{"author":null,"canonical_references":[],"database_sha256":"8cfbe7284c6936871d57c02dc6aa63ebbdfd4722422d539dd9f716e46e91112e","date_end":null,"date_start":null,"edition_year":null,"id":"sermonindex-ecf-3132","native_reference":{"book_number":510,"chapter_from":4,"chapter_to":4,"system":"MyBible module coordinates (mapping unverified)","verse_from":25,"verse_to":25},"public_import_allowed":false,"record_kind":"verse-keyed-module-record","review_required":["English edition and exact text","author/work attribution","dating","verse mapping and citation kind","reuse and attribution","split author quotations and deduplicate"],"review_status":"unreviewed","source_html":"<p><b>Bede</b>: Why did the nations rage and the peoples devise vain things? The prophet does not ask as if he does not know but reproves the madness of the impious in astonishment, those who rose up against the Lord the Savior, although harmed not at all by him, rather assisted by many good deeds. He mentioned nations because of the Roman soldiers, peoples because of the Jews. Hence it is aptly said that the nations raged but the peoples devised vain things against God. For indeed, the leaders of the Jews with diligent meditation plotted how they might deliver the Lord to death; but the soldiers are found to have inflicted nothing upon him, to have laid no traps against him, but merely to have obeyed the governor's orders in his insult and death. Hence they are also said to rage, driven by an unskilled and disorderly motion; and since rage is properly of wild beasts, they are rightly said to rage who, setting aside reason, were inflamed by bestial fury. However, that the peoples are said to have devised vain things looks back to what is said about the blessed man in the preceding Psalm: \"But his will is in the law of the Lord, and in his law, he will meditate day and night\" (Psalms 1). For just as he is blessed who spends all his time in meditation on the divine law, so rightly must that people be assigned to perpetual miseries who not only pridefully turn away from meditating on God's law but also, in insanity, frequently engage in meditation against God himself, the lawgiver and their Lord.<br/><i>— Retractions on Acts</i></p><p><b>John Chrysostom</b>: It is to sue God, as one may say upon His own covenants, that they thus produce this prophecy: and at the same time to comfort themselves with the thought, that in vain are all the imaginations of their foes. This then is what they say: Bring those words into accomplishment, and show that they \"imagine vain things.\"<br/><i>— Homily on Acts 11</i></p><p><b>Oecumenius</b>: Which nations rose up against Christ? The nations of the Jews, namely. For although they were all Jews, nevertheless they came from various nations among which they were scattered.<br/><i>— Commentary on Acts</i></p><p><b>Tertullian</b>: By thus departing from Judaism itself, when they exchanged the obligations and burdens of the law for the liberty of the gospel, they were fulfilling the psalm, \"Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us; \"and this indeed (they did) after that \"the heathen raged, and the people imagined vain devices; \"after that \"the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers took their counsel together against the Lord, and against His Christ.\" What did the apostles thereupon suffer? You answer: Every sort of iniquitous persecutions, from men that belonged indeed to that Creator who was the adversary of Him whom they were preaching.<br/><i>— Against Marcion Book III</i></p>","source_html_sha256":"eb91185b5f923e1f485b3c6313b23013a75e33865b9c65fccc1b505aeddf3b00","source_module":"ECF","source_row_id":3132,"source_url":"https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/ecf/","text_sha256":"259e202dbd5cf1cf01677c4555799def82876730bfb6fa0a0b8133dd4ef5a699","translator":null,"work":null}