Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Why do you marvel at us?
Acts 3:11-16
11 As the lame man who was healed held on to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the porch that is called Solomon’s, greatly wondering. · WEB
Peter's first move is to refuse the credit, and his second is to name what the crowd did — because the healing is evidence for a person, not for the healers.
The crowd runs together in Solomon's porch, and it runs toward the wrong people. Peter's opening is a pair of questions that both push in the same direction: why marvel at this man, and why stare at us as though by our own power or godliness we had made him walk? The disclaimer covers both ways the credit could be misassigned. Not our power, which would make them wonder-workers; not our godliness, which would make them holy men whose piety God rewards. Neither category applies, and both were available.
What he puts in their place is a name that predates all of them: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers. The healing is not presented as something new breaking in. It is presented as the God of the covenant acting again, and Peter will spend the rest of the sermon showing that the acting is exactly what the prophets said it would look like.
The title he gives Jesus is his Servant, and it is repeated twice more in this chapter and again in the church's prayer a few pages later. It is the language of the servant songs, where God's chosen one is glorified through suffering and rejection Isaiah 52:13. Peter says God has glorified him, and the glorification is placed after the events he is about to recite rather than instead of them.
Then the recitation, and it is unsparing. They delivered him up and denied him before Pilate when Pilate had determined to release him. They denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a murderer instead. They killed the Prince of life. That last phrase is the sharpest thing in the sermon: the word means the originator or leader of a thing, so the charge is that they put to death the source of life itself — an act which, stated plainly, is self-refuting, and the next clause says why. God raised him from the dead.
The accusation is severe and it is addressed to brothers. Peter is not an outsider indicting a foreign people; he is a Galilean Jew in the temple courts telling other Jews what they did, in a city where he himself had denied the same man to a servant girl. The severity is what makes the offer in the following verses mean anything, and the next word out of his mouth is that they acted in ignorance.
He closes the paragraph by returning the healed man to the argument. It is by faith in his name that this man was made strong, whom you see and know. The evidence is standing in front of them, holding on to Peter, and it is the same evidence the council will be unable to answer the next morning. Faith is named twice in the sentence, and the text does not specify whose faith it was. The name is what did the work; the faith is what took hold of it.
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