What Does Acts 13:48 Mean?

(48) **They were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord.**—Both verbs are in the tense of continued action. The joy was not an evanescent burst of emotion. The “word of the Lord” here is the teaching which had the Lord Jesus as its subject. **As many as were ordained to eternal life believed.**—Better, *as many as were disposed for.* The words seem to the English reader to support the Calvinistic dogma of divine decrees as determining the belief or unbelief of men, and it is not improbable, looking to the general drift of the theology of the English Church in the early part of the seventeenth century, that the word “ordained” was chosen as expressing that dogma. It runs, with hardly any variation, through all the chief English versions, the Rhemish giving the stronger form “pre-ordinate.” The Greek word, however, does not imply more than that they fell in with the divine order which the Jews rejected. They were as soldiers who take the place assigned to them in God’s great army. The *quasi-*middle force of the passive form of the verb is seen in the Greek of Acts 20:13, where a compound form of it is rightly rendered “for so he had appointed,” and might have been translated *for so he was disposed.* It lies in the nature of the case that belief was followed by a public profession of faith, but the word “believed” does not, as some have said, involve such a profession.