Acts 15:12-18 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Then all the multitude kept silence Having nothing further to object to what had been advanced; and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul Who confirmed Peter's reasoning, by declaring what miracles God had wrought among the Gentiles By their ministry; of which, the chief miracle was, that he had amply conferred the gifts of the Holy Spirit on the believing Gentiles, although they were uncircumcised. After they had done speaking, James, the son of Alpheus, one of the apostles, answered those who were for subjecting the Gentiles to the law, by adding, in supplement to Peter's reasoning, that the prophets had foretold the conversion of the Gentiles; so that it was always God's purpose to make them his people. The passage he appeals to, quoting it according to the reading of the Seventy, is Amos 9:11-12; where see the notes. It may be thus paraphrased: After this After the Jewish dispensation expires; I will return To my people in mercy; and will build again the tabernacle That is, the house, or family, of David; which is fallen down Is in a low, degraded state: I will do this by raising from his seed the Christ, who shall erect, on the ruins of his fallen tabernacle, a spiritual and eternal kingdom; that the residue of men And not the Jews alone; might seek after the Lord After an acquaintance with him, and the blessings consequent thereon; and all the Gentiles upon whom my name is called Or who shall be called by my name; who shall be my people. James adds, Known unto God are all his works This the apostle infers from the prophecy itself, and the accomplishment of it. And this conversion of the Gentiles, being known to him from eternity, we ought not to think a new or strange thing. It is observable, he does not speak of God's works in the natural world, (which would have been nothing to his present purposes) but of his dispensations toward the children of men. Now he could not know these, without knowing the characters and actions of particular persons, on a correspondence with which the wisdom and goodness of those dispensations are founded. For instance, he could not know how he would deal with heathen idolaters, (whom he was now calling into his church,) without knowing there would be heathen idolaters; and yet this was a thing purely contingent, a thing as dependant on the freedom of the human mind as any we can imagine. This text, therefore, among a thousand more, is an unanswerable proof that God foreknows future contingencies, though there are difficulties relating thereto which man cannot solve.