Acts Chapter 13 verse 33 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 33. - How that God for God, A.V. ("how that" being in ver. 32); our children for us their children, A.V. and T.R.; raised up for hath raised up... again, A.V.; as also it is for as it is also, A.V. Our children. The reading of the R.T. is not adopted by Meyer or Alford, and is scarcely an improvement upon the T.R. There can be no reasonable doubt that ἀναστήσας, raised up, means here, as in ver. 44, raised from the dead. Observe with what skill the apostle speaks of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God's promise to their fathers, which it was to be presumed they were anxiously expecting. The second psalm. Many manuscripts and editions have, "the first," because the first psalm was often reckoned not numerically but as an introduction to the whole book, so that the second psalm was numbered as the first. This is probably the reason why the eighteen psalms as reckoned by the Jews include Psalm 19, though Joshua ben Levi explains it by the rejection of the second psalm, on account, no doubt, of its testimony to Messiah as God's begotten Son. But the rabbins generally acknowledge the application of this psalm to Messiah (Lightfoot, 'Exercit. on the Acts'). Thou art my Son, etc. This application of the second psalm to the Resurrection is best explained by Romans 1:4. The reference in both passages to David is remarkable (vers. 22, 23). Christ, who was begotten of the Father before all worlds, was declared before men and angels to be the Son of God, when he was raised from the dead in the power of an endless life.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(33) God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children.--The better MSS. give, with hardly an exception, unto our children, and the Received text must be regarded as having been made to obtain what seemed a more natural meaning. St. Paul's language, however, is but an echo of St. Peter's "to us and to our children," in Acts 2:39.As it is also written in the second psalm.--The various-reading, "in the first Psalm," given by some MSS. is interesting, as showing that in some copies of the Old Testament, what is now the first Psalm was treated as a kind of prelude to the whole book, the numeration beginning with what is now the second.Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.--Historically, Psalms 2 appears as a triumph-song, written to celebrate the victory of a king of Israel or Judah--David, or Solomon, or another--over his enemies. The king had been shown by that day of victory to have been the chosen son of God--the day itself was a new begetting, manifesting the sonship. So, in the higher fulfilment which St. Paul finds in Christ, he refers the words, not primarily to the Eternal Generation of the Son of God, "begotten before all worlds," nor to the Incarnation, but to the day of victory over rulers and priests, over principalities and powers, over death and Hades. The Resurrection manifested in the antitype, as the victory had done in the type, a pre-existing sonship; but it was to those who witnessed it, or heard of it, as the ground on which their faith in that sonship rested. Christ was to them the "firstborn of every creature," because He was also "the firstborn from the dead." (See Notes on Colossians 1:15; Colossians 1:18.)