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

Zacharias and Elizabeth, Simeon, Anna and many others, and simply needed conversion to the
Christhood of Jesus, like thousands of other pious Jews serving God in the full light of their
dispensation, needing not conversion to God, but to the Christhood of Jesus, a mere matter of
historic faith, having already been saved by justifying faith in the Christ of prophecy. I doubt not that
item of history which certifies that the Ethiopian eunuch who raised the shout in the presence of
Philip, “went on his way rejoicing,” stirring the people along the road, telling them of Jesus, His
redeeming grace and dying love, arriving at Thebes, the Ethiopian capital, turns preacher and shakes
the whole country with a spiritual earthquake, pressing the evangelistic work as the years go by, till
finally the Apostle Matthew comes to his relief, taking Ethiopia for his field of labor, where he
preached on till bloody martyrdom crowned his triumphant exit from earth to heaven.
40. After the manner of the old prophets the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip from the
presence of his happy Ethiopian convert, dropping him down at Azotus, which is another name for
the old city of Ashdod, a Philistine capital. It seems that Philip never returned to honor the office of
deacon in the Jerusalem church. God put him in a better work, i.e., preaching the gospel. We are here
informed that he continued his evangelistic peregrinations northward, “preaching in many cities till
he arrived in Cæsarea.” It seems that he settled in this metropolis of the Mediterranean, making it
henceforth his residence, from which he radiated out in his evangelistic work, as we hear no more
of him till twenty-three years have rolled away and Paul stops in his home in Cæsarea (Acts 21:9),
while on his last journey to Jerusalem in May, A.D. 58. We now find his evangelistic force
augmented by four preaching daughters, whom God has given him to assist him in his labors of love.