¹⁷”The God of this people Israel chose our fathers and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt, and with an uplifted arm He led them out from it. ¹⁸For a period of about forty years He put up with them in the wilderness. ¹⁹When He had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, He distributed their land as an inheritance—all of which took about four hundred and fifty years. ²⁰After these things He gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. ²¹Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. ²²After He had removed him, He raised up David to be their king, concerning whom He also testified and said, ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after my heart, who will do all My will.’”

In Paul’s message at the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, he speaks, as it were, to all Israel. This sets the tone for his messages to Israel wherever and whenever he had the opportunity. He anchors the Messiahship of Jesus Christ in the context of Jewish Scripture and history. In other words, his message is to be understood as a fulfillment of what God had spoken of in the Jewish Scriptures, not a new religion Paul was starting.

Only twenty-six verses long, this sermon probably represents Luke’s summary of what Paul said. He first affirms the chosenness of the Jews. Although he does not name the patriarchs, his listeners would have been reminded of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom God had made clear that their descendants were to be His chosen people. Branded in the Jews’ collective memory was the formative period of Egyptian captivity, the exodus from slavery, and forty years of desert wandering resulting from their stubborn disobedience. During this time, Israel became a functioning nation, lacking only a land of their own.

However, God forged for them a land through military conquest and followed up their settlement there with a series of fifteen judges who ruled the people over three hundred years, the last judge being Samuel the prophet. This period ended when the Israelites rejected any further judgeship and demanded to have a king, like all the surrounding nations (1 Sam. 8). So God gave them a king as they desired: Saul, who reigned for forty years. King Saul was a fraud, self-willed and insecure—reflecting very much the kind of people they all had become. But God replaced Saul with David, and the apostle Paul quotes God’s assessment of David, “A man after my heart, who will do all My will” (quoting from 1 Samuel 13:14). Why this particular focus out of all Jewish history? The reason is this: Paul is about to make the connection between David and Jesus, and therefore the description of the former also applies to the later.

Lord, help me to understand the whole OT in what it teaches about Jesus, for it all points to Him.