivalent, τὰς ώδῑνυς τοῡ θανάτου, pains of death. Though the figure used would be somewhat altered if the original sense of the Hebrew had been preserved, yet the real meaning of the passage would remain the same. The meaning of the expression ‘pains of death,' here spoken of as endured by Jesus, would seem to be, that death was regarded as a painful condition, because the body was threatened with corruption, and that consequently these pains were loosed when the body was raised and delivered from corruption (comp. Lechler); or in other words, ‘the pains of death' do not cease when life departs: they follow the body into the grave; but in the case of Jesus, these pains of death corruption were loosed, for God raised Him up.

Because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. Death could have no real power over the Holy One, who is deathless, as the voice of God has plainly shown in the words of the following Psalm (Psalms 16) quoted verbatim from the LXX.