Daily Sacrifice, August 5 (2:23)
“Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain”— Acts 2:23.
THE betrayal, mock trial, and condemnation to death of our blessed Lord form together the most colossal miscarriage of justice in all history. Yet everything was foreseen by God, and all was in accord with the sure Word of prophecy. Those who participated in this infamous crime were all playing the parts long since predicted, little as they realized it. It is not that they were foreordained to act as they did. They were free moral agents in one sense, because they acted deliberately according to their own wills. But they were slaves of Satan, the great arch-enemy of God and man, who led them on to do what God Himself had declared should be done. There is a difference between His foreknowledge and His foreordination—a difference that Peter made clear in his sermon that day. Every adverse actor in that most awful drama of the ages was individually responsible for his behavior toward the Holy Saviour, even though it was by their means that He was brought to the cross, where He offered up Himself as a propitiation for our sins.
—John Newton.