Acts 8:33

“In his humiliation his judgment was taken away.” It is a significant fact that our Savior was killed by a cruel mob, stirred up and led by the preachers who stood at the head of the popular church, claiming, and doubtless believing, that they were God's true ministers. Pilate, the Roman governor, as history says, had not a sufficient military force to keep the peace, having recently sent away a detachment to quell an insurrection in Syria. Consequently, defiant of Roman laws, which gave every man a fair trial and the right of self-defense, he assigned the death-warrant of Jesus merely as a peace measure, to keep the mob from killing him and, at the same time, deluging Jerusalem in blood. “Who shall declare his generation?

because his life is taken away from the earth.” “Generation” here means race, family, posterity, hence it means the spiritual children of God. If Jesus had not died, the plan of salvation would have collapsed and He would have had no spiritual posterity. The sown grain must die in the earth in order to produce a crop. You must die [i. e., old Adam in you] if you ever have a spiritual posterity. Hence, as a rule, unsanctified people have few, if any, spiritual children. Because our Savior redeemed the world by His death, in the grand finale He will exhibit before the Great White Throne a spiritual posterity which neither men, angels nor archangels can ever enumerate. They will outnumber the sands of the sea, the dust of the desert, the leaves of the forest and the stars of heaven; while contrastively Satan's rabble will dwindle into an insignificant handful. This is one of the many confirmations of the wonderful achievements of the millennial reign, when the world will be flooded with overwhelming populations, the devil cast out, the road to hell overgrown with pennyroyal and dog-fennel, holiness covering the earth as the waters cover the sea, earth's teeming millions sweeping up to heaven as the millennial centuries go by, thus supplying heaven with her long-anticipated populations redeemed from the earth by the blood of her Son. Meanwhile the chariot rolls along and time is unconsciously beguiled, the Ethiopian electrified by the thrilling gospel of Philip. They arrive at some water, recognized by the eunuch calling the attention of his comrade and inquiring why he should not be baptized, pursuant to the preaching of Philip from Isaiah 52:15. As the inspired narrative says that this was a desert, and geography reveals no river in that region, and Eusebius, the historian of the fourth century, describes the spring Bethsoron along that road, certifying that it was commemorated by the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch at the hands of Philip, you must not forget that (Acts 8:37) the eunuch's confession is an interpolation [see R. V.]. I hold in my hand the oldest Greek Testament in the world. It has nothing of it. That verse was composed and inserted by Erasmus, a contemporary of Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century, who, while transcribing his Greek Testament, concluded that the connection required a confession there, and supposing that some careless transcriber had left it out, he composed and inserted that thirty-seventh verse. Subsequently older manuscripts were found, and especially the Sinaitic which I hold in my hand. As none of them have that verse, it is demonstrative proof that it never existed till Erasmus composed and inserted it.