Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
The prayer for boldness, and the place shaken
Acts 4:23-31
23 Being let go, they came to their own company and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. · WEB
Threatened with silence, the church prays — and asks not to be protected but to be made bold, which is the request that is answered.
The two report back to their own company, and the phrase is warm and slightly defiant. Released from a hearing before the nation's highest court, they go to the people they belong to, and the whole group prays together with one accord.
The prayer begins where the situation does not. It begins with creation: O Lord, you are God, who made the sky, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. Before mentioning the threat they name the one who made everything that could threaten them. The order is the argument. A council that can imprison is being addressed by people who have just recalled who owns the material it is made of.
Then they reach for a psalm and find their own week in it. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot a vain thing; the kings of the earth take a stand against the Lord and against his Christ. And they read it out, name by name: Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus. The psalm is not applied loosely. Four parties are identified and each is matched to a clause.
What they say about that gathering is the chapter's hardest sentence, and it repeats a pattern the book will not let go of. They assembled to do whatever your hand and your counsel foreordained to happen. The men in the psalm are raging freely and are doing precisely what God had determined. Nothing in the prayer suggests they were compelled, and nothing suggests God was improvising. Scripture holds both and this church prays both, which is a good deal more useful than resolving them.
The petition, when it finally arrives, is not what the circumstances would suggest. They do not ask for protection, for the council to be restrained, or for the threats to be withdrawn. They ask God to look at their threats — simply to notice — and then to grant that his servants speak your word with all boldness. The danger is left in place and the request is for nerve to go on doing the thing that caused it.
One further petition is added, and it is not for themselves: that God stretch out his hand to heal and that signs and wonders be done through the name of his holy Servant Jesus. The healing that started the trouble is what they ask for more of.
The answer comes in three parts, immediately. The place is shaken, which is a sign given to the people who prayed rather than to the authorities who threatened. They are all filled with the Holy Spirit — all of them, again, as at Pentecost, and this is the second filling of people already filled, which settles that the experience is not a single unrepeatable initiation. And they spoke the word of God with boldness, which is the petition granted in the same terms it was asked. The prayer for courage is answered by the giving of courage, and the men go back out to do the thing they were forbidden to do.
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