Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Peter stands up: this is what Joel spoke
Acts 2:14-21
14 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and spoke out to them, “You men of Judea and all you who dwell at Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to my words. · WEB
Peter answers the mockery with a prophecy, and the claim he makes is that the last days have begun and the Spirit is now poured out on everyone without rank.
He begins with the joke, and disposes of it by the clock. It is only the third hour of the day — nine in the morning, and on a feast day, when devout men would not yet have eaten. The reply is brief because the charge is not serious. What is serious is that something has happened which needs an explanation, and the explanation Peter reaches for is a text.
This is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel. The formula is worth pausing on. He does not say the event resembles the prophecy or fulfills it partially. He identifies what the crowd is watching with what Joel described, and everything else he says rests on that identification holding.
The prophecy's first claim is about timing: in the last days. That phrase, applied to a morning in Jerusalem, sets the terms for the whole New Testament. The last days are not a period still to be entered; they began with the events this book narrates, and they have been running ever since. A long interval and a final period are not contradictory. What the phrase asserts is that no further age intervenes before the end.
Its second claim is about distribution, and it is stated four ways in three verses. Sons and daughters. Young men and old men. Servants and handmaidens. The Spirit falls across the divisions of sex, of age, and of social station, and the prophecy specifies the last of these twice as if anticipating disbelief. Prophecy in Israel had been the vocation of a few; what is announced is that it will be the common possession of the many.
The third claim is the hardest and is not softened. Wonders and signs, blood and fire and smoke, the sun darkened and the moon like blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes. Peter quotes it in full, including the part that plainly had not happened that morning. He is not claiming the entire prophecy was discharged at nine o'clock. He is claiming that its opening has begun, which necessarily brings the rest into view — the outpouring is the first movement of a sequence whose last movement is the day of the Lord.
And the quotation is allowed to run to its final line, which is where the sermon is going: whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Peter has three thousand people in front of him whose only question is what this means. He answers by putting an open door in the middle of a prophecy about the end.
settled What this mark means