Acts 2

22 "Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Natsorean,*‘Natsorean’, not ‘Nazarene’. The Text has ‘the’ Natsorean, the Branch-man (see Matthew 2:23 and Isaiah 11:1). In Acts 22:8 the glorified Jesus identifies Himself to Saul as ‘the Natsorean’, which Saul would understand as being the Messiah. a man from God attested to you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by Him in your midst, as you yourselves well know,*Peter here addresses specifically the Israelites, presumably residents of Jerusalem and Judea, since they had been eyewitnesses of what Jesus did. 23 Him—being delivered up by the established purpose and foreknowledge of God—you murdered, having taken Him with lawless hands and crucified Him;*"You took with lawless hands"—‘take’ and ‘lawless’ clearly give the idea that they were responsible for their actions. "Being delivered up by the established purpose and foreknowledge of God" is a clear statement of God’s sovereignty in action. So here we have divine sovereignty and human responsibility side by side; they are both true, whether we understand it or not. (Less than 3% of the Greek manuscripts, of inferior quality, omit ‘having taken’.) 24 whom God raised up, ending the labor pains of death,*In Revelation 1:5 Jesus is called "the firstborn from among the dead". Death is pictured as a huge womb, pregnant with all the dead, and Jesus Christ was the first one out, literally the ‘firstborn’. Resurrection is the process by which one is ‘born’ out of physical death. The figure of death as a womb is strong, but effective. That ‘womb’ had been holding people for thousands of years, but now finally ‘gives birth’. (People like Lazarus who were returned to this life for a while had to die all over again; they have to wait for the resurrection like the rest of us.) because it was not possible that He should be held by it.