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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Acts 17:28 - 17:28
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For in him we live, and move, and have our being - (or, more briefly, “exist”). - This means, not merely, “Without Him we have no life, nor that motion which every inanimate nature displays, nor even existence itself” [Meyer], but that God is the living, immanent Principle of all these in men.
as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring - the first half of the fifth line, word for word, of an astronomical poem of Aratus, a Greek countryman of the apostle, and his predecessor by about three centuries. But, as he hints, the same sentiment is to be found in other Greek poets. They meant it doubtless in a pantheistic sense; but the truth which it expresses the apostle turns to his own purpose - to teach a pure, personal, spiritual Theism. (Probably during his quiet retreat at Tarsus. Act 9:30, revolving his special vocation to the Gentiles he gave himself to the study of so much Greek literature as might be turned to Christian account in his future work. Hence this and his other quotations from the Greek poets, 1Co 15:33; Tit 1:12).