What Does Acts 13:33 Mean?

(33) **God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children.**—The better MSS. give, with hardly an exception, *unto our children, *and the Received text must be regarded as having been made to obtain what seemed a more natural meaning. St. Paul’s language, however, is but an echo of St. Peter’s “to us and to our children,” in Acts 2:39. **As it is also written in the second psalm.**—The various-reading, “in the *first* Psalm,” given by some MSS. is interesting, as showing that in some copies of the Old Testament, what is now the first Psalm was treated as a kind of prelude to the whole book, the numeration beginning with what is now the second. **Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.**—Historically, Psalms 2 appears as a triumph-song, written to celebrate the victory of a king of Israel or Judah—David, or Solomon, or another—over his enemies. The king had been shown by that day of victory to have been the chosen son of God—the day itself was a new begetting, manifesting the sonship. So, in the higher fulfilment which St. Paul finds in Christ, he refers the words, not primarily to the Eternal Generation of the Son of God, “begotten before all worlds,” nor to the Incarnation, but to the day of victory over rulers and priests, over principalities and powers, over death and Hades. The Resurrection manifested in the antitype, as the victory had done in the type, a pre-existing sonship; but it was to those who witnessed it, or heard of it, as the ground on which their faith in that sonship rested. Christ was to them the “firstborn of every creature,” because He was also “the firstborn from the dead.” (See Notes on Colossians 1:15; Colossians 1:18.)