What Does Acts 2:23 Mean?

(23) **By the determinate counsel and fore knowledge of God.**—The adjective meets us again in St. Peter’s speech in Acts 10:42; the word for “foreknowledge in his Epistle (1Peter 1:2), and there only in the New Testament. The coincidence is not without its force as bearing on the genuineness both of the speech and of the letter. It has now become the habit of the Apostle’s mind to trace the working of a divine purpose, which men, even when they are most bent on thwarting it, are unconsciously fulfilling. In Acts 1:16, he had seen that purpose in the treachery of Judas; he sees it now in the malignant injustice of priests and people. **Ye have taken**. . . .—Better, *ye took, and by lawless hands crucified and slew.* Stress is laid on the priests having used the hands of one who was “without law” (1Corinthians 9:21), a heathen ruler, to inflict the doom which they dared not inflict themselves.