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

ut that he will run away when the wolf comes. What can we expect of the hireling ministry who this
day girdle the globe, with their Briarean arms reaching out after “filthy lucre” instead of souls.
23. “For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.” This verse
shows clearly that Simon had never been saved from inbred sin abiding in his heart after
regeneration, and even amid those wonderful revival scenes getting the upper hand and again slaying
him by his old predilection of money-love.
24. From this verse we see that the Holy Spirit had not utterly forsaken Simon; but that he
becomes penitent under the straight and terrible warning of Peter, so that he actually calls on him to
pray for him that he might be reclaimed. Here the curtain falls, hiding forever the continued vision
of an open door to reclamation to be followed by entire sanctification amid the wonderful privileges
of that glorious revival, now augmented by the ministry of Peter and John, having come from
Jerusalem and joined the heroic young evangelist in his arduous labors. Ecclesiastical history,
corroborated by secular, gives us a legend, by some doubted, certifying that poor Simon was never
reclaimed, but went on from bad to worse, becoming the founder of one of the first heresies of the
Apostolic age, thus returning to Satan’s ministry, in which Philip found him, and there spending the
remnant of his days.
25. After the arrival of the apostles, Philip accompanied them; meanwhile they prosecuted
extensive tours in Samaria, everywhere preaching the gospel, seeing multitudes of those heathen
converted, and unhesitatingly preaching to them the second work of grace, i.e., entire sanctification
in the reception of the personal Holy Ghost.
THE CONVERSION OF THE ETHIOPIAN EUNUCH.
26-40. After the apostles have completed their Samaritan tour and returned to Jerusalem, leaving
Philip surrounded by hosts of his converts pressing the battle, an angel of the Lord appeared to him
in visible form, and with audible voice sending him away on a southern tour down toward Gaza, the
most southern city in Palestine, in the olden time occupied by the Philistines, the road leading
through a desert. For expedition he leaves Jerusalem on the east, taking a bee-line toward Gaza. Ere
long he recognizes a man in royal costume slowly riding along before him on a chariot, lost in
meditation as he reads the wonderful prophecy of Isaiah 52 and 53, describing the Lord’s Christ in
His first advent into the world, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, despised and rejected
of men,” bleeding and dying to redeem a wicked world from sin, death and hell. The strange traveler
proves to be the first comptroller of the royal treasury of Queen Candace, of Ethiopia. He is a Jewish
proselyte, a worshiper of the God of Israel, who has traveled fifteen hundred miles to Jerusalem to
worship the Most High in His temple, and is now returning. He has in his possession the Greek
Septuagint version of the Old Testament, translated by seventy learned Jews, B.C. 280, under the
administration of Ptolemy Philadelphus, at Alexandria, Egypt, for the benefit of his Jewish subjects.
It had no divisions into chapters, out he was reading the prophecy of Isaiah, found in chapters 52 and
53. Pursuant to his kind invitation, Philip mounts the chariot, and, seated beside his brother in ebony,
preaches to him the Christ of prophecy, about whom he has been reading.