Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
You will not allow your Holy One to see decay
Acts 13:26-37
26 “Brothers, children of the stock of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, the word of this salvation is sent out to you. · WEB
Paul reaches the resurrection by the same psalm Peter used and the same argument — David's grave — which shows the church had one case, not several.
The sermon restarts with a fresh address, and both halves of the room are named again: Brothers, children of the stock of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, the word of this salvation is sent out to you. The Gentile adherents are told the message is theirs before anything controversial has happened.
The account of the crucifixion is remarkably free of blame directed at his hearers. It happened in Jerusalem, and those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they didn't know him, nor the voices of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. The irony is precise and is not an accusation against the men listening: the people who heard the prophets read aloud every week fulfilled those prophets by failing to recognize the man they described. Ignorance is named as the cause, as Peter named it in the temple.
Then the same three-beat structure every sermon in this book uses. They found no cause of death and asked for the execution anyway. They took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead — and the witnesses are named, though Paul does not include himself among them: those who came up with him from Galilee, who are his witnesses to the people.
The first Scripture cited is the second psalm, and the way Paul applies it deserves care. You are my Son. Today I have become your father is quoted as fulfilled in that he raised up Jesus. Paul supplies the referent himself. The language of begetting is applied to the resurrection and enthronement of the Son — the day a king was publicly acknowledged — not to an origin at some point in time. That reading is not imposed on the psalm; it is the one the preacher states in the same sentence.
The second citation is a promise of the holy and sure blessings of David, attached to the clause that governs the whole argument: he was raised now no more to return to corruption. This is not a resuscitation with another death to come.
And the third is the psalm Peter preached at Pentecost, handled in exactly the same way and to the same conclusion. You will not allow your Holy One to see decay — and then the disproof of the obvious candidate, in words that are Paul's own and not Peter's: For David, after he had in his own generation served the counsel of God, fell asleep, was laid with his fathers, and saw decay. But he whom God raised up saw no decay.
Two apostles, a decade and a thousand miles apart, take the same psalm and settle it by the same fact — that David is buried and his body did not survive burial. That is not coincidence, and it is not one man copying another; it is evidence that the earliest church had a single, worked-out case from the Scriptures, and that both men were preaching it.
The way Paul describes David's death is the plainest statement of the matter in the sermon. He served his generation, fell asleep, was laid with his fathers, and saw decay. Three verbs for what happened to David, and all three concern a body in the ground. The contrast that carries the argument is not between two destinations after death but between two outcomes in a grave.
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