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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The application of the prophecy:
v. 29. Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulcher is with us unto this day.
v. 30. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, He would raise up Christ to sit on his throne,
v. 31. he, seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that His soul was not left in hell, neither His flesh did see corruption.
v. 32. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.
Peter, in this section of his sermon, uses the intimate and confidential address "men and brethren. " He wants to make the people feel that it is in their interest to hear him out in his argument. He had quoted a passage from a Psalm which, as the people knew, was written by David, a passage held throughout in the first person. The question therefore was as to who was speaking when David wrote, he himself or someone else. Now concerning David, whom Peter here calls a patriarch, the ancestor of a kingly race, he could freely say, and without any fear of contradiction, that he died and was buried, his grave being in Jerusalem and well known to all Jews. So the death of David was a fact, and the presence of his tomb implied that this ancestor of kings, on his part, had seen corruption. Of himself David, then, had assuredly not spoken. On the other hand, as the Jews knew, he held the position of a prophet, one through whom the Lord foretold the future, and as such he knew, by a revelation of God, that God had promised him with an oath that a descendant of his would sit upon his throne. See 2Sa_7:12-13. With this knowledge in mind, David wrote this prophecy of the 16th Psalm, speaking of the resurrection of Christ, that He would not be abandoned in the kingdom of death, and that His flesh would not see corruption. Thus Peter proved clearly from his text that Jesus suffered death according to a predetermined and expressed aim of God, but that death could not hold Him, that He plainly must and did arise from the dead. And that this prophecy has been fulfilled the apostles also, the twelve men standing before them, could testify; they were witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus. Their eyes, their senses, did not deceive them; they had been with the risen Lord; they had received His commission. This fact is of great comfort also to us, who place our faith in the message of the risen Lord, as recorded by these witnesses of His resurrection.