1. " Him.... ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death; because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. For David speaketh concerning him," Sic. (Acts 2:23-2523Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: 24Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. 25For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved: (Acts 2:23‑25).) To the sin of Israel's cruel rejection of the Lord is here contrasted God's action toward Him so rejected. They slew Him, God raised Him: and then the cause of this, in the Lord's high personal glory. He loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that He should be holden of it. For David speaketh, &c. The hindrance to death's power, as here assigned, is not the innate power of the Lord, as we have it in Rom. 1, declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, but the personal glory and dignity ascribed to Him by the counsel of God as the one witnessed of by the Spirit in David; and not in David only, but in all the scriptures. There is no truth more manifest to the spiritual mind, or more important to the student of scripture than this, that Jesus is the sum and substance of the Spirit's testimony in scripture. His name the clue and thread to what (if this is not seen) are to our poor foolish minds the mazes and obscurities of scripture. Reader, when you study scripture what do you look for in it? Testimony to Jesus, or something about yourself? If the latter, the book will be a dark book to you, for the saint's portion all flows through Jesus; no scripture touches the saint save immediately through Jesus, and if you will thrust self forward to see how much can be forced to apply to it, so losing sight of Jesus as the center of it all, you will find a poor-poor portion.
What I learn here is, death powerless to the Lord, because represented in scripture as His appointed passage into conferred blessing. May we adore the grace which in God counseled, and which in Christ undertook, and which in the Spirit revealed, such a path for Him to obtain a glory He could share with us.