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

33. “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away.” It is a significant fact that our Savior was
killed by a cruel mob, stirred up and led by the preachers who stood at the head of the popular
church, claiming, and doubtless believing, that they were God’s true ministers. Pilate, the Roman
governor, as history says, had not a sufficient military force to keep the peace, having recently sent
away a detachment to quell an insurrection in Syria. Consequently, defiant of Roman laws, which
gave every man a fair trial and the right of self-defense, he assigned the death-warrant of Jesus
merely as a peace measure, to keep the mob from killing him and, at the same time, deluging
Jerusalem in blood. “Who shall declare his generation? because his life is taken away from the
earth.” “Generation” here means race, family, posterity, hence it means the spiritual children of
God. If Jesus had not died, the plan of salvation would have collapsed and He would have had no
spiritual posterity. The sown grain must die in the earth in order to produce a crop. You must die
[i.e., old Adam in you] if you ever have a spiritual posterity. Hence, as a rule, unsanctified people
have few, if any, spiritual children. Because our Savior redeemed the world by His death, in the
grand finale He will exhibit before the Great White Throne a spiritual posterity which neither men,
angels nor archangels can ever enumerate. They will outnumber the sands of the sea, the dust of the
desert, the leaves of the forest and the stars of heaven; while contrastively Satan’s rabble will
dwindle into an insignificant handful. This is one of the many confirmations of the wonderful
achievements of the millennial reign, when the world will be flooded with overwhelming
populations, the devil cast out, the road to hell overgrown with pennyroyal and dog-fennel, holiness
covering the earth as the waters cover the sea, earth’s teeming millions sweeping up to heaven as the
millennial centuries go by, thus supplying heaven with her long-anticipated populations redeemed
from the earth by the blood of her Son. Meanwhile the chariot rolls along and time is unconsciously
beguiled, the Ethiopian electrified by the thrilling gospel of Philip. They arrive at some water,
recognized by the eunuch calling the attention of his comrade and inquiring why he should not be
baptized, pursuant to the preaching of Philip from Isaiah 52:15. As the inspired narrative says that
this was a desert, and geography reveals no river in that region, and Eusebius, the historian of the
fourth century, describes the spring Bethsoron along that road, certifying that it was commemorated
by the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch at the hands of Philip, you must not forget that (v. 37) the
eunuch’s confession is an interpolation [see R.V.]. I hold in my hand the oldest Greek Testament in
the world. It has nothing of it. That verse was composed and inserted by Erasmus, a contemporary
of Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century, who, while transcribing his Greek Testament, concluded
that the connection required a confession there, and supposing that some careless transcriber had left
it out, he composed and inserted that thirty-seventh verse. Subsequently older manuscripts were
found, and especially the Sinaitic which I hold in my hand. As none of them have that verse, it is
demonstrative proof that it never existed till Erasmus composed and inserted it.
38. “ . . .they both went down into the water, both Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.
39. “And when they came up out of the water. . .” That translation sounds favorable to immersion.
I now give you another, which is equally correct:
38. “ . . .they both went down to the water, both Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.
39. “And when they came up from the water. . .” I verily trow the blessed Holy Spirit gave us this
passage in that ambiguous verbiage, lest some one might be stickleristic on the quantity of water and