(I recently taught a Bible study covering the book the Acts of the Apostles. I used my mother’s Ryrie Study Bible to provide the basic outline of the Bible study.)
We now move into the second section of this chapter that describes how the believers respond to this first act of persecution: they pray.
Read Acts 4:23. We don’t know exactly where the believers were meeting, but a good guess might be the upper room mentioned in Chapter 1.
Notice how the believers begin their prayer. Read Acts 4:24. They don’t weep and wail and ask for protection or deliverance from future opposition! No, they thank God for being sovereign, creator of the heavens and the earth. As we read on, we see that they are also praising God because they are seeing fulfillment of prophecy, as given to David centuries before.
Read Acts 4:25-26. The believers are quoting from Psalm 2:1-2. Depending on your version you may read against his “Anointed One” or against His “Christ.” Both mean “Messiah.” Let’s read all of Psalm 2. The believers would have known the complete Psalm and rejoiced at seeing how the current persecution and rejecting of Jesus was predicted by God. Such knowledge would have made them feel save in the hand of the sovereign God.
In their prayer, they become even more specific in stating how these verses by David were fulfilled. Read Acts 4:27-28. They make it clear that both Gentiles and Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death and that God knew beforehand that this would happen.
Only after praising God for His power do the believers pray for specific things for themselves. Read Acts 4:29. consider their threats” I think the believers could be saying two things here. 1) They might be asking God to hold the people persecuting them accountable for what they have done and judge them accordingly later. We are not the judge, God is. Read Hebrews 10:29-31. or 2) They might be saying, look, God, these people are threatening to hurt, even kill us. We are flawed human beings, easily frightened and swayed. We need you to work in us and give us the courage to speak the gospel with boldness and not fear, even when we know the end result can be death.
Read Acts 4:30. Self-explanatory. Rather than asking God to “tone down” the miracles and therefore make the believers less of a target for persecution, they want God to “ramp it up!” and heal as many people as possible, so all can know the power of Jesus’ name.
Read Acts 4:31. God immediately responds with a sign, just as their requested: the room shakes. What really jumps out at me in this verse is the last sentence. And they were all filled with the Holy spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” And the word in this sentence that hits me is the “all.” It isn’t just the disciples, now, who are speaking boldly in public about Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is all the believers.
To be continued…
Source
Philip Yancey and Tim Stafford (notes). The Student Bible. NIV Version
