Acts 1:16

Acts 1:16. The Scripture must needs have been fulfilled. The Scripture referred to is Psalms 69 (LXX., Psalms 68) Psalms 26; and Psalms 109 (LXX., Psalms 108) Psalms 8. The quotations are freely made from the LXX. Version. The most important variation is in the first citation from Psalms 69, where in the original the plural instead of the singular is used, their habitation, their tents instead of His.

Guided by the Holy Spirit, St. Peter finds in these words of the two Psalms this especially sad episode in the history of Christ plainly foreshadowed, and discovers in them an injunction to proceed to the election of another to make up the number of the Twelve.

His bishoprick let another take. St. Peter's words here give us the clue to the right understanding of the terrible imprecations found in some of the Psalms. They are no curses pronounced by David or any other king or prophet; they are never the expression of a longing for personal revenge, but are, as Chrysostom expresses it, a prophecy in the form of a curse pronounced upon some enemies of God and His Church, hereafter to arise. They are judicial sentences one day to be pronounced as the punishment for some sin which, in the foreknowledge of the Almighty, would be committed perhaps ages later on in the world's history. Augustine in his twenty-second sermon, writing of Judas, well puts this view of the spirit in which the Psalmist wrote his words: Infigura optantis, praenuntiantis mens intelligenda est.

While believing that the view above given represents the real meaning of the imprecations found in the so-called denunciatory Psalms, the writer of this commentary thinks it desirable to quote another and quite a different interpretation. ‘We find these prayers for vengeance,' writes the Dean of Peterborough (Dr. Perowne, Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Cambridge), ‘chiefly in four Psalms, the 7th, 35th, 69th, 109th.' ‘Are these anathemas to be excused as being animated by the spirit of Elias? a spirit not unholy, indeed, but far removed from the meekness and gentleness of Christ. Are they Jewish only? and may they be Christian also?' Dean Perowne apparently decides that they were Jewish only; ‘the older dispensation,' he urges, ‘was in every sense a sterner one than the new. The spirit of Elias, though not an evil spirit, was not the spirit of Christ. The Jewish nation had been trained in a sterner school, It had been steeled and hardened by the discipline which had pledged to a war of extermination with idolaters.... It is conceivable how even a righteous man under it, feeling it to be his bounden duty to root out evil whenever he saw it, and identifying, as he did, his own enemies with the enemies of Jehovah, might use language which to us appears unnecessarily vindictive. To men so trained and taught, what we call religious toleration was a thing not only wrong but absolutely inconceivable.' See Perowne on Psalms 35, and General Introduction to Psalms, page 72.