Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Isaiah's word to a hard heart, and two years unhindered
Acts 28:23-31
23 When they had appointed him a day, many people came to him at his lodging. He explained to them, testifying about God’s Kingdom, and persuading them concerning Jesus, both from the law of Moses and from the prophets, from morning until evening. · WEB
A day-long exposition divides his hearers, Isaiah supplies the explanation, and the book ends with the kingdom preached in the capital and nobody stopping it.
They appoint a day, and many come to his lodging. What follows is the fullest description of Paul's teaching anywhere: he explained to them, testifying about God's Kingdom, and persuading them concerning Jesus, both from the law of Moses and from the prophets, from morning until evening.
Every element is the book's method in miniature. The subject is the kingdom of God — the same subject the risen Christ taught for forty days. The person is Jesus. The sources are Moses and the prophets, nothing else. And it takes all day, because that is how long it takes.
The outcome is the outcome everywhere: Some believed the things which were spoken, and some disbelieved. No city in this book has ever responded as a body, and Rome does not either.
As they break up, Paul speaks one last word, and it is Isaiah's. The prophet's commission described a people who would hear without understanding and see without perceiving — and the reason given in the oracle itself is the part that must be read in the order the text supplies it. For this people's heart has grown callous. Their ears are dull of hearing. Their eyes they have closed.
The closing of the eyes is their own act, stated as such. What follows — lest they should see with their eyes... and would turn again, then I would heal them — is the consequence of a refusal already settled, not its cause. God's word does not create the hardness; it meets it, and where a heart has decided, the very message that would have healed it confirms it. This is the same pattern the Scriptures describe with Pharaoh, and it is why the quotation ends on the note of healing withheld rather than of healing refused.
And the quotation is not a dismissal of his people. Paul, who wrote that he could wish himself accursed for their sake, quotes a prophet who was sent to that same people and told at the outset how they would receive him — and who kept going.
The conclusion drawn is the book's last announcement: the salvation of God is sent to the nations, and they will listen. Not as a punishment and not as a replacement. It is the sentence that has been coming since a promise to Abraham that all families of the earth would be blessed, since a Roman centurion's household, since a door of faith opened to the nations. And the last three words are the only optimism in it: they will listen.
Then the ending, which is not an ending. Paul stayed two whole years in his own rented house and received all who were coming to him, preaching God's Kingdom and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, without hindrance.
The trial is never reported. The verdict is never given. A book that has followed one man through four hearings simply stops with the case unheard, and it stops on a word that means unhindered.
What closes is not the story but the frame. The book opened with the risen Christ speaking about God's Kingdom over forty days; it ends with a prisoner in the capital of the world preaching God's Kingdom for two years. Between those two sentences lies everything — Pentecost, a stoning, a road to Damascus, a sheet let down from heaven, a council, a jailer, an earthquake, a shipwreck.
And the point of the last word is that the chain was on the wrong thing. Paul is in custody and the message is not. The commission given on a hillside outside Jerusalem — Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth — has reached the center of the empire, and the book puts down its pen mid-sentence because the work it describes has not finished.
settled What this mark means