Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

MIRACLES OF THE END.
19, 20. These two verses describe the miracles of the end of the present age. You see how Peter
couples them right on to the miracles of Pentecost; because he expected the Lord to return to the
earth and set up His kingdom in his day.
Also,
Matthew 16:28: “There are some of those standing here who may not [not “shall not,”
as E.V.] pass away until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Matthew 24:34: “This generation may not pass [not “shall not,” as E.V.] till all these
things are fulfilled.”
From these and many other Scriptures we see the gracious possibility of our Lord’s return to the
earth during the life-time of the apostles and their contemporaries. The Greek in these passages has
the contingent tense. There are no contingencies with God. The contingency was all on man’s side.
As man always fails, so he failed in the Apostolic Age. There was a gracious possibility for man to
preach the gospel to every nation during that generation; in which case our Lord would have returned
on the throne of His millennial glory before that generation all passed away. All the apostles and
saints expected to see the Lord return and “be caught up to meet him in the air,” which would have
taken place if that generation had pushed to the ends of the earth and preached the gospel to every
nation, as they could and should have done. These verses (19 and 20) describe the momentous
miracles of the Tribulation. Luke Chapter 21), in his description of our Savior’s sermon on the
judgments, preached on Mt. Olivet the day before He suffered, speaks of oceanic inundations during
the Tribulation destroying multitudes. John describes the Armageddon wars deluging the world and
heaping the battlefields with mountains of the dead. When the governments all fall (Daniel 7:9) the
rabble will rise, burn, rob and murder indiscriminately. Hence the bloody and fiery phenomena of
the 19th verse. The smoke of conflagrations, gun powder and the vapor from the oceanic inundations
and bloody battlefields will darken the sun and make the moon look red as blood. We have every
reason to look out for these miracles immediately, as they are the next on the prophetic program.
TIME OF WAITING.
21. “And it shall come to pass that whosoever may call on the name of the Lord, shall be saved.”
If the Pentecostians had proved true to the wonderful enduement of the Holy Ghost, they might have
peregrinated the whole known world and preached the gospel to every nation, in which case the Lord
would have returned to the earth before that generation had all passed away (Matthew 14:24 and
16:28.) But like humanity in all ages, they failed. Man has always been a failure and always will be.
He failed in Eden, winding up with the Fall; he failed in antediluvian times, swept away by the
righteous judgments of the flood; he failed in the Patriarchal dispensation, landing in Egyptian
slavery; he failed in the Mosaic dispensation, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Roman armies and the dispersing of the Jews to the ends of the earth; he also failed in the Savior’s
ministry, blindly rejecting and crucifying Him. The prophecies are equally explicit as to his egregious
failure in the Gospel dispensation, plunging blindly and precipitately into the horrors of the great